Six
ICE AND LIGHT
I HE RADIO REPORT the evening before had been terse and
I ominous: gale warnings for the northern Labrador Sea.
^ Our apprehension was over more than heavy seas, how-
ever. There were icebergs ahead--and we would be steaming into
those waters in darkness, straight into a picket line of ice the size
of cathedrals, borne slowly south on the Canadian Current. Im-
placable icebergs from the tidewater glaciers of West Greenland,
the towering, gray marble walls at Savissivik and Torsukattak and
Upernavik. But in those heavy seas, we knew, the ship's radar
would not be able to distinguish even those fifty times larger than
the ship from the wild crests of windblown waves.
204
Ice and Light 205
The heavily laden vessel, the MV Soodoc* carrying equip-
ment and a year's supplies to an arctic mine, plowed resolutely
into the dark water, taking spray over her bows. The wind vibrated
cables until they moaned; it wailed through the ship's deck cranes.
Waves began to wash over us amidships. The crew secured port-
holes and hatches on the ship's upper deck and prepared for the
violent pitching and rolling to come.
We passed into Davis Strait in peace. The storm passed us to
port and fell away behind, one of those strange reprieves that leave
you in momentary disbelief.
In the morning I stood in the bow, watching the ship's prow
split smoothly the six-foot swell of green-black water. Looming
in the fog, those ice massifs that had left some of us sleepless were
moving inexorably south, wreathed in gray silence, inchoate in the
cold air. If we had but touched last night, the ship would have
been torn by the noise of alarms and Klaxon. We would have bolted
up the companionways in our storm gear for the tiny lifeboats,
hobbled by half-donned clothing, brought down to the raw edge
of life. Lowering away into ice and darkness in 20-foot seas, terror
like a wild dog in your chest.
We passed in peace. I stared at the dark swell and thought how
gently is the sparrow held that lights on a ship at sea. And then
went aft, for the first meal of the day.
Montreal was far behind us. We were on the stretch, bound
for the Northwest Passage; cutting the same water, seeing the same
colors and animals and clear currents that Frobisher and Davis
and Baffin had seen. Which is why I had asked to come. And to
see the ice that had silenced them all. If I had a desire simply to
be with anything in the North, it was to be with icebergs. I do not
know if I had had this wish for years or if it only intensified as the
prospect of the voyage loomed. But when I saw them, it was as
*For Mfotor] V[essel] Sault ("Soo") [Sainte-Marie, Ontario]
d[ominion] off] c[anada], a 355-foot, 7000 dead-weight-tonnage bulk
cargo ship, with a complement of twenty-three.
2O6 ARCTIC DREAMS
though I had been waiting quietly for a very long time, as if for
an audience with the Dalai Lama.
On the afternoon of the day we knew the storm had passed,
I stood on the starboard side of the bridge at a window, with the
heavy protective glass lowered. I rested my forearms on the sill,
feeling the warmth of the bridge heaters around my legs and a
slipstream of cool air past my face. The first icebergs we had seen,
just north of the Strait of Belle Isle, listing and guttered by the
ocean, seemed immensely sad, exhausted by some unknown calam-
ity. We sailed past them. Farther north they began to seem like
stragglers fallen behind an army, drifting, self-absorbed, in the
water, bleak and immense. It was as if they had been borne down
from a world of myth, some Gotterdammerung of noise and
catastrophe. Fallen pieces of the moon.
Farther to the north they stood on their journeys with
greater strength. They were monolithic; their walls, towering and
abrupt, suggested Potala Palace at Lhasa in Tibet, a mountainous
architecture of ascetic contemplation. We would pass between
them, separated from them by no more than half a mile. I would
walk from one side of the ship to the other, wondering how
something so imposing in its suggestion of life could be approached
so closely, and yet still seem so remote. It was like standing in a
dirigible off Annapurna and Everest in the Himalayas.
The suggestion of life around them was not an illusion. Harp
seals and flocks of seabirds were drawn to fish schooling in the
nutrient-rich waters at their base--an upwelling driven by fresh-
water runoff from the iceberg, pouring into the lighter water of
the salty ocean. With my binoculars I could follow the scarves of
turquoise meltwater unfurling 400 feet to the sea.
I occasionally drew back from the starboard window to make
a sketch, or to bring the binoculars up to my eyes. I marveled as
much at the behavior of light around the icebergs as I did at their
austere, implacable progress through the water. They took their
color from the sun, and from the clouds and the water. But they
also took their dimensions from the light: the stronger and more
Ice and Light 207
direct it was, the greater the contrast upon the surface of the ice,
of the ice itself with the sea. And the more finely etched were the
dull surfaces of their walls. The bluer the sky, the brighter their
outline against it.
I wrote words down for the tints--the grays of doves and
pearls, of smoke. Isolated in my binoculars, the high rampart of
a mesa-like berg seemed sheared off like a wall of damp talc. An-
other rounded off smoothly, like a human forehead against the sky,
and was pocked and lined, the pattern of a sperm whale's lacerated
tun. Floating, orographic landscapes--sections broken out of a
mountain range: snow-covered ridges, cirque valleys, sharp peaks.
The steep walls often fell sheer to the sea, like granite pitches,
their surfaces faceted like raw jade, or coarser, like abraded
obsidian.
Where the walls entered the water, the surf pounded them,
creating caverns, grottoes, and ice bridges, strengthening an im-
pression of sea cliffs. At the waterline the ice gleamed aquamarine
against its own gray-white walls above. Where meltwater had filled
cracks or made ponds, the pools and veins were milk-blue, or
shaded to brighter marine blues, depending on the thickness of the
ice. If the iceberg had recently fractured, its new face glistened
greenish blue--the greens in the older, weathered faces were
grayer. In twilight the ice took on the colors of the sun: rose,
reddish yellows, watered purples, soft pinks. The ice both re-
flected the light and trapped it within its crystalline corners and
edges, where it intensified.
The burden of rocks, gravel, silt, and sand that icebergs
carry within them streaks their sides; as they melt, they rise higher
in the water and the debris in their shoal water creates a series of
waterline marks. As they fracture and tilt, the patterns of water-
line marks cross at odd angles and slant skyward.
It seemed almost superfluous, but the third mate took the
measure of one with his sextant: 64.7 meters high by 465.4 meters
long (212.27 by 1526.88 feet). Another is 70.4 meters high by
371.0 meters long (230.97 by 1217.19 feet); but the numbers can-
2O8 ARCTIC DREAMS
not encompass them. The ice reaches far below the surface of the
water and stretches away in a third dimension. It is impossible to
know how much of it lies beneath the water--four-fifths of its
height and seven-eighths of its mass is the mariner's general rule.
And the shape of each one changes as our ship passes. New valleys,
slopes of wind-packed snow, ramparts and spires, and columnar
bluffs come into view. Another set of measurements of the same
iceberg turns out differently.
One day, low decks of cumulus clouds bearing off to the
southeast open up a horizon to the west and north. In brilliant
sunshine the icebergs now gleam as crisp a blinding white in the
black water as storm-lit sails. After a while icebergs near the
horizon break with the surface of the ocean to float low in the pale
blue sky. Four or five of them, distant mirages, not seeming to take
the moment seriously at all. I return, smiling, to those immediately
before me, and renew my faulty sketching. I remember the church
at Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, Saint Francis of Assisi; photog-
raphers have gone there for decades, impassioned with a desire to
render it in shades of black and white only. What would an
Edward Weston or a Wynn Bullock or a Paul Strand have thought
of these? I stare for hours from the starboard window at these
creatures I have never seen before. They drift past in the spanking,
beautiful weather. How utterly still, unorthodox, and wondrous
they seem.
IN the interior of Greenland the Wisconsin Ice Age continues, as
it were, unabated. The Greenland ice cap, forming continuously
from layers of compacted snow and trapped air and expanding at
varying rates, is 1500 miles long, 450 miles wide, and up to 11,000
feet thick. It bears down with such force that the center of the
island is warped some 1180 feet below sea level. The glacial tongues
and margins of the ice cap reach the sea at several prominent
points, where enormous sections of ice break off and float away
in the currents. One of the most imposing of them is the 400-foot-
Ice and Light 209
high palisade of Humboldt Glacier, which stretches north and
south for 50 miles at the edge of Kane Basin.
Most of the icebergs of the Northern Hemisphere are calved
from the western glaciers of the Greenland ice cap, into Disko
and Melville bays. They drift north in the West Greenland Cur-
rent for a while and then come south that year or the next with
the Canadian Current to the Labrador Sea. As imposing as they
are, icebergs are dwarfed by ice islands, a kind of ice calved along
the north coast of Greenland and the northwest coast of Ellesmere
Island from ice shelves that extend offshore into embayments of
the ocean. (The structure and behavior of shelf ice have been
likened to those of both glacial ice and sea ice, though strictly
speaking it is neither.) These ice islands, up to 300 square miles in
extent but only 150 to 165 feet thick, become incorporated in the
polar ice pack, where they make ideal, long-term drift bases for
scientific research. They are structurally sound, and their flat tops,
uniformly corrugated like a tin roof, offer a working platform
close to the surface of the water. (Fletcher's Ice Island [T-3], a
50-square-mile platform spawned from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf
at Disraeli Fiord, Ellesmere Island, was used by scientific parties
for twenty-five years before work there was terminated in the
mid-1970s.) Ice islands normally drift for decades in the ice gyre
north of Alaska before being caught, finally, in the East Greenland
Current, in whose waters they eventually disintegrate and melt.
Almost as extensive as ice islands but much thicker are tabular
icebergs, which break off whole from the foot of a tidewater
glacier. With a volume of 40 or 50 cubic miles, they are the largest
objects afloat in the Northern Hemisphere. Other sorts of fresh-
water arctic ice include the ice that forms on arctic rivers and on
tundra lakes and ponds (which may freeze to the bottom in
winter), and the lenses and wedges of ground ice within permafrost.
The latter influence the formation of a distinctive geometry of
frost cracks in the tundra called "patterned ground," and raise the
hemispherical mounds, or frost boils, called pingos. (A well-known
2 I O ARCTIC DREAMS
cluster of some 150 pingos, from 3000 to 5000 years old, rises near
Toker Point, just east of the mouth of the Mackenzie River.)*
The sea ice that forms on the surface of the ocean behaves
in less predictable ways than freshwater ice, depending on how
it is formed and altered and on how old it is. Its physics--the
distribution of forces within it, the range of its elasticity and
plasticity, the structural quality of its crystal lattices--is highly
complex. "Scarcely a substance on earth," writes one scientist, "is
so tractable, so unexpectedly complicated, so deceptively passive."
Freshwater ice usually begins to crystallize at 39.2 °F, the
temperature at which fresh water is densest. Sea ice does not
achieve its maximum density, or start freezing, until it is cooled to
2 8.6°F. In its initial stages, the crystalline structure of sea ice
incorporates brine and is not solid. It will therefore bend under a
load before it fractures, while newly formed freshwater ice, brittle
and also more transparent, will fracture suddenly, like a window-
pane. (Because of its elasticity, even sea ice four inches thick is
unsafe to walk on, while freshwater ice only half as thick will
support a human being.)
In the absence of any wind or strong current, sea ice first
appears on the surface as an oily film of crystals. This frazil ice
thickens to a kind of gray slush called grease ice, which then
thickens vertically to form an elastic layer of ice crystals an inch
or so thick called nilas. Young nilas bends like watered silk over
a light ocean swell and is nearly transparent (i.e., dark like the
water). When it is about four inches thick, nilas begins to turn
gray and is called young ice, or gray ice. When gray ice finally
* Permafrost, a unique substance, is frozen soil, not ice. Part of the
confusion over how to classify it, however, arises from the fact that it
behaves somewhat like ice, extending itself through the soil by a
process of crystalline growth. The complex pattern of its development
accounts for the facts that it underlies ground in the Arctic that was
never covered by glacial ice and that east of the Taimyr Peninsula it
reaches a depth of 1900 feet.
Ice and Light 211
becomes opaque it is called first-year ice. And in these later stages
it thickens more slowly.
By spring, first-year ice might be four to six feet thick. If it
doesn't melt completely during the summer, it becomes second-
year ice in the fall, tinted blue and much harder. (Brine in the
upper layers has drained out during the summer and fresh ice
crystals have filled the interstices.) Second-year ice continues to
thicken, until it stabilizes after a few years at about 10 to 12 feet.
If it remains unmelted through a second summer, it is simply called
multiyear ice, or polar pack ice, to distinguish it from first- and
second-year pack ice.* A more formidable version of multiyear
ice, paleocrystic ice, forms in the open polar sea and may be 50
feet thick.
Pack ice may be consolidated in great expanses of rubble called
field ice, or broken up by lanes of open water (leads) to a lesser or
greater degree, creating various types of close and open pack ice
--for example "close pack" (seven-tenths to nine-tenths coverage
of the sea).t
Winds and currents almost always affect the formation of sea
ice. If a swell comes up in a sludge of grease ice, for example, the
crystals congeal in large, round plates that develop upturned edges
from bumping against each other--a stage called pancake ice. If
nilas is broken up by the wind, the separate sheets often ride up
over each other in a characteristic interlocking pattern called
finger-rafting. Heavier ice may ride up cleanly over itself or create
low ridges of rubble or piles of crumbled fragments as it grinds
* The term "pack ice" is used in a wide sense to include any accumula-
tion of sea ice other than fast ice (ice attached to the shore), no matter
what form it takes or how disposed.
t Because sea ice presents such a grave danger to ships, precisely defined
terms are critical for accurate reporting. Terms that refer to the type
and extent of ice coverage are standardized in the Scott Polar Institute's
Illustrated Glossary of Snow and Ice and the Canadian Hydrological
Services' Pilot of Arctic Canada.
212 ARCTIC DREAMS
against itself. Weathered by wind-driven snow, this debris forms
rounded hills called hummocks. Ice of sufficient thickness, frac-
tured by wind, tide, and currents and then driven in on itself by
these same forces, may create a huge riprap of rubble, 20 to 40
feet high and extending as far below the ice, called a pressure
ridge.
Wind and current affect sea ice formation to such an extent
that very little smooth ice occurs anywhere in the Arctic except
in bays and along shallow coastlines. In spring the ice surface
develops puddles and melt holes (often at old aglus) and a complex
pattern of surface drainage. Second-year ice is likely to produce
needle ice at the bottom of these melt pools, sharp spikes diligently
avoided by men, dogs, and bears. In the upper layer of first-year
ice that has been drained of brine candle ice sometimes forms,
which tinkles like a glass chandelier as it collapses before a gust of
wind or at the touch of a hand.
Because sea ice responds to wind and current and because
winds and currents have predominant patterns, researchers look
for the same kind of sea ice to form in the same places every year.
In Coronation Gulf, where winds and currents are light, the ice
may be unusually smooth for many miles in every direction. In
Nares Strait (Kennedy Channel, Hall Basin, and Robeson Channel)
between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, multiyear ice driven
down from the north piles up in ridges 80 feet high, a violently
fractured landscape that extends north and west to the extremely
rugged ice of the Lincoln Sea.
The variety of ice types and the many patterns of its fracture
and dislocation amaze a first-time visitor. What could become as
ordinary underfoot as soil or rock remains as exotic as the surface
of another planet. When nilas sags beneath you, your legs have no
idea what to do. If you are forced to cross a series of pressure
ridges with a heavy sledge, or must fight constantly to keep a small
boat from being crushed in moving pack ice, you have difficulty
imagining any landscape more exhausting or humbling.
Ice and Light 213
Flying over the ice is an easy way to appreciate its tectonic
activity on a larger scale, to better understand it as the never-
quite-settled surface of the Arctic Ocean. From above, the finger-
rafting of huge, transparent sheets of nilas seems like a delicate and
regular joinery of panes of glass. The rafting of sheets of young
nilas creates a pattern of scattered, altostratus-like shapes. Dark ice
cakes below prove to be ones covered with epontic algae and
flipped over by animals, or places where walrus have hauled out,
rested, and defecated. Long streaks of gray-white ice cutting across
a broad, snow-covered expanse show where leads have recently
frozen over. A low pressure ridge may lead to a dark hole and a
patch of reddish snow, a polar bear kill. Streamers of grease ice
in patches of open water line up with the wind. In winter the leads
steam with frost smoke where the (relatively) warm water meets
the frigid air.
A geometry of lightning-bolt-shaped leads, of long black
ponds, jagged rills, and ridges of debris that meander like eskers
stretches as far as light and the atmosphere let you see. In a wide
lead, small floes roll slowly off the wind to the right, on a heading
of 30° to it. (All windblown ice in the North behaves this way
because of the coriolis effect, the tendency of a moving body on
the earth's surface to drift sideways because of the earth's rotation.)
Because of the constant, accordian-like adjustment of the ice
surface, there is always open water in the Arctic Ocean, even in
the coldest weather. Along the coast, where a band of stable,
shorefast ice forms, a predictable flaw lead often separates shore-
fast ice from the moving pack, particularly when offshore winds
are blowing. (This flaw zone is a regular highway for sea mammals
and the most heavily hunted area of the sea ice by both bears and
men.)
In addition to these flaw leads and the numerous leads that
open and close regularly in the pack, there are relatively large areas
of persistent open water called polynyas that stay open all winter.
They are maintained by unique current and wind patterns and
2 I 4 ARCTIC DREAMS
occur in the same places year after year. Depending on their size
and location, polynyas can harbor significant concentrations of
overwintering seabirds and marine mammals. (The whaler's West
Water in Baffin Bay was actually the southern end of the largest
polynya in the North American Arctic, the North Water.)
SHOREFAST ice, embayed ice, or sea ice that has formed in regions
where there are no appreciable currents can offer a serene and
dependable surface over which to travel, even at night. Pack ice,
the ice beyond the flaw lead, holds a different sort of attraction
because of its constant motion, varied topography, and the access
it provides to certain animals. But to venture out there on foot is,
to put it simply, to court death. Pack ice moves irregularly before
the wind, and the change in orientation of an individual piece of
ice is unpredictable. Commonly, especially on larger pieces of ice,
there is no sensation at all of movement or change. A person might
discover suddenly that he was far from shore, or realize he had
no idea of his position. In every coastal village from Inglefield
Fiord to Saint Lawrence Island there is a story of someone who
got caught out there by mistake, often pursuing a polar bear, and
who was never seen again.
The crushing power of moving pack ice is not a great threat
to people traveling with dogs or on foot. They can usually move
nimbly enough over its surface. To be at its mercy in a boat or
small ship, however, is to know an exhausting, nerve-wracking
vulnerability. In May 1814, with his whaling ship beset off the
east coast of Greenland, William Scoresby set out on foot to
reconnoiter the final mile of maneuvering that he hoped would
set him free. Like many men caught in such circumstances,
Scoresby was terrified. But he was mesmerized as well by the ice,
by its sheer power, its daunting scale, the inexorability of its move-
ment. The sound of its constant adjustment before the wind was
like "complicated machinery, or distant thunder," he wrote. Even
as he sought a way out, he marveled at the way it distracted him.
He lost the sense of plight that spurred him, the pleading whining
Ice and Light 215
that came from his ship's pinched hull; he became a mere "careless
spectator." It was as though he were walking over the. back of
some enormous and methodical beast.
The sea ice was a more perilous environment in the era of
wood ships than it seems today from the bridge of a steel-hulled
icebreaker, but no arctic sailor was or is ever at ease in it. The
whalers forced their way in with poorly fitted ships and lived for
months at the extreme limits of their ability to cope. To get
through a stretch of ice and out to open water, or to survive in a
stream of ice driven down on them in a storm, nineteenth-century
sailors had to employ several operations. With a favorable wind and
an ice-strengthened prow, they could "bore" their way through,
following the shouted directions of a lookout in the crow's nest.
But a sail ship has no reverse, no reliable "dead slow," no instant
"hard-to-port" response. More often they had to take the ship in
tow behind their whaleboats and row through the ice. Or "warp"
it forward, winching from the windlass against anchors set in the
ice ahead. Or "mill-doll," by dropping a boat with three or four
men from the bowsprit, to fracture ice in advance of the prow.
In the shifting pack, even a 250-ton ship could conceivably
be crushed in two or three minutes, forced up in the air with an
explosion of its oak ribs and driven under with a grunt, like a
grand piano caught in an industrial press. To protect it during a
storm in the ice front, or at night when they could not find open
water, the crews sawed temporary docks in the floes. As often as
not they lost that protection and had to begin all over again the
wearying task of cutting and removing blocks of ice. In heavy
weather the pack moved like a jigsaw puzzle; loose ice hit them
repeatedly, "hard enough to knock the ship's brains out." Officers
tried to mete out a crew's strength over the course of a storm, or
until they got out of the ice. But any situation could change
instantly--ice at rest one minute was moving the next. Officers felt
the strain of unceasing responsibility and vigilance. "During that
time," wrote one captain of a harrowing seventeen hours he spent
running a shore lead, "I did the heaviest smoking of my life. I
2 l 6 ARCTIC DREAMS
smoked twenty-two cigars and numerous pipes, and I had coffee
brought to me every hour. I don't know whether it was the
tobacco or the coffee that brought us through, but we made it with
no damage."
Damage was routine, some of it serious. "Relays of men at
the pumps and others working with buckets," wrote a captain of
his stove ship, "succeeded in raising seven to eight tons of water
per minute, [but] the sea came in quicker than it could be thrown
out." And the sea was a frigid 3o°F. They fothered their broken
hulls with wads of sail and filled the cracks as well as they could
with cordage and oakum. They sought a desperate protection up-
current of icebergs.* But the icebergs sometimes disintegrated and
the ships were swamped or crushed. Once a storm passed and the
menacing ice was still, they no longer had to lie in their bunks and
listen to the "rending, crashing, tearing noise," the screech and
detonation of a ship's timbers. But until they were clear of it, its
capricious and unappeasable nature preyed on their imaginations.
If it got very cold, as often happened toward the end of the
whaling season, ice might congeal around a ship, creating in only
a few hours "a crystal pavement by the breath of Heaven cemented
firm." Then a man stood on the deck in such stillness, he could
hear his watch ticking in his pocket. Men who had collapsed at the
pumps or lost their appetites when ice peeled the copper sheathing
off the ship's bottom now went out on the ice for a stroll and flew
kites or tossed a ball, as though they were on a commons.
When a ship was seriously beset, the crew packed their be-
longings, set them on deck, and waited. The slow compression of
the ship could go on for weeks before the keel finally broke or the
holds flooded. When a ship was lost, however, it rarely sank right
away--the men had time to step overboard and walk away, if
* Icebergs, because of their deep keels, move with the current, while
sea ice moves before the wind. An iceberg can therefore plow a course
through oncoming sea ice, providing shelter for a ship in its wake.
Ice and Light 217
they were lucky, to another ship. In the fall of 1777, more than
350 such shipwrecked men, whalers and sealers, were to be found
hiking over the ice off the southeast coast of Greenland. About
140, given food and clothing at native settlements, eventually
reached Danish villages on the west coast. The others perished. In
1830, so many ships were destroyed in Melville Bay (the place they
called "the breaking-up yard") that at one point nearly 1000 men
were camped on the ice. Legally under the command of no
captain, they set fire to the broken ships and milled about for weeks
in drunken celebration. (Not a man was lost in this weird
catastrophe.)
Five years later an isolated group of British ships, fishing too
late, became for the first time irrevocably beset in Baffin Bay. The
men had neither proper clothing nor food enough to see them
through the winter. Most died of starvation, exposure, and despair
during the four months they were carried passively south in the
Canadian Current. The ships' logs are poignant. On November 11,
1835, an officer of the Viewforth wrote: "Weather milder. A
great many fish have been playing around the ship to-day, amongst
which we observed unicorns and white whales. We are now to
the southward of Cape Searle, a sublime object. The moon has
been in sight all day--it never sets--a thing I never saw before."
On November 13 a mate aboard the Jane wrote: "Strong breezes
with snow; heavy press, ship suffering greatly, how she can bear
it God only knows. It's awful work; long dark nights, no hope for
us if she goes. May God preserve our shelter."
When they reached the ice front in February, the floes
opened and then closed, opened and then closed on them. Each day
they built up their hope from scratch. One of the whalers sank.
When the others were finally released, too few men were still alive
aboard some of the ships to hoist sail. They drifted aimlessly in
weather so foul that for days on end they could not take a bearing
or fix their position. Some were met by outwardbound whalers;
miraculously, every ship eventually reached England. The follow-
2 l 8 ARCTIC DREAMS
ing year, a dozen vessels froze in again. Half these ships sank, and
the loss of life was extensive--forty-four of fifty-eight aboard the
Dee, forty-two of forty-nine aboard the Advice.
Sometimes it was over very quickly. At 3:30 A.M. on the 26th
of April 1832, the whaler Shannon of Hull, running before a
southeast gale, slammed bow first into an iceberg. The captain
ran forward in the darkness and laid his hands to the wall of ice
even as it continued past them, ripping open the ship's starboard
side. They were awash in minutes. Sixteen men and three boys
were swept away. The survivors clung to each other beneath a
sail, on a part of the ship kept afloat by trapped air. They were
without food or fresh water. They survived, with the death of
but three more, by bleeding each other and drinking the blood
from a shoe. A man who left their deck shelter to commit suicide
spotted two Danish brigs on the 2nd of May. The survivors, save
the captain, were all frostbitten. "The rescue," writes a historian
of the arctic whale fisheries, "was one of those providential affairs
of which many instances could be related."
I think of a final image of devastation: the remnant of several
whaling crews found in a frozen stupor behind a sea wall of dead
bodies, stacked up to protect them from the worst of the heavy
seas in which their small floe rolled and pitched.
The horror and loss of life are remote from us now. Our
assessment of arctic seas is today more often made from an air-
plane, amid the crackle of constant radio contact, or from the
warm bridge of an icebreaker, guided by the lugubrious move-
ment of a gyrocompass and the deep-space silence of satellite
navigation systems. This machinery compresses time and space,
and comforts us because of the authority with which it keeps
danger at bay. From these quarters, its scale reduced, we appraise
the landscape very differently.
Few men in northern ships today, however, are without
regard for the human history that preceded their own in those
waters. And no arctic ship's master, his Lloyd's of London Ice
Class IA Super ship boring through four feet of sea ice at a steady
Ice and Light 219
five knots, sleeps free of the stories that have been passed down.
They are ignored only by men for whom the recalcitrance of the
land is but a distraction, a disturbance to be quelled by machinery.
The frozen ocean itself still turns in its winter sleep like a
dragon.
MAX Dunbar, a pioneering arctic oceanographer, has described
the Arctic Ocean with some wistfulness. Because of a paucity of
seismic and magnetic research, and a lack of core samples from
the seabed, the evolution of the Arctic Basin is a puzzle; and
because so much of its waters are covered with ice, the Arctic
Ocean remains the least understood of the world's seas. Its waters
are relatively sterile when compared with those of the highly
productive subarctic seas. Their lack of productivity, however, is
not due to coldness or to lack of light as much as to the water's
vertical stability. Without an upwelling of inorganic salts (phos-
phates, nitrates, and silicates) from the bottom, a rich life in the
sunlit upper layers cannot be sustained. (The lack of any endemic
genera, the low number of plankton species, and small plankton
populations are all signs of the ocean's youth as well as its
sterility, in Dunbar's view.)
Oceanographers divide the Arctic Ocean into five regions,
according to the relatively few species of life to be found in each
one. Farthest north is the high Arctic abyssal region, perpetually
ice-covered and least known. Between there and the coasts lies a
high Arctic shallow region of drifting annual ice, which enjoys
periods of summer sunshine and some upwelling. Along the North
American and Eurasian coasts is a brackish water region, a zone of
fluctuating temperatures and salinity due to a tremendous out-
pouring of freshwater rivers from the northern rims of the two
continents. (More meltwater flows in spring from the Lena into
the Laptev Sea than from any other river in the Northern Hemi-
sphere.)
Most of the Arctic is without tide pools and that array of life
typified by the presence of sea grasses, kelp, and barnacles, because
22O ARCTIC DREAMS
the near-shore bottom is scoured by ice every year. Some areas,
however, do harbor small populations of intertidal creatures, and
these constitute a fourth zone, the Boreal littoral faunal region.
Soviet scientists, far and away the most experienced of arctic
oceanographers, also recognize a fifth zone between brackish
coastal waters and the high Arctic shallow region, which they call
the low Arctic shallow region (essentially a broad shelf sea, the
continental shelf north of Russia being the most extensive sea shelf
in the world).
The life of the polar seas is structured around a spring bloom
of epontic phytoplankton that initiates a period of active feeding
by herbivorous zooplankton. Carnivorous zooplankton, various
crustaceans, and a small number of fish species, principally polar
and arctic cod, extend this food web, as we have seen.* The sea
ice prevents 99 percent of the sun's light from reaching these active
layers of the water, but it also insulates creatures in the food web
from the extreme cold of winter, and it has profoundly shaped their
evolution and development. The Arctic Ocean, in fact, cannot be
explained ecologically without taking the sea ice into account.
Because of this, many oceanographers have come to regard the
Arctic Ocean as unique, a landscape that requires a special point of
view.
The foundations of Western ecology were laid down by
scientists working almost exclusively with temperate-zone eco-
systems. The violent fluctuations characteristic of arctic eco-
systems played no role in their original conceptions, and certain
conditions that typify arctic ecosystems were treated as impedi-
ments rather than normal circumstances for the development of
life. Snow and ice, for example, were at first regarded as temporary
* Arctic fish have adapted to their unusual circumstances in several
striking ways. The mouth of the arctic cod opens forward and up,
allowing it to feed on the underside of the ice. Because of low light
conditions the eyes of arctic species are somewhat larger, and because
cold water is denser than warm water, arctic species also tend to be
stronger swimmers than their southern counterparts.
Ice and Light 2 2 1
and relatively unimportant conditions in the environment, not as
integral components of the ecosystem. Snow, however, proved to
be as fundamental in shaping an animal's life in the Arctic as rain-
fall is in the Philippines or sunlight in the Arabian Desert. It
creates the stable platform from which certain animals reach
browse unreachable in the summer. It forms the barrier that, more
than cold temperatures, sends seed-eating birds south in the fall.
It provides cover for the ermine and other weasel-like animals that
plunge into snow at the approach of a predator and burrow long
distances through it without surfacing. It provides insulation for
ptarmigan, which dive into it in the evening to sleep. It provides
the contours that conceal predators from their prey; at the same
time, it founders predators and allows longer-legged and broader-
footed prey to escape. It shelters a creature like the lemming, too
small to grow hair long enough for insulation and still be able to
walk. It creates a greenhouse effect for some plants in the spring
and protects them from drying winds in the winter. It is snow
that determines that a ground-dwelling squirrel that cannot migrate
must hibernate, while an arboreal squirrel, living high above the
ground, can remain active all winter.
Winter, not summer, is more the season of record in the Arctic
for the evolutionary biologist. A northern ecologist looking at
snow sees an element as integral to the landscape as soil. It is snow
that cuts some animals off from their food, makes heavy energy
demands on others, and insulates a third group.
Ice, to the ecologist, is but an extreme form of snow, and it
alters the landscape and affects the lives of animals in ways as
profound and subtle. The quality and type of sea ice are as crucial
in shaping the lives of arctic marine mammals as topographic relief
and the presence of plant food are in directing the movements of
land animals. Seals and walrus depend on the ice to carry them
passively to new feeding grounds and to function as a platform upon
which they can rest, molt their hair, and give birth to their young.
Ice floes also serve as temporary islands where these animals are safe
from orcas and landbound predators. As a seaward extension of the
222 ARCTIC DREAMS
land, the ice becomes as a winter highway for migrating muskoxen,
caribou, polar bears, and arctic foxes. Icebergs and large remnant
pieces of pressure ridges that ground in coastal bays and continue
to shift in the tides all winter, can keep enough water open to
maintain a herd of walrus at a new feeding ground until spring. In
November, after a river has frozen over and its channel has drained
(no water flows into it after the watershed above freezes), you can
sometimes drop through the ice and walk around on the empty
riverbed--one of the polar bear's favorite places for a winter
bivouac.
The most dramatic association between ice and arctic life,
perhaps, and still largely an unexplained mystery, involves events
at polynyas in winter and spring. Polynyas occur both along the
coast (long, narrow shore polynyas) and at sea (more lakelike,
flaw polynyas). The open water, which occurs in the same places
every year, offers an overwintering refuge to some animals and a
staging ground to other animals migrating north in the spring. (The
consistent pattern of open water has no doubt been crucial in shap-
ing the migratory routes of many seabirds and marine mammals.)
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, nar-
whals, 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 bow-
head 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
2 2 4 ARCTIC DREAMS
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 re-
quire 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--archaeol-
ogists, 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
Ice and Light 22
5
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 im-
posing 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 peace-
ful, 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
2 2 6 ARCTIC DREAMS
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. Even-
tually 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 explora-
tion, 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
Ice and Light 22J
two imposing polar bears are tearing apart the wreckage of yet
another ship crushed in the ice.
The luminist tradition in nineteenth-century American land-
scape 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 sooth-
ing 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 paint-
ings 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 pin-
points 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
228 ARCTIC DREAMS Ice and Light 229
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 entree), 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 tradi-
tion 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, how-
ever, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it in-
adequate. 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. Occa-
sionally 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 brush-
strokes; 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;
228 ARCTIC DREAMS Ice and Light 229
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 entree), 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 tradi-
tion 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, how-
ever, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it in-
adequate. 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. Occa-
sionally 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 brush-
strokes; 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;
2 3 O ARCTIC DREAMS
the aurora borealis itself; and the mirages that occur at sea, in-
cluding 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 atmo-
sphere. The air itself is clear. Slight inversions in the lower atmo-
sphere 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 sur-
rounded 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 2 2 ° 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 draw-
ing 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
Ice and Light 231
William Parry's drawing of solar arcs and halos.
notice of a stark December moon. A "complete halo encirclfed]
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."
The physics involved in the refraction and reflection of sun-
light by ice crystals and water droplets, and its diffraction by air-
borne particles, is dauntingly complex. The arcs and halos produced
are sometimes very faint; they also occur in unexpected combina-
tions. Seeing them, however, is largely a matter of training your-
self 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 min-
utes after midnight, two long, rainbow-hued shields standing on
2
32
ARCTIC DREAMS
the horizon on opposite sides of the sun, an unusual pair of sun
dogs.*
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 glitter-
ing splendour to dazzle the eye, as has been too often described;
rather the appeal is to the imagination by the suggestion of some-
thing 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 holo-
caust to Europeans in the Middle Ages. Vikings thought it a
reflection in the sky of Vulcan's forge. Miners in Alaska at the
* Once I developed the habit of looking into the "empty" part of the
arctic sky opposite the sun, and at sections of the sky that spanned more
than 60°, I began to notice much more in temperate-zone skies--the
mother-of-pearl iridescence of the sun's or moon's corona in clouds,
for example, or noctilucent clouds in the stratosphere late in the eve-
ning. The most complex and spectacular display of solar arcs and halos
I ever saw was in the winter sky over Los Angeles. At first, out of the
corner of my eye, I thought they were only wind-distorted jet
contrails. I almost didn't look up.
Ice and Light 2
33
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.
The first time I recognized the northern lights was on a
flight from Seattle to Anchorage, when I saw them above the
Wrangell Mountains. It was a clear night, and at first I thought
it was only a long, moonlit orographic cloud, the kind one often
sees isolated over a mountain. Then I saw it move. Completely
absorbed, I watched the long banner of pale light, unfurling in
lateral movements over the snow-white mountains until the plane
turned away. The motions were like a t'ai chi exercise: graceful,
inward-turning, and protracted.
The bottom of an auroral display rarely comes as close as
100 miles above the earth. To the human eye, however, the thin
wall of light sometimes appears actually to touch the earth because
of a problem of depth perception with objects of unknown size
in space. Accurate descriptions are further complicated by its
overwhelming size, and its movement. The light wall is often
hundreds of miles long and 150 miles or more high; as the intensity
of auroral activity increases, the "curtain" of light begins to un-
dulate in a horizontal direction, folding back on itself in huge
S-curves and then unfurling again.
There are additional problems with perspective and scale.
To someone underneath the display (the top of the wall is tipped
toward the south), the aurora may appear like a convergence of
rays toward an apex above. Seen edge-on (from directly beneath
the bottom edge), the display may seem like luminous smoke rising
from the earth. From a distance it may look like a weightless
curtain of silk, hanging straight down and rippling in the night air.
The aurora occurs in a thin corridor called the auroral oval
centered on the North Magnetic Pole. The display is created by
an electric discharge in the earth's ionosphere and is apparent to
us because some of the energy released is visible light. The most
common tinting, of pale, whitish green and pinkish rose, is light
emitted from oxygen atoms. During intense periods of auroral
234 ARCTIC DREAMS
activity, nitrogen molecules release a crimson light, usually appar-
ent only at the bottom edge of the auroral curtain.
Imagine that your view is from the sun and that you are
facing the earth. To your far left on the earth's surface are the
penumbral shadows of dawn. Before you is the bright light of
noon. To your far right the border between evening and night.
Streaming outward from the sun is a gas of ionized, or charged,
particles, mostly helium and hydrogen nuclei, called the solar
wind. These particles pass around the earth as though it were a
rock in a stream of water. In doing so they flatten the planet's
magnetic field (the magnetosphere) on the near side (day) and
elongate it on the far side (night). As it flows past the earth, the
solar wind generates an electric current from left to right. The
path of least resistance for the solar particles that carry this current
is along force lines in the earth's magnetic field that curve down
to the earth's surface in the polar regions (like the embrasure of
an apple, where the stem is). Particles pouring into the polar
regions from a positive terminal on the left create the aurora. As
they flow up and out to a negative terminal on the right, they
constitute a separate invisible phenomenon, the polar wind.
As the stream of particles flows earthward down the funnel-
shaped surface of the magnetosphere at the Pole, it excites electrons
in oxygen atoms and nitrogen molecules which, as they settle back
into a stable state, emit energy--X rays, infrared and ultraviolet
light, radio waves, and visible light.
The still wall of light we perceive curved along an east-west
arc is the calmest sort of auroral display. The more energetic the
sun's streaming particles, the deeper they penetrate into the earth's
ionosphere and the taller the wall of light becomes. Varying
intensities in the electric field produced by the solar wind, and in
the solar wind's own magnetic field, cause the wall to develop a
series of fine corrugations and folds perpendicular to its east-west
extension, to surge in several directions, and to break up into
patches. The changes in the electric and magnetic fields that pro-
duce, respectively, the changes in color and motion are caused by
Ice and Light 2
35
magnetic storms on the sun. Major magnetic storms occur in an
eleven-year cycle, in association with solar flares in the vicinity of
sunspots and in solar features called coronal holes. Magnetic sub-
storms, far more common, create the sequence of auroral events
that arctic viewers think of as "typical" for an arctic winter eve-
ning. First, a sudden brightening resolves itself into a transparent
auroral curtain. Its fine corruscations (rays) become more promi-
nent. There are surges of movement east and west across the
curtain, which starts to develop deep folds. The entire display may
then move steadily north. Toward dawn it breaks up into isolated
luminous patches, like clouds.
The power produced in this generator is astonishing--i tril-
lion watts with a current of i million amperes. The most violent
solar storms affect magnetic compasses, wreak havoc with radio
communications and certain navigational systems, and create in-
duced electric currents in long conductors like the trans-Alaska
pipeline.
Many people claim the aurora makes a sound, a muffled swish
or "a whistling and crackling noise, like the waving of a large flag
in a fresh gale of wind," as the explorer Samuel Hearne wrote. And
some Eskimos say "the lights" will respond to a gentle whistling
and come nearer. They easily evoke feelings of awe and tender-
ness; the most remarkable effect they seem to have, however, is to
draw a viewer emotionally up and out of himself, because they
throw the sky into a third dimension, on such a vast scale, in such
a beautiful way, that they make the emotion of self-pity impossible.
I remember flying from Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks one winter
night. The sky was clear and the aurora borealis was very strong.
With moonlight from the south the snow-covered landscape below
was bright, its relief evident in ground shadows. Even the faint line
separating the snow-covered tundra from the snow-covered ice
was apparent. The auroral curtain stretched out to the west from
my view, toward the village of Wainright and the Chukchi Sea.
It was in its early, quiescent form of diaphanous rays, a long, pale
ghost fire. I could see the edge of the Brooks Range and the plain
ARCTIC DREAMS
of the North Slope below. I recalled days of camping in the
mountains, of traveling on the tundra, and the times I'd camped
on the arctic coast west of Prudhoe. I could see these places clearly,
but it was the aurora, towering over the earth, that resolved what
could have been only a map into a real landscape, making the
memories seem immediate and tangible.
No one knows whether the first Europeans found their way to
Iceland, and thence to Greenland and North America, by accident
or by design. A reasonable thought is that Iceland occasionally
appeared to people in the Faroe Islands as a great looming mirage,
like the one of Somerset Island I saw that day. Such mirages often
occur whenever a mass of warm air lies over a body of cold water.
Light rays that under other conditions might travel straight off
into space are bent, or refracted, back earthward in a series of
small steps as they pass through layers of air at different tempera-
tures.
Mirages are usually divided into two categories: in superior
mirages, like the one of Somerset, the image the eye sees of an
object is a false image above the actual object; in an inferior mirage,
the false image occurs below the object. Superior mirages are
commonly seen at sea in the Arctic in summer, especially late in
the afternoon of a clear day. Distant islands, ships, coastlines, and
icebergs lying beyond the real horizon all appear to be closer than
they are, the sea itself appears slightly concave, and the horizon
seems unusually far off.
Superior images are created when light waves pass from
denser (or cooler) air in the lower atmosphere into air that is less
dense (or warmer). Evenly spaced layers of successively warmer
air (i.e., layers of air arranged in a perfect temperature gradient)
work like a series of eyeglass lenses, each of which is successively
less corrective. A ray of light passing through them all is bent back
earthward in a smooth arc. The viewer sees a single clear image of
the real object.
Ice and Light 237
If the lenses are arranged, however, so that a more corrective
lens comes between two less corrective lenses, the ray of light is
turned back on itself. If it is turned back sufficiently (e.g., because
of a strong temperature inversion in the lower atmosphere), a
viewer will see not only the primary image but a second, inverted
image on top of it. Another series of corrective lenses "out of
sequence" (i.e., a second temperature inversion in the lower
atmosphere) will create a third image, this one right-side-up on
top of the second image. With other changes in the order of the
lenses, the primary image itself will disappear entirely, leaving an
empty space between the horizon and the second, inverted image.
The degree of "stooping" (the vertical compression common
with superior mirages), as well as the number of images that appear,
and any apparent magnification of the image, depend on the rate
of change of air temperature vertically and the presence of re-
versals in that rate of change. Mirages, of course, are always im-
precise. The distortions come about because of shimmering (due
to slight turbulence in the air) and because the entire atmospheric
lens itself is astigmatic--it curves more strongly in one direction
(vertically) than the other (horizontally). All mirages, therefore,
are vertically fuzzy. It is this astigmatic quality of the atmosphere,
in combination with complex atmospheric inversions above uni-
formly bright objects like the sea ice, that gives rise to the most
impressive of arctic mirages, the fata morgana. These extensive
"mountain ranges" or "urban skylines" seem utterly real to the
soberest viewer because of the combined effect of several optical
phenomena.
Under mirage conditions, sunlight reflecting off the sea ice,
through layers of successively warmer air, in which there is a
sequence of slight temperature inversions, creates the appearance
of a high grayish rampart in the distance. The wall appears in
outline and detail exactly like a distant palisade seen through the
earth's blue haze because the astigmatic atmospheric lens has
broken the white ice up into areas of light and shadow, and
23 8 ARCTIC DREAMS
vertical blurring has eliminated any recognizable features. If the
layers of air are then slightly tipped by a breeze and return to
the horizontal in a regular rhythmic pattern (which occurs be-
cause of gravity), the alternation will produce permanent peaks
and spires on an already steady image and the illusion is complete.
The upper edge of the mirage appears serrated, like the arete of a
mountain range; the gray walls suggest snow-covered slopes, even
down to dark ridge lines where wind has apparently blown the
snow away; and the clefts of steep montane valleys are apparent.
Mirages were a source of delight and amusement to many
arctic travelers. They brought lighthearted feelings and a sense of
mock astonishment to the serious, sometimes tedious business of
making coastal surveys and plotting a course. Fata morganas stand
somewhat outside this tradition of innocent whimsy. Seasoned
explorers, vehemently insisting on what they had seen, set down
mountains and islands on their charts where there was nothing but
empty sky. So convincing were these apparitions that the skepti-
cism of other explorers (or even a member of the same expedition)
was met with contempt. Expeditions sent out later to verify these
new lands sometimes saw the same fata morgana, further confus-
ing the issue. Only by prolonging their arduous journeys, thereby
observing a constant receding of the image, did they prove that the
land was not there at all.
So it was for the Macmillan Expedition (1913), sent to con-
firm the existence of a "Crocker Land," reported by Robert Peary
northwest of Cape Thomas Hubbard, northern Axel Heiberg
Island. The "Barnard Mountains," reported by John Ross in 1818
to extend from Devon Island to Ellesmere Island across Jones
Sound, were found not to exist by Edward Inglefield in 1852.
American explorer Charles Francis Hall's "President's Land"
proved an ephemera. The "King Oscar Land" and "Petermann
Land" described by an Austrian army officer from Cape Fligeli,
Franz Josef Land, in 1884 were never seen again. Vilhjalmur
Stefansson set off twice in search of "Keenan Land" in the Beau-
fort Sea.
Ice and Light 2
39
Some arctic experts conjecture, especially in Stefansson's case,
that these fata morganas were actually tabular bergs or ice islands.
It may, indeed, have been a tabular berg hundreds of square miles
in extent that a Cossack explorer named Alexei Markoff found
far north of the Yana River delta in 1715. The "prodigious moun-
tains" of ice that blocked his path were never reported again.
THE monotonic surfaces of the Arctic create frequent problems
with scale and depth perception, especially on overcast days.
Arctic hare and willow ptarmigan sometimes disappear against
the snow when they are only two or three yards away. Even when
a contrasting animal like a caribou or a brown bear is visible on
snow or ice, it is sometimes hard to determine whether it is a large
animal at a distance or a small animal at close range. In My Life
with the Eskimo Stefansson recalls spending an hour stalking a
tundra grizzly that turned out to be a marmot. A Swedish explorer
had all but completed a written description in his notebook of a
craggy headland with two unusually symmetrical valley glaciers,
the whole of it a part of a large island, when he discovered what
he was looking at was a walrus. Johann Miertsching, traveling with
M'Clure aboard the Investigator, wrote of a polar bear that "rose
in the air and flew off" as the hunting party approached. A snowy
owl. "These comical deceptions," wrote Miertsching, "are a fre-
quent occurrence."
The white-out is another familiar deceptive phenomenon. It
commonly occurs under an overcast sky or in a fog bank, where
light traveling in one direction at a certain angle has the same
flux, or strength, as light traveling at any angle in any other direc-
tion. There are no shadows. Space has no depth. There is no
horizon. On foot you stumble about in missed-stair-step fashion.
On a fast-moving snow machine your heart nearly stops when
the bottom of the world disappears.
William Scoresby, in his Account of the Arctic Regions
(1820), offered an original explanation for mistakes in depth per-
ception that are frequently made along certain arctic coasts. The
240 ARCTIC DREAMS
coasts he had in mind are characterized by an extreme degree of
contrast between their barren rock walls and expanses of snow
and ice. With no middle tones to work with, the eye has trouble
resolving these two-dimensional vistas into three dimensions. The
human eye also commonly uses the relative density of blue light
scattered in the air to judge distance (this is the light that softens
the edge of a far mountain); but the clear arctic atmosphere
scatters very little light. Faced with these high-contrast, black-
and-white coasts, having no knowledge of their real height, and
staring at them through an exceedingly clear atmosphere, early
mariners had no idea whether they were 5 or 25 miles offshore.
Mogens Heinson, sent out to search for lost colonies in Greenland
by Frederick II of Denmark in the sixteenth century, battled ice
and snow squalls across the North Atlantic for weeks before he
raised Greenland's southeast coast. With a fresh gale blowing
favorably and clear skies, he laid a course for those towering cliffs.
After several hours he appeared to be no closer to the coast than
when he began. The effect was so convincing that he succumbed
to the belief that his ship was being held motionless over an under-
sea lodestone. Frightened, he put about until the coast of Green-
land was far behind, and then set course for Denmark.
IT is my habit when I travel to note resemblances, particularly of
form and color. For example, that between the bones of a lemming
and a strand of staghorn lichen next to it on the tundra. Or the
sound of a native drum made from walrus intestine and its un-
canny resemblance to the underwater voice of the walrus. Or
between an object I have never seen before and objects I am
familiar with--the head of an arctic hare's rib and the rainspout
gorgons of cathedrals. Scoresby's observation is memorable; a
pure contrast of black and white draws much in the Arctic to-
gether. Sunlit icebergs on a matte-dark sea are a very common
example. But I also remembered this point when looking up to see
arctic hares feeding on a shadowed hillside. Or any of the white
summer birds against dark hills or soil--ivory gulls and tundra
Ice and Light 241
swans. Or the other way around--black guillemots flying over
the white ice. Or any of the arctic birds in which the black-and-
white pattern is so apparent--snowy owl, snow bunting, dovekie,
common loon, snow goose. The black bowhead with its white
chin patches. Walrus on an ice floe. Leads in the spring ice.
The startling contrast in these images became a reminder for
me of the tendency to register only half of what is there in a
harsh land, to ignore the other part, which is either difficult to
reach or unsettling to think about. The dim-lit ocean beneath the
ice, so difficult of access, remains unknown, as do the winter lives
of many of the animals and plants. The ice life of the ribbon seal
is known, but not its pelagic life. The beautiful throat-singing of
the Eskimo, katajak, is heard by the winter visitor but not the
shouts of a shaman bound by his helpers with walrus-hide cord
and "traveling" in a trance. Caribou moving through the Ogilvie
Mountains like wood smoke in a snowstorm, that image, but not
the caribou cow killed by ravens in her birthing.
I would remember a flock of jet-black guillemots, streaking
low over the white ice.
In the middle of summer, lying on my back on the warm
tundra, I would think about the winter, because the summer by
itself was so peaceful and I was trying to understand how the
ivhole landscape fit together. Winter, with its iron indifference, its
terrible weight, explained the ecstasy of summer. The effects of
winter were disquieting to contemplate. Not the cold, though that
could make you ·whimper with pain; it could, they would say,
make rocks give up and shatter. Not the cold but the oppression.
The darkness that came down. The winter wind that picked up a
boat in a village and pitchpoled it across the frozen beach, as if
darkly mad. The oral literature of the Eskimo is full of nightmare
images from the winter months, images of grotesque death, of
savage beasts, of mutilation and pain. In the feeble light between
the drawn-in houses of a winter village, you can hear the breathing
of something with ice for a heart.
I remember a January in Fairbanks when the temperature
2 4 2 ARCTIC DREAMS
stayed around --45 °F for a week. Any bit of moisture in the air
turned to crystals, creating an ice fog. It is haunting and beautiful
to see the exhalations of a herd of caribou hanging over them like
a cloud in that cold, or breath trailing behind a gliding snowy owl.
But in Fairbanks, where the fog from furnaces and cars and wood
fires was suspended just above the streets, it was oppressive. It
blurred the edges of buildings and muffled the sound of the al-
ready obscure passing car. Snow as hard as concrete took the curbs
away from the streets. In the witless gray light, huge ravens walked
the alleys behind stores, tearing at bits of garbage. They hunkered
on the tops of telephone poles in the white vapor, staring down,
cawing that ear-splitting caw. I never felt anything so prehistoric.
Winter darkness shuts off the far view. The cold drives you
deep into your clothing, muscles you back into your home. Even
the mind retreats into itself.
In winter I try to remember the spring: light so brilliant the
eyelid by itself is no protection. You sleep with a strip of felt tied
over your eyes. (I would think of Winifred Petchey Marsh, wear-
ing snow goggles with thin slits while she painted on the tundra
at Eskimo Point, because sunglasses distorted the colors.) Of air
so clear, a vista so open, you thought you would be able to see
Iowa from the banks of the Colville, with just a little elevation.
But in winter I would also dwell on darkness. A kind of darkness,
for example, that afflicts the Kaminuriak caribou: excess killing
at the hands of Eskimos, in modern times. Everyone is afraid to
say something about it, for fear of being called a racist. It is
easier to let the animals go than to confront that tenebrous region
in ourselves. The darkness of politics, in the long hours, runs into
the darkness of the land. Into anger.
I would think of the Eskimo. The darker side of the human
spirit is not refined away by civilization. It is not something we
are done with. Eskimo people, in my experience, have, still, a
sober knowledge of their capacity for violence, but are reluctant
to speak of it to whites because they have been taught that these
Ice and Light 243
are the emotions, the impulses, of primitives. We confuse the
primitive with the inability to understand how a light bulb works.
We confuse the primitive with being deranged. What is truly
primitive in us and them, savage hungers, ethical dereliction, we
try to pass over; or we leave them, alone, to be changed. They can
humiliate you with a look that says they know better.
In the modern ironies of a remote village--satellite televising
of game shows, a small boy wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, pasta for
dinner with cloth napkins, after a sermon in the Baptist church
about the scourge of Communism--even here, especially here, it is
possible to catch a glimpse, usually in the preparation for a hunt,
of the former power, the superhuman strength and unflinching
intensity, of the angakoq. He is an intermediary with darkness. He
has qaumaneq, the shaman light, the luminous fire, the inexplicable
searchlight that enables him to see in the dark, literally and meta-
phorically. He reaches for the throat of darkness; that is the primi-
tive, as primitive as an explosion of blood. Out hunting, in the
welter of gore, of impetuous shooting, that heady mixture of joy
and violence, sometimes it is possible for an outsider to feel the
edge of the primitive. Unbridled, it is frightening. It also defeats
starvation. And in its enthusiasm for the concrete events of life, it
can defeat what weighs against the heart and soul.
Winter darkness brings on the extreme winter depression the
Polar Eskimo call perlerorneq. According to the anthropologist
Jean Malaurie, the word means to feel "the weight of life." To
look ahead to all that must be accomplished and to retreat to the
present feeling defeated, weary before starting, a core of anger, a
miserable sadness. It is to be "sick of life" a man named Imina told
Malaurie. The victim tears fitfully at his clothing. A woman begins
aimlessly slashing at things in the iglu with her knife. A person
runs half naked into the bitter freezing night, screaming out at
the village, eating the shit of the dogs. Eventually the person is
calmed by others in the family, with great compassion, and helped
to sleep. Perlerorneq. Winter.
244 ARCTIC DREAMS
I would turn over a tiny Dorset mask, the anguished face, in
my mind. I recall a day of errors, hunting seals in the ice of the
Beaufort Sea. I felt whatever trouble we had had that day was due to
my own failures of attitude, though this was self-indulgent think-
ing. I was skinning a bearded seal on a small ice cake with another
man, in silence. The ocean--still as a pane of glass. One call only,
from a loon. I thought how the ice under my feet could suddenly
melt. I was standing on water over the water. My heart went into
my neck. Later we ate. I ate the meat of the seal.
No summer is long enough to take away the winter. The
winter always comes. You try to get a feeling for the proportions
of a full life, one that confronts everything. An animal dies. You
face two central, philosophical questions: What is death, and what
is the nature of an animal? You fall asleep on the summer tundra
in the streaming light. You awake to the sound of birds--plovers
and Lapland longspurs. Inches from your eye, an intense cluster
of Parisian blue flowers. A few inches farther a poppy nods under
the weight of a bumblebee. Above, cumulus clouds as voluptuous
as summer fruits. You roll over and embrace the earth.
A black guillemot flies over the white ice, and then disappears
against the dark water.
DURING the sea-lift passage of the Soodoc north through Davis
Strait, en route to Little Cornwallis Island, I got in the habit of
spending afternoons in the cab of a large front-loader that was
chained down on the deck alongside other pieces of heavy machin-
ery. I could sit there out of the wind and occasional rain, looking
out through its spacious windows at the sea and ice. Sometimes I
would read in the Pilot of Arctic Canada. Or I would read arctic
history with a map spread out in my lap.
The days among the icebergs passed slowly. I sat in my
makeshift catbird seat on the deck, or stood watching in the bows,
or up on the bridge with my binoculars and sketchbook.
The icebergs were like pieces of Montana floating past. A
different geography, I thought, from the one I grew up knowing.
Ice and Light 245.
Icebergs create an unfamiliar sense of space because the hori-
zon retreats from them and the sky rises without any lines of com-
pression behind them. It is this perspective that frightened pioneer
families on the treeless North American prairies. Too much space,
anchored only now and then by a stretch of bur oak savanna. Land-
scape painting of the T'ang and Sung dynasties (seventh to twelfth
centuries) used this arrangement of space to create the sense of
a large presence beyond. Indeed, the subject of such paintings was
often their apparent emptiness.
American landscape painting in the nineteenth century, to
return to an earlier thought, reveals a struggle with light and space
that eventually set it apart from a contemporary European tradi-
tion of pastoral landscapes framed by trees, the world viewed
from a carriage window. American painters meant to locate an
actual spiritual presence in the North American landscape. Their
paintings, according to art historians of the period, were the
inspirations of men and women who "saw the face of God" in
the prairies and mountains and along the river bottoms. One of
the clearest expressions of this recasting of an understanding of
what a landscape is were the almost austere compositions of the
luminists. The atmosphere of these paintings is silent and con-
templative. They suggest a private rather than a public encounter
with the land. Several critics, among them Barbara Novak in her
study of this period in American art, Nature and Culture, have
described as well a peculiar "loss of ego" in the paintings. The
artist disappears. The authority of the work lies, instead, with the
land. And the light in them is like a creature, a living, integral
part of the scene. The landscape is numinous, imposing, real. It
ceases to be, as it was in Europe, merely symbolic.
At the height of his critical and popular acclaim in 1859,
Frederic Edwin Church, one of the most prominent of the lum-
inists, set sail for waters off the Newfoundland coast. He wanted
to sketch the icebergs there. They seemed to him the very em-
bodiment of light in nature. Following a three-week cruise, he
returned to his studio in New York to execute a large painting.
246 ARCTIC DREAMS
The small field sketches he made--some are no larger than
the palm of your hand--have a wonderful, working intimacy
about them. He captures both the monolithic inscrutability of
icebergs and the weathered, beaten look they have by the time
they arrive that far south in the Labrador Sea. Looking closely
at one drawing, made on July 1, I noticed that Church had
penciled underneath it the words "strange supernatural."
The oil painting he produced from these sketches came to
be called The Icebergs. It is so imposing--6 feet by 10 feet wide--
a viewer feels he can almost step into it, which was Church's intent.
In the foreground is a shelf of ice, part of an iceberg that fills most
of the painting and which rises abruptly in the left foreground.
On the right, the flooded ice shelf becomes part of a wave-carved
grotto. In the central middle ground is a becalmed embayment,
opening onto darker ocean waters to the left, which continue to a
stormy horizon and other, distant icebergs. Dominating the back-
ground on the far side of the embayment is a high wall of ice and
snow that carries all the way to the right of the painting. In the
ocean air above is a rolling mist. The shading and forms of the
icebergs are expertly limned--Church was an avid naturalist, and
conscientious about such accuracy--and the colors, though slightly
embellished, are true.
There are two oddities about this now very famous American
landscape painting. When it was undraped at Gaupil's Gallery in
New York on April 24, 1861, the reaction was more reserved than
the lionized Church had anticipated. But The Icebergs differed
from the rest of Church's work in one, crucial aspect: there was
no trace of man in it. Convinced that he had perhaps made a mis-
take, Church took the work back to his studio and inserted in the
foreground a bit of flotsam from a shipwreck, a portion of the
main-topmast with the crow's nest. The painting was then exhibited
in Boston, where it was no better received than it had been in
New York. Only when it arrived in London did critics and audi-
ences marvel. "A most weird and beautiful picture," wrote a
reviewer in the Manchester Guardian. England, with its longer
Ice and Light 247
history of arctic exploration and whaling and but a few years
removed from the tragedy of Sir John Franklin, was certainly more
appreciative, at least, of its subject matter.
The second oddity is that Church's painting "disappeared"
for 116 years. It was purchased in 1863 by a Sir Edward Watkin,
after the London showing, to hang at his estate outside Manchester,
called Rose Hill. It then passed by inheritance through Watkin's
son to a purchaser of the estate; and then, by donation, to Saint
Wilfred's Church nearby (which returned it to Rose Hill with
regrets about its size). By 1979 Rose Hill had become the Rose
Hill Remand Home for Boys, and The Icebergs, hanging without
a frame in a stairwell, had been signed by one of the boys. Un-
aware of its value and seeking funds for the reform school's opera-
tion, the owners offered it for sale. The painting was brought back
to New York and sold at auction on October 25, 1979, for $2.5
million, the highest price paid to that time for a painting in
America. It now hangs in the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, in
Texas.
CHURCH'S decision to add the broken mast to The Icebergs speaks,
certainly, to his commercial instincts, but the addition, I think, is
more complex than this; and such a judgment is both too cynical
and too simple.
Try as we might, we ultimately can make very little sense at
all of nature without resorting to such devices. Whether they are
such bald assertions of human presence as Church's cruciform mast
or the intangible, metaphorical tools of the mind--contrast, re-
membrance, analogy--we bring our own worlds to bear in foreign
landscapes in order to clarify them for ourselves. It is hard to
imagine that we could do otherwise. The risk we take is of finding
our final authority in the metaphors rather than in the land. To
inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to pro-
voke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar
landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an
understanding of ourselves.
248 ARCTIC DREAMS
A comparison with cathedrals has come to many Western
minds in searching for a metaphor for icebergs, and I think the
reasons for it are deeper than the obvious appropriateness of line
and scale. It has to do with our passion for light.
Cathedral architecture signaled a quantum leap forward in
European civilization. The gothic cathedral churches, with their
broad bays of sunshine, flying buttresses that let windows rise
where once there had been stone in the walls, and harmonious
interiors--this "architecture of light" was a monument to a newly
created theology. "God is light," writes a French cultural historian
of the era, Georges Duby, and "every creature stems from that
initial, uncreated, creative light." Robert Grosseteste, the twelfth-
century founder of Oxford University, wrote that "physical light
is the best, the most delectable, the most beautiful of all the bodies
that exist."
Intellectually, the eleventh and twelfth centuries were an age
of careful dialectics, a working out of relationships that eventually
became so refined they could be expressed in the mathematics of
cathedrals. Not only was God light but the relationship between
God and man was light. The cathedrals, by the very way they
snared the sun's energy, were an expression of God and of the
human connection with God as well. The aesthetics of this age,
writes Duby, was "based on light, logic, lucidity, and yearning for
a God in a human form." Both the scholastic monks in their
exegetical disquisitions and the illiterate people who built these
churches, who sent these structures soaring into the sky--157 feet
at Beauvais before it fell over on them--both, writes Duby, were
"people trying to rise above their poverty through dreams of light."
It was an age of mystics. When Heinrich Suso, a Dominican
monk, prayed at night in church, "it often seemed as if he were
floating on air or sailing between time and eternity, on the deep tide
of the unsoundable marvels of God." And it was an age of
visionaries who spoke of the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse,
where there would be no darkness.
Ice and Light 249
The erection of these monuments to spiritual awareness sig-
naled a revival of cities, without which these edifices could not
have survived. (The money to build them came largely from an
emerging class of merchants and tradesmen, not royalty.) In
time, however, the cathedrals became more and more esoteric, so
heavily intellectualized an enterprise that, today, the raw, spiritual
desire that was their original impetus seems lost. To the modern
visitor, familiar with an architecture more facile and clever with
light, the cathedrals now seem dark. Their stone has been eaten
away by the acids and corrosives of industrial air. The age of
mystics that bore them gave way rather too quickly to an age of
rational intellects, of vast, baroque theological abstraction.
A final, ironic point: the mathematics that made the building
of the cathedrals possible was carefully preserved by Arabs and
Moors, by so-called infidels.
By the thirteenth century, Europe was starting to feel the
vastness of Asia, the authority of other cultures. "The dissemina-
tion of knowledge," writes Duby, "and the strides made in the
cultural sphere had opened [European] eyes and forced them to
face facts: the world was infinitely larger, more various, and less
docile than it had seemed to their forefathers; it was full of men
who had not received the word of God, who refused to hear it,
and who would not be easily conquered by arms. In Europe the
days of holy war were over. The days of the explorers, traders,
and missionaries had begun. After all, why persist in struggling
against all those infidels, those expert warriors, when it was more
advantageous to negotiate and attempt to insinuate oneself in those
invincible kingdoms by business transactions and peaceful preach-
ing?"
This was the philosophy that carried the Portuguese to India,
the Spaniards to Peru, and the French and British into the hinter-
lands of northern North America. Hundreds of years later, a
refinement on this philosophy of acquisition propelled Americans,
Canadians, and Russians into the Arctic.
2SO ARCTIC DREAMS
The conventional wisdom of our rime is that European man
has advanced by enormous strides since the age of cathedrals. He
has landed on the moon. He has cured smallpox. He has harnessed
the power in the atom. Another argument, however, might be
made in the opposite direction, that all European man has accom-
plished in 900 years is a more complicated manipulation of mate-
rials, a more astounding display of his grasp of the physical
principles of matter. That we are dazzled by mere styles of ex-
pression. That ours is not an age of mystics but of singular adepts,
of performers. That the erection of the cathedrals was the last wild
stride European man made before falling back into the confines of
his intellect.
Of the sciences today, quantum physics alone seems to have
found its way back to an equitable relationship with metaphors,
those fundamental tools of the imagination. The other sciences are
occasionally so bound by rational analysis, or so wary of metaphor,
that they recognize and denounce anthropomorphism as a kind of
intellectual cancer, instead of employing it as a tool of comparative
inquiry, which is perhaps the only way the mind works, that
parallelism we finally call narrative.
There is a word from the time of the cathedrals: agape, an
expression of intense spiritual affinity with the mystery that is "to
be sharing life with other life." Agape is love, and it can mean
"the love of another for the sake of God." More broadly and
essentially it is a humble, impassioned embrace of something out-
side the self, in the name of that which we refer to as God, but
which also includes the self and is God. We are clearly indebted
as a species to the play of our intelligence; we trust our future to
it; but we do not know whether intelligence is reason or whether
intelligence is this desire to embrace and be embraced in the
pattern that both theologians and physicists call God. Whether
intelligence, in other words, is love.
ONE day, sitting in my accustomed spot on the cargo deck of the
Soodoc, I turned to see the second engineer, who had brought two
Ice and Light 2 51
cups of coffee. He was from Guyana. We talked about Guyana,
and about the icebergs, some forty or fifty of which were then
around us. He raised his chin to indicate and said, "How would
you like to live up there? A fellow could camp up there, sail all
the way to Newfoundland. Get off at Saint John's. How about it?"
He laughed.
We laughed together. We searched the horizon for mirages
with the binoculars, but we were not successful. When his break
was over, the engineer went back below decks. I hung over the
bow, staring into the bow wave at the extraordinary fluidity of
that geometry on the calm waters of Melville Bay. I looked up at
the icebergs. They so embodied the land. Austere. Implacable.
Harsh but not antagonistic. Creatures of pale light. Once, camped
in the Anaktiktoak Valley of the central Brooks Range in Alaska,
a friend had said, gazing off across that broad glacial valley of
soft greens and straw browns, with sunlight lambent on Tulugak
Lake and the Anaktuvuk River in the distance, that it was so
beautiful it made you cry.
I looked out at the icebergs. They were so beautiful they also
made you afraid.