The flights alone are worth it. An ad in the airline's magazine features models in sealskin parkas. The safety information card is titled "Aniktailitjutit Tuhagutikhait." The rear half of the airplane holds fourteen souls, each of us bedecked in fleece; the front half is stacked with crates, orange plastic sleds, a cardboard box labeled "FILLETS", and three Dora the Explorer bicycles.
Two hours out of Ottawa, we leave trees behind. Three hours out, a flawless white layer of clouds materializes below my window and seals off the world. Down there is Nunavut, a Canadian territory the size of California, Texas, Montana, Colorado, and Nebraska combined. Population? 34,000. Traffic lights? Zero.
We stop twice to refuel. I finish a book. I listen to three podcasts. In rare breaks in the clouds, I glimpse infinities of sea ice: silvery and uniform, broken by the black lightning-strokes of ten-mile cracks.
Eventually, 1,100 miles shy of the North Pole, we slip down through the white a final time. The knife edges of a fjord show themselves, then vanish. Beatriz Gerling, an elegant Brazilian woman in the seat beside me, murmurs, "It's nowhere. Nowhere."
The airstrip is gravel. In the airport, signs are in English, French, and the Inuit language Inuktitut; this last is written in a syllabic alphabet, and to my uninitiated eyes looks like an alien script transmitted here from some future age.
Welcome to Pond Inlet, Canada (population: 1,491). We are 72.4 degrees above the equator, north of the northernmost point in Alaska. While I wait for my bag outside the one-room airport, I see slush and rocks and mud and cigarette butts and a few hundred houses. No bushes. No moss. It's early June, and back home in Idaho the garden foams with flowers. Here in the High Arctic, I have to search for ten minutes before I find some lichen.
Our hotel is two hundred yards from the airport. On the walk there I can hear sled dogs, staked on the sea ice below town, whimpering and howling. A little girl riding a pink bicycle stops, peers into the screen of her iPod touch, then asks my name.
Tony?" she says. "Tonytonytonytony?"
A light snow falls. A man passes on an ATV. Behind him rides a woman, her arms wrapped around his waist. Behind her, in the hood of her parka, sits a baby wearing a knit cap.
In the lobby of the hotel, everyone takes off their shoes. A young Inuit man whispers, "You want to buy some char?"
Char, I wonder, is that dope?
"Fish, fish, you want some?"
Dinner is overcooked pork and rice. Everything—the four different kinds of juice, the coffee, the folding chairs, the watercolors of wolves on the wall—was either flown here or brought by boat in summer, when the ice gives way long enough to allow ships to reach the harbor. All the gasoline in town, for example, came at once, last August, and has stayed at the same price since.
At 10:30 p.m., in full daylight, I walk to the Co-op, Pond Inlet's only sizable store. A gallon jug of skim milk is priced at thirteen dollars. A box of Tide powdered laundry detergent will run you forty-four dollars. At 3 a.m. I nudge aside the curtains of my room and see kids playing basketball on a plywood court across the street. The snow has stopped and the boys move through light that is almost supernaturally clear, the kind of light astronauts talk about.
It won’t get dark here again until August.
By November, dawn will roll right into twilight.
By January, the sun won’t come up at all.
Thirteen of us—a British family of four, Beatriz from Brazil (along with her daughter and son-in-law), a government official from Nunavut's capital, Iqaluit (population: 6,813), a travel consultant from Denver, and three photographers whose lens cases are bigger than my duffel bag—have come here for the Narwhal and Polar Bear Safari offered by a touring outfit called Arctic Kingdom. Arctic Kingdom cut its teeth escorting film crews and divers—Disneynature, Discovery Channel, etc.—into frozen places. Now they offer trips to anyone who can afford them.
The idea is to spend a week on the sea ice near Pond Inlet, clomping around in gigantic insulated boots, looking for animals. In our group, folks mention polar bears and a chance to more viscerally understand climate change, but the principal draw seems to be the narwhal: a two-ton carnivorous whale who winters above the Arctic Circle, breathing through cracks in the surface ice and diving down a mile to engulf Greenland halibut for dinner. In spring, a large percentage of the world's narwhals work the melting edges of the ice north of Baffin Island, hunting Arctic cod and waiting for the ice to break up.
The male narwhal has a gigantic spiraling tooth sticking out of its face, and over the centuries the tusks have often been mistaken for unicorn horns and sold for twenty times their weight in gold. Narwhals are an elusive species, scarce enough that Mark Carwardine—a British zoologist and BBC personality on our trip who has been taking pictures of whales for twenty-five years—has never seen one.
In the morning, I put on twenty-one articles of clothing and sweat through a Parks Canada briefing that includes comments like "The consequences of any accident are made much more severe by the park's remoteness," and "If the polar bear charges, don't run. Instead, stand your ground and fight for your life."
Then we meet our Inuit guides, heap our bags onto long wooden sleds tethered behind snowmobiles, and head out onto the frozen surface of the ocean.
For years, my father-in-law has kept a Japanese novel on his desk as a way of reminding himself that reading from left to right is an arbitrary convention, that things don't always have to be as they are. Life is full of such reminders, if only we remember to notice them. Steering columns don't need to be on the left side of cars, for instance, and maps don't need to be printed with north at the top. Alphabets don't have to be Roman. Days don't always begin with a sunrise.
In the months preceding my trip to the Arctic, I worked long days completing a novel. I'd leave the house before my wife and sons were awake, pedal in darkness to my office, and stare at my computer screen until my eyeballs ached. When I'd come home, ten or eleven hours later, I'd be so drained I'd hardly have time for dinner, a dog walk, and a few pages of a book. Days started to bleed into one another. More than once I arrived at my office and could not recall a single detail of my commute.
However you want to experience the Far North—by sailboat, motor yacht, dogsled, even hot-air balloon—Arctic Kingdom Polar Expeditions can build a trip for you. But you're going to pay for it: Even the most modest excursions cost a fortune. The weeklong Narwhal and Polar Bear Safari that I booked ran me $10,185 (416-322-7066). The five flights each way between Boise and Pond Inlet added $4,058. Since my closet didn't contain items like "waterproof insulated mitts" and "rubber boots comfort rated to -100ºC," I also opted for the clothing-rental package. That cost $480, and I didn't regret it once: I don't think I took off my glove liners for six days.
Fifteen thousand dollars can certainly buy you a more opulent week almost anywhere else, but what other outfitter can take you to the ends of the earth, hand you a plastic bag full of candy bars, charge your camera battery, and show you a whale that might have been born before the American Civil War?
"Habits are cobwebs at first, cables at last" goes an old Chinese proverb, and I've come to the Far North hoping, like the others, to see narwhals and icebergs but also to airlift myself out of my habits for a week and to try to remember that the world doesn't have to be one particular way. It can snow in June. Laundry detergent is a luxury. Children can play fifteen hundred miles from the nearest patch of lawn, in the middle of the night, without flashlights.
And in some places in the world, you can walk on the sea.
The sleds we ride in are called qamutiks. The driver pulling mine is Sheatie Tagak, a sixty-something elder from Pond Inlet who has hunted seals, whales, caribou, and bears all his life. Sheatie's cheeks are windburned to a lacquered shine, and his torso looks as solid as granite. I'm wearing two pairs of long underwear and expedition-weight bibs; Sheatie is wearing jeans.
The qamutik bucks and twists as Sheatie's Ski-Doo hauls it across the ice. For the first hour, I almost manage to convince myself that we're crossing a big snow-covered plain stretched between mountain ranges, that below the sled runners is solid ground.
Then we come to our first crack.
It runs for a half-dozen miles in either direction and is about as wide across as the snowmobile is long. At its edge I see, for the first time, the thickness of the sea ice: a four-foot-thick slice of pale blue. In the gap hangs black, torpid water, utterly still. Little plates of slush float on its surface.
This, I think, my heart in my mouth, is not solid ground. This is a membrane of ice suspended on top of ten zillion gallions of certain death.
Sheatie runs the sled alongside the crack for ten minutes, looking for a safe place to cross. When he finds a spot he likes, he opens the throttle, skips the skis of his Ski-Doo across the gap, and hauls us over.
We jump seven more cracks on the way out. Some are as narrow across as a beer cooler; two are wide enough to swallow a Subaru. Each time I find myself simultaneously elated and terrified. How, I ask Sheatie, will these cracks look in five days, when we try to make our way back? "Bigger," he says, and grins. We skirt the southern shores of Bylot Island, a stronghold of glaciers and rocks, entirely uninhabited. In the afternoon, we spy a female polar bear climing a snow-covered slope to our north. We stop the sleds and raise our binoculars; the bear stops too, and regards us with her little black eyes. Her fur is astonishing: a thousand rippling shades of ivory. Her paws are the size of cafeteria trays.
I glance at the rifle strapped to Sheatie's snowmobile. But the bear merely makes a dozen swimming motions with her nose, sniffing the air, as curious as we are. Then she crests the ridge in five silent steps and is gone.
A mile or so off the southwestern corner of Bylot Island, on an ice field that appears to be the size of Indiana, we find home: a cluster of yurt-like tents. Inside the dining tent, wizards named Philip and Katie serve chili and biscuits and butter tarts.
"Don't worry," Philip says as he offers us seconds. "Here you burn calories just standing up."
Our expedition leader, a handsome and unflappable Canadian named Tom Lennartz, runs us through the camp rules: Charge your electronics when the generator is running; put up the flag when you're in the bathroom; don't wander off.
To host thirteen guests in relative luxury on top of four feet of ice, which in turn sits atop a bitterly cold ocean, forty-five miles from the nearest town and two thousand miles from the nearest four-star hotel, involves logistics matched only by a moon landing. Fourteen foam mattresses, fifteen insulated vinyl tents, 180 sheets of plywood, a propane water heater, a four-burner cooking range, a library, dozens of tables and chairs, a hundred loaves of bread, a Canadian flag, a dog to serve as a polar bear warning system, and God knows how much toilet paper--Tom and his staff dragged all of this out here the week before. There are fuel drums, two dozen cans of condensed milk, bushels of disposable hand warmers. When I tour the kitchen tent, I see jars of spiced salt, Kit Kats, chopsticks, curry paste, marmalade, fresh dill. Katie even has a little "garden" going; a tray of arugula and sunflower sprouts tucked against one of the vinyl windows.
In three weeks it'll all be gone. "By July," says Tom, gesturing at the plywood beneath his boots, "all this will be open water."
We wake to pancakes, bacon, and Nescafé. Then we sled ten minutes across the ice to the floe edge.
A floe edge is a boundary, an ecotone: a borderline where ecosystems meet. As the sea thins in spring, tiny plants bloom on its underside, tiny animals eat those plants, then slightly bigger animals eat those tiny animals. Seabirds come to the floe edge to hunt marine worms, bears come to hunt seals, walruses come to hunt clams (or seals), and arctic foxes trot behind bears, hoping for leftovers. And narwhals come to chase schools of Arctic cod.
The liquid sea has the color and sheen of a black grand piano. Pack ice drifts in ghostly forms along the horizon. Out of sight, beyond the curve of the horizon, lies Greenland. One of the guides lowers a thermometer over the edge; twenty-eight degrees. (Because of the salinity, seawater can remain liquid below the freezing point of freshwater.)
The photographers unpack their tripods and bazooka-size telephotos, which look like they could lock onto a duck's eyeball from three miles away. I sit with binoculars. We wait for narwhals on the edge of an abyss.
Birds called thick-billed murres (picture glossy black-and-white footballs with wings) glide past in incalculable numbers and land in the water on their fat bellies. Among them travel ducks called king eiders; the males are glamorous looking, with iridescent green cheeks and bright-orange knobs on their faces.
The platinum sea, the silver sky, the white ice (touched with blues)—it's a dazzling, soothing palette. When the wind is down, silence is the medium here: There is the clicking of camera shutters, and the gentle cries of the murres, and the slow, almost inaudible creaking of ice. Nothing else.
Tom lowers a microphone twenty feet off the edge, and I clamp on headphones and hear what sounds like a bomb dropping: a thirty-second whistle, slowly losing pitch, followed by several shorter bottle rockets. These are bearded seals. I listen to their eerie, strange elegies travel the darkness. I hear the clicking of shrimp, the crackling of ice, the hulking, ponderous dirge of a bowhead whale, what might be the distant thunder of a walrus. It's an underwater Serengeti.
I try to imagine the narwhals out there, navigating all that racket, singing, echo-locating, doing what else we can only guess. "We know more about the rings of Saturn than we do about the narwhal," wrote naturalist Barry Lopez in his 1986 book Arctic Dreams, and not much has changed in the three decades since. The few Crittercams we've tried to place on their backs usually come off as soon as they're planted; the few satellite tags we've managed to shoot into them often prove impossible to retrieve. The narwhal occupies a world composed primarily of darkness and pressure; he is comfortable in a place so beyond my comfort zone that I can scarcely dream myself inside his head.
For lunch there's macaroni and cheese with truffle oil and sliced pears. Despite the black edge of the water, and the rifle propped against Tom's qamutik, and the polar bear tracks crisscrossing the floe edge, the day starts to lull. The eiders and murres string past, the water whispers against the ice. No whales show them- selves. For hours I sit and listen to the hydrophone—all these creatures, harrying the silent fish.
That night (though what are nights out here, where night never comes?), I ask Tom if I can climb an iceberg maybe a quarter mile from camp. He says, "Just stay within eyesight." It's a fairy castle of powder blues and cobalts, seemingly illuminated from within. At the top, I scrabble up something like an electric-blue half-pipe and sit with my binoculars. Forty hours earlier I was buying a Twix in the Boise airport. Now I stare out at what might as well be Neptune.
But this too is Earth. The ice I stand on fell as snow in Greenland, was compressed for millennia until it became part of a glacier, flowed slowly downhill, calved into the sea, drifted across Baffin Bay, and finally ground ashore on an undersea ridge a thousand feet below my boots, just before the autumn ice formed around it and locked it into place.
Some scientists project that the High Arctic, at the peak of summer, could be entirely free of sea ice as soon as 2030. In another fifteen years, will people be able to climb an iceberg like this, a mile out to sea, in early June? What does that mean for the birds, bears, seals, and whales who come to the floe edges to feed? What does that mean for us, who rely on these polar ice fields to bounce so much of the sun's heat back into space?
Around midnight, the light assumes the dizzying clarity of expensive vodka. How far can I see? Fifteen miles? Fifty? In a world of all white, distances become impossible to estimate. I walk back to camp, ease off my boots, hang my parka in my tent. Five minutes later, one of the guides roars into camp on his Ski-Doo and yells, "Bear!"
Among the things I've brought to the Arctic is a 1917 essay titled "Art as Technique," by a Russian named Viktor Shklovsky. In it, Shklovsky argues that routines function as a kind of anesthetic in our lives. "If we start to examine the general laws of perception," he writes, "we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic....If one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us."
But art, Shklovsky says, ought to help us recover the sensations of life, ought to revivify our understanding of things—clothes, war, marriage—that habit has made familiar. Art exists, he argues, "to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known."
Sometimes you have to make yourself a stranger to your own life in order to recognize the things you take for granted. Like sunsets, or hot showers, or alphabets. My health, my family, the streams of photons sent from our star—how had I stopped actually seeing these things?
The polar bear—a big male—hurried off through the broken ice north of camp. By the time I had climbed back onto the iceberg to search for him, he was just a dot loping through a golden mist.
two Mornings lAter, we head not toward the floe edge but away from it, toward towering cliffs north of camp. As we draw closer, I can see little white flecks fluttering like confetti against the massive brown backdrop of rock. These are gulls: black-legged kittiwakes. Tens of thousands of them.
At the base of the cliffs, the Ski-Doos shut off and then we hear the birds—an uproar of screeches and kek-keks and kit-ee-wakes. The cliffs are striped with guano, and all along them—on little ledges, some of which look no wider than a finger—the birds are incubating their eggs in shallow cups of mud and moss and seaweed. Above the kittiwakes are murres, nearly as many. They are here in numbers that stupefy.
A male kittiwake returns from the sea and somehow—how?—finds his mate among the multitudes and stands on a tiny ledge beside her and regurgitates a meal into her mouth. She gulps it down and tilts her head as if to say, "What else did you bring?"
All around them, the same domestic scene is played out in multiples of ten thousand. I realize: It's a megalopolis, the Tokyo of kittiwakes. For how many Junes, I wonder, have these birds and their ancestors returned to these exact same cliffs? If the sea ice goes away, for how many more will their descendants? I feel as if some secret has torn free from the earth, something very private and old, some- thing much larger than myself. I've had feelings like this once or twice before: in the waters off southeast Alaska, watching the wide, impossibly long silhouette of a humpback whale flow beneath my kayak; in the Gulf of California, watching a fisherman reach over the stern of a boat and seize the thrashing bill of a marlin with a gloved hand, and feeling in my bare feet the sleek, hard flank of the fish striking the underside of the boat. These are feelings that seem to suggest the world possesses quantities of power I will never understand.
This is why I've come—to see the long, shimmering spirals of birds and to hear them; to remind myself that the world includes mysteries so ancient and so enormous the human mind will never fully make sense of them.
Later, when I look back at my notebook, my notes from the bird cliffs consist of only three words: tens of thousands.
On the fourth day, we finally see narwhals. They show themselves to us shyly, a handful of arched, gleaming backs in the distance, marbled black and gray. Everyone's binoculars go up; the cameras sound like quiet machine guns. The narwhals appear maybe a dozen times, moving fast from right to left. I see a fluke, a tusk, and then they're gone. For the rest of the day the ocean seems more alive than ever. We scan the low black swells until our eyes hurt. But the narwhals have slipped away.
There's a line from Tolstoy's diaries that always breaks my heart. "I was cleaning a room," he wrote, "and, meandering about, approached the divan and could not remember whether or not I had dusted it. . . . I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember—so that if I had dusted it and forgot—that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. . . . If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been."
How often do we forget if we dusted something, or what we ate the night before, or the name of someone we met ten minutes ago? What percentage of our lives slips past unconsciously? Don't we owe it to ourselves to pay as much attention to the world as we can while we still have time?
In the Far North, I paddle an inflatable kayak over water so cold and still it is like gliding over lacquered ebony. I listen to ten-thousand-year-old iceberg chunks pop like frying oil when they are set into the pot atop the stove to become our drinking water. I get to know Sam Omik, a native of Pond Inlet, who, like a polar bear, eats primarily "country food" (raw seal and caribou meat), and who takes one taste of the tomato and fennel soup Philip serves us one afternoon and spits it onto the ice. Sam also has a half-million-dollar home in Iqaluit, two Ski-Doos, a wife who has published a book, and a deep fondness for cartoons.
As the hours slide past and the sun spins laps around the horizon, fear and displacement are replaced by something else: sublimity. When I left my wife planting lemon verbena in the gentle Idaho sunshine, I thought that I was leaving spring behind with her. But spring exists above the Arctic Circle too, once you learn to see it. Tiny willows creep across the ground of Bylot Island, wearing the fuzz of coming blooms. Some of them, an inch tall and no thicker than a pencil, are more than a century old. Dust blows down from beneath the retreating snows and creates melt pools on the ice as big as lakes.
Some of the photographers on the trip are disappointed that they didn't get better shots of narwhals. But I am exhilarated to have seen them. For how many more years, after all, will they come here and find cod?
"When I was a boy," Sam tells me one afternoon, "the glaciers on Bylot Island all reached the sea. Now they are a thousand feet back."
Another guide, Jason Aglak, adds, "In winter the sea ice would get five or six feet thick. Now it's rarely three or four."
On our last evening, during dessert, a bowhead whale shows himself along the floe edge not fifty feet from us. I watch his seemingly endless back pass through the field of my binoculars, and remember that they can live to be more than two hundred years old, perhaps the longest-lived mammals on earth. For how many springs has this same whale come to the floe edge to eat? What will happen to him if the ice goes away?
The skin of every whale—like the ice around camp, written over with tracks—is a record, each line a story. All told, I'm above the Arctic Circle for eight days—or one long day, depending on how you look at it. We make hot tea and laugh and eat hamburgers on a rim above a black, teeming universe, peering out at the ever-changing surface of the sea, each of us contemplating our own mysteries. We eat Triscuits in a snow squall. We brush our teeth in sweet, unadulterated sunlight at 2 a.m. We go for walks on Neptune.