The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Read online

  The far edge of the world, at the back of the North Wind, east of the sun and west of the moon, as far as far, at the back of beyond, out of reach, out of touch, out of the ordinary, beyond the Arctic Circle, beyond so many things. Far.

  Fear. See Polar Bear; Cold

  Footing. Made difficult by the rubber boots worn for landings in the Zodiac and by the rule that you should step on stone not on moss. Sometimes given a choice between one’s own and the mosses’ survival, the moss loses. Sometimes it wins. In a Japanese garden the irregularly placed stepping stones are meant to make you conscious of every step. Same here, but the scale varies and in Japanese gardens you never break your leg or fall down a mountain into an icy sea. Though maybe they imply these things.

  Frankenstein. The cold of the Arctic rhymes with the cold in the hearts of the polar explorer, Walton, who wants to press on though it may mean death for his men and himself. And the cold in the heart of Victor Frankenstein, who pressed on with his experiment and disavowed responsibility for the results. But what does deep cold mean in an era of melting, thawing, heating? What is the virtue of cold, the refuge, the other ways to describe emotion? Cold as calm, as restraint, as stillness, as inaction?

  Glaciers. Pelle the glaciologist speaks to us of glaciers, and the colored lines of his graphs slope down, toward melt and runoff and diminishment and disappearance. The shape of modern gloom is a slant downward from left to right. And of modern despair, the opposite slant—of rising temperatures, seas, carbon.

  Graves. The dead—the main thing left behind by many expeditions and whaling parties, left in graves on which rocks are piled or wooden crosses erected, which have sometimes been raided for souvenirs, wooden tombstones, clothes, and even bones, says Lisa the guide, deploring it. Sometimes it was the wood of coffins they were after in this place where wood is a valuable import. Some of the whalers were buried with pillows under their heads and a clump of their native soil. Hats and other pieces of clothing survived in the cold environment. In the museum in Longyearbyen are seventeenth-century wool hats, including some striped knitted ones.

  Guide. I had gotten an email from the Swedish photographer and Arctic historian Tyrone Martinsson the preceding January that said at the beginning, “I am writing to you to propose for you to join an expedition tour to Svalbard in September? I have a project here that is getting together 12 artists and scientists on a ship for 7–10 days sailing around Svalbard in the Arctic.” Who would say no to that? Not me. Most of the twelve seemed to be photographers, and masses of black boxes and laptops to download them into would clutter the ship’s tabletops. Every landing involved people peeling off one by one to gaze into their instruments and ignore the rest of us, which is not at all according to guidelines. The guidelines for travel in this part of the world are mostly about polar bears and about sticking close to the guide with the signal gun to frighten a bear off and the rifle with the massive bullets to shoot to kill if necessary. And looking around.

  The chief guide was named Lisa Ström, and before we got there I’d pictured a no-nonsense outdoorswoman in the conventional mode, but this one was a young vegetarian despite the fact that the northernmost vegetable crop must be harvested hundreds of miles south of here. At first she seemed gentler than the Nordic Lisa I’d pictured, but gradually in conversation it emerged that she had tried to repeat Rasmussen’s journey across the Northwest Passage by dogsled until the breaking up of the ice stopped her. She was planning to be the guide, along with her younger brother, on a two-month ski expedition to the south pole in November. She was sturdy but not burly, curiously humble and endlessly diligent, with chestnut hair and clear brown skin and a delightful voice and (Swedish) accent. Like older sisters generally, she was consciously and conscientiously affected by gravity; like younger brothers everywhere, hers—who was along as Guide #2—was not. To prove it, he did wild things with his paraglider and told us about them in detail, including the one where he had a rubber dinghy strapped to his back so he could land in the ocean.

  And then one evening he began to tell stories at her expense about the misfit sled dogs she rescued and then lodged with her parents, since she travels so much. She joined in and they regaled a dinner table with stories of difficult personalities of the arctic canine and the calamities and hilarities that resulted, complete with impersonations of canine antics and facial expressions. A tall young man in a paneled room on a ship enthusiastically imitating a female dog that comes bounding into your tent.

  Gulf Stream. All the way from Mexico and Louisiana. See also Wood

  Icebergs. The color blue that is cold, pure, fierce, and somehow the blue that you always wanted and had to come to the end of the world to get, the blue you can’t have since these sapphires are too big to take and too prone to melt. It’s odd seeing an iceberg after so many pictures of them for so long, and odder to make pictures and turn them back into the familiar and maybe safe after seeing these great chunks calved by glaciers actually afloat in an icy sea. Their reflection in the sea doubles them, makes them into great faceted jewels that no one can wear and that won’t last forever, and it only doubles their visible self when beneath the reflection is so much more. And the wake of the boat makes them rock on the water so that you can also see that the old adage “the tip of the iceberg” is accurate, for far more of them lies underwater. See also Reality and Representation

  Infinity. Eternity. Mojave. Sorrow Fjord. At a place named Sorrow Fjord there is a ledge up from the best beach for landing and then a plateau with a couple of wooden houses—the wood gray from time and weather, pulled down into splinters and matchsticks—and then beyond, a great expanse of nearly flat land paved solidly in stones, pink, orange, white, gray, brown. And there is a kind of ecstasy of looking from the tiny detail of the rocks to the distance stretching away toward the sea and the horizon. There were reindeer droppings and small clusters of moss but no actual animals, not even birds, during the hour or two I was allowed to drift across this space whose footing reminded me of the pink quartz and other stones that cobble the area near the Nevada Test Site, and so I also strolled on that other hot inland shore where I spent time twenty years ago and found myself as a writer and a traveler. The sun was out and it was almost warm.

  Journey. The pleasure of the boat chugging along and sometimes rocking and swaying when we were on open water, the sense of a continuity of movement and a continuity of landscape flowing by on one side, or the other, or sometimes both, the minor wistfulness that not everything could be seen, not even the landscape on both sides of the boat, the constant measuring comfort against going out on the deck for an unobstructed view, the mystery of what went by in the night when I was dreaming of home in the form of many strange landscapes representing my city with trees, with mounds, with familiar companions amid those nonexistent places, the punctuation of the flow of time in a boat, the clashing boom of the anchor chain going down, the silent business of the crane dropping the Zodiac overboard with a guide inside it, the clambering down the ladder to be transported to another shore, the moment pausing on one of those Arctic shores when I recalled Virgil’s Aeneid: “Ah, Palinarus, too trusting of the tranquil sea and sky / You will lie naked on an unknown shore.” Though we approached ours in layers of down and wool and silk and synthetic fibers and rubber boots and insulated gloves.

  Light. This far north the twenty-four-hour cycle of day and night we have further south stretches out into the one-day-and-night-per-year the poles have, as though they were located somewhere other than the earth, which we have been told since our earliest days has 365 days a year. Says one source: “At 74° north, the midnight sun lasts 99 days and polar night 84 days, while the respective figures at 81° are 141 and 128 days. In Longyearbyen, midnight sun lasts from 20 April until 23 August, and polar night lasts from 26 October to 15 February.” If the town of Longyearbyen has a 99-day-long day in summer and an 84-day-long night in winter, then it has 184 days a year, not 365. And two of those days are many times the twenty
-four-hour cycle. I was there near the equinox, so that the daylight hours were getting shorter at a gallop, about seventeen minutes shorter each day. Over the course of ten days the length of a day decreased by nearly three hours. During the course of September the day would have grown shorter by eight hours.

  The sky was cloudy, misty, and gray all the days I was in Svalbard but the last, so that there were no shadows, was no sun, until that day when everything looked unrecognizable in the crisp golden light.

  Plastic. In the form of bright blue barrels on the north-facing beach, beyond which is nothing but water and ice until the north pole. In the form of a bright yellow ring on the beach by the pile of male walruses. In the form of tattered plastic sheeting that mixes with the seaweed on the beach, near the reindeer. In the form of a Lux dishwashing liquid bottle, well abraded, on the next beach, before the dead bear. And the one after, as marigold and green nylon fishing rope and a blue-green stretch of net with scraps of clear plastic higher up. On every beach.

  Polar Bear. What does it mean to delete a photograph of an endangered species? And why is it that everything about polar bears looks familiar except their rather defeated-looking rumps with the tails flattened into them? See also Sleep; Reality and Representation

  We saw six living polar bears, two in places that prevented us from landing, but we were always, when not at sea, conscious of polar bears, imagining them, organizing all our movements around them. When we landed in the Zodiac, Oskar went ahead with his rifle unsheathed and the big red-tipped bullets ready to be slipped into the chamber, and everywhere we went we were supposed to walk behind these armed guards, to not branch out or venture forward first. So I began to scan all landscapes for bears, looking to see if this distant patch of snow might be a bear, if one might be coming from behind that rise or across that distance. There were bears in the landscape and in my imagination. Safety on Svalbard is an exercise in populating the landscape with even more than the 3,000 or so polar bears it is thought to contain, or maybe it’s a process of knowing that you don’t know where those 3,000 might appear.

  Polar bear #4 on an iceberg on 9/11 having her meal that disrupts the harmony of colors—a red side of seal. Like the icebergs, something strange to see in actuality after so many images and imaginings that are only representations. And a horde of cameras pointing at her, turning her back into the familiar that is the photograph. This one swam away with its seal in its mouth, a v-wake behind her.

  Polar bear #5 on a rocky little peninsula where we had intended to land on 9/12. Long, low snaky neck from the knob of the backbone between the shoulders and the shambling long-legged gait, black nose, black eyes, black mouth on creamy ivory. It looked back at us, raising its head to taste the diesel smell on the air, or ours. Lisa tells us they can put radio collars on the females, but the males’ necks are thicker than their heads, so they slip the collars off.

  Polar bear #6 on 9/13 on another rocky hillside above the German huts, which were the last part of the German military to surrender during World War II, in September of 1945. Spotted from the Zodiac, so we don’t dock.

  Polar bear #7 was on the rocky path to a glacier, alongside the roaring brown stream that issued forth from it. Most of it had been eaten so thoroughly its hide was smooth and white on the underside, and its massive spine—attached to a dainty pelvis—was tossed away a few feet, separate. Its black nose was intact, its eyes closed, and what seemed like almost a faint smile on its mouth, through which a few bloody fangs protruded. Lisa said it was the first dead polar bear she’d ever seen in Svalbard’s wildernesses. Perhaps it died and was then devoured by foxes or bears; perhaps a bear killed it. Further on, there were bear prints in the sand, the four toes distinct, the tracks either of this bear or of its killer or devourer or both. If another bear ate it, that cannibalism may be a sign of environmental stress and hunger.

  Polar bear (stuffed). In the middle of the baggage carousel in Longyearbyen, as though laid siege to by luggage, as perhaps polar bears are. In the Polar Hotel in the town, stuffed in prankish positions, including one small bear whose hindquarters are in the dining room but whose front end pokes through the corridor, with boxing gloves on its hands. Lifelike but not so exciting in the museum in Longyearbyen. Ragged and raided in the sad museum of the Russian outpost at Pyramiden. Also in skins, photographs, souvenirs, stamps for postcards, etc. Aids to imagining polar bears.

  Reality and Representation. We see polar bears, photograph them, see icebergs, photograph them, and then I want to look at those things in my photographs. I have seen them so often in pictures and never in actuality, and now the actuality too readily turns into a representation. On the fourth day we go out to see a group of walruses on the beach, which obligingly flash their tusks and undulate and otherwise ignore us, but it has begun to snow and the wind is fierce and I’m underdressed (see A Warm West) and it’s hard to care about anything but the snow blowing sideways and my icy fingers and cold feet and cooling back and chilly face. I go back to the ship at the first chance and decide to read the 1937 compendium The Arctic Whalers, by Basil Lubbock, put together at the last moment when the men who worked in the heyday of that industry were still alive or had been within memory of the author. Instead of being out in the fierce cold, I read accounts of those who had been out for far longer at these latitudes and enjoyed the stories almost as much as I do at home at latitude 37°41' N.

  A Captain Ross, former commander of the Isabella, was lost for four years, survived with his men by some desperate means near “Navy Board Inlet,” and was rescued on August 26, 1833, when he and his three boats of men set off to signal a ship. “The leader of the three boats, a gaunt, grim, bearded man, ‘dirty and dressed in the rags of wild beasts,’ said, “I am Captain Ross.” The mate of the Isabella refused to believe him and told him Ross had been dead two years or more.

  A few pages before came the account of the loss of the Shannon, when on April 26, 1832, at 58°20' N, she ran into an iceberg during a gale. The ship fell apart under them and partially sank. The captain and what crew members who had not been washed overboard survived on salvaged provisions under a shelter rigged up from a sail. “A Shetlander suggested to the surgeon of the Shannon ‘that he should bleed him, that he might drink his own blood to quench his intolerable thirst.’ The surgeon had his lancet in his pocket; he opened one of the man’s veins and collected the blood in an old shoe. The man drank his own blood with delight.” The surgeon then bled a dying man to offer him the same meal, but he died, and the shoeful of blood was offered around to the seventeen survivors “and it had an astonishing effect in reviving them. One by one, Captain Davey and the 16 men were then bled in succession, the doctor even bled himself. Some mixed the blood with flour, others drank straight from the shoe, but one and all found themselves wonderfully refreshed.” They were rescued by “two Danish brigs bound for Davis Straits with passengers,” the Hvalfisken and the Navigation, the latter headed by a Captain Bang, six days and seven nights after the wreck.

  I read these stories and ate a small, fragrant, fresh-baked cinnamon snail (see Swedish baking) and some chocolate, along with a shot of calvados and some tea in the warm saloon, looking out occasionally at the snow blowing sideways up here at the Seven Islands north of Latitude 80 on September 12, 2011.

  Some of the castaways in these grim accounts sickened horribly from scurvy. On page 319: “All of us that partook of the [polar bear] liver were seized with a dreadful headache. We were nearly all dead with it in a few days; the skin came off our bodies from the crown of the head to the sole of the feet. Around that time our provisions were further reduced to 1½ lbs. of bread per week; we had only 20 cwts. of bread on board, and very little meat. What could we do? We were like walking ghosts.”

  Lack of vitamin C in the first case. (Here the guide shows us scurvy grass that the Svalbard trappers learned to add to their diet.) And toxic levels of vitamin A in the second. On page 305 a drunk man whose clothes had frozen solid was rescued just
before he himself had died of cold.

  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.