Last week, I drove south. En route to Tucson, Arizona, I took the long way through a backcountry by-way showcasing New Mexico’s geologic past, then spent the night in Las Cruces at the Big Chili Inn, home of the world’s largest chili pepper and plastic-encased mattresses. In the morning, I went west and south into the bootheel of New Mexico. Butting against Arizona to the west and Mexico to the east and south, the bootheel feels like its name. Some cowboy, standing tall in the north country, has Mexico under his heel.
This is basin and range country: massive, flat, open valleys with disconnected mountain ranges strewn randomly. The basins have no outlet, and what little water falls here, less than eight inches a year, pools here, waiting to evaporate. It doesn’t wait long.
The Continental Divide Trail begins just a few miles farther south, and if you’re ambitious, you can follow it 3,028 miles on foot to Canada. The Little Hatchet and Big Hatchet Mountains stretch northwest from the western Mexican border.
In a state where the middle of nowhere is where you are most often, the Big Hatchet Mountains are twenty-four miles and an hour’s drive from the nearest US town, which has a population of fifty. The western edge of Mexico, at the inside of the bootheel, is barely nine miles as the vulture soars or the migrant walks.
In my zippy little car, I cruise south. Stopping to take photos along the road, as I am wont to do, I attempt to capture the expanse of desert, the mountains climbing into the blue sky as the only relief from the cactus, the dust in the basin, and the temperature, not yet at noon, already at 98º. I haven’t seen another car for twenty minutes, but seemingly, within seconds of pulling over, a border patrol vehicle appears.
Do you need help?
No, I say, just taking photos.
Ok, I’ll get out of your way. He pulls away, drives 200 yards south, and pulls off the road, engine running, air conditioning on full blast as the day’s heat builds. I expect my license plate is being checked. Who stops here? Maybe a scheduled pick-up or a water cache drop-off.
I finish my photos and continue south, driving past the parked patrolman. I do my thing, poking around, stopping here and there. SUVs, pickups pulling trailers with ATVs, vans pulling cargo trailers pass me, all border patrol vehicles. We leapfrog each other. My dusty green car hopping around the black and white federal rigs, just me and thirty of my closest border patrol buddies hanging out in the desert.
The road, a chip-sealed tar and gravel affair, is mostly straight, deviating only to pass through the gap dividing the Little Hatchet Mountains to the north from the Big Hatchet Mountains to the south. As I move farther south on this simple, two-lane road, the shoulder lines and center stripe disappear. Along one or both sides appears a secondary dirt road, like the frontage road of interstate highways through big cities and wide-open states. I ponder this. And, then, I find old tires in a heap at the edge of the parallel road. Chained together, like the drags used to smooth snow for skiing or level a rodeo arena, they are used to clear the dirt lanes.
I stop again, pulling onto one of these dirt tracks; I park in the scant shade of a lone juniper. I scan with my binoculars, drink some water—a routine stop when exploring. Pulling back onto the paved road, I wait for a patrolman to pass, knowing I will only leapfrog again. But he stops—the same officer.
If you walk away from your car, make sure you drive over your tracks when you leave.
I must have had a blank look.
He gives me the movie-famous hand sign, index and middle fingers gesturing from eyes to the ground. We’re looking for tracks. This is a dangerous place. Be careful out here.
Yeah, yeah, I say, realizing the frontage roads force anyone walking through the desert to cross the swept-clean dirt that records every person who passes from desert to pavement. As he pulls away, I think to myself, I will cover every track I find. And I will offer water to any person I see.
Although it is a struggle to be human in this time and in this cultural landscape, if the hatchet comes down, I won’t surrender my humanity to border patrol.
Last week, I was in Joseph, Oregon, for a writing workshop. Writers and readers from around the West came to connect and learn, explore, and expand. I dusted off this piece and read it at open-mic. I trust it will carry weight again—for the first reading or the tenth.
Full of snowmelt and spring rain, the Imnaha River squeezes through Blue Hole.
The Imnaha Dreams
Last summer camping on the Imnaha River, I had a dream. It was August, but on the river in the bottom of a forested canyon and at elevation in the Wallowa Mountains, it was cold. I slept in the bed of the pickup, curled into my down sleeping bag, with multiple layers of clothing and a hat. I don’t remember much about the dream except that it terrified me, and I awoke as I was about to be decapitated.
Startled awake with the sound of water rushing downstream to join the Snake River, the trees crowding in above me, and the stars brilliantly clear in the gaps between the branches far above, I wondered what had occurred on this site. I lay awake a long time thinking about the dream and whatever energy I had tapped into.
As happens, the year waned. The dream, all but forgotten, left my conscious memory.
Last week, I was camping on the Imnaha. I had a dream. It was June, but in the river bottom, in an open ponderosa pine park and in the spring rain at elevation in the Wallowa Mountains, it was cold. I was a few miles above the previous campsite; I slept in the camper in the bed of the pickup. Big Cat was with me. I don’t remember much about the dream except that it terrified me, and I awoke when every hair on the back of my neck and head was standing on end, both in the dream and not.
Jolted awake by the dream, I heard the river and the rain on theroof of the camper, I had the sense that I was in the wrong place. Lying awake, I remembered last year’s dream.
The Imnaha was home to the Niimíipu, the Nez Perce. These were the last grazing lands of Chief Joseph’s band. They lived in these canyons, in the mountains, and on the grassy slopes. They grazed their horses and lived their lives here, on a shrinking allotment of land “given” to them by the US government in this far-flung corner of Oregon and then slowly taken away again as white settlers discovered its value. There were promises and skirmishes and then Chief Joseph fled with other Nez Perce who would not agree to forced relocation to a reservation.
Most of us have heard some piece of this story. Pursued by numerous factions of the U.S. military, they crossed the Snake River, the mountains of Idaho, and The Big Hole in Montana. They wove their way through Yellowstone, the Sunshine Valley, the Absaroka Mountains, and north again to the Bear Paw Mountains of central Montana. Finally, after 1,170 miles and multiple battles, they surrendered. They were 40 miles from the Canadian border. They were relocated to Kansas, and Chief Joseph was never allowed to return to the Imnaha.
I don’t claim to have any connections to the past, no clairvoyance; I don’t channel spirits. But, I believe that the land remembers a lot of things we choose to forget. There was peace and there was some type of balance. Then, there was not. Everything has energy; we all come from entropy, take shape, and then return to entropy. Blood that soaks into the soil, flesh, and bone scattered by scavengers and decay doesn’t cease to exist; it takes a new form.
Maybe the dreams were just dreams, my subconscious pushing me into places I don’t want to go or reminding me of things I have not fully processed. Despite the terror that woke me, I don’t think the violence was directed at me. I think it was a reminder.
The river, the forest, and people, both Native American and, at this point, of European descent too, have flowed through this place for generations. Today, we often camp in remote places and feel some sense that we have discovered them for the first time, no matter the fire ring, the litter, or the road. We read the roadside signs about what was, who was, and when it was. We snap a photo. We move on.
We forget that there were others in this place long before any of us discovered it. Not just people passing through on a summer trip but those who lived and died here, sometimes violently, sometimes unjustly.
The next night before sleeping, I smudged the camper, the truck, and myself, burning sage as an offering to the people who came before us and in their memory. Water, trees, people will continue to flow through this land. May it be a more peaceful journey for us all.
Early summer wildflowers spread across the open ridge line.
Perhaps you’ve lived with upstairs neighbors. My experience is that they are always The Elephant People, heavy-footed and awake at awkward times that I am not.
This spring, a nice young couple moved in above my bedroom. They were a bit flighty, clearly making efforts to avoid me. I can be scary, I admit, so I don’t blame them. I was pleased to have quiet and considerate neighbors.
As the spring wore on to summer, I heard a few scramblings and some muffled discussion, an occasional screech, the things of long summer days. Then, last week, there was a tussle. I don’t know the circumstances, but I heard a commotion, and seconds later, there was one unhappy mama bird screaming outside my bedroom window and three chicks on the ground, not quite ready for primetime.
They fussed and fluttered, finally making their way to fence posts next to calling mama. One female and the male climbed the posts, hopped about, fluttered down, tried again. The male finally walked across the pasture to a juniper and disappeared into the branches. It was getting dark by then, and the female was tentative, dropped to the ground, took a step, climbed back up on the post. I wanted her to snuggle with her brother and sister (whom I can only think already made it to the tree), but she spent the night on the wooden crossbar tucked against the upright. I saw her at first light and then not again.
That afternoon, I heard mama screaming, screaming, screaming. When I investigated, a Cooper’s hawk came out of the nearest tree, and the kestrel parents zoomed after it, diving and strafing. Lots of aerial maneuvering before the Cooper’s dropped into the draw and shook the following kestrels. The next day, the kestrels had a pair of ravens pinned in a juniper.
The chicks are out there, the parents are still hunting and feeding and protecting. I bet I feel more like the empty nester than they do.
It’s spring, and the birds are hustling to keep up with their growing chicks. This pygmy nuthatch and its mate were working hard foraging, feeding the gaping maws, feeding themselves. Caught in flight, I could almost hear this harried bird thinking, “Fly away! Fly away!” as it left the still open, hopeful mouths of its chicks. Soon they will fledge and the empty nest will be quiet, waiting for next spring.
Acorn woodpeckers have a hoarding problem. It’s not just weird Uncle Woody; whole families stash acorns, thousands a season. The holes are used generationally, and some storage trees, called granaries, hold as many 50,000 acorns. Some granaries aren’t trees. Fence posts, houses, roofs, water tanks, street lights, they’re all fair game.
I took this photo one morning while marveling at the ingenuity and tenacity of a bird determined to store a winter’s worth of food. I trust it never taps into the power line.
“You know, the point of business cards is to share them.” JB is my colleague and friend. He’s a good man, capable, knowledgeable. He’s also my antithesis, an extrovert, a people person. He engages with anyone; has a thousand questions. He’s the nicest of schmoozers, sincere, and genuine. JB collects business cards and has a special folder that holds the ones he receives. He notes where and when he received them. This is a level of dedication that I cannot muster.
Business cards are one of my nightmares. I prefer not to give them out. Perhaps this stems from living in Japan, where business cards are a formality. They are offered with humility and a polite bow; there is reverence. I don’t take myself this seriously.
“Yes, JB, I know what business cards are for.”
“Are you going to use them today?”
“Maybe. I will do my best to give out business cards today,” I declare. We are at a day-long workshop with people from state and federal agencies, biologists, consultants, policy people. It’s a lovely setting on the Columbia River, and despite the gray November day, I would rather be outside.
We enter the building, JB dives into the fray. I go to the bathroom.
I am wearing wide-leg trousers. I love these pants, though, like most girl clothes, the pockets are left wanting. Not quite deep enough to be genuine pockets, but deep enough to lull you into believing something in your pocket will stay there.
I stand up, pulling up my pants, turning to flush simultaneously. The silver business card holder, a gift from my mother (another extrovert), slips from my pocket and into the toilet bowl. Gratefully, the toilet contents are gone, and the case turns sideways against the outflow, stopping its downward spiral. I can only laugh. I reach in, retrieve the case.
I expect the cards are entirely soaked but open the case to find only a few wet edges. Regardless, I empty the case into the bathroom trash and wash the case, my hands, the case again, my hands again, and finally, I pocket the case.
Loitering in the lobby between talks, a man approached me, introduced himself.
“I work for PUD.” This is not auspicious to me. I know PUD is the public utility department, but I would never, ever introduce myself as working for PUD.
I give him my name. It blows by him. We chat for a few minutes. His interest is clearly not related to work or the conference. I don’t know how to extract myself.
To my great relief, JB joins the conversation. The three of us talk for a few minutes. JB now knows the man’s life story and sees that a professional connection could be valuable. I know otherwise but hold my tongue.
Finally, JB turns to me and says, “Did you give him your card?”
“Well…” I politely decline to offer a card.
I took this photo after fleeing the scene. I was grateful to be above the clouds and beyond the realm of business and its cards.
It was Memorial Day weekend, late May, though there was still snow. The spring bird song was incredible. Wildflowers were blooming. Pronghorn babies were popping out. And the mosquitoes were voracious. They were so thick and so wild for blood. I took this photo in a wild hot spring at Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge. For some reason, the mosquitoes didn’t linger over the hot spring. I lingered where they didn’t—my own Hart Mountain refuge.
Timber Press will release Best Little Book of Birds: CoastalWashington in June. Look for it at your favorite local bookstore – and if you can’t find it there because, say, you live in Oklahoma, I recommend ordering it directly from Timber Press (available for preordering, too) or from Powell’s Books.
WooHoo!
Gratitude to the amazing photographers Steve Lenz, Greg Smith, and Matt Vann and to the Timber Press team of editors, photo editors, layout and design people, and the whole crew that worked behind the cover, unseen and unnamed. Thank you!
As you may know, I moved recently, and for the first time in almost three years, I’ve unpacked everything. I’m not long in the furniture department, but I’ve got rocks, shells, and bones covered, from Australian abalone to obsidian blocks and a complete moose skeleton.
The earth spins through the ephemeral colors of the day. The ethereal light of morning is luminous. The sunset gradient passes from the sun’s flame to cool atmospheric blue in a hair’s breadth and illuminates the setting moon.
This year’s photos cross landscapes and time, the eternal and ephemeral. From the spiraling mazes of Southwest canyons to the glowing night sky of the Arctic and a handful of people in between, 2023 was about scale.
May 2024 flow easily and provide expanded horizons.
My time in Svalbard is rapidly slipping away. The dark is comforting, always there, no matter the hour or weather. There is no need to rush to catch the last bit of the day before sunset. I draw the curtains against street lights.
The moon is back. It rose above the horizon the other day, almost full. It fills the clouds, and the mountains glow snowy bright, rivaled only by Mine 7’s reflected light.
I am ridiculously grateful for a smartphone smart enough to capture the dark. My night photography camera skills are lacking, as is a tripod.
As indoor light exceeds the outdoor light, the regular 0916 library photo becomes increasingly sharper images of me in front of the library stacks. Night is taking hold, and with it comes new light– town, bonfires, the moon, and aurora take the sky.
Photos of houses and buildings that aren’t falling into the ground are not my specialty, but it seems incomplete to give the impression that there are no people or infrastructure in Svalbard. This is a company town transitioning into a tourist destination. The coal industry is being consciously closed as the government introduces its green sustainability agenda and levies the draw of the north for those who recognize its rapid decline.
The town is nestled in a valley (read never gets sun even when the sun never sets). The north end of town touches the fjord. To the east and west are high plateaus that climb straight from town, level out, and hold the town between their arms. Uphill, to the south, is a glacier. This confuses me almost daily. I expect glaciers to the north, and going south always feels like downhill, according to Ents, so this is a double cross of my wiring.
Housing is mostly company-owned, apartments and row houses in bright colors are nestled below the avalanche fences on the east side of town and the now-derelict coal shuttle structures. Across town and the river, the church takes the high ground. Although it, too, is in a high-risk avalanche zone, no fence has been built above the church yet. Walking into town from the south, you walk toward the fjord, toward another mountain through the ubiquitous street lights – my arch nemesis the world ’round.
The tradition in town is to take off your shoes and hang up your coat when entering many public places, including the library, where I often work. Like kids everywhere, the after-school crowd rarely remembers the “hang up your coat” part. It makes me laugh every day.
I’ve been working in the Longyearbyen library almost every day. I stand at the windows facing southeast. When I first arrived at the beginning of September, the morning sun poured through the window, soaking and warming me with light. And then, last week, I realized the sun moved behind the mountain before its light fell through the library windows.
These four photos were taken at 0916 on the mornings of 18, 21, 25, and 26 September. In a week’s time, the sun slipped below the ridge and out of view. It still rides the horizon behind the mountains, and in 25 days, it will drop below the sea, not to return for four months.
The red sails are a tourist gimmick, but the effect is stunning when fog slides around the icebergs creating a shroud of mystery.
The football pitch
Local kids practice their soccer moves on the Astroturf while Disko Bay icebergs, staunch supporters, look on.
Why it’s called ‘Greenland’
Oddly, it’s not called Greenland because of the intensely lush vegetation or the neon mosses of Disko Island. Rather, it was named Greenland as a ruse to encourage Viking settlement. Like many places, it had a name before it was ‘discovered’ by Europeans. The original name reflects the native connection to the land; Kallaalit Nunaat means “land of the people.” From the rich mosses to the columnar basalt and city block-sized icebergs, Greenland is stunning.
The view from Round Mountain to the west includes the town of Round Mountain and its range of protective mountains.
Tailing tales
The view east from the town of Round Mountain is not of Round Mountain any longer but of its remains. In extreme mountaintop removal, gold was extracted in flakes and nuggets, and the mountain was moved, grain by grain, to the valley. The neatly stacked tailings contrast with the geologic structure of the flanking mountains, snow still clinging to the upper crevices.
Down the road
Another mine is relandscaping a different piece of real estate. Rolling slopes and gentle peaks have become unscalable walls and plateaus upon plateaus.
Earth-moving
Can the mountains survive when earth-moving trucks come on tires twice the size of pick-up trucks? Has anyone asked for mountaintop approval?
Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowline. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
**H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (often misattributed to Mark Twain)
This year, 2023
I am once again throwing off the bowline and going north. Two weeks of sailing on Greenland’s west coast, similar to the Svalbard residency in 2018, with a smaller sailing vessel and fewer people – many of them from the Arctic Circle. Illulisat and Disko Bay are the area of exploration. Then, a week in Iceland with a dear old friend to share the northern calling and expand horizons.
Finally, in early September, I return to Svalbard. I will stay through the final sunset of 2023. On 26 October, after a day with one hour, thirty-five minutes, and twenty-five seconds of sunlight, the sun will set and not rise again until 16 February 2024.
I experienced 24-hour daylight in Alaska —the long, hyper-stimulating days, the sun circling the horizon, never dipping below its edge. Now, it’s time to try the flip side. The moon will be my ally, the stars and northern lights companions.
I’ve flown over Greenland many times on the way to and from Europe (photos from 2009) – always looking down and saying to myself, someday, I will be there. This time, I’m catching the trade winds to weave among the icebergs. A new road with no asphalt and no driving. I hope you’ll sail along.
Gorgeous blue New Mexico day. Blustery winds, high river, mud red as it flows below the height of Wall on the northeast side of camp. We put in on Wednesday, unloading gear, pumping up rafts and inflatable kayaks. Loading gear and tying down water, toilet, dry bags, coolers, food. And off, high snowmelt, high wind, blue sky. Herons and ducks, vultures, red rock, bluffs, and walls climbing from the river to the mesas above. Ponderosas, juniper, piñon, slot canyons, side canyons, water always flowing. The first night, a late partial solar eclipse somewhere, and in the morning, I climbed the wall to find the sun before anyone else awoke. I could see across rows of mesa cliffs and upriver, along the canyon above the rapids where we would start the day’s float. A ponderosa eked out an existence on a boulder, mid-river, at the head of the rapids. Water, rock, tree mark time: eternal river time, canyon time, life time.
Tear down camp, load gear, lock it down, move on, another day’s float. Below the walls of red and ochre, tuff or sandstone, blue sky, green ponderosas, and the faint hint of spring among the willows, the sun strong and brilliant, the air cold and the wind biting. Tailwind, headwind, river turn, no wind, headwind, river bend, tailwind. Rapids, rocks, high water snow melt, cold water biting through sun.
Dead elk, antler standing true against river boulder, waves breaking and flowing over the skull, parted by the forehead, rounded above the boulder by the rib cage no longer full of life, full of breath. Canada geese shifting along the bank, starting, flying, swimming, laying their long necks into a kinked line, thinking themselves invisible. Geese with downy nests in open rock crevices above the water, brooding alcoves like so many bees in honeycomb. Cliff walls full of cliff swallow nests. Globes of mud and spit held together against the rock, entry tunnels extending out, open to returning parents.
The accompanying dog running on the bank, climbing aboard a kayak, jumping off again, running the islands, swimming the channels, shaking out on the next beach to be picked up, and packed along again. Once running to the tip of an island only to startle a goose off its nest flush with the grasses, flushed from the grasses, eggs uncovered, dog disinterested, into the water for the next kayak stop pickup.
Rafts swirling forward, backward, around, flowing with the current, working against the wind, with the wind, in no wind, the water moving on, no time to waste, no time to pause. So much sky, so many walls, so many ponderosas. Layers of clothing on, layers off. Sun, wind, no sun, too much wind. Jacket on, hat off, gloves, socks, wind jacket, no jacket. The endless string of pieces shed, and pieces returned to their appropriate body parts. Lunch stop, sun, no wind, rest, warm, eat, laugh. Push off, float, float, float again farther. Hold the water, an impossible task, follow the course, fill your space, fill your soul with red mud water, blue sky, ochre and red walls, green ponderosas. Flow on, flow on.
Along the bank of a Labrador river on a late October day, the sound of a splash rose into the blue autumn sky and reached me. We were hauled out, Joe and I, our canoes resting on their sides on the bench above the beach. The stove was going, and it was teatime. Joe, ever the old Canadian trapper, was having a smoke, waiting for the water to come to temperature. I stood, binoculars in hand, crept to the water’s edge, and looked up the beach.
Barely a foot wide against the vast flow of river, the beach was a long step down from me. A tree had fallen off the bank and into the water. Just this side of the tree, ten meters from me, was a wolf casually traveling unimpeded by the dense forest above. It had walked into the water to skirt the downed snag.
It was searching the sand, sweeping its gaze from bench to water. I inhaled one very small, sharp gasp. The wolf stopped, looked up. Directly into my eyes. Gold. This is what I remember. A black wolf with gold eyes. We didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.
But holding my breath didn’t change the outcome. After a long moment, the wolf turned and bolted. I dropped to my knee, lifted my binoculars, watched the wolf retreat. Reaching the snag, it fled into the depth of the forest rather than be further exposed crossing into the water.
The wolf didn’t know we were there, having come in from the water with the wind coming downriver. Even in this remote place, it knew that humans were trouble. It knew that to be tethered to this species, the kind with two legs, was not the safest option.
Of course, I didn’t know the wolf was there either, having only mere human senses. Yet despite the opposing lore that wolves are trouble, I have been tethered these many years. It is the only option.
The days of water seem far away. From one extreme to the other – the wettest place I ever lived to the driest. Surely there is a happy medium somewhere.
A coal, oil, lumber train lumbering through sage and creosote.
Great blue herons wading through a still Rio Grande channel surrounded by autumn cattails and reflected in rain-muddied water.
A fall watercolor of saltgrass to sage, sage to willow, willow to cottonwood, the details of texture and color fuzzy, delicately bleeding onto the page.
Only a couple of months ago. The South Atlantic in Namibia. The cold water, the cold air, the African sun. Pebbles like rolled glass. I collected some of these against my better thoughts. The pier with hot chocolate for the KilcherKinder. Wine for me and Constantin, a different form of warmth on a cold day. African winter, not something one believes in. Barefoot in the cold sand, the high surf, tide. Flamingos in flight, their pink bodies, kinked necks, and streaming legs like an afterthought, “Don’t forget us!” Houses, building at the beach’s edge. Too close, too certain. Is there no storm surge, no risk?
This ocean I see daily, the ocean of desert, the ocean of grass, cholla, juniper, and pinyon. It is not lifeless as many think. No more lifeless than the oceans of water. We dismiss too much. The surface belies nothing of what lies underneath. If we can’t see it, does it not exist?
The ocean, power, depth, crashing waves, fluid, flowing, cleansing. What does it know? What does it see? What do we deny?
My mind stalls. The ocean draws me. Always has. Yet I have no more words to express, explain desire, need, floating, held, drifting to the lulling, the rhythmic calm of ocean. Sensory overload via deprivation.
My gear is mostly clean and stored now. A substantive layer of red grit has been rinsed from the bathtub after scrubbing boots, duffel, and backpack. I am getting used to the sun being in the southern sky again. My hands no longer look like worn stone and I seem to have finally lost the sand in my teeth after face-planting on the downslope of the famous red dunes. This was not an easy trip, long days, difficult roads, heat, cold, wind, and dust.
What’s the difference between this and fieldwork in New Mexico?
Space, time. People. Attitudes. Beliefs. Distances, geographic and human. Colors. Textures. The light. Elephants. Hyenas and lions.
My camera stopped working early in the trip. Although disappointed and frustrated by the sudden lack of this visual extension of myself, it gave me permission to see. Instead of looking quickly and then taking photos, I watched the landscape; I observed the animals. I saw more and saw it more viscerally. I picked up my cell phone to take a photo and realized the futility of trying to capture something so distant and obscured, or so intimate and detailed, and put it down again. Slowly shifting away from the thought that poor resolution was better than none.
I have much to process, the photos I did take with my camera and phone, and the images my head holds. These latter are somewhat out of order and are filtered through a light I can’t recreate on a different continent, with colors faded and intimacy lost.
Here are a few landscapes from South Africa and Namibia before the camera quit.
Tomorrow I am off on an adventure to Africa. My connections may be spotty and the possibility that I have no wifi for the rest of the month is good. And for that I am grateful. When I return I promise to share photos and stories.
In the meantime, in light of the ongoing American political saga, I offer this piece from 2016.
When I was in third grade, the elementary school principal came into our class to speak with the students. I don’t now remember what the primary reason was for his visit; what I remember is only a fragment of his lecture.
He stood at the chalkboard and wrote in large letters:
M A N
Stepping to the side so everyone in the class could see the letters, he said, “Without man,” he stepped back to the board and wrote “wo” before completing his sentence, “you cannot have woman.”
On the board was the word:
wo MAN
Almost 50 years later, I can still see this man saying these words, spewing ignorance and sexism across a new generation of children.
The principal of a school stepped into a classroom to tell half of the students that they were not of value or importance, that without the other half, they simply did not exist.
At the time, I am not sure that I understood all of the implications of his words – I was, after all, a child. But, I still think about this often; clearly, it made an impression on me.
To be told that, as girls, our very existence is entirely dependent upon men fundamentally undermines all that we intuitively know to be true about ourselves, our intrinsic value in the world, and all that we think ourselves capable of doing.
Woe, man.
Women innovators, explorers, and scientists the world around and for generations back have been discouraged from their pursuits. Surely, their place in the world did not involve pushing boundaries. Too many women have been punished for pursuing their dreams, questioning the status quo, and for attempting to break barriers.
Sexism must die. In light of the recent election, the dis-ease that it has created, and the long road that lies ahead for us, it seems particularly important to bring these words out of the dark. They are words that can no longer be whispered. They must be clearly spoken, believed, and lived by every thinking person: sexism must die.
The possibility of a quiet revolution or a slow paradigm shift has passed. Improving women’s status has repercussions well beyond the individual; it has been proven time and again. Yet, repeatedly, women are held back, pushed down, and thrown out.
And, of course, this extends beyond women to every other minority (whom, collectively, create a majority).
Whoa! Man.
Imagine a world where all genders, orientations, colors, and religions are celebrated. Imagine collaborating across the board, and finding the best place for each of us to shine. Imagine if we were each encouraged to pursue our inherent talents and were supported in our dreams. What an amazing world we could create.
It’s time. Whoa! Everyone. What a cool world we live in.
This spring, I entered one photo in the annual National Audubon Society photography contest. Of almost 10,000 photos entered, my photo was selected as one of the Top 100.
I’m super excited. Yet… I don’t know how to celebrate this – Suggestions, anyone?
Textures, colors, grasshoppers, darkling beetles, and cactus; a bull leaves a dry water hole; starving horses move to a water tank while vultures circle overhead. Drought drags on, fire rages, and summer monsoons seem far away.
When the arroyo gets a bit too aggressive, and wind threatens to take what’s left of the road, when you’re hard-pressed against the canyon wall, and there’s not much space for a rig to squeeze through, you know what to do. Put those old cars to work. The seat needs reupholstering, but marvel that 60, 70, 80 years later, the steel holds its rust lazily, the chrome sparkles, and the headlight might still work if only the other parts cooperate.
On the way to my first semester of college, I passed a car with a bumper sticker that read, “Nuke a gay whale for Jesus.” In the early 1980s (Reagan-era) no one grasped the idea, let alone the meaning, of political correctness yet. This simple sticker encompassed the social outrages and advocacy issues of the day. “No Nukes” raged after Three Mile Island; ranging from elephants and wolves to children, the latest “Save the…”-themed iteration was “Save the Whales.” Gay rights finally gained a foothold more than a decade after the Stonewall riots and as HIV/AIDS began its rampage through the world. And, well, you know, Jesus, an enduring point of derision, adoration, and divisiveness.
Save the Whales
I remember those “Save the…” campaigns. A few years past the signing of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) extensive vitriolic opposition insisted that this law, meant to protect species and the habitat required to sustain them, would curtail industry and cause undue harm to economic development. The idea that any species needed saving met resistance. And, really, so what if a species goes extinct?
The ESA says that individual species need company, critical habitat, and connectivity. I doubt, in 1973, the authors of the ESA would have specified that species need breeding opportunities, hidden in the “need company” and “connectivity” categories – as individuals need the opportunity to meet potential mates. Nothing lives in a vacuum.
“Species loneliness’ identifies the intense solitude that we are fashioning for ourselves as we strip the Earth of the other life with which we share it.” R. MacFarlane, Underland, A deep time journey
Save the humans from themselves
Despite human-perceived otherness, separateness, and higher life form-ness, humans need other humans. Like the species we are trying to save, we need connectivity to each other and the world around us. We need food, water, shelter. Every habitat has a carrying capacity. As the population grows, we need to do more with the remaining resources without destroying what’s left.
I wonder, were passenger pigeons considered critically imperiled when their population dropped to three billion? As many as five billion of this well-known extinct bird once flew east of the Rocky Mountains in flocks that reportedly passed overhead for hours and sometimes days. Near limitless flocks diminished to zero during the last 30 years of the 19th century. Market hunting, habitat loss, and human disruption of breeding colonies that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands of pairs destroyed the connectivity.
The ESA is designed to protect critically imperiled species from extinction as a “consequence of economic growth and development untampered by adequate concern and conservation.” I wouldn’t say the human population is critically imperiled (hello, eight billion). Our current global condition, rampant changing climate, and the subsequent increasing catastrophic weather and human crises resulted from untampered economic growth and development. It does not appear that the ESA has caused undue harm to economic development.
Intended to take no more than two years, the process to list endangered species currently averages 12 years. In the ESA’s 50-year lifespan, 1,652 species have been listed in the U.S. Only 85 of these have been delisted—11 due to extinction. As many as another 50 species went extinct while waiting to be listed. As economic development continues to harm the species (human and otherwise) of the world by reducing and polluting critical habitats, climate change exerts itself more heavily. And as the listing process drags into decades, is it time to list humans?
Where are the humans?
This morning, I Googled “ESA” for background information; Emotional Support Animal (ironic that this ranks so highly) and European Space Agency filled the first page of results. The Endangered Species Act has fallen off the front page of life and into the obscure corners of historical hysteria that we were changing the species composition of the Earth. The Endangered Species Act has been overshadowed by the looming climate crisis that may make all current species obsolete.
Where are the humans in this? We continue to drag out the ESA listing process. We continue to consume fossil fuels. We continue to expand our population. We continue to expand resource extraction. We continue to expand our water consumption. We continue to expand our habitat consumption. We continue to create and transport nuclear waste. We continue to expand use of chemical fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, cleaning compounds. We continue… We continue… We continue…
At what point do we realize we expanded beyond our capacity? At what point do we understand if we foul this nest, no other planet exists on which to build a new one? Nothing lives in a vacuum. If we can’t get it together to save other species, can we do it for ours?
Would a current sticker say “Queer Jesus rode the plutonium train to the climate change extinction grounds”?
“It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a “species loneliness” – estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
In no particular order, 2021 as I saw it through the lens of technical difficulties, a substantial geographical move, and one last road trip for Big Cat to the great catnip fields in the sky.
Plus, bluebirds as a small wish for 2022, beauty, joy, and peace to all.
In case you were wondering, this is where the West begins. Step off the pavement and into another realm. Don’t anticipate stepping back onto pavement willingly again.
From sunrise to sunset, there are no obstructions in the light. No trees create shade, no ridgelines prevent the sun from rising for hours past sunrise. Clouds move across the landscape casting shadows briefly as they sail past. And, then at dusk, the Earth turns golden. Some days, the clouds, the setting sun, and the glowing Earth conspire to create a study in contrasts and a moment so clear, you are forced to pause. There is nothing but this, and nothing more is necessary.
The cliff dwellings were already ruins when the people of the canyons drew the Spanish arrival on the walls in the 1500s. Spanish horses were larger than Navajo ponies, and a priest always accompanied the troops. Conquerors, it seems, needed to administer last rites frequently.
Today
Horses graze in the cottonwoods and ramble through the river bottom providing scale and movement to a timeless scene.
These are Nurdles, the plastic pellets that are used to make all plastic products. They are small and light and often escape the captivity of shipping containers and factory waste streams. They turn up in the most remarkable places, like the Oregon beach in the photo above where I collected this vial.
After Nurdles are extruded into their final form, they go off to live in the world. When their useful life as some product or another is over, they are discarded and become a different part of the waste stream. The plastic breaks down into smaller pieces but, being a petroleum derivative, never biodegrades. Rather, it becomes micro-plastic, and it is becoming a common beach phenomenon. The Nurdle vial in my hand in the photo to the right is the same vial among the micro-plastic below. Kneeling in the sand, I collected this vial-full in ten minutes without moving from this spot.
In my most cynical moments, I see a brightly lit, well-appointed marketing office with sleek, well-dressed communications people sitting in comfortable chairs pitching a new ad campaign to a group of equally scruffy biologists in Carharrts and flannel. “We’ll call it, ‘Ecosystem Services, making nature more useful again.’ It’s a new way of thinking about the natural world.”
A buzz phrase coined in the early Oughts, “Ecosystem Services,” identifies human benefits of the natural world and values them as we would price engineering projects. Really, they are not valuable unto themselves, but they offer us a range of goods and services that make them worth keeping. Our natural world has come to a marketing campaign to encourage people to believe that wild spaces are valuable. What of their inherent right to exist undisturbed?
“We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects. We manipulate them to serve the complicated ends of our destiny.” Barry Lopez
Do you agree and sympathize with the abuser or reach the breaking point and snap? It happens both ways, doesn’t it? Where is the Earth on this spectrum? “Our Earth,” I almost said. Is it our Earth? Or are we its people? I think the latter. Yet, we enslaved it, and torment and abuse it. Is it ready to throw us back into the dust and goo from which we slunk? Who would blame it? Those who plundered its depths, mined its oceans, and leveled its mountains? Everything we take turns to waste and ash and anthropomorphic layers of plastic. When future archeologists uncover this epoch, will they wonder that we destroyed ourselves in the mindless, relentless pursuit of personal wealth? Will they see that we drowned in our own waste and called it Climate Change?
“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Rachel Carson
Desert forest
Logging trucks roar past my house from the early, dark hours of the morning until, this time of year, long after sunset. We call them “logging trucks,” but they no longer transport logs. They carry toothpicks. The forests cut today are row crops. There is no time for them to become forests; timber companies would have us believe that there is no money in sustainable forestry. Yet, there are no longer jobs or community support in commercial cutting either. A single harvester and a handful of truck drivers can clear and move a cutting unit in no time. Mills are mostly automated, and much of what comes off the land is sent abroad to be returned as cheap products; the profit mostly goes to investment firms. Clearcuts are sprayed to kill all competing vegetation before the next crop is planted, despite evidence that trees grow better with various plant compatriots and mature trees nearby, regardless of aerial herbicide applications sometimes drifting (or sprayed) onto private lands and chemical runoff in the once-teeming salmon rivers and residents’ drinking water.
“Sadly, it’s much easier to create a desert than a forest.” – James Lovelock
The UN has declared the years 2021–2030 as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The common goal is not just to stop environmental degradation worldwide but to reverse it. I laud the initiative and the intent, but I question the feasibility. We spent centuries creating this mire. In a generation with eight billion inhabitants on the planet, we will need to put forth our most valiant efforts to dig out of the muck. For those without food or clean water, a safe place to rest, without educational opportunity, or sustaining income, will these people have the capacity to create more than a day’s worth of survival? Do those with enough have the will to bring the others along, support and encourage their well-being, and the habitats we all depend upon? Can we judge those pursuing deforestation in an attempt to survive when we skin our landscape in economic pursuit? We cannot cast stones.
“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Rennaissance painting to cook a meal.” E.O. Wilson
Perhaps a new quote for the marketers and the decade on Ecosystem Restoration could be, “Ask not what your ecosystems can do for you – ask what you can do for ecosystems.”
My calendar says the winter solstice occurs on 12 21 2020 at 0202 PST. Three palindromes must be auspicious. The light returns and another trip around the sun begins. May 2021 be everything that 2020 was not—joyful, expansive, and healthy.
Given the rampant lockdowns and shelter in place orders this year, the annual photo round-up is not as adventurous as other years. Still, I hope there is something here that will resonate.
The rain seems to have settled in and the days are a series of water, flowing, falling, ebbing. Six-hour windows of tide in, tide out, water falling from the sky, flowing downriver to the sea, and upriver on the incoming flood tide. The geese and ducks floating by in the rain-soaked air seem to say, “WTF? Are we swimming or flying?”
I will try flying. This year is about defying gravity. Are you ready?
p.s., Thank you for the most generous birthday president.
When Europeans invaded North America, it held an estimated 220 million acres of wetlands. In the intervening years, approximately half of that was lost to development, “reclamation,” dredging, poor land-use practices, and, more recently, drought and climate change.
Wetlands are one of the most ecologically productive habitat types on Earth, providing a multitude of benefits to humans, including economic boons like billions of dollars in flood damage prevention and a place for the vast majority of commercial and recreational fish to spend some of their life (multi-billion dollar industries), not to mention millions of waterfowl and shorebirds. Five percent of the lower 48 states’ land area is swampland, and more than a third of all threatened and endangered species live only in swamps. Wetlands also filter and store water (a finite resource) and store one to three times more carbon per acre than forest or prairies – a significant fact given the current climate and its crisis.
This is a minuscule fraction of wetlands’ value, but it is enough to create the question, “What makes sense about draining the swamp?” Only foolish, short-sighted people would suggest such a thing.
What we need is a flyswatter.
Eliminating parasites (think mosquitoes draining lifeblood and introducing malaria) that inhabit the swamp would solve the problem.
And that is what voting is all about—one swat per person.
Full disclosure, I could not vote in the 2016 election because I moved and changed my address after the registration deadline (unknowingly, or I would have waited, but really, who could imagine the outcome?). So, this year, I encourage all those who did not, could not, or would not vote in the last presidential election to get out and swat some parasites. They suck.
p.s., November 3rd is not only election day; it is also my Birthday! Yay! I want a new president, please. And, thank you.
“In these difficult times” has become the new standard, but what was easy about the time before now?
Remember, way back in February before the Coronavirus pandemic really hit the US? Remember how houselessness was a huge issue? Remember how affordable housing, even for people with fulltime jobs, was problematic? Healthcare was unaffordable to most and marginally provided by employers and the government. The education system was underfunded, failing, and exorbitant—and leaving young people fortunate enough to go beyond high school in deep debt (hello, 12.74% student loan interest rates). While income rose, it didn’t keep up with inflation and buying power–even for basic necessities–was down considerably.
Migrant families were being separated and put into concentration camps. People of color were being killed in the streets. And let’s not forget the weekly mass shootings.
National parks were being considered for privatization. National monuments were being stripped of their protected status and the remaining public lands were being opened for mining and oil extraction. Forests were being clearcut; the timber often shipped abroad for processing.
The US was on tenuous grounds with most of its former allies and was cozying up to a variety of tyrants and miscreants. The president was bombastic, petty, and immature. Not to mention destructive, vindictive, and lacking any form of intelligence.
Tell me, how were those times not difficult?
This is just the surface and just one country. Many other places are struggling with their own national issues.
This added layer of self-inflicted trauma–yes, self-inflicted. I see you, out-of-state non-believers, without masks wandering through my town–may create the perfect storm of difficult times but from my view, there is no indication that the previous time was easy.
Is this phrase hammered into us as a means of making the pre-COVID world seem rosy? People want to go back to their normal lives, but what is normal about weekly mass shootings? What is normal about being houseless? And is that a normal we want to support? If that is normal, I vote for abnormal.
We have an opportunity to create something better. The world systems are breaking down – now is the time to lay the foundation for the rest of the 2000s. Now is the time to rebuild with everyone in mind – not just the elite and the wealthy. Start at the beginning. We all deserve dignity, humanity, and equal rights. It’s a good place to start.
Instead of saying “in these difficult times,” let’s say, “I see you. You are invaluable. We have work to do. Let’s build a new world.” Practice starts today.
p.s., My birthday is on November third. I want a new president, please.
Keep some perspective. It’s only 99 miles; it’s wild and scenic. Don’t forget to stop and hug the trees. And, go the extra mile, talk dirty to them along the way.
p.s., please apply liberally to fellow humans, hug at will. And, if you’re skeptical about talking dirty, at least say sweet nothings.
The air was alive with waxwing buzz this morning. Flooding in, like a masked mob, the birds jumped from berry to berry, before ebbing back to the big spruce when disturbed. How did last season’s fruit survive this long?
The final leg of the Svalbard journey was from Montana, where Big Cat was staying with a friend, to Oregon. Big Cat and I set up for a road trip. I planned to stay in Boise, halfway between Bozeman and Ashland, but nine hours out of Bozeman, I hit Boise and thought, hell, Ashland is only eight more hours. And, so I drove on. The following is a road trip poem and the final Svalbard installment. I’m sure there will be more about Svalbard to come to these pages but this is technically the end of the trip.
Itinerary
Longyearbyen – Oslo
Oslo – Copenhagen
Copenhagen – Newark
Newark – Denver
Denver – Bozeman
One day rest
Bozeman – Ashland
Road trip
Bozeman 0900
Autumn light in golden cottonwoods and aspens
Mind’s eye sees Arctic blue light
Elk herd #1
“Caution! Animals on roadway. 12 bison killed by vehicles in 2018”
West Yellowstone
Coffee
Henry’s Lake
Rigby
“When you gotta habit
get banged $2”
Gas
Idaho National Laboratory
Craters of the Moon
Sagebrush desert and lava fields
Glacier mirages
Sardine juice for Big Cat
Lunch for me
Identified roadkill:
1 Badger
1 elk
1 cat
Uncounted deer and skunks
1 jackrabbit
1 raccoon
Elk herd #2
Gas
Boise rush hour
NPR first time in 71 days
Trump still an idiot
Coffee
Keep going
Sunset
Not polar night
Oregon
White Settlement Road offers glimpse of past
Says more about present
Sardine juice sloshed on truck seats while attempting to catch throwing up cat
It is almost awkward to be in the world of light, trees, and birds again. The noise and chaos of the group over the last two weeks remain in my head and feel familiar now in the sounds of Oslo, children, motors, bikes. The space of the fjords and mountains is closed in by buildings and blocks. Withdrawal from Svalbard physically is too abrupt. The reality of trains and city and money return to the fore and leave me turning inward again. Shy and reserved. New space. New head. New. Again.
The sun has been above the horizon for some time already today and will continue there for several more hours. The light is strong, almost harsh – a beautiful sunny day in Oslo in October. Rather unusual. There is no snow in sight and the trees are full of autumn-colored leaves. How did I get here?
Tomorrow is the first leg of the last leg. Oslo to Newark.
I need time to reflect and process. I need to put photos and places together, I need to fill in the many gaps of things that happened and the things I saw.
For today, I plotted a course through the botanical garden and I’ll walk through the university as well. See what I see.
I met a friend of a friend at a coffee shop this afternoon. She was great. We had a lovely conversation. She was the mayor of Longyearbyen for many years. First arriving there to introduce the university research branch. Apparently very successful at that. And, as it happens, she is also the wife of the Mayor of Oslo. She worked for the UN on the climate change panel. She’s smart, ambitious, and looking to the climate/emigrant/world changes that affect all of us.
I came from the burning west to the melting Arctic. The changes are evident. How could I not see that? And why did I have to travel so far to identify this issue? Connecting Cooper with Svalbard seemed obvious but now connecting Ashland to Svalbard seems more obvious and more necessary. Shifting my focus and adjusting my perspective was anticipated.
I used the analogy of the wars. How does that go? – They came for the socialists, the trade unionists, the Jews, but I was none of these and I did not object, it was not my business. And when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me. [First they came… by Martin Niemöller]
When Bangladesh is underwater, and Sudan reaches 50ºC (122ºF) on a sustained basis we don’t blink. What happens when the permafrost no longer exists and the seed vault is flooded, Europe is on fire, and what was once productive farmland is desert? Who will hear the complaints? Who will rescue us? All of us?
Sitting now with a Spitsbergen IPA and some gifted crackers and dried figs. Longyearbyen is brown and soggy as the lovely snow of two weeks ago is gone from town. It clings higher up and in the avalanche chutes. The sun rolls around the edges of the horizon, barely peeking through the mountains at times. I still feel the pitching boat and walking down the hall at the hotel leaves me rolling side to side as the building rocks under my feet. Weird that the land sways so.
Yesterday was an epic hike worthy of any good trip. Sarah and Kristin – two of the guides – have long wanted to do a hike together and specifically, each wanted to go to the Sweden House, Svenskehuset – a long-storied building from 1872. We anchored in Skansbukta for two nights allowing a morning landing.
We started southwest along the coast; no trail, of course, but there is only one direction and one shoreline. Sarah and Kristin, Georgia, Patricia, Andrea, Offer, John, Isaac, Lindsy, Martina, Lena, me, Max, and Nora. We walked along the low bench just above the waterline. We crossed many polar bear tracks in the snow, a sow with a cub seemed to have walked most of our path – though we were backtracking them. Across the tundra, green with moss, puffy, soft and lumpy, down into a river bottom, across the frozen river and up the bank to the far side.
We passed a trapper’s cabin. The trapper was there for years, met a woman in town and married her. They moved together for the winter to the cabin, but she died that winter. She was buried on the hill above the cabin. He left in the spring and never returned.
We passed several herds of reindeer feeding, grazing across the slopes and benches around us. Down to the beach, thinking it would be an easier path. The beach was ankle-breaker cobbles and narrow, ~3m wide at its widest. The wall above us was finely layered sediments solidified into rock. As we walked, rolling over, through, and along the cobbles, we moved up and down the tide line, off and on the wet rocks. It was slow and rough. I fell once, landing squarely on my recently-broken arm, falling backward, landing in the same way. Ow.
We came to a point, where the tide was up against the wall, so we backtracked to a river bottom where it cut through the sediments and drained into the ocean. We followed upstream, walking on the ice until we were able to climb the bank and continue on the tundra again. We crossed more tundra and another river, down, down, down, across the ice and then up, up, up to the west bank. And finally, after 13km and ~5 hours, we came to Sweden House. It was open, of course. We took down a few shutters and went inside for lunch. The structure was pre-built in Sweden in 1872. Taken apart and shipped to Svalbard as the headquarters for a man who wanted to mine dinosaur poop from the mountain (not gypsum but I can’t remember what it’s called). By the end of the first summer, it was obvious the endeavor would not be profitable. They packed the house with the remaining equipment, fuel, and supplies, and left it.
The same winter (1872–1873), a sealing ship froze into the ocean near the northwesternmost islands. The captain asked for volunteers to take the lifeboats south to this house, knowing that splitting his crew would allow them all to survive. There were enough supplies and shelter at Svenskehuset for as long as needed. Seventeen men dragged the lifeboats across the ice until they found open water and then rowed south into Isfjorden – about 220 miles of rowing in open ocean. They landed and opened the house.
In the spring, when the sealing boat was free from the ice, the sealers sailed south to pick up the 17 men. When they landed, there was no smoke and no activity, but there were two fresh crosses. The other 15 men were found dead in their bunks. Scurvy was blamed – at the time, scurvy was thought to be caused by laziness. In 2008, an archeology team excavated and tested tissue samples (bone) – they died of lead poisoning from heating the canned food in the tins. The first person to die was the oldest at 55 – he was the experienced hunter and Svalbard man who was expected to help keep the others alive. Once he was gone, the rest relied more upon canned food sealed with lead beads.
We had lunch – Offer offered his many snacks to the group (yay! And thank you!). We looked around and started back at 15:20. Sunset was at ~16:00. We hiked across the tundra along the riverbank to an easier place down and then up the other side, more tundra, another river. Rather than dropping back to the beach, we crossed the lower slopes of the crazy flat-topped mountain with the mudslides and rocks. In the second river bottom, I found a spectacular ammonite.
By this time, Lena, who has two collapsed disks in her back, was in pain. We picked our way across the mud slopes. It got darker and we went more slowly. It rained off and on, the wind came and went. We made our way to the beach, Mario and Åhsild were waiting at a lighthouse just up the coast [we learned this once we were within radio distance]. When we got to the beach, we had to cross another river. It was frozen in the morning when we crossed but now was wild, raging with ice and high current. Where it entered the ocean was the narrowest point, but the surf was high and washing back into the river. Sarah and Kristin decided they would carry everyone across. Crazy. I walked but was required to walk with them, one on either side. They carried each person with hiking boots or low boots. I didn’t show them mine. We moved down the beach a bit to a place with less swell.
[We loaded into the boat, one at a time, no hurry, single file in the surf.] The 14 of us, Mario and Åhsild, everyone and everything was offshore. We put Lena on the cold, wet floor, counted heads and started out. Before we went anywhere, Mario said, “Big wave coming, hold on.” Sarah, who was already wet through knelt at the front of the boat and held a light so we could see the water. 20–30 minutes later we were lifting onto the mid-deck. We were sent away as they helped Lena get out of the Zodiac and examined her. She spent the night in the captain’s cabin.
A bit of decompression. Everything was soaked and muddy. I hung what I could to dry and rinsed what I could to get the mud off. I had a hot shower and then, at ~2130, finally went up for dinner and a couple of honey/lemon grogs. Salmon, yum. Mario and Sarah both announced Lena was well and resting. I stayed and visited and relived everyone else’s epic adventure. Which felt much like any other day in the field.
Aboard again
Later, Mario sat at the table where I was sitting. He said in the morning, he took the Zodiac across to land and was chopping driftwood for a bonfire, when he had all the wood he wanted and was ready to load it into the boat, he discovered the Zodiac, with his flare gun and rifle, had floated away. He had an ax and the radio. At first, he thought to strip and swim but as the Zodiac moved farther away, he saw this flash of the ax and radio onshore and the captain floating naked near the Zodiac holding his rifle and flare gun.
“Antigua, Antigua, Marijn, Mario.” The Zodiac has an anchor, you know. Yes, I know.
And then, when he and Åhsild landed at the lighthouse they were hoping the beach was appropriate for a pick-up and climbed, with all of our lifejackets, up the bank. Realizing that meeting us there was impossible, they turned back to the water and found the Zodiac completely stranded on the beach. Mario, buying time, stalled, coiling line until a wave sort of put the boat back in the water. After they were once again on board and underway, Åhsild said, “Mario, should we put on our life jackets?” Oh, yes.
The Big Wave. We were all on board, Lena was stretched out on the bottom of the Zodiac. We were pushed offshore. Later, Mario, with a glass of scotch in hand told the story of the Monster Wave. He said, “I saw the wave and thought, ‘What the hell is that?’ Normally, you would turn along the edge of the wave and surf it. But because I was thinking ‘What the hell is that?’ I didn’t react in time and then had to do a different maneuver and gun the engine so the bow rose into it then you cut the engine so the stern rises again and balances out.” With scotch in hand, he told us about cutting wood, landing at the lighthouse, and the Monster Wave. And I said, “How is it, again, that you got the girl in your bed tonight?” He had a rather sheepish look and laughed.
Our adventure was much discussed as those who rarely venture into the outdoors express awe at the wild, the variability, and the prowess of the guides and crew. Lena said this morning that Sarah thanked her for making it back to the ship because the only other option was a helicopter.
We lifted anchor this morning and made our way back into Longyearbyen. Bus, internet, hotel, laundry, shower. Semi-real world tucked into a now-soggy brown industrial Arctic town. Sailing into town, I could see the mud mountain we skirted last night in the dark. It was dark and glowering.
There were reindeer herds, groups, individuals, all over the place yesterday. I found a dead reindeer, too. Short, round, and rolly-bodied beasts. No polar bears.
For open water, the chairs [in the dining/common area] are bungee-ed to the floor so they can only slide a small distance. Flat surfaces, other than the dining tables, have green sticky mats like the cabinet liners people sometimes use. I showered the other night during rough seas. The water fell in a straight line, of course, as gravity dictates, but once on the floor, it didn’t go to the drain but sloshed back and forth with the [motion of the] boat, washing the bathroom floor as it did so. The open shower curtain will sway widely from one side to the other against the white wall. Coats, towels, dining room lights all swing with the boat. The beds are long enough for me and comfortable, locked into their wooden forms. There are sway boards if you need to not roll out in rough seas. The toilets use salt water, and the boat has a desalination processor on board. The ship runs on diesel and wind, of course. Registered in the Netherlands, and built in 1956, she had 8 meters added to lengthen the hull a few years ago.
Yesterday afternoon I went on the last Zodiac tour through glacier ice. Huge blue icebergs mixed with the slushy pancake ice floating on a sea of glacier gray-green water that was thick as milk and calm as paint.
We crossed Kongsfjord from Ny-Ålesund to Ny-London – a marble quarry that went bust. It is an island of marble, but the marble crumbled and turned to gravel by the time it got to Europe, and so, like so many other dreams, it was abandoned. Leaving the buildings, train tracks, and machinery was easier and cheaper than removing anything. Polar steampunk is born. We landed, and I walked, took photos, and finally swam. Well, I went into the water. I stripped under the cliff out of the wind. Walking in up to my waist, I stood for a long few seconds before dipping in up to my neck. I stayed there for another few long seconds and then walked out. My toes and fingers immediately lost feeling.
The water was amazing. Cold, of course, but also almost sweet in its saltiness. Hard to explain. I dressed right away again, and the clothes didn’t stick the way they sometimes do with salt water, though the beads of water froze on my skin. Yesterday, and the day before, were the coldest days, I think.
Have I saturated your senses with ice and sky? I hope not. I never have enough sky. Vast expanses that absorb my thoughts, my anxiety, my idea of significance in the universe; somehow, ice fills the same need. I surrender to these things.
Often, when I feel pressed for time but have something I want to write, I leave notes in my journal, so I remember to flesh out the thoughts later. 10 October was one of those days, but I don’t think I adequately fill in the gaps here. What I do remember was standing on the bow of the boat surrounded by ice floes, brash ice, and pancake ice, alone, at 0100 hr., watching the northern lights play across the sky, the stars screaming brilliantly across the velvet blackness, and Bob Marley rolling through my head. Why would the Redemption Song fill my mind now?
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds”
Our only polar bear sighting
10 October, 0111 hr. Blomstrandbreen at anchor
moving through the ice – pancake ice in the night
stars- shooting star
northern lights – green and white, pulsing, flowing, swirling, east to west across the south and above
glacier sounds- thunder and jet engines
setting sail – hauling ropes and raising the sails
snowing, pelting, cold, stillness, silence
snow cave on island at glacier base
northern lights and redemption song @ 0100 hr Bob Marley
Water on the hull, ice on the hull
11 Oct Ny-Ålesund
We’re in port. Shore leave for an evening, and this morning we do a tour of the town. Built for coal mining, it is now an international research station.
While sailing the other night, we were called out for the northern lights, which turned out to be minimal. I never went back to sleep. An hour or two later, we had dropped the sails and were running on the engine, through the ice. Brash sea ice that was in giant pancakes in the fjord. I finally looked out the porthole and had to go on deck. The ambient light was inconceivable. The ice was thick and as far as I could see in the night. At the bow, Marijn was using a torch to look for icebergs and glacier ice, directing the captain port and starboard, maneuvering through ice cautiously. As I watched, we came to a stop and dropped anchor.
The northern lights began again in full 180º glory. Green and white, they swirled and spun, waving curtains of light. I stood for an hour there, in the middle of the night, in the cold, and watched the lights and stars. It was spectacular. We were in Blomstrandbreen in Kongsfjorden. We were anchored between a glacier and an island. The island was named as a peninsula because the glacier connected it to the mainland and it was thought to be a tongue of land that reached into the fjord. As the glacier retreated, it was discovered the island was not attached. This happened recently and it has not yet been renamed as an island.
find the Zodiac
We did a Zodiac tour through the ice in the morning. Giant pancake ice with glacier ice blocks in between. The pancake seams were fusing and knitting. Slush on the surface and the first sea ice forming underneath. It snowed heavily for a while, Christmas snow, as Kristin said. Fluffy, white, giant snowflakes. Beautiful. Arctic silence. Another massive glacier, we were well away from the face, which we estimated at 80m high. I took photos of the other Zodiac, miniature, at the glacier base.
We motored out of Lilliehöökbreen that night [maybe the night of the 8th?], moving through the fjord while we had dinner and then onto the open ocean, cruising north at speed through the night. I went to bed ~2200 and was awakened at ~2330 for the aurora. Standing on deck in the dark, with a sky full of stars and the shimmering green lights of the aurora was stunning. Inky black, velvety cold. Seven satellites and a shooting star with colors curving across the southern horizon – waves of color in a line, southeast to southwest, with the most intense walls of light east and west.
Antigua at anchor in Ytre Norskøy
When we woke yesterday morning, we were in Ytre Norskøy (~80ºN) – the northwestern tip of Spitsbergen. We were anchored between two islands in the corner of the archipelago with nothing between us and the North Pole, ~1,000 km north.
We landed and did a hike – up the ridge of the outer island. It was cold, windy, and snowing–pelting, horizontal, ice balls of snow. We got part way up but had to turn back and reroute. The snow was deep, and the landscape underneath was rocky. Rerouting, we wove our way up almost to the top. There is a modern, metal cross at the top. No one seems to know where it came from or who put it there. Kristin thought it was for the memory of the whalers.
Kristin scouts at the edge of the world
Another day at The Arctic Circle office
We moved the boat a short distance to another anchorage for the night, with a landing first. Few people dd the afternoon landing – most were tired, needed to work, didn’t want to go into the snow and cold. We had a static landing spot; big boulders and deep snow. I went waist-deep into a snow-well around a rock. Laughing, of course, and stuck. Extracting myself required a lot of floundering and flopping.
Whale ribs dug from the snow
Dropping back to the shoreline, I found six whale ribs in the rocks. I laid them out on a boulder in the snow to photograph before putting them back into the rocks. There was a jawbone, I think, too. An enormous length of bone – 3–4 meters, half-eaten, and chewed down and half in the water. Sarah said a whale had washed up there a year or two ago and that the bears had been scavenging. But I showed her that the ribs were cleanly sawed. It is illegal for humans to disturb carcasses.
A whale jaw bone at water’s edge
I’m struggling to put together some photos for a presentation. The new computer has few photos and all of my recent essays are on the blog site – I haven’t kept any on the computer. And what is interesting to this group?
We had presentations again last night. Kim, the weaver, uses scientific data to create patterns – like the incarceration and recidivism rate of kids, ice mass of Greenland over time, and the shape and size of a glacier in Alaska, over several panels and 40 years. Going, going, gone. Nora does performance art and sings – amazing work. More intimidation. Carson read the opening monologue of her new play. Dawn showed some of her documentary about an Australian ballet dancer set for the international stage who was randomly knifed in the face. The attacker was never found, and 18 years later, the woman continues to work through the trauma. Intimidating bodies of work and intellects behind them.
The blue tongue of a glacier behind Antigua
Yesterday’s second landing was across Lilliehöökbreen. Behind the ship was another glacier, a giant blue tongue, a sleeping goanna, along the water’s edge, and one smooth surface of blue ice.
Lena said last night that for the past 18 months, life was geared toward this trip. I, too, have been that way and when we return? Nothing planned, scheduled, or aligned.
Island landing in Fluglefjorden – I built a snow cave and curled into a ball inside.
We moved the other night, from the beach with the sand and glacier cubes to the north into another fjord. Anchoring on one side of Lloyd’s Hotel (Möllerfjorden), we did a landing in the morning. [The grandly named Lloyd’s Hotel is a well-used cabin that appears to be heavily influenced by the Jim Morrison Paris memorial-type crowd. Open to anyone who happens upon it, it has collected random memorabilia from those passing through. A polar bear had recently visited the cabin. There were tracks directly to, around, and right up against the building. The bear must have stood on its hind legs to look at the roof – but I can’t say if it left any tokens.] We crossed the peninsula on foot into the other arm of the fjord (Krossfjorden). Coming through a pass, we hiked onto the ridge above the glacial valley (Lilliehöökbreen) and above Antigua, which had moved around the peninsula.
Across Antigua’s deck to Lilliehöökbreen.
When we came into view of Antigua, she was doing depth soundings in uncharted waters. The glacier once filled the bay. Now, as it retreats, it has melted far enough back to split into two glaciers where the mountains above the bay divide it. The foot of the glacier used to be a united face that met the water’s edge. The head of the fjord is a pan of glacier; mountain top knobs stand above and between the ice fields creating the same effect as a braided stream, many sources twining together and apart again. In this case, rivers of ice flowing around the mountains, each with a different mountain top source, met at the foot and combined into an expansive glacial face. Now, the single glacier front has moved back far enough to be two narrower glaciers split by the mountain ridges and flowing into the new bay. The uncharted water depth was variable, as little as 4 m – the ship’s draft is 3.2m.
In the Zodiac, we wandered through the ice pack, looking at the glacier. It calved regularly and rumbled like thunder. A tiny ringed seal came right to the boat, diving around and under the Zodiac repeatedly, watching us for 20–30 minutes. Kristin and Åhsild said seals never did this.
Christina did salt words – “longing” to “belonging” and “surge” on the bow of the Zodiac. We floated; we did a minute of silence to hear and believe. The walls towered above us, blue and white, black and gray, ice blue, and aquamarine. The surface water was full of ice floes, bergie bits, and pancake ice, congealing and spinning.
Zodiac tour to Lilliehöökbreen.
Ice and reflection.
Glacier face 1.
Glacier face 2.
Antigua depth sounding at the foot of Lilliehöökbreen.
Yesterday, we continued motoring north along the strait between mainland Spitsbergen and the barrier island to the west; the water was rough. I only slept ~1½ hours between my watch and breakfast (mistake!). I was able to write and work on the computer for a while but, then I stood up and instantly felt sick. The rest of the morning and afternoon, I spent between the midship deck and the common room. Mostly outside, sometimes throwing up at the rail. A lot of people were in their beds for the day.
The kitchen crew is super nice. Alex stopped to rub my back while I was throwing up and asked if I needed anything. I sort of brushed her off in my puke-y state, despite her clear well-meaning intent. A few minutes later, Jannah came out and handed me crackers. She said, “Eat these.” Then, while I dutifully ate the crackers, she stood and watched me and talked. ~ “I love this job. I laugh all day. Some days, I get really sick from the motion. I come out here; I throw up. I go back and laugh more. It’s a good job. You need food in your stomach. Make sure you always have something to eat.” She was right, of course. Eating seems the last thing you would want to do when you’ve been heaving at the rail all day, but it makes a difference.
Footprints, I’m thinking about footprints – the human footprint, glacial footprints, polar bear tracks, the iceberg prints, fox tracks.
Finally, we left the open water north of the island and moved into the 14th of July Bay, where I took these photos.
All of the photos on this page were taken on the same day in the same location. The variation in color from one to the next shows the range of effects that light, cloud, distance, time of day, and falling snow can have on images. At first, I found the eternally blue light on ice distorting and disorienting, but this is the color of the place and most everything in my memory has an indelible wash of shades of blue.
We did a morning landing on a barrier beach; an open channel along the side allowed access to the lagoon at the front of the glacier. I tried out the new waders, walking in the lagoon among the icebergs until my hands no longer worked. After lunch, we went again to a different spot on the spit where the icebergs were clear, aquamarine. It was cold and snowing but there was no wind and it was spectacular.
After an hour or so, the Zodiac picked us up and we motored across the lagoon and along the glacier face. The water was like mercury, calm, flat, and reflective in the fading light. The icebergs were beautiful shapes and the water surface was trying to congeal. There were thunderous rumbles from deep within the glacier. The textures and colors are so unimaginable, blues and purples I’ve never seen before. Sarah said she had never seen the glacier this way, the clouds and snow gave the colors new intensity.
We started moving before dinner was done and motored through the night, north. I “helped” with the 0200–0600 watch as we sailed. Fill in the logbook; do the rounds. I didn’t go into the engine room – that seemed impossible. The water was pretty rough and I had waves of nausea – I was fine and then felt terrible, fine, and then terrible. At one point, I stood at the rail and threw up what little was in my stomach and then was fine again. The 1st mate (Marijn) was on when I started and switched with the 2nd mate, Annet, his wife, at 0400. The time went remarkably quickly, and the light was beginning as we were released at 0600. In time for breakfast. Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep before I started the watch at 0200; that left me pretty wasted and with a sleep-deprivation hangover.
The residents are doing presentations during the trip. The first group went the other night. Kristin is a novelist for young adults – fantasy kick-ass girls. She had her first NYT bestseller 10 years ago but she looks like she is ~35. Christina was a publisher, and now is working on a book about climate change. She is also an artist and is drawing the maps for the book – on seaweed. Andrea is writing a book on Barents, the explorer who “found” this land. She has two previous books, including one on concentration camps across time and continents. Isaac does city murals. Starting with graffiti, he now has a crew that does public murals on commission for cities all over. Very intimidating. Not the people, but their accomplishments and the paths and personalities that have taken them so far.
It appears that I am out of sync. Dates in my journal and dates on the photos and the memory of each day’s locations do not agree. I realized too late that I did not reset the day or time on my camera to the European time zone, so each day in Svalbard is split across two dates. The words below belong to the photos in the last post. This adds to the flow and non-flow of time in the Arctic. Read on.
4 October Fridtjovbreen
The trip guides are four women, ~30-ish. Sarah is Dutch but has lived in Svalbard for ~10 years. Kristin and Åhsild are Norwegian, and Emma is Dutch-Australian and lives in London. Kristin and Åhsild are fantastic sources of information about glaciers, geology, currents, and animals, among other things. I haven’t spoken with Emma much yet. Sarah is the lead, well organized, and coordinated. It is an amazing dynamic. They carry weapons and flares and are layered in leather and Gortex, and each has wild hair that says, “Fuck you, patriarchy, I’m a woman, and I’m badass.” Sarah also brought her dog, Nemo, an old husky mix who is very cool and knows the ship routine. They inspire fun and joy and verve.
Lena says the captain looks and acts distressingly like an old boyfriend. Alas.
We were going to sail yesterday with the square sails but, when we got to the wind line at the mouth of Isfjorden, there was no wind. We motored to our next spot, another fjord – there are three openings at the mouth with a barrier island, a narrow strip of rock barely above water, that stretches almost the width of the opening, leaving a narrow channel on either side with wicked currents in each. We came in on the north side, then turned into a small bay with a glacier at the base. A narrow opening after a narrow opening. And we did a landing in the north wind along the spit at the mouth of the bay.
Loose ice from the glacier is piled up against the spit at the mouth. We were given another perimeter, along the moraine, above the main fjord. There is pancake ice packed there and beautiful crystal globes of ice from the glacier. A trapper’s rack hangs carcasses high above the beach out of non-climbing polar bears’ reach.
Motoring out in the morning yesterday, we passed a herd of reindeer, a sub-species only on Svalbard. They are shorter and bulkier and live on the few plants and lichens that live here. Their survival here is stunning.
There was a giant black guillemot colony on the cliff face at the mouth of Isfjorden. Kristin said sailors all know this as the entrance to the Isfjorden. It was a massive triangular wall – I don’t think I took a photo in the end – though I have taken a thousand photos already. So much to see. Landscapes, of course, but also patterns and textures, colors, skies.
Birds on the water – non-sailing yesterday, we saw a lot of birds on the water. Not the summer din and numbers but nice to see eiders, guillemots, a tubenose – fulmar (maybe?), gulls. There were some auks, I think also. The eiders dove and flew ahead of the ship as we came to anchor. I tried to get a few in flight, alongside the boat and water.
The water is sublime. As we left anchor yesterday morning, we moved through pancake ice, very thin and newly formed. This time of year, the freshwater is still flowing into the fjords. Since it is less dense than saltwater, it floats on the surface and freezes easily and earlier than the saltwater. If it stays cold with an early winter, it often holds and thickens.
We have had beautiful days –sun and warm air for this time of year. The sailing wind did not come in yesterday when we wanted to sail, but it arrived when we got into the bay and was brutal on the shore. Odd since we were in the protected fjord by then. The crew is talking about the north winds, how strange and strong they are. There are three low-pressure cells backed up to the south of Svalbard being fed energy from northern high pressures, so it is uncertain what will come from that.
I love the sweater I bought in Longyearbyen and can’t imagine where I would be without it.
I’m already having trouble finding space. It’s just after 0600; the kitchen is waking up. I thought I would have time before everyone else got up.
Ok. So, finding space for myself in this landscape of space. This is a different experience from Cooper. Of course, I knew that. Still. Everyone is great, and I know we will find our way in between and around each other. I am less consistently exposed to so many people all at once. I suppose it’s good for me and part of the need to be open and expand to new horizons.
I was on deck last night for a while. It was mild (relative), and the sky was bright. The moon was behind a hill, there were clouds scattered across the horizon, the ~360º horizon, and small lights began to the north. Green and white, gentle, shimmering, and pulsing, and then the slow curtain and swirl along the horizon. They shift so suddenly and dramatically, I thought I would end up with big blobs of color in the photos—and some I did, but others showed patterns I didn’t see. The traces must be in the air but not so vividly clear that I can see them. The long exposures apparently allow them to be visible. That is my guess, anyway.
When I was still at home in June or July, M texted that I need to up my game for this experience. I suppose yes. And yet. Everyone has some form of art background, teachers, writers, professors, filmmakers, etc. All have years of experience or are young and creative and ambitious. They all have defined ideas of what they want from this trip, what they will create, and what that means. I’ve repeatedly said that I will tie Cooper and Svalbard together, but it seems unreasonable now and unlikely and almost unnecessary. Each person asks what are you doing and what do you want to accomplish today. I want to be. I want to see. I want to find what is here not force my thought of what I should be doing on the landscape. Is that a cop-out? Maybe just a different approach, a different perspective. I want to see what is here, not what I want to see in the landscape. I don’t want to impose my expectations onto a place that has no expectations of me and no chance to respond or indicate its desire for me to see it from its perspective.
Very anthropomorphic. Yes.
But as the trees connect and communicate, I believe that the landscape speaks a slow language of time and rock, ice and water. Like the Ents, anything that is worth saying is worth saying slowly and clearly. Geologic time is about as slow as our world knows. The glacier we are anchored on, Esmarkbreen, is surging now, moving quickly forward and, simultaneously, it is retreating. The land-fast glaciers are becoming less so – slick meltwater is finding its way underneath and allowing more motion. When it hits the sea, it calves, and another piece of the language drops away into a new slang word. And a little bit of the old way disappears.
As I am a rookie in the ways of art, my companions are rookies in the way of the north and the outdoors and the wild and the wilderness. And what is wild anymore? NYC is wild to me – a humanity free-for-all that locks people into isolation, unnaturally creating boundaries between people who live a few feet from each other and who cross paths daily without acknowledging or identifying each other. Like rats in overcrowded colonies. Maybe I am justifying my point of view rather than exploring different sides. Two minds – focus and unite. I only need to identify the path that interests me not badmouth the path that doesn’t. That has long been my trait, hasn’t it? Funny that this idea comes to me now. Since I was a child, I remember saying, “Oh, I don’t want that…” Often about unattainable things. Many of these things were desirable, but out of reach. Rather than fight to create the possibility, I dismissed them, without identifying what I did want. I know I’ve written this before. Perhaps I’ve been poised at this point my whole life but never clarified the path I wanted, and so, have stayed on the unidentified, undefined course.
Sky, water, snow, mountains, and light all come together, fading one into the other or standing rigidly separate. Hard lines between water and mountains and mountains and sky are few. Ice and rock, clouds and light bridge the gaps, creating an infinite variety of landscapes. An occasional reality check, a Rubik’s cube, another boat, or a man-made object bring the focus back to every day, the mundane, the necessities of human life in the Arctic. But the sky and the landscape are the stuff of dreams.
First and second mate try their hands at a Rubik’s cube
All courses start here.
Hazy, misty light gives depth where snow and cloud blend together
Range upon range gives way to the coming glacier
Crowding into the valley
A ship at glacier’s mouth
Ice and rock below Victerhukfjellet, the folded mountain
Shore ice glows as the evening sun drops below the cloud ceiling
Kristen watches the flank below Vikterhukfjellet
Blue ice, pink mountains
Victerhukfjellet at sunset
A trapper’s meat cache reaches out of polar bear range
The finest skim of ice doesn’t prevent a near-perfect mirror image
At some point during my trip, I realized that I never changed the date and time on my camera to reflect the European time zone. Photos I take on one day appear with a different day and time than when I took them. Time becomes irrelevant and the bright days flow into cold, star-filled nights. The textures of water, clouds, and mountains shift with the morning and evening light, the wind, and the speed of Antigua.
We left port yesterday afternoon with the motor but put up the sails quickly and fairly flew across the fjord. We helped with the sails – a token effort by the guests. Ropes everywhere, sails pulled up front to back and staysail in the bow. The wind was high and rough and almost everyone felt it. I did well outside but inside was pretty queasy. Eating helped and the food was good. I didn’t eat a lot and went to bed almost immediately.
Someone pounded on the door to say the aurora was visible. Lena (my cabinmate) and I got dressed and went out but there was little activity and after 10 minutes I went back to bed. By the time we went up for the aurora the crew had pulled down the sails and dropped anchor in a quiet arm of the fjord with a wall to protect us from the wind bombing out of the north. The water was calm, and the boat rocked gently for the night.
We did a landing this morning and a hike up the glacier edge. The grays and greens and blues are satisfying and intense. The glacier was growling and grumbling. Thunder came from within the glacier, massive rolling peals as it shifted and creaked into a new position. It calved audibly but we couldn’t see it from where we were, though we watched the wave from the calved iceberg cross the bay and wash up onto the shore.
The landscape is wide open and at the same time constrained within the walls of glaciers and the surrounding mountains. The beach is gravel and sand with gently lapping water. There is a tide, but it seems very small. Black guillemots in their winter attire were on the water and a few purple sandpipers along the beach. Two seals followed us when we first landed; they barked at us.
Ant-sized humans cross the gravel outwash plain at the foot of Esmarkbreen
Retreat – Sublimate, v.: to pass directly from the solid state to the vapor state; archaic: to improve or refine, as in purity or excellence. As the world we created spins out of our control, it is time to recant. We know the Past and the Present, they hold no secrets, and no amount of blame or negotiation will change either. As a species watching our suicide drama play out in slow motion, we must withdraw from the feudal and futile, selfish and rapacious, allowing light and air to supplant notions of dominance.
No time – Perhaps I overestimate. The universe, here long before humans began their journey, will remain long past our term. As humans fade into the geologic past, our constructs, physical and metaphysical, will be of no consequence. Like thousands of species before us, we may become a sedimentary layer, or a fossil pressed in rock. Unlike our predecessors, we can choose our course of action. It is not beyond our ken to initiate a new design, accepting global shifts as they occur, choosing to remain a part of the universal configuration rather than apart from it.
Outside the human realm, independent of water and ice, Past and Present, the aurora borealis sways and glows in the Heavens. Indifferent to the vagaries of the human ego, the plasma flow viscerally draws us to join the dance. It is within our power to redirect Present Chaos. Necessity obviates the need for further debate. If we want to know the Future, we must create it, and we must nurture it.
Our path then is this: move toward the light. Collectively overcoming inertia, seeking the light, we can pull the Future out of thin air.
Impetus.
Ascendant, adj.: directed upward
“…real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.” Barry Lopez
Advance – Water became ice. Masses of ice ranged from the north across oceans, continents, and islands; tongues extended from mountain tops to valleys, grinding through walls of stone, depositing sediments via meltwater. Sea level dropped as cold held water in its solid form. Earth’s crust deformed, depressed by the weight of ice, and its rotation shifted as the mass on the north side of the globe held sway.
Our time – Products of geologic time, humans found their way to the far north, ever expanding their range, ever devouring that which they believed to be rightfully theirs. The Cosmos, now in our hands, took a new shape. We moved mountains, tilled bottomlands, mined minerals, metals, and power. We tamed, maimed, and killed animals, plants, forests, and oceans. We harnessed fire and created ice on demand. We built new substances from the elements, exploiting natural structures to suit our desires, turning oil to plastic and coal to heat.
Retreat – Ice becomes water. Glacial ice, pack ice, shore-fast ice, it all melts. Sea level rises; shorelines drown. Our heat does not dissipate, but instead stagnates overhead, trapping us in our effluent. Hurricanes, cyclones, blizzards, forest fire, drought, floods, the Earth we manipulate responds in kind. We hide in our denials, in our superiority, in our arrogance. Our expectation that Earth is ours is flawed. The sun oversees all. Its cycles are unaware of our needs or our existence. It is fire not harnessed.
We are not rulers of Earth, nor conquerors or tamers. We are stewards. Our tenure will be marked not by our great deeds or structures, nor our mass upon Earth’s surface. Rather, we will be remembered for our refuse and that which was lost during our watch. In place of glaciers and polar bears, we leave pit mines and plastic water bottles.
We have agency, and we have created the untenable. A new equilibrium, not yet reached, is imminent. We of the Present, we are in Limbo, Purgatory.
Chaos.
Every empire must fall.
Disintegrate, v.: to lose unity or integrity by or as if by breaking into parts
“Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?” Barry Lopez
Barbara Crawford, a co-resident on the Arctic Circle, asked me to write three essays to introduce her exhibit opening this June in the Montefalco Museum, Montefalco, Italy. The gallery has three rooms one leading into the next where she is presenting her paintings and sculptures from Svalbard in a version of The Divine Comedy, each room will be introduced by an essay and will follow the themes of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Hell is explored through water and the past, Purgatory as ice and the present, Heaven in air and the future. If you happen to be in Umbria in June, be sure to visit. In the meantime, and with no further delay, here is Part 1, Hell.
Hell Water Past
Distant. Persistent. Resistant. Recalcitrant.
Immemorial time – Before there was Europe or Svalbard, the Arctic Ocean or coal, even before there was life, there was primordial soup – a steamy, overheated, water bath that covered the Earth. Whatever you believe about creation or evolution, there are undeniable truths: seafloors spread, mountains rose, life began.
Advance – Fire and brimstone greeted the first water-borne carbon-based biological beings. Across time, continents moved, an atmosphere formed, and life burgeoned. Shapeshifting was the norm, land masses stretched and smashed together; oceans mixed and remixed, and uplifted mountains washed back into the seas. Plants and animals diversified, flourished, lived, and died. Their bodies fell to the earth, to the seafloor, into the future in conglomerations of sediments and carbon reserves.
Mountain chains were spurned by wandering continents, eroded by unceasing weather, and churned by heat and pressure into new forms, into new mountains or no mountains. Carbon was compressed deeper, harder. Pieces changed position or were reworked, but the players remained the same.
Cosmos.
Time immemorial proceeded into the ages of the ancients, pharaohs, empires, and deities. What was once wild and raw and orderly in its state of natural fluctuation became fodder for the human dynasty.
Infrangible, adj.: not capable of being broken or separated into parts
“Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty.” Barry Lopez
Last but not least, this rounds out the cast. Twenty-eight residents and 11 crew members set sail for two weeks on the waters of the North Atlantic. Tight quarters, snowy weather, and a boatful of ideas make for lively times.
Carson contemplates
Mary Ellen in the ice field
Andrea intensely focused
Rachel in waders
Lindsay at the rail; Dawn under the veil
Kristin at leisure
Nora seeds the Arctic water with ice cubes. Restoration.
Isaac in the Zodiac
Barbara C. in the white sea
The galley crew, Piet, Janene, and Jannah, after dinner calm
As a field biologist, I often said there was a reason I worked alone in the woods for so many years. Not quite a misanthrope, I don’t suffer fools lightly – though I spent many years as a fool myself, and fooling myself. Two weeks on a ship full of people from which your only escape is to get into a Zodiac with the same people and spend time on shore again with those same people, oh, that took some mental wrangling.
In the end, the people were as much a part of the success of this trip as the location. For someone who rarely takes photos of people, this group enthralled me. The crew each knew enough for twenty people. The crew and residents both were not diverse but rather were infinite in their stories, their articulation via a chosen medium, their creativity, and openness to the possibilities of art, design, expression, and life.
In the order taken
Sarah, the lead guide, and Nemo, the lead dog, above Esmarkbreen
Martina and Georgia attempt to see-saw
Lena blows bubbles
Max paints Arctic landscapes in the dining room
Max’s painting
Mario, the captain, with roasting fork out of hand, explaining the boat
Julie waves for the camera
Offer watches the sky from the Zodiac on deck
Dawn and Bonnie out of the wind against the wheelhouse
There are fewer than five miles of roads on an island more than 500 miles from the nearest landmass. At the end of the season, ride your snowmobile to the edge of the remaining snow and walk away. When you return in the fall, it will be there. Maybe you got close enough to town to store your bike with the snow machine. Just lean it against the snowmobile. It’s fine.
Stopping in for a beer at the Coal Miner’s? Great. Park your dogs out front. Take off your shoes and leave your gun at the door.
A lone snowmobile stands at glacier’s edge and away from the pack conveniently camouflaged as rocks (lower left)
These slopes surround Longyearbyen. A jumble of billions of pieces of talus could, with a bit of patience and a lot of time, be put back together. Rock caps give way to steep slopes and mounds of coal mine tailings stretch across the valley floor, all creeping toward the fjord. Rock slides etch the ridges with geometric patterns that stand out under light snow cover. Ridge after ridge stands against the sky, crumbling into the earth.
Afternoon light and cloud shadows play on snowy mountains.
As you may know, in October 2018, I spent three weeks in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard as a member of The Arctic Circle, an annual expeditionary residency program. Sailing from the town of Longyearbyen on the three-masted Barquentine ship, Antigua, we explored the coast and fjords, the light, textures, sounds, and landscapes, following the western edge of Spitsbergen, the largest and only permanently populated island of the archipelago, to the south and to the north and back again to Longyearbyen. In between, we motored; we sailed, putting up and pulling down sails; we ate and laughed; we heard stories of our shipmates, the residents, and the crew; we explored on foot, in the Zodiac, in the ship; we saw reindeer and seals, a handful of birds, polar bear tracks and snow angels; we heard glaciers; we watched the sun revolve around the horizon morning to night and again; we saw the aurora; it snowed, it rained, it was cold, windy, foggy, and raw; it was sunny, blue, and gorgeous; the water was calm and it was not; and day by day, we lost daylight as we revolved our way closer to the Polar Night and winter. And day by day, we lost, in the smallest modern human-pampered-on-a-ship way, what it meant to be separate from the landscape.
There is a lot to tell in this tale. And there is a lot that I cannot express, neither through words nor in my photographs. I kept a journal, of course, but it is perfunctory. I was too enthralled and engaged with the place and the people, too overloaded with the intensity of the space. My introverted anti-social self was in way over my head. Finding calm headspace to reflect and express the experience did not happen for me on board. And writing onshore in the cold and wet, well, many of you know my handwriting. In the months (!) since I meandered in and out of my photos, racing through them initially to share what may be of interest to the rest of the residents and crew, I bogged down when it came time to express the meat of the place in my images.
Arctic geometry: angles, triangles, and plane plains.
Via email, I lamented to my sweet friend Linda that I was not keeping up with my blog, ideas were percolating but I was reluctant to put them on paper or into the ether. Her response, “my sense is that you saw too much, know too much and hurt too much. Your slowness in letting it out is, I believe, more kind to us who think it’s going to hurt us too much.”
My lazier self says, yes, I am being kind. My practical self knows not where to begin or how to convey the mesmerizing passage of time and light in a place known for cold and dark. And, as this place passes from our memory in the years of melting ahead, I will mourn, as with all things, not for its passing but for my loss. For our loss. For all those who will not know it and who will wonder at its very existence. Like the miles-long herds of bison and the days-long flights of passenger pigeons, the Arctic is fading.
I don’t believe that we alone are entirely to blame, the planet has long worked in its own mysterious ways, but in no way have we helped. Exploiting everything we could for centuries, erasing landscapes for coal and oil, eliminating people and their ways of life, executing populations of fish and animals for our endless, grinding consumption, we certainly carry the brunt of the shame.
And so, I start the only place I can, with my experience and impressions. Like the Cooper Island series previously posted here, over the coming months I will share my journal, photos, and thoughts. I hope you’ll tag along.
I know that there are no words to make death better and so, I often remain silent for too long when people I know suffer a loss. For all the power of words, they are only words, and they cannot replace the love of a lifetime, a father, husband, or child. They cannot replace the smile, the joy, the humor of one who is no longer.
Process
Lessons in scale.
For months I have been ruminating, exploring my experience on Svalbard. I am leery of processing my photos – they cannot truly represent the exquisite colors and textures of the ice, the ocean, the landscape. They cannot convey the quality of light, the weight of the cold air, or smell of snow. They only pluck at the edges of the vast expanse, the scale of mountains, glaciers, open water, and solitude. It does not seem possible to feel the distance, the isolation, or the fortitude of the place, resolutely anchored in the north with nothing but open water and ice between it and the North Pole.
No words
Polar bear tracks disappearing
Now, more than ever in our species’ memories, the Arctic is commonly open water. The ice ages and Little Ice Age are gone. The pack ice of the Arctic Ocean basin, oscillating around the northern axis; building and retreating; seizing ships and men of old; providing a hunting and birthing platform for animals supremely adapted to the cold, the ice, and the dark; releasing accumulated nutrients into the water for the ocean-bound and the flying, diving creatures of summer; this great pack ice is leaving us.
There are no words that can mollify this loss. And yet, now more than ever is no time to be silent.
Each year I put together a dozen or so photos that describe the year past. This year I have an extra year’s worth of photos from Svalbard so I am presenting them in two parts. I hope you enjoy them.
Part I
The year stateside.
Arrowleaf balsamrootRattlesnake CanyonOwyhee stormPainted HillsPainted Hills 2BobCatCrater Lake and Wizard IslandSmoke Sunset
One early autumn afternoon, toward the end of The Arctic Circle residency, many of the residents and crew were on deck pulling down the sails from our morning sailing, enjoying the sun and the views, painting, and chatting. The lead guide, Sarah, came out of the crew quarters, walked directly across the deck to the gunwale gate, opened it, and stepped off the side of the ship. On a day that probably had not risen above freezing, she jumped into the Arctic Ocean. I saw this happen. She was purposeful and composed. And, I thought, “Why did she do that?”
She was entirely encased in a red survival suit and wearing a life vest. Her face, with rosy cheeks and a few wildly curly locks of hair, was framed in red. John, standing next to me, yelled, “Man overboard” and pointed to her in the water, as we were instructed to do at some distant time in the past.
Everyone on deck scrambled, the Zodiac was lifted and launched, the second mate and another guide jumped in and off they went. By now, only a minute or two later, Sarah had drifted a substantial distance from the ship. The ship turned hard to when the alarm went up but the currents and the wind took her away. I watched with my binoculars. John held his position, not looking away from Sarah’s. She bobbed in the waves, floating easily, and just as easily disappearing into the swells and into the low-angled sunlight. As John later pointed out, it was probably the most peaceful eight minutes of her entire trip with us.
Contact
The Zodiac reached her, and the two women began maneuvering her deadweight into the boat. It took a couple of attempts to gain a solid hold (and why don’t survival suits have handles built in?) before they were able to slide her over the Zodiac’s tubing and onto the floor. They returned to the ship and lifted her out. A drill that required eight minutes, start to finish.
Retrieval
In the Arctic Ocean, two minutes means near certain death. For a ship underway, in heavy seas or the Arctic dark, two minutes is an impossibility. For a crew new to each other, under reasonably controlled circumstances, eight minutes was a good trial.
This is not a drill.
The climate change alarm went off long ago. The global survival suit, a tremendously thin layer of atmosphere between Earth and the universal void, has a few leaks. We’ve long known this. Somewhere along the line, we collectively decided it doesn’t matter and we walked off the side of the ship. I am still thinking, “Why did we do that?”
While many people stand around pointing, a handful more are scrambling to reduce emissions, decrease resource extraction, and increase a range of efficiencies. We can’t turn the whole planet hard to, or launch a Zodiac to drag floating carbon back to Earth.
Antigua depth sounding in the uncharted waters of Lilliehöökfjorden. The glacier, Lilliehöökbreen, background right, retreated enough recently to open this entire bay. Antigua felt her way into the unknown depths ranging from 4m to 70m. She draws 3.2m
I repeat this is not a drill.
Whether or not you believe in climate change, whether the climate change I believe in is caused by human-made CO2 or fluctuations in solar radiation, it is hard to deny that Earth is changing. Storm seasons are shifting, intensity, duration, and total numbers increasing. Droughts and floods are deepening, fire seasons extending, desertification encroaching. Glaciers are melting and pack ice is not forming. Animal ranges are expanding and contracting to retreat from or fill in newly (in)hospitable territory. Some creatures are disappearing entirely; waters are too warm, too acidic, too stagnant. Parasites and diseases previously kept in check by heat/cold/ water/drought are rampaging through populations that were once better able to withstand a seasonal, rather than a year-round, onslaught.
In reality, it doesn’t matter what we believe. The Earth is in rapid motion in uncharted territory.
My recommendation is, get the crew together and run a few emergency drills. We need the practice.
Blomstrandbreen glacier, foreground, was attached to Blomstrandhalvøya. It was thought that there was a peninsula under the glacier. It wasn’t until the glacier melted that an island was exposed. Note the tiny people lower right foreground.
Last week, I was in Joseph, Oregon, for a writing workshop. Writers and readers from around the West came to connect and learn, explore, and expand. I dusted off this piece and read it at open-mic. I trust it will carry weight again—for the first reading or the tenth.
Full of snowmelt and spring rain, the Imnaha River squeezes through Blue Hole.
The Imnaha Dreams
Last summer camping on the Imnaha River, I had a dream. It was August, but on the river in the bottom of a forested canyon and at elevation in the Wallowa Mountains, it was cold. I slept in the bed of the pickup, curled into my down sleeping bag, with multiple layers of clothing and a hat. I don’t remember much about the dream except that it terrified me, and I awoke as I was about to be decapitated.
Startled awake with the sound of water rushing downstream to join the Snake River, the trees crowding in above me, and the stars brilliantly clear in the gaps between the branches far above, I wondered what had occurred on this site. I lay awake a long time thinking about the dream and whatever energy I had tapped into.
As happens, the year waned. The dream, all but forgotten, left my conscious memory.
Last week, I was camping on the Imnaha. I had a dream. It was June, but in the river bottom, in an open ponderosa pine park and in the spring rain at elevation in the Wallowa Mountains, it was cold. I was a few miles above the previous campsite; I slept in the camper in the bed of the pickup. Big Cat was with me. I don’t remember much about the dream except that it terrified me, and I awoke when every hair on the back of my neck and head was standing on end, both in the dream and not.
Jolted awake by the dream, I heard the river and the rain on theroof of the camper, I had the sense that I was in the wrong place. Lying awake, I remembered last year’s dream.
The Imnaha was home to the Niimíipu, the Nez Perce. These were the last grazing lands of Chief Joseph’s band. They lived in these canyons, in the mountains, and on the grassy slopes. They grazed their horses and lived their lives here, on a shrinking allotment of land “given” to them by the US government in this far-flung corner of Oregon and then slowly taken away again as white settlers discovered its value. There were promises and skirmishes and then Chief Joseph fled with other Nez Perce who would not agree to forced relocation to a reservation.
Most of us have heard some piece of this story. Pursued by numerous factions of the U.S. military, they crossed the Snake River, the mountains of Idaho, and The Big Hole in Montana. They wove their way through Yellowstone, the Sunshine Valley, the Absaroka Mountains, and north again to the Bear Paw Mountains of central Montana. Finally, after 1,170 miles and multiple battles, they surrendered. They were 40 miles from the Canadian border. They were relocated to Kansas, and Chief Joseph was never allowed to return to the Imnaha.
I don’t claim to have any connections to the past, no clairvoyance; I don’t channel spirits. But, I believe that the land remembers a lot of things we choose to forget. There was peace and there was some type of balance. Then, there was not. Everything has energy; we all come from entropy, take shape, and then return to entropy. Blood that soaks into the soil, flesh, and bone scattered by scavengers and decay doesn’t cease to exist; it takes a new form.
Maybe the dreams were just dreams, my subconscious pushing me into places I don’t want to go or reminding me of things I have not fully processed. Despite the terror that woke me, I don’t think the violence was directed at me. I think it was a reminder.
The river, the forest, and people, both Native American and, at this point, of European descent too, have flowed through this place for generations. Today, we often camp in remote places and feel some sense that we have discovered them for the first time, no matter the fire ring, the litter, or the road. We read the roadside signs about what was, who was, and when it was. We snap a photo. We move on.
We forget that there were others in this place long before any of us discovered it. Not just people passing through on a summer trip but those who lived and died here, sometimes violently, sometimes unjustly.
The next night before sleeping, I smudged the camper, the truck, and myself, burning sage as an offering to the people who came before us and in their memory. Water, trees, people will continue to flow through this land. May it be a more peaceful journey for us all.
Early summer wildflowers spread across the open ridge line.
