Arctic Dreams, page 25
Polynyas are kept free of solid ice all winter by a complex interaction of forces—prevailing winds, currents, and tides, and perhaps local upwelling. They seem especially important for walrus and bearded seals as winter refuges, less so for ringed seals, narwhals, and belukhas. Some seabirds, such as the black guillemot, eiders, and oldsquaw, as well as Ross’s gulls and ivory gulls, may also benefit by wintering in these places, though scientists are hard-pressed to explain how a food web can function in these dark, bitterly cold places.
Polynyas seem really to come into their own in the spring. The annual phytoplankton bloom may start in them as much as two months before it begins in adjacent, ice-covered areas, offering migrating colonial seabirds (northern fulmars, kittiwakes, dove-kies, murres) a significant head start. Polynyas also seem vitally important as feeding areas for early-arriving narwhals and bowhead and belukha whales.
Areas of year-round open water in the Canadian Arctic. Adapted from Ian Stirling and Holly Cleator, Polynyas in the Canadian Arctic.
One cannot consider polynyas, of course, without recalling images of narwhals and belukhas fatally trapped in savssats; and the precipitate oscillations in normal sea-ice formation that can catch tens of thousands of early-arriving or molting seabirds by surprise. (In the spring of 1964, 100,000 king eiders—one-tenth of the regional population—were frozen-in in the Beaufort Sea.) A very real sense of loss in the face of large-scale catastrophe, however, can obscure how integral to the nature of northern ecosystems this edge between life and death is, an edge the annual formation of sea ice sharply accentuates.
One fall afternoon a friend, an ornithologist, was counting migrating birds near Demarcation Bay on the north coast of Alaska, at a place called Pingokralik. On several tundra ponds he was also following the progress of three or four families of red-throated and arctic loons. Loons are unable to walk on land, and they require plenty of open water for taking off. Early in September, when the red-throated loon chicks were barely half their parents’ size, the coast was buffeted by snow squalls. Within a few days the tundra ponds were frozen over. My friend emerged from his tent one morning to find a red-throated loon and its chick paddling about energetically in an effort to maintain a small patch of open water. The other parent, which had spent the night at sea, flew by every half hour or so with food in its beak, but it could no more land than the other bird could take off.
The next day it warmed up enough so the pondbound adult could take off and the other bird could land with food for the chick. The loons—there were other families in similar straits nearby—persevered in this manner, even as the human observer was driven off to a more permanent shelter. He did not know the fate of the loon chicks (the adults may well have abandoned them). What he remembers seeing were the adults flying back and forth strongly from the sea, dark spots fading in the snow squalls. Resolute, even in the face of poor timing. Successful animals.
During parts of one summer I lived at the Canadian government’s Polar Continental Shelf camp at Resolute, Cornwallis Island, a staging area for scientific research in the Arctic. During those weeks I was able to speak with a number of scientists—archaeologists, biologists, geologists, ornithologists; but one of my strongest memories is of an evening I spent with a retired geologist named Maurice Haycock, talking about painting. Haycock was in his eighties when I met him. He had had a long and successful career as a geologist with the Canadian government and had played the French horn for many years in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra. He had also traveled occasionally with the Canadian landscape painter A.Y. Jackson, both of them painting in the Northwest Territories on geological field trips.
One afternoon Haycock and I walked down to the edge of Barrow Strait together to look at a hazy apparition of distant Somerset Island, which had been lifted above the horizon in an imposing mirage. (Puikartuq, the Eskimo call it, “coming up for air.”) We also examined a Thule campsite together. And he told me stories of his experiences in the Arctic in the 1920s, when travel was by dog sledge. He described one time in particular, of sledging across smooth coastal ice in brilliant spring weather, mile after mile. Time fell away. He experienced a detachment so peaceful, he said, that in his scientific mind he solved problem after problem. He spoke to me with the tones of someone remembering once having fallen in love. He was charming, a man nearing the end of a life of rich, authentic moments.
The evening I am thinking of, I was sitting in his room in camp. He lay on his bed with one arm across his forehead. In his other hand he held several brushes, from which he meant shortly to wash the residue of the day’s efforts. He was trying to capture in words his admiration for the land. He recalled having painted once at the Grand Canyon and the trouble he had had in painting the air, the space between the south rim where he stood and the far north rim.
He was trying to speak about the difficulty of painting air. And he said he liked to paint here on Cornwallis Island, the fields of glacial till where there was hardly a plant, because he enjoyed the subtleties. “A close-toned land,” he said. The brushes clicked in his hand as he rolled them against each other. He thought in silence. “The tones of the land here,” he said, “are lighter than the tones of the midday sky.”
As I listened, I felt the evening sun pouring through the windowpane onto the side of my head. The room was airy with sunlight, flushed, like an empty summer bedroom in one of Edward Hopper’s paintings. I could see how brightly Haycock’s eyes shone as he moved through the forests of his own memory; his large, roughened hands; and the sheen on a painting he’d done that morning on a small piece of birch plywood. I was acutely aware of listening to him, though for long periods neither of us spoke. He reminisced about days painting on the tundra near Great Slave Lake with Jackson, one of Canada’s radical Group of Seven, landscape painters who gained prominence for their indigenous Canadian style in the 1910s. He talked about why one went out to paint like that. It was a conversation with the land, he said.
The evening slipped quietly away from both of us. Eventually he went to wash his brushes and I went to my room and lay down to think. If I were a painter, I, too, would be taken with the fullness and subtle quality of the light here. You have the color balances from all twenty-four hours from which to choose, the sweeping lines of crisp desert vistas under huge prairie skies, and the rarefied air with which to work. Ice and water push the light up beneath cliffs and into other places where you would expect to find shadows, and back into the sky where it fills the air. At certain hours the land has the resolution of a polished diamond.
This obvious and disarming beauty, oddly, is absent from nineteenth-century European landscape paintings of the region. But the subject of virtually all of that work was British arctic exploration, and the theme was remarkably consistent—a nation blessed by God, at war with the elements in a treacherous landscape. The Arctic they painted was a place beyond the pale of civilization, a beast that preyed on virtue and enterprise. Among the most famous of these paintings are Caspar David Friedrich’s The Polar Sea (1824), in which a ship of exploration (the Hope, in an early sketch) lies crushed amid huge, rafted floes; William Bradford’s An Arctic Summer, Boring through the Pack Ice in Melville Bay (1871), in which a distant three-masted ship, although itself bathed in light, is headed for a foreground of ice overshadowed by cloud and upon which rests a cruciform fragment from another vessel’s mast; and Edwin Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes, in which two imposing polar bears are tearing apart the wreckage of yet another ship crushed in the ice.
The luminist tradition in nineteenth-century American landscape painting found itself only on the fringes of the Arctic, but it was a movement far better suited to an evocation of the North than the European tradition. Luminist painters sought out a soothing and restful light, which they found along the New England coast at places like Provincetown, Massachusetts. The art critic John Russell, alluding to the nation’s mood after the Civil War, has called it “a healing light.” I think of these New England paintings because the light in them, the plein-air essence of it, is a familiar light in the Arctic. As I traveled to and from Resolute, especially in the evening hours around midnight, I beheld scenes that reminded me forcefully of the work of luminists like Fitz Hugh Lane. At Cape Vera, Devon Island, one evening, the water in Jones Sound was so black and matte-finished it looked like scorched earth, and the icebergs floating in it were so brilliant my eye could not rest on their surfaces. Another time, off the west coast of Ellef Ringnes Island, the air, not the sun, seemed to be the source of a flat, breathy light, within which I saw only long, restful lines: a bare strand meeting the dark water, and the water the vacant blue of the sky. And yet again on Banks Island, at two in the morning, I saw a herd of muskoxen moving across a shallow slope of green grass in strong light, through air as bright as if it had just been washed in a summer rain, with brilliant, individual pinpoints of purple lousewort and white avens in the foreground. As in the New England paintings, it was as though “all that one beheld was full of blessing.”
The evening I spoke with Haycock, I came across, in my notes about light, the words of a prisoner remembering life in solitary confinement. He wrote that the only light he experienced was “the vivid burst of brilliance” that came when he shut his eyes tight. That light, which came to him in a darkness that “was like being in ink,” was “like fireworks.” He wrote, “My eyes hungered for light, for color….” You cannot look at Western painting, let alone the work of the luminists, without sensing that hunger. Western civilization, I think, longs for light as it longs for blessing, or for peace or God.
The night I spoke with Haycock, in a building on Cornwallis Island in which no one but scientists slept (a scientific background was Haycock’s entrée), I felt because of his artistic passion the great range of human inquiry. We desire not merely to know the sorts of things that are revealed in scientific papers but to know what is beautiful and edifying in a faraway place. Considering the tradition of distant travelers, the range of their interests and the range of their countrymen’s desire to know, the government camp on Cornwallis Island seemed an impoverished outpost. There were no provisions there for painters, for musicians, for novelists. And there were no historians there. If the quest for knowledge in any remote place is meant in an egalitarian sense to be useful to all, then this is a peculiar situation. Yet it is no different from what one would find in a hundred other such remote places around the world. Whenever we seek to take swift and efficient possession of places completely new to us, places we neither own nor understand, our first and often only assessment is a scientific one. And so our evaluations remain unfinished.
Whatever evaluation we finally make of a stretch of land, however, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression—its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.
At first it seems that, except for a brief few weeks in autumn, the Arctic is without color. Its land colors are the colors of deserts, the ochers and siennas of stratified soils, the gray-greens of sparse plant life on bare soil. On closer inspection, however, the monotonic rock of the polar desert is seen to harbor the myriad greens, reds, yellows, and oranges of lichens. The whites of tundra swans and of sunlit ice in black water are pure and elegant. Occasionally there is brilliant coloring—as with wildflowers in the summer, or a hillside of willow and bearberry in the fall; or a slick of vegetable oils shining with the iridescent colors of petroleum on a tundra puddle; or the bright face of a king eider. But the bright colors are more often only points in a season, not brushstrokes; and they are absorbed in the paler casts of the landscape.
Arresting color in the Arctic is found more often in the sky, with its vivid twilights and the aurora borealis. (The predominant colors of the aurora are a pale green and a soft rose. I turned over a weathered caribou antler once on the tundra and found these same two colors staining its white surface. Such correspondence, like that between a surfacing guillemot and an Eskimo man rolling upright in his kayak, hold a landscape together.)
Arctic skies retain the colors of dawn and dusk for hours in winter. On days when the southern sky is barely lit for a while around noon, layers of deep violet, of bruised purples and dense blues, may stretch across 80° of the horizon, above a familiar lavender and the thinnest line of yellow gold. The first sunrise/sunset of spring may glow “carmine and lake [red], fading off into crimsons, yellows, and saffrons,” as a British naval surgeon wrote in his winter journal. In the spring and fall, when sunrises and sunsets are more widely separated, vivid reds, oranges, and yellows shine through washes of rose and salmon, of pale cyan, apricot and indigo, as they do in other latitudes. In summer, the skies have a nacreous quality, like the inside of an abalone shell. The colors of summer skies are pastel; the temperature of the light, however, varies enough so that around midnight yellows in the landscape fade noticeably and blues deepen.
The striking phenomena in the arctic sky for a newcomer are the unsuspected variety of solar and lunar rings, halos, and coronas; the aurora borealis itself; and the mirages that occur at sea, including fata morganas. These events are especially apparent in the Far North for several reasons. The kinds of ice crystals that cause solar and lunar refraction are often present in the arctic atmosphere. The air itself is clear. Slight inversions in the lower atmosphere and sharp temperature differentials at the surface of the ocean in summer, which cause mirages, are common. And the arctic region lies directly underneath the part of the earth’s atmosphere that makes the auroral display, or northern lights, visible.
When he was in winter quarters on the coast of Melville Island in 1819–20, William Parry drew a picture of the sun’s halos, arcs, and parahelia, or sun dogs, that is now famous. He captured in that single drawing many of the effects that are regularly seen in the Arctic either alone or in some combination. The sun, at the time, was about 22° above the southeastern horizon. It was surrounded by a halo that measured 44° across the horizon and by a second halo 92° across the horizon, part of which was cut off below by the line of the earth. (These are called, after their degree of radius, the 22° and 46° solar halos.) Both these halos were subtended by other arcs, while yet another arc cut across the sun and swept away east and west, parallel to the horizon (the parahelic arc). Where the parahelic arc crossed the 22° halo, two brilliant sun dogs appeared. And below the sun, just at the horizon, gleamed a third sun dog (actually a subsun).
This picture can be readily explained by physicists in terms of ray mechanics, a precise bending of sunlight through certain types of ice crystals aligned in a specific way. In fact, a physicist named Robert Greenler reproduced the elements of Parry’s drawing almost perfectly in a computer illustration generated by the formulae involved—a tribute to the accuracy and completeness of Parry’s work.
Francis M’Clintock, another British explorer, was presiding at a burial through the sea ice in Baffin Bay in 1857 when he took notice of a stark December moon. A “complete halo encircl[ed] the moon,” wrote M’Clintock, “through which passed a horizontal band of pale light that encompassed the heavens; above the moon appeared the segments of two other halos, and there were also mock moons or paraselenae to the number of six. The misty atmosphere lent a very ghastly hue to this singular display, which lasted rather more than an hour.”
William Parry’s drawing of solar arcs and halos.
The physics involved in the refraction and reflection of sunlight by ice crystals and water droplets, and its diffraction by airborne particles, is dauntingly complex. The arcs and halos produced are sometimes very faint; they also occur in unexpected combinations. Seeing them, however, is largely a matter of training yourself to look. On a single spring day over Lancaster Sound I saw a soft, opaque white pillar or feather (the shape was like a passerine bird’s tail feather) standing between the sun and the southeastern horizon (a sun pillar); and that evening, a few minutes after midnight, two long, rainbow-hued shields standing on the horizon on opposite sides of the sun, an unusual pair of sun dogs.7
The aurora borealis, pale gossamer curtains of light that seem to undulate across arctic skies, are transfixing in part because of their diffidence. “It is impossible to witness such a beautiful phenomenon without a sense of awe,” wrote Robert Scott, the British Antarctic explorer, “and yet this sentiment is not inspired by its brilliancy but rather by its delicacy in light and colour, its transparency, and above all by its tremulous evanescence of form. There is no glittering splendour to dazzle the eye, as has been too often described; rather the appeal is to the imagination by the suggestion of something wholly spiritual….”
It is unusual in the literature of exploration to find a strictly consistent reaction, but virtually everyone who wrote down his thoughts about the aurora described, first, the inadequacy of his language and, second, a pervasive and stilling spiritual presence. Among Eskimos the descriptions are often of events that precede or follow life on earth, of the play of unborn children, or of torches held by the dead to help the living hunt in winter. In more southerly latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, where the aurora is occasionally visible, its connotations are much different, largely because its predominant color when it becomes visible that far south is a deep red. The apparition suggested conflagration and holocaust to Europeans in the Middle Ages. Vikings thought it a reflection in the sky of Vulcan’s forge. Miners in Alaska at the turn of the century, of a more scientific and prosaic bent, thought the aurora was a gaseous form of lightning or the glow from radium mines.
