The Dark Came Back
Last night it got dark.
I had not seen that in seventeen days. At that latitude (78°13'N) in July the sun does not set. It circles. Around two in the morning it drops toward the horizon, considers it, and climbs again. You stop checking the time. You start doing things at hours that have no business holding activity. You sketch at one. You are on deck at three a.m. because someone said whales and there were whales. The day has no lid on it. I got used to it faster than I thought I would and then I started to love it, which I did not see coming.
Then the plane came down over Denmark and the windows went black and I sat there looking at it like a man who had never seen night.
So. I am back.
I came off the ship on the twenty-ninth at nine in the morning. Sixteen days on a forty-nine-meter sailing vessel. A full circumnavigation of Svalbard. Tempelfjorden, Hornsund, Agardhbukta, Mohnbukta, Noorderlichtbukta, Murchisonfjorden, Fuglefjorden, Dahlbreen. Names I could not have pronounced a month ago and now know the way you know a street. I have a cold. I have memory cards I have not emptied and a green notebook full of handwriting I can barely read.
Negribreen
There was no signal after Longyearbyen. Sixteen days without news. No feed. No headlines. No opinions about anything. I have not been offline like that since before offline was a word anyone needed.
Here is what I am carrying and cannot yet sort.
Nine polar bears seen by the ship. Five of them close enough that I photographed them. Two polar bears evacuations, which is a word that means everyone back to the zodiacs now, and means it without discussion. Whales at two in the morning. Belugas at midnight on the first night out. Walrus on a beach. Seals that came to the hull and put on a show. A blue fox cub who wanted to come closer than his nerve allowed, running the slope above us, turning to check where we were, turning back.
Landings. Zodiacs. A day of sailing where the wind came and went and came and went and it was one of the best days. Every day was the best day really.
The sound a glacier makes when it lets go. That one does not go into words and I am going to spend some of the next months failing to put it there.
Stones. I did not expect the stones.
And the people. I wrote an entry before I left about boarding with thirty strangers. There were twenty-eight. I did not have the imagination for what two weeks in that space would do. Friendships that should take years. I have no account of how it works and I am not going to attempt one tonight. Christina. Cathleen. Vicki. Maggie. Shannon. Hattie. Annalise. Johanna. Eleanor. Ling-Lin. Seth. Gergö. There are more.
The guides get their own entry. They earned it. Sarah Gerats led them, with Lisa, Beth and Reese. Sarah has been doing this for many many years.
Johanna is one of the artists. She came aboard with plaster and casting materials to take impressions of glacier ice and learned on arrival that the permit she needed was two months out. It should have ended there. It did not end there. Sarah found the way through and the rest of us helped where we could, and I filmed a woman kneeling on floating ice, water on every side of her, pressing plaster into something that will not exist much longer.
On the last morning Sarah said goodbye to each of us, one at a time. Her eyes were wet. So were mine. We had been hers for two weeks and now she had to put us back.
And the crew. Joachim the captain had the helm. Victoria ran the bar and the food and did it with more grace than the hours deserved, and there was not a day she was not the most pleasant person in the room. The rest of them kept a ship running around Svalbard for sixteen days and I never once had to think about it. That is the whole job and they did it.
Maggie had done this before. Two years ago. Same program, same waters. That voyage went up one coast and turned around. They saw no bears at all. We went the whole way around and saw nine. Same program. Same ship. A different world.
I keep returning to that. There is no trip I could send you on that would give you mine.
I read Christiane Ritter on the way north. An Austrian painter who wintered in Svalbard in 1934, the only person in my luggage who had been where I was going. She spent a long time trying to understand what her husband meant about this place. She understood it by standing in it. Not by being told.
That is my problem now.
I am going to write about this for the next sixteen weeks. One day at a time, one entry a week, in order, from the day I arrived to the day I stepped off. Day zero to the last landing. I will do it as well as I am able. And I know starting out that the thing itself does not transfer. You will get the ice and not the cold. The light and not the strangeness of a day with no end to it. The bear and not what happens in your chest when someone says bear and means it.
I am going to do it anyway. It is what I have.
Sixteen weeks. Starting with the day I landed.
Last night the dark came down over Denmark and I sat with it a while. Seventeen days without it.
My eyes filled. It was hard to hold it back.
“But it is also true that one will never experience in the Arctic anything that one has not oneself brought there.”
