First Impressions of the Arctic

What are your first impressions of the Arctic?

My vocabulary drains.  It’s like looking at a book cover with only pictures. It’s like trying to learn a new language on top of a half-learned one.  My words are rendered to useless, pattered clichés. 

Frost over the ice on the Hula Hula

When I close my eyes, I hear the soothing scraping of plastic runners on a wooden sled moving steadily over hard pack snow.  I smell the worn coyote ruff on David’s gear-swap-parka that encircles my face like the entrance tunnel to an igloo.  A garment that inspires the guys to tell me I look like Kenny from South Park.  I feel a dull sting where my feet should be, swaddled inside military surplus bunny boots.  My nerves wave at me with vibrating little hands: a new awareness of the vital patters of blood flow.

A shot from the sled (we're in back and Robert is pulling)

When I open my eyes, I see an ocean of silver snow and steel-blue ice.  I never knew the sun could paint so many colors onto white, the absence of all colors.  As I strain to make out our direction,  I look for clues as to what is beneath us on the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain.  Where does Barter Island end and the ocean begin?  Are we traveling on ice? Sand? Tundra? Oil? Graves?  Is that black spot a rock? Polar bear? Trash? An ancient sled?  As I strain to orient myself, I am struck by footprints---a fox—and I remember that it is not my words or definition that make this place important.  For millions of migratory birds, polar bears, foxes, voles, and my guide, who is strangely comfortable driving the snow machine without a face mask—the Coastal Plain is home.

Wolverine Tracks that constantly encircled  and eluded us

** this is a piece I just found in my journal from a trip David and I took to Kaktovik and the Arctic Refuge (Hula Hula River) this April with Robert Thompson.  Robert asked me the question on the first day when I was still sun-blinded.  I doodled the response over the next week in the Refuge.