Jack Stephens nursed the Toyota HiLux pickup truck along the unpaved mountain road above Thule Air Force Base in Greenland. In this austere, rocky expanse, we had just passed, of all things, a traffic sign—a yellow diamond with the black-lettered word Slow—and I asked Jack to stop. I wanted a picture of it, for, in the distance below, amazingly, strangely, lay the brown fell-fields and, farther on, like a permanent cloud, the Greenland ice cap. I got out of the truck. Just where metaphoric cloud and literal cloud met was hard to discern. The world turned white there, and for seconds I could not move. Was there a faint blue line separating earth from sky? I twitched my head, framed the shot, pressed a button. Hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, on a mountain with just two humans, here I was taking a picture of a traffic sign, of a single word—exact and evocative—that, much later, would lead me to muse on some unexpected and strange evolutions of language. Mesmerized, I kept looking at peeled yellow paint and the unfamiliar world thereafter, that caution and panorama. Jack waited patiently.
I hadn’t exactly come for this. Working on a book about meteorites, I would travel soon with researchers from the Peregrine Fund, which operates a scientific enclave at this American air base. I’d travel by open boat—it would take three trips because of mechanical problems and a biologist’s rock-gashed hand—but we’d find the obscure locations where explorer Robert Peary had retrieved three massive meteorites in the 1890s. While P-fund researchers surveyed for falcons, I’d retrace footsteps in order to explore obsessions with meteorites. But before the Barb (“Big Assed Red Boat”) was ready, I had time to explore land beyond the metal-and-pipe-laden base. Jack, the Thule meteorologist and P-fund site coordinator, showed me ice cap, icebergs, glacier, bay and ocean from on high, broken foundations, and cables flung along the ground because they could not be buried in the frozen earth. They stretched everywhere, like the filaments of a spider web.
Alone one day, I would watch storms over Dundas, a now-empty village that was once home to commerce—a trading post. Those red-and-green buildings, squat, wooden, and simple, were then the only bright human colors in the landscape. There was orange lichen on rocks and on a single headstone for a long-dead, forgotten sailor. Pre-storm dark seemed both to mute and to vivify the orange.
I had wanted, almost desperately, to write about something that did not touch, let alone ruminate on, ecological relation and ruin. For years, those words seemed to go hand in hand, like desire and shame. As Aldo Leopold wrote, once you know a landscape ecologically, you see not only its beauty but also its wounds. After years of researching extinct birds for my first nonfiction book, I needed to move beyond such losses. My fascination with the night sky had helped me cope (surely we cannot sully every planet), and watching shooting stars led me to write about them and their larger kin. I found the science and stories of meteorites a delight—and an escape.
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