Tell the Stones

Land of the White Wolf

It starts White Wolf, a book by Jim Brandenburg (Northword Press Inc., 1988). So, few people visit Ellesmere Island that the wolves are not afraid of humans and the photographer lived close to them for months. “Why don’t you go somewhere warm, sit on the beach and drink margaritas” friends ask? But I am drawn to tundra, deserts, mountains, and as far away from people as I can be. I resolve that a visit to where there are more wolves and muskox than people will be my 50^th birthday present. 

A critical passage in the book says:

 “The traditional first stop for all expeditioners is Resolute Bay in the Northwest Territories, the most northerly spot serviced by commercial airlines. From there, Arctic dreamers must charter 748’s, DC-3’s, or Twin Otters, the smallish, highly maneuverable aircraft with skis for wheels, the ‘workhorses’ of the Artic. "

 A phone call to the Resolute Airport quotes the price, $16,400 for a solo round-trip, a bit beyond an indulgent birthday present.  Or, they ferry guided groups north. If a guide has an extra seat they will sell it to defray costs. I am in luck. Two guides have reserved a flight and there is one vacant seat. I arrive at Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, that an early British explorer termed, “perhaps one of the dreariest and desolate spots that can well be conceived.” (From Aurora Borealis, a paper published by the crew of HMS Assistance during the time it was stuck in the ice off Cornwallis Island). He is right. There is no sign of life. Just wind-swept desolation. Six hundred miles north we land at a guard station at Tanqueray Fjord.

The next day I begin my solo trip. My planned route is to loop up Air Force Valley and cross the river to head northwest to Yelverton Pass, a less traveled route. I have heard that a pack of wolves inhabits Yelverton. The day is calm and balmy with sun shining through thin overcast, bathing rock and ice with brief luscious mid-July warmth.

At the Air Force River crossing the river is hundreds of feet wide, or rather its braids occupy that distance. Multiple channels of fast-moving silt-laden water rush over stones. I cannot see all the channels that I need to cross, but it looks doable.

In past years I had learned the hard way that once rushing water is waist deep and touches the pack that all hope of maintaining balance is gone. My fording stick quivers in the current, feeling for holes to avoid.  The first braid is crossed with only a few near losses of equilibrium. I wander up and down the mid-stream gravel bars looking for shallow broad areas to cross the next braid. Finally, there is just one. Beyond it is a cut bank of gravel alluvium topped by an inviting sedge meadow with Arctic poppies. It is where I want to camp.

I wade in slowly. The fording pole quivers in the current. Not even halfway across water laps at my crotch and the bottom of my pack. This braid is too big. There is no crossing. I reluctantly retrace my route. But now I am cold from the icy glacial melt and exhausted. Halfway back there is another near fatal step. Water leaps at my shorts and I pull back struggling against the current. I collapse on a gravel bar, drop the pack and sit there defeated. 

It is 2:30PM. Glacial streams are generally at their lowest in the early morning after night’s cold has slowed their runoff. I will be here for at least 12 hours. The guide who organized my air travel for this trip had told me the previous year of a couple who had waited at another glacial stream for the 3:00AM low point. Just before putting on their packs and entering the ford a wall of water and ice had rushed down the channels, born of release of dammed water in an upstream glacier. I thought of how little resistance my two feet high gravel bar would offer to such a rush of water.

Later that evening during dinner I notice that the stones at the water’s edge that I am using to mark depth became submerged—in a matter of half an hour. Even at 8:00PM the river is still rising under the balmy Arctic day. A cold breeze comes from the north where the sun now travels sideways above the horizon. At midnight I look again. The river has risen again. The marker stones are gone.

By 2:00PM the water has fallen slightly. The Arctic sun has now circled 180 degrees and is starting to ride higher in the northern sky. Though the tops of my marker stones can just be seen it is now or wait until a cold snap slows the glacial melt. I quickly break camp, as much to keep warm as to control my fear. Finally, everything secured by extra rope I fasten my belt to the top of the pack. If I have to throw off the pack mid crossing, I might be able to grab the belt and founder across. 

Picking a route, I step in. The first few braids are easy. The first big one I had crossed the day before remains.  Water leaps at my crotch. The walking pole shudders in the current. I retreat and force my way upstream where my cold feet feel that the floor of the stream is a bit higher. Now only 20 feet remain, then 10, then the last 5 as I scramble up the gravel bank. The lessons of the land have begun.

Thankful to be free of my prison I abandon the trip to Yelverton Pass. It is 3:00AM. I am cold from the stream crossing and weak from fading fear. I need to walk. I head up Rollrock Valley to circumnavigate the Ad Astra Ice Cap. The peaks are soon lost in an encroaching Artic mist that begins a light slow rain. The totally barren peaks remind me of nothing less than the inner ramparts of Mordor from Lord of the Rings. 

Miles up I begin to fade. My ebbing fear has left a strange burned-out void. I am tired, hungry, and camp in a small patch of sand. It is 8:00AM. I crawl into my tent, with barely enough energy to eat some crisps of jerky and sleep until noon. Mist still covers the mountains, but the light rain has stopped. I walk all day and camp near a glacier that blocks further progress. I have to cross it tomorrow to reach the continuing valley on the other side.

As I cook dinner, I ponder what brought an aging gay man to the Arctic. Tears well in my eyes as I feel stripped to my barest and most raw emotions. These are the same tears that bullies delighted in while I was in grade school; the same tears of an easily bruised sensitivity carried through childhood into adulthood. Here, physically, and emotionally drained at the edge of the world I let my tears flow freely. 

I remember houseboating on Lake Shasta—20 gays in two houseboats for a week. One night we pulled up on a beach, picked up the trash and pulled scraps of plastic stuck in the drift manzanita branches. We made a stage, decorated with plastic scrap cut into streamers, and had a talent show. Earlier that day we had passed a houseboat full of drunken straight men. They were loud, vulgar, and raucous. They shouted to a passing boat with bronzed ladies lying on the roof. “Hey baby. Want a good time?” It made me glad to be gay.

But here years of bruised emotions piled on by schoolyard bullies are still eager to emerge.  Years of seeing my generation die of AIDS while religious bigots trumpet this as the will of God—all these wounds can be washed by the flow of tears.

A broad mass of ice blocks the upper end of Rollrock Valley. Several flows of ice from the Viking Ice Cap to the south break out of the mountains. White silent tongues breach the high cliffs, move down the side canyons, and then merge on the floor of Rollrock Valley. The glacier reaches totally across the valley and pushes up against the opposite cliffs in a jumble of broken ice and fallen rock. 

I look out of my tent at the wall of ice. Will the top of the glacier be like an ice cube—smooth and blue? Is it slick? Far northern glaciers are different. There is so little snowfall here and so cold they remain frozen to the ground. Because they are frozen to the ground there are few or no crevasses because they barely move. But, because they have no crevasses, and so little movement, melt streams can form on them year after year, scouring a channel that becomes deeper each year.

 Little did I know what waited for me as I strapped on crampons and made my first tentative steps onto the ice. The last time I wore crampons was 27 years ago. That was on packed snows of Mount Rainer. Our leader kept haranguing us not to step on his rope with our crampons. He showed us how to do an arrest with an ice ax. Now, without an ice ax, without a rope, without companions I face the ice wall and take my first step. For the second time in two days I feel fear. But Wow! It is not slick at all! It is melted honeycomb crunch! Still wary I eye grayer patches amid the bright white of the glacier. Do they hide crevasses? Skirt them. Proceed cautiously. Breath slowly. 

Death is the most unforgiving teacher of all. An ice chasm slices across the glacier from one side of the valley to the other, roaring at the bottom with a rushing melt stream. Its sides are sheer blue ice, 80 feet down. The only way across is what is left of a snow bridge that formed the winter before. 

 I have struggled for days to get here working up Rollrock Valley from Tanqueray Fiord after that night on an outwash bar.  As I stand there a sudden clatter of rocks rolls down the mountains and within seconds boulders are bounding across the ice like cannonballs. This is a clear message. Stay away from the headwalls. Do not see if this melt channel narrows there.   This is the only path.

Carefully I creep to the edge of the chasm where one side of the bridge joins. Gingerly I tap on the snow bridge with my ski pole. It holds. Then I push harder with my ski pole, then harder, leaning. The ski pole pushes through as I fall, forward at first toward the chasm, then twisting to my side, falling, and lying panting and shaking on the edge. There is no way out if one falls in, just rushing freezing water in a channel of ice eighty feet down. It would be over quickly. 

Gradually I get onto my hands and knees and move back from the edge, heart pounding. This has to be the way. I had pushed my pole more to the side where it was thinner.  I try again more toward the center, lean on it carefully, and it holds. Without thought I back up and make a flying run over the snow bridge to the other side. There is no going back. This has to be the stupidest thing I have ever done.

On the far side the glacier drops precipitously into icy Rollrock lake. On either side of the valley sheer scree slopes of loose rock crumble into the lake. In most places this glacier overhangs the scree, but one spot offers a passage onto the shattered rock.  In this pocket of desolation, I find the bones of some animal that tried to come this way—a dwarf caribou? In one small place a small clump of multicolored lichen grows. These are the only signs of life on this planet.

Rollrock Lake is hundreds of feet below. For miles along the lake the valley wall is nothing but steep loose talus.  I walk along the broken rocks on a narrow bench, until I come to where the bench has given way. Beyond the bench the scree is loose. I step on it, and it moves like an escalator toward the lake, recruiting other rock until the whole slope is in motion. I look up at a thousand feet of crumbling cliffs, then down hundreds of feet of slipping rock to the lake. Finally, there is nothing to do but follow a more tightly packed run of scree down to the lake. The rocks move, then stop. Slowly I pick a path, avoiding the worst places, sliding a few steps at a time, looking down at the lake, listening for rockfall from above.

The lake had been higher earlier in the year and formed an ice shelf all around its edges. Then it dropped and formed a second ice shelf 3-4 feet below. Then it dropped again to a final ice shelf now on the water’s surface. My legs are getting weaker, and one leg can no longer lift my weight and the pack.  If I slip under the upper ice shelf it will be into a space between ice shelves, no way out except falling through into the thinly frozen lake. I test each step before putting my weight on each rock. Most hold. If they do not, I back up fast or leap forward to what looks like the next stable rock. 

I hear a tinkling like bells. Thank God, there are people here! Mostly I avoid people. Today they are welcome. But nowhere are they seen. Finally, it is clear the tinkling is coming from the lake itself, all around the lake.  Between the ice shelves stalactites form, break off, and fall into the lake. Each makes a clear tinkle as it jostles like chimes with its neighbors.

Gradually the end of the lake draws closer. One last steep jumbled slope of large boulders blocks the way. Each is bigger than me. Beyond them the talus ends. Mud flats devoid of any life now stretch across the valley from mountains on either side and far up the valley beyond. Nothing grows here. It is just out from under the last ice age. Sinkholes appear in the mud where it drops into open spaces in the rocks below.

 I can go no farther. I am shaking and weak. Out there about 40 feet is a mud and sand flat about a foot high. Run off has eroded around it. A place for a tent. I step into the mud wading toward it. Quicksand! Up to my waist. I flail backward now weighed down in gray muck. More carefully I take a longer route. 

A cold wind springs up as I slowly put up the tent. I thrust the walking stick three feet into the silt to keep the tent from blowing away, throw my pack inside, peel off my mud drenched clothes, and crawl into a sleeping bag. I have no energy to cook so I guzzle almost a quart of sugar drink packs and jerky for dinner. There is nothing left to do but to assume a fetal position and let the night nurse my bruises.

After a fitful sleep I emerge the next morning. Dead gray silt extends for miles up the valley. Slowly I wander through this desert, avoiding where silt liquifies and quivers like quicksand. As the valley rises slightly the drainage gets better. In protected places among the rocks, mosses grow. The ground begins to be covered with a carpet of mosses, willows, sedges, and in some places has a springy feel. 

Life follows vegetation. Instead of only my footprints I see droppings and tracks of snowshoe hare. Predators will not be far behind. There are only a few species of land mammals on Ellesmere Island: Peary caribou, a dwarf form; wolves; musk ox; snowshoe hare; ermine; Arctic fox. It is a fine balance here on the edge of life. Winters are long and harsh. Increasingly warm rains freeze on the lichen and the dwarf caribou can no longer push away soft snow but are locked out by ice. Gradually they dwindle. There is little forgiveness here.

 The valley ends deceptively—a slight rise among folds of the land. At the crest, before me Charybdis and Scylla glaciers reach from opposing ice caps to block the south end of Ekblaw Valley. I turn north. On this valley’s gentler slopes, the spring wash of silt laden run-off has coalesced in places into hummocks. Willows, sedges, and mosses cover the hummocks. Muskoxen tracks and caribou droppings are abundant.

 I walk a few miles along the shore of Ekblaw Lake and camp near sedge meadows. Musk ox tracks and droppings are everywhere. There are horns of caribou shed last winter. On top of a rocky knoll nearby are the bones of a muskox. Musk ox like heights where they can make their stand. Perhaps this one had made its stand but had fallen to wolves. Or maybe it just died in the cold long frozen winter.

Released from the trials of Rollrock Valley I have time for easy walking—time to sit and gaze at the broad open Arctic uplands nestled at the edge of ice-capped mountains. There is time to think of the lessons of Rollrock Valley. The first lesson is the primacy of fear.

My own edge feels raw. I stand before the last ice sheets reaching to the Arctic Ocean. My ghosts speak to me. You must forgive the poor straight folks who do not how to react to us gay folk. They too have their fears. “Will he come on to me? What should I say if he does?” So, we say nothing, frozen in our fears like these ice sheets. We talk about everything but what we are. The consequences of this were demonstrated in a recent workshop. We were told to think of the three most important things about ourselves and then to carry on a five-minute conversation with a stranger at the workshop, never mentioning those things. We all skirted and danced around those important things—our friends, family, and loves. It is a built-in exercise in alienation that most gay people do every day. We avoid our fears or the fears of others. Or we throw the whole thing into their face and let them deal with it. That too is cruel. Not every encounter needs to result in baring our souls. The bruised soul is seldom in shape to spill itself in any manner that is comforting to anyone--to ourselves, or to whoever is listening. Some are better listeners and can offer comfort easier than others. Others of us awkwardly do our best and hope the moment passes. I am not exempt. Out here I bare my soul to ice and rock. There is no awkwardness, no judgment, no regret. I snuggle into my sleeping bag again. Its warmth is familiar and comforting.