A Wilder Time Read online

  To gain a different perspective, I took one step to my left, and then something else moved. Three feet behind her, a tiny hatchling darted away, only to stop among the foliage and vanish. And then, almost next to that first hatchling, another baby ptarmigan briefly materialized, huddled down in the vegetation, it, too, nearly invisible. Not wanting to scare them any more, I backed off a step, but that only startled the mother again. She ran toward the two hatchlings, and together, the three of them froze. Astonishingly, another tiny bird appeared, exactly where the mother had been standing; she had been protecting it under her wings, until she could not take the tension any longer. I backed away a few more feet and tried to see if there were any more.

  I knelt down on hands and knees and then lay on my belly to see if the form of the little birds could be seen against the sky, hoping I might discover even more of them. As my face came within inches of the ground, I was suddenly awash in layers of sweet flower scents. As I rested lightly on the surface, the smell of dozens of blossoms I hadn’t noticed engulfed me. Arctic poppy and white Arctic bell-heather were interspersed among mountain sorrel, hairy lousewort, purple saxifrage, and mountain avens. I was awash in a botanical sea, carried into an unexpected world.

  For a moment, the birds were forgotten and my attention focused on identifying individual scents from different flower species, but the complex mix of fragrances eluded me. The smells came and went, as though wafting over the ground in waves and streams, riding the will of the gentle, wandering breeze. No wonder the bumblebees almost always zoomed along at ground level, buzzing their way among the flowers there. Scent was their map, and that map rested just above the vegetative surface. Olfactory pleasures flowed there, each component of the currents marking the presence of a sought-after flower. The organic signatures, sensed by us as odors, must have been more than that for the bees, but what?

  Happily covered by the smells of the flowers, I looked again for the birds and spotted one more a little farther off, behind the first two that had made themselves known. The mother loomed over her brood, doing all she could to protect them. Finally, probably as a last, desperate move, she limped off, faking a broken wing and injuries, trying to lead away the hulking human intruder.

  Riddled by guilt for having stumbled into her life as a perceived threat, I started to leave, realizing those small birds knew the world as I never would. Within a few inches of the surface, the breezes we are familiar with become tempered by stones and boulders and tundra hummocks. In such stillness, scents can accumulate and mingle. A world of perfumes would cloak the hatchlings and saturate their feathers, becoming a sensory background to the birds’ accumulating experience of living, the only reality they would know.

  As I stood up, the scents vanished. I breathed deeply, searching for a hint of them, but there was nothing more to smell in the air I walked through.

  THE OBVIOUS LESSON WAS that scale matters. This world is not designed for us; we populate and experience a very small part of it. We evolved to fit optimally, more or less, within a certain volume of space less than eight feet high and a few feet wide. We do that well. But we are not ordinarily privy to the world that exists within the tangle of tundra plants and saturated soils, nor the complex of forms below the tidal range, nor the chaos of currents the falcon flows through. Not paying attention to these things leaves us impoverished and ignorant.

  To some extent, science provides access. It attempts to delve below the surface experience and provide descriptions of what exists there. Regardless of the scale examined, the pursuits of science have shown that there is much more within each realm than imagination could ever, ever produce.

  What science cannot provide or explain, however, are the human experiences those spaces inspire, nor why we pursue understanding them in the first place. Knowing the mathematical and objective description of place only feeds the hunger to understand, while that hunger remains one of the greatest of all mysteries.

  Clear Water

  THE BEDROCK, BACKBONE TO THE LANDSCAPE, shapes impressions and guides the winds. Tidal flow is constrained by it; the ice rests on it. It is impenetrable. We break off samples with ringing hammers and nothing flows out, but in that crystalline scaffolding, water resides. The water is inherited from the time the rocks were little more than mud sludge on the ocean floor. Slowly buried and recrystallized, the atomic lattices of evolving new minerals capture the water molecules in systematic arrangements, preserving them for future considerations.

  GREENLAND IS INCISED BY THOUSANDS OF FJORDS and fringed by countless islands and skerries, giving it a length of coastline as great as the circumference of Earth. The ice sheet that dominates it contains more than 600,000 cubic miles of frozen water. As a consequence, it is a place defined by water. As one becomes sensitive to that reality, unexpected perspectives present themselves. The extent to which water and rock are consanguineous must be addressed.

  FAR WEST OF THE ICE CAP, THE FJORD WATERS are free of silt and mud and are crystal clear. Many years before, when I left for my first summer expedition in Greenland, I already knew it would be a place dominated by the sea. Knowing that intellectually and experiencing it in reality, however, are two utterly different things.

  One early afternoon on an unusually warm day on that first expedition, walking along a low ridge that was the heart of a small peninsula, I glanced down to my left toward a little bay of crystal clear water that ended at a stony beach about a quarter of a mile away. The nearly vertical rock walls that bounded the north and south sides of the bay plunged directly to its floor. The water was about fifteen feet deep. Sunlight lit the seafloor so brilliantly that the colors of the underwater world, which are usually muted and dim, pierced the air in a vibrant shimmer. Every imaginable shade of green and purple and gray, highlighted by splotches of yellows and blues, glowed there.

  Incongruously, a nearly black gash asserted itself, riding in the water right next to the shore below me. Three feet long, linear, and near the surface, it stood out in sharp contrast to the asymmetry of the free-form backdrop of dancing colors on the seafloor. Slowly, it moved inland toward the beach, seeming to drift with the tide. At first, I thought it was a piece of driftwood, riding the currents from some faraway place where wood grew and logs existed. Eventually, through exquisitely subtle, swaying undulations, it revealed itself to be a fish, slowly swimming in that crystalline liquid space. It did not seem hungry, or on the prowl, more as though it were relaxing in the high noon light, casually taking in the serene tranquility of its world.

  Later that day, walking back to camp, the wonder of that liquid space haunted me, and I decided I needed to see more of it. We had a small skiff for short excursions to sample and explore the cliff faces bounding the bays near camp.

  With fifty yards of monofilament line, a single hook, and a two-ounce lead sinker, I rowed across the inlet where our camp sat, making for a cliff face across from us that indicated it might be a good fishing spot. It was late afternoon; sunlight slanted at a low angle, illuminating the rock wall with a water-filtered elegance. I stopped rowing and looked straight down in the crystal clear water, curious at what could be seen of the bottom. But everything there—the seaweed-encrusted stones, fish, shellfish, and cobbled seafloor—shimmered and flowed, causing a feeling of vertigo. Something seemed to manipulate the light, unnatural and unexpected.

  The bay was the outlet of a small stream that ran behind our camp. Water babbled over stones and wended through grassy stretches, soaking up what warmth it could from the sun and land surface. The water of the bay was icy cold. When the stream entered the sea, it floated as a freshwater tongue on the cool density of salt water. The result was a layer of fresh water several inches deep flowing across the bay on the back of the sea. The interface between the fresh water and the salt water was a boundary of contrasting densities, mixing in small gyres and tiny internal waves. The difference in temperatures and compositions of the fluid masses bent the light reflected from the bottom, distorting th
e patterns, twisting the colors.

  I reached over the side and put my fingers into the freshwater. As they moved down a few inches, my fingers penetrated the slithering boundary layer. Painlessly, I watched as flesh disassembled into a dance of swirling abstractions, my fingers becoming nothing I knew.

  As I pulled my fingers out of the water and continued rowing toward the cliff face, an aura of enchantment settled over the bay, as though I was entering a world that had been waiting to be seen. Above the waterline was a series of bands of rusty browns and white, typical of the sulfide-rich gneisses and schists in the area. Approaching the cliff face, though, it became evident that the colors below the waterline bore no resemblance at all to that pattern. The waterline became a discontinuity, severing the submerged world from the land surface with impressive precision. Underwater, no hint existed of the obvious banding on land. Instead, a rich deep purple covered the wall. The water was at least thirty feet deep and, although the clearly visible bottom was a random mix of light-colored boulders, sand, and gravel, the entire wall was a simple dramatic purple from waterline to bottom.

  Only when I was a few feet from the underwater cliff face did the purple resolve into thousands of sea urchins, so densely crowded that their spines tangled together in an organic, spiked weaving. Barely an inch of space existed between any of them for hundreds of feet. Looking closer, it became clear that what seemed a static purple surface writhed in subtle motion, each urchin slowly making its way through that forest of individuals, spines lazily waving in the current, grazing on whatever algal remnant had been missed by its neighbors. For some minutes, I drifted along the water’s edge, marveling at the nature of urchin existence, a biological complexity lacking mind but driven by the urgency to eat.

  Eventually, I pushed away from the wall to examine more of that submarine tableau. My eyes, though focused on the seafloor thirty feet below, were caught by something out of focus and just below the surface. At first, what seemed to be floating in the water was an iridescent wire slightly and repeatedly rippling in invisible waves. Then, as though a veil had suddenly been lifted, that one wire resolved into a collection of hundreds, moving in a slow ballet with the gentle current. I pulled in the oars and leaned over the gunwale, trying to make out what this was. “It” turned out to be hundreds of small comb jellies—marine invertebrates that look like jellyfish but belong to the phylum Ctenophora (jellyfish belong to the phylum Cnidaria). Each was shaped like a lantern three to four inches long and two inches across. Along the length of each body ran eight thin threads of cilia that glowed with iridescent colors as the cilia propelled the slowly turning lanterns in the sea. The cilia beat in rhythmic waves that flowed along the nearly transparent bodies, giving the impression of thin threads of rainbow colors tumbling in the clear water. They surrounded the boat as far as I could see, immersing me in a world of shimmering kinematic magic.

  There was nothing to do but relinquish intent and float with the jellies. I lay down in the boat, head braced on the stern board, and gazed at the silent spectacle of light and colors, mesmerized, as the skiff slowly turned in the gentle current.

  A River of Fish

  AS THE DAYS WORE ON DURING THAT EXPEDITION to substantiate Kai and John’s earlier findings, the three of us became more certain that the conjectured suture zone was in the area we were studying; we were mapping it. Once we realized that, it became important to understand the relationship between the old magmatic rocks that Kalsbeek and his coworkers had found back in 1987 and the suture zone we were tromping through. The available geological maps seemed to show that the magmatic bodies did not extend north of the NSSZ. But was that simply a fortuitous geological relationship or did it mean that the shear zone sliced through the frozen magma chambers in some massive tectonic action, displacing to some unknown location the remainder of that igneous complex? The pencil gneiss in the shear zone told us that the magma, once frozen, cooled, and solidified, had experienced significant deformation there. If the sheared pencil gneisses were the only significant deformation preserved in the magmatic bodies and if the magmatic bodies were only deformed like that in the shear zone, the NSSZ would almost certainly be the major tectonic feature John and Kai had described so many years before. The question we had been pursuing had been reduced to whether the pencil gneisses were to be found throughout the region or if they were present only within the shear zone.

  So, on a brisk, sunny morning, we set off to see if those sheared magmatic rocks were present in an area to the southeast of our camp. Sampling them and seeing what, exactly, they looked like would help determine how the story of that old mountain system would be told.

  WE CRUISED IN THE ZODIAC ACROSS THE FJORD to a place where small coves and inlets gave good exposure of the geology. A gentle breeze brushed over the water’s surface, making the trip easy but bracing. Throughout the morning, we made a number of stops, but we found no evidence of significant deformation in those old frozen magma bodies.

  By late morning, the breeze had vanished and a pervasive stillness settled in. With it, the inevitable swarms of summer mosquitoes arrived, their incessant high-pitched whine setting nerves on edge. We pulled out our gloves and mosquito-netted hats and put them on. One gets used to doing fieldwork in mosquito nets and gloves; after a very short while, the netting is forgotten and the gloves come on and off easily. But when it was lunchtime, netting and gloves became a bother. We decided to escape the mosquitoes by making a dash out into the fjord with the Zodiac at full throttle, leaving the bloodsuckers in our wake. We threw in our backpacks with our water bottles and lunches and John quickly cranked up the outboard. As we flew across the mirrored surface, the cloud of mosquitoes rapidly fell away and we sighed with relief, throwing the hats and gloves in our backpacks on the Zodiac floor.

  Once we were out of mosquito range, John shut off the motor and the boat drifted with the slowly flooding tide, turning lazy circles in the water. The fjord was a shimmering glass surface, occasionally lapping against the side of the boat, the only sound that interrupted an otherwise absolute stillness. Small blocks of ice from the ice sheet floated past, melting their way to oblivion. We spoke few words, allowing the feel of the place in the warm sun to seep in. We slowly ate our usual lunch of bread, sardines, and cheese, washed down by a thermos of coffee.

  By the time lunch was finished and we headed back to shore, a light breeze had returned. When we landed, the mosquito swarms descended, but the breeze kept them downwind, the dark clouds of aggressive, frantic insects seemingly shrieking at the fact they could not get to us. The mosquito netting was put away and the gloves came off.

  The place we had put ashore was a small cobbled beach next to a long outcrop of gently sloping gneisses. The layering in the rock ran perpendicular to the coastline, which meant that we could easily walk across many different rock types, putting together fragments of a protracted history as we measured and sampled.

  I took off ahead of Kai and John, who were arguing about something in the gneisses that didn’t interest me. The sky was so blue, it seemed to give off a light of its own. The water, usually an intense cobalt when reflecting such a sky, was a murky pale greenish hue because of the finely pulverized rock flooding into the fjord from the meltwater gushing from the base of the ice just a couple of miles to the east.

  Eventually, I rounded a small point and came to an expanse of smoothly polished stone where thin black layers in very white rock were folded intricately into distorted accordionlike forms. I walked back and forth for a short while, simply enjoying the quiet beauty of the stone while trying to make some scientific sense of it. The feeling that an anonymous potter had playfully indulged in some lyrical fantasy was irresistible.

  After a few minutes, the notebook came out and, on hands and knees to more closely observe the minerals in the rock, I began writing the story that seemed to present itself. The texture of the rock pressed into the skin of my palms. It was smooth as glass in places, polished by the Ice Age glaciers th
at had ground at it with water and silt thousands of years earlier, but there were also small patches where the polished surface had spalled off, exposing a studded face of fractured crystals of quartz and feldspar and hornblende. I ran my hand over the contrasting textures, curious about the tactile experience of conflict between polish and edge.

  The warmth was soothing. Greenland can often be briskly cold, even when the sun is out. But that warm day allowed the rocky outcrop to absorb the sun’s rays and radiate back a welcome heat. I took off my backpack and jacket and rolled onto my back, feeling the warmth ooze through my shirt and onto my skin. For minutes I lay there unmoving, savoring the luscious luxury of that simple contact. After a while, turning to the right, watching in silence, the static massiveness of the ice wall at the horizon of our world captured my attention.

  There was no beach there, just white rock bounding ocean. A stone’s throw away, small ice blocks from the calving ice sheet lazily floated on a now-ebbing tide.

  Then I noticed a huge school of herringlike fish slowly swimming by, just a few feet from the water’s edge. It was startling to realize they had been there all along.

  That species of fish was often out in the fjord, but usually they were alone or in small groups. They nearly always seemed dazed and lethargic, flopping from side to side, as though they lacked the energy to move fins and tail in any coordinated way. But in that school near the water’s edge, they swam with purpose, flowing like a slow river toward the head of the fjord. They had gathered where the water was shallow, warm, and protected. Thousands of them, moving in a band that was many feet wide, extended from the surface to a depth hidden by the murky water. How long that living river extended was impossible tell; it stretched out of sight in both directions. I sat there mesmerized, wondering at the collective imperative that drove so many individuals to a destination they could not possibly know.