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.

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

But there is something else. As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. For one brief moment we noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, a memoir of her experience training a falcon in the wake of her father's death, might be my favorite non-fiction book of the past several years. I don't read a lot of non-fiction, and part of its appeal was its literariness: Macdonald interweaves her own story with rich threads of fiction, like that of fellow falconer T. H. White, and history and myth. But it also resonated with me because, like several people have in the wake of the COVID-10 pandemic, I have become more interested in birding and birds. Though training a hawk and birdwatching are very different pursuits, they share an inexplicable sense of satisfaction that derives from the way human and animal life intersects.

One of my favorite essays from Macdonald's new collection Vesper Flights hits much closer to home: Macdonald describes watching fall migrants in New York City from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, whose bright lights both attract and confuse the birds. In her account they "resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire" and "ghostly points of light." In this moment Macdonald captures a very specific sense of amazement that occurs when one realizes that New York City, the concrete jungle, is--and has always been--a place where birds have lived lives that precede and overwrite us. Birding in New York puts me in touch with the transitory nature of life, as if the earth wears the city lightly.

The experience of reading Vesper Flights can't compare to H is for Hawk. The strength of that memoir is not just in the incision of its insight but the power of its narrative: the tortuous twin processes of training the hawk and coming to terms with the death of a father. The essays in Vesper Flights can feel too brief and too numerous, and when there are so many the form begins to show. The epiphanies come, as they never do in life, with a little too much regularity. The strongest essays are often the ones that linger the longest, like a long profile of a researcher who uses Chile's Atacama Desert as a stand-in for the surface of Mars, or an account of the yearly ritual of "swan upping," in which the Queen's swans--she owns most of the swans in the country, I guess--are tracked and tagged.

A theme does eventually emerge: several of the essays address the way that our ideas of the natural world intersect with the burgeoning forces of nationalism. In more than one piece, Macdonald describes how, during World War II, species that were considered notably "British" became rallying cries for preservation, as if British identity were to hinge on the continued existence of these birds. She makes much of the fact that birds don't know borders, even as they are enlisted in our most parochial disputes about who belongs where. She talks about how immense murmurations of starlings helped develop wartime radar technology, and hapless migrators whose leg tags have been mistaken for spy technology by suspicious powers. This is such an interesting perspective that I found myself longing for a book that might have been--not a collection of brief essays, but a book that develops this theme as fully and insightfully as H is for Hawk.

Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson

He was alone, a young male of a ferocious and persecuted tribe whose only friends, except the Spirit that made it, were its enemies--the otter hunters. His cubhood was ended, and now indeed did his name fit his life, for he was a wanderer, and homeless, with nearly every man and dog against him.

Tarka, a river otter, is born in the west of England. He learns from his mother how to feed himself, hunting for fish and frogs, and also how to play. But an otter's life, Tarka will learn, is not an easy one, and he spends his entire life in the shadow of the gruesome Deadlock, the champion hound that local men employ to hunt and kill otters. Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter follows Tarka's life from birth to death, hunting, mating, playing and fighting.

Tarka is not like Watership Down or any number of other books about talking animals; the animals do not talk and are really no more than animals. Though they are often given names--Tarka's otter associates include Greymuzzle, White-Tip, and Tarquol, and other animals get them too, like the heron Old Nog and the crow Kronk--the animals are not anthropomorphized. Rarely does Williamson even assign the kind of emotions to them with which we may identify, which preserves the essential strangeness of an animal's life: it explains, for example, how Tarka can search so endlessly for his "lost love" White-Tip and then leave her again. And yet Tarka can be as engaging and thrilling as any adventure novel. Tarka's relationship with his nurturing mother, his steady companionship with his first mate Greymuzzle, his yearning for White-Tip, his escalating skirmishes with Deadlock--these events are gripping, but their interest lies in the projection of human emotions that the reader must bring with them.

Otters are an interesting subject for this kind of book. For one, they're famous for their playfulness, a trait that makes them more rounded as "characters" than, say, the stoats and weasels that compete with them for food. One of my favorite scenes in Tarka shows the protagonist learning to play with a crow--a similarly intelligent and playful creature--by passing rocks and sticks and other objects back and forth. But otters are also meat-eaters, efficient and vicious killers, and Williamson doesn't shy away from depicting the violence of the natural world. (Don't get too attached to the hedgehog Iggywick just because he has a cute name.) Tarka is an enemy to many just as he has enemies, and yet he has too "many friends, whom he played with and forgot--sticks, stones, water-weeds, slain fish, and once an empty cocoa-tin, a bright and curious thing that talked strangely as it moved over the shallows, but sank into the pool beyond, sent up bubbles, and would play no more."

Tarka the Otter's depiction of the Devonshire countryside in which Tarka lives is remarkably rich. It's clear that the novel is the product of man years of close observation of animal behavior in exactly this habitat; Williamson's introduction is in part a defense against critics who claim that an otter could never, for instance--spoiler alert--drown a dog. But as the foreword notes, Tarka is really a novel about habitat, because the shape of an animal's life is completely governed by its habitat in a way a human being's never could, and Williamson does this idea justice by casting a sharp eye on the botany, geology, and hydrology of Devonshire. A liberal use of local jargon emphasizes this, and makes Tarka a convincing portrait of a single animal in a single corner of the wide world.

Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Pop Quiz!
1. ha-ha
a.) favored retort of Nelson Muntz
b.) sunken fence faced with brick
c.) tree root that resurfaces far away from the tree

2. blains
a.) pumpkins
b.) twigs suitable for starting a fire
c.) swellings, sores, or blisters

3. besom
a.) broom
b.) bosom
c.) paraffin produced by a particular subspecies of bees

4. buckram
a.) kind of coarse linen or cloth stiffened with gum or paste
b.) short grain
c.) male sheep

5. corn
a.) wheat
b.) corn
c.) barley

6. flitch
a.) counterpart to Aberclombie
b.) side of bacon
c.) another name for a thrush

7. dishabille
a.) dishwater
b.) weeds that thrive in rocky soil
c.) careless dress

8. duodecimo
a.) referring to animals with eyes on the sides of their heads
b.) a small printed book
c.) 20

9. loggerhead
a.) lumberjack
b.) goat
c.) endangered sea turtle

10. sit-ye-down
a.) great Native American warrior
b.) archaic basketball trash talk
c.) the great tit

11. pizzle
a.) Snoop's way of expressing 3.14
b.) a penis
c.) the central post of a tent

12. milt
a.) semen of a male fish
b.) turtle excrement
c.) common name for males born in the 30s

Answers:
1b, 2c, 3a, 4a, 5a, 6b, 7c, 8b, 9c, 10c, 11b, 12a

You shouldn't feel bad if you didn't know the definitions to most of these words. Many of them were part of the personal vernacular of Mr Gilbert White, an 18th century English curate in the little town of Selborne. The ones that are not of his devising are incredibly arcane.

Besides being a curate, White was something of a naturalist. Among the many aspects of nature that he observed and recorded was a turtle, that he named Timothy. His notes about the animals and plants that he studied survive to this day, housed in various institutions. With Timothy, Klinkenborg turns the tables on White and other naturalists, letting a turtle expound on man and nature. Klinkenborg tells the story of Mr White and the village of Selborne through the eyes of Timothy, using the terminology of White. The result is oddly poetic, akin to reading the King James Bible. You may not understand every word, but the overall meaning sinks in.

I really struggled with the first forty-or-so pages of Timothy. After finishing the book, I went back and looked at the beginning, and came to the conclusion that it was no different from the rest of the book. The vocabulary and Klinkenborg's style (a lot of short, abrupt sentences...fragments really) just took some getting used to.

Here is a brief excerpt that is indicative of both Klinkenborg's writing style and Timothy's ruminations:

Humans repose in the distinctness of their being. Family of god. Upright stature. Bipedal stride. Pride of reason. Pompion head. They hold themselves apart from the works of creation as much as they can. Except for sporting and poaching. Breeding and rearing of barnyard animals. Coaxing wheat and barley and turnips out of the ground...
...Are there to be no swifts in the skies of Mr Gilbert White's heaven? No house-martins building under the thatched eaves of that celestial city? No tortoises in the gardens there? And what if instinct -- so little known to humans, but a pure flame in swifts -- is a surer guide than reason to his god?