Moby-Duck (55 page)

Me, I'm having a good time. We're sixty-two miles from the ship, ninety miles from Resolute, off the coast of an island that NASA considers to be an approximation of Mars.

“Lots of seal holes,” Swannell says, banking east, back toward the
Louis
. There are indeed lots of seal holes, black dots on the floes below, easy to see because of their roundness, an aberration of geometric perfection in a landscape that abjures geometric perfection. Seals, it seems, are the gophers of the Arctic. A lead appears, and flying over it, hundreds of feet below us, is a flock of white birds, too far down for an amateur bird-watcher like me to identify. Ahead on the horizon, just entering the scattered puzzle pieces at the edge of the pack, a red speck appears, a red speck that grows into the
Louis.

Named for one of the ships sent in search of John Franklin, the ill-fated British explorer who sacrificed his life and those of his men on his fourth and final search for the Northwest Passage, Resolute is one of the coldest, northernmost settlements in the world, so cold and northern and bereft of edible game animals that the Inuit avoided the place until 1953, when the Canadian government, eager to establish the northern limits of Ottawa's sovereignty, compelled four Inuit families—twenty-three people, twenty-seven dogs—to move there. These unhappy pioneers, after a single hungry winter, regretted the move, but their requests to return south were denied. Since Resolute boasts an airstrip and a military base and a scientific research station, the Canadian government likes to call it “the gateway to the Arctic.” The Inuit like to call it either Qausuittuq, meaning “the place with no dawn,” or else Qarnartakuj, meaning “the place of the ruins.”

To me it seems like the place of corrugated metal buildings painted in primary colors, or perhaps the place of many all-terrain vehicles, or the place of wolfish, xenophobic sled dogs on staked chains who, when roused from their slumber by a curious stranger, bristle with canine menace. Most of all it seems like the place of pebbles and dirt. The roads are unpaved and vehicles traveling along them kick up curling plumes of dust. There is, so far as I can see, no flora to speak of. The hills rising from behind the village are as denuded as dunes. On one of them, written in white, appears the word RESOLUTE, as if the landscape itself were a kind of giant map. This is not at all how I pictured an Inuit village in the Arctic. There's no snow on the ground. No igloos. There are, however, polar bear skins, draped over porch railings like beach towels drying in the sun.

Resolute's scientific research station, on the outskirts of town, in convenient proximity to the unpaved airstrip, is the northern base for something called the Polar Continental Shelf Project, the primary purpose of which is to provide logistical support to visiting scientists. By design, we've arrived just in time to attend festivities commemorating the project's fiftieth anniversary, festivities taking place in a blue building the size of an airplane hangar. The festivities include an assortment of speeches, a throat-singing performance by Inuit teenagers, and a free lunch to which all 229 residents of Resolute have been invited. Politicians from Ottawa have flown in for the occasion, as has a business executive from the Ontario-based cell phone company responsible for the BlackBerry.

It is a disorienting experience, after ten days of voyaging through Arctic waters, to find oneself seated in a stackable chair, in a hangarlike room crowded with media and mariners and Canadian politicians in blue jeans, and Inuit mothers, some of them teenage, dressed in a kind of garment called an
amautik
, meaning “coat with pouch,” the heads of their babies poking up out of the hoods. It is even more disorienting to find oneself politely trying to remain awake for the duration of multiple PowerPoint presentations on, for instance, the “over predation of musk ox,” or the ecological importance of the wetlands of Creswell Bay, or, most disorienting and tranquilizing of all, a speech delivered by the executive from BlackBerry, who has, it turns out, come all this way in order to bestow some playground equipment on the children of Resolute.

Captain Rothwell, dressed in his nautical finest, looking very much the part of a sea captain, the brass buttons of his navy blazer polished to a shine, also has a gift to bestow, a framed photograph of the
Louis.
To make it to Resolute in time for today's festivities, Rothwell had to cut a number of research stations from the scientific plan, much to the dismay of the scientists. The
Louis
was supposed to play a large role in today's festivities. Crossing the ice on snowmobiles, locals and visitors alike were supposed to come out for guided tours of Rothwell's big red ship, but this morning village elders informed us that the ice conditions were too dangerous. Robie Macdonald was pissed. “We rush out here and then they can't do their open house—typical.”

After a half hour of speeches, the juvenile beneficiaries of the playground equipment have left the room, and, following their lead, I join them, outside. In the sunshine, on a piazza of dust, the kids joust at each other with little complimentary souvenir flags commemorating today's anniversary. Most wear free Polar Continental Shelf Project baseball caps, too big for their little heads, from which paper tags still dangle on plastic threads. Others, also wearing free ball caps, have gathered in the lunchroom, in anticipation of the feast to come. There on folding tables draped with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, a catering staff has begun to set out the spread—urns of coffee, towers of stacked Styrofoam cups, hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, paper plates, the usual North American picnic.

Wandering through the crowd, searching in vain for my Arctic Virgil, Eddy Carmack, I notice an elfin young woman—rusty hair, pale complexion, big blue eyes, worrisomely thin—filming Inuit children with what looks to be an expensive video camera. Making small talk over hot dogs, I'm surprised to learn that rather than the television journalist I mistook her for she is in fact a Rhodes scholar. What the hell is a Rhodes scholar doing in Nunavut? Shouldn't she be in tutorials with an Oxford don?

The answer is complicated. For one thing, she's from here—well not from here, not from Resolute, but from the North. In Canada, apparently, the 60th parallel is a kind of Mason-Dixon line, dividing North from South. (In my head, learning this, I perform a kind of geographical somersault: how strange to think of Toronto and Edmonton as the South.) Her name, Erin Freeland-Ballantyne, suits her, suits her so well that if a novelist were to give such a name to an anthropological Arctic explorer with a Rhodes scholarship and an Irish complexion, it would seem way too heavy-handed, the first name and surname both. Freeland-Ballantyne grew up in Yellowknife, capital of Northwest Territories, made famous by a television show called
Ice Road Truckers
.

Like me, she's in Resolute because of Eddy Carmack, who's hired her to assist with “community outreach.” She's supposed to help the scientists learn from the Inuit and the Inuit from the scientists, a summer job for which she is well qualified. A biogeographer, she's writing her Rhodes thesis about, she tells me, “the effect of oil and gas development on Dene and Inuit community health.” She's also, at twenty-six, the mother of a two-year-old daughter whom, for the next few weeks, she's left back in Yellowknife, in the care of her husband, an unemployed poet who drives a Volkswagen microbus and lives in an apartment above a restaurant. She appears to be experiencing far less separation anxiety than I am. In the subsequent days I'll spend in her company, I'll hear Freeland-Ballantyne say things like, “Fresh caribou liver is good for your breast milk.”

Two days out of Resolute, four days from Cambridge Bay, in the smoking lounge, where the yardlong penis bone of a walrus hung, trophystyle, above the wet bar, members of the
Louis
's crew were drinking cans of Pepsi purchased from vending machines, and tapping their cigarettes against the crenellated edges of black plastic ashtrays, and watching, on the flat-screen television, a National Geographic documentary called
Hunter and Hunted: Arctic Attack.
Ice pick Erin Clark was there, as was Paul Devlin, the chief cook. As was Doug Murray, chief technician. As were off-duty oilers and able-bodied seamen. Through the two portholes of the smoking lounge could be seen blue skies and white ice.

No one in the smoking lounge was paying attention to the view through the portholes. Everyone was paying attention to the documentary, which recounted the tragic tale of a starving polar bear who happened upon a pair of delicious young women, Swedish graduate students, hiking on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. They'd dressed appropriately, in brightly colored Polartec, and they'd brought along carabiners. They'd neglected, however, to bring along firearms. “Nearly three thousand polar bears live in the region,” the baritone narrator intoned.

Paul Devlin, in his chef's whites, leaned forward, intently, on his elbows.

“They outnumber humans here, by two to one,” the baritone narrator continued. “Despite these considerable odds, there have been very few fatal attacks since Spitsbergen was settled nearly one hundred years ago. The bears simply haven't been a problem”—an orange special effect burned across the screen, accompanied by the sound (
whooosh!
) of a flash fire, as if a polar bear had spontaneously combusted—“but the animal, approaching the hikers”—portentous pause—“is.” On the sound track there now erupted what I took to be an ursine roar.

“I'm not going on the ice, fuck that,” Doug Murray, the technician, said.

That same day, Captain Rothwell piped over the PA system the news that a polar bear, a real polar bear, could be seen to port. I rushed to the bridge just in time. There it was, sitting beside a seal hole. Looking so cuddly you almost wanted to give it a hug. Contrary to Melville's meditations, it wasn't really white but a kind of creamy off-white and dirty about the withers. The Snapper and the Australians, having flown home from Resolute, weren't on hand to capture the moment, but everyone with a camera was snapping away, an impulse that, even as I was brandishing my own digital point-and-shoot, struck me as curious. I'd seen a polar bear before, at much closer range, most recently at the Central Park Zoo, where through thick windows you could watch the animal swimming around in its tank, or from above, witness it devour a lamb shank. Why photograph it here? Was an animal viewed in its natural habitat somehow more real than one viewed swimming around in a landscaped aquarium the size of a swimming pool? Even if, in the photographs one took of it, it appeared as a yellowy dot scarcely distinguishable from its icy habitat?

The way we look at polar bears is indicative, I think, of a larger confusion, a larger and perhaps untreatable blurriness in our vision. It's as though the more pictures we take of the world the less clearly we see it, as if our megapixelated screens weren't windows but kaleidoscopes. Even in the perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter, Fridtjof Nansen was less confused about the meaning of polar bears than I was, standing on the bridge of the
Louis
at the height of the Arctic summer. In my cabin belowdecks I'd been reading both
Farthest North
and Barry Lopez's
Arctic Dreams
, which perhaps explains at least some of my confusion.

Polar bears appear almost as frequently in
Farthest North
as does the eponymous whale in
Moby-Dick
. They sneak onto the
Fram
. They eviscerate sled dogs. One bites a harpooner named Peter Henriksen on the hip before Henriksen delivers a roundhouse to its noggin with an oilburning lamp. One bear Nansen encounters in the dwindling light of October he describes as “a beautiful white fellow rummaging among the flotsam on the beach,” but as darkness falls he's less given to aesthetic appreciation and instead, understandably, to either hunger or fear. One bear he calls a “monster,” another a “demon,” another a “ghost.” Nearly every bear the mariners of the
Fram
meet, including the one that tasted human flesh, ends up dropping to the ice, felled by a ball, then flayed by knives, then turned into dinner and blankets. Of the execution of a mother bear by firing squad and her two cubs by a pack of sled dogs, Nansen writes, “It was a glorious slaughter, and by no means unwelcome, for we had that very day eaten the last remains of our last bear in the shape of meatcakes for dinner. The two cubs made lovely Christmas pork.”

Compare this with the chapter of
Arctic Dreams,
published less than a century after
Farthest North
, in which Barry Lopez accompanies a team of biologists hunting for
Ursus maritimus
on Lancaster Sound. From Lopez, we learn many wonderful ursine facts,
³⁸
but his ultimate aim is to dispel the old myths. European explorers, he notes, eventually saw in the polar bear “a curious image of themselves”—“a vaguely noble creature, wandering in a desolate landscape, saddled with melancholy thoughts”—whereas Lopez seeks to see the bear itself, and succeeds more than any writer I've read.

And yet, he too ends with a curiously anthropomorphic image—an image, he writes, “of vulnerability.” The biologists he's traveling with have shot a female with a tranquilizing dart. “As I sat there,” Lopez writes, “my companions rolled the unconscious bear over on her back and I saw a trace of pink in the white fur between her legs. The lips of her vulva were swollen. Her genitalia were in size and shape like a woman's.” Lopez, feeling like a prurient voyeur, looks away. How far we'd come since the Victorians. This anesthetized beast is no monster of God but a damsel in both estrus and distress. The polar bear, in other words, remains symbolical, and since the publication of
Arctic Dreams
, it has grown more symbolical still. I can't help wondering whether vulnerable images of polar bears—usually less graphic and more sentimental than the one Lopez gives us—have become as common and therefore potentially as obfuscating as the monstrous images with which, in my mind at least, they compete.