Arctic Dreams

Arctic Dreams satisfies my yearly quota for nature books, the last being Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard. It is Barry Lopez’s meditation on the (as you may have guessed) Arctic. He considers its denizens, its geography, and, to his credit, the Arctic’s figurative significance as the wastelands atop the world.

Though Dreams, having dispatched the Leopard, is my favorite nature book by default, I still have reservations about the genre itself. Mainly because books and nature are oil and water.  Books exist in the indoor world. They are written at desks, read in bed, found scattered over tables and pressed shoulder to shoulder on shelves. They don’t do well outside. The only “outdoor” books, really, are beach books, and beach books are books so lousy that you can breeze through them while enjoying the real breeze off the ocean.

Books about the outdoors, then, are uneven, and beset by problems from the get-go.

The first problem is a problem of description. Have you ever had anyone recount a comic strip for you? Or describe a painting? It never works, because the world of images and the world of words don’t coexist easily. I’m not saying you can’t draw a picture with words — certainly not, all great writers can plant a picture in your head so clear it’s as if it were something you’d seen somewhere before — but I am saying that in describing something already extant, there’s garbling when you translate from the visual to the textual. So much of nature appreciation is vague, emotive stuff, brought on by the quality of light or a subtlety of composition. Saying “there was a tree” can never capture all of that, unless you’re willing to spend twenty pages on it, by which point your reader couldn’t care less.

Which is the next problem — unpeopled nature. We care about people. The jury’s still out on whether we care about nature. Yes, many of us can enjoy a walk in the woods, but can you enjoy reading about some other guy’s walk in the woods? Especially if all he’s doing in there is enjoying it? Until nature starts pummelling our heroes with storms, burying them in avalanches, or striking them with lightning bolts, we’re not much interested. The land is too passive, too big and too faceless for us to really care. And the pleasure of seeing a character change over time isn’t there, since the earth operates on a time scale too big for us to contemplate. Though of course this last claim can be questioned, now that global warming has entered the public eye. (On the other hand, notice how it took a dramatic narrative like “YOUR CHILDREN WILL ROW KAYAKS TO WORK” before this recent green fad took hold.)

Barry Lopez, I have to say, takes pains to answer both of these critiques.  Lopez makes the land itself a character, saying:

“The land, an animal that contains all other animals, is vigorous and alive.”

We come to care about the Arctic the more we learn, as Lopez imparts some of his amazing passion for this ostensibly barren land with ecstatic prose. Near the end of the book, Lopez travels to an oil refinery. There, he discovers “some of the saddest human lives I have ever known.” Among these workers are men who “felt the Arctic was really a great wasteland ‘with a few stupid birds.’” Lopez has done his job well enough that after 400 pages of learning about the Arctic’s animals, peoples, and history, such a claim strikes us as ridiculous.

When it comes to the problem of description, Lopez’s eye for chronicling the natural world goes a long way towards solving it, and he knows which details to pick out and which to ignore as he evokes scenes. Admirable as all his descriptive work is, it’s stuff I could get more easily from a documentary about the Arctic. To justify this book, Lopez has to give the reader something they can only get from a book.

Here its successes are uneven. With 9 chapters and an epilogue, Lopez covers a great breadth of material. But it starts to feel unfocused, since he spends the first quarter of the book doing in-depth studies of the muskox, polar bear, and narwhal, but then jumps between migration, light, literature, and geographic history. The scattershot nature of the book doesn’t damage it, though, since contrary to its physical reality, the Arctic is fertile ground for writing. A land of such incredible extremity, where the sun does not shine in the subzero winters and does not set in the mild summers, inspires similarly extreme events.  Lopez has obviously done a ton of research, and he sprinkles the books with astounding anecdotes about polar explorers. For instance:

“… on the 26th of April 1832, the whaler Shannon of Hull… slammed bow first into an iceberg… They were awash in minutes. Sixteen men and three boys were swept away. The survivors clung to each other beneath a sail, on a part of the ship kept afloat by trapped air. They were without food or fresh water. They survived, with the death of but three more, by bleeding each other and drinking the blood from a shoe.”

The downside of so much research, which can yield incredible stories like that, is that Lopez feels obligated to bury you in history. This happens at the end of the book, by which time he’s earned some goodwill, and he does make an effort to interpolate dull recountings of which explorer discovered what island with more interesting stories. Another I enjoyed was the tale of the Parry expedition. During the winter months, when the waters freeze, Parry and his men took shelter in an embayment and waited for the melt. Due to the erratic nature of the Arctic’s seasons, they weren’t assured of escaping any time soon, and so set about building a little society. They put on plays, and one even got “an encore at the end of the season.” They also began publishing The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle, where anonymous authors sniped at unpopular officers, as well as wrote poetry and essays. That kind of stuff speaks to the hardiness of these polar wayfarers, and is just (forgive me) the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the bizarre happenings north of 66°.

Wait, I thought I had critical things to say about this book. Oh, right — the tone. This is another pitfall of nature writing, which is the fact that it’s written by people who love nature. As somebody who has written a book, I can tell you that you don’t write novels about things you are only mildly interested in. Lopez is in love with the Arctic. For the average person of civilization, leading a sedentary life and glimpsing nature mostly through windows, this love can often seem… over the top. Lopez closes his book on Saint Lawrence Island, in the Bering Sea. After participating in a walrus hunt, the sensitive Lopez is overwrought. So overwhelmed is he, by the events of the day and the beauty of his surroundings, that he decides to bow to nature. Literally bow. While it’s a pretty image, it’s simultaneously ridiculous, and I wonder if he looked around for any observers before doing it. Older dude in a parka, just bowing to sea ice and sky… I don’t know. It reminds me of The Snow Leopard, which made me write: “A leaf makes you see the underlying unity in all things? Really?”

Lopez’s sensitivity leads to moments like that, and it also leads to a tiresomely rigorous brand of cultural relativism. He takes great pains to never even give the impression of disparaging the Eskimos. But Lopez is circumspect, even with his circumspection. For every potshot at the Brits: “he trusted naively in the superior worth of rank and social position over practical experience, a trait, of course, that distinguished many Englishmen of his and later generations,” he balances it with a swipe at Americas, noting their preference for spectacular adventure rather than solid, if tedious science. And that’s fine — I’m not going to pretend like I’m interested in national honor. But when it comes to the Eskimos, a people Lopez respects deeply and has clearly spent a great deal of time with, he starts sounding like an apologist. One explorer met a band of Eskimos. Lopez writes: “characteristically intent on testing newly met people for any weakness, the Eskimos stole from him.” Personally, I don’t think this was the Eskimos “testing” the white men. They just wanted to steal some nails, because they didn’t have any. A minor quibble, really, but it gets at Lopez’s relentless positivity. Some dark and depressing stuff has happened in the Arctic — I know because Lopez mentions some of it in passing, right before blithely returning to his cheerful essays on the land. You can’t get too frustrated, though, because the writing is fine and the spirit so earnest that you feel guilty for such cynicism.

Arctic Dreams carves out an existence in the middle ground of this dispute between nature and books. M John Harrison, one of my favorites, weighed in on this. As he said:

“Stones and grass have many virtues,” Roberto Bolano has a character say, “but words have more.” I’d reverse that.

My feeling is that for Lopez, stones, grass, and words all have equal virtue, and that virtue is beauty. After reading Artic Dreams, I can’t really argue with that.