At Large and At Small (18 page)

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Eternally icy? Montana, Stefansson explained, in the tone a parent might use to drum something obvious into the skull of an unusually dim-witted child,
is far colder; arctic summers are hot; there are 762 species of arctic flowering plants. Silent? In the summer, the tundra resounds with the squawks of ducks, the cackles of geese, the cries of plovers, the screams of loons, and the howls of wolves (which, when heard on starlit nights, constitute “the most romantic sort of music”). Once the ice starts to freeze against the coast,

there is a high-pitched
screeching as one cake slides over the other, like the thousand-times magnified creaking of a rusty hinge. There is the crashing when cakes as big as a
church wall, after being tilted on edge, finally pass beyond their equilibrium and topple down upon the ice; and when extensive floes, perhaps six or more feet in thickness, gradually bend under the resistless pressure of the pack until they buckle
up and snap, there is a groaning as of supergiants in torment and a booming which at a distance of a mile or two sounds like a cannonade.

Depressing? According to Stefansson, “an Eskimo laughs as much in a month as the average white man does in a year.” A benighted people? The Inuit are honest, considerate, courteous, hospitable, fun-loving, self-sufficient, and morally superior to any but the
“rarest and best of our race.”

In other words, the Arctic was not (as Peary had described it, using the sort of language to which readers had become accustomed) “a trackless, colorless, inhospitable desert”; it was a high-latitude Arcadia. Precipitation was light. Gale-force winds were rare. Water was abundant, even at sea, since salt leaches out of ice floes within a few seasons, rendering them
deliciously fresh. Illness was infrequent; tuberculosis was seldom transmitted during the winter because “the spit is likely to freeze when it is voided.” And the region flowed, if not with milk and honey, then with caribou, polar bear, walrus, and seal, all there for the taking (even if shooting seals beneath the polar ice “resembles hunting as we commonly think of it less than it does prospecting”).
Why burden your sledges with heavy provisions, thereby limiting an expedition’s duration and range, when, if you merely did what the Inuit had been doing for centuries,
you could live off the land? “Do not let worry over tomorrow’s breakfast interfere with your appetite at dinner,” Stefansson liked to tell his men. “The friendly Arctic will provide.”

If the Arctic was so friendly, it followed
that you didn’t need to be a masochist in order to explore it. Stefansson had nothing but contempt for “heroes who conquered the Frozen North,” since he considered the Frozen North a myth and the metaphor of battle entirely wrongheaded. (Friends don’t fight.) He believed this sort of bunkum had been invented to satisfy readers in overstuffed armchairs who found narratives of ease and pleasure less
riveting than hyperbolic accounts of “suffering, heroic perseverance against formidable odds, and tragedy either actual or narrowly averted.” Stefansson’s stance—partly a pose, but only partly—was that being an arctic explorer was no harder than any other job. He wrote to a friend that the prospect of returning to the far north was as pleasant as, and not much different from, the prospect of spending
a winter in Heidelberg. Finding your way to a remote Inuit camp was “no more wonderful than knowing that a fifteen-minute walk will take you to the Flatiron Building from the Washington Arch.” Why pretend you were bristling with machismo when living in the Arctic was a piece of cake?

I recognized the Stefansson shtick just last week when I was reading a German fairy tale to my seven-year-old
son. Its plot revolved around a king who assigns progres
sively more impossible tasks to a cocksure young man —stealing a dragon’s flying horse, stealing the dragon’s blanket, and finally stealing the dragon himself. The penalty for failure is death by dismemberment. Every time the king ups the ante, our hero says, “Is that all? That is easily done.” In fairy tales, such characters are never punished
for their bravado; they always perform their assigned tasks without breaking a sweat and end up marrying the king’s daughter. In this case, the young man not only follows the prescribed formula for success but has the pleasure of watching the dragon eat the king for dinner.

The voice of that young man is the same voice Tom Wolfe had so much fun with in
The Right Stuff
, that of the airline pilot
who, as his plane seems about to crash, drawls into the intercom:

“Now, folks, uh… this is the captain… ummmm… We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the
lan
din’ gears’re not… uh…
lock
in’ into position when we lower ’em… Now…
I
don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s
talk
in’ about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red
light
that
iddn’ workin’ right”… faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say,
I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you
… “
But
… I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta
hum
or that little ol’ light… ”

You know that pilot will never have an elevated pulse, never admit there’s an emergency, and never crash the plane.

I first encountered this attitude of studied insouciance
thirty years ago, when I took a wilderness course at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming, during an era of outdoorsmanship considerably more primitive than the present one. Our catchphrase was “No prob.” Five weeks without tents or stoves? No prob. We slept under tarps suspended from trees and lit fires twice a day, forearming ourselves for rainy days by squirreling little bundles
of dry sticks in our pockets—our six-foot-three-inch leader tenderly called them “twiggies,” to underline how very cozy and unintimidating the whole venture was—just as Stefansson had squirreled handfuls of dry
Cassiope tetragona
(arctic heather) in
his
pockets. No fancy freeze-dried food? No prob. We baked bread, pizzas, even birthday cakes by heaping hot coals on our frying pan lids, and cleaned
the blackened pans with swags of limber pine, which we called Wind River Brillo. No food at all during the five-day “survival expedition” at the end of the course? No prob. We fished for trout and foraged for grouse whortleberries. Those five days were the hungriest of my life, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting it. (Stefansson: “Any traveler who complains about going three or four days
without food will get scant sympathy from me.”) That dragon was
easy
to steal.

A few years later, when I became an instructor at NOLS, the ratio of bluster to genuine joie de vivre declined precipitously. We pooh-poohed Outward Bound, our competitor in the wilderness-skills field, as
unnecessarily anhedonic. OB promised to build character by asking its disciples to face fear and hardship; NOLS
asked, as Stefansson had, “What fear? What hardship?” One winter we took out a group of mountaineering students for a couple of weeks to climb Wind River Peak on skis. It was ten below zero, but we built both a small igloo and a gigantic snow cave, in whose toasty precincts we threw off most of our clothes and stretched as luxuriously as cats next to a radiator. At night, when we schussed the snowfields
above Deep Creek Lakes, the hoarfrost reflected the full moon, and it was almost as bright as day.

That was small stuff, and very long ago. But, years later, it was enough to make me understand what Stefansson meant when he described hunting caribou on Banks Island on a cold, clear day: “In his exuberance of good health it is difficult for the arctic hunter to feel anything but pleasure in almost
any kind of weather or almost any circumstance. I suppose what I am trying to explain is about what the Biblical writer had in mind when he spoke of a strong man rejoicing to run a race.”

Stefansson had just the sort of upbringing you’d expect: pioneer-style, in a one-room cabin in the Dakota Territory, with scant food but plenty of Norse sagas recited in the evening by his Icelandic parents,
who had emigrated first to Manitoba and then to the United States. When he was eighteen, he set himself up as a winter grazier, caring for the livestock of local farmers. The great blizzard of 1897 hit during his first season, and all his assistants quit, unwilling to work on skis or shovel their way into
barns buried in snowdrifts. No prob. Stefansson carried on alone and, of course (because
the young man in the fairy tale never labors in vain), didn’t lose a single head of cattle.

At the University of North Dakota, Stefansson was thrown out of his boardinghouse for espousing Darwinism and then expelled from college for spotty attendance and “a spirit of insubordination.” (His fellow students staged a mock funeral. His hearse was a wheelbarrow, his widow a black-clad classmate whose
tears were facilitated by an onion wrapped in a handkerchief.) No prob. After finishing up at the University of Iowa and attending graduate school at Harvard, where he switched his field from divinity to anthropology, he was offered the post of ethnologist on the 1906 Anglo-American Polar Expedition to northwest Canada. He and his expedition never ended up intersecting, since he traveled overland
to the Mackenzie Delta—solo, of course—and the ship that carried his colleagues failed to penetrate the ice beyond Point Barrow, two hundred miles to the west. No prob. He spent the winter living with the Inuit, collecting ethnographic artifacts, learning Inuktitut, and formulating his belief that the only way to get along in the Arctic was to dress and hunt and eat like a local. “I was gradually
being broken in to native ways,” he wrote.

By the middle of October, I had thrown away my nearly outworn woollen suit and was fur clad from head to heel, an Eskimo to the skin. I never regretted the lack of a single item of such arctic clothing as money can buy in America
or Europe.… A reasonably healthy body is all the equipment a white man needs for a comfortable winter among the arctic Eskimos.

Two more expeditions followed, one primarily ethnographic, the other geographic and scientific. By the end of his tenth arctic winter, Stefansson was the uncontested master of what he called “polarcraft,” a body of knowledge he later codified in a volume called the
Arctic Manual
. Although it was commissioned by the U.S. Army as a survival guide for Air Corps fliers who were forced to make emergency
landings in the far north, its author couldn’t resist transforming it into a how-to book on what
he
liked to do—live off the land, with minimal provisions, for years at a time. (A downed flier, for instance, would be unlikely to make use of his observation that the ideal sled dog is bred by crossing a husky or a malamute with a wolf.)

The
Arctic Manual
is my favorite Stefansson book. The chances
that I will ever need to apply its lessons may be slender. But just as devotees of Martha Stewart feel more secure knowing they
could
make a wedding centerpiece from belt buckles and gumdrops, even if they never actually have to, so I derive a certain degree of comfort from reading and rereading Stefansson’s arctic tips. It reassures me to know that pussy willow fuzz can be used for the wick of
a seal-oil lamp. That two lemon-sized chunks of iron pyrite, struck together, will start a fire faster than matches. That it is possible to cook with the hair and wool of a musk ox or grizzly bear, one hide being sufficient
for two or three eight-quart pots. That if you are not ashore during the spring thaw, you should select a thick floe on which to spend the summer, and resume your travel in
the fall. That a dead seal can be easily dragged, but a polar bear tends to flip upside down. That you should not rub decayed caribou brains on your clothes, since the hides will stiffen. That skin boats can be boiled and eaten. That the best way to approach a seal you wish to shoot is to look like a seal yourself: wear dark clothing, wriggle along the ice, and occasionally flex your legs from the
knees as if scratching lice with your hind flippers.

It is important to understand that these pieces of advice are offered in a spirit not of grit-teethed stoicism—
I may be facing death, but, by God, at least I know enough not to rub decayed caribou brains on my clothes
—but of casual bonhomie, as if the author and the reader were in perfect agreement that this stuff is
fun
. Stefansson wasn’t
a survivor; he was a voluptuary. Why would anyone wish to wear wool when “nothing feels so good against the skin—not even silk—as underwear of the skin of a young caribou”? Why live in a house when an igloo, lit with a single candle, resembles “a hemisphere of diamonds”? Why employ Inuit or Indians to do one’s hunting when one could have the satisfaction of doing it oneself? “I would as soon think
of engaging a valet to play my golf,” he observed, “or of going to the theatre by proxy.”

Stefansson admitted that his hunting had not always been fruitful. In lean times he had eaten snowshoe lashings, sealskins intended for boot soles, and the remains of
a bowhead whale that had been beached for four years. (It tasted like felt.) But when the Arctic chose to show its friendly aspect, its cuisine
practically made him swoon. Frozen raw polar bear meat had the consistency of raw oysters; half frozen, it was more like ice cream. The soft, sweet ends of mammal, bird, and fish bones were scrumptious. Seal-blood soup, an especial favorite, warranted a recipe that might have intrigued Brillat-Savarin:

When the meat has been sufficiently cooked it is removed from the pot which is still hanging
over the fire. Blood is then poured slowly into the boiling broth with brisk stirring the while. In winter small chunks of frozen blood dropped in one after the other take the place of the liquid blood poured in summer.… The consistency of the prepared dish should be about that of “English pea soup.”

The
ne plus ultra
of arctic fare was caribou flesh: in ascending order of “gustatory delight,”
the brisket, ribs, and vertebrae; the tongue; the head, especially the fat behind the eyes; the little lump of fat near the patella of the hind leg; and the marrow of the bones near the hoof, which was customarily rolled into little balls and eaten raw. Stefansson maintained that a high-fat, all-meat diet not only pleased the palate but also cured depression, prevented scurvy, reduced tooth decay,
and relieved constipation. (When he was in his late forties and living in New York City, he undertook to prove his nutritional theories by spending a year, under the supervision of Bellevue Hospital, on an exclusively carnivorous diet. Not only did he remain healthy, but he was proud to report that X-rays
revealed an “unusual… absence of gas from the intestinal tract during the meat-eating period.”)