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Remember

One rainy autumn day in 2009, I went to visit the Nicholas Roerich Museum, a five-story brownstone at 319 West 107th Street in New York City. Roerich was a cultured Russian painter (1874–1947), a set designer for the Moscow Art Theatre, a philosopher with deep, wide-ranging interests in archeology, religion, and language, and also a gifted colorist, an artist who used color in a skillful or distinctive way. He fled Russia for America at the age of forty-six, and after a few years in New York City, left in 1923 to sojourn and paint in the Himalayas, India, and Mongolia. He returned to New York in 1929 with 500-some paintings. He and his wife of many years, Helena, eventually moved to the Kullu Valley, at the foot of the Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh, in northern India, where they pursued their mutual and individual interests in art, religion, music, and science. He died there at the age of seventy-nine.

Many of Roerich’s Himalaya paintings are hanging in the Roerich museum, and I was headed there to see them mostly because I knew so little about him and felt compelled to learn (as had once been the case for me with an American painter that Roerich’s life and work reminds me of, Rockwell Kent). I had seen paintings of his over the years in books and magazines and had sensed there was something in his work that would speak to me if I could see the paintings full size in a museum setting. And there was. It emerged from a vivid, 34×46-inch tempera-on-canvas painting entitled Remember.

The painting stopped me abruptly. Not because it was more impressive than the other paintings hanging nearby, but because it riveted me like a vision. On the far left is a lone male in dark clothes wearing a yellow vest and astride a white horse. He has risen up in his stirrups to look back while the horse waits. A traveler. On the far right of the painting is a large dwelling—the rider’s home, one might assume. Prayer flags flutter on thin poles above these quarters, and two women, one bearing a water jar on her head, stand before the house looking toward the rider, perhaps a wife and daughter. All else is space—the bare ground between the rider and the women and the spectacular, rising blue walls of the Himalaya, a backdrop of vertical land, its jagged peaks white with snow. The painting is about space as much as it is about departure, and few pieces I’ve ever seen say so poignantly how one’s memory is activated by leave-taking. The rider has turned to gaze back at the women and the dwelling. The waiting horse faces in the direction of the rider’s destination. The middle ground of the painting is rendered imprecisely, almost abstractly. The serigraphed foothills suggest the great depth of this particular landscape, which finally towers in the distance.

Whether Roerich intended for us to reflect on how memory fixes upon those elements of home the departing traveler will most keenly, or most emotionally, recall, or whether his title is an admonition to the rider not to forget those he is leaving behind, I don’t know. It’s enough for me to sense, when I look at this image, that I am being brought immediately into the predicament of departure—the desire so strong to head out, yet at the same time feeling a breach opening, the breaking of a bond that can be repaired only by returning.

What experience might be discovered on the far side of that breach to somehow justify the leaving?

When in 1979 I encountered a traditional group of people for the first time on their home ground, at a small Nunamiut Eskimo village called Anaktuvuk Pass, in Alaska’s Brooks Range, I had among my first thoughts an obvious question: Why did I know so little about these people? I didn’t mean knowledge about their material culture or their hunting techniques or the way they were able to survive in the harsh landscape they’d chosen to live in, but about the way they understood the world. What did they find mysterious but still worthy of their full attention? And whatever that was, did they leave it be or did they pursue it analytically? Were the difficulties and paradoxes of leading a just life the same for them as they were for me? Why was it never mentioned in the good schools I attended that such people saw as deeply into the physical world as the Greek philosophers we were asked to read?

Did they possess attitudes and approaches necessary for survival, which my own culture might have unknowingly thrown away with the onset of modernity—or not even considered to begin with? Why weren’t their insights into life’s predicaments a larger part of the growing international discussion about human fate? Why were their metaphors considered less empirical, less sophisticated, by most people in the cultural West?

My anxiety about this gradually created a sense of urgency. Wherever I have traveled since those first days at Anaktuvuk Pass, I’ve wondered, What is going to happen to us? What is our fate if we do not learn to speak with each other over our cultural divides, with an indifferent natural world bearing down on us?

In writing this book, and in recalling the Roerich painting, I had in mind recounting my experience in five separate places, and believed that this journey through recollection would start at Cape Foulweather. As I began work, however, I felt the insistence of three other places, in each one of which I’d felt an identical and peculiar sense of urgency about humanity’s fate.

It was the same sense of urgency that I imagined the rider in the Roerich painting to be feeling.


IN THE SPRING of 1987 I was traveling down the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Wuhan with a delegation of American writers. The ferry stopped late one night at Yueyang, and most of the passengers—several hundred people—disembarked to purchase food and other items at a public market that had remained open to receive the travelers. The route to the market from the riverbank proceeded up a large, brightly lit cement staircase with dozens of steps. I’d noticed another staircase on disembarking, however, hardly lit at all, but which appeared to lead to the same place. I took that route. The newer staircase must have been constructed to replace the crumbling one I began ascending, and down which a stream of foul water was meandering. I’d gone only a short way before I realized I was climbing through a stream of sewage.

About halfway up the hill I paused before a framed opening larger than a doorway in the wall of a building. On the far side, in a room lit with large candles, a group of six or seven naked men were readying themselves for bed. One man was standing upright in a washtub while another poured rinse water over his head from a metal pitcher. Others were smoking cigarettes and mending clothes. It was a humid night and the bodies of all these men—sinewy, lean, hard—glistened in the candlelight. Bunk beds were arranged on the walls in tiers of three, and several men had already retired. Stevedores, I thought. I could hear water splashing in the tub, the trickle of sewage by my shoes, spilling softly down the steps, and the murmur of conversation coming from the room. It was a scene of human laborers at day’s end, but one that originated in another century. The candlelight in the room did not spill far, and the men, I knew, could not see me standing in darkness on the staircase.

At the top of the stairs I entered the night market. Passengers were haggling over root vegetables—turnips, onions, potatoes—and merchants were shouldering their way through with plastic buckets of butchered meat. Others were carrying strings of ulcerated fish from the Yangtze, water in which I had seen all manner of waste floating (and to my astonishment two endangered Yangtze river dolphins). Live monkeys and other small mammals, hedgehogs among them, stared out from the confines of screened metal cages. In one booth, wicker trays of dead crickets and heaps of caterpillars were on display, beneath a kind of clothesline from which dozens of sparrow-like birds hung by their feet. This was more than the atavistic scenes of medieval meat markets that Pieter Aertsen painted in the sixteenth century. It was the future, the years to come, when we would begin killing and consuming every last living thing.


IN AUGUST 2012, I was serving as a guide and lecturer aboard a Canadian ecotourism vessel in the High Arctic. My habit each day was to get up at five and to take a cup of coffee up to an open deck above the bridge where I could watch birds. I regularly met a couple there who had the same habit, but who were much better birders than I was. The morning I’m thinking about, the ship had turned out of the Parry Channel a few hours before and was heading south into Peel Sound. We were bound for Bellot Strait, a narrow waterway that marks the northernmost shore of the North American mainland. We’d told the passengers that we had a good chance of seeing polar bears there. For some reason it had not yet registered with me how really unusual the scene before me was—entering Peel Sound without an icebreaker escort. In the historical literature of the Arctic, explorers have repeatedly emphasized that Peel Sound is simply not navigable for an unescorted ship, even in summer. It’s always heavily jammed with multiyear ice.

I joined my companions. Neither of them spoke a word of greeting. Nor were they scanning with their binoculars. They were staring blankly into the sound. Three cups of coffee steamed on the small shelf in front of us. I knew this older man and woman had read as much Arctic history as I had, and now I realized what had made them silent. There was not a single ice floe in the waters ahead. Not a scrap of ice. We saw numerous ringed seals and bearded seals swimming there, but the polar bears we’d been certain we’d find hunting those seals were nowhere to be seen. Their hunting platforms were gone.

I thought of the passengers below, who had been asking from the start of our journey in west Greenland whether we were going to see any evidence of global climate change, about which the Greenlandic Eskimos had expressed such consternation.


IN THE SUMMER of 2007, I was traveling in Afghanistan. I’d gone to Kabul to visit a woman I’d met at a conference in Ubud, Bali, the year before. She was the head of the Red Crescent there and had invited me to stay with her family if I ever came through. One day she took me to her offices at the edge of the city. I visited with some of the people being cared for there, many of them victims of the war. At some point she introduced me to a man about my own age and then returned to her office. He and I continued to walk around the grounds of the compound, talking about the plight of the people there and about his work. We had no particular destination, we were just walking. I assumed we would end up back at his office, where my friend might be waiting for us.

At one point he opened the door to a large building and we entered. Perhaps a corridor here provided a shortcut back to his office. It was quiet in the building’s lofty hallways, which were lit by sunlight from the clerestory windows. As we entered, I saw a woman standing by herself in a broad corridor off to the left. She was wrapped in a bedsheet and leaning against the wall. When she saw us, she began running toward us, the sheet floating behind her like a luffing sail. She was naked, a woman in her fifties, her face one of incomprehension, of both disbelief and wonder. Her mouth worked soundlessly, like a fish out of water. Suddenly she halted. She and I stared at each other without moving. Then she turned and ran back down the corridor.

The man and I walked on. He said those who lived here had been driven mad by the war, mostly women who’d lost children and husbands. Occasionally they manage to get out of their rooms, he said. He seemed to be ashamed and embarrassed, grieved by what we had seen. He hadn’t wanted me to see it.

But I did, and I remember her face to this day.