Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it.

He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.

He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk. [N. Scott Momaday, frontispiece]

This is exactly what Barry Lopez does in his stunning 1986 National Book Award winner Arctic Dreams. “At one level, it is a beautifully written natural and human history of the Arctic, including its exploration and exploitation. This in itself makes the book a gem, opening up a landscape that most of us will never visit, giving a glimpse into the capabilities that have allowed people and other species to make it their home.” [Writing Redux: Review of Arctic Dreams]

Here are just some of the many quotes I highlighted that exemplify Barry Lopez’ evocative and insightful descriptions of his observations while living and working in the Arctic.

The apparent monotony of the land is relieved, however, by weather systems moving through, and by the activities of animals, particularly of birds and caribou. And because so much of the country stands revealed, and because the sunlight passing through the dustless air renders its edges with such unusual sharpness, animals linger before the eye. And their presence is vivid. [p. xxiv]

Time and again you come upon the isolated and succinct evidence of life — animal tracks, the undigested remains of a ptarmigan in an owl’s casting, a patch of barren-ground willow nibbled nearly leafless by arctic hares. You are afforded the companionship of birds, which follow after you. (They know you are an animal; sooner or later you will turn up something to eat.) Sandpipers scatter before you, screaming ‘tuituek’, an Eskimo name for them. Coming awkwardly down a scree slope of frost-riven limestone you make a glass-tinkling clatter — and at a distance a tundra grizzly rises on its hind legs to study you; the dish-shaped paws of its front legs deathly still, the stance so human it is unnerving. [p. xxv]

[Note: Lopez mentions ‘Eskimo’ as an inclusive term referring to descendants of the Thule cultural tradition in present-day Canada and the Punuk and Birnirk cultural traditions in modern-day Alaska. The words he highlights are from the Inuktitut dialects of the eastern Canadian Arctic. [Source: Writing Redux]

I stare out into Lancaster Sound. Four or five narwhals sleep on the flat calm sea, as faint on the surface as the first stars emerging in an evening sky. Birds in the middle and far distance slide through the air, bits of life that dwindle and vanish. Below, underneath the sleeping narwhal, fish surge and glide in the currents, and the light dwindles and is quenched. [p. 140]

Barry Lopez offers additional levels to Arctic Dreams besides his brilliant portraits of the landscape and its inhabitants. With a poetic and philosophical lens, he also highlights different forms of resilience and ingenuity in finding ways to survive the extremes of a spare, harsh ecosystem.

Trees in the Arctic have an aura of implacable endurance about them. A cross section of the bole of a Richardson willow no thicker than your finger may reveal 200 annual growth rings beneath the magnifying glass. Much of the tundra, of course, appears to be treeless, when, in many places, it is actually covered with trees — a thick matting of short, ancient willows and birches. You realize suddenly that you are wandering around on ‘top’ of a forest. [p. 29]

I have come here [Banks Island] to watch muskoxen. The muskox, along with the American bison, is one of the few large animals to have survived the ice ages in North America. Most all of its companions — the mammoth, the dire wolf, the North American camel, the short-faced bear — are extinct. The muskox abides, conspicuously alone and entirely at ease on the tundra, completely adapted to a polar existence. [p. 43]

The adaptive strategies of arctic animals to failing light and low temperatures are varied. In general, they must either develop insulation against the cold or slow down, or halt, their metabolic processes to survive. Warm-blooded animals and flowering plants aside (these must bloom and fruit rapidly in the summer), the most salient, overall adaptive strategy of arctic organisms is their ability to enter a frozen state or a state of very low metabolic activity whenever temperatures dip, and then to resume full metabolic activity whenever it warms sufficiently. Many arctic spiders and insects, along with lichens, ferns and mosses, lie frozen for the duration of the winter. Trees, along with grizzly bears and ground squirrels, carry on their life processes but at a very low metabolic rate. Fish and various beetles use cellular antifreeze agents (glycoproteins) to extend their periods of activity during freezing weather. Other adaptive strategies show parallels with those of desert plants. The leathery leaves of saxifrages and the hairy leaves of Labrator tea, for example, both reduce the transpiration of precious water in the short summer. [p. 30]

For its size, the muskox is surprisingly nimble and surefooted. In part this is due to the shape and structure of its hooves, which are broadly round and sharp-edged with conclave bottoms. A broad heel pad gives the animal excellent traction on rock and hard ground and on various snow surfaces. The front hooves, which are larger, are used in winter to break and paw through wind-slabbed snow and groundfast ice. The muskox also uses its chin for this purpose. [p. 59]

At the approach of a threatening animal, including men and their dogs, muskoxen begin to draw near to each other, sometimes quickly, and occasionally in response to the sudden bellow of a herd bull. (The herd bull is more often distinguished however, for being the last to respond, and the first to relax, in these situations.) The animals may initially press together in a line abreast, with the herd bull toward the center and sightly forward, and younger bulls at the flanks. If the approaching animal changes direction, or if more than one animal is approaching, the muskoxen may back around into a rosette, rump to rump, with calves and yearlings wedged between adults. [p.61]

Another level or layer of Barry Lopez’ narrative raises questions about our connection to landscapes in general; how we engage with them, how we shape them and, more to the point, how they shape us and our assumptions.

If we are to devise an enlightened plan for human activity in the Arctic, we need a more particularized understanding of the land itself — not a more refined mathematical knowledge but a deeper understanding of its nature, as if it were, itself, another sort of civilization we had to reach an agreement with. [p. 12]

And I would think as I walked of what I had read of a creature of legend in China, an animal similar in its habits to the unicorn but abstemious, like the ivory gull. It is called the ‘ki-lin.’ The ‘ki-lin’ has the compassion of the unicorn but also the air of a spiritual warrior, or monk. Odell Shepard has written that “[u]nlike the western unicorn, the ‘ki-lin’ has never had commercial value, no drug is made of any part of his body; he exists for his own sake and not for the medication, enrichment, entertainment, or even edification of mankind.” He embodied all that was admirable and ideal. [p. 150]

I do not mean to suggest that the narwhal should be made into some sort of symbolic ‘ki-lin.’ Or that buried in the more primitive appreciation of life that some Eskimos retain is an ”answer” to our endless misgivings about the propriety of our invasions of landscapes where we have no history, of our impositions on other cultures. But that in the simple appreciation of a world not our own to define, that poised arctic landscape, we might find some solace by discovering the ‘ki-lin’ hidden within ourselves, like a shaft of light. [p. 151]

Lopez also gives wonderful insights into the skills of those who have lived in the Arctic North longest, those having to survive over centuries with limited resources.

Here in the dirt, pushing past the desiccated winter pellets of muskoxen with my rib bone, past the fresher pellets of arctic hare, past windblown tufts of shed caribou hair, and a layer of dry, curled leaves from willows and saxifrage, I find a damp and precious mud. A foundation. Whatever their moral predilections may have been, the Kanghiryuakmiut and Kanghiryuachiakmiut ate the flesh of the muskoxen who browsed these willows. They made ladles from their horns, tools from their bones, and slept through the first, freezing storms of autumn on the thick insulation of their hides. And they survived. In the long history of man, before and after the coming of the glaciers, this counts for more than one can properly say. [p. 53]

Wherever I went I felt the loss of the Sadlermuit and so a sharper sense of gratitude toward those who once wrote down the observations of arctic peoples, described their skills, and saw to the preservation of the objects of their culture. Even if we cannot say what an object meant, we can still marvel today at what it did and at the people who made it. With a minimum of materials historic Eskimos created a wealth of utilitarian implements, distinguished by ingenuity in design, specificity of purpose, and appropriateness of material to the task.*

*The materials they worked with, of course, came almost entirely from the animals they hunted. Eskimos generally regarded these materials as gifts given in accordance with ethical obligations they felt toward the animals. The two parallel cultures, human and animal, were linked in biological ways and, for the Eskimo, in spiritual ways that are all but lost to our understanding today. It was the gift rather than the death that was preeminent in the Eskimo view of hunting.*

Winter clothing was almost always made from caribou skin. The fur of arctic fox and, in the western Arctic, Dall sheep, was warmer, but those skins were too delicate. Caribou hair is not hollow the way polar bear hair is — it consists of large, multichambered cells — but the effect is the same: excellent lightweight insulation. The skins of adult cows, taken early in the fall, before their winter coats got too thick, provided the best combination of warmth and lightness. (Late-fall cow skins, like those of bull caribou or of muskoxen, were too heavy to be comfortable but made excellent bedding.) Caribou calf skins were used for underclothing and boot liners. The skins of the caribou’s forelegs were used for boot uppers and in the palms of mittens because they resisted abrasion. The ruff of the parka was of wolverine or wolf, furs that easily shed the ice crystals that form there from breathing. [p. 191]

Eskimos utilized the caribou completely. They made clothing, bedding, and bags from its skin and tools and weapons from its bones and antlers. Noting that fats in the caribou’s leg joints congealed at lower temperatures the farther they were from the body core, they took the fat from the foot to use as a lubricant for bowstrings in freezing temperatures. (Western civilizations made the same discovery with cattle, whence neat’s-foot oil.) They used the marrow of its bones for fuel; its blood in glues; its sinews for lashings, bindings, and thread. What they did not eat they cached, against the lean months of spring. [p. 192]

Arctic Dreams also sheds light on the historical interactions between explorers and the indigenous Eskimo populations. Lopez recounts tales of Eskimos both aiding and challenging outsiders, drawing attention to the intricate forces at play as industrialization impacted their traditional ways of life.

A Yup’ik hunter on Saint Lawrence Island once told me that what traditional Eskimos fear most about us is the extent of our power to alter the land, the scale of that power, and the fact that we can easily effect some of these changes electronically, from a distant city. Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, “the people who change nature.” [p. 39]

A good reason to travel with Eskimo hunters in modern times is that, beyond nettlesome details — foods that are not to one’s liking, a loss of intellectual conversation, a consistent lack of formal planning — in spite of these things, one feels the constant presence of people who know something about surviving. At their best they are resilient, practical, and enthusiastic. They pay close attention in realms where they feel a capacity for understanding. They have a quality of ‘nuannaarpoq,’ of taking extravagant pleasure in being alone; and they delight in finding it in other people. Facing as we do our various Armageddons, they are good people to know.

In the time I was in the field with Eskimos I wondered at the basis for my admiration. I admired an awareness in the men of providing for others, and the soft tone of voice they used around bloodshed. I never thought I could understand, from their point of view, the moment of preternaturally heightened awareness, and the peril inherent in taking a life, but I accepted it out of respect for their seriousness toward it. In moments when I felt perplexed, that I was dealing with an order outside my own, I discovered and put to use a part of my own culture’s wisdom, the formal divisions of Western philosophy — metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic — which pose, in order, the following questions. What is real? What can we understand? How should we behave? What is beautiful? What are the patterns we can rely upon? [p. 202]

Sometimes the most incredible books are just sitting on our shelves waiting for us. At some point in time, I bought and planned to read this “groundbreaking exploration of the Far North.” It took almost forty years for me to do that, but it remains just as relevant and just as exquisite in its descriptions as when it was first written. I will return to it time and again as one does when one is lucky enough to discover a literary miracle.

[Source of posters: Writing Redux]

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