As the heat of another Texas summer deepens and prolongs – now almost six months without cease – I turn each year, for an emotional respite, to reading books about polar exploration and natural history.  In the last few days I’ve returned to “Arctic Dreams” by Barry Lopez, now 30 years since its first release.  I believe it stands at the pinnacle of achievement in the literature of American natural history.  I first read it in 1988, when it provided good company during a six-month stint on a ship sailing between Central and South American ports.  Reading it now, I feel as if I’ve been reunited with an old friend.

Lopez selects a single topic for each chapter in the book: marine life; Inuit culture; land and perception; etc.  Chapter 8, a synopsis of European exploration of arctic regions, concludes with a passage that takes my breath away, and which rewards with each re-reading:

“I think we can hardly reconstruct the terror of it, the single-minded belief in something beyond the self.  Davis [John Davis, English mariner and arctic explorer] wrote of the wild coasts he surveyed that he believed God had made no land that was not amenable, that there were no wastelands.

“Walking along the beach, remembering Brendan’s deference and Parry’s and Davis’s voyages, I could only think what exquisite moments these must have been.  Inescapable hardship transcended by a desire for spiritual elevation, or the desire to understand, to comprehend what lay in darkness.  I thought of some of the men at Winter Harbor with Parry.  What dreams there must have been that were never written down, that did not make that journey south with Parry in the coach, but remained in the heart.  The kind of dreams that give a whole life its bearing, what a person intends it should be, having seen those coasts.”