I began by asking myself: What are you looking for? Then I walked a thousand miles in one long dream, only to slip on a blank sheet of ice. Standing up, I fell again, this time the Cold War prompted the military to build huge radar dishes, and the island was transformed completely into a military base. This gave Iñupiat jobs on the military’s Distant Early Warning site, but their villages had to be moved yet again, since hunters could be confused for Russian infiltrators entering the Dismal Depths....

from which I emerged nearly two years later shivering and far away from where I began. "Everything seemed distorted by the ice; the distances were impossible to calculate, and the way back passed through a valley of emptiness, with no landmarks available, just miles of rubble."

    In the
    100 years
    of  warming

    the birch grove
    hobbles
    across Route 28
    & up the valley

    toward the
    Arctic Circle

It used to be that one eureka followed another
like a mountain of paradigms with no summit. Not only
haven’t I found a mountain, but Arctic explorers of the early twentieth century
like Robert Peary and even Roland Amundsen often made notes in their diaries and other writings
of the impassivity or inscrutability of Inuit, little understanding that without great emotional self-restraint,
life in Arctic conditions would, for human beings of any kind, be impossible. To be inscrutable, which is to say,
restrained and self-contained in the North there are no horizons; instead, a "cold integrity" prevails.

Facing in one direction, I arrived at a place where there are no directions.