Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

It is as though the land slowly works its way into the man and by virtue of its character eclipses these motives. The land becomes large, alive like an animal; it humbles him in a way he cannot pronounce. It is not that the land is simply beautiful but that it is powerful. Its power derives from the tension between its obvious beauty and its capacity to take life. Its power flows into the mind from a realization of how darkness and light are bound together within it, and the feeling that this is the floor of creation.

One of the coolest places I have ever been is called Burnt Cape on the island of Newfoundland. It is a high hump of grey gravel and white cliffs, dotted with little orange flowers that grow close to the ground to protect themselves from cold temperatures and high winds; they grow nowhere else in the world. Burnt Cape is described as a piece of the Arctic emerging fifteen degrees of latitude below the arctic circle; there are signs that warn travelers that, in rare circumstances, polar bears travel here on spring ice floes. It's a tiny spot, relative to the real Arctic, but it impressed upon me how so stark and enigmatic a landscape can capture the imagination, and become the stuff of dreams.

Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams is about the Arctic landscape as it is, and how it is imagined. Lopez, whose extensive experiences with Arctic researchers from Baffin Bay in Alaska to the eastern reaches of Greenland shows through impressively, begins his book with chapters on the region's animal life: the musk ox, the polar bear, the narwhal. Though we have only lately come to pay close attention to these animals through scientific research, Lopez argues, we still know very little about them, and they continue to surprise us. Is it true, as the indigenous people of the Arctic claim, that you should leap from a polar bear's attack to its left, because they are all left-pawed? From there, Lopez moves onto chapters about ice and the landscape, and only at the end of the book, to people: the indigenous people who have lived there for millennia, and the latecomer Europeans who let their dreams run away them and largely shipwrecked into disaster. That's the way it should be, it seems--the people last, and the Europeans last of all.

A relatively educated contemporary reader might cringe at Lopez's use of the word "Eskimo," which is largely thought of these days as a slur (see the CFL team's recent name change to the Edmonton Elk). But that might obscure the tremendous sensitivity Lopez has toward the indigenous people of the Arctic, whose long tenure on the land has produced a knowledge of it that no European can reproduce. He makes a really simple, but somehow not obvious, point about about the difference between Western science and indigenous knowledge: Western science, with its emphasis on controlled experimentation, simply cannot reproduce the number of hours of observation that indigenous communities have devoted to the land in which they live. He gives a remarkably sober and thoughtful treatment of the various benefits and drawbacks of the two kinds of thinking, explaining, for instance, how Western science is better equipped to describe the migrations and entire life cycles of Arctic animals, whom the Inuit or Yupik only encounter during certain seasons. But compare this to the map drawn, by memory, of Cumberland Sound, by an indigenous man, with its many hundreds of tiny inlets.

The first Arctic explorers, Lopez describes, paid insufficient attention to the indigenous people of the Arctic, as they paid insufficient attention to the land itself. The doomed James Franklin of the HMS Terror might have wondered, for instance, why the Inuit are nomadic, or why they travel in small groups, when loading up his ship with hundreds of men and planning to overwinter in the Arctic when trapped in ice. The Arctic has always been a place of men's dreams, Lopez describes, and those who have lived there the best are those who are patient and observant enough to dare the impossible task of taking it on its own terms.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, so the sample size is small, but I think Arctic Dreams may be the best nature book I've ever read. Lopez certainly has a fiction writer's knack for description, and has a way of making the Arctic landscape, which seems to so many alienating and monotonous, come alive with color and light. He faithfully describes how "the winter face of a muskox, its unperturbed eye glistening in a halo of snow-encrusted hair, looks at you over a cataract of time, an image that has endured all the pulsations of ice," and how "at certain hours the land has the resolution of a polished diamond." I'm reminded of the tremendous descriptions in William Vollmann's The Rifles, but even then I'd have to admit that Lopez's Arctic makes Vollmann's seem drab and bereft.

Arctic Dreams was published in 1986; it sadly has the doomed quality of a letter written by someone who doesn't know it's their last. In the era of climate change, it can seem both incredibly prescient and bleakly quaint. Of all the breathtaking descriptions of stalking polar bears and immense ice fields, it is sobering to think that perhaps the description that has changed the least is that of the dreary corporate wasteland that is Alaska's Prudhoe Bay complex, a place where lonely men come to suck oil out of the sea and try very hard not to look around while they do it. Books like Arctic Dreams are a reminder of what happens to the land, and to us, when we fail to look closely at it.