The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (4 page)

Would it have been odder to read my biography of Karl Marx and his family or my book on mirror neurons or my Icelandic fairytales than to read accounts of experiences so much more intense and arduous than mine in the same place?

The click of cameras was a constant whenever there were animals or something particularly spectacular, and the lineup of cameras on deck when we went by the prettiest scenery was inevitable. And on every walk, although we were supposed to stick close because of polar bears, the photographers among us would drop off one by one, lose themselves in the
making of an image, and stretch our line out to a series of broken dots. The guides were too polite to herd us well. What will become of all those photographs? I took them too; it is a reflexive response to something exciting to look at, and sometimes to something not so exciting to look at but full of potential to mutate into a photograph worth looking at. There are problems with this, and pleasures too.

Reindeer.
Antlers on a skull. Then droppings looking charmingly familiar in the unfamiliar landscape. Then tiny figures in the distance, enlarged through borrowed binoculars: definitely the short-legged reindeer of Svalbard. Reindeer, made so engaging by all the images of Sami and Siberian nomads riding and herding them, by the great herds of caribou in northern Alaska, by something about their air of both meekness and ruggedness, by the lovely way their antlers sweep back like the antlers of that famous Scythian brooch. My Mexican reindeer made out of brightly colored wool scraps with their antlers wound in colored yarn and colored tassels everywhere are evidence that their charm carries far, right down to the edge of the subtropical jungle of Chiapas, where I bought the first three.
Reinos
said the receipt when I bought three more of them in Guanajuato, the reinos who watch over me, the household guardians who here evolved into short-legged, solid, furry creatures to conserve body heat, since they don’t need to flee predators, the reindeer who Oskar tells me often starve or freeze to death and whose winter grazing only serves to eke out their fat stores a little longer. I keep accidentally calling them caribou: I learned that the two were essentially the same species twenty years ago when a friend repeated the comment of Gwich’in activist Sarah James that she didn’t have much use for Christmas but she liked the song about the red-nosed caribou.

Round Portholes.
The ship had every charm the word
ship
could possibly convey. The
Stockholm
is from 1953 and looks like the picture of a ship as I would imagine it in ideal form. It weighs 361 tons and is 40 meters long, with round portholes and rigging and various decks and wooden boats for ornament and a Zodiac for landings and coils of thick blue rope in baskets
and Swedish colors—dark blue and pale yellow—outside. Inside it has a saloon full of rich wood and comfortable furniture and a dining room studded with old colored engravings of animals from some zoological book and a map of an earlier Arctic sea journey that shows the landmasses radiating from the pole at the center, so that you see that continents don’t really describe the organization of space up here. And small cabins with bunks and round portholes and a bridge in which they kept all the old brass instrumentation even though the captain and first mate seem to steer by computer information instead.

I once read that we crave, contradictorily, both security and adventure, comfort and challenge. Thus the child toddles forth to investigate but wants to be able to retreat to its mother’s knee. Lying in a rocking top bunk in a cozy little room while the Arctic goes by through a porthole might be the highest possible fulfillment of those two desires in combination. When the rocking of the boat brought up the horizon, I could see the mountains in the distance across the water. When it rocked down or didn’t rock at all, I mostly saw the sea and straits and fjords with birds going by. Once I saw a pod of dolphins, black fins arcing out of the water, through the porthole of my cabin.

Russian Ruins.
The population of the once-thriving mining town of Pyramiden is now two in the winter and about a dozen in the summer; and though the hotel that looks like a Soviet barracks is technically still open, when we visited, the door that said STAFF ONLY would shut, leaving behind empty corridors and a smell of boiling potatoes. The dingy creatures in the little museum were falling apart, and the teeth and claws of the stuffed polar bear had been stolen. There was a gap in the floor where the heating was being worked on and a handful of Russian souvenirs for sale: nesting dolls and Soviet badges. Next door was a yellowish brick building, much like the hotel, that was fully populated by kittiwakes. They had built nests in the rows of deep window frames, two or three messy nests per ledge, and they screamed like seabirds and sometimes cried like children. More of them perched atop the swing sets and slide. Everything else was silent.

The delicate blue of the former canteen and cultural center was intact, but inside it the big plants had been allowed to die, so that their leaves were translucent light brown against the light of the windows, and in the big kitchen, paint was peeling everywhere and piling up on the floor. It must have once been the northernmost movie theater in the world. And across what the humorous Russian guide Dmitri called Red Square—a long, greenish rectangle planted with imported grass on imported soil—was the newer cultural center that, he told us, contained the northernmost grand piano in the world, though all the books had been stolen out of the library. In front of the center was a statue of Vladimir Lenin. “A man I never met,” declared Dmitri. It was there to be frozen and snowed upon and ignored for the foreseeable future, except in summer, when groups like ours came by and took pictures. The northernmost statue of Lenin in the world, he added.

Perpendicular to the newer center was the swimming pool, a half-size Olympic pool tiled in pastel colors with the lane dividers still stretched across the dusty expanse. Undoubtedly the northernmost swimming pool in the world, in which no one any longer swims.

Sleep.

Bear: One of the three polar bears the captain spotted on the far side of Magdalenafjord our first day was napping. These bears seemed to be performing illustrations of their capacities for us. The first we saw was walking with that long-legged, ambling, shambling gait that seems so different than that of black and brown bears, just as their long streamlined profiles seem different from the dish-faced, domed-forehead faces of grizzlies. Walking alongside a hill of scree, its white that makes it invisible on the ice makes it distinct on the gray slope. The second one was up higher, tearing at something it was feeding on, with gestures of its neck. The third was recumbent upon a bed of green moss, the moss that grows in domelike hummocks, its head and tail just slightly curled in, and it periodically rearranged itself or looked up at us. It was shocking to have so quickly penetrated to the realm of polar bears’ naps and shocking to see the creature so vulnerable and so confident in its own habitat. If it was in that habitat—so
far from the sea ice where I think it is supposed to be hunting—maybe it was in crisis. It was hard to tell, but a white bear on green tufts is not exactly camouflaged.

Me: Being here was restful. It seemed both odd to be so comfortable in such a remote place and perfectly sensible to have come to the end of the world for the peace and quiet in which to nap. Which I did deeply and often, and at night I dreamed—of a forest that doesn’t actually exist at the end of my childhood street, a house on the corner of a street near Baker Beach in my city that also doesn’t exist, and then the childhood swimming pool piled higher than its deep end in wishing coins and debris thrown by neighbor children, and a visit with the infant son of an acquaintance in a house I have not actually been in for twenty or thirty years. It was so peaceful in this quiet place at the end of the world where I could only be reached by the radiotelephone that only my brothers had the number for.

Swedish Baking.
Sometimes what looked like rye bread was cake, sometimes what looked like fruit bread was rye with nuts, sometimes a great brown sourdough loaf was baked, sometimes the coffee cake that was put out on the round table in the saloon was extraordinarily moist and delicate, particularly considering that it was made by thin tattooed young women named Hannah and Erica, sometimes one wished that there was not quite so abundant a choice of sweets and starches. Spiral cinnamon rolls, cookies of various kinds with nuts, another moist coffee cake topped with toasted almond slivers and cardamom, chocolate cake, raspberry pie with whipped cream, and more.
See
Sleep (Me)

Underwater Forests with Pink Lanterns
. Sometimes when the Zodiac came into the shallows for a landing, you could look down and see whole forests of ruffled seaweed, long pale sheets of it in rows, and branching seaweeds, a kind of lushness that did not exist on shore, though great slimy mounds of kelp did. I said to Lisa, the guide, the forests here are all underwater, right? She beamed in approval that I had recognized this obvious fact. And there were also various kinds of jellyfish, notably, small ones like pink lanterns, like the ghosts of small cucumbers and sea urchins, like tiny zeppelins,
floating by in the dark clear water, festively, so delicate, so enchanting, so unlike the massive warm-blooded animals you hear about here. There were urchin shells, tall spiraling seashells, occasional mussel shells on shore where the seabirds flew. These when alive were also wildlife.

Walrus.
The first walrus more wrinkled and pink and comic than I had imagined with its eyes invisible and its whiskery lip rising and falling like a gigantic cyclopian eyelid. A fanged eye. Its vast chest wrinkled and creased into chasms or crevasses of dry hide. Its tusks looking mildly dignified when its head is upright but also pointing sideways, and sometimes it scratched itself with its flipper and looked more agile and more like a cat or a dog. More walruses turning their heads in various directions so that their tusks looked like semaphore torches or runes, as though they were sending us messages we were inadequate to receive.

Their Latin name is
Odobenus rosmarus: Odobenus
means “one that walks on teeth,” and
rosmarus
comes from Old Norse, meaning “horse of the sea.” So the walrus is a sea horse that walks with its teeth. “For me the walrus is a prehistoric animal. I feel like I am traveling back in time when I see them—or even smell them,” says Lisa Ström, and she tells us they can use the tusks to get up on the ice and the front flippers to walk on. They have lice, walrus lice, so they are always scratching themselves. The male averages 1,200 kilos; females, 800. Pink wart-like growths stud the male neck and breast. (“Maybe it’s attractive!” Lisa speculates.) “The females have straighter teeth and they don’t generate the big pink warted neck. Those with the biggest teeth can lie in the middle of the group, in the warmest, nicest spot, protected from predators. Tusks start to grow at age two, and the animals live up to forty years. Killer whales and polar bears prey on walrus but pursue only the females on Svalbard. Diet is sometimes fish, sometimes swimming birds and other seals, but mostly mussels—fifty to sixty kilos of mussels, or 4,000–6,000
per day
,” she explains, guiding us to know walruses.

A Warm West.
This is what Tyrone, the expedition leader, told me to bring, grossly understating the degree of cold we would encounter. I liked the instruction, though, since I am always wearing the West in some sense. But
this was the far north, and I wish I had brought my faux-fur-lined vest I wore all through my times in Montana and Wyoming in winter and much of Iceland in summer. And not lost my insulated jacket in the Frankfurt airport. A cold north.

Water the Color of Gunmetal. See
Color

Wonder.
You are north of everything on a ship out of a story, sailing onward, with glaciers, crags, peaks, mists looming up on either side, and the moment requires so many practical reactions it is not until you are sitting in an armchair forty-three degrees south of this experience that the full wonder of it sets in.

Wood.
So many long logs on the shores of this place where not even a bush grows, evidence of the great forces that drop trees into water and send them on tides far beyond the scenes of their growth. More wood in the fox traps, the graves, the houses, and other structures that are lightly scattered across the land. The bare wood houses that weather to gray, like driftwood. The house we saw on the last day that was sturdier and more expansive than the rest we’d seen, more like a farmhouse than a survival hut, with fresh wood showing that it was maintained, and inside it, penciled names from the nineteenth century onward written on the bare wood walls, and one massive table with an X, and another structure like a stool for oxen, massive and lone in the sunlight that streamed through the windows we had just removed the protective boards from.

Zodiac.
Black rubber raft used for all landings in the wild, expertly captained by Lisa, clambered down onto with a ladder on the side of the boat, and afterward heaved up onto the
Stockholm
’s deck by a crane and pulley. Its name suggests another zodiac, a rubber ring as black as night bearing the arctic zodiac in which the constellations are different and one is born under the sign of fox, walrus, ring seal, whale, polar bear, reindeer, pink jellyfish, ivory gull, spiral snail, scurvy grass, cod, and mosquito.

2013

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE BOILING POINT

Reflections on the Arab Spring and After

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.