Thoreau of the Desert

It is not the answer that enlightens,

but the question.

---Eugene Ionesco

Desert Solitaire, a 2016 Reading Challenge book, has been in my mental To Be Read (TBR) stack for many years. The title beguiles me and has kept me from reading the book because I was afraid it would disappoint, as if the title was too beautiful for what may follow. I have not been disappointed.

Desert Solitaire epigraph:

Give me silence, water, hope

Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes

-- Neruda

Delicate Arch

Edward Abbey worked as a seasonal Park Ranger at what was then called Arches National Monument in Utah, in the late 1950s. He lived twenty miles away from the nearest house in a "little tin government house trailer". Mice-ridden, (an adopted gopher snake took care of them), freezing cold in April, stifling hot in July, equipped with the bare necessities for living, the trailer became a place to store food and belongings. When the weather turned warmish, he built a lean-to "ramada" and a fire pit and moved outdoors, where he slept under the stars. Desert Solitaire was written ten years later from the journals Abbey kept during his seasonal work at the Arches.

From Abbey's Introduction:

This is not primarily a book about the desert. In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea...If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. What I have tried to do then is something a bit different. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.

Edward Abbey held strong views about modern America's attitude to wilderness. He could not abide the superficial way most tourists visited the Arches. His "word of caution" regarding "industrial tourism":

Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe...

Some have attributed Abbey with the beginning of the Earth First! movement and ecoterrorism. His book The Monkey Wrench Gang is about sabotaging a dam construction project in the Southwest, so it is kind of understandable that he would be seen as a proponent of drastic means to stop man's destruction of the natural environment. Abbey strenuously denied that he supported ecoterrorism. However, in Desert Solitaire, he admits to tearing out several miles worth of new road survey markers near his trailer house. A very naughty protest, but not ecoterrorism.

Rattlesnakes, wildflowers, poisonous water springs, fresh water springs, cliff seeps and hidden grottoes, flash floods, quicksand, range cattle, and uranium are described in beautiful prose in this masterpiece of nature writing. One of the most interesting things to me is that according to Abbey, the beautiful land forms in the Arches are not the result of wind erosion, but of the slow drip of water and the effects of contraction and expansion of cold and heat over eons of geologic time.

Lake Powell, Glen Canyon

Abbey describes not only his surrounds in the Arches, but a river raft trip down the Colorado through Glen Canyon, as the dam was being built. It is heartbreaking to know that the beauty he describes is now deep under water and silt, buried forever. Even if the dam is not permanent, the silt is. His solitary foray up the side canyon where the Escalante River enters the Colorado is my favorite part of the book. He finds the ruins of a cliff dwelling perched high up the canyon wall. It is all now buried forever. And sadly, Glen Canyon Dam was built not for irrigation but for electricity so that hordes of people could live in the desert southwest.

Mt. Tukuhnikivats in the La Sal range

We accompany Abbey on a camping trip and solitary climb up one of the highest mountains overlooking the Arches, Mt. Tukuhnikivats. And, we go to the bottom of Grand Canyon where Abbey spent 35 days camped near the Native American village of Havasu. While there he nearly trapped himself on a ledge while exploring the area around his camp. He worked his way down a cliff side and was stranded. Piling rocks and then centering his walking stick in the pile, he climbed up to the tip of his stick and used it as a launch to jump up to a handhold in the rock above. Risky.

Havasu Falls, Grand Canyon

The Maze

This same fearless attitude sent him and a friend to The Maze, a no-man's-land of canyons (now part of Canyonlands National Park). At the time, they were barely able to get into the area with a Land Rover. They repelled down a cliff face to the maze itself, not knowing if they would find a way to climb back up. Yes, risky but Abbey described himself as "not an atheist but an earthiest". He believed one should "be true to the earth". He was not afraid because he did not separate himself from the environment.

He believed in the desert.

"The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert."

The title Desert Solitaire is perfect for this book. It is beautiful. The book is beautiful. I will read it again.

P.S. While recuperating from hand surgery, I could hardly hold a book in my hands for more than a few minutes. This is what I did as I inched my way through Desert Solitaire:

 

Still in the Tunnel and Mystery Bookmark

Sorry for the abrupt interregnum here. I should have let you know that I had carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand so would be absent for a bit. The surgery was not scheduled to happen until this coming Monday but there was an opening so they whisked me in on Friday, May 13th (yikes!!!) so it was all a big whirlwind. Anyway...three weeks into recovery and I am nearly back.  Very satisfied with the procedure and expect to be fully recovered in another week or two. Left hand is scheduled for June 28, so fair warning, another pause to come!

Enough about that.

With lots of time to dawdle, I finished two 2016 Reading Challenge books. I will post on the Lopez book soon, and the Farrell book later as it is part of trilogy I need to finish.

Also, I have listened to many audio books while playing one-handed Churchill Solitaire on my iPad. As usual, my genre choice is British mystery but I also listened to a short history of Greece and a mystery with a knitting theme. Random, but I do tend to choose my reading matter based on the most shiny thing I see at the moment.

Here is what I am currently reading in the physical book world:

Provence by Ford Madox Ford

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

I have "dipped into" Plutarch's Lives, The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, and The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell. I will save those for later. The Dunnett is quite dense. So much so, I have a companion volume to refer to when I do not understand her historical references. I love the challenge but am not quite ready for it right now. Plutarch is part of my mental "must read the classics" obsession and the Farrell is part three of a trilogy so I will wait to post about it when I can speak to all three books. I need to re-read Troubles, the second book in the trilogy because for who knows what reason I began reading them out of order and it was several years ago and I cannot remember much about Troubles. The first book, Siege of Krishnapur, winner of the Booker Prize, is shown above. I am still thinking about that one so am looking forward to the next two.

Here is a teaser for you ~~

Side Two of a Bookmark

I found this in one of the books I am now reading...more to come. Now, I have to grab some ice and rest my hand.

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out."

--Heraclitus

In the opening epigram, facing the Table of Contents page, Heraclitus, over 2,500 years ago, said in twenty words what Annie Dillard used 279 pages to say in her masterpiece of nature writing, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Using keen observation and much research, her chronicle of a year of life near Tinker Creek and its surrounds is a much more nuanced and detailed look at the Fire that keeps each of us and the rest of the Universe in constant aliveness and motion.

A 2016 Reading Challenge book, I finished my well-worn ex-library copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek last night, and have some thoughts about it before moving on to the next book on my list. This book reminds me of a project begun in 2013 by my favorite book blogger who blogs as dovegreyreader. She had been reading nature writers Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin and decided to learn as much as she could about the area covering a one mile radius surrounding her English country home. She has written about her explorations here: Beating the Bounds.

From the frontispiece of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance...I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

"It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen..." From the beginning, Dillard is "beating the bounds" of her neighborhood in western Virginia while using what she sees and hears as evidence for her personal abiding faith in a Creator. We are with her as she walks along Tinker Creek and then stands stock still as she watches a frog collapse inward, like a leather purse being slowly folded flat. She then reports what she found through research that an aquatic water bug with pincers holds the frog in place from behind, injects a liquefying agent, and quickly sucks the frog to death. Poor innocent frog! But wait, does not the frog eat something else alive one second and dead the next? As Alfred Lord Tennyson said in a poem, nature is "red in tooth and claw" and that is quite apparent from the start in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Organized by season, Dillard takes us around her suburban surrounds. From the sky to the quarry we learn how to "see" nature. Once seen, we learn a little more about how to understand what we are seeing. And, for some of us this understanding is a spiritual experience, for others a confirmation that physics and biology work together in mysterious ways.

For Dillard, the journey's ultimate goal is spiritual. For me, reading about the journey resulted in a better understanding of what is over my head, in the water around me, and under my feet. Satisfying enough for this reader. The ongoing confirmation of Dillard's faith actually seemed "preachy" at times and nearly caused me to put the book down and not finish it. However, reminding myself that not everybody is the same (thank you, Jane Austen!), I stuck with it and am glad I did.

For me, the most incredible bit in the book takes place in a quarry, in the fall. Dillard has decided to contemplate the sunset as she looks over a quarry. She notices a curved "something" on a rock ledge over the way. Deciding to take a look, she walks in that direction but stops as soon as she realizes it is a small copperhead snake resting on the rock, still warm from the last of the day's sunlight. Knowing the risk she is taking, she moves closer to the snake and sits down within four feet of it. She sits very still and observes the snake, its scales, how its tail decreases in size to nothingness, how its head is raised up above the rock. Then, in amazement she watches a mosquito land on the snake's back and begin sucking its blood. This lasts for about two minutes. She imagines how much effort the mosquito has to expend to reach between the scales and find the perfect place to insert its needle-sharp snout. After this is over, Dillard wonders if the snake could feel the mosquito as it went about its work. She also tells the reader that copperhead snakes are abundant in her area, account for most poisonous snakebites in the U.S., and are not quite poisonous enough to kill an adult human. There are timber rattlers in her woods too and she always carries a snake bite kit with her wherever she goes.

I admire her courage. Copperheads are found in the hill country of Texas too. When we visited relatives there I was always worried sick about one finding my kids as they played in the brushy areas around their grandma's house. We should have thought of a snake bite kit!

Here are a few of the notes I took as I went along:

Dillard quotes Arthur Koestler: "Gravity, to Copernicus, is the nostalgia of things to become spheres."

From a physicist: "Everything that has happened is a particle, everything in the future is a wave."

Dillard: "Beauty itself is the language for which there is no key."
"I find it hard to see anything about a bird that it does not want seen. It demands my full attention."

This is a GOOD book. If you are interested in nature and like nature writing, even down to the gory bits, I highly recommend it.

Annie Dillard is now in her early 70s and lives on an island in the Puget Sound. Here is what she has to say about her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

"In 1971 I wanted to try my hand at prose. My journals were full of facts that I used to write Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), a sustained nonfiction narrative about the fields, creeks, woods, and mountains near Roanoke, Virginia. Because I "Named" its chapters, in the style of 19th-century narratives, many reviewers took it for a book of essays. The book attempted to describe the creator, if any, by studying creation, leading one writer to call me (wonderfully) 'one of the foremost horror writers of the 20th century' ".

It's that "nature, red in tooth and claw" bit.

The Song of the Lark

Book One of Sixteen

2016 TBR Reading Challenge

My apologies for the sporadic posts. I am continually surprised by how long it takes to recuperate from serious illness at this age. Not feeling bad now, just low energy and low interest level in things that used to occupy my mind like an obsession. Some things remain constant -- I am reading several of the books from my 2016 reading challenge. This is a challenge to read through at least sixteen of the books in our "To Be Read" stacks. This is an update on the first of my sixteen. Have you joined the challenge?

My personal reading road map has guided me through myriad detours and strange meanderings over time. Willa Cather is an American author I have known about but not really taken that seriously. Considered a "western" writer, Cather wrote in the late 19th and first part of the 20th century. Stories about pioneers and the hardscrabble life do not usually interest me much. You see, I prefer English literature and have pretty much ignored American writers. I have lots of their books, but usually pass them over when looking for something to read. Is the writing too raw and new? Not serious enough? Perhaps, as I do like the history, established tradition, and the legacy of the ancients found in English literature. Snobbish prejudice aside, many years ago I read My Antonia by Willa Cather. I remember being moved to tears by the beauty of the writing, the story, and the feeling of being there, on the Nebraska prairie, as I read. For reasons I cannot even now imagine, I never read another of Cather's works or thought about her much, until now.

About a year ago, I was reading through a collection of nature writing by women, Sisters of the Earth, edited by Lorraine Anderson. One of pieces was an extract from Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark. Here is a snippet from the biographical sketch of Cather at the beginning of the piece:

"Cather's work has been praised for its lyrical and profound evocations of nature...The land is a central figure in her mature fiction; a primary theme is that if treated properly, the land is a source of well-being and -- in the case of struggling young opera singer Thea Kronborg, protagonist of Cather's third and longest novel, "The Song of the Lark" -a source of deep solace. Kronborg has tried to transcend the limits of her upbringing in the frontier Colorado town of Moonstone by escaping to Chicago; when that attempt has seemingly failed, she finds respite in Panther Canyon in the Southwest."

When I read the extract from Sisters of the Earth titled The Ancient People, I knew I had to someday read The Song of the Lark. Once again, Cather's writing was so evocative, I felt I was there, in the deep, winding crack in the earth called Panther Canyon. Here, where long-abandoned cliff dwellings occupy the inner gorge within the canyon:

"The dead city lay at the point where the perpendicular outer wall ceased and the V-shaped inner gorge began. There a stratum of rock softer than those above had been hollowed out by the action of time until it was like a deep groove running along the sides of the canyon. In this hollow (like a great fold in the rock) the Ancient People had built their houses of yellowish stone and mortar. The overhanging cliff above made a roof two hundred feet thick.

In both walls of the canyon the same streak of soft rock had been washed out, and the long horizontal groove had been built up with houses. The dead city had thus two streets, one set in either cliff, facing each other across the ravine, with a river of blue air between them.

The canyon twisted and wound like a snake, and these two streets went on for four miles or more.

All the houses in the canyon were clean with the cleanness of sun-baked, wind-swept places, and they all smelled of the tough little cedars that twisted themselves into the very doorways. One of these rock-rooms Thea took for her own...The day after she came Henry brought over on one of the pack-ponies a roll of Navajo blankets...and Thea lined her cave with them. The room was not more than eight by ten feet, and she could touch the stone roof with her fingertips. This was her old idea: a nest in a high cliff, full of sun."

Thea Kronborg, is a descendant of Swedish immigrants, and is one of a large family living in southern Colorado, desert country, in the late 19th century. Her father is a clergyman in the small town of Moonstone. Thea's mother recognizes a streak of musical genius in her daughter, and arranges for her to learn to play the piano. Her teacher, an alcoholic German musician, is a stern taskmaster. He too recognizes Thea's talent and pushes her to embrace her ability before she really understands what it is. Over time, Thea becomes aware that she is different from her brothers and sisters, and from her schoolmates. She feels the constraints of the small too-close community and finally breaks free. She travels to Chicago where she studies piano with a well-known concert pianist. When he has to leave because of a career opportunity, he hears Thea sing and is sure she is headed in the wrong direction with her piano studies. He arranges for her to continue her musical studies, and convinces her that her true musical talent is in her voice. Over time, Thea studies, learns the "ropes" of performance art, and then, just as she is about to launch her career, suffers a physical setback, contracting a serious case of pneumonia which nearly kills her. During her long recovery, she is invited to travel to the Southwest, to a friend's ranch for a healing rest. It is while visiting the ranch that she makes a personal breakthrough in her relationship to her art.

Thea stays at the ranch for weeks, making the trek into the canyon every day to occupy her "nest". There she finds badly needed solace and gathers into herself the canyon's raw energy and the spiritual echoes of the Ancient People.

"Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she herself seemed older. She had never been alone for so long before, or thought so much. Nothing had ever engrossed her so deeply as the daily contemplation of the cliff...Here everything was simple and definite...Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab. And here she must throw this lumber away. The things that were really hers separated themselves from the rest. Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer. She felt united and strong."

Thea emerges from the canyon with renewed purpose as she pursues her musical career. She had gone through a "vision quest" of a sort, and now understands and believes in her gift. As she explains to her mentor, "Dr. Archie":

" 'You see, Doctor Archie, what one really strives for in art is not the sort of thing you are likely to find when you drop in for a performance at the opera. What one strives for is so far away, so beautiful' -- she lifted her shoulders with a long breath, folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him with a resignation which made her face noble -- 'that there's nothing one can say about it.' "

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and plan to re-read My Antonia. It is on my Kindle. Many of Willa Cather's works are free for Kindle download, as they are in the public domain.

I hope to see you back here soon with another reading challenge update. This seems to be the right time to zip through these books as they are there in my TBR stack and so I do not have to do a lot of creative thinking about what to read next.

Ruwenzori - Mountains of the Moon Part I

"Around this bay the Anthropophagi Aethiopians dwell, and from there towards the west are the Mountains of the Moon from which the lakes of the Nile receive snow water."

--Ptolemy (90 AD-168 AD) Book 4, chap. viii

"Here the silence was the voice"

Let's take a journey to Africa, shall we?

In an old car named Boanerges we haul ourselves from Kampala, Uganda to the foothills of the Ruwenzori  or the "Mountains of the Moon". It is December, 1934 and we are part of a "...British Museum Expedition to East Africa organized for the purpose of studying the flora and fauna of the equatorial mountains in relation to their peculiar environment." We are hoping to investigate two "hitherto almost unknown valleys ascending from the south and the southeast", the Nyamgasani and the Namwamba. We know there is a string of eight lakes near the top of the range, discovered by air a few years earlier.

 

 Ruwenzori "Mountains of the Moon" due west from Kampala

We have turned south at Fort Portal and are nearing the southern tip of the Ruwenzori. We are hoping to locate our base camp at the farm of a Captain Chapman. After many hours of unloading and loading our supply lorry and vehicles so we can cross the flimsiest of bridges, we continue until the road ends.  At this point, traveling by foot, our porters hired in Kampala carrying our supplies, we hike into the foothills to Captain Chapman's farm.

On the way to Captain Chapman's farm

At the farm, Captain Chapman has agreed to let us use a logging camp up the hill from his house as our base camp. He will also manage the base camp for us, sending up supplies in relays throughout our stay. At the farm we hire more porters. "They were Bakonjo, pleasant and friendly fellows, but much less civilized than the majority of the Uganda peoples...They are an ancient race, since they have been little affected by the Hamitic waves from the north and north-east, merely retiring before them, like the Celts, to the mountains, where they have preserved their old language."

One of the porters is a "rain man". We are here during the dry season in Uganda but expect bad weather anyway based on reports from previous expeditions.  Luckily for us, when dark clouds roll in as we trek up the mountain, the rain man climbs the nearest small hill, stands at the top with a flute-like whistle and blows a few blasts to keep the rain away.  "An uncanny success seemed to attend his efforts...and we ourselves almost began to believe in the power of the whistle."

As Captain Chapman has warned us, we have to cut a trail through the thick undergrowth and bamboo. "It was all unknown ground. There was no track. We had to cut a path all the way. We soon got used to the routine. We cut generally for two or three days; then all the porters were massed for moving camp. The next day we started cutting again. One of us would...go ahead with the porters. Somerville (our artist) would draw...while I would gather plants and take photographs."

Continuing on this way up, up the mountain we come and finally reach higher elevations where the going is easier and the plants become giant specimens of common plants found in our more temperate zones. 15-foot tall flowering lobelias, 50-foot tall heather "trees". Think of the pretty blue lobelias we plant in the spring, only with huge flower spikes, and normally one-foot tall heather bushes turned into trees 50 feet high.

As we continue to gather specimens and photograph strange new plants and mosses, we see very little signs of animal life. There are Colobus and "blue" monkeys at the lower elevations. Also large purple slugs on the bamboo. Higher up we see "hyrax", a small rodent-like animal used for meat and fur by the porters. We see little blue "sunbirds" (African hummingbirds) work the blue flower spikes of the giant lobelias. Very little else except for crows and birds resembling starlings.

Ruwenzori Close-Up

As we finally approach the highest elevations, the porters become skittish about the mountains and lakes. They are very superstitious and will not camp near any lake. We find rock outcroppings for their shelter and set up camp "proper" near a large lake, one of the eight discovered by air. "We were standing almost on the Equator, yet it was as cold as a really cold winter's day in England, and a little ahead there was permanent snow and ice."

Two of us set out to climb to the top of the highest peak above our camp, Weismann Peak. All the snow peaks, Mt. Stanley, Mt. Speke, and Mt. Baker are visible from the top. On the south side of Weismann Peak is a glacier, one of those feeding the high mountain lakes, and eventually, the Nile River. As we take in the long view, we see a strange cloud next to our camp down below. We realize it is smoke, and rush down as fast as we can, only to find a burnt out campsite. Moving down to the rock shelter, we find our colleague and the porters are safe. A gust of wind blew flames from the campfire beyond the safety zone and set dry moss and brush on fire as well as our tent and sleeping gear. No samples were lost, thank goodness! But, it means an early departure down the mountain.

As we descend, we gather more plant samples, and laugh at our strange outfits -- remnants of burnt clothes, and tent flaps! When we reach the lower elevations, we have to cut our trail again, although not as time consuming as when we climbed up the mountain.

Back at base camp, we take a long relaxed rest. Smoke from intentional grass fires has cut visibility and our mountains are lost in the haze. A huge swarm of locusts comes through the area turning the sky even darker as they pass over. A very strange thing happens. A stork falls out of a tree, nearly unconscious. It is determined he has gorged himself on locusts. After several hours he recovers but is too weak to fly. He stays for several days and enjoys the attention, allowing us to scratch his chin! Finally, he flies away, headed to one of the large lakes in the area.

We hear news of our other group, back from their northern approach to the mountain. They have also had a successful trip. Our southern approach is not the easiest way to reach the high elevations, but we think it must be the most beautiful. Feeling satisfied with the results of our journey thus far, we settle in to label and pack specimens and reflect on Ruwenzori.

And now, it is time to make plans for the next stage of our journey--a plant safari on Mount Elgon.

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

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.