July 17 -25 2004 / Svalbard: Land of the Ice Bears
In which we travel above the Arctic Circle, amid the ice
Part 2 - Surrounded by Ice Music, and a Landing
Just after breakfast yesterday we approached a small island, and on it were to be seen two groups of bears, females with cubs. They were only visible at a distance, with binoculars (how grateful I am for my fine binoculars, for there are people on board who have none--I suppose the same people who spend most of their time indoors, reading, or in one case, doing crochet work in the lounge)--anyhow, I see these bears crossing the landscape and rejoice and give thanks that I can watch them, godlike, from this distance, and they do not know I watch. Maybe God is like that--rejoicing and giving thanks that He can observe all the wonders of the world He has created, at a distance, wondering at it. What exactly does "entertainment" mean? Are we God's entertainment?
At any rate, we all stood on deck and watched these bears going about their bearish business.
Then not long afterward, arriving at the edge of land, there we saw another. This one, first spotted in a patch of snow, wended his way (surprisingly, soberingly fast, he was) down to the water and slid in. It was fantastic. There was a long, creamy line in the water, with a black bit at its tip, his muzzle, which he lifted clear of the water every few seconds, to look about? to breathe? He swam steadily and briskly in a line parallel to the coast, to what destination we could not see. Only his back and that muzzle were visible, the back a bit humped. I thought how fearful to meet him in the water.
Our ship waited a long time at this place, to watch this bear. Then we turned away from him and approached a valley filled with glaciers, a fjord. At least ten glaciers flowed into a grand confluence that met at water's edge. The glaciers were striped white, gray, brown, black, in intricate patterns. The surfaces of some of them were cut across by deep, rounded crevasses. It was impossible to get a sense of their height or width, for nothing of human scale was near.
We had expected gray skies and overcast. Instead the sun shone hotly in a clear deep blue sky. I contemplated the brilliant landscape through my viewfinder, trying to figure out how to capture what my eyes saw. Impossible, quite impossible. Can't capture it in words, either, obviously...
At another side of the fjord suddenly beluga whales were spotted. They are inexplicably the same color as the polars, a creamy white, looking like nothing as much as white chocolate, with that slick, matte look. The whales blow a bit, just a low vase-shaped spray. They arch their great spines and sinuate through the water, showing us only a hint of their big bodies. There go the ships, and there is that leviathan whom Thou hast made to take his pastime therein.
Zodiac excursions and kayaking were organized, and John and I slid into a puffy yellow kayak and paddled off. We passed by the shoreline littered with boulders and rocks and pebbles. There were banded and strangely-marked rocks in the water just under our hull. On small sandy pocket beaches were strange tracks, perhaps of birds, we could not see clearly.
We passed warily in front of the anchored ship and moved cautiously toward the wall of glaciers. We dared not come too close. At intervals, sounds echoed from the wall, hard to tell from which direction. Loud reports, great bangs and groans.
We and our yellow craft are stunningly, vanishingly small here in this mighty landscape. Like little early mammals moving nervously amid the underbrush that is trampled by dinosaurs.
I try to make pictures of all this, how we move through the bergy bits that dot the water. The water itself is different colors. At the far end of the fjord, where the bare land meets the glacier tongues, there is a rush of water down the steep brown hillside, carrying with it a burden of the land itself, and that water is cocoa-brown. There must be hundreds of feet of sediment under our boat. Away from the shore, the water is that lovely milky turquoise which indicates glacial runoff, and which I have seen elsewhere. I love it that natural processes lead to the same result all over this world, and all the other worlds, too.
As we paddle slowly amid the ice pieces, I become aware of the sounds they make. It is as if we were paddling through a giant bowl of Rice Krispies into which milk has just been poured: snap, snap, pop, crackle, drip-drip-drip, pop--each wet sound is tiny, but there are so many of them that together they make ice music. Plork. Plork. Plurk ... plurk ... plurk. Later we are told that this is the sound of millions of tiny bubbles of ancient trapped air being liberated from the bergy bits as they melt.
Faint, delicate music.
Eventually all the zodiacs return to the ship, and we kayaks come in too, and the ship moves again, for we are trying to go north and then over the top of the islands, and down the east side.
This evening is the Captain's cocktail party, and Captain Skog speaks in his dry way and introduces his crew, who come from all over the world. The ladies have dressed up a bit, and there are actually some men who are wearing coats and ties.
After dinner, at about ten in the evening (the sun high above the horizon in a blue sky), we stop to view a small crescent-shaped island which is covered with walruses. They lie piled up on the shore like so many warm brown logs, tusks in the air as they lie on their backs. Once in a while one raises its head, or sits up, and there is a flurry of comment and clicking from the pax, who line the railings and deck. We don't get really close to the walruses and their island, since we do not want to disturb them. I love it--these animals certainly disturb us, but we do nothing to them.
And to bed. Not long after, about midnight, I can hear that the ship is passing through icy waters--the shushing and tapping and occasional banging on the hull just at my head. I sleep, and waken every couple of hours, to listen I think. Very early in the morning, perhaps four or so, I am awakened by a much more violent sound, ripping and clanging and tearing and grinding, and I know that we must have forced our way through solid pack ice.
Sure enough, when we get up this morning we learn that because of fog and heavy pack ice, we have had to turn away from the east coast after all, and make our way back along the west side, where we came from.
And that's what we're doing now, moving along the west side. As I sit here in the library, on either side the landscape shows pale, faintly pastel blue or violet even--the sea on one side and the ice-covered teeth of mountains on the other. The water is glassy, oily, stippled with small ripples.
Up on the bridge this morning they were playing calypso music; the Captain was elsewhere at the time. A strange universe.
At last we got to make a landing yesterday. I shall have to check the names of these landing places... Because of the thick and unusual pack ice, we have proceeded away from the north, around which we could not go in order to get down the east coast, and instead turned around and went back down the west coast. We turned into a fjord, which lies along a fault. The east side of it is high, the west side lower, rounded, and good for going ashore. The sea was dead flat, unbelievable when I remember our terrifying zodiac launches on the Iceland trip amid the high seas. Glossy, glassy sea. Hop into the zodiac and onto shore. Our first landing.
One difficult thing here is that like Galapagos, but for different reasons, we must always stay in a group and with a guide. In this case, an armed guide, against the possibility of bears. So John sets off on the "long fast" walk, and I, somewhat reluctantly, on the "medium" walk with Karen the naturalist, in order to do a bit of botanizing and looking at my favorite kinds of things, which are hers also. The only thing is that she has to watch for over twenty people in the group, and one must not linger behind to take pictures or to kneel down with one's nose to the ground looking at the innards of gorgeous plants through the loupe. The first time I did that I heard someone say, Is she all right? She's got a magnifying glass, someone responded. But I had to do it all very quickly, and take some pix as well. Not fantastically satisfactory, but the best that could be managed.
What did we see? The grave of a whaler, young, his skull clean and neat, nestled within fallen-in boards of his coffin, and surrounded by a garden of tundra plants. A hundred or more years of upheaving from the freeze/thaw cycle has once again brought him to the world of the living. Karen said they did not bury them at sea, but always on land somewhere, and that they carried wood for coffins. Oh, I can understand that! I would not wish to lie at sea either.
We saw other bones, too--a length of polar bear spinal column, robust, elegant, familiar. Bird sternums, wings. Caribou antlers.
Scat, of geese, ptarmigan, fox. The fox scat smells fishy to me.
A small fly-like insect, which I catch in a bug box. Karen is not pleased with this, not because I have caught it, but because I have the bug box with me and she doesn't--has them back at the ship, she says. She is quick to correct me when I offer a thought. That's okay, I really respect her and I am trying not to step on her lines with the folks.
We see many excellent flowers. I am thrilled because I have identified several of them correctly, at least as to general family. Way back in Longyearbyen I thought something was in the buckwheat family. Turned out to be sorrel--oh, okay, I thought, I'm wrong. Turns out it is indeed in the buckwheat family. A tiny thing but what a pleasure for me.
There is Arctic Willow, about an inch high, great forests of it. There are clumps of various saxifrages (I should like to find out what makes that such a successful tundra group). There is the Svalbard Poppy, a luscious delicate greenish-white and very delicate flower, with intricate sexual parts, jauntily springing forth about three inches from the ground.
There is a buttercup, which can't be sticking its head more than half an inch into the air, and its flower so tiny as to be almost invisible, perhaps an eighth of an inch across.
We clamber with varying degrees of agility over the large rocks, dappled with lichens. There are some lovely pale yellow ones that I have never seen before.
Damn, there is a lot that Karen taught but I do not remember it. Perhaps the pictures will remind me.
Finally we pick our way back to the shoreline. The ground has sorted itself into polygons, the alternating freezing and thawing of "frost boils" forcing the lighter and smaller materials to the surface and pushing the larger and heavier ones to the sides. Each of these formations pushes against others nearby, thus forming polygonal shapes and quite neat sortings.
John meets up with our group. He has had a successful walk and asks if we had seen the polar bear tracks. So we set off hastily, Karen, rifle slung over her shoulder leading the way.
Yes, there they are, in the sandy verge of a pool. They are truly enormous, very wide, with a large ridge across, four big toes each with a claw indentation at the end. Possibly ten inches across.
Sobering.
Now this morning we were awakened by the cracking and crunching of ice against the hull not a few inches from our heads. We dress quickly and hurry on deck. We are passing through an enormous ice field. All around the ship are various sizes of bergs, some green, some white, some blue, some with brown stains. The ship plows through some of them with great jolts and crashes. Hordes of kittiwakes and fulmars fly eagerly to the displaced ice, looking for things to eat which may have been dislodged by our passing. Some of these birds pass so close to my head, as I stand there on the deck, that I need to duck. It's cold and rainy, and we are in full gear. The air is so fresh it seems to have a taste. The birds swarm above the swirling ice, the ship lunges and lurches, her hull ringing and clanging.
On the bridge, the captain looks closely at the icy way through binoculars, giving directions to the Filipino helmsman every few seconds. The ship moves carefully, slowly. There is a seal, and another.
We try to enter a fjord, but are turned back by the ice. Our Expedition Leader comes on in a bit and tells us that in eighteen years of this trip, this is the first time there has been too much ice to enter here. He must be frustrated, and the captain too (he loves his ice).
So here we all are, about one hundred of us, traveling at the whim of the ice--with all our highly technical equipment, and the accumulated knowledge of several centuries, still traveling only by the dictates of the ice.
Oh, a good lesson.
The usual plaint: how oh how will I ever capture this in any recognizable not to mention elegant form?? I have been taking pictures very carefully and hope to have some visual record, but this written record is dry and lifeless.
Eventually yesterday we made a landing, oh a fabulous landing, but not before some adventures of a sort. We continued south along the west coast of Spitsbergen, hoping to find a fjord not made inaccessible by ice. Finally an approach was made, but only through a thick band of ice, through which Captain Skog crunched the ship. We'd heard from a sailing vessel that there was clear water beyond this band, so we boomed our way through it--only then to learn that the sailing vessel was, as it is called, nipped by the ice--caught in it. So we turned around, went back through, found the sailing boat (a ghostly sight in the thick fog), waved to her, and cracked a path for her. She sailed off to the west, and we to the east to approach the fjord.
John and I went on the "long, fast" walk. Which only meant that we got to go ashore first, and trit right out. There is a small Polish research station here, which is studying an enormous colony of Little Auks, or dovekies as we call them at home. They are stubby black birds with white wing patches. They have a charming habit of running for long distances over the water, leaving a kind of crab-like pattern behind them, and then either diving abruptly into the icy water, or else taking flight.
Their guano fertilizes the soil and allows a thick luxuriant deep carpet of mosses and other plants, brilliant emerald green, grass green. Soft, deep underfoot. Little clumps of creamy white and purple saxifrage decorate the green carpet.
In the fog stand reindeer, eight of them, great antler trees upon their heads. They are only visible as faint tracings, mysterious dream animals. I am reminded of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, danced in the moonlight at Revels--
The fast walk is not so very fast, at all, and so I am able to stop here and there and quickly take pictures, trying so hard to catch and so to hold and have the Place. We hear the calls of the birds on the hillside above us.
They wheel and swirl in the gray sky just above their cliff. They swirl out and around as if being stirred by some giant hand. They pass over us in lacy tracery, some flocks so low that we can hear the faint whir of their wings, a blessing pronounced on us if only we listen.
Since the first time I heard a bird fly, on the roof of my house at 6 Arlington Street, illicitly and secretly up there, and some large bird flew over me and I heard its flight--since then I wait to hear the sound of a bird flying. It's in the air more than people know, one of those ineffable gifts just there for the taking, but taken by few.
Well, I'm just in ecstasy up there below the birds! I lie down in the soft blanket of mosses, and the birds swirl and wheel above me, and I hear the music of their wings, and above me the birds make a gray and black kaleidoscope.
I lie as a reindeer on the moss.
This morning finally I get up early enough to get my coffee, go out on deck, see the ice and the distant mountains with their embroidery of snow. I go onto the bridge, where the captain and the first mate are looking closely at the way ahead, discussing what they see--I think that is a mirage effect, says Captain Skog. The mate gives directions every half minute or so to the helmsman. The mate says, well, look at this, here's a lead. We can get through here. Yes, says the captain, and there is good ice for bearss.
Now, an hour later, we are amid good ice for bearss. Cakes and small mountains of ice surround the ship, People are scanning for bearss. I love the bearss, and the birds, but I love the landscape the most.