Arctic Dreams Revisited

A Well-Thumbed "Arctic Dreams"

My boss at the research institute where I used to work has a bumper sticker on the wall of his office.  It says "Nature Bats Last".  My thoughts exactly.  I finished Arctic Dreams several weeks ago, and have since left the Arctic far behind so re-visiting it has been a pleasure and has made me think about its future. Barry Lopez wrote his masterpiece nearly 30 years ago.  I wonder what he thinks about the Arctic now?

Does he remember the vast ice floes and "ivu's"?  Ivu is the Eskimo word for a strange phenomenon that occurs in the coastal ice. "Suddenly in the middle of winter and without warning a huge piece of sea ice surges hundreds of feet inland, like something alive."  Does he wonder how the ice is doing now as global warming takes its toll?  Could he "...stand at the edge of this four-foot-thick ice platform...to find yourself in a rich biological crease.  Species of algae grow on the bottom of sea ice, turning it golden brown with a patchwork of life. These tiny diatoms feed zooplankton moving through the upper layers of water in vast clouds -- underwater galaxies of copepods, amphipods, and mysids. These in turn feed the streaming schools of cod.  The cod feed the birds.  And the narwhals.  And the ringed seal, which feeds the polar bear, and eventually the fox...It is the ice...that holds this life together...For ice-associated seals, vulnerable on a beach, it is a place offshore to rest, directly over their feeding grounds.  It provides algae with a surface to grow on.  It shelters arctic cod from hunting seabirds and herds of narwhals, and it shelters the narwhal from the predatory orca.  It is the bear's highway over the sea.  And it gives me a place to stand on the ocean, and wonder."

Sea Ice

Does he wonder if many polar bears are having to do this as they travel their ice highway?

As I wonder about the Arctic, I cannot help but fear that with the melting of the sea ice, a cascade of calamities awaits the entire planet.  Without letting this post become too political, I will just say that science is science and opinion is opinion.  Let oil companies drill offshore in Arctic waters and we will see what happens.  The Arctic environment is rapidly changing due to global warming. We are drilling for more carbon-based energy resources in this pristine environment, an exercise fraught with its own dangers, AND the extraction of said resources contributing to more global warming.  Very, very disheartening. As an adult in the modern world, I use these extracted resources every day and cannot discount my own role in our dysfunctional relationship with nature. So, I hope with all my heart that alternative energy sources are made readily available as soon as possible!

Back to the book...Lopez has cast a spell on me.  I have fallen in love with narwhals, musk oxen, polar bears, ringed seals, dwarf willow and birch forests, more species of land and seabirds than I can remember, the aurora borealis, and the sea ice with all of its quirks and dangers.  I am fascinated by the indigenous people of the Arctic. Lopez refers to them as "Eskimos", the old generic term "...from the French Esquimaux, possibly from eskipot, an Algonquian word meaning 'an eater of raw flesh'.  Some Eskimos feel this attribution puts them in a poor light with modern audiences and so use other terms for themselves."  "Inuit" in the Canadian Arctic, "Yup'ik" in the Bering Sea region, "Inupiat" in the North Slope of Alaska area, and "Inuvialuit" in the Mackenzie Delta.

Eskimo

Before modern day "Eskimos" were the Thule peoples, thought to have had contact with the Vikings in the eastern Arctic.  Their scrimshaw carvings are sometimes beyond strange and are thought to reflect the tricks played on the mind by numbing cold and darkness.

The nature writer Robert Macfarlane writes "Arctic Dreams is filled with stories of people whose expectations are confounded by the polar environment, sometimes fatally.  A hunter, his perception of scale confused by the tundra's monotony, spends an hour stalking a grizzly, which turns out to be a marmot.  A polar bear grows wings and flies off as a party approaches:  they have been following a snowy owl.  Then there is the fata morgana, a mirage of ice and light that simulates a serrated mountainous coastline, and occasionally cost the lives of the 19th-century explorers who approached it, hoping for a landfall." He continues, "Science, for Lopez, finesses the real into a greater marvellousness. Arctic mirages were once thought to be the work of angels; they are now known to be the work of angles.  For Lopez, the two are never far apart. Throughout his writings, Lopez returns to the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them."

Grace.  Wonder.  Honor.  What we must, as human beings, remember when we are up to bat because "Nature Bats Last".

  

Musk Oxen

Narwhals

Ringed Seal

Aurora Borealis

Reading Rest Area

We have grand kids this weekend, siblings from around the world in town, and a birthday party, so lots going on here at Reading Road Map Headquarters. What is NOT going on much is reading, as in reading for long stretches of time without interruption. Are there ever any such "stretches of time"?

Given the state of things here, this is what is going on right now on the Reading Road Map journey:

Finished "Arctic Dreams" and a post to come soon.

Reading Colette short stories, as well as "Earthly Paradise", an autobiography of sorts comprised of short pieces written by Colette.

Another M.F.K. Fisher book, "Two Towns in Provence".

Listening to "Five Red Herrings" by Dorothy L. Sayers, a free audio book download from my local library. I like this production because it is done as a radio play rather than a narrator reading the book.

Just barely beginning "The Mountains of the Moon", a trip to central Africa in the early part of the 20th century.  I pulled out one of our beautiful old 1950's map books to follow along with the British Museum Herbarium expedition to Ruwenzori, 'the mountains of the moon'.  The map book takes up almost half of the dining room table when opened out so I suspect it will not get to live there long.  This journey will go on hold until later this month.  The map books will be the subject of more than one post. They are close to the top of my list of favorite things.

Kenya and Uganda

Ruwenzori

I am also strolling through cookbooks as I plan the weekly menu.  What I am NOT doing, is going to book-related blogs to read reviews of new books, ordering new books, and moving them to the bookshelf to sit unread for who knows how long.  So far, so good!

Looking at the above list, one might think a bit of  "reading ADD" has returned. It looks like a scatterbrain list, but really, it does not feel like it in real life.

There might be a beautiful picture book about Leonard and Virginia Woolf's garden at Monk's House coming my way, but it will be a gift, so it does not count.  Right?

I Cannot Wait!

   

Dreaming of the Arctic and Africa

On Fridays My Reading Road Map will go outdoors.  We will visit far away places or nearby gardens. We will investigate the natural world.  I found two books in the stacks Wednesday that shout "faraway places" so I want to give them a mention today.

Arctic Dreams

The first book is "Arctic Dreams:  Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape" by Barry Lopez, a philosophical nature writer who lives nearby in the Cascade foothills of western Oregon.  Lopez won the 1986 National Book Award for Nonfiction for this book.

My copy is a well-used 1986 Scribner's large paperback, and a whopping 464 pages.  I am on page 313, so on the home stretch to the finish.  I have started this book and put it down several times over the years.  For some reason it was never the right time.  Now I know to read it is a privilege and this is why.

Barry Lopez writes about Arctic land and seascapes, the creatures who populate them, and the history of Western exploration and exploitation of them with a quiet contemplative voice. Maybe I needed to be quiet to read it.

Here is a small sample from the preface.  Lopez is writing about a summer evening walk through the tundra in the western Brooks Range of Alaska.

“…it was on that evening that I went on a walk for the first time among the tundra birds.  They all build their nests on the ground, so their vulnerability is extreme.  I gazed down at a single horned lark no bigger than my fist.  She stared back resolute as iron.  As I approached, golden plovers abandoned their nests in hysterical ploys, artfully feigning a broken wing to distract me from the woven grass cups that couched their pale, darkly speckled eggs.  Their eggs glowed with a soft, pure light, like the window light in a Vermeer painting…I took to bowing on these evening walks.  I would bow slightly with my hands in my pockets, toward the birds and the evidence of life in their nests—because of their fecundity, unexpected in this remote region, and because of the serene arctic light that came down over the land like breath, like breathing.”

He "took to bowing" to the birds.  The profoundness of this has stayed with me throughout this book.  I will never forget the quiet reverence of those words.

Soon we will return to the Arctic.  We will talk about musk oxen and polar bears, narwhals and ring seals.  We will discuss ice and northern lights, the Thule people and ancient willow and birch forests so short one can walk over the top of them.  We will also think about this artwork by Frederic Edwin Church.

Finally, the chapter I am reading now is titled "The Intent of Monks".  Quietness indeed.

Mountains of the Moon

The second book from Wednesday's stacks is "Mountains of the Moon:  An Expedition to the Equatorial Mountains of Africa." by Patrick M. Synge.  Another book I have had for decades, in this case still unread.

As you see in the picture, this book came from Fermin Lasuen High School library in San Pedro, California.  It is one of my original 3,000 volume library and is considered an "ex-library" book to collectors.  These are looked down upon as much as Book Club editions in that world.  Mine is a third edition, printed in London in 1938.  It is badly damaged but contains two beautiful "coloured plates" one of which you can see in the picture, "The Lake of Death", Seventh Nyamgasani Lake.  There are 91 "collotype plate" illustrations and two maps, one a pull-out folding map.

Right now all I know about this book is the physical description I have shared with you.  From a book review on Goodreads:

“In 1934, Patrick Synge travelled on an expedition sponsored by the British Museum of Natural History to the Ruwenzori range in East Africa, purported to be the "mountains of the moon" spoken of by Herodotus.  Synge, a botanist, was immediately enchanted by the place. His book is, in large part, an enthusiastic and good-natured account of the things that most impressed him. Being a botanist, his most vivid writing concerns plants, but I must say that seldom have I read more captivating descriptions of local scenery, flora, and fauna.”

We will return to the "Mountains of the Moon" again, I promise.