![]() The sense that at these latitudes every life is earned over millennia.īut all of this is changing. The scale and silence of a glacier pondering its future. At least to foreign eyes, there is an undeniable patience to the long hours. We imagine a timeless place, and it seems to make sense. ![]() Like the expression “frozen in time,” our warm-blooded bias equated metabolism with motion, and motion with speed. These narratives conjure a certain stillness in the landscape, a sense that the Arctic is not merely empty, but slow. The Arctic-where foreigners encounter a sublime landscape, still and pristine where women and men test themselves against the hostile elements where experts sojourn under the banner of science to discover the essence of Nature, and in Nature’s reflection encounter some essential humanity. We often tell stories of the Arctic as though we were on the other side of a frontier that separates it from humanity. “It’s whale,” he said, smiling, and tossed it onto the conveyor belt. It was dark red, almost purple, and cut into a blocky prism. “You know what this is?” he asked with a smile. At the till, he held up a parcel of vacuum-packed meat. Here, in the middle of the Vestfjorden, a fifty-mile-wide bight of the North Sea, we shared a moment of mutual recognition, beholding each other in the stillness of the arctic night.Įarlier that afternoon, I stood in the checkout line of a grocery store with Ole Gunnar, a Norwegian army officer who hosted me in the mainland town of Bødo. Transiting through the twilight, a pod of orcas swam ahead, keeping pace. Even darker shapes, now black, emerged from the water, each bearing a luminous white oval. Shapeless gray clouds strung along the horizon. Around midnight, I stepped out onto the foredeck and into a dimly lit world, devoid of color or shadow. when the passenger ferry departed for the archipelago of Lofoten, along the northwestern coast of Arctic Norway. As Stephen Lezak explores the paradoxical human narratives that overlay the Arctic landscape-a frontier, a paradise, a marker of humanity’s impact on the planet-he bears witness to a place that is teetering in an uneasy balance between eternity and loss.
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