Lawrence Millman - At the End of the World

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To the Memory of

Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, John Muir, Peter Freuchen, Barry Commoner, Elliott Merrick, Frederica de Laguna, Ejnar Mikkelsen, Paul Shepard, Bob Marshall, Wetalltuk, and Henry David Thoreau

Let your life be a counter-friction against the machine.

H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU

If you dont live it, it wont come out of your horn.

C HARLIE B IRD P ARKER , J R .

Look at me, for I am God.

P ETER S ALA

In this account of an obscure Arctic tragedy, Ive used the Inuit spellings of names rather than the widely variable spellings that appeared in newspapers and Mountie Police reports at the time of the tragedy. For example, the Inuit never put a u after a q, but some of the Mountie reports refer to Qarak as Quarak or even Quarack. Ive also pluralized words the way the Inuit pluralize them, so one white person is a qallunaak, but several white people are qallunaat . Likewise, Inuk is the singular of Inuit, a fact that most writers dont seem to realize, because they constantly refer to a single Inuk as an Inuit. On the other hand, Ive simply added an s to pluralize words commonly used in English, like kamiks . Ive also added an s to pluralize the East Greenlandic monsters known as qivitoqs and tupilaks because those words have entered into English parlance, too.

In my journeys North, I collect stories, and when I return home, I try to coax those stories onto paper. This coaxing may take a day, a week, or a month, but eventually the story agrees to be written down.

Not so a particular tragedy that occurred in a remote area of Canadas Hudson Bay in 1941: it was elusive, recalcitrant, and perhaps even hostile to my efforts to put it onto paper. I want to remain obscure, it seemed to be telling me.

Meanwhile, the present kept intruding on the past. Hey, it would announce, theres been another terrorist attack. Or it would say, Isnt it time for another google or two? It would follow me from place to place like a predator in pursuit of its prey. Download me! it would demand.

I was in a quandary. Not even my old pals Charles Darwin, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Henry David Thoreau, hard as they tried, could provide me with any help. Nor was the unsurpassing strangeness of the Hudson Bay tragedy itself capable of assisting me.

At last a so-called lightbulb went on in my head, and I realized I couldnt write about the past without also writing about the world immediately around me. In other words, the present. With this realization, I gave birth to the notes youre now holding in your hand.

In 2001, I wanted to investigate the murderous aftermath of a meteor shower, so I flew from Boston to Montreal, then to Kuujuarapik in northern Quebec, and then to the Belcher Islands, a helter-skelter of fifteen hundred rocks in the turbulent waters of eastern Hudson Bay.

I was afraid, I was so afraid, the old Inuit woman kept saying to me. Her hands were tightly clasped, and her eyes seemed to reach out and grab mine, as if she wanted me to see exactly what she had seen.

You had to say, Ee, ee, the world is coming to an end, or they would kill you, another Inuit elder in the Belchers told me.

The worldin fact, more than one worldwas indeed coming to an end.

From my notebook: Ive pitched my tent at a place, Kingualuk, that consists of glacial rubble and till, boulders, and a sea of granitic pebbles. Theres hardly a shred of pastoral softness here, only the earths exposed bones.

And not just the earths bones: the de-articulated bones of a Thule Period (AD 11001700) Inuk reside in a burial cairn on the hummock above my tent.

I once peered into a similar burial cairn in Hudson Strait and saw a wholly botanized skeleton, its every bone decorated with algae, lichen, and moss, whereupon I thought: Greenwhat a splendid color to accompany ones journey to oblivion.

Near my tent, a seal skull and a walrus skull were resting so close together they seemed to be kissing. A reminder that all organisms both living or dead are connected.

Better a tattered notebook than a digital device for documenting this now rocky, now bone-ridden world. For a digital device would square and pixilate it, thus depriving it of its primordial delight.

I will nail my colors to the proverbial mast and say that I believe such devices are depriving us of far more than just primordial delights.

We are a species that, in the words of poet Robinson Jeffers, likes to break its legs / On its own cleverness, a fact that will occasionally oblige me to rant in these notes.

Example of a rant: Seated at a computer, you may think youre reflecting your own thoughts, but youre only reflecting your devices algorithms.

There were no algorithms at Kingualuk. Only the perpetual rhythms of the incoming and outgoing tides on rock.

A local Inuk named Simeonie told me this story: There was once a woman so ugly that no man would marry her. Rocks had no objection to her looks, so one of the rocks at Kingualuk took her for its wife, and they had a very happy life together.

I studied the rocks in the vicinity of my tent, but it was impossible for me to identify the wedded couple. Maybe all of them were wedded.

Man is not above nature, but in nature, wrote nineteenth-century German biologist Ernest Haeckel.

Simeonie also told me about a mermaid with a typically Arctic morphologypart seal and part womanwho came ashore in the 1950s a mile or so from where I was camped. I heard a visiting minister shot her, he said.

Another Inuk told me that it was a Hudsons Bay Company trader, not a visiting minister, who shot the mermaid.

Concerning the Hudsons Bay Company: it transformed the people of the Canadian North, formerly hunter-gatherers, into trappers, providing them with sugar, guns, ammunition, and the occasional mirror in return for furs.

Furs, furs, furs is the white mans cry, wrote Arctic anthropologist Diamond Jenness in People of the Twilight .

Any reasonably intelligent mermaid who came ashore in the Belcher Islands during the winter of 1941 would have turned around and quickly swam back out to sea.

Hudson Bay is a vast frozen sea that plunges like an icy wedge into the heart of North America, wrote Arctic historian Robert McGhee.

Lying in the southeastern part of Hudson Bay, the Belcher Islands were named after an eighteenth-century English sea captain who never set foot on them.

A series of pancakes, nibs, blunt teeth, and gable ends spread out over three thousand square miles, the islands may occupy a subarctic latitude (56 20' N, 30 W), but their tundra habitat proclaims them resolutely Arctic.

The low-lying nature of the islands made early explorers and mariners give them a wide berth. Those few ships that didnt give them this sort of berth were invariably wrecked, like the Kitty, an English charter freighter that fetched up on the Precambrian rock outcroppings of the Belchers in 1859.