A Wilder Time. William E. Glassley

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      As I walked on, up and over two more small shoulders and the intervening expanses of tundra, concern about the impact of my boots on that delicate place began to loom in my mind. Each step seemed an intrusion, punching down thousands of years of undisturbed growth in a brief, violently invasive moment. Guiltily, I turned to see the damage. It was stunning to realize there was nothing to see. With each step, that wet and soggy world yielded to the presence of a wandering mortal, momentarily exposing its most intimate details to daylight it had not known for centuries, but was hidden again as the boot was lifted and the yielding mass restored itself to its original form. In that world, I was no more significant than an afternoon breeze.

      At first impression, the ability of life to thrive at that high latitude challenged reason and logic. But as the insignificance of my presence sank in, it became obvious that it was the toughness and tenacity of that living world that defined the reason and logic of the place. The biased patterns of thought I had inherited from another context were little more than low-level cosmic noise, a background hiss. I had yet to grasp the magnitude of my ignorance.

      After perhaps thirty minutes, I reached the last wall of rock. Tired and sweating, breathing hard, legs burning, I climbed the last forty feet of outcrop.

      The ridge crest was a slightly rounded, broad platform of nearly barren white and gray gneiss, randomly covered by the brittle lichens. I scrambled to the top and raised my eyes.

      My breath caught in my throat. Extending from horizon to horizon, for nearly a hundred miles, untouched wildness rested silently in exquisite vulnerability. Stupefied, arms outstretched in submission, I slowly turned around, trying to take in the magnificence of the vista. Tears welled up as tangled emotions—sadness, joy, liberation, humility, anguish—flooded through me.

      I turned toward the east and was surprised to see that the clouds ended at the land’s edge, where it was subsumed by the ice sheet. Some mysterious atmospheric phenomenon demanded that, under the set of conditions that day contained, clouds that hung over land and sea would dissipate over the reflective frozen surface. Brilliant deep blue sky skimmed over the ice, framing the blinding white light of its crevassed surface.

      From north to south, the sharp edge of the ice front zigged and zagged across the ground, marking a jagged boundary between worlds of conflicting expectations. In places, cliffs of white-blue ice soared hundreds of feet for miles, only to give way gradually to gentle ice hills and valleys that met the rock surface with slightly sloping indifference.

      In contrast, the landscape to the north, west, and south was a mosaic of fjords, lakes, rivers, and mountains. The gray sky reflected off meandering waters, while the dark, shadowed land rose and fell in a pattern of parallel sharp-walled ridges. West-running fingers of ice-sculpted bedrock pointed toward the Davis Strait just over the far western horizon, the flow of landforms giving the scene a feeling of movement, a sense that some dynamic was playing out, even in the absence of motion.

      To the south was the fjord on which we had just sailed. That fjord, as with all fjords there, was cut into solid bedrock, confined to flow in narrow channels by sheer walls hundreds or thousands of feet high. Its breadth in places was more than five miles; in others, less than two. Although our camp was right at the water’s edge, it lay hidden in the lee of that first small ridge I had scrambled up.

      For long moments, I lived in a fantasy that no other person existed, that the lone human soul in all the world stood on that ridge, mesmerized by the bewildering wildness of everything surrounding him. As I stood there with those feelings, a vague unease settled in, one that would come and go throughout my time in Greenland. That feeling was not a sadness per se; rather, it was a quiet longing for things humanity has no words for, but with which wilderness settings overflow. There was a sense of missed opportunities, of an inability to connect with something profound, as though what I was immersed in shimmered incomprehensibly at the edge of sight.

      OVER TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO, during the last Ice Age, the landscape I stood on had been buried under thousands of feet of ice. Every valley and ridge that could be seen, every hillock and defile had been the floor to that ponderously migrating sea of frozen water. This was a young, inherited landscape, shaped by the grinding ice of that ancient time. As the Ice Age melted away and exposed the bedrock, the sculpted land provided footholds for pioneer plants. Season after season, as plant life slowly but incessantly blossomed, withered, and died, plant remnants found anchor in ice-wedged cracks, lichen attached to bare rock, and dust settled into pockets and irregularities, nurturing an unimagined future that included our little camp.

      As land plants took hold, Neanderthals and emergent Cro-Magnons may have walked over the hillocks and ridges there, searching for food and exploring. But it’s unlikely they settled anywhere in that harsh place—the world farther south and across warmer seas was more hospitable. Even so, it was difficult, when gazing at the ice walls, not to imagine early humans skirting along them.

      It was a panorama that defied comprehension. There was nothing familiar there. The absence of trees, of houses or streets, of cars or people, the lack of movement of any kind—all contributed to a sense that I was walking alone in an alien world, not of Earth, but of some planet where forces and processes played out their dramas according to different rules.

      The longer I stood there, the more intense was the conflict between the experience of the place and what I had remembered of Greenland. As before, a deep sense of serenity permeated everything that was present—there was a unity of actions and substances, an uninterrupted unfolding that shaped and colored everything. And yet, something felt askew.

      Then a lone bumblebee buzzed past my ear, soared off into the valley, and disappeared, and it became clear what that disjointed experience meant. Despite the dynamism of that world, it was utterly and deeply still. I suddenly realized that it was the silence of the place that I had forgotten.

      The gentlest breeze brushed my face, but there was nothing to hear. The distant rivers flowed, their shimmering surfaces vaguely vibrating with motion, but no sound emanated from them. I turned in every direction, listening for anything, but there was nothing.

      What could be heard was the nature of the primordial world. Four billion years ago, on the barren surface of Earth’s first land, with the exception of a rare roaring gale or exploding volcano, there would have been no sound. Similarly, in the ocean or the air, silence would have persisted, except where seas lapped onto continental margins and waves washed over eroding sands. In fact, for most of Earth’s history, silence ruled.

      With the emergence of animals more than 600 million years ago, that silent condition was slowly modified. Fishes clicked, bees hummed, dinosaurs roared and bellowed, birds chirped, horses whinnied, and, eventually, humans spoke and sang. The buzz on the surface that life brought to the world grew in complexity and volume, culminating in the constant roar of our cities.

      A shout or a scream where I stood would have been swallowed in the expanse of wildness. That world was ancient beyond measure, holding on to the nearly vanished character of what once was, existing as a remnant enclave, speaking in its silence the song of our origins. What was present in that vast, unimaginable panorama was an invitation to embrace anything and everything.

      I stayed at the promontory for as long as I could, struggling to find a way to silence my mind. But my hands and feet were aching from the cold, and the exhaustion of the past day was beginning to take hold. Wrapped in the cloak of wilderness, I walked back to camp, trying to do nothing but listen.

      THE NEXT MORNING, BEFORE I WALKED to the cook tent, I went down to the fjord to hear the sound of water lapping on the shore, seeking a connection to the world we had left behind. There was no wind; the surface of the water glistened like glass. The slight swell that slowly undulated that finger of sea did not stir a single grain of sand. What sound СКАЧАТЬ