Volume 3, Number 9 June 2010
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complete with 400
Italian prisoners of war
“A feel-good novel...realistic,
fascinating stuff.”
—Janet Worrall,
author of
Italian Prisoners
of War, 1943-1945
“A tour de force”
—New York Times
“Bob Sanchez is a consummate writer.”
—Kaye Trout’s
Book Reviews
The Daying of Night
ARCTIC CIRCLE:
Birth and Rebirth in the Land of the Caribou
By Robert Leonard Reid
240 pp. David R. Godine $27.95
Reviewed by Marty Carlock
Arctic Circle moves at (ha-ha!) a glacial pace. What plot there is unfolds in exquisite detail. Yet for readers willing to slow down and mute their expectations, it offers some very fine nature writing.
Those who rush might overlook some of this writer’s wry comments. For instance, in the endless day of Arctic summer, he watches a male tern enthusiastically mount his mate over and over. Reid muses that in the Arctic, “convention is upended, and the vigilant observer will observe a steady stream of goofy reversals—the daying of night, the screw of the tern.”
Reid’s book is not exactly a chronicle; it’s a poem, an ode to wild Alaska. It’s not only about nature, but also about human interaction with it, and specifically about the reactions of one human, himself, to it. Initially I was impatient with Reid’s prologue, his meandering and his failure to get on with it. But this book is not about plot or narrative tension; it’s about being there. And Reid has a talent for taking us there.
Stepping out of the plane and catching his first breath of Arctic air:
I recognized the scent at once. I knew it from high mountains and long Sierra nights, and from the Lake Erie winters of my childhood—cold, piercing, silent, alarming, liberating. The scent...lights up everything it passes along the way, from the little hairs in your nose to that flappy thing at the back of your throat to your windpipe, all the way down to your lungs...Your skin jingles and your ears bristle...
He celebrates his sixtieth birthday with this odyssey, a quest to see the herds of Arctic caribou, tens of thousands of them, during their migration. Along the way we learn a good deal about these critters. That all but gravid females lose their antlers after the rut, so the pregnant ones are able to take charge of the best grazing. That the herd he focuses on migrates compulsively every year to the same place—ivvavik, “the sacred place where life begins”—to give birth to the calves. That they scatter randomly afterward, and scientists have no clue as to why they scatter or how they sense the way back. That they cover some 2,700 miles in this round trip, the longest migration of any land mammal on earth.
Reid is a candid writer. He doesn’t flinch from telling us about the very bad novel he thought of writing, about his diffident flirtation for decades with the idea of wild Alaska, about his disappointment at finding a wildlife photographer already camped in the wild, remote valley where he was going to be deposited. His emotions mirror the ones we would most likely entertain in a similar setting.
Reid’s first traveling companion, Shaun Griffin, is lauded as a poet, photographer, and grizzled veteran of a hundred capricious enterprises. Yet Reid himself, although he writes prose, is a poet. He takes care to choose the felicitous word, the one that works but we would never have thought of. Here are a few samples:
yeasty clouds
a chill vanilla sky
muscles of snow
a slow, loping wind
When Reid describes one of his friends, my reaction is “Wow, I wish I were friends with this guy.” I wish in fact I were friends with Reid, whose persona comes through as a sensibility attuned both to the natural world and to people, a human sponge that sops up experiences with relish and ponders them with insight:
Who could live here without engaging unabashedly in life and its mysteries? Simply knowing that everyone else on your meridian stood south of you, was warmer than you, and was perplexed and amazed by your presence here; simply knowing that you were the civilized world’s last defense, its human DEW line against lemmings and snow-borne disease, against blizzards of foolishness and ignorance, and especially against true knowledge of the dreadful emptiness that lurked to the north... simply knowing those things would surely alert you to the onerous weight of existence.
It’s not only nature that glows under Reid’s pen. Struggling to learn to drive a snowmobile, he spins out repeatedly and loses heart. Then he bears down fiercely on the task at hand.
Somehow my single-mindedness paid off...the mystery went out of the machine...Now began a dreamy, effortless span of time and miles...Crossing a rolling upland, traversing beneath an icy palisade, scooting up a gnarly slope...I felt at home...gazing out at a white starry world through orange-tinted goggles, smelling and feeling my surroundings over the roar and jitterbug of the engine, I was drunk on the idea that the planet I inhabit is one helluva fine place to spend a life.
For decades Reid mulled about which is the true Arctic, the radiant expanse beloved by romantic rebels living off the grid, or its antithesis, the nasty, dark killer of intrepid explorers. Toward the end he realizes there is a third possibility: It is “a thrilling exhilarating North, a place of spicy, silvery, frosty air, electrifying scenery, wildly beating hearts, and a palpable sense that the earth is acutely, shimmeringly alive.”
Literal-minded readers may flinch at Reid’s onslaught of lyricism. Not me. I feel as if I’ve been to the Far North with him.
Freelance journalist Marty Carlock, author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston, has published more than 1,600 articles in thirty-plus publications. At present she writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture Magazines and for her own amusement.
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