Lost Souls: Finding Hope In The Heart Of Darkness

DISORIENTATION The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; . . . and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable, it is alternately stone in you and star. Rainer Maria Rilke,"Evening" The herd of caribou seemed to stand fifty feet tall at the shoulder, towering over the tundra like mammoths from a lost epoch. Behind it were the ragged mountains of the Brooks Range, their peaks dusted with snow from a recent storm and hammered as flat as anvils. And on the other side of the mountains, to the south, was the start of the North American continent, a vast, unbroken expanse teeming with rivers, forests, and wildlife. I turned to face the north. The union of the midnight sun and arctic temperatures created the fata morgana, mirages that made objects even at a great distance appear enormous and exaggerated. Before me was the Beaufort Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean. At the horizon, looming like a gigantic white fortress, was the beginning of the polar ice cap, the very roof of the world. It seemed as if it were about to crash down on top of me. I was standing on Icy Reef, a band of small islands almost three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle that forms a fragile barrier between the Alaskan mainland and the frigid sea above it. The reef itself is just a strip of exposed rocks, gravel, and sand, no more than twenty yards in width and barely above the water line. There were logs all around me, spit out into the treeless region via river drainages from the interior's boreal forests. Smoothed by the currents and bleached by the near-incessant sun, they blanketed the shore with what looked like shards of bone. At certain points along the reef, not more than a mile or so separated what were in essence two radically different worlds. To the south was a panorama of color -- mountains, tundra, wild flowers, and animals on the mainland. To the north, nothing but the stark monochrome of the Arctic Ocean, dappled by jagged chunks of white ice that had broken off from the summer ice pack not far away. I could feel the powerful tension in these extreme contrasts. If I turned in one direction, I faced a great land bursting with vitality. If I shifted toward the other, I confronted a seemingly endless abyss of gray. It was as if, without flimsy Icy Reef standing guard between the two, these worlds would violently collide with each other, a cataclysm of south and north, earth and ice, movement and stasis that might set off a chain reaction that could destroy the entire cosmos. It wasn't just a sensory overload -- it was an existential one, too. For me, the reef became a metaphor for the human condition. I may have been standing on a sliver of silt, but I also straddled the cradle and the grave. The overwhelming images and optical illusions brought me to the limits of my faculties of perception, but it was awareness of the paradox of my own existence -- a paradox that took concrete form in the environment surrounding me -- that carried me to the terminus of rational comprehension. I had reached the Borderline, the murky boundary between life and death. I became confused, disoriented. A jumble of questions crammed my brain, queries that the sea and sky did not, or would not, answer: Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going? As remote and inaccessible a location as Icy Reef was, I understood exactly where I was on the globe. What I no longer knew was my place in creation. That feeling of being lost on the most basic level is one that seeps into all of us at some point in our lives. It transcends place and time, culture and history. Artists and thinkers have tried to capture this phenomenon, sometimes in moments of soul-searching and sometimes in burGoldstein, Niles Elliot is the author of 'Lost Souls: Finding Hope In The Heart Of Darkness' with ISBN 9780609610374 and ISBN 0609610376.