The Sun is a Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds

In life, we’re always closer to the edge than we like to admit, never guaranteed our next breath, never sure of what will follow this moment. We’re human. We’re vulnerable. With love comes the risk of loss. There are a million accidents waiting to happen, future illnesses too terrible to imagine, the potential for the ordinary to turn tragic. This is true in cities and towns as much as it is in the wilderness. But out here we face these facts more clearly, aware of the divide between today and tomorrow. And, for this reason, every day counts.

And so crossing this river has become necessary, in the way that it’s necessary to kiss a lover before leaving, to pause and look up when the moon is rising. Our bodies know what is essential and what is not.

I realize now that staying in one place is not the same as being stuck. We’ve seen so much in the past five months, covering ten or twenty or forty miles at a time. But this isn’t the only way of seeing. Here, it’s the seasons, the animals, the shadows and sounds that change. In the series of paintings Francesco had shown us before leaving, every view of the lake looked slightly different; each cloud, each shade of green, each reflection on the water’s surface colored by the mood of the day. It takes much more than a visitor’s eyes to uncover such subtleties.

A full life, by definition, doesn’t fit into tidy boxes.

to happen, future illnesses too terrible to imagine, the potential for the ordinary to turn tragic. This is true in cities and towns as much as it is in the wilderness. But out here we face these facts more clearly, aware of the divide between today and tomorrow. And, for this reason, every day counts.

No matter the distance or destination, we’re all joined by the most basic of human desires—to see what’s around the next bend.

For many years, we’ve known that birds use the sun as a compass.

How do they find their way over oceans and glaciers, across continents and mountain ranges, without the benefit of a map, compass, or GPS?

In life, we're always closer to the edge than we like to admit, never guaranteed our next breath, never sure of what will follow this moment. We're human. We're vulnerable. With love comes the risk of loss. There are a million accidents waiting to happen, future illnesses too terrible to imagine, the potential for the ordinary to turn tragic. This is true in cities and towns as much as it is in the wilderness. But out here we face these facts more clearly, aware of the divide between today and tomorrow. And for this reason, every day counts.

About Northern Wheatears: ...birds from Alaska flew nine thousand miles to Kenya; those from Canada crossed the Atlantic to spend the winter in Mauritania. For young birds, just a few weeks old, this departure also signals the ultimate coming of age passage. Not only must they soar on brand new wings; they somehow must find their own way. Adults typically depart before the fledgings, leaving them to navigate alone across oceans and continents. If the birds I see make it, they'll leave the company of caribou and musk oxen to sit on the backs of elephants and zebras.

We leave the Haul Road behind and enter a landscape that opens itself to us. Valleys dance beneath the autumn sunlight, and the ground holds firm and solid underfoot. The tussocks that plagued us for weeks have finally given way to bare, lichen-covered slopes. My muscles lengthen and flex with each stride. I have begun to understand what it means to live in constant motion. Like caribou. Like water. Like geese on their long annual migrations.

As a biologist working in Alaska, I’m no stranger to the effects of a warming climate—there are few topics that garner more attention. But my understanding is shifting. From the people we’ve met, the birds and bluffs and storms we’ve seen, I’ve learned a different set of facts. There’s little local interest in discussing hypothetical consequences; the effects are evident here and now. The Arctic as we know it—a land of persistent ice and snow, a home to walruses and polar bears—is quickly becoming legend. The permanence borne of cold, the secrets locked in ten-thousand-year-old frozen soil, erode a little more each day.

Out here, I am half scientist, half disciple. I’ve left the laboratory far behind and, with it, the need to quantify and contain. In its place, I’ve reconnected with the simple act of observation. Watch. Listen. Learn. These were the tenets of the earliest naturalists, the instincts of indigenous people around the globe whose survival depended on knowledge gained from the land. My passion for birds and the natural world also emerged from these basic principles. I fell in love with the image of the sky blocked by kittiwakes flying in perfect synchrony, became intrigued by a chickadee whose beak promised to foretell something about our environment, tuned my ears to the nuances of a warbler’s song. What drew me to research was not the rigor of statistics or the mystery of what lies within an organism’s genetic code. It was the birds themselves.