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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 of grasses and twigs.
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