A Wilder Time. William E. Glassley

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СКАЧАТЬ jangles nerves, an unexpected calm eventually settles in. The dictatorship of night’s blackness, which constrains movement and limits sight, is banished. Clocks and time of day become unnecessary burdens. The freedom of timelessness seeps into life. We got used to taking strolls along beaches at two in the morning, with billowing globes of clouds backlit by the sun reflecting off of glassy fjord surfaces. Watching prowling Arctic foxes stealthily search for sustenance in the spongy tundra at midnight, clearly visible in the pale light, would become addictive.

      AFTER UNPACKING, WE TOOK A BREAK FOR COFFEE. Kai put a pot of water over a hissing Primus set up on a flat stone. As we stood around waiting for the water to boil, red plastic mugs with a spoonful of instant Nescafé in our hands, we mused about our abrupt change in circumstances. Just twenty-four hours earlier, we had been in Copenhagen, one of the world’s most sophisticated cities, where John met us at the airport for the flight to Greenland. Shortly before meeting John, I had been sipping cappuccino at a sidewalk café and enjoying the bustle of tourists along the quay in Nyhavn. I had flown in from San Francisco a few days before to help Kai finalize the logistics for the trip. Now, isolated from the rest of the world, removed from everything a “normal” day would bring, the meaning of normal became ambiguous. We were at the beginning of days of discovery, of seeing things never before seen. Excitement was implicit in every comment and laugh. The water finally boiled and Kai poured it into our cups, the smell of the instant coffee pungently punctuating the Arctic air.

      But there was also an undercurrent of tension.

      “It is nice to be back.” Kai sighed as he looked across the fjord. His ruddy face glistened from the afternoon’s efforts. A thin smile on John’s face acknowledged the passing of decades. He was looking off in the same direction as Kai. I nodded, and uttered a slight “Hmm.”

      Across the fjord, nearly five miles away, a small ice field glowed white against the grayish greens and reddish browns of the tundra it rested on. We absentmindedly watched it as we mused about plans and what we might find. Eventually, Kai’s comments turned to the controversy that had briefly been mentioned long before. He glanced down at the plant-covered ground and slowly ran a boot across it. He spoke with strong emotions about published interpretations of the geological history that conflicted with years of work and the field observations of two generations of researchers. He quickly alluded to the fact that those new conclusions were based on a single season in the field, and lacked the in-depth direct scrutiny earlier studies had benefited from. It was our task, he said, to break new ground, with more detailed attention given to specific locations and features that might resolve what was clearly a conflicted set of hypotheses.

      I asked what papers he was talking about. Although I knew there was some disagreement about details of the geology—it is a science, after all, and debates keep things honest—there wasn’t any specific paper I could recall that justified this attention.

      John said that he had the papers with him and that he would bring them out later, his baritone voice taking on a serious tone. Then, breaking into a smile, he swept his hand across the scene in front of us. “I think this is a time to just be glad that we’re back.”

      A few comments on the amazing beauty and feel of the place were made, but most of what was sensed was barely shared through small jokes and quiet nods. The emotions we felt were close to our hearts. After our break, we went back to work, setting up our individual tents.

      By eleven, we were exhausted from thirty hours of travel and work. We said good night, headed to our tents, and climbed into sleeping bags.

      Sleep came quickly, but I woke up within an hour. Tense from the excitement, sleep became impossible. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, pulled on clothes, an outer jacket, and boots, and slipped out of the tent. Shouldering the small backpack that was tucked under the tent’s rain fly, I struck out for a hike up the ridge to our north to calm my mind. In the dusky light from a cloud-veiled midnight sun, colors and edges were muted, but the grandeur of the landscape was not diminished.

      ARCTIC TUNDRA, THAT UNIQUE ORGANIC COLLAGE of grasses, mosses, sedges, dwarf plants, and lichens, is often portrayed as dreary, as if it were a monotone of color and texture. But that is not the case. The tundra biome flourishes as a botanical riot, an evolutionary chaos rich with successes and possibilities—it is a deep velvet softening to the stone margins of a hard-edged world.

      Mosses insinuate themselves into available spaces. Black, white, and orange lichens, their edges brittle and curled, cover in floret forms exposed rocks and branches. Arctic willows, ragged and squat, scatter about opportunistically, standing with quiet arrogance—at a height of two feet, they are the tallest plant. Flowers of white, pink, purple, red, and yellow are everywhere, sparkling like brightly colored gems scattered on a green-gray world. Clumps of cotton grasses, with their puffy white manes on waving eight-inch stalks, assert themselves with a graceful confidence.

      Each plant extends roots into the decaying remnants of diverse ancestors, a living boreal flesh mantling thousands of generations of organic detritus. They huddle in hollows and drape over rocks, ponding water in small catchments, carpeting that cold world in a damp lushness.

      Time is frozen in such a place. Whether I walked in a twenty-first-century landscape or a primordial, Ice Age epoch could not be told. That inability to know time riddles the experience of place, dislocating perception into an insecurity that, in my case, made it seem as though I had trespassed into some other world.

      By the time I reached the first rock outcropping, the effort of pulling soggy boots out of the thick, wet tundra had grown tiring. My heart was pounding and I was breathing hard. Leaning against the twenty-foot stone face, I worked to catch my breath, rest, and expand my sense of what was around me.

      The stone wall was nothing unusual, just the common gray layered and recrystallized gneissic rock we would see so much of over the next few weeks. Between the clusters of lichen colonies, bare rock lay open to the elements. I took out my hand lens and looked at a magnified rock face studded with broken crystals, excavated and sculpted by millennia of winter ice and summer rains. Perfectly shaped crystal faces and cleavage edges formed a microscopic, raw-edged sharpness to the rounded surface of the bedrock rib that was the ridge.

      The scramble to the top of the wall involved a few minutes of light exertion, but it came at a cost. My fingertips, palms, and knuckles were bleeding in the time it took for that trivial ascent. I dropped my backpack, pulled out my gloves, and put them on over sore hands.

      At the top of the small bench, I looked up and saw that the ridge I had seen from camp and thought was the top was only one of several shoulders below the actual ridge crest, which was several hundred feet above me. What was to have been a short saunter was going to be a longer hike. With a deep breath, I put the backpack back on and set off.

      Walking through that land became a stroll along ponds of slowly seeping water deeply tinted with brown tannins, glistening. Some were enclosed in pillowed banks of deep green mosses, the somnambulant waters barely rippling as tiny streams trickled in and out. Other small catchments were little more than slight depressions in a saturated, vegetated surface. I could not escape the uneasy feeling that I was intruding into private gardens of invisible beings, constructed by them for the sole purpose of quiet meditation.

      Moths and spiders and huge bumblebees appeared out of nowhere, gamboled about, and then instantly vanished. Flying creatures darted from flower to flower, briefly setting them in motion from the backwash of beating wings. But, except for the bumblebee, whose hum became a racket at close range, the visitors were silent.

      Arctic wrens came and went, nervously concerned at my presence. They appeared out of the tundra from hidden places, fearfully attempting to distract my attention, worried I would ravage their nests. They had nothing to fear—I was incapable of finding those exquisitely hidden weavings СКАЧАТЬ