As each person on this trip takes shape in my photos, I realize that they all held leading roles as stars of their own Arctic show.
Theresa in scale
Stina by glacier light
Christina belonging to the surge glaciers
John ponders exposure
Åhsild on watch
Kim ready to climb, photo-bombed by Captain Mario
Barbara L. at a standoff with an iceberg
Shirley listening
Second Mate Annet keeps order on deck
Emma, the rear guard
Guide/guard Kristin scouts
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.
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)
Ready to head back out
Longyearbyen storage unit
Dog Parking at the Coal Miner’s
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.
A billion pieces…
A few billion more…
Maybe a bigger table…
Or the floor
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.
Pastels meet mountains and sea.
An adventure
