Arctic Dreams, page 32
More irritating to the eye than these gratuitous monuments are the tens of thousands of miles of seismic trails generated in a continuing search for oil and gas, and the hundreds of thousands of empty aviation gas barrels scattered across the tundra at thousands of spike camps used by scientists, technicians, and, in recent years, by Eskimo hunters. As the science of seismic surveying improves, the same areas are surveyed all over again, and the system of trails left in the tundra by the cleat-footed tractor trains is extended. Vegetation does not grow back; the compressed soil does not rebound; spring rains do not wash the trails away. If anything, they occasionally grow worse. The exposed soil absorbs more sunlight, permafrost below begins to melt, and the tractorway begins to sink and separate, like a prairie gully in soil held together by no roots.
Puluwatan natives in the Caroline Islands are famed for the accuracy with which they navigate on the high seas between distant archipelagos of the South Pacific. They align their boats with certain rising and setting stars, and note the presence at sea of particular species of birds, the salinity of the water, the set of currents, and the behavior of swell systems. Likewise, an Eskimo navigating in polar darkness and white-outs and across featureless stretches of ice and snow makes full and efficient use of the few clues available to him. On shorefast ice in summer fog he travels between the voices of seabirds on landward cliffs and the sound of surf on the seaward edge of the ice. When he begins a journey over open terrain he marks the angle of the wind and checks his bearing periodically by glancing at the fur of his parka rim, at its alignment with the breeze. He bends down to feel the trend of sastrugi (ridges of hard snow that form in line with the prevailing wind) when he cannot see them in darkness or blowing snow. He notes the trend of any cracks in the ice as he crosses them. Sea ice cracks can reveal the presence of a cape or headland invisible in the distance, or they may confirm one’s arrival at a known area, where the pattern of cracks is the same, year after year. The need to pay attention to the smallest clues is essential—a dark object on the ice could be a stone, revealing a hidden shoreline.
Constant attention to such details, memories of the way the land looks, and stories told by other travelers and hunters about the region are used together with the movements of animals, especially those of birds, and “sky maps” to keep the traveler on course.8 Searching for such small but crucial clues, especially in the tremendous glare of light in spring (the traditional season for long journeys, because of the combination of good light and firm ice) or in the low-contrast conditions of winter, can be exhausting for a man who does not know what to ignore.
These navigational skills are still part of village life for some in the Arctic, used just as often today in traveling long distances by snow machine as they were once by people traveling by dog sledge or on foot. And such skills still remain more critical for the success of a journey, especially over the sea ice, than even the best maps and navigation aids. Fogs and blizzards obscure the reference points important in navigation by topographic map—even compasses can’t be consistently relied on here. The closer one gets to the magnetic pole, the stronger the vertical component and the weaker the horizontal component of this electromagnetic field become, causing the needle to wander listlessly, east and west of magnetic north. Corrections for compass declination at certain longitudes and latitudes are useless. Ionospheric disturbances, including magnetic storms and a phenomenon called “polar cap absorption,” adversely affect radio direction-finding equipment. The frequency of temperature inversions in the summer makes it difficult to align a sextant on an undistorted horizon. And satellite-generated maps showing the extent of the sea ice, sent electronically to ships, are dated in twenty-four hours.
In the Arctic the sun does not rise reliably in the east and set in the west, and the farther north one goes, the fewer are the stars that rise and set. The summer moon is so dim that its presence is barely noticed. The most dependable sources of direction for most Eskimos, therefore, are the behavior of the wind and ocean currents, the consistent alignment of a flaw lead, and such things as the direction of flow of a river. You hardly ever hear someone say he is going to head “east” to hunt or visit or look around.
One September morning I traveled east (the way I envisioned it) with several friends in a small boat from our scientific base camp at Beaufort Lagoon, near the Canadian border. It was a balmy day, exhilarating weather after a week of cold wind and rain and overcast skies during which we had been working at sea. We were headed for the Yukon border, which had for all of us a romantic allure. We traveled about 25 miles along the coast before we were cut off in the shore lead by ice. Fortuitously, we were within a hundred yards of the border.
We doffed our parkas and wandered about the tundra somewhat aimlessly, in the vicinity of a cluster of weathered driftwood piles that marked the dividing line between the two countries. Caribou trails and the sight of migrating ducks and geese, the absence of immigration officials, and, not least, the sun shining brightly in a cloudless sky made us all take crossing the border less seriously. We found tufts of polar bear fur caught in the dry tundra grasses, and the tracks of a bear in the steep embankment, where it had descended the coastal bluff to the ice and headed out to sea.
In such benign circumstances it was hard to imagine the deadly tension that characterized other national borders on that same day. We were all of us more affected by an exotic childhood idea—reaching the Yukon Territory. We took our bearings from a country in our heads—it was an idea that brought us here, to a spot on the tundra we would be hard-pressed to distinguish in terms of plant life or animal life or topography from the tundra a mile farther to the east, or back to the west. To come here at all was an act of carefree innocence. We stood around for nearly an hour. We took each other’s pictures. We were delighted by the felicitous conjunction of this good weather and our idea of “the Yukon Territory.”
Ideas no less real and far more affecting brought European explorers into the Arctic hundreds of years ago. They were searching for lands and straits they knew existed but which they had never seen; and they could not believe they did not exist when they failed to find them. As there was a Strait of Magellan at Cape Horn, they thought, so too should there be a northern strait, a Strait of Anian, just as there were Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern oceans. Did not the most learned references of the day, the sea charts, depict such a passage? And did it not make sense that Frobisher should find gold in the Arctic, just as the Spaniards had in the tropics?
When the early arctic explorers wrote down in official commentaries what they had seen, they were hesitant to criticize the wisdom of the day, what the esteemed maps indicated. They were prone, in fact, to embellish, in order to make themselves seem more credible. They even believed on occasion that they had sensed something where there was nothing because it seemed ordained that it should happen—did not the eye glimpse faintly a shore before the fog closed in? Had not the ear recorded a distant surf before darkness and a contrary wind conspired against it? The land, they believed, should corroborate, not contradict, what men knew from sources like Ptolemy about the shape of the world. The accounts of such explorers were read and passed on; the entangled desires and observations of the writers, with a liberal interpretation by cartographers with reputations of their own to protect, perpetuated a geography of hoped-for islands and straits to the west of Europe that could not be substantiated, a geography only of the mind.
The influence of these images, of course, was considerable. Such a mental geography becomes the geography to which society adjusts, and it can be more influential than the real geography. The popular image of a previously unknown region, writes J. Wreford Watson, is “compounded of what men hope to find, what they look to find, how they set about finding, how findings are fitted into their existing framework of thought, and how those findings are then expressed.” This, says Watson, is what is actually “found” in a new land.
Another geographer, John L. Allen, pondering the way we set off for a fresh landscape, writes, “When exploration is viewed as a process rather than as a series of distinct events, its major components [are seen to be] clearly related to the imagination. No exploratory adventure begins without objectives based on the imagined nature and content of the lands to be explored.” The course of discovery is guided, then, by preconceived notions. Field observations, writes Allen, “are distorted by these images. The results of exploration are modified by reports written and interpreted in the light of persistent illusions and by attempts made to fit new information into partly erroneous systems and frameworks of geographical understanding.”
Over the past twenty years, some of the focus of academic geography has shifted away from descriptions of the land and focused instead on landscapes that exist in the human mind. The extent and complexity of these geographical images, called mental maps, are wonderful. An urban resident, for example, sees himself situated in urban space with specific reference to certain stores, parking spaces, and public transportation stations. He assigns one street or building more importance than another as a place for chance meetings with friends. He knows which routes between certain points are safest and how to get to a certain restaurant even though he doesn’t know the names of any of the streets on the way. The mental map of an Eskimo might be an overview of the region where he customarily hunts—where caribou are likely to turn up in the spring, where berries are to be found, where consistent runs of char are located, where the ground is too swampy to walk over in June, where good soapstone is to be had, or a regular supply of driftwood.
The mental maps of both urban dweller and Eskimo may correspond poorly in spatial terms with maps of the same areas prepared with survey tools and cartographic instruments. But they are proven, accurate guides of the landscape. They are living conceptions, idiosyncratically created, stripped of the superfluous, instantly adaptable. Their validity is not susceptible of contradiction.
Our overall cultural perception of a region requires another term. Mental maps are too personal; and the term does not convey sufficiently the richness of the invisible landscape, that component of a regional image that aboriginal groups dwell on at least as much as they consider a region’s physiographic components. Jahner’s term, the spiritual landscape, refers more specifically to relationships inherent in the physical landscape which make us aware of the presence of the forces and relationships that infuse our religious thought. If one can take the phrase “a country of the mind” to mean the landscape evident to the senses, as it is retained in human memory and arises in the oral tradition of a people, as a repository of both mythological and “real-time” history, then perhaps this phrase will suffice.
Amos Rapoport, an Australian architect, and like Tuan and Carpenter curious about the meaning of “place,” made a landmark study among Kurna, Arunda, Walbiri, and other Australian aborigines. He mapped their mythological landscapes. He understood that the stories that compose a tribe’s mythological background, their origin and their meaning and purpose in the universe, are “unobservable realities” that find their expression in “observable phenomena.” The land, in other words, makes the myth real. And it makes the people real.
The stories that unfold against the local landscape, and that give expression to the enduring relationships of life, said Rapoport, are as critical for people as food or water. The mythic landscape is not the natural landscape, Rapoport concluded, but the mythic and natural landscapes overlap at certain visible points in the land. And the limits of the local landscape, he emphasized, are not something that can be politically negotiated; they are fixed in mythology. They are not susceptible of adjustment. Rapoport’s study made it eminently clear, as he put it, that Europeans may “completely misunderstand the nature of the landscape because of their point of view.”
It is always somewhat risky to extrapolate from one aboriginal culture to another. I know of no work comparable to Rapoport’s in the Arctic, however, and his observations come as close to being generically sound as any anthropologist’s I know. The journals of the most attentive arctic explorers, those with both a flair for listening and a capacity to record metaphorical impressions without judgment, are filled with references to mythological events that occurred at particular places. Eskimos are not as land-conscious as aborigines; they are more sea-conscious, and the surface of the sea is impermanent, new every year. Still, the evidence for a landscape in the Arctic larger than the one science reports, more extensive than that recorded on the United States Geological Survey quadrangle maps, is undeniable. It is the country the shamans shined their qaumaneq, their shaman light, into.
The aspiration of aboriginal people throughout the world has been to achieve a congruent relationship with the land, to fit well in it. To achieve occasionally a state of high harmony or reverberation. The dream of this transcendent congruency included the evolution of a hunting and gathering relationship with the earth, in which a mutual regard was understood to prevail; but it also meant a conservation of the stories that bind the people into the land.
I recall a scene in one of the British discovery expeditions to the Arctic of a group of ship’s officers standing about somewhat idly on a beach while three or four Eskimo men drew a map for them in the sand. The young officers found the drawing exotic and engaging, but almost too developed, too theatrical. I can imagine the Eskimos drawing a map they meant not to be taken strictly as a navigational aid, but as a recapitulation of their place in the known universe. Therefore, as they placed a line of stones to represent a mountain range and drew in the trend of the coast, they included also small, seemingly insignificant bays where it was especially good to hunt geese, or tapped a section of a river where the special requirements for sheefish spawning were present. This was the map as mnemonic device, organizing the names of the places and the stories attached to them, three or four men unfolding their meaning and purpose as people before the young officers. They did not know what to leave out for these impatient men. There was no way for them to separate the stories, the indigenous philosophy, from the land. The young officers later remembered only that the maps were fascinating. Had the Eskimos told them that the Pentateuch was merely fascinating, they would have thought them daft.
The place-fixing stories that grew out of the land were of two kinds. The first kind, which was from the myth time and which occurred against the backdrop of a mythological landscape, was usually meticulously conserved. (It was always possible that the storyteller would not himself or herself grasp completely the wisdom inherent in a story that had endured, which had proved its value repeatedly.)
The second kind of story included stories about traveling and what had happened to everyone in the years that could be recalled. It was at this place that my daughter was born; or this is where my brother-in-law killed two caribou the winter a bear killed all my dogs; or this, Titiralik, is the place my snow machine broke down and I had to walk; Seenasaluq, this is a place my family has camped since before I was born.
The undisturbed landscape verifies both sorts of story, and it is the constant recapitulation in sacred and profane contexts of all of these stories that keeps the people alive and the land alive in the people. Language, the stories, holds the vision together.
To those of us who are not hunters, who live in cities with no sharp regret and enjoy ideas few Eskimos would wish to discuss, such sensibilities may seem almost arcane. And we may put no value to them. But we cut ourselves off, I think, from a source of wisdom. We sometimes mistake a rude life for a rude mind; raw meat for barbarism; lack of conversation for lack of imagination. The overriding impression, I think, for the visitor in the Arctic who walks away from the plane, and waits out the bouts of binge drinking, the defensive surliness and self-conscious acting in the village, is that a wisdom is to be found in the people. And once in a great while an isumataq becomes apparent, a person who can create the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself.
This is a timeless wisdom that survives failed human economies. It survives wars. It survives definition. It is a nameless wisdom esteemed by all people. It is understanding how to live a decent life, how to behave properly toward other people and toward the land.
It is, further, a wisdom not owned by anyone, nor about which one culture is more insightful or articulate. I could easily imagine some Thomas Merton–like person, the estimable rather than the famous people of our age, sitting with one or two Eskimo men and women in a coastal village, corroborating the existence of this human wisdom in yet another region of the world, and looking around to the mountains, the ice, the birds to see what makes it possible to put it into words.
One July evening I flew with two paleontologists from Ellef Ringnes Island some 400 miles southwest to their new camp near Castel Bay on Banks Island. In the years before, these two people had elucidated a wonderful bit of arctic history. A collection of fossils they assembled from a thick layer of interbedded coal and friable rock called the Eureka Formation on Ellesmere Island indicated that 40 to 50 million years ago, during the Eocene, the Arctic was a region forested with sequoias and ginkgo trees. It enjoyed a moist and temperate, almost warm climate and a collection of animals that showed a resemblance to the kinds of animals that have been discovered in Eocene deposits in Europe. At the time, the Eurasian and North American crustal plates were just beginning to separate at the northern end of the Atlantic Ocean, and animals had only recently ceased moving back and forth.
Robert West and Mary Dawson and I sat in the jump seats of an aircraft called a Twin Otter, amid their camp gear and fossil collections, for several hours. I listened to them explain their work, and took pleasure in it, in the fulfilled hopes and dashed dreams of a field season, and in some of the scenes they envisioned in the land below us during the Eocene, when three-toed horses, ancestral flying lemurs, and prehistoric crocodiles lived. It was not something they could see clearly, only imagine. They recounted their patient search through frost-riven rubble in the Arctic, looking for bits of mineralized bone, teeth, and shells, for pieces of petrified wood and casts of fallen leaves, the shreds of evidence that suggested a landscape.
