Time to Eat the Dogs
On Science, History, and ExplorationAutumn
Autumn in Bavaria, Wassily Kandinsky, 1908
Poets coo about autumn as a gentle season, a time of harvests and golden light. It is Dickinson’s cool orchard where “the berry’s cheeks are plumper” and Keats’ quiet time scattered with grain “drows’d with the fume of poppies.”
But berries and poppies have no place in my autumn, which announces itself to summer like an air-raid siren. Deadlines have arrived for two articles (on Mars and the historiography of exploration). Copy edits for a third are overdue. My book project, drows’d with the fumes of neglect, crawls into a corner to die. Students flutter and spin towards my office like falling leaves. Classes begin in three days.
Wonderful, wonderful posts wait to be written, to be plucked from the golden orchards of science and exploration. They hang unripe, waiting for more pesticide.
So no deep thoughts today, just some links that I’ve found:
Apollo 11 Launch, 1969. http://launiusr.wordpress.com/
Roger Launius’s Blog. Launius is a sharp historian who focuses on the history of space exploration. I’m currently reading his book Robots in Space and was excited to see that he has entered the blogosphere. If you want my recommendation of things to read on his site, check out his piece on the popularity of the Apollo Program.
Jaipreet Virdi http://jaivirdi.wordpress.com/
From the Hands of Quacks. Jaipreet Virdi’s history of science blog covers a number of topics, from history of medicine to the challenges of being a grad student. It’s got a nice list of links too.
Jesse Bering http://www.scientificamerican.com
Bering in Mind I can’t think of a way of connecting Bering’s research psychology blog to exploration, so I won’t try. I like his pithy writing style and spin on contemporary issues from a variety of perspectives including evolutionary biology. His latest post on polyamory is also well-done in pointing out the widespread use of the naturalistic fallacy in defending human sex behaviors.
Cosmic Variance. A group blog on physics and astrophysics that is hosted by Discover magazine. The posts often give a lot more depth and perspective on astronomical discoveries than regular media outlets provide.
Ok, done. May your autumn be filled with berries and poppies – or poppy derivatives – as your needs dictate.
The Discovery of HMS Investigator
HMS Investigator
In 1845, Sir John Franklin and 128 men sailed into the Arctic aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in search of the Northwest Passage. They were never heard from again. The mystery of the search for Franklin took decades to solve. Theories about the causes of the expedition’s demise continue to the present.
The irony of the Franklin expedition is that it accomplished more in failure than it ever could have in success. The disappearance of the party sparked dozens of relief expeditions from Britain and led to a comprehensive survey of the Canadian Arctic archipelago and its native peoples.
For the United States, which entered the search effort in 1850, the rescue of Franklin became the driving force for U.S. exploration of the Arctic, a 60-year effort that established the polar regions as next frontier after the American west.
Last week an expedition organized by Parks Canada found HMS Investigator which set out to find the Franklin party in 1850. In taking up the search for Investigator, Parks Canada made itself a part of the 150 year old legacy of the Franklin search. It also established a place in a much larger lost-explorer theme that became dominant in the 19th century as explorers set out to find other explorers who had gone missing.
Yet in his editorial about the discovery, Canadian Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice is eager to point the different, distinctly modern, uniquely Canadian elements of the Parks Canada search.
Jim Prentice, Canadian Minister of the Environment
First, it was done on the cheap:
This modern-day expedition was typically Canadian: quietly conceived and carried out on a modest budget from an unassuming cluster of 10 orange Mountain Equipment Co-op tents scattered on the rocky shore of Mercy Bay.
Second, the crew was quintessentially Canadian:
The senior marine archaeologist manning the sonar was Calgary-born Ryan Harris. Alongside him were archaeologists Jonathan Moore, who hails from Kingston, Ont., and Thierry Boyer of Montreal. Also present was soft-spoken John Lucas, a Canadian of Inuit ancestry and the senior Parks Canada officer for Aulavik National Park.
With some substitutions of names and technology, this statement sounds a lot like the patriotic boosterism of the British Admiralty or the American Geographical Society 150 years ago.
Ultimately Prentise’s interest in showing this effort as ‘exceptionally’ Canadian make it sound a lot like other efforts in 19th century frontier conquering. While their are the usual nods to the importance of archeology and the history of indigenous peoples, he ends his editorial on the subject that was of highest importance to the Great Powers in the late 1800s: territorial rights.
Most importantly, however, the quest for the Investigator celebrates our Arctic heritage and speaks to the exercise of our sovereignty in the Arctic Archipelago today.
Things change, things stay the same.
Most importantly, however, the quest for the Investigator celebrates our Arctic heritage and speaks to the exercise of our sovereignty in the Arctic Archipelago today.
Radio, Audience, and Exploration
John Dankosky, host of Where We Live, WNPR 90.5
Writing is lonely work. But it is not always solitary. Despite the isolation that I sometimes feel pounding out text on my laptop, I work in the presence of an audience, or rather, a perceived audience. The perceived audience is a tough crowd usually, tougher than the real one. It is with me as I write this — sitting at the oak table at the Eastham Public Library– watching me.
My perceived audience is made up of three groups: academics who work on the same subject as me (I know their names and see their faces), academics who work in the same or overlapping disciplines (hazier) and everybody else: non-specialists who are interested in the Arctic, or exploration, or who typed in the wrong search term on Google.
In graduate school, I paid attention to the first two groups. In particular, I tried to interpret the reactions of the specialists. Nothing that I wrote, at that point, seemed likely to find its way into the hands of lay readers, so I didn’t trouble myself with them.
Mapping out a graduate essay was like planning a war game: anticipating threats and finding tactical responses. I became adept at different weapon systems. My arsenal included the obscure, the arcane, and the highly theoretical.
Planning papers in graduate school.
This has changed over the last decade as I have started writing and lecturing for a broader audience. The lay audience that once sat at the back of the room has edged closer to the front. This is not simply because they make up a larger percentage of my readership.
It is because they ask the best questions.
For example, last week I was a guest on WNPR’s Where We Live show about exploration. No one who produced or called in to the show was a specialist or an academic. Nor was the host, John Dankosky, an exploration expert (although he’s a whip-smart journalist).
In the studio
Yet the questions were tough and incisive. “At the beginning of the 21st century, what’s left to explore?” “Do Americans have a special relationship with exploration?”
Dankosky raised one of the best questions after the show was over. “Why do politicians defend human space flight as a jobs program for engineers and astronauts? Aren’t these the windfalls of discovery rather than the heart? Would we defend money given to artists through National Endowments for the Arts as a great way to employ artists?
A very good question.
You can listen to the full show here.
Field Notes: Naryan-Mar
Waterfront at midnight in Naryan-Mar, 24 June 2010
The town of Naryan-Mar sits at the apex of the Pechora River delta in the Russian European Arctic. It is the capital of the Nenets Autonomous Okrug (NAO), a Florida-sized region of tundra and taiga at 69° N.
Pechora River Basin. The Pechora flows north into the Barents Sea. Its watershed extends east to the Ural Mountains (bottom right)
In late June, I attended the Arctic Perspectives XXI conference in Naryan-Mar along with participants from Russia, Finland, Canada, and the U.S. We represented many fields: history, geography, anthropology, medicine, and Arctic studies.
Flying into Naryan Mar reminded me of flying into Barrow Alaska at 71° N: both are set in flat landscapes, surrounded by green, marshy tundra that extends to the horizon. Thousands of lakes and ponds mark both regions, and in Naryan-Mar, the Pechora River and its tributaries coil and swirl their way north, like some vast design from the Book of Kells.
Pechora River near the northern delta, 68 N latitude.
Once on the ground, though, it was easy to see the differences between the two towns. The population of Naryan Mar is three times larger than Barrow (which is just over 5,000). Naryan Mar has trees, albeit small ones, while Barrow — at least the Barrow I remember visiting in 2004 – has few life forms apart from dogs, residents, and tundra.
Both cities have benefited from the oil economy of the Arctic, but Naryan-Mar shows the flush of oil money: a new civic center, flat-screen public displays, a new cultural center, and a significant port center.
Downtown Naryan Mar at 1 am
Naryan-Mar also feels more European. While 61% of Barrow residents are Inupiat, only 11% of the NAO are Nenets, the reindeer-herding people who have inhabited this region since the 12th century. (I could not find any demographics for Naryan-Mar itself, but it seemed to follow this ratio). 67% of Naryan-Mar residents are Caucasian.
The conference sessions presented some terrific work — on polar medicine, energy competition and independence, Arctic nationalism, ecology, and history — yet the differences among the papers made it difficult to find threads strong enough to hold them all together thematically.
Lassi Heininen (University of Lapland) giving lecture translated by Olga Zhitova
Ultimately, though, the conference succeeded less as a place to exposit work than to explore ideas. I offered an paper on the methodology of studying Arctic exploration (which I will present in a later post), a subject that may have been relevant to — at most — one or two other participants. And I did not hear any papers that had a direct bearing on my current work.
Victor Dmitriev (Arctic and Antarctic Institute, St Petersburg) giving a toast.
But the papers – and especially the participants – made a deep impression on me. The feeling of otherness that I described in my last post on Moscow seemed to be reversed in Naryan-Mar. I was surrounded by scholars who love the Arctic, who come to it from different countries and different perspectives, and who desired to communicate their work (and something of themselves) to their peers.
Nenets elder welcomes us to Bugrino settlement, Kolguev Island
Leaving Kolguev Island, Barents Sea, 71 degrees N. latitude
I will never forget it.
Field Notes: Moscow
In the Moscow Metro
As someone who studies travel, and loves to travel, it still makes me feel self-conscious at times to BE a traveler. This is because the experience of travel rarely feels purely experiential to me: sensations of places, people, and things are always mediated by ideas of travel, by my awareness of the histories of exploration, contact, and encounter. In short, I rarely seem to find the “raw feed” of the travel experience. When it arrives, there is always a news ticker scrolling somewhere at the bottom of the screen.
I imagine that psychologists go through something like this when talking to their therapists. Does the shrink-on-the-couch recall her experiences as pure sensory feed, a chronicle of acts and feelings that follow in easy succession? I doubt it. She must be analyzing these acts as she recalls them, “shrinking” her own actions as she relates them to her therapist.
Chris McCandless
This is not unique. One does not have to be a historian of exploration or therapist to weave third-person narratives out of one’s first-person encounters. Chris McCandless, idealistic explorer of Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild, writes a journal about his travels as if they were happening to someone else, an else that McCandless even gives a name “Alex Supertramp.”
In this conscious creation of an alternate self, McCandless is tipping his hand: travel is not really the subject of his drama; it is merely the stage for self-discovery, a platform upon which he (Chris/Alex) acts the part of heroic protagonist and omniscient narrator. Not all travelers are so dramatically inclined, but it does lead us to a broader question: can we ever experience the journey as raw feed of new experience? Is it ever possible to turn the news ticker off really?
And if travel experiences are unavoidably hybrid and impure, jumbled together with ideas about places and our ideas about ourselves, why do they still manage to affect us so deeply? These were the questions that took hold of me in Moscow as I prepared for my journey to Naryan-Mar, a small Arctic city near the Barents Sea in a region known as the Nenets Autonomous Okrug (NAO). I was heading there for the Arctic Perspectives XXI Conference, an international, interdisciplinary gathering of scholars talking about about circumpolar issues in the far north.
By any literary measure, my 48 hours in Moscow were uneventful. I did not get arrested. I wasn’t poisoned or ransomed. I did not suffer from a temporary bout of amnesia. Nor did Moscow resemble the exotic communist fantasy of the Western imagination. The Moscow of 2010 is not Stalin’s Moscow or Gorbachev’s or even Yeltsin’s. It is a modern European capital ablaze with neon, populated by chic clubs and fast food restaurants.
House of the Embankment (Dom Naberezhnoy) during rush hour
And yet I found it amazingly, frighteningly, marvelously other. It was most dramatically other in language. I do not speak more than 50 words of Russian and can only slowly decipher Cyrillic script. But the experience of foreignness went deeper, attaching itself to little things rather than big ones. Circular outlets. Underground crosswalks. Conventions of dress. Codes of conduct in the metro. On the train. In the airport. In the cafe. These are the quotidian marvels that every traveler experiences, the state of being a stranger in a strange land.
Outlet in my hostel room
Yet however small, they are pervasive and all-encompassing. At one level, the traveler sees Moscow as the Muscovite sees it: a landscape of imperial edifices and perpetual motion. Yet for me, it was a landscape of little differences, some of them comprehensible, others not. Yet more affecting was the sense that these surface differences – in language, brand names, architectural style – were the thinnest film over a great well of difference lurking beyond the visible. Who do Russians watch at 11:30pm while Americans are watching the Late Show? When do they file their taxes? What are the Russian equivalents of the televangelist, the road trip, the visit to Burning Man? And if there are no equivalents, what are the Russian customs which defy cultural translation? What are the rhymes that parents sing to their children at night?
How can any traveler fathom the depths of such difference? How many years in Moscow would be required to apprehend it from the inside? And in this feeling of profound otherness, I suspect there is an answer – a partial answer at least – to the question of why we travel even as we are constantly trying to analyze and box what we experience. We adopt these analytical modes — seeing oneself as a character, comparing experiences with other events, recalling background literature — because the experience of difference would otherwise overwhelm us. They give some order – a shabby, imperfect order – to the flood of unfamiliar sights and sounds.
Even those of us who enjoy the vertigo of travel – this feeling of incomprehensible otherness – still need this crutch I think, a way of organizing what we see so we are capable of functioning. And perhaps it is more than just a crutch too. Because in rendering it in familiar terms, the travel experience becomes integrated into the world back home, a part of us despite its unfathomable nature.
Next post: Field Notes: Naryan-Mar
