Your reaction to a book is influenced by a number of things, chief among which has to be the time when you read it. Imagine you are in lockdown and haven’t stepped out of home for close to a hundred days. And you decide to read a book about a place as far away from home as
Barry Lopez’s descriptions of that wild distant place called the Arctic have a strangely calming effect on you - anxiety levels drop as you imagine the endurance needed for a tree to survive, or an animal, or a human being, in that most inhospitable world. “...the most salient, overall adaptive strategy of arctic organisms is their ability to enter a frozen state or a state of very low metabolic activity whenever temperatures drop, and then to resume full metabolic activity whenever it warms sufficiently.” It’s a lesson we can all learn, perhaps.
The world he describes is wondrous - where the concept of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west doesn’t apply; neither does the convention of a morning, noon, afternoon, and evening. It’s a world that strangely receives the same amount of sunlight as the tropics, but it comes all at once, and at a low angle, so without vigour. As much moisture falls here as in the Mojave desert, and it is available as liquid water, the only form plants can use it, only in summer.
The organisms that make a life here are far fewer in number - but they do exist.The muskox and the caribou, the polar bear and the narwhals. Lopez writes about them in detail, describing their coping mechanisms in an environment where survival can be so very hard. And then there are the people, the Eskimos (or the Inuit or Yupik, as we call them today) who have an instinctive understanding of the harsh, beautiful land and its creatures, borne out of centuries of interaction and reflection and observation. Lopez calls them the ‘hunting people’ and takes pains to describe this understanding and contrasts it with Western civilization’s relationship with nature. This understanding he says is a ‘state of mind’; one that means you ‘have the land around you like clothing’, that you ‘release yourself from rational images of what something “means” and to be concerned only that it “is”.’ It is a very different take from how we traditionally look at the natural world. Lopez writes, “ Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, “the people who change nature.”
Lopez also writes extensively about man’s quest to discover and own these harsh lands - that primordial quest for fame and fortune that led the western man to risk life and limb in journeys into the unknown, journeys that are quite unimaginable to us in modern times. The harshness of the environment has very little parallel - “No summer is long enough to take away the winter. The winter always comes,” he says. And even in late summer, he says, “Eventually the cold, damp air finds its way through insulated boots and wool clothing to your bones.” The will needed to get there and survive had to be quite extraordinary.
But ultimately, it is Lopez’s descriptions of the beauty of that extreme north, that made the book for me. To quote just one instance: “After dinner I went down by the water to wash my hair and to sit. Two silver-gray caribou were gazing at the far end of the river. It was so warm I was barefoot. In the hills beyond were the black dots of muskoxen and white dots of browsing arctic hare. The sound of the river was in my head, and its cold drops ran down my chest. A Chipewyan guide named Saltatha once asked a French priest what lay beyond the present life. “You have told me heaven is very beautiful,” he said. “ Now tell me one more thing. Is it more beautiful than the country of the muskoxen in the summer, when sometimes the mist blows over lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? That is beautiful. If heaven is still more beautiful, I will be glad. I will be content to rest there until I am very old.”
At its heart, this book is an elegy, for a world that is most likely lost to us. Where modern technology has made redundant the knowledge of the land and its inhabitants that comes from living off it, using what is available in the harshness. This loss affects our relationship with our environments in a very fundamental way. It makes us look at our landscapes and the animals within as things to ‘use’ today without understanding the larger picture. And because today’s science allows man to, as Lopez says, ‘circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him... to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent….” Lopez wrote these wise words in the 1980s. How much more relevant they are today!
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