He circles one more time, giving us all a good look, then bears northwest for Barter Island and Kaktovik, over the last foothills and two thousand feet above the coastal plain. Well, I’m thinking, now I’m satisfied. Now I’ve seen it, the secret of the essence of the riddle of the Spirit of the Arctic—the flowering of life, of life wild, free and abundant, in the midst of the hardest, cruelest land on the northern half of Earth.

And then, as we approach the coast and the tiny island at its edge, the frozen sea appears again, the ocean of ice, the crescent rim of whiteness stretching on, and on, and on, unbroken, apparently unlimited, toward the hazy stillness of the polar climax—and beyond. What can I say of that? The vision chills both thought and emotion.

What can I say except confess that I have seen but little of the real North, and of that little understood less. The planet is bigger than we ever imagined. The world is colder, more ancient, more strange and more mysterious than we had dreamed. And we puny human creatures with our many tools and toys and fears and hopes make only one small leaf on the great efflorescing tree of life.

Too much. No equation however organic, no prose however royally purple, can bracket our world within the boundaries of mind.

So what. “Gil,” I say. “Doctor Gil Zemansky.”

“Yes?” he says.

“Buy us a beer in downtown Kaktovik.”

“I’ll buy two,” says Gil. “One for you and one for me.”

River Solitaire

A Daybook

AT SATURDAY NOON, on November third, a few days before the last general election, I rowed a small skiff into the current of the Colorado River, near the town of Moab, Utah, and disappeared for ten days.

By choice. Since I lacked the power to make a somewhat disagreeable world of public events disappear, I chose to disappear from that world myself. This was easily arranged. Nobody goes down the river—not the turbid, muddy, freezing snowmelt of the Colorado—in November. I was assured of having the river to myself. I preferred this kind of solitude not out of selfishness but out of generosity; in my sullen mood I was doing my fellow humans (such as they are) a favor by going away.

A friend from Moab saw me off. Another friend—Ken Sanders—would meet me at the end of my solo journey, seventy miles downstream at a nowhere place known as Spanish Bottom. From there we planned to run the rest of the river together, my little rowboat following his big pontoon raft through Cataract Canyon, rejoining American culture (such as it is) at the Hite Marina on Lake Powell.

In my boat I carried enough food for two weeks, a one-man tent, a sleeping bag, some warm clothes in a rubberized bag, five gallons of drinking water and the many other little items needed for a week or more in the wilds—cigars, bourbon, the Portable Tolstoy, matches, Demerol tablets, pen, notebook, a .357 and a P-38.