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.

Arctic Birding

Northern Fulmar in flightI often tell people that if they want to learn birds, start in the winter (at least on the East Coast). Learn the limited winter birds well and in May, the height of migration, you’ll notice a song or color different from what has become familiar. Another option is to start birding in the Arctic.

There are few species in the Arctic—and often lots of what is there. You can see hundreds of Little Auks, Kittiwakes, Black Guillemots, Arctic Terns. There is time to memorize the shape of each of these birds at a distance, to love the orange-red feet of the Black Guillemots, to marvel at the grace of the Arctic Skua. If you memorize those birds that come to the Arctic in the thousands to breed, you will then pay attention when something new comes along, like a Long-tailed Skua.

Long-tailed SkuaThe other upside of of Arctic birding is that there are no songs to memorize—the only bird singing is the Snow Bunting. The Long-tailed Duck make their marvelous, yodeling call, and the Arctic Terns cackle as they fly overhead, but these calls of mating or alarm are easily added to a birder’s repertoire. Above all, you don’t have to pick the birds out of dense bushes or leafy tress: there they are, in all their glory, flying in a blue blue sky or perched on an ice berg.

Birding from the deck of the AntiguaIn two weeks of traveling by boat in the Arctic I saw but 30 species of birds. And that was hours every day on deck, on shore, scanning into the distance, past icebergs and around glaciers, into the gray or blue sky. The most constant companion on the boat became my favorite bird of the trip: the Fulmar.

At first, the Fulmar seems a dull bird: a gull sized sea bird, grayish in color. But they were such great acrobats it was hard not to admire and then love them. Often, a Fulmar soared a foot above the water, not a wing-beat keeping it aloft. It would bank toward the boat and then glide over the deck before plunging to water level once again. Several of the birds played with the ship like this for hours. I made it a sport to try and photograph the birds in flight, but they snuck up on the ship in such a way that they most often caught me off guard.

FulmarOne afternoon our boat floated near one of many green blue glaciers for a few hours. Kittiwakes mobbed the base of the glacier and from time to time a hunk of  ice calved off, putting all the birds into the air. Meanwhile, near the boat, Fulmars floated. They dunked their heads into the water and then, like trying to perform a butterfly stroke, they lifted their wings. But the wings barely made it out of the water, as if a wing were broken, the bird floundering. When I first saw a Fulmar bathing like this I thought it might be wounded, slowly drowning. But soon I realized there were many flopping about in the water near the glacier. Perhaps this water is fresher, washing off some of the salt from the long winter at sea.

The Fulmar belongs to that strange family of birds with tube noses, the Procellariiformes. Fulmars have a short, thick bill with a tube on top through which they secret excess salt water. This allows them to live in the ocean, coming on land only to breed (they are long-lived and late breeders, starting at 8-10 years old). I spied a few content on an ice flow, and when one rose to move about, it was clear those legs are not made for walking.  

pick out the special bird!The birds that Nansen sees in 1896 are those that I saw in 2014.  “We had not expected to meet with much bird life in these desolate regions. Our surprise, therefore, was not small when on Whitsunday a gull paid us a visit.” They regularly see birds including Kittiwakes, and the big and aggressive Glaucous gull, which he calls a blue gull, the Black Guillemot, Ivory Gull, and of course the Fulmar.  Nansen’s pleasure in the birds is lovely to read. The difference in his pleasure and mine, is that the birds are not just beautiful to see.  “Today my longing has at last been satisfied. I have shot Ross’s gull.”  Well, my longing was not satisfied: I never saw the rare Ross’s gull.

Life on Board

Antigua in the iceI did not grow up around boats or water. I have never lived on a ship. But I have read a lot of narratives of ship life, of exploration. No matter how much I have read, I was not ready for the round porthole that opened onto my top bunk bed, letting in the relentless northern sun. I could not have anticipated the sense that living on a ship must be like joining a cult, all of us koolaided out on the vast and incomprehensible landscape. I could not have hoped for cake—cake!—every day at four to go with the constant cups of tea and coffee.

This trip on the Barkentine ship Antigua with The Arctic Circle was not exactly a cruise, and not exactly an expedition, and not exactly an artist’s residency. It was a bunch of creative people—sculptors and painters and writers and sound artists—put on ship to sail north along the coast of Spitsbergen and create something: a painting, some music, a moment on the ice, an essay. We were sort of spoiled and often yelled at (who didn’t sign back in after going on shore? Who wore sandy shoes on deck? Who left their life vest on deck?).

I loved my traveling companions for all they showed me. I saw the land differently through the photos of the sun taken by Irish physicist Tom McCormack, or the sewn images of the Arctic Skua made by Australian artist Suzi Lyon, or the sound recordings of Donald Fortescue. In the evenings I read the comic books of Ursula Murray Husted and had conversations about sadness and shyness with the performance sculptor, Jess Perlitz. Of course I was focused on birds, and enjoyed the moment of separating out the Iceland from the Glaucous Gull with David Heymann, the architect from Texas who had designed George Bush’s house. This was all far from the experiences of my polar explorers.

Fram in the Fram museum, OsloI had moody Nansen in mind throughout this trip. I know some of the things he worried about: his men getting scurvy, the cold, and always what would be the extent of the ice and would they make it north as planned. None of these were my concern. What I wondered about: would life be claustrophobic (at times it was—there were over thirty of us on board and only one open room in which to live, work, play). Would I be seasick? (yes, on the first day). Would I miss email and the internet? (nope). Would I be able to walk on shore? (yes, but in a very limited way).

My companions and I all complained about the rules and made jokes about the daily pudding. But it all felt a bit indulgent as I thought of Nansen making it through his third polar winter subsisting only on polar bear and walrus. He would have loved that mayo drenched “salad.”  And, of course, the daily cake.

Nansen becomes fond of his ship, the Fram: “for, to say the truth, we all of us dearly love the ship, as much as it is possible to love any impersonal thing. And why should we not love her? No mother can give her young more warmth and safety under her wings that she affords to us. She is indeed like a home to us.” Nansen devotes an entire chapter of his book Farthest North to the construction of the ship, which was the first built for Arctic travel: “the whole craft should be able to slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice.” It was insulated and solid, and the name means “onward”—what more could you ask of a ship? I visited the Fram in Oslo, the boat sitting protected in a museum. It was Nansen’s boat, but Amundsen used it as well to travel to Antarctica. Stepping on board, I lost my legs, had to sit down for the thrill of walking the same wooden planks as these brave and obsessive men.

Life on board. Count the number of laptops.Through the course of the trip I asked people who or what they left at home. We were 20 women and 7 men, ranging in age from 23 to 67. Many are married, four in same-sex relationships but it was mostly dogs and cats and one rabbit left behind. A few had children, yet only two had children at home (and one claimed to have half a child since she had sold her eggs to come on this trip). We were largely solitary folks, skeptics, wanderers. On board, we celebrated two birthdays, and while I sold a house, another bought a house, and one grandmother fell gravely ill. Life goes on but we were cut off (except for the World Cup results—the German captain posted this daily, perhaps gloating in the German victory over the U.S.). It was but two weeks, yet in a world where we are used to constant contact people felt the void. When we docked in the research town of Ny Alesund, some stood in line for the phone, making surprise calls home. There was no one for me to call, and I found this a freedom. I was not pulled home or to a future reunion. I was simply there, looking at a glacier, talking in the galley, dreaming only, perhaps of a time in the future when I would eat a fresh salad.  

Arctic Circlers 2014These two weeks were nothing compared to my explorers who headed out for years at a time, safe return not assured. Nansen’s men (all men) left behind a total of 22 children. When Nansen heads out he’s 32 years old and had been married four years. His second autumn on the ice he celebrates his birthday on October 10^th. “Exactly 33 years old, then. There is nothing to be said to that, except that life is moving, and will never turn back.”  The explorer, so experienced yet still so young, knew not to look backward; he and his ship: onward.