On this last day of the month, before it is another month and no longer the month that it currently is which aptly is Shameless Promotion Month , I want to draw your attention to just a few of the many foods, animals, and causes that are deemed month-worthy.
Here they are: Honey, Chickens (obviously pertinent), Mold, Mushrooms, People Skills, Subliminal Communications and Pleasure Your Mate.
None of which are particularly relevant to the life to Saint Jerome (342-420), whose feast it is and whom you probably know as the Doctor of the Church who translated the Hebrew Bible.
It turns out that Jerome may be the first – perhaps the only – saint to make note of why it is not a good idea to cry when wearing make-up: rivulets & runnels down the cheeks. He may have spent 4 long years alone in the desert, but he still knew a thing or two about personal hygiene.
Saint Jerome in the Desert, El Greco
“If in a moment of forgetfulness they shed a tear it makes a furrow where it rolls down the painted cheek.” One wonders if he observed this phenomenon in company with Saint Paula, when he was not battling the nasty gossip that circulated about his relations with this rich Roman widow.
Saint Jerome in his Study, Filippino Lippi
Unless the wind blows us away this evening, tomorrow we will discuss various types of honeybee communication: vibrating, piping, and the two types of queen piping: tooting and quacking.

HAVE YOU HUGGED AN ELDER TODAY?

With great sadness I beg to inform my dear readers that this is my last post from the Arctic. I had hoped to tell you about the taxidermy displays and the Russian security check on the gravelly beach in Resolute, on Cornwallis Island. I was hoping to describe the elegant irony of sailing past the DEW line installations (abandoned and otherwise) in a Soviet-made boat. I had also hoped to describe the throat singing in Pond Inlet which I expected to sound like the ululating women in Gondar, Ethiopia, but was altogether different and mesmerizing (Once again You Tube cuts to the chase: just put in ‘throat singing’.), as well as shopping in the Pond Inlet Coop as well as the carcass of the narwhal on the beach (the ONLY narwhal I ever saw, minus the unicorn tusk) as well as the discarded hitchhiker’s sign for Montreal, perhaps the most poignant and mysterious sight of all given that Pond Inlet is at the northern tip of Baffin Island and there are no roads from there to Montreal or anywhere.
But I find myself back in New York, where the chickens have not yet figured out where to lay their eggs and the autumn honey is flowing.

One last thing: a sign from the Kuujjuaq Airport in Nunavik. And many thanks to my intrepid photographer for her willingness to take whatever pictures I asked of her, no questions asked.

Tundra, Tussocks, Pingos & Palsas

If I were not in the Arctic and therefore reading daily from Butler’s Lives of the Saints, I would certainly let you know that today is the feast of Saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660) whom you recognize as the name on all those boxes in supermarket parking lots where you can deposit your old clothes under the illusion that they will go directly to some needy person who will not reject your rejected items as too tight, too loose or too painfully-eighties. And I would likewise tell you that Vincent de Paul, having escaped from his pirate captors, helped the poor, nursed the sick and been generally kind, died of natural causes in Paris. I would add that his story does not end there, as 52 years later his body was found to be incorrupt, then ‘defleshed’ in a flood, leaving only his washed skeleton to serve as his earthly presence. Some enterprising sort, combining the skills of candle-making and taxidermy, then encased the skeleton in a wax effigy to create a suitable display for the Vincentian House in Paris. Though you don’t have to go to Paris to see it: there is always You Tube.

But here in the Arctic, we have geology.
From our portholes on the Lyubov Orlova, we glimpse the steep cliffs and bleak hills of Devon Island (largest uninhabited island on earth, used for Mars-simulation exercises), Bylot Island, and Baffin Island.
It is an abstract landscape, forbidding and secretive. Or so it seems from the ship.
On land, geology becomes the storyteller. We go ashore in the zodiacs (all landings are “wet landings”) and realize that we are standing upon a vast field of polygonal humps in the tundra, frost boils created by millennia of freezing and thawing: the frost-heaving tosses up rocks and then they settle in a pattern as elaborate and defined as a honeycomb.
Frost boils are the commonest form of patterned ground in the Arctic, but you should not think less of them for that.
Pingos are larger and have the character of archeological remnants. They are conical hills with solid clear ice at their center, and I long to use the word in Scrabble. Occasionally someone will mistake a palsa for a young pingo, but that would be a mistake because at its core the palsa has frozen peat. We did not see any palsas so I could not embarrass myself by misidentifying it as a pingo. We did cross landscapes of lumpy peat mounds, spongy hummocks that defied one’s knees, not unlike moguls.

Something of a stretch: How a Pregnant Polar Bear and a Queen Bee are similar

In some mysterious way not fully understood by either mammalogists or entomologists, in both cases the female in question has some control over her internal reproductive system.
Female polar bears will come into estrus in the spring, and mate with a male of the species. But then she will – somehow – delay implantation of the fertilized ova until she has gained enough weight to successfully carry her cubs to term. It is not known how she manages this. Does a certain avoirdupois trigger the implantation? Do hormones do the trick?

The Queen Bee, who busily lays up to 2000 eggs a day during the honey season, must deposit either fertilized or unfertilized egg in the honeycomb cell presented to her by the workers of the hive. They are the ones who make the cells of the correct size, smaller for the worker females, larger for the male drones. The workers decide whether the hive needs more workers, or a few more drones to go out and disseminate their genetic matter. The Queen uses her front legs to gauge the cell’s diameter, and then backs into the cell and as the egg passes through her oviduct, she either fertilizes it or not.


When the Queen was mated on that fateful nuptial flight, she stored all the sperm in her ‘spermatheca’. This is a small sac next to and connected to her vagina via a small duct, through which she will discharge the spermatozoa when she determines to lay a fertilized egg.
We don’t quite know how she does it. What chaos would transpire if we mere humans had that ability?

You can imagine how delighted I was when I learned from our marine mammalogist on board the Lyubov Orlova of this quirk in the reproductive cycle of the polar bear, and quickly saw its tenuous similarity to the case of the Queen Bee. I tried to share my enthusiasm with several other Arctic travelers, but just then there were several thick-billed murres flitting across the sky – and they beckoned more than a Queen Bee’s reproductive talents.

NOT THE PATRON SAINT OF THE ARCTIC

Several people have asked me if there is a patron saint of the Arctic. (This is not technically true; only 2 people asked, but their interest looms large.) And I am sorry to report that there is not.

There are a few saints who are frequently represented with bears. Probably the first was St Cerbonius whom Roman soldiers threw to wild bears to be cruelly slaughtered. Instead, the bears, awed by his sanctity, became docile and licked Cerbonius’ feet.

Then in the 6th century, St Columbanus was looking for a lonely cave in which to pray his lonely prayers. He found such a cave, but it was already occupied by a slumbering bear. The bear, however, agreeably vacated the cave to accommodate St Columbanus.

A century later, both St Corbinian and St Humbert managed to turn ferocious ursines into bellhops: both saints are generally pictured with a bear behind, carrying their luggage.
Were any of the above-mentioned bears of the polar variety? Probably not. But we are grasping at straws here.

Tamed bears aside, it is Saint Brendan the Navigator who is most commonly associated with the Arctic, or voyages that may or may not have arrived at the Arctic regions.
In 484, Brendan was born, significantly, under the Aurora Borealis,in Kerry, Ireland. He grew up in the care of St Ita who made sure he was devout. Mostly, he traveled. In Sabine Baring-Gould’s 8-volume Lives of the British Saints, which devotes about 30,000 words to Brendan, we are told that Brendan’s first voyage came about when St Ita advised him to make himself scarce for a couple of years. Brendan had left a young boy in charge of his boat and the boy had drowned; when his brother went to help him, the brother drowned as well. Assuming that the boys’ family would be seeking revenge from Brendan, absence was suggested.
Whether he was fleeing an angry family, or seeking the Isle of Blessed, Brendan and 14 of his monks built 3 boats out of willow twigs, covered them with hides, and packed food for 40 days. On March 22 they sailed west. How far did they get? Perhaps they made it to Greenland or Newfoundland or Baffin Island. It is unlikely that St Brendan celebrated mass on the back of a whale; though there is a small whale-shaped island off Galway, conveniently called Whale Island, with an inland ‘blowhole’ into which the waves pour in at high tide and spout up.
Pre-Norse Irish books and relics have been found on Iceland. It certainly seems more possible that Brendan and his sailing monks made it to North America, than that Simeon Stylites lived atop a pillar for forty years, and no one doubts that for an instant.

Side note: Brendan’s sister’s name was Briga, and like my sister with a similar name, I can bet that it was frequently either misspelled or mispronounced or both.

ANOTHER LOST ANNIVERSARY

It was 9/11 all day long and far better than considering that THE 9/11 would have been my 25th wedding anniversary had I still been married and all the sadness that goes with that, far better was looking for BOWHEAD WHALES in Isabella Bay Preserve, a bowhead whale sanctuary just south of Cape Raper on the east coast of Baffin Island.
And this is what I learned: How to Look for a Bowhead Whale.
• Stand on deck in the freezing cold (it’s snowing and we are plowing through the Arctic Ocean) and scan the horizon both with and without binoculars
• Discuss the merits of using binoculars or not for whale watching; people can feel very strongly about this. There are those who favor the Scan-the-horizon-with your-bare-eyes technique vs. those who favor Magnified-examination-of-a-limited-area.
• Finally at long last see a blow – this is a bowhead surfacing and expelling warm air; the visible (fan or heart shaped depending on your informant) mist is a result of warm air from the whale’s lungs making contact with the cold atmosphere
• Discuss how much a bowhead’s blow looks like a whitecap (to you, the uninitiated) and then with time learn to distinguish between them, a skill that may have ramifications in later life
• Listen as knowledgeable/seasoned whale watchers count the seconds from the first blow in the certainty that the second blow will come in ten seconds, and then feel stupid when you cannot see the expected blow. And later, upon learning that bowheads can stay underwater for up to an hour, feel even stupider for having thought that second-counting made any sense at all
• Once you have mastered the sighting and identifying of the blow, you begin to see the whale’s body, the black back, the fluke and then the grail of whale watching, the photographable breach –living proof of your cetacean worthiness.

Look very carefully and you may see the blow of a bowhead whale. Or you may not.


Since I cannot produce a picture of a whale, I offer an iceberg and a glacier.

Unless otherwise noted, all Arctic photos are by Brigitte Kingsbury.

I AM NOT SPEAKING OF YOUR LANGUAGE

In a day that did not include a Zodiac landing on Beechey Island to see the graves of the first members of the Franklin Expedition to die, and the only ones to have graves, and then sighting one’s first live polar bear (not counting the Central Park Zoo), the Lyobov Orlova’s lifeboat drill would have been the highlight.
First we gathered in the lounge (the forward lounge where the curtains are always pulled closed and the movement of the ship is magnified and very sick-making and all forms of stomach distress are exacerbated) and heard from the Russian Security Officer. (Have I mentioned that the entire crew of 52 is Russian? The young women are blonde and wear toothpaste-tight jeans. The young men are swarthy, but mostly unseen by us. They all smoke healthy Russian cigarettes somewhere in the bowels of the ship.)
“Good evening ladies gentlemen. I am safety officer on this ship. Unfortunately I am not speaking of your language. I speak only Russian.” Then he launched into his speech – in Russian - that presumably referenced life vests and muster stations and life boats, but could just as well have been his favorite poem by Pushkin, or a dithyramb to his wife's sexual allure.
Then Jason, our Inuit expedition leader, translated. Or we assumed he did.
Five minutes later the bell blasted throughout the ship, and as instructed, we put on our warmest clothes and rubber boats and gathered any life-saving medications we might need on the open seas, and carried our life vests up to our muster station at the stern.
There, Dmitri, Russian Safety Officer, gave another speech in Russian. Jason translated. The sun was shining and icebergs benignly floated and sparkled in the surrounding sea.
Later, my sister, showing off her linguistic talents, said, "Kamillarlutit."
Trying to one-up her, I replied, "Itsavautaup ataaniippallaijuq." Which means, "It's probably under the chair.