A Wilder Time Page 8

  Then, without a hint that change was coming, the light suddenly dimmed and the wind stopped. We joked with one another as the tent cooled. The wind began to blow from the west, gently at first, sending the tent canvas into small but insistent convulsions. Then, within barely three minutes, the wind picked up and we were buffeted by pounding gusts. The tent flaps snapped and the walls bowed in, pushing down on our heads. Kai turned down the Primus; we stopped our talking, dropped our notebooks and pens, and ran outside to see what was happening.

  The fjord had turned into a dark gray maelstrom of blown-out whitecaps and east-running waves. Long white streaks of foam formed perfectly straight lines on the choppy surface. Wind tore at everything, howling with gale force; we had to lean into it to stand up.

  I shifted my eyes from the water to the rock wall that I scanned every morning. There, an epic battle was taking place, the like of which I had never seen.

  The gale was screaming down the fjord from the west, directly into the massive stone buttress. The wind slammed head-on into the wall and had nowhere to go but straight up. As it did, streamers of clouds condensed out of thin air, forming vertical white stripes hundreds of feet long, rushing up and over the rock face, decorating it in speeding, billowing ribbons. When the wind and clouds reached the summit, they ran off to the east. Cloud fingers miles long angled upward from the crest of the wall, racing at incredible speed toward the inland ice.

  Suddenly, I heard John yell in a frantic voice, “The boat!”

  I turned toward the little cove that we had anchored in and saw a disaster unfolding.

  John had devised an ingenious anchoring system for dealing with the huge tidal range there. Normally, where the tides were small, we would have simply dragged the boat up the beach to a spot above the high-tide line and tied it off without fear of losing it. But there, that was not possible. The twelve-foot tidal range overwhelmed the span of beach. So John had dropped an anchor about a hundred feet offshore, and tied a buoy to it. He had also tied a pulley to the buoy as well as one to a rock onshore. A rope looped through both pulleys allowed us to secure the stem and stern of the boat and then haul on the ropes until the boat was some distance offshore; in the morning, we would simply pull the boat back in. That way, regardless of the tidal stage, the boat could ride out the ebb and flow, safe from the rocks onshore.

  From our camp, though, we could see the boat caught by the gale wind, dragging the anchor in a large arc toward shore. It was headed toward a promontory of jagged rocks. We had patching supplies, but not enough to repair the entire boat if it were torn up, and we had no backup. We desperately needed the boat to finish our work; without it, we would be helpless, the summer would be lost, and we wouldn’t have another chance to return for more than a year. Our only chance was to get the boat ashore, and there was precious little time for that.

  John was already in a flat-out run for the cobbled beach. Kai and I took off after him. We reached the small cliff above the beach at the same time and took turns scrambling down it. John sprinted across the cobbles and grabbed the line to the boat. The three of us began hauling on the rope. For some obscure reason, locked in the physical geometry of our situation, every time we pulled on the rope, the boat accelerated in its race toward the rocks. We stopped for a moment, trying to figure out how to solve the problem as the boat moved toward its destruction. We only had seconds, but there appeared to be no answer other than to pull. It seemed hopeless, since we could clearly see we did not have time to haul in enough rope to keep the boat off the rocks.

  “There’s no choice. We have to pull!” Kai shouted.

  Without hope, we grabbed the rope again and pulled.

  We struggled for some seconds, pulling as hard and fast as possible, all the time watching the seemingly inevitable disaster unfold. Then, when the boat was within just a few feet of the first jagged rock, the wind suddenly dropped to almost nothing. The boat stopped moving and began lazily drifting with the tide back toward the buoy. Within minutes, the gale was over, the foehn wind began again, and the sun came back out.

  Relieved, John reset the anchor and Kai and I headed back to camp. As we walked, I turned to look at the stone buttress. It was bathed in shafts of cloud-broken sunlight. Although shadows came and went, in that late-afternoon light the cliff face glowed.

  Bird Cries and Myths

  WE WERE WORKING THE SOUTH SHORE of Arfersiorfik Fjord, far to the west of the pillow basalts and the rock that smelled like singed hair, searching for more evidence of that old ocean floor. The location was about as far west as we could sail and still have time and fuel to make it back to camp.

  The day was clear, the wind light and out of the north, the temperature warmer than normal. It had been a long but productive morning—a few good samples collected, some measurements of the rock fabric noted in our field books, even a few hints that there might be the kind of metamorphic history we were looking for. We decided to take a break and stop for a quick lunch in a small rock-protected notch along the shore. John turned the Zodiac toward the beach and gunned the engine briefly before shutting it down and pulling up the prop. Kai and I jumped out when the boat lurched onto the sandy gravel, then dragged it up above the reach of the rising tide and tied it fast.

  We found a small pocket of sun-warmed rock, threw down our backpacks and settled in for lunch. Eating our kippers and rye bread, and drinking coffee from the thermos, we talked about what we had seen and what to visit farther west along the coast. As the debate evolved, an afternoon wind began to blow, coming strongly out of the northeast. Chop formed on the water, blowing against the tack we would have to sail to get back to camp. Beating against it would make for a hard trip, so we decided to cross quickly to the northern shore, where we could sail in the lee of the hills and bluffs. Since there was a lot of geology along that coast that had not yet been mapped, that plan had the benefit of letting us fill in a few more data points on our sparsely populated field map. We cut our lunch short and repacked our backpacks, quickly scrambled down the scree to the graveled beach, and pushed off.

  The first site of interest on the north shore was an enigmatic white blotch on the aerial photographs we used to plan our work. In the old print, taken from twenty thousand feet decades earlier, a featureless white area about half a mile wide, just inland from the north shore and separated from the water by a narrow peninsula, sat like a blemish on the image. It appeared to have a small inlet from the fjord, and sharp cliffs surrounding it, but otherwise, there was nothing to suggest what it was. Its whiteness stood out in sharp contrast to the muted grays and blacks of the tundra, water, and gneiss that surrounded it.

  Because there was a flooding tide, John set us on a heading that would intersect the north shore about half a mile west of the inlet, which would allow us to cruise slowly back with the incoming tidal flow.

  The trip across the two miles of open water, sailing against a five-knot current, took about twenty minutes. We kept looking for the whiteness we knew had to be on that far shore, but a small bluff hid it from view. Once we reached the other side, John swung the Zodiac around and we slowly rode the tide east along the water’s edge, our anticipation growing with each minute, as we wondered what that white land would turn out to be.

  Within a few hundred feet of the inlet, the bluff hiding the white terrain dropped away and we caught our first glimpse. Right at the water’s edge, a flat shelf of bedrock gneiss tens of yards wide and perhaps fifty yards long made a little shoal just a foot above the slowly rising fjord waters. The gneiss was washed clean by the endless rising and falling of the salt water over it. The aerial photo of this small peninsula must have been taken at a much lower tidal stage. John ran the Zodiac right onto it.

  The featureless white area turned out to be a vast tidal flat of very fine mud, surrounded by a broad white beach that ended in sharp cliffs of pure white powdery sand and silt. The cliffs were cut into sediments deposited by streams gushing from the base of the ice sheet thousands of
years ago. From the look of the sediments—the foreset beds capped by a few meters of flat white silt—those ancient flowing waters must have formed broad deltas as they flooded into the frigid fjord. Although the present ice front was nearly forty miles east from where we were, the edge of the ice must have been less than a mile away when the white sediments were first deposited as deltas. The tidal flat was made of those same sediments, reworked and redeposited by ebbing and flooding tides and seasonal rains during the thousands of years since the ice had retreated.

  The white surface of the tidal flat was completely barren of plants—a rare Arctic desert of fine mud existing as a sterile membrane protected by the bedrock rim at the edge of the fjord. When it was exposed to the air at low tide, the mud dried slightly, becoming a featureless off-white presence. It quickly became apparent why no plants grew here—tidal cycles kept the mud brackish, and the glacial outwash sediments were devoid of nutrients.

  I walked across the small peninsula to the edge of the sediments and knelt down. The surface was featureless and almost perfectly horizontal, the smoothest and flattest natural expanse of land one could imagine. Fjord waters a fraction of an inch deep flowed over it, slowly making an ingress as the tide rose. The afternoon light shimmered on the mirrored film of water, reflecting a pale sky and white cliffs.

  With nothing to hunt or gather there, the likelihood was small that anyone had ever disturbed that place. The aura it exuded was of a barrenness that seemed to mirror much older times, billions of years ago, when there were no land plants, when the hills and valleys and rolling plains of the earliest Earth were rock and blowing sand. It would have been a place in which life was able to survive only if saturated and immersed, covered by liquid, impregnating mud.

  I walked along the bedrock shore and around the muds that were drying in the sun. Glistening, succulent, resting in a color just this side of white, the mud was irresistible. Kneeling down and slowly pushing my fingers into it, I wondered how deep it might be.

  Weirdly, I could see my fingers penetrate the top fraction of an inch, but the muck was so fine and so water-saturated, so perfectly balanced with the air temperature that there was no resistance or sensation. As I plunged my arm deeper, it was like pushing through a magical wall into a different realm, a place where everything was alien and imaginary.

  Half an inch below the gray-white surface of clays, a fluid, organic black ooze glistened on my fingers. With the protective membrane of clay broken, the underlying, thriving biology flooded the air with the sulfurous aroma of its complex, primitive world.

  Three billion years ago, communities of single-celled life colonized the tidal pools and flats of early Earth. Living things ran riot, unencumbered by anything except the limits of nutrients and the boundaries of water. Surface clays in tidal flats protected fragile organic molecules from ionizing ultraviolet radiation, and held in the moisture necessary for life’s chemistry. Tidal cycles replenished what was diminished; sunlight kept it warm. Resting there in that silent mud was what we came from, our vestigial home.

  John and Kai were a quarter of a mile away, measuring the strike and dip of the colored layers that composed the bedrock gneiss, establishing the fabric that long postdated that birthing process. Eventually, I walked over to them, hands dripping with rapidly drying mud.

  Just then, Kai turned toward the Zodiac and said, “Gentlemen, we need to hurry. The tide is lifting the boat.” I grabbed my hammer, pounded off one more sample, which I quickly labeled and bagged, and then ran to the boat.

  As we powered out into the fjord, we suddenly heard a strange sonorous wail over the whine of the engine. Unable to make sense of it, we ignored it at first. But the strangeness grew and persisted, eventually causing John to power down the outboard so we could listen.

  The sound came from across the fjord, more than two miles away, mournful, wrenching, and melodic. As we listened, it slowly morphed into a feminine symphonic chorus.

  We decided it would be irresponsible not to investigate—perhaps a small fishing boat had sunk and people were stranded, or some other tragedy had happened. John swung the bow around and we started back across the fjord.

  Within a very short distance, the cries changed. At first, the wailing became fragmented and less sonorous; then, we heard bursts of sound and staccato screeches. John stopped the boat and we listened again.

  The southern shore of the fjord was a massive rock wall, rising hundreds of feet straight out of the water. It was barely in shadow and its face was patterned grays. At first, that was all we saw. Then, after straining our eyes, we spotted hundreds of circling gulls wheeling on the updrafts coming off the cliff. The rock face was, in fact, a rookery. From their numbers and crying, it seemed something had startled the birds, perhaps an Arctic fox, perhaps the noise of our outboard—it was impossible to know.

  Amused at being duped, we headed back the way we had come. As we made it to our original position and course, the wailing began again, the bird cries morphing back into rending cries of distress.

  WHAT WE HAD EXPERIENCED could be easily explained. Over the cold fjord waters, chilled air accumulates, forming a dense layer perhaps a few feet thick. The air at higher elevations is warmer and less dense. Since the speed of sound varies with air temperature and density, sound waves become distorted and pitch changes when the waves are refracted through the stratified fjord atmosphere. In most places, the effects are minimal and not even noticeable—words spoken in one place will be heard as intended. But if the conditions are right, the refraction can be dramatic, the sound distorted. Sitting in our small boat, our ears immersed in the chilled, dense air, more than a mile from where the birds uttered their cries, the propagating sounds stretched into an aural mirage.

  Such an explanation, though, trivializes that experience. Cruising along the edge of the fjord, heading back toward camp, it came to mind that what we had heard was almost certainly the sound of the Sirens, the mythical creatures Odysseus heard more than 3,200 years ago, tied to the mast of his ship as his men toiled to keep it on course, wax in their ears so they would not be lured to their destruction by the Sirens’ song.

  We had entered that place below the surface of things where nature fosters the birth of myth. Our little diversion into the fjord was an excursion across a permeable membrane.

  Ptarmigan

  INEVITABLY, TO COEXIST AMICABLY with those one came with into the wild, one must bathe. While certainly bracing, bathing in the field in the Arctic is a duty, not a pleasure. There are two reasons why this is so. One is that most streams and lakes are ice-fed, making the water very, very cold. The other is that on a clear, sunny day when there is no breeze and temperatures are appealing enough to make bathing attractive, clouds of mosquitoes descend by the hundreds, if not the thousands, to gorge on naked flesh. The only solution is to bathe when there is a breeze strong enough to keep the mosquitoes downwind, which makes immersion in the water unimaginably painful.

  On a particular day in July, when the sky was gray and a slight breeze blew, it was time. It had been days since I last bathed, and I was ripe. After a few hours spent steeling myself that morning, waiting for the temperature to creep up just a degree or two more, I grabbed soap and a towel and headed off.

  The stream where the Arctic char swam was to the east of us, a little more than a quarter of a mile away. It tumbled in a torrent through a small boulder-choked gully just before entering the fjord. The rush of water was fed from a chain of three lakes, the most easterly of which sat at the immediate edge of the ice sheet. The walk to the stream was an easy stroll, done in a few dread-filled minutes.

  Arriving at the stream, I walked along, looking for a small sheltered pool. Rather sooner than hoped, a perfect spot emerged from around a small bend. Water fell into a small catchment deep enough to submerge myself in, providing just enough space to duck under the frigid cascade.

  Taking a deep breath, I quickly undressed and plunged in. To say that it took my breath away is an un
derstatement—the gasp that escaped my lips was probably heard back at camp. A sharp, stinging wave of intensely burning cold exploded from every inch of skin as I shuddered and writhed. As quickly as possible, I soaked myself, stood in the wind and lathered up, then dived again under the waterfall to rinse off. The total amount of time spent in the water was probably less than three minutes, but it felt like hours.

  Scrambling out of the water and standing precariously on wobbling boulders, I dried as fast as possible in the biting breeze. My skin was red and burned from the cold, and the scratchy towel seemed to do little more than smear the water over goose-pimpled flesh. I stumbled over boulders, stubbing my toes, to where my clean clothes lay in some bushes and then put them on as an aching numbness began to affect my feet and hands. Once my clothes were on, the relief from the chilling wind was exquisite.

  The walk back to camp first led along the pebble beach at the mouth of the stream, then up a small bluff to the tundra bench. As I ambled along, the feel of clean skin under layers of insulating clothes was invigorating. The harsh prickling from the cold subsided and a fresh sense of sharp sensitivity to light, air, and smell gave an impression that the world was somehow newly refreshed. Everything seemed vibrant and intensely real.

  Lost in thought, walking through the grasses and short-stemmed flowers of the tundra carpet, I experienced a feeling of belonging, of being in a welcoming spaciousness, a sensation that replaced the dread that had accompanied the bath. I relaxed and could feel my muscles loosen.

  Then, off to my left something flickered at the edge of sight. I ignored it for a few steps, not wanting to interrupt the simple pleasure of walking through that quiet place. But fearing that I might be missing something, I stopped, turned around, and took a few steps back the way I had come. Suddenly, as if materializing out of nowhere, a female ptarmigan about the size of a large chicken quickly scuttled away, just five feet from me. She didn’t move far, perhaps a foot or two, before she settled back into the tundra and puffed up her feathers. Despite the short distance between us, finding her in the tundra took intense concentration. The patterns of brown, tan, and black markings on her matched precisely the pattern of color and texture of the plants she was nestled in. I stood mesmerized by the visual magic she performed, leaning my head to one side and then the other, trying to find some position that would allow me to see her, but she insistently melted into the scenery.