In his journal, Emerson wrote: “Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis….We dive & reappear in new places.”
At latitude 81° north, longitude 30° west, it was just past ten in the morning on the first day of July 2001 when I hoisted a sixty-pound pack on my back, more than half my weight. In the company of six other seasoned northern travelers and the photographer David McLain, I followed Dennis Schmitt across Warming Land, a triangular peninsula on the northwest tip of Greenland, five hundred miles north of the northernmost inhabited village in the world, and five hundred miles south of the North Pole.
Warming Land was named after a Danish botanist, though at that latitude, hardly anything grows. The trip would last three to four weeks—the entirety of what passes for summer.
“Only glaciers have walked here,” Dennis said. His hiking boots were old and only half-laced, and a pair of ski goggles hung on stretched elastic around his neck. “We are going to a land where, as far as I know, no human has ever set foot. You will base your well-being on each other, and we will travel as a miniature society for three or four weeks in what will seem like a small lifetime.”
Sandy-haired, paunchy, disheveled, Dennis had a genius IQ and an irreverent restlessness. He’d divided his life between Arctic exploration and music composition. He had left home at seventeen and lived with a widow at Anaktuvuk Pass in Alaska, learned Inuktitut, and began making first ascents of Arctic mountains, including the 13,176 foot-high Mount Marcus Baker in the Chugach Mountains plus others in the Brooks Range. He returned home to get his degree in anthropology and linguistics at Cal Berkeley, and on the side, he composed classical music.
The Arctic kept calling—a kind of polar madness propelled him. “My focus had been Arctic Canada. I climbed on Baffin Island and northern Ellesmere Island, and as soon as northern Greenland was opened to outsiders in 1995, I immediately explored Wulff Land, Oodaaq Island, Kaffeklubben Island, and Cape Morris Jesup, where I climbed the most northerly mountain in the world.” From these weather-layered ascents, Dennis wrote contemporary symphonies whose movements replicated the movements of his feet up and down remote unnamed mountains.
On the flight north from Resolute, Nunavut, in a fat-tired Twin Otter, the two pilots clipped an aeronautical map between them that Dennis had already calculated was off by eleven miles. Northern Greenland had not yet been mapped. “We navigate the old-fashioned way,” one of the pilots said, smiling and pointing to the sextant bolted onto the top of the instrument panel.
The Greenland-born explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen wrote in his notes during his near-fatal 1917 expedition to the top of Greenland: “Quite near us we saw St. George’s Fjord, narrow as a river of ice cutting into the land, encircled by high mountains….There is a breadth here and a depth, a wild mountain grandeur. “
Eighty-four Julys later, our group began a journey across what Dennis described as “an Arctic Yosemite,” with dihedral buttresses, polar glaciers, and fast-moving rivers. Hunger was the greatest challenge for Rasmussen; I wondered if it would be the same for us. Before we left Resolute, Dennis suggested we each eat a whole rasher of bacon. “You’ll need the fat,” he said. And we did.
On our six-hour flight northeast, Dennis lurched from side to side, pointing out places where he had wandered. On the left side of the plane, Ellesmere Island was scalloped mountains, giant snowfields, blue-blasted crevasses, and fluted channels of ice. On the right, Lake Hazen sparkled. Under us, the Kennedy Channel was choked with upended slabs of pressure ice and pocked with decapitated icebergs and scuds of drifting snow. Hall Basin’s L-shaped beach was crowded with pancake ice. The cracks between platelets had already begun freezing, reminding us that “summer weather” at this latitude was brief—perhaps no more than twenty days.
After a long, airborne reconnoiter through narrow canyons and over glaciers, we landed on a wide plain near Saint George Fjord. I stood in place and did a three-sixty: down-sweeping tawny cliffs, bright ice tongues between what looked like brown buttocks, tight-joined limestone underfoot, calved ice drifting toward the channel. An all-encompassing silence descended. “This is Warming Land,” Dennis whispered in my ear. We pitched tents, boiled water, drank soup and tea. All night the fjord held sun like a silver knife; the top of Hendrik Island was a gold hat. It was there that the Inuit hunter Hendrik Olsen had disappeared. He was Knud Rasmussen’s favorite team member, the best hunter of the group. He had gone to the island to get a seal and was never seen again.
In the morning I heard Dennis’s sweet voice: “It’s time. Don’t worry, we’re just going for a little walk.” We hoisted our packs. Underfoot, calcified limestone made a firm floor. Farther on, frost-heaved rock erupted into patterns: sorted polygons and circles of “fines,” smaller rocks surrounded by larger cobblestones as if a mosaic-maker had been through. Instead of traveling the sea ice by dogsled, we made our way on foot over felsenmeer, “sea of rocks.” For navigation we had only a satellite photograph taken from twenty-eight thousand feet. There were frigid rivers to cross and glaciers. We practiced self-arrests with ice axes; our crampons were tied onto the tops of our packs.
The first day we leapt across a five-foot-wide gorge of roiling water and trudged over a mountain topped with “quickmud,” sinking to our knees in thawing lobes of earth. Where mud mixed with ice, we glissaded. Life at this latitude was almost nonexistent, except for the redpoll we saw atop a boulder. Brown with a red cap and a pink breast, this bird survives the Arctic winters by storing seed in its esophageal pocket and taking shelter in lemming burrows.
To step on land that perhaps had never felt a human foot—I had thought that was a privilege for those going to the moon. From the notes Rasmussen made during his Second Thule Expedition, I couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t traversed Warming Land on his way home from his disastrous, hunger-filled journey. That made this arduous trip even better for me: to think that the man from whom I’d learned the most about Arctic culture had been there too and that, perhaps, our paths were overlapping.
While taking a drink of water from a roaring glacier-fed river, I fingered a piece of fossilized coral. This had once been a shallow sea. Now it was a polar desert. Arctic willow was splayed out flat on the ground as if trellised there. Nothing grew more than two inches off the ground.
I spied a woolly bear caterpillar basking in the sun. This type of caterpillar grows so slowly it can take fourteen years to develop. The woolly bear caterpillar freezes solid in the winter, finally pupating and emerging as a butterfly, then lives so hurriedly, it doesn’t even bother to eat; it simply has sex, and as soon as there’s a hard frost, it dies.
We came into a long U-shaped valley. Cliffs swept down, tawny and red, and a fast-flowing river pooled on marble slabs, spun, and fell. Everywhere we could see how ice had made this place. Glacier ice had scratched, scoured, abraded, and polished every surface and hollowed out whole valleys, cut deep lakes. The canyon deepened as we walked. On one side a glacier’s crumbling edge broke into turquoise spears.
I stopped once to rest and looked up: above was a hanging valley with its own tiny ice cap melting into a wispy waterfall. Ahead was a half dome—the counterpart of El Capitan but made of limestone, not granite. “This is what Yosemite must have looked like during the ice age,” Dennis said admiringly. He slumped down against a rock, furiously scribbling a few bars of music, then said: “This is the place I feel most at home.”
Every day was a long hike up and over mountains and ice. When we crossed wide frigid rivers, we took off our boots and pulled on neoprene “socks” worn with Teva sandals. Before stepping into the water, we unstrapped our backpacks in case we fell so the weight of them wouldn’t cause us to drown. But on the other hand, if we lost our gear and food, we’d die anyway, so we didn’t let it happen. We linked arms or used our trekking poles for stability, and slowly made our way across with our pants pulled up over the knee—anything to keep our clothes dry. Sun out. No wind. “It’s the kind of silence in which you can hear the rocks getting old,” Chuck, one of our group, said. We followed the edge of a lake. During a rest I took off my boots and wiggled my raw toes, then doctored the abrasions and blisters. We heard water falling stereophonically: the remnants of the last ice age melting. A hundred tiny streams wormed their way through gravel; where water leaked down the two-thousand-foot-high scarp, the rock face was black and gold. “Here we are at the end of time,” I said to no one in particular.
Four days in and I was already feeling hunger. I’d come from a high-protein meat diet in Africa to one that was only candy bars and dried soup. I had packets of crackers and cookies and one sausage that I rationed. One slice a day—that’s all I permitted myself. As we walked the deep glacial trench, we saw no scat, no spoor, no animals. We were the only megafauna around.
Thick mats of saxifrage covered the rocks. Saxifrage is derived from the Latin for “rock-breaking herb”; the plant has an uncanny power to burst through the calcium-rich limestone latticework. Purple saxifrage evolved in the high Arctic. Its buds overwinter, so as soon as the snow melts in June, flowering can occur. Three or four weeks later, the ripened seeds cross-fertilize if there is a bumblebee or a butterfly around. If not, the male anthers grow long, bend inward, and as soon as a gust of wind pushes them toward the female stigma, pollination occurs. When purple saxifrage is in bloom, elsewhere, on the southern part of Ellesmere Island, caribou are calving. The entire season of one plant is thirty days.
Thinking of those botanical adaptations, I regretted how ill prepared we humans are. Survival was on our minds—not that I was frightened of our deep isolation. I was simply vigilant. But I rationed my food too earnestly and discovered that the salami I’d brought had gone bad.
Everything solid that I’d been able to carry—crackers, cookies, candy bars—was gone by the end of the second week. Hunger woke me: I stood outside my tent and licked the pockets of my parka for crumbs. Nights were below freezing. Days were barely above. It was always light.
Hunger became an ally. My metabolism changed and my understanding of this land changed with it. On the night the wind howled, our tents rattled like bones. We were camped by a string lake. Pans of ice made of bunched crystals floated by. Pale green on top, the clear sides looked like see-through rows of teeth. When the sun came, the bunched stalks disintegrated: deconstructed chandeliers. I heard music—not Dennis’s but candle-ice tinkling. The whole lake chimed.
Lying on top of my sleeping bag by the water, I lost track of my body. I wasn’t floating—there was nothing mysterious going on—but something had let go inside me. The weight of my boots, my abraded heels, ankles, and toes ceased to hurt and no longer impeded my journey. I had entered a trance state. The equation was this: hunger + beauty = movement. I wanted only to keep going.
Some days we crossed musk ox tracks, but they were old. There were no seals in the fjords, no fish in the lakes or tarns. It was easy to see why Rasmussen’s crew starved. Boundaries gone, an “anything’s possible” mindset took over. References to what was or what could be seemed confining. I had come unfastened.
Every day I felt stronger. Every day I lost one pound. Dennis showed me the rumpled pages of his new symphony’s first movement and hummed it directly into my ear as we walked. The music was a wild continuum that matched this place: icy and percussive with bold, strident progressions followed by melting harmonics. At the same time, I began hallucinating. Sprays of light shot out from the ends of my fingers, and each time my feet pressed down, a chord sounded. The earth was an instrument, and my walking on it made music that only I could hear.
Exhausted and cold, my eyes were drenched; I felt ecstatic. Along the way, Dennis and I stopped to stare at a revetment. High up on a wall was a huge cave. “Big enough to live in,” Dennis said. “Big enough for a Steinway?” Chuck asked, teasing, but Dennis didn’t hear. He was already shuffling through and marking his battered sheaves of music.
A waterfall pulsed off a wide lip of rock rounded by thousands of years of tumbling. For days we’d been walking uphill. Now we were on the other side of a mountain and the vegetation became even more sparse. Rock prevailed. “I’ve been surprised by its uniformity,” Dennis said. “It’s a monoculture of limestone, an old seabed through which a glacier recently passed.”
Without knowing it, we had entered the protected midsection of a canyon, a platform teetering on the divide. The canyon deepened as we walked alongside a river running by one wall. It was leading us, but I couldn’t have imagined where. Then we entered a great “hall.” An enormous flat spread out before us, a plain of rock. A single glacial erratic big as a house lay in the middle, frost covered and cracked jaggedly in half. Meltwater streams poured from the toes of the glacier on the far side and threaded through the gravelly till, ending in tiny pools that shimmered.
The glacier itself was a rough wall of collapsing pillars chiseled by sun. A piece fell, echoed, went silent. David walked up beside me, his cameras finally at rest. “This is the courtyard of the gods,” he whispered. We were silent for a long time. If ice has a memory, would it ever forget this place?
“Up here you are looking at a geological landscape, the same rocks that were here millions of years ago, but rearranged by glaciers,” Dennis said. “Where we are right now has nothing to do with human time. The word now is meaningless. What we call a year is a tiny framework in a huge sea of time. We are engulfed.”
I lifted my arms. No words came, only images of the Japanese gardens I had once visited: Saihō-ji, Kinkaku-ji, Ryōan-ji. But this place was the font. The whole world was this, embedded in this, had issued from this. It was a place where, as Dōgen said, being and nonbeing are rolled together.
Fresh, original, unvarnished, spontaneous, and old. No hinge that held or released. Some places remind you of nothing and everything at once. That’s what this basin did. We were suspended somewhere between Nyboe Land and the Sherard Osborn Fjord as if suspended by one of Dennis’s musical interludes.
I stepped forward. Would I fall? Water flowed around the toe of my boot, as with the glacier that leaked meltwater from its foot. The basin had a Japanese severity. It was distinct, direct, precise. Yet everything seemed to overlap everything else: crumbling glacier ice, meltwater splashing against pincushions of moss, moss edged by shoaling gravels.
Time to leave. It wasn’t silence but absence descending as I stepped back. No grief, nothing tender, only this hard hall of light and rock. I was tired. We had walked almost the entire unmapped peninsula. At the last moment I turned to bow.
The width of Warming Land is just under forty miles, but the topography is complex. Our only understanding of it came from Dennis’s satellite map. Our feet translated the intellectual “above view” into a blistered, footsore reality. We were often “rimrocked”—unable to get through a mountain pass—and had to turn around and try another way.
Perhaps Knud Rasmussen had seen this place—I hoped he had. But no other human had ever been here, had breathed its crisp air. One very high-altitude airplane—perhaps a spy plane—flew over each night. That’s all. We walked in light, slept in light, walked in light. Each step took us north toward the next fjord.
“Because we go, beauty stays,” the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote. It was getting cold and we had to make camp. After an hour’s walk up-valley, we set our tents by a narrow lake, where we stood for a long time bundled in parkas watching lake ice move. I slept with the tent flap opened and my head pushed outside. A lone glaucous gull, one that we had seen briefly the day before, had followed us there, hoping for food. I had none to give.
I longed for a day of rest, but “mad” Dennis had other ideas. More jittery, obsessed, and withdrawn than ever, he announced that we would be going on a twenty-four-hour-long hike to Sherard Osborn Fjord. We would begin at midnight. “So get some sleep now,” he said cheerfully. When he saw our looks of disbelief, he cajoled us: “It’s only a walk, just a walk….”
A roar woke me. “Avalanche!” David yelled. I dragged myself out of the tent: a piece of the ice cap had fallen, burst midair, and tumbled down but stopped well before it reached us. Later more curds of ice crashed down the rock face. At seven p.m. it rained.
We slept until ten in the evening. Dennis woke us to get ready to go. We ate a snack, then marched off with only our daypacks. Although relatively unencumbered, we were so tired and our feet and ankles were so raw, the feeling of liberation was hardly noticeable. When the temperature dropped suddenly, snow squalls roared over our heads.
Up and over the mountains we went, past entrances to side canyons. There were five river crossings, slow traverses through quickmud and over scree slopes. I no longer tried to avoid pain but slammed my feet down hard, using my spine as a shock absorber. Someone found an Arctic hare’s foot on the ground. “Should we bring it for good luck?” Chuck asked. “We may need it.”
Mist wound around a spire of igneous rock. With an eye out for geological changes, Dennis quipped, “It’s an anomaly, like me.” Another whole canyon system appeared out of the clouds, and its rushing river merged with the one we were following. Curtains of shadow moved across canyon walls as if pushed by an inextinguishable sun.
Along the way David confided that he wasn’t feeling well. “Every time I turn my head, the world spins,” he said. Dennis was so far ahead we couldn’t catch up to tell him we had a problem. His mountain-climbing passion was opulent and out of control.
Helping David, we climbed down the side of a waterfall and up an almost vertical slope. Buttresses flew by. Thousands of feet below, a deep gorge was filled with splashing water and boulders. It was six in the morning when something sticking out of the ground stopped us. A bone, possibly a human femur, surrounded by three flat rocks. Was this a cemetery? I looked for skulls, more skeletal remains, but found nothing. The bone was old—how old? “It may not be human,” Miki said. We listened to her because she was a microbiologist. “I don’t want to disturb it,” she said, and replaced the bone on the ground.
The slope opened up and we entered what looked like a Roman amphitheater: before us were massive blocks of terraced rock in long rows like theater seats, all facing the engorged river below. “Those Romans really got around, didn’t they?” Frank, Miki’s husband said, and yelled out a few lines in Latin. The words echoed. “Yes, they had to be here!” he said, laughing.
David’s dizziness worsened and he sat on the scree. Below was a vertiginous drop to the river. One bad step and you could plunge. We could see where Sherard Osborn Fjord began, and the monolith Dennis wanted to climb—it was just around the bend—but Miki took refuge with David and announced that she couldn’t go any farther. She had started out as the strongest; now she said she was frightened. David’s head was hot. Dennis and Bill, a journalist based in Moscow, had gone on. After a long discussion among Chuck, Frank, Miki, and me, we turned back, one of us on each side of David until, closer to camp, the way flattened out and we could see our tents.
We had been walking for fourteen hours. The pace had slowed to a shuffle. When we finally arrived at camp, we ate a light meal of soup, raisins, and tea. Snow came, and soon our whole world was white—the lion-colored cliffs and the long lake. My yellow three-season tent was the only sun. Dennis had said to wait twenty-four hours before worrying about him, but that was before the storm began.
At some point I crawled out, too oblivious to realize I wasn’t wearing any waterproof gear, and I wandered. Up on a gravel ridge I looked in the direction of the fjord. Would Dennis and Bill find their way back? Would David get better?
The snow was wet and slapped my face. After years of travel out on the ice with Greenland subsistence hunters, I knew how quickly things could turn bad in the Arctic, and a feeling of dread filled me. The stupid, joyful drudgery of the trip had become a daily ritual—walking across the top of the earth on glacial rubble—but how pointless it suddenly seemed.
Rasmussen had gone hungry when he passed through Warming Land. He had to eat most of his dogs, and his botanist, Thorild Wulff, starved to death and was left behind. Was that whose bones we had discovered? Chuck, Frank, Miki, and I had a meeting about what we would do if Dennis and Bill failed to reappear and if David grew sicker. Could we find our way back to where the plane had left us off? Could we carry David?
Voices woke me. It was Dennis and Bill. Thirty-six hours had passed. “It was difficult and thankless,” Dennis said, laughing. “The snowstorm hit when I was on the summit. The front of the monolith was like a diving board—three thousand feet straight down. In the whiteout, I made sure I turned the right way before starting out.”
Bill said, “We were pretty tired. At one point near the bottom, Dennis lay down to drink from the river and dozed off with his head in the water!” To which Dennis replied, “I can sleep anywhere!” Then he dived into his tent to sleep, goggles still on. After a long rest and something to eat, we all started for “home.”
Backpacks lightened, feet bandaged, and inured to pain, we were like horses trotting back to the barn. A dusting of new snow lay on brown palisades. Across a wide valley, alluvial fans aproned out into meltwater deltas chinked with mud the color of deerskin hides. At midnight all but one cloud vanished. The air felt warm and the lake where we camped turned from cerulean to celadon—fine porcelain you could see through as if into the true nature of things.
We slept by a stream. I didn’t bother with the tent. Rock was my bed; walls were made of ice; the roof was changing weather. The snow changed to bright sun and back again. David’s whirling world had slowed. The pace was leisurely, and between river crossings we took wolf naps. The crane fly that had landed on my notebook the week before and walked between words returned. The glaucous gull didn’t. Only one of its feathers remained, stuck between two rocks.
From the river we climbed two thousand feet straight up, only to find that there wasn’t a way to get to the next ridge, so we climbed back down and went around. Before us appeared a steep-sided, squared-off lake walled by an icy terminus that was calving green leaves of ice. We teetered around the edge, then scrambled up a rock face before strapping on crampons and traversing a badly deformed glacier where a fringe of bent icicles hung from its side—proof that the glacier was moving.
At the snout I leaned in to listen. “Can you hear it breathe?” Dennis asked. I nodded: “This is our only keeper of time.” We put our ears to the meltwater ticking. It was summer’s fast clock in a slow geological world.
Beyond the lake we entered a narrow pass of linked tarns. Alpine poppies flapped in the breeze. We stopped to rest in what seemed more like Switzerland than Greenland. The plants were alpine. Chuck, who had carried extra weight for me the entire trip, curled up and napped on a bed of shale—ancient layers of mud that felt much softer than the previous seventy miles of sharp limestone.
A single bumblebee flitted by. The Bombus polaris generates heat by shivering. Only the queen survives the winter. In the spring she hatches out a new colony of workers and starts over again.
The last day of walking was long. For every downhill, there were ten uphills. “Is that mathematically possible?” Miki asked, groaning. She was limping now from a sore Achilles tendon. I thought of the great warrior, Achilles. Miki said she must have been wounded in the heel by Paris’s arrow. We were limping and laughing until finally we walked onto the much-anticipated “runway” where we hoped the Twin Otter would land.
The temperature dropped and we ran up and down the tracks the plane had left weeks before to warm ourselves. Dennis pulled the satellite phone from his pack and called Bradley Air in Resolute. He gave the pilots a concise weather report: “Two-thousand-foot ceiling. Precip starting. Wind from the west at five knots.” The pilots said, “Can’t come. Call tomorrow.”
Dennis paced back and forth humming newly composed bits of his symphony’s first movement, then gave an impromptu disquisition on modern music. “I’ve been using the fugue but taking it further,” he explained. “The emotional and imaginative effect is more important than sticking to a rule. But when it threatens to become noise, I eliminate it. Too much twentieth-century music is based on a mathematical idea that turned out to be unlistenable. Too much density and the human ear can’t stand it. I used the twelve-tone system to create fragmentary effects, like adding a spice—a context for a return to tonality.”
That night we boiled water as usual to make our “add-water” suppers. I was hungry but found I couldn’t eat anything solid—so I gave the few dehydrated meals I’d brought to David. Instead I drank broth and tea and tried to imagine the agony of those who had actually starved up here.
Bad weather closed in and the ceiling dropped from two thousand to five hundred feet. Dennis kept his calls to Resolute short. He had to conserve the batteries. When he called at eight in the morning, the pilots said, “Can’t make it. Call tomorrow,” and we began to wonder whether they would be able to come for us at all.
Day three. The pilot said: “Ceiling too low. Don’t know when or if we’ll be able to get you.” After, Dennis stood before us, ever more disheveled but intensely alert. He ordered everyone to bring out all their food and spread it on the ground so we could calculate how many days we would be able to survive. He looked at the meager array and shook his head. “There must be more,” he said, and burst into the tent of the “quiet couple,” the ones who stayed aloof from the rest of us. He came out holding two stuff sacks full of food: a wheel of cheese, sausages, candy, dehydrated meals. He looked at the couple, furious. “This belongs to all of us!” he said. “And when we get truly short of food, you will not be given any.”
No one spoke. We boiled water and stirred our meager soups. Hard to sleep that night. The sun shone on our hunger. On the fourth day, when Dennis called Resolute, a woman answered the phone. “They left at six this morning. Not sure if they can make it. Can’t refuel at Alert, so bringing fuel barrels.” Click.
We held vigil by the side of the runway all day and into the night as heavy clouds—the ceiling—lowered to the ground. It was cold. With no sun, we were losing hope. I remembered how the two pilots grinned and shook their heads when they left us at the beginning of July. Now my clothes hung on me, and with no hairbrush, my long hair was tangled beyond repair.
We napped in our sleeping bags enshrouded by a cloud. Then we heard a distant noise. It was difficult to know what it was or where it was coming from. We stood silently, backs straight as if at attention. Dennis held his hands behind his ears, then smiled. “It’s them.”
The Twin Otter lifted straight up out of the mist that hung in Saint George Fjord like some monster, made a quarter turn, came straight for us, and landed short on its fat tires. The pilots stepped out. “We did a scud run all the way from Resolute. Couldn’t stop at Alert. Weather bad there. Have to refuel here. We’ll hand down the barrels.”
Ten heavy barrels came down. Hose attached, we took turns hand-pumping fuel into the plane’s tanks over the next few bone-chilling hours, then reloaded the empty barrels back onto the plane. Strapped in and shivering, the pilot turned and said, “Sorry, can’t turn the heat on. Too many fumes.” We wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags and parkas as the plane took off over the frozen channel below.
I was shaking with cold when Dennis wrapped an extra parka around me and hummed the music he had been writing into my ear. We flew over Petermann Glacier, which would soon calve off a block of ice bigger than Manhattan; followed the uninhabited coast of Ellesmere Island; and crossed Nunavut’s eastern archipelago, including Beechey Island, where the remains of Franklin’s starving crew had been found. Dennis had asked the pilots if they would call ahead to Resolute and ask someone to open the kitchen and cook something for us. Anything would do.
All the way to Resolute, Dennis looked back at the country behind us, at the ice-capped triangular lobe that was Warming Land, and Hendrik Island. It was one of the many fingers at the top of Greenland that grasped the last of the earth’s ice.
“It’s not easy to leave,” Dennis said to me. “You could say that polar desolation is my joy. It’s where my music comes from.” Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. “Ice is the god of this place. It’s here that we refresh our souls.”