|
On Sale Now!
|
|
|
 |
Essay—December 1998
Text by Alan Kesselheim |
Only this faint stirring in the air remains: the whisper of
ancients only a generation past. They were still here, clothed
in skins, dancing in igloos, beating on drums, walking the ridges,
and spearing caribou at river crossings, when I was a young boy
learning to ride a tricycle in a Boston suburb and John Kennedy
had a decade yet to live. |
Humanity
is a whisper here. Here caribou breast the landscape in antler-bobbing
streams. Here musk ox pound craters in the snow with their chins
to reach winter grass. Wolverines and Arctic foxes scent through
the mosses after small prey—lemmings, tern eggs, hares. Sandhill
cranes court one another on low bedrock ridges with stick-figure
decorum. Here a wolf plunges its face into the hot entrails of
a caribou calf. Here winds comb the stiff-grassed tundra with restless,
rough, currying fingers. Humanity is elsewhere, gone away, sloughed
off to the coast like the draining rivers taking their load of
sand. Starved out, decimated by smallpox, swindled by the fur trade,
and seduced by religion, rifles, whiskey, sewing needles, sedentary
comforts. That old story. That old story no one wants to hear and
I don't want to tell. A story that makes my bones heavy.
Only this faint stirring in the air remains: the whisper of ancients
only a generation past. They were still here, clothed in skins,
dancing in igloos, beating on drums, welcoming the first birds
of spring, walking the ridges, and spearing caribou at river crossings,
when I was a young boy learning to ride a tricycle in a Boston
suburb and John Kennedy had a decade yet to live. I have met them.
Grandmothers who clean hotel rooms in places like Rankin Inlet
and Baker Lake but who, as young girls, pounded strips of caribou
into dry meat and competed with the foxes for birds' eggs. Old
men who return to the land once or twice a year by powerboat or
snowmobile to shoot caribou with .30/30 rifles but who, as young
boys, paddled skin kayaks and carved snow blocks to build igloos.
And on the land, the swell of northern land, a crescendo of teeming
emptiness, I have had the company of their whispers.
At a windbound camp on Kamilukuak Lake, when I stoop down to pick
up a piece of weathered driftwood, I find that it has been worked,
fashioned to some purpose—weapon, tool, piece of boat frame.
My hands run over the surfaces painstakingly crafted by other hands,
hands separated from mine by an unimaginable gulf of circumstance,
yet focused on the same smoothed stick.
Or paddling across Angikuni Lake toward the outlet of the Kazan
River, there on a low, broad ridge stand a series of inukshuk,
the rock cairns built across the treeless terrain to signify trails,
caribou crossings, campsites and graves. Their human-like profiles
pluck at the corners of my vision. Again and again I turn to them,
expecting to see one raise an arm in greeting, to see another break
into a run.
Again, in the Thirty-Mile country, when we stop for lunch and there
are half a dozen tent rings, rock circles that once weighed down
the edges of caribou-skin shelters. I lie in the center of one,
on ground that cushioned the sleep of an Inuit family, a man and
a woman, children: people, I think, satiated with the land. I think
that because scattered everywhere on the ground are old caribou
bones settling into the sphagnum.
Or on a wave-washed rock beach along the shore of an unnamed lake,
where a low pile of rocks, full of gaps and crevices, hunkers just
above the high-water line. Inside, the gleam of bones. A human
femur, rib slats, the top of a skull. Gray lichen feathers around
the cranial sutures.
We were here, it all says. We lived here. In our way, we flourished
in this immense scarcity. We made love on this ground, bore children
in this tent. We stood, just here, looking across the same blue-seamed
space, knowing that space. We wrestled dead willows to kindle our
fires. We stooped over grizzly tracks in the sand. We lit moss
wicks steeped in caribou tallow to flicker against the winter night.
We listened to the singing ice in the fall and thought of the meat
cached away in permafrost crannies. And always we awaited the caribou,
watching and listening and scenting for them every day, and dreaming
of them by night.
Once, when we stopped for a stretch and a break in the all-day
paddling rhythm, a flat bench part way up a ridge draws us to it.
We turn to take in the view. At our feet, sunken in the ground,
are foreign pieces of wood. Foreign, because there is no wood anywhere
for many miles. We haven't seen a tree more than head high in a
month. The driftwood we make our fires from is the thickness of
our fingers. The only trees are wind-twisted, ground-hugging spruces,
barely waist high. This is real lumber, six-foot lengths, one-by-four
boards, and once we spot it, a litter of it snaps into focus all
around.
At first the wood appears milled, finished with precision machinery.
I pick up a lichen-encrusted board and see, close up, that it is
actually rough-hewn, almost perfectly turned, but done by hand.
On the inside surface is gouged a row of evenly spaced, angled
divots. The cross pieces cut to match those divots have fallen
almost exactly in place. They still fit neatly. In fact, laid out
there on the ground, fallen apart yet in a recognizable shape,
as if a carpenter had set out the pieces of a project, each in
its approximate position, is the frame of a kayak.
These bits of wood may have been collected and passed on for generations.
A well-turned cockpit coaming would have been an inheritance worth
marrying for. There is not a screw or a nail anywhere. Whittled
pegs still protrude through holes drilled out with a primitive
bit. The curved boat ribs, the support pillars, the long sides,
the keel, all are there among the moss campion and short, bristly
grasses.
It is as if a carpenter had fashioned all the parts of a project,
set them in place, and then never gotten back to it. Or—and
this comes to me as I stand there in the summer warmth with black
flies pinging against my forehead—it comes looming up out
of the whispering past with the certainty of a true and real story—it
is as if an Inuit man, a hunter of caribou, had paddled his skin-covered
craft up against the same sloping shore where we beached.
It is a fall day in this story. The lake is black and choppy, the
sky lowering, the wind like shafts of ice. Flecks of spray have
frozen like candle wax where water splashed up on the deck, on
the sleeves of his skin parka, on the leading edges of the wooden
paddle blades. A young boy ducks out of a skin tent and runs to
join the man onshore. Together they lift the boat and carry it
up to the flat, protected elevation. They pause, with the kayak
at their feet, and look across the dark water. A thin snow scuds
across their view.
Winter comes. The long twilight, then true darkness. The lakes
freeze like plates of iron. It is a starving season. The fall caribou
hunt was a marginal success. Hunters waited at the time-honored
crossings, hunkered behind rock blinds, but the deer never came.
Only a few meat caches are full, and the wolverines pillage one
of those. The oil lamps run dry. People sit in a dark stupor, in
semi-hibernation, for days at a time. Sickness visits the camp;
people wither and shrink. A young woman dies in childbirth. Elders
walk out of the igloos in the night and don't come back. Late in
the season, still months from spring, the people abandon camp and
straggle toward the wan hope of a distant fur-trading outpost.
Spring arrives. The ice rafts up under the lash of wind. The sun
is buoyant, high in the sky. Birds fill the open water; gravid
caribou push their way toward calving grounds. The kayak rests
patiently on the island. Its decay is a slow, gnawing dissolution
made up of freeze and thaw, chapping winds, chewing rodents, the
insistent settlement of fungus and moss and lichen. The stretched
skin goes first, that thin organic layer, drying to parchment;
then the sinew thread in its small, tight, meticulous stitches.
Rodents den up in the hull and raise young. A two-year-old herring
gull perches for much of a summer at the tip of the bow. Bird droppings,
fish bones and eggshells litter the ground. The sun desiccates
the exposed wood. Every winter the snow drifts over the boat, forming
a white burial mound. Water fingers into the cracks and then freezes,
prying the boat open.
When the young boy who helped stow the kayak after its final outing
is a father with children, a man who lives in a prefabricated plywood
house in Chesterfield Inlet and whose bad dreams writhe with emaciated
ghosts, the first board drops loose. The next winter a peg falls
out. The hull surrenders its form to the erosion of time and gravity
and chance. The wood, precious and rare, settles its small weight
into the tundra, and moss rises up around it.
We place the pieces of boat frame back into the perfect molds on the ground.
My hands tingle with this communion, paddler to paddler. I have been out long
enough that the lift of waves under boat hull is a sensation branded into my
nerve synapses. I have felt the same cords of river current bending past rocks,
dropping over ledges, eddying along shore as this paddler did. I have hunched
down against the same implacable winds roaring across a plain of water. I have
paddled into the midst of grunting strings of caribou swimming at a blue narrows,
felt the close thrill of their straining bodies. I stand, now, in this paddler's
footprints and look out across the blue expanse, the gray, distant hills, the
patches of snow that linger, even in August. When we paddle away, I notice the
feathery contrail of a remote jet in the cloudless sky.
Alan Kesselheim is a freelance writer in Bozeman, Montana. This
essay is an adapted chapter from his fifth book, Threading the
Currents, now available from Island Press of Washington, D.C. |
|
|
|
