Outpost, p.25
Outpost, page 25
xii I can find no record of this swim but during our trip to Svalbard the story was repeated and acknowledged by several guides – some even suggested that the bears swam to Jan Mayen, 1,000 kilometres south of Svalbard, rather than Bear Island/Bjørnøya, which seems impossible. So the bears become modern myths and ghosts, and people conflate stories of survival or endow them with superpowers to endure. Epic sea swims are not unprecedented – journeys of over 400 miles/650 kilometres have been documented – but bears pushed to such feats more often drown than survive. As the fast-ice melt accelerates and sea ice coverage diminishes, bears swim ever further to find floe. Erlend told us that bears now have six to seven weeks less of hunting every season. – ‘Longest Polar Bear Swim Recorded — 426 Miles Straight. Study predicts more long-distance swims due to shrinking sea ice’, National Geographic News, Anne Casselman, 2011.
xiii Svea – full name Sveagruva, meaning ‘Swedish mine’ – was a mining settlement at the head of Van Mijenfjorden, closed by the Norwegian government in 2017. The third largest settlement on Spitsbergen after Longyearbyen and Barentsburg, Svea had no permanent inhabitants – workers would commute from Longyearbyen. Today it’s a ghost town but moves are afoot to try and emulate Pyramiden’s success as a tourist attraction.
xiv A red stela akin to Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920) but a higher spire splinter built without curves. The final ton of coal extracted from Pyramiden’s mine sits at its base in a hopper.
xv The heating radiator is a Russian invention, of course – thought up by Prussian-born Franz San Galli, a businessman living in St Petersburg, in 1855. The Russian for radiator is радиатор. The Russian for, ‘Excuse me, my radiator is dangerously hot, can you help?’ is ‘Извините, мой радиатор опасно горячий, вы можете помочь?’ . . . ‘No, seriously, I think this radiator wishes me dead’: ‘Нет, серьезно, я думаю, что этот радиатор хочет, чтобы я умер.’
xvi Erlend was constantly dropping in words like ‘truculent’ – his English was outstanding and impeccable.
xvii Which it isn’t – it’s at 78° 39' N. – the proud Russians clearly rounded up in celebration of Pyramiden’s great works and perhaps to kick a bit of snow in the more northerly face of Ny-Ålesund.
EPILOGUE
The female bear was dozing, two cubs by her side. Erlend had stopped his snowmobile and was stood up on the running boards, scanning through binoculars. He pointed and passed me down the glasses.
I found her turned away in the shade of an iceberg, her back like a furry pear.
A periscope ear flicked and swivelled, the only sign she was awake, alert. I realised I was doing mental calculations as to how fast she could get over here – twist on to her feet and cover the 300 metres of ice between us – forty seconds perhaps. A fully grown bear can cover a short distance at 30 to 40kph. But everything was still. Calm. As so often on the trip, people were whispering. Through the silent tunnel of the glasses the cubs began to wrestle. Joshing, nipping playfully. Wonderful to see. I couldn’t hear them, the wind was blowing away from us, towards them. They would have heard us coming from miles across the fjord, the mother knew exactly where we were, that circling ear – her attitude of sleep was just that; she was acting, she was not relaxed, she was lying down, senses cocked. Polar bears can smell a seal twenty miles away. For us it was a thrill to see some bears at a safe distance. For them it would have been like trying to ignore another person in the same phone-box.
The bears weren’t actually white at all, they were creamy, peachy, straw – particularly round their necks; slightly blue on the muzzle with black lips and noses. Their pads were slate.i They lay as my cat at home sprawls in his basket by the Aga, except they were lying on a frozen fjord in the Arctic a few hundred metres from three Englishmen, two Welshman and a Norwegian . . . and about forty Russians with snowmobiles standing fifty metres to our right.
We’d been late getting over to the other side of the fjord after our tour of Pyramiden, added to which we’d stopped en route to watch a ringed seal basking on the ice beside its hole. Like the bears, the seal had seen and heard us coming. It stared at us blearily from a posture best described as ‘trying to carry on a conversation whilst lying on your back and reaching under the sofa’. After a few seconds, it seemed to blink and, with great gravitas, disappeared. We beetled over to the hole and looked down. The seal wasn’t there, obviously, but it was an extraordinary portal, scooped and rounded with slush. The water below was darkest green. I didn’t fancy it. The impressions of the sharp flippers on the ice where the creature had lain revealed the tools with which it kept its egress open. A seal has several holes on the go at any time, Erlend told us, and being only semi-aquatic they need to haul out regularly to rest, to get warm and dry, to moult, and to give birth to their pups in spring. But polar bears are perfectly capable of lying silently beside a seal hole for a week, and whilst the bears can operate at any time of the day or night, their activity generally follows that of their main prey and seals are larks, so polar bears are most active in the morning – the early bear catching the seal.
Good luck with that, I thought, good luck trying to do beary things when you’re surrounded by pungent people with strident cameras and snowmobiles. Each spring the bears must steel themselves for Pyramiden’s paparazzi circus.ii And the camera, as John Berger pointed out, violates an animal’s normal invisibility and deprives the animal of its own ability to observe:
A recent, very well-produced book of animal photographs ( La Fête Sauvage by Frederic Rossif) announces in its preface: ‘Each of these pictures lasted in real time less than three hundredths of a second, they are far beyond the capacity of the human eye. What we see here is something never before seen, because it is totally invisible.’ In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.1
The cubs had gone back to sleep, tired from their tussle. We all stood quietly, conscious of our luck, the great fortune to see Ursus maritimus in the wild; because it was wild, deeply so – Svalbard and the bears. We were the interlopers and had been ever since we stepped off the plane a week before – had been ever since we started whaling there in the seventeenth century; will ever be, perhaps, and thank goodness for that.
Erlend leant forward to restart his engine and turn the snowmobile away. We followed, leaving the polar bears be.
—
What to think about all this? What to say?
In the moment, as we were driving away, my feelings were many and mixed. Here we were and here also were a great many others. Too many – and not just snowmobiles but people: too many people because the bears had been bothered, and people should not bother the bears. But I had seen them and been amazed and moved by the experience. I felt hugely conflicted. In the immediate aftermath of the trip all I wanted to do was suggest to other people that they not do likewise. Don’t go to Svalbard. Don’t get on a snowmobile. Don’t buzz off in search of ice bears. Don’t bother the bears . . . like I’d done.
I tried to make sense of the experience in a letter to my Swedish friend, Gonz.
I struggled to explain it, dancing around the idea that perhaps more landscapes need to be conserved as Ny-Ålesund is protected by being placed off limits. Fewer snowmobiles, more BBC nature programmes – I tied myself up in knots of well-meaning, aware all the while that I sounded sanctimonious . . . so I was delighted when Gonz wrote back to say that he’d been interested in what I had to say and understood my perspective because he’d had similar ideas himself, many times, and occasionally still caught himself having ‘selfish and condescending thoughts for others’ – something I took on the chin.
‘I have to say I don’t agree with you,’ his letter continued. ‘All places should be explored because we as humans are explorers – nomads – and it’s as pure a feeling to explore as it is to breathe or eat. But I do agree more must be done to make sure explorers and explorations are matched in more logical ways. If you can’t reach a summit by training and preparing, you shouldn’t be allowed to do it.’
He made the analogy with climbers wearing oxygen to reach Everest. Should oxygen be banned to reduce the numbers? Of course not. But the current situation is environmental ruination – there, as at so many other exploration Meccas.2
Gonz told me he often discusses such things with a friend who’s an eighth-generation mountain guide in Zermatt. Over many years they’ve come to the conclusion that the PADI certification system used by divers is a model which could be mirrored in the world of exploration – a set of standard tests every would-be explorer and guide would undergo so both knew what they were dealing with.
Such a system would go some way to ensure that everyone would know rescue basics and guides ‘would no longer have to guess a client’s level of skiing, climbing, etc., or most importantly, take a client for purely monetary reasons’.
Which is all very well, but the wellbeing and safety of people hadn’t been foremost in my mind as I rode away from Pyramiden. Human beings aren’t endangered, in fact we’ve never had it so good; and the world gets smaller as more people lift themselves out of poverty and have disposable income for travel . . . and nobody has the right to deny people the opportunity to see the world. But the Earth is a delicate, finely balanced planet and a sustainable approach is vital.
So if the question is really how not if we travel, a realisation and acceptance of our place in the scheme of things – that everything is connected; that we are an intrinsic part of nature rather than elective visitors – seems to me essential.
In this the plight of polar bears is an excellent example. Their diminishing habitat and evolving behaviours to cope with that lack – the fact their pack ice hunting grounds are melting away – has not been caused by a surfeit of snowmobilers on the fjords of Pyramiden. We live in the Anthropocene. The Earth is warming and people all over the globe are responsible but the effects, at least until recently, were observed and felt by only a few, a fraction of the whole. This is now changing. Things are accelerating, escalating. We need to slow down. Take stock. Rein ourselves in, take responsibility.
And if the question is really how not if we travel, because humankind are a questing lot, I suggest we begin by physically slowing down and changing the focus of our travels from ground covered to quality of experience and connection. Rather than globetrotting, globerambling or even globestanding and -sitting should be the goal. What’s the point of racing through a longed-for landscape if the means of travel renders it a blur? I suggest a return to animal speed and heightened awareness might be the way to go.
—
A few days after my return from Pyramiden, I took a trip with Astrid Dillner, a young Swede who teaches dog sledding on the outskirts of Longyearbyen.
At a boxpark of square kennels built on stilts, each home to an Alaskan husky, we harnessed our team:
Nelson & Emile leading the way
Radar & Luna in the middle
Cox & Mika at the back.
Muscular, handsome, patient dogs. Warm white fur against the cut snow’s blue.
The sleds were wood, bound together with cord to create the necessary flexible frame. The driver stood at the stern, one foot resting on the rake of a brake, the other on one of the running skids. The passenger sat in front, swaddled in rugs, along with the bags and supplies.
We ran up into the mountains in smooth snow channels. Sun glare. Shadow chill. The only sounds were harness jingle, the pants and padding of the team, the shush of the runners and occasional call of encouragement from Astrid behind. Otherwise it was silent. Just us, darting clean through the landscape.
It felt ancient, balanced, peaceful. Wonderful.
On the return leg I had a go at driving the dogs but really it was effortless because they knew the way. My only real challenge was to stop them going too fast, something I tempered with a touch on the brake – at which point Luna would turn her head and shoot me a glare of ‘Spoilsport!’
Too fast? you might be thinking. Too fast after a snowmobile safari? Well, yes, because it’s all relative, isn’t it? The skidoos were zippy but I was lower in the sled so the world appeared to pass at a similar speed but, crucially, it wasn’t and so I was able to take in the landscape and feel immersed in a way that the cat-bikes hadn’t allowed. Added to which: a dog team know how to get you home in blizzards, they know bad ice and how to avoid it, and they know if there is danger in the immediate area. Machines cannot do any of these things.
—
So much of this book has been about the search for spaces which afford clarity, be it Kerouac’s dream of peace in the high Cascades, the brutalist ply of the Swiss writer zoo or the far-flung temples of Japan. Spaces apart, places to think ‘some distance away from the main army’.
The urge for going to the ends of the Earth that so many of us share in one form or another – the dream of going further in the case of a few – has a mirror in the teams of people who prepare the way, creating and caring for the stations en route, the rungs of the ladder as I think of it now. So Stefán and Atli shore up the sæluhús and Dr Rupert oversees the MDRS, and the Cordouan keepers keep watch over the Gironde’s shipping, and Erlend leads parties out into the Arctic and keeps them entertained and safe.
And all the time the question of why we go circulates and percolates about.
I think it has to do with wonder and faith, a need to explore and discover and light out into the unknown, to see.
Nick Cave recently wrote that he thinks humanity needs to draw itself back to a state of wonder. His way has always been to write himself there, to reach such a state and place through work, repetition, a process – Cave famously used to work office hours to write new songs.
People build sheds, word-splashing cabins set apart from the everyday. Dahl and Deakin, Thomas and Starling – the latter’s Shedboatshed an amazing hymn to the transportive power and possibilities of the humble hut.
But maybe the thing all these examples have in common, the thread that joins all my outposts together, is that they allow people to engage with the world inside and out in various ways. In this sense, all outposts are lighthouses – sites of illumination.
Sometimes they afford an immediate sense of revelation, sometimes their secrets must be worked for and earned. But in writing this book, I’ve learnt that an outpost doesn’t have to be somewhere you go to get something specific – a place to juice, a plot to mine; an outpost can simply be somewhere to go to be, to find something new of yourself – something magical and unexpected which might change your life; as my father felt changed by Svalbard, and the strange stories and artefacts he brought home inspired and fired me.
So, yes, I agree with Gonz. The need to travel and explore for ourselves is deep within the human animal. But one can go and leave no trace, go and do no harm. Travel slowly. Take it all in. Remember our place and duties of care.
And if you go to Svalbard, maybe take dogs – give my regards to Erlend, Astrid and Luna. Lay off the snowmobiles if you can and leave the bears alone.
Polar bear print and wool glove on frozen Billefjorden, Svalbard, 2018. Photograph: Dan Richards
______________
i ‘What time of the day did you see them?’ asked my zoologist friend Dr Nick Crumpton when I got back to London. Late morning, I told him. ‘Ah, well, polar bear hair is actually transparent and not white at all – it’s hollow and merely scatters light, making them appear white – their skin is actually black. It’s pretty neat optics. But when the light is softer, around sunset, they can look pinkish. Of course, they might have been bloodstained too . . .’
ii At least nobody’s out here hunting them any more, you might say, but the presence of tourists inevitably means that every year bears are shot ‘in self-defence’ – a term that rather suggests that it’s the bears who act inappropriately when most often the opposite is true; most often the ill-prepared housebreakers shoot the ursine owner. Erlend was firm: ‘When bears get shot, it’s rarely their fault.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my family – Annie, Tim, Joe, Bob and Moz. All my love.
Outpost was written with a lot of people’s help and I have tried to name and thank as many of you as possible below. Looking back over all the adventures, I’m struck by how generous people have been, the amazing friends I’ve made along the way, and how so often the unexpected tangents and apparent setbacks gave rise to the greatest wonders and meetings.
To begin with Iceland, I’d like to thank Chris Gribble and his team at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich; Dr Katrin Anna Lund of the University of Iceland; Anna Selby, dear friend and poet; and the Íslanders: Kristín Viðarsdóttir, Sjön and Haraldur Jónssen, who put me on the right track, drew me maps, and were so gracious and kind in their hospitality.
Stefán Jökull Jakobsson, Atli Páls and Hekla the dog, thank you for letting me work with you, showing me sæluhús and opening my eyes to the realm of the huldufólk. Thanks also to all at Ferðafélag Íslands, Halldór Óli Gunnarsson for allowing me to reproduce elements of Draugasögur úr Hvítárnesskál, and Hannah Walker and Dr Oscar Aldred – my love to you both.
I’m hugely grateful to Simon Starling for taking the time to see me, furnish me with scrumptious Danish lunches and generally gad about Copenhagen. The trip to the zoo was an excellent highlight. Thanks to you and your team – Maja McLaughlin, Marta Merovic and Kath Roper-Caldbeck. I am also thankful to Rachel White, Collections Manager and Archivist at the Roald Dahl Museum & Story Centre, Great Missenden, for allowing me access to Roald’s archives and letting me explore the writing hut.
