Return of the iceman

It is more than a generation since the appearance of Barry Lopez’s classic Arctic Dreams. That book’s effortless integration of history, anthropology and ecology, mediated through its author’s radiant prose, introduced a global audience to the frozen north. It freed the frigid ice world from much historical polar literature, conjuring instead landscapes of delicate beauty and extraordinary natural abundance. Lopez also revealed the Arctic as a place of remarkable human achievement, as expressed in the survival skills and spiritual endurance of the indigenous Inuit.

A follow-up has long been anticipated and now, 33 years later, Horizon has finally arrived. It is vast in both scope and size; comprising more than 200,000 words, the book is divided into six geographical sketches, the shortest of which is nearly 60 pages long. The normally reticent Lopez begins his story with a lengthy preamble about his childhood, which offers insights into his career as a global nomad. It seems significant that he grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, close to both America’s Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, and all but one of his six sections are set by the sea.

The first, Cape Foulweather, is on the shores of his adopted home state, Oregon. The second and third are off Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic Circle, and on Ecuador’s Galápagos archipelago. His quest for the remains of early hominids in the Rift Valley of Kenya provides the one inland anomaly. Sections five and six are set largely on the Pacific shores of Australia and the frozen edge of Antarctica, where Lopez joined a scientific expedition in search of meteorites.

These locations supply the backdrop for some of the author’s favourite themes, most notably the adaptation of life to its surrounding environment, and especially the spiritual and physical armouries developed by non-industrial peoples living in the most arduous conditions.