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

Ny Ålesund

Ivory GullAn Ivory Gull greeted the ship when we docked at the town of Ny Ålesund. It had a few head feathers out of place, but otherwise it was the perfect white bird that it is.  I almost missed the bird in my excitement at reaching Ny Ålesund. Ny Ålesund is where the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the millionaire American pilot Lincoln Ellsworth and the Fascist Italian Umberto Nobile launched their dirigible the Norge to fly over the North Pole in 1926.

The history of explorers attempting to fly over the pole is a long and elaborate one.  I spent hours looking at photos and film about it in the marvelous airship museum in Longyearbyen. The first attempts to fly over or to the pole begin with the American journalist Walter Wellman in 1907. His three-hour attempt cost over $100,000 and was an unqualified disaster.  If you look at the size and clumsiness of a dirigible—which is really a huge sack of hydrogen— it’s easy to understand why this was a disaster. What is harder to understand is why people continued to attempt this feat.

Bust of AmundsenAmundsen, who in his day was a hero and media darling, is one of the greatest explorers ever to have lived. He was the first to the South Pole, the first to navigate the northwest passage and the second through the northeast passages. And, he is probably as well the first to cross the North Pole. After each expedition, he turned to the next challenge, both technological and geographical. He mastered moving across ice with skis and dogs on his expedition to the South Pole. Air—planes and dirigibles—were the next frontier.

Amundsen attempted to fly in a plane to the pole before taking on the dirigible. In two planes, he and his fellow adventurers headed out; both planes were damaged when they landed on the ice. He and his men were taken for dead before they emerged, grizzled and half starved several weeks later.

The plan then shifted to using an airship. Airships are lighter than air, and can remain aloft without propulsion. But they are also enormous, not easily maneuverable, and can’t carry much weight. What they also learned is that in fog they ice up, adding to the weight. Ellsworth financed the ship, Amundsen worked on details and Nobile was the engineer on the project. As the airship, the Norge, moved north from Italy toward Ny Ålesund (then known as King’s Bay), they built a protected launch site for it.  This included mooring masts, a giant hangar and stockpiles of gas and engine fuel. The remains of the mooring mast stand a few hundred yards out of town. It rises into the air, giving a sense of the size of the beast and the logistics involved in this expedition. 

Mooring mast where the Norge was securedThe three explorers launched the airship and when they floated over the pole, dropped their flags (the Fascist Italian flag much larger than the American and Norwegian) before continuing on in the fog toward Alaska. The fog iced up the ship, making it precariously heavy, but they managed to land near their destination, Nome. The success of this expedition is clouded by the aftermath; the Norge flight became all politics. Nobile proclaimed that it was flying under an Italian flag in the spirit of fascism, while Norway also claimed the ship.

This history, not even 100 years ago, feels ages away. Ny Ålesund is now a research town made up of colorful wooden buildings, some sporting the flags of various countries conducting research in the Arctic. The blues and greens make it look like a summer resort. When Amundsen arrived there in 1926 there were 22 houses, a company store, and a coal a mine shaft.  Now, tourist ships arrive every day in summer, and we were able to buy postcards and sweaters in the one little shop. But I’m grateful for this casual trip to a place where Amundsen launched his successful expedition and where, a few years later, he headed out only to vanish into the ice of the North.

Little Auk

PuffinI left the narrow, gravel beach and walked across the layer of snow, uphill, toward the side of the half green mountain towering above us. From time to time the grainy snow collapsed under my weight and I punched through to thigh level. At one point, my foot came up without the Muck boot; I dug down to liberate my boot.

At the top of the short hill stood Sara Blue with her husky dog Nemo. I wondered if, standing there scanning into the distance for bears, she was bored or content. Did she want conversation or to be left with the silence of the Arctic landscape?

That silence was punctuated by the calls of the Little Auks (known in the States as Dovekies) on the mountainside above us. I could see the flurry of activity of the auks, skimming left and right in small flocks. Their busyness was dizzying, dots disappearing against a craggy mountainside, or landing on a flank of the mountain, like pepper sprinkled to season to the snow. They seemed to know what they wanted, where they were going.  Self preservation and propagation—that is the whole story.

Black Guillemot“What does that sound make you think of?” I asked Sara Blue.

She hesitated a moment and leaned back on her hips, her legs spread wide. She was wearing a thick wool sweater and blue pants. Her gun rested easy on her shoulder.

“It’s not a sound that belongs here,” she said.

I smiled. She was right, the cheerfulness of the birds seemed out of place in this vast, austere landscape tinted with grays and whites. Below me the ship sat quiet at anchor in a green-gray sea.

The calls made me think of a warmer climate, of a bazaar in North Africa. I thought of the chase scene in Casablanca, the chaos of cars and voices calling out with things for sale. These little black and white birds did not have narrow streets to negotiate but the entire side of a mountain on which to sell their wares. They were dots of vibrant life coming together in a “loomery” (a group of Auks can also be called a colony or a raft—but loomery, can’t beat that).

Little Auks in flightThe Little Auk is a surely tenacious bird. It’s the smallest of the Alcids, that family of birds that includes the Black Guillemot (which kept our ship company throughout the trip), and Puffins (Atlantic Puffins floated near the ship as well). They are shaped like a nerf football, and when they fly it’s as if they have been launched, fast and precise, by the finest quarterback. They are black on top and white below, with a stubby bill. Against a blue sky, they look like sparkling snowflakes.

When I travelled to Alaska, seeing a Dovekie wasn’t a given. On the island of Gambell, we scanned a high cliff laced with Least and Crested Auklets to find one lone Dovekie. And then a few months later, one showed up at home, in New York.  The call went out to all of the local birders, the little bird a sensation. Perhaps it had been blown off course from Greenland, home to the largest breeding ground of Dovekie’s (about 30 million). Where Dovekies spend the winter is out in the open ocean, at the edge of the ice. They come to land only to create life.

Little Auks dotting the snow sideWhen Nansen and Johansen head south from their winter alone on the ice where they sleep as much as 20 hours a day, the first birds they see are Little Auks. It is February 25^th and lovely weather, even spring-like. A flock of six Little Auks fly by, then a flock of four. “Once more we heard their cheerful twittering, and it roused a responsive echo in the soul. …It was the first greeting from life. Blessed birds, how welcome you are!” 119 years later, standing below that busy mountain of Little Auks, I too felt that blessed echo in my soul.