Kayaking the Arctic

On my last day in Longyearbyen, in the Arctic, I wanted to kayak. In a kayak you sit close to the water, and I hoped to feel more inside of this landscape that we had been floating through on a sailboat for the past two weeks.  But also, at home in the Hudson Valley I kayak every day, so to be in a little boat on the water for me is to feel home.

In 1896 Nansen with his traveling companion Johansen end their three year expedition in the Arctic crossing open water in kayaks made of skins stretched over a wooden frame. The kayaks were boxy and stable and could carry a large load. At one point, walrus surround their boats, and a walrus “shot up beside [Nansen], threw itself onto the edge of the kayak, took hold farther over the deck with one fore-flipper and, as it tried to upset [him], aimed a blow at the kayak with its tusks.” At another point, a walrus punches a hole through his boat.

Imagine this walrus climbing onto your kayak...I think about paddling in my kayak and a walrus flopping onto the deck. I’d roll over in an instant. On our second day on board Antigua, someone thudded down the hallway and knocked on doors. “Walrus,” the call went out. Jolted from sleep, we emerged on deck to see a mother walrus with a baby lounging on a cake of ice. They both peered at the boat as we floated past. The baby lifted its head in curiosity and the mother took her large flipper and pushed it down. We were close enough to these big slug-like creatures to get a sense of the heft—and it made me dizzy to imagine such an animal sharing my kayak with me. 

A few days later we saw a pile of walrus on land. They lay on their backs, tusks pointed toward the sky. They lolled on each other, and on the sand, fanning themselves with their flappers. Two remained in the water, playfully rising up in battle. The tusks are formidable, long, wide, hard. How fast it could gouge a boat!

Cold water ready with Donald FortescueThe worst kayaking moment  for Nansen, however, is when the kayaks—with all of their gear—float off. Without that gear they are dead men. Swimming to retrieve the boats, he could also have died. But the later option is the one he had to chose.  Nansen vaults into the water and catches up to the boats.

I’ve had a boat float off without me, but swimming out into the Hudson is not swimming the Arctic. I had made three quick plunges into the icy water while I was in the North—three strokes was about all I could manage. I emerged breathing quickly, stunned by the cold. My body soon started to tingle, to vibrate with an ice cube vigor. It takes Nansen hours to warm himself.

It is for gripping scenes like this that I read these polar narratives, thrilling at the adventures. In some ways, I have spent my life trying to recreate that sense of adventure that comes with the unknown. And so certainly that was in my mind when I rented a kayak through Svalbard Wilderness Adventures and with fellow Arctic Circler Donald Fortescue headed out at 9 in the morning in dry suits, and full of instructions on the cold. We had one young Swedish guide and three other kayaks, all doubles (Donald and I were in singles). We shoved our boats into the Inisfjorden where Longyearbyen sits. The water was black-green and wind-ruffled. We flew across the Fjord and slid onto shore on the far side within forty five minutes. There a few cabins rested. Some of these rustic cabins were built (and refurbished) when coal was mined from the mountain above. Now these are summer cabins. “Norwegians like their summer cabins,” the young guide explained. And I thought: who doesn’t?

We built a fire and, wrapped in snowmobile suits, sat around shivering and eating a lunch of cheese and sausages. The Swedish boys regaled us with tales of driving the bad roads of Norway along the coast to Tromso in their Previa van. They would be road tripping back to Stockholm, looking for adventure that would probably come when their unreliable car broke down.

We walked the shoreline, enjoying a Purple Sandpiper along the beach line and the ever-present Arctic Terns. We looked at the remains of an airplane, wrecked on this lonesome shore.

The return felt like paddling across a wind-tossed Hudson River in early April, the water still snapping cold. We had no encounters with walrus or other creatures. We had no mishaps with the boats. It was an oddly tame paddle; this is what the guides guarantee. But something in me expected an adventure in this half tamed, cold land. But what I realized as my boat slid on to shore, my shoulders and arms pleasantly sore, that my outings alone, close to home, in the tame and populated Hudson Valley, are often full of more unexpected moments, mis-haps, those moments I’d call adventure.  

August 18, 2014 in Arctic, Kayaking, Travel

Pyramiden

The Antigua docked at Pyramiden in the evening and Sascha, the guide to Pyramiden came on board. He was slender, mid-thirties, with shoulder length black hair that needed a wash.  He gave a brief history of the town, without cracking a smile.

Pyramiden is a Russian ghost town of the north. It was founded by the Swedes to mine coal from the pyramidal shaped mountain in 1910. In 1927 they sold it to the Soviet Union. The town, on the  Billefjorden, was officially closed in 1998 but about 20 people continue to live there, running a small tourist business.

When Sascha was done talking, someone offered him a drink.

“I don’t drink,” he said in a strong Russian accent. “I smoke weeeeeed.” We all laughed.  Sascha continued with his deadpan look, eyes wide.

Our guide to PyramidenThe night before, Antigua had docked in Berentsberg, a still active Russian coal mining town (owned by the Russian mining company Arktikugol, which also owns Pyramiden). The school in Berentsberg is solid yellow brick, painted with images of whales and bears and a great gray owl in blues and reds and purple. But despite the cheerfulness of these drawings, the place was decidedly depressing, with buildings falling down and workers, who sign on for two year stints, passing without a glance or a smile. So I wasn’t prepared for how alive Pyramiden would feel.

The next day Sascha greeted us wearing a Russian cap and a long, formal coat. His rifle slung over his shoulder, he looked like a guard outside of the royal palace. He began the tour of the of the once wealthy community by telling us that “It was a privilege to live here.” He showed us the northernmost empty swimming pool, and the cultural center complete with a stage and the northernmost out of tune grand piano. Outside stood the northernmost statue to the grandfather, Lenin. The wide, open central walkway of the town was known as the Champs Elysee, and the apartment reserved for women was known as Paris. Now only two women live in town, and Sascha lives “like a monk.” Above the town hovered the wooden frame that houses the rails of the coal mining cars. It snaked high up the mountain. On the face of the pyramidal mountain someone had placed wooden planks spelling out Peace on Earth.

Kittiwake hotelLike many abandoned places, wildlife has moved in. What was once yellow brick apartments was now a Kittiwake hotel. On every window ledge the white gulls had constructed mud and grass nests where they sat brooding over their eggs. The constant calls of the gulls sounded like Italian mothers sitting at a balcony chatting with each other. From time to time there would be a silence, followed soon by a great uproar.

A short walk brought us to some healthy looking reindeer. “This is special grass,” Sascha explained. When Pyramiden was in its heyday rich soil was brought in by ship from the Ukraine. “Big ship, Ukraine to Pyramiden,” he repeated to emphasize the absurdity of this. It isn’t special grass, it’s really just grass, but it doesn’t belong in this landscape. It did thrive, however, and for a time there was a farm, complete with cows and chickens. The grass is still growing green and the reindeer love it.

Coal mine on Pyramiden mountainFurther on a fox crept across the above-ground pipes, then turned and stared at us. Nearby, a line of charred wood made me wonder if this could be the remains of what was burned during the Second World War. The town was abandoned and destroyed as the Nazis approached. In 1946, Russians returned, building what we now toured, all proof that communism works.

Until Berentsberg and Pyramiden I was living with one image of the north, one filled with icebergs and snow covered mountains and fantastic wildlife. From time to time we’d pass a wooden trappers hut, which told the story of subsistence hunting on this land, a life spare and hard that is easily romanticized (for the best of such narratives, read Christiane Ritter's A Woman in the Polar Night). I was imagining a peaceful land as well, not one touched by war. Pyramiden re-sculpted my view of the north into something less pristine, less peaceful. Pyramiden might be a ghost town, but the story it tells brought to life the complexity of this Arctic landscape.

August 15, 2014 in Arctic, Birds, Norway, Travel

Fishing and Hunting the Arctic

Walrus, protected since 1952

Reading polar literature for someone who loves the natural world is a challenge. Every journey involves a fair amount of brutality, of killing. On most expeditions the dogs are at once loved and needed but also overworked, often killed, sometimes eaten. That was the case with Amundsen heading to the South Pole. He feeds the dogs to the remaining dogs, but he also eats them: “we have now had three splendid dinners out of our good Greenland dogs,” writes one of his shipmates. Yet Amundsen loved his dogs (at times it seems more than the men) and in writing about them is at his most philosophical. Killing the dogs is a horror: “It is my only dark memory from down there, that my lovely animals were destroyed.” The treatment of the dogs is also something that Nansen feels keenly “It was undeniable cruelty to the poor animals from first to last, and one must often look back on it with horror. It is the sad part of expeditions of this kind that one systematically kills all better feelings, until only hard-hearted egoism remains.”

Young reindeer, protected since 1925

The dogs are one story; the killing of wildlife another. South polar literature has less bloodshed, mostly because once the explorers are moving across the continent there’s nothing to kill (near the coast there are, of course, penguins and seals to be killed). In the north, living by ones rifle is part of the game and the fresh meat helped to keep away scurvy. And though Nansen does kill a lot, and describes it in agonizing detail at times, he takes no pleasure in this. Neither did Amundsen who was never a sport hunter. Nansen’s thoughtfulness comes through even as the trigger is pulled on a walrus: “It was a touching sight to see her bend over her dead young one [which he had shot] before she was shot, and even in death she lay holding it with one fore-leg.” And then he soon turns to what matters to him: “the side of young walrus tastes like loin of mutton.”

It is looking into the eyes of a dying animal that is the test of the hunter. Nansen again, writing about a walrus: “There was something so gently supplicating and helpless in its round eyes as it lay there that its goblin exterior and one’s own need were forgotten in pity for it. It almost seemed like murder. I put an end to its sufferings by a bullet behind the ear, but those eyes haunt me yet; it seemed as if in them lay the prayer for existence of the whole helpless walrus race.”

Arctic Fox, with limited protection

Now, of course, all of these walrus on Spitsbergen are protected and have been since 1952. The Svalbard reindeer was protected as early as 1925, and the polar bear in 1972. The Arctic Fox has limited protection (that is, it can be trapped during certain periods), and populations are stable in Svalbard. But what isn’t protected are the oceans around this archipelago. The US proposed at a meeting in February of 2014 to put a moratorium on fishing in the central Arctic ocean, the region of the Arctic that has until now been covered in ice. Melting polar ice is opening up new territory, and that region needs to be studied before commercial fishing moves in. But the Arctic waters we floated off Spitsbergen are open to commercial fishing.

One morning we woke in front of the Recherche glacier in the Belsund Fjord. The Antigua had traveled all night, south from our highest point. What we had left behind was ice, a snow-covered landscape. It felt like we had awakened in a new world. Not only was there less snow and ice, but near us two ships rafted up. Other humans felt odd when we had been so  isolated in the ice. Now here we were, rubbing elbows with Russian fishing ships.

Russian fishing shipThe captain stood near me on deck and explained in his impeccable German accent how they fish. “Imagine the ship is an airplane. When they throw their net into the water, it is as if they tossed down a net from the sky. The net hauls up everything the plane flies over: trees, houses, cars, people. The only thing it wants are the horses, but it gets everything else, all piled together. Most of it is killed by the time the net comes up so even if it is protected that doesn’t matter.” He shrugged and walked away, disgusted.

All of this unwanted fish are referred to in the fishing industry as “bycatch” or “trash fish.” A net holds mostly trash fish. For instance, a shrimp trawler on the Gulf Coast pulls in 16 percent shrimp. The rest is a range of fish, all of which is dumped back into the ocean, alive or dead. Some chefs, I learn, are trying to take advantage of that bycatch by using these fish that would otherwise die. A small step. But a bigger step is needed.  

I am not opposed to hunting or fishing, but throwing a net is not fishing. Hunting and fishing involve an exchange: every fisherman and every hunter should, like Nansen, look into the eye of what they kill.

August 05, 2014 in Arctic, Environmental Issues, Norway, Travel

Arctic Silence

Arctic Tern

What I missed most while on the ship Antigua was not fresh food or a comfortable bed. What I missed was silence. Music played over the boat speakers in the main room. Someone was always talking, laughing, wondering about what day of the week it was, what was next or what was for dinner.  The galley looked like a Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon: dozens of open computers, everyone at work writing or managing photos or sound or videos. There was the hum of creative busyness that seemed to stretch long into the endless light. 

I had been anticipating, even looking forward to the Arctic silence. In my life at home, I equate silence with peace. With steadiness. But I knew that silence could be varying, unpredictable. When I travelled to the Antarctic in 2005, I felt ambushed by the silence. It stretched the length of the Ross Ice Shelf, and swallowed me (my essay, “The Secret of Silence” is about this Antarctic experience). I wanted to compare the silences of this world, the tame silence of home and the untamed silences of north and south.

Glacier front, Svalbard

On a summer walk in 1896 the explorer Nansen writes of the silence of the north: “not a sound to be heard but the drip, drip of water from a block of ice, and the dull sound of a snow-slip from some hummock in the distance.” In the north in summer, the ice moves, the glaciers that cap every fjord along Spitsbergen calve, which is a boom like thunder. There are colonies of Kittiwakes and Little Auks chattering, twittering, gossiping from the sides of mountains. There is movement that punctuates the silence. Another way of saying it is that it wasn’t all that silent.

The silence of a northern winter is of a different order.  “Silent, oh, so silent! You can hear the vibrations of your own nerves. . . . Eternity and peace are here.. . . “  It is the sort that gives scale, to the world, to life. “What are all our research and understanding in the midst of this infinity?” Nansen asks. It’s a question we all must ask.

Hoping to experience a bit of the northern quiet, one afternoon the wonderful nonfiction writer Luling  Osofsky asked a few of us to join her in a zodiac. “The silent zodiac,” she called it. “No pictures. No talking.” I climbed aboard. We puttered out toward a glacier, and our guide Ismael, skeptical of our desires, cut the engine. The chunks of ice slapped against the rubber side of the zodiac, bobbing in the green-blue sea. We drifted with the current, closer and closer to the Fridtjovbreen glacier. Ismael held up his thumb to gain a sense of our distance from the glacier should it calve. We sat on the round, hard side of the zodiac, looking out at the world. The rocks on shore looked like loaves of sliced bread. In the same way, the blue green glacier looked cleaved, as if Roland came through with his sword. But his sword wasn’t strong enough to cut through the hard ice, only to chip into it. A few silence seekers, unable to resist the proximity to the blues and whites, the shape and power of the glacier, pulled out iphones to take pictures. We live in a world where we can’t not take photos.

A slice of glacierIt was not quiet as we bobbed there in the zodiac. Above us the Arctic Terns flew by, and I imagined their call as “knee up, keen up, knee up.” Did they make this call the length of their journey from the Antarctic? In any case, under the urgency of the summer sun, these agile, graceful birds don’t shut up. The water that toiled around us, bubbled and pinged like being in a deep fryer, or a Jacuzzi. There were high and low notes, a symphony of freezing sound. I was tempted to tip over backward into the cold cold water. The water kept tugging at me: three times on this trip I pulled off my clothes and dashed into the water. When I emerged (but a few seconds later) my limbs tingled with the retreating cold.

We bobbed this way for a while, then needed to retreat. “Is there somewhere you would like to go?” Ismael asked, starting up the engine. It was as if we could chase silence, could find it more profoundly in one place rather than another. All I wanted was off the boat for a while, to replace human sounds with the dance of water and ice sounds, to remember silence is rarely complete. A moment after our retreat, an enormous chunk of ice tumbled into the water, an explosion, the roar of thunder. Nansen describes it as “a noise like the discharge of guns, and the sky and earth tremble so that I can feel that ground that I am lying on quake.” What remained was a light blue wound. What was revealed was ice that had been encased in its own lightless silence for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

August 01, 2014 in Arctic, Travel