2024 Book #31

“Arctic Dreams” by Barry Lopez

Book #31: Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. 

I carry a lot of book-related lists in the Notes on my phone.  When the mood strikes me, in between various reading challenges or other tasks I’ve set for myself, I pull one of them up and make an effort to grab one of the listed books at random (usually from the library; there’s a whole ‘nother fiddle-faddle I do with the books on my actual shelves here at the house).  This book comes from a “Recommended Books” list, which has well over 30 books on it, and waxes way more than it wanes (but don’t let that deter anyone from suggesting titles my way! I love to get new ideas, and I do make an effort even though it may take me awhile to follow up).  Specifically, this title was recommended by book group buddy Peter Moore - who has a very entertaining Substack; read it here:

Peter, look: it only took me 2 years! 

Barry Lopez was drawn to the Arctic the way some people are drawn to religion, or a medical calling.  Over the course of a number of years and a variety of jobs and postings, Lopez spent long periods of the 80s working and living – and thinking, considering, weighing – in one of the most forbidding, remote regions of the world.  For most of us down in the Lower 48, Lopez notes, the image we have of the Arctic is of emptiness, and sameness: all those white vistas, all that ice, all the interiority required to survive the cold and other elements.  Okay, that’s true in part: “To travel in the Arctic is to wait,” Lopez notes at one point; in another, it’s almost like he’s pitching the most recent season of True Detective: “In the feeble light between the drawn-in houses of a winter village, you can hear the breathing of something with ice for a heart.” 

Mostly, though, this book was written as a corrective, to open out those vistas, to dive deeply into what and who can be found among the eternal presence of ice and the snow.  Lopez is firm on a number of counts, not least of which is that the Arctic is a place of great beauty: “The beauty here is a beauty you feel in your flesh.  You feel it physically, and that is why it is sometimes terrifying to approach.  Other beauty takes on the heart, or the mind.”  To study, really dive into the landscape requires what he refers to as a “reciprocal” relationship: to a man so doing, “the land becomes large, alive like an animal; it humbles him in a way he cannot pronounce.” 

Not for everyone, Lopez emphasizes: there are all too many military or industrial functionaries for whom this land is merely a transactional place, a site from which riches can be found, a point of view that is a sad echo of that which characterized the long misrule of the Hudson’s Bay Company during its multi-generational monopoly over the economics of much of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada.  Too, Lopez describes with anthropological horror the proles who are doing the work in the refineries or other industry: mostly men, full of rage, drinking and gambling away their boredom and dissatisfaction, vaguely paranoid about outsiders’ motives, full of anomie and restlessness.  (It’s not too difficult to imagine whom these folks supported politically in the decades following their interactions with Lopez back in the 80s.) 

The people whom Lopez vibes with are the scientists, especially the quirky ones with their fairly obsessive life plans, their willingness to ask questions and to listen, their intense focus on gleaning what they can from the land and its elements, living or non.  And the indigenous folk of the Arctic (Lopez lumps them all into the umbrella term “Eskimo,” which doesn’t sit well with me; he offers an explanation in an early footnote and I concede that he knows the people and their cultures millions of times better than I do from my comfortable piece of Mid-Atlantic suburbia, but still, it feels awry): while there are cultural differences that are unbroachable at times, Lopez has nothing but respect for the modern descendants of the peoples who made their lives in the cold, icy far North, especially once out in the open air or on the icy waters.  One result of his respect is that Lopez has more positive things to say about hunting than, again, I’m comfortable with in my own coddled bit of late-capitalist middle-classiana.  But given the conditions and the limitations imposed by a very brief, strict amount of seasonal variation, it is not surprising that much of the shared vocabulary of the people of the Arctic, and the one topic that comfortably crosses barriers, is about the specific fluctuations in this year’s seal or walrus migration, for example. 

It is important to Lopez to be able to communicate, even commune, with the people he respects among those he encounters in his various Arctic sojourns: as he puts it, “In such an atmosphere of mutual regard, in which each can roll out his or her maps with no fear of contradiction, or suspicion, or theft, it is possible to imagine the long, graceful strides of human history.” In his most optimistic moment, he opines that the Eskimos’ affinity to their land could be an antidote to the loneliness “that in our own culture we associate with individual estrangement and despair.”  And yet, Lopez admits that he has to swallow a certain amount of ambivalence around the topic, not least because he is there to watch and learn from the animals at least as much as he is to learn from the humans.  “Few things provoke like the presence of wild animals,” he asserts early on.  “They pull at us like tidal currents with questions of volition, of ethical involvement, of ancestry.” 

Fully a third of the book’s 9 (very) long chapters are animal case studies of a sort, looking at, for example, the muskoxen of Banks Island, the polar bears (who, apparently, are all lefties?  Who knew?), the narwhals, the snow geese, animals whose umwelts he approaches with great respect.  (The company of the birds in the field is, in his word, “guileless.”  “It is easy to feel transcendent when camping among them.”)  But even when he’s analyzing the animals, and his feeling about their place in the much more complex ecosystems of the Arctic than we are likely to imagine from a distance, what Lopez is really looking for is a connection with the place that they inhabit. 

It’s not exactly a spiritual quest: God is mentioned only lightly here (not relatedly, but I have to mention it: I did love that there’s a Danish scientist who explored the region from the 40s through the 80s, and upon whom Lopez leans more than once, named Christian Vibe; the Danes also gave us an earlier scholar named Ole Wurm), and the soul, likewise.  Instead, Lopez is on an intellectual quest to enrich himself by looking and inquiring and committing to the place. 

In one of the central chapters, on ice, snow, and the light of the Arctic region, Lopez lays down his credo: “Our obligation toward [a stretch of land] then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard…. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned.  And to be alert to its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.”  “The land,” Lopez argues, “urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.”  The people that Lopez respects most are those who understand this lesson, who meet the land (and its inhabitants, human especially but not solely) with respect, dignity, integrity, not violence or rapaciousness. 

Sometimes this leads Lopez a bit astray – in the last chapter, when he is in full summation mode, he makes far more than feels necessary of a personal visit that a corporate CEO made to an Eskimo community and his willingness to defer to the cultural norms of the villagers, a kind of noblesse oblige that I guess is preferable to many other faces that capitalism can show to those on the ground (including, of course, the most common: no face at all).  But still: this shipping company exec is part of the vast machine that’s grinding away at the Arctic that these indigenous people know and understand (the people of the far North are “trapped in a long, slow detonation,” Lopez notes elsewhere), and an hour’s sitting around the fire with a few dozen villagers isn’t going to undo that fact. 

Nevertheless, on every page of this stirring, evocative book (I mean, I haven’t even talked about the history of Arctic exploration – William Parry’s 1819-20 expedition comes off especially well here, especially compared to some of the other nitwits or on-the-make hucksters in that long story – or the vocabulary-expanding dimensions of a book that taught me about polynbas and savssats, added the word “pagophylic” to my vocabulary, and explained what an “ecotone” is), Lopez acts out for the reader what he hopes they can do for, well, everything all around us.  And the moral and ethical implications therefrom: “What every culture must eventually decide, actively debate and decide, is what of all that surrounds it, tangible and intangible, it will dismantle and turn into material wealth.  And what of its cultural wealth, from the tradition of finding peace in the vision of an undisturbed hillside to a knowledge of how to finance a corporate merger, it will fight to preserve.” 

This is a beautifully-written and lovingly-lived book: it won the National Book Award upon publication in the late 80s, and it was a joy to sit with over this past week.  And I’m haunted, too, by the knowledge that Lopez’ book, published in 1988, describes an Arctic that, far from being eternally ever-thus, has been the site of some of the most scarily-accelerating impacts of climate change in recent years (largely the by-product of exactly the mining and extraction efforts that fund many of the researchers he encountered, to their extreme nonplussedness).  The dreams of the Arctic may indeed reveal “the tenor of an age,” but our tenor and our age have some re-evaluating to do, as we all try to live up to an ideal that Lopez sums up as “making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.”