Four Quarters of Light (10 page)

As I completed my notes, part of me mused on the fact that though science can explain the facts of something it can never explain its effect. The isolation on the lake no doubt added to the drama, just as my initial fears heightened the unreality of the moment. But the marriage of science and psychology was still not enough for me. The essence and effect are only partly revealed by them; the backwash takes longer to work out. The naturalist John Muir, an explorer who travelled through the Alaskan wilderness in the 1880s, wrote, ‘I have been one thousand feet down in the crevices, with matchless snow and sculptured figures and carved ice work all about me. Solomon's marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such colour, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feast my soul and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What a good death that would be!' For me, Muir is nearer the
mark. I too, in a moment, had sensed a similar feeling. The lure of wanting to stay, to remain, to become one with the earth and the inspiring heavens – it's a profound seduction. It enfolds you completely. But it is dangerous, because you cannot remain. Dan was right to befriend it like a comfortable old whore, not to let himself become utterly beguiled by it.

The
Pequod
, as I had chosen to call our twenty-six-foot RV (recreational vehicle), had arrived. The name Herman Melville gave to his tragic ship in
Moby-Dick
seemed somehow appropriate to our own vehicle of exploration. It was, after all, going to help me find my own white whale in this massive expanse of Alaska. Initially I loved its compactness, but as soon as we began to load it with all the gear we had brought or bought in Fairbanks it became unattractive. But we made several day trips out into the bush to get the hang of the vehicle.

So when Mary and her husband Pat, a retired lecturer at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, asked me to go canoeing on the Chena with them, I agreed readily. I remembered both of them from my visit a few years back when I was a guest speaker at the university. Mary was then married to a history professor and Pat was single and a science teacher. I was happy to meet up with them again and plan a short trip down the Chena into Fairbanks.

Mary had advised me over the phone that long outback trips took lots of planning and preparation and you were ill advised to undertake such a trip unless you were well versed in survival skills; Pat had concluded that survival skills were fine, but you
had to be fit enough to apply them in the first place. I presumed Pat's remark was a way of reminding us that he was now retired and not up to the rigours of a trip like an enthusiastic younger man or even a curious writer. I was happy to comply with Pat's thinking. Both he and I were about the same age and trials were not something I was looking for. Trials, at my age, were situations that unfortunately happened to you, and were to be avoided at all costs. With this unspoken agreement we loaded what little kit we had, strapped the aluminium canoe to our roof and drove off beyond the city's reach.

During our journey Pat explained to me that it was a good time to take to the river as the glacial meltdown had already begun, though it was much earlier than in previous years. He insisted that just because it was mild outside I shouldn't be fooled; the rivers were always cold when they were swollen with glacier melt. ‘If you fall in and are not hauled out within four minutes, you're gone,' he said. ‘You've a four-minute life expectancy in the water.'

It sounded drastic. ‘That's like a three-minute warning before a nuclear holocaust,' I said.

‘Yes, except there are two differences: one, you've got a minute longer in the river, and two, you are the only one who is going to die.'

I looked at both Mary and Pat. Their faces were noncommittal, as if they had just explained to me the recipe for a blueberry pie.

‘Well, four minutes will be more than enough for me. I can't swim,' I said equally noncommittally.

They both smiled, and replied, ‘That's okay, then.'

In the Athabascan language, the suffix ‘na' simply means ‘water' or ‘river', and my frequent studies of Alaska maps revealed that practically all the named rivers carried this suffix – Chena, Tanana, Nowitna, Susitna, Lake Minchumina, and hundreds more. This was the land of water, yet curiously the native mind had not invested it with any elaborate religious or spiritual significance to anything like the same degree they had the other elements of earth, air and sky, and every species of plant and
animal life. I was beginning to understand. Water was God here; it needed no explanation, only to be respected and feared.

Our conversation had opened up another interesting topic. Many people during our stay to date had commented on the early arrival of summer, and how generally summers were arriving earlier and winters were arriving later. The phrase ‘global warming' was offered by way of explanation by many to whom I had spoken. Pat was quick to take up the question. He explained that if it was global warming there was little Alaskans could do about it, but they should be aware of its effects. The greater part of the Alaskan landmass resided on permafrost, and if that started to thaw, Pat declared, ‘We've got real big problems, bigger than probably all the gold and oil revenues could cure.' As Pat explained it, part of the problem was more than just the physical one of permafrost thaw; it was just as much to do with a way of thinking and an attitude to the problem. Scientists thought in terms of centuries and large-scale catastrophe; engineers, politicians and big business had a habit of thinking in shorter increments, such as decades. As he was explaining, Mary winked slyly at me, letting me know I was about to get a lecture.

‘Long-term projections don't really inject the right degree of urgency into the matter,' Pat said. ‘But it's a bit like falling into the river. If we don't take care of the thing today it will be too late tomorrow. The facts as far as they already exist should inform our politicians about the urgency of the problem. Currently, the state spends over thirty-five million dollars a year on permafrost repairs to our roads. When you drive down that roller-coaster between Delta and Valdez you'll see what I mean. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa can't hold a candle to the buckled and decayed houses in the Farmers Loop area. People fail to grasp the larger picture. Global warming means more frequent storms and more tidal waves. Already there are several villages along the north-east coast that have had to move. Relocating a whole village and reinvesting in its infrastructure can cost anything from fifty to a hundred million dollars. Now, that's not petty cash.' Pat stopped abruptly and looked at me. ‘You sure you want to listen to this?'

‘All grist to the mill,' I answered, encouraging him.

‘Okay then. You see, the problem is as much under our feet as it is above us. One of its characteristics is that permafrost literally freezes carbon in place. Carbon is a greenhouse gas and is responsible for global warming. More than one seventh of the earth's carbon is stored in permafrost. Unfreeze that and climate warming will escalate. Accordingly, the tundra will become grasslands more common to Alberta than to Alaska.'

‘And Fairbanks sinks into the sods,' I added.

‘No, Fairbanks is on the Tanana River flood plain; gravel-laden permafrost will thaw in a more stable way. But out there, wet, silted soils will repeatedly thaw, jumping and dancing like a bucking bronco. On your travels you'll see lots of telephone poles zig-zagging along the roadside like they were tipsy. Well, if you could speed up a series of time-lapse photos taken over the last thirty or fifty years, you could literally watch them jerk right out of the ground.'

‘Okay, Pat,' Mary interjected, ‘you keep talking and we'll miss our set-down point. Look, there it is. Pull in.'

‘Your lecture was delivered with perfect timing, professor,' I said to Pat.

He smiled as he hoisted the canoe from the roof. ‘That's the core problem, time. How much time have we got?'

Again Mary interjected. ‘Enough to paddle our way back to Fairbanks. Now hurry up, Pat.'

Within minutes we were on the river, with Pat steering from the rear, Mary in the middle and me paddling downstream like an enthralled Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans. After our discussion in the car, floating down the Chena was like looking through the long viewfinder lens of a millennium camera. Pat had spoken in terms of evolutionary ages, centuries of change and glacial speeds. Now it was as if the lens had been jerked back into tight focus. From a global contemplation we were thrust into this up-close image of three insignificant individuals in a tiny canoe floating easily down the Chena in its first glacial swells. I mumbled to my friends some inconsequential remark about the silence. Mary's
voice answered from behind me. ‘You don't really hear the silence until you are up in the northern reaches of the Yukon. Out of nowhere you hear the sudden cracking and thundering and then this terrifying hiss as the glacier breaks up. You could be hundred of miles from it, but you hear it, like it was only around the next bend. For a split second you half expect a wall of water to come down on you. But there is nothing, just pristine silence. Like you never heard before.'

Mary's words seemed entirely appropriate and did not require an answer. I let the echo of them float into my senses as we drifted on to the soft splashes of the paddle, like hands clapping in the distance. The overriding impression was one of watchfulness, as if I was being watched and even weighed up by the land I was moving through. The forest I was looking at was in fact a forest of eyes looking back at me. I don't know if it was the silence of the place or if it was some kind of an inverted echo of my night on the frozen lake, but here everything was aware, sensate. Nothing was inanimate.

I could rationally understand the indigenous peoples' insistence that nature had a persona as had every living thing in it. It must not be offended and must be treated with respect. Even at this short distance from Fairbanks, nature, the natural environment and the endless unforsaken outback was in control. In Europe the countryside is controlled by civilization; wild places, such as they are, are protected by communities of men and the laws of government. Man is in control. We pass through countryside en route to another part of human civilization, another time or another city. Here in Alaska you realize very, very quickly that it is the reverse. Man is the alien species here. The outback has neither been conquered nor been controlled. People survive in the outback only to the extent that they live in some kind of harmony with it.

I remembered standing in a wooden cathedral in Chiloe, an island off Chile. The entire structure was made of meticulously carved tree trunks. All the adornments, the altar and the Stations of the Cross were constructed of hand-carved wood. The whole
place was a homage to the god in the wood. In that place I had felt the same sensation of being watched by every artefact in the cathedral, just as now, in this blown-away wilderness, I was being observed. But more than that, it was as if I was being measured for my suitability to enter into this living place. I remembered thinking as I stood in the church and absorbed this watchfulness that perhaps Christ didn't die on the cross; perhaps his spirit was received into a tree and something of that powerful spirituality was radiating back at me from the tree-framed walls. Though I was thousands of miles away from Chiloe in geographical space and millions of miles away in cultural evolution, and though my present surroundings were wholly different, the sensation was so alike. But I didn't dwell on the comparative facts of my thoughts; instead I accepted the coincidental reality of my feelings, and with that the watchfulness wasn't threatening any more, or at least it made me feel less apprehensive.

I was dragged out of my reverie by Mary poking me in the back with her paddle. As I turned to her she pointed upward. Above me I saw the almost vaporous V of some twenty or so geese moving in the luminous sky. They were turning at an angle away from us and were soon gone. Mary and Pat were trying to decide whether they were geese or swan. Mary resolved that they were trumpeter swan, and that was a sure sign that summer would be with us in less than a week.

As we continued I would occasionally catch a glimpse of something in the distance, and when I questioned what it might be I was informed it was ‘the pipeline'. I had been contemplating a few minutes earlier how everything in nature had a personality, but the manner in which my question had been answered confirmed that the pipeline also had its own separate existence.

‘Oil and Alaska are synonymous terms to the outside world,' I ventured.

Pat was quick to respond. ‘The pipeline has funded almost single-handedly, directly or indirectly, the development of Alaska. But the relationship of Alaskans with the pipeline is an uneasy one. As I see it, there are two major problems to be
resolved.' I had begun to notice that, like all scientific minds, Pat thought in lists of facts to be examined. ‘How much oil is there left on the North Slope? Some say another thirty years, or more if Bush's government opens up the Arctic Refuge to exploitation. And secondly, can the existing structure withstand another thirty years? If permafrost thaw is to continue at an accelerating rate then the seventy-eight thousand structures that carry the pipe some eight hundred miles to Valdez are in serious danger. The cost of constant renewal would be astronomical. And while these shortsighted engineers and politicians who are in the pockets of the oil company continue to insist that things won't happen overnight, they are only adding to the catastrophic dimension of the whole thing.'