Entry 050: Day 14: Days of Future Past
Tuesday, 28 July 2026. Dahlbreen, Forlandsundet, Longyearbyen.
The breakfast room was empty when I came up, and I had seen it that empty once before. That was day three, when we sailed through the night and half the ship was ill behind the walls and I went up hungry, which felt close to rude at the time. Same room, different cause. We had danced in front of a glacier until two in the morning and it showed. I was up. Nobody else was in a hurry to be. The ship was also running low on things by then. The green salad had gone days earlier and never came back, so the salad bar had become more of a proposal. The Nutella was finished, and after everything that has already been written about me and that Nutella I am not going to stand here and claim it was somebody else. Other items had been getting smaller all week without anybody saying so.
Sarah briefed one landing. An island in front of Dahlbreen, which is the glacier we had spent the previous night dancing in front of, so the party and the last landing of the voyage happened in the same place about eight hours apart. I took a few selfies on deck before we went down, because two weeks in I had started to suspect that photographic evidence of my own existence was thin. I look exhausted in all of them, which is the correct record. The landing opened at half past nine. The island was small and it was getting smaller, because the tide was coming in the whole time we were on it, and there were icebergs sitting up on the rock where the sea had put them and then left. It took several zodiac runs to get us onto a thing that size.
The Rembrandt in front of Dahlbrenn
Beth gave the arrival briefing. I heard none of it. I was standing there with my face pointed the right way and nothing going in, and then I turned and said something to somebody, and Beth said, Richard, what did I just say. I invented an answer on the spot. It was not close. She had me and she knew she had me, and I have not felt that particular temperature in my face since school. Here is why it landed harder than it deserved to. My friend Steffi is a guide. She is from the skydiving days and she knows Beth, and before any of this she gave me one instruction, which is that you listen to the guides. I told Beth about Steffi the day I came aboard. So I turned up with a reference and then spent two weeks trying to be worth it. Rhys had already shouted my name across a beach at Witches Bay with two bears on the wrong side of the water, and I had earned that one by going with him toward the bears instead of back to the zodiac. This was the second time in sixteen days a guide had to get my attention, and it was over nothing, which is what made it worse. All Beth wanted to say was that somebody was setting up a photo shoot on the island. I apologized and went up the rock to get out of everyones way.
I lay down flat up there where nobody could see me, so I thought. Below me the others were spread across the rock in a way I had not seen all trip. Christina lying down. Hattie sitting. Cathleen sitting. Ling-lin at the edge looking into the water. I took six photographs from that island in three and a half minutes and then I stopped.
Photo: Christina Olson
I wrote something before this trip about the way I live, which is in the future or in the past, with the present as the corridor I move through on my way to somewhere else. Part of why I went north was to find out whether I could stop doing that. For thirteen days it worked. I was in the place I was in. On the fourteenth the future came back and started making arrangements. What I was going to do when I got home. What I was going to do about several things that have nothing to do with the Arctic and everything to do with a week in Denmark before I ever boarded this ship. I lay on a rock in front of a glacier with my eyes shut, trying to sleep and not sleeping, and none of it would stay outside. Christina took a photograph of me lying there with the ship on the water behind me and the ice wall behind that. It is the best picture of me that exists and I did not know it was happening. It is my profile photograph now, which means the face I show the internet belongs to somebody failing to handle going home.
Then I got up, walked down, said something to Cathleen, heard a zodiac coming and thought, I am gonna skedaddle. First one off the island. Possibly Ling-lin too, although I would not swear to it. Everybody else stayed out there for another three hours.
The ship was mine for a while, which had not happened once. I showered. I laid out my gear. Our bags came back up from storage that afternoon and the instruction was that we were off by nine the following morning with everything packed, and cabin five is not a room where two men can pack at the same time, so Gergő and I were going to have to take shifts and he was still on the island. I took the head start. Then I went round photographing the inside of the boat, which I had started the day before and could not leave alone. The day sheets were stacked at the buffet, every day of the voyage sitting on top of the one before it, and I peeled them off and photographed each one. Sarah gave me her full log afterwards, which is why the dates and the water temperatures in these entries are correct and my memory is not doing the work. I had also bought a small version of the big route map taped round the pillar and had been drawing our track onto it and collecting signatures for a few days. By the end I had every artist and every guide on it. It is framed now and one of my best souvenirs.
We left the glacier after a late lunch, and in the middle of the afternoon the wind came. Northwest four to five in Forlandsundet. The crew had promised that if it ever showed up again they would use it, and they used it. Main sail, fore staysail, inner jib, outer jib, and an hour later the topsails and the flying jib as well. There were more than enough hands on the ropes, so I stayed out of the way and watched. I had been useless with rope for two weeks and I saw no reason to break the streak on the last afternoon.
Everything came down as we moved into Isfjorden, and then the crew thank-you happened on the foredeck. Champagne, all of us out there, Joachim talking and then Sarah talking, the sun low and the water going silver behind them. A minke came up off the side while it was going on. I saw it and did nothing about it, which after two weeks at five hundred millimetres counts as growth.
Joachim and then Sarah talking.
The last presentations came after that, and Sarah went last. Sarah ran that expedition, wrote the day sheets by hand every night, kept the log, picked the ice, made every landing possible and got twenty-eight people around Svalbard and back. She also makes photographs under the name Alma Noor, there are nine bodies of work on her site, and not one of us had the faintest idea. She spent sixteen days making everybody else's work possible and then stood up at the end and showed her own. There aren’t enough words to describe Sarah. Thorough, fearless, ten steps ahead of the room, and curious about every single person on that boat. Rhys and Beth and Lisa were superb and I would go anywhere with any of them. Sarah is something else again.
Making faces with Gergő and Cathleen. Last evening at the bar. Photos: Christina Olson
There was a signed poster hanging by Victoria's bar from some earlier voyage, and I had asked her whether we could do one. She printed the polar bear Maggie had drawn and we all signed it. It is titled The Wild Ones, which is what Sarah had been calling this group since the first week, back when it was a joke about bear magnets and before anybody understood how right she was. I taped it up next to the bar and I hope it is still hanging there. Then the bar tab. Fourteen days of it, settled in cash off a sheet of paper with my own handwriting on it. There was a box for tipping the crew and an envelope each. You could put a card through instead, but I had a pocket full of euros that Svalbard had given me no use for, so cash it was. Then I did one more thing. Somewhere in cabin five there is a Ghosts of the Ice sticker in a spot nobody is going to find. Two weeks photographing things on their way out, and on the last afternoon I hid something on that ship that is meant to stay. Who will ever find it? If Victoria and Sarah are reading this, they might be the only ones.
We came into Longyearbyen at five minutes to midnight and I was not on deck to see it. Sixteen days aimed at that harbour and we came back into it at midnight in full sun like thieves who had not thought the plan through, which suited me, because I did not want to be brought back at all.
“Forever is composed of Nows”
