Empty Places

“The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it.” - Doris Lessing

I can’t sleep so I bundle up (silk underwear, sweater, expedition jacket with fleece lining, hat, scarf, and gloves) to see what’s happening on deck. It’s three in the morning and as light as it was at three in the afternoon. Fog blankets the ship; it is possible to believe we are all alone in the world.

The ice drifts by. We can sometimes hear the crack as a fault line opens up in a huge plate. Our ship rumbles on and we cannot help but feel invincible. For many days we’ve seen nothing but ice and the dark bruise of the sea welling up in our wake. In the middle of the Arctic Ocean, we are too far away from land for even the gulls to reach us. There are rumors of walrus tomorrow and someone claims to have seen a seal, its head bobbing on the waves, but it is easy to believe in mirages here in this frigid world of light and shadows.

Whenever I walk the deck and listen to the satisfying crunch of our nuclear-powered ship as it plows through the 8-foot-thick ice, I scan the distance for bears. I watch as the ice gives way and huge chunks are disgorged only to settle back into these coldest of waters after we pass. I listen to the roar of our massive engines and wonder how I came to be here, alone on deck, in the cold sun that never sets, steaming full speed toward that most elusive and strange of destinations: the North Pole.

Creatures in the Map

We begin our trip in Oslo where we board a plane for our three-hour flight to Longyearbyen, the largest city on the archipelago of Svalbard. It sits in the elbow of the island of Spitsbergen and is home to a shrinking population of 1,500 people. Despite the heavy cloud covering, we get glimpses of glaciers and black waters lapping against the still snowy shores of Norway’s north. We touch down ungracefully on the Longyearbyen airstrip, built over the constantly shifting permafrost. Scattered applause greets our landing. The world is gray and dirty and the hills above town are covered in snow. At 78 Degrees North, Longyearbyen is, as a t-shirt trumpets, “close to the North Pole.” As the icy wind bites through our expedition-issued jackets, it is easy to believe the claim.

We spend several hours touring the small city and its environs, because there is a delay with the helicopter (since our ship is nuclear-powered, it must anchor no closer than five miles offshore). I enjoy a beer and talk with our guide for the afternoon, Tove, and our driver, Lars. A young woman of 21, Tove is planning on traveling to La Paz, Bolivia in August to live for six months and work in an orphanage. Lars is saving for a trip to the U.S. where he wants to drive a lumber truck in Alaska and visit Austin, Texas just in time for the thrash-metal band Pantera’s show sometime next year. As he gives me his e-mail address he says what he really wants to do is to be a roadie for a band. “Pantera?” I ask.

He says, “You must have dreams.”

The last stop before boarding the helicopters is the Longyearbyen art gallery, which boasts a fascinating room of maps. Most include Freisland, an imaginary island that graced the maps of the world for over 200 years, because no one could definitively prove that it did not exist. I note the various monsters, dragons, and enormous worms that populate the unexplored polar regions on early maps. Because of the constant cover of the polar ice pack, isn’t it possible that the true nature of this area is still undetermined? What lies under the thick ice in the dark waters? Even today, the Arctic Ocean is one of the least explored areas of the earth. For all we know, the old maps may be right and we may break through the ice and find these strange creatures of the deep have risen silently from the polar abyss to meet us.

The End of the Earth

Our ship is named “Yamal,” which means “end of the earth” in the language of the Nenets people, traditional Siberian reindeer herders. Launched in 1992, Yamal is one of five Arktiika-class ice-breakers leased to the Murmansk Shipping Company by the Russian government. In the winter, the Yamal and its sister ships open shipping lanes between Russia and Alaska, but as it is summer, TCS Expeditions has chartered the ship for 90 passengers to travel between the Norwegian island of Svalbard and 90 Degrees North.

Two nuclear reactors, each containing 245 enriched-Uranium fuel rods, power us through the ice. Yamal can cruise comfortably at nearly 20 knots in open water and can break through 6-9 feet of ice at 3 knots continuously. We experience this first on the morning of our second day aboard as the ship shudders against what I imagine is surely a fatal iceberg, only to plow right through without losing speed. “First ice,” drawls veteran Bob Headland, our resident polar expert and archivist at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University. We rush to the deck to witness what we’ve just learned is called the “ice knife” cut through a plate of 6-foot-thick ice with something like aplomb. Yamal breaks the ice mostly, however, with its 24,000-ton weight. The reactors power six dynamos, which then transfer power to three motors connected directly to the propellers. Several spare propeller blades sit on deck – they are each approximately ten feet tall.

The eleven days we spend on the ship cannot be discretely divided. Instead, we wake and sleep based on meal times and rumors of spotted animals. The only unchangeables are the meal times: 8:00-9:00 is breakfast, a veritable cornucopia of delights that includes everything from eggs to yogurt to the ever-present bowl of fresh fruit and even a small jar of peanut butter; lunch lasts from 12:30-1:30 – its most attractive feature is the presence of the hot buffet, which at times contains such delectables as French fries, pesto ravioli, and calamari; and dinner, which begins at 7:30 and lasts until the final table swills down the remains of their wine and departs for the bar. Despite the fact that Yamal is primarily a working ship and not a cruise vessel, the food is excellent and the catering staff even includes a dedicated and enthusiastic Austrian pastry chef who creates such delicacies as the much-admired “Symphony of Strudels.”

My fellow passengers are a well-heeled lot, as you might expect for an eleven-day trip with a minimum price tag of $21,000.They include retired bankers, attorneys, doctors, and university professor or two. The modest cabins house us all (we occupy the winter quarters of engineers and second mates); while a small gym and saltwater pool provide a welcome opportunity to work off some of that strudel. In a fitting irony, however, when I want solitude in this most desolate of places, I can only find it in my cabin. Even the freezing decks are occupied at most times by polar bear scouters, bemused insomniacs, and photographers snapping photo after photo of the endlessly fascinating ice, which groans and cracks under us like bones.

The ship crunches on through day and night and though we lower the shade and pull the curtains, our cabins resembles early evening on a summer’s day. All night long the sun hovers like a hawk, soaring on what currents there must be somewhere toward the horizon. We don eyeshades and insert earplugs (against the crushing of the ice), but still we twist and turn, restless in our bodies’ knowledge that something here is not right. We find ourselves wandering the ship at three in the morning, hanging over the red rails that line the decks, playing interminable games of bridge or Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit. We drink coffee, because a pot is constantly brewing and the bar closes sometime around one. Sleeplessness takes its toll as we drowse through the day, nodding off in lectures, and missing breakfast or even lunch. Most of us sleep several times a day, slinking off to our cabins at the slightest lull in the schedule. “To read,” we say, and get through a couple of pages before our eyes begin to sag and we lie back, “just to rest,” and are gone for hours. We wake groggy and too warm in the overheated cabins and, distrusting the sun, try to decipher the implacable face of the clock. It is always the same time, our bodies say, and we cannot convince them otherwise. We sleep and wake according to the law of random distribution. Perhaps if there are pastries at tea, we will set the alarm, but usually we sleep through until dinner and get up only to eat and drink and realize that it’s past midnight and it feels like one in the afternoon. Night exists only in our memories and we see the stars in dreams and wonder what exactly they had ever meant to us.

Where There Are Bears

During our days on board, we learn much about the Arctic from Bob Headland, a veteran of 19 journeys to the pole who carries his encyclopedic knowledge about the polar regions and their history as easily as his slightly antiquated British accent and the cognac he imbibes each night. Much of the following comes directly from his notes. The Arctic (from the Latin meaning “place where there are bears”) is essentially an ocean, Greenland, the northern extremities of three continents, and several archipelagoes. The boundaries are not distinct, but are best defined by a combination of the tree-line, the southern limit of continuous permafrost, and the average extent of winter sea ice.

Ever since it could be imagined, the North Pole was a prize as one London paper put it “waiting to be won.” History is littered with accounts of explorers who tried and failed to attain the pole. Later in the trip we visit Cape Norway in Russia’s Franz Josef Land archipelago and see the remains of explorer Fridjof Nansen’s hut. Nansen abandoned his ship, The Fram, when it became locked in the ice. He spent the winter here on Cape Norway. We try to imagine 8 months of darkness and bitter cold, where man is locked in the most desperate of struggles with the polar bear, the walrus, and the idea that he may never see the sun again. It proves exceedingly difficult to do and so we make jokes about how we would trade the cursed sun for some stars and a moon, but none of us means it and we all laugh nervously at the thought of a shipwreck that does not occur in the tropics. The ice and light and water encourage these strange thoughts and we find ourselves imagining what we would do if we were somehow thrown overboard, where we would run to avoid the breaking ice, how we would signal, how long we would survive.

When we visit the engine room of the ship, however, the immense turbines, the multi-layer consoles controlling the nuclear reactors, and the staff of engineers that oversees the workings of the ship, convince me that we are an ineluctable force. Nothing is going to stop us; nothing has the chance. After hearing about the struggles of the early explorers to reach the pole, I feel a twinge of embarrassment that it all is coming so easily to us. If history is a struggle, perhaps we have reached the end of history, where we can travel even to the North Pole without sacrificing anything more than money. And yet I can’t help but succumb to the excitement of the journey. There is something in the bright and frigid air. After all, we have passed 83 Degrees North and are steaming steadily through the night. I turn my eyes to the sea and try to reclaim the mystery of the voyage. The North Pole – the end of the world. No bears yet, though.

At Least We’re Not In Cancun

We go to bed one night with the promise that by the next morning at nine we will reach the pole. We churn through the night, the ship lurching and swaying, backing up and then ramming the obstinate ice again and again.

At 90 Degrees North, we stop for champagne and photographs with the ship’s GPS device. The day is perfect – a thin blue sky holds the bright sun. This is the first time since we boarded that we can see the sun without the hindrance of a heavy layer of clouds. An hour or two after reaching the pole on this shining day, our captain finds a suitable sheet of ice that won’t break under the weight of so many expectations and we file off the ship, down the steep gangplank, suitably bundled against the bright and shining cold. The snow glitters like the stars we’ve missed, like crystal, like nothing we’ve ever seen. We stand in awe, save for those among us who’ve been to Antarctica and can’t restrain themselves from comparing this ice here to the enormous glaciers and bergs on the other side of the earth. “If you’re going to do both, you should do the North Pole first,” someone says and I breathe a sigh of relief.

A few minutes after we step upon the ice, the music begins. Eurotrash disco, Belgian reggae, a remix of the remix of an obscure Abba tune. The North Pole is put on notice – we have arrived. Despite the complaints of some of the members of our group, the music does not cease and we wander around this celestial landscape just barely to hear the immense silence that surrounds us and the thin layer of snowing crunch underneath our new boots. The only remedy is to walk around the bow of the Yamal to the other side of the ship (forbidden territory – polar bears) and sit in the lee of the music. Only there, and for the few minutes someone fumbles with a tape, are we able to listen to the wind scour the ice, removing the snow and exposing the soft blue I can’t name, because it is not something I want defined. It is the color of change. Of the shifting ice and the black wind that blows all winter. It is the color of the summer sun that never sinks below the horizon and the air that gets trapped in the ice and frozen in the shape of snakes and the petals of flowers no one’s ever seen.

Several times, I break through the ice to plant my foot in a shallow pool of water. Someone claims it’s fresh and so I try it. It is and pretty soon, we have bottles full of it, souvenirs to take home and (for one 14-year-old boy) to sell on eBay. At tables set upon the ice we eat corn on the cob and sausages and vegetable shish-ke-bobs and lentil stew. We swill the hot spiced wine served to us by Austrian university students and I pocket a soft, doughy pretzel and a can of Diet Coke for later. We take pictures of each other by a flag that reads “90 Degrees North – North Pole,” although we are actually closer to 89 degrees – there not being a solid piece of ice at the pole, an irony lost for the moment on us as we congratulate each other on standing where only 10,000 people have stood before. The sun breaks over us and we shuffle through the snow, wondering silently or aloud how we have come to this strange place and what it all means.

We don’t have long to ruminate, however, because the crew has hung a small pool ladder over the edge of the ice in preparation for the much-discussed, much-feared “Polar Plunge.” The waters here near the pole are the coldest on earth. A high salinity and its position under the ice allows the water to remain liquid at 28.3 degrees Fahrenheit. The hardier/crazier of us strip down to our bathing suits and try to convince ourselves that this is a good idea.

Someone says you can’t last more than four minutes in this water, and I find myself clawing for the surface the second I submerge. The cold erases any thoughts I might have about it. I don’t even remember it is salt water until I taste the tang on my frozen lips. When I open my eyes underwater, I see the silty darkness, the rush of shadows, and the light above. For a moment I think about letting go and sinking to the ocean floor two and a half miles below, but then I propel myself out of the water and up the ladder. I stand shaking and strangely warm upon the ice, feeling triumphant and somewhat ridiculous. Three seconds. Maybe. Later some of the crew jump in and swim around for a few seconds, each trying to outdo the last. After a few minutes of watching them, I walk slowly back to the ship in my bathrobe and boots to visit the sauna and breathe the superheated air in an attempt to warm my frigid body.

At dinner everyone is talking at once. In the midst of so much unpopulated space, the ship rides like a moveable cocktail party over the sea. I find myself thinking about what it does mean for us to be here, why it feels wrong to talk so much about it, and what lesson (if any) I should take back from the pole. It’s a strange place to visit. The only thing “to see” is the ice. There’s water, sure, and the sky, and a lot of clouds, but it’s not something that translates well. When you ask people why they went on this trip, you get answers like “I’ve been to 70 countries and this was somewhere I hadn’t been.” I picture some multi-colored checklist superimposed on paper with a cartographer’s watermark. I see columns of x’s, smug lines crossing out Angola, dismissing with French Guyana.

But I wonder if there’s not something else that brings us here – some desire to see a place not very many people would even consider visiting. A place that has nothing tangible. A land that is not even a land, but simply a floating ice cap never exactly in the same place. Is it, as one passenger said, the luxury of not being in communication with the world? I think that has something to do with it. We may not feel like true explorers, but at least we are not in Cancun. There is something in the quiet, in the immensity and brightness of the ice, in the bitter cold of the lashing wind, in the remembering of those who came before us. It is, at its best, a philosophical trip. There is space enough to think and to consider what the world means with you in it.

Most importantly, I think we are here to remember (a deep remembering far below the thin layer of consciousness that now reminds me of the brittle surface ice) what the world would be like without us. There is a lot of light and the distances are great. Standing on the bow, I stare off at the cracking ice and imagine for a moment that I can see the wind before I realize that we are the wind; it is simply the implacable momentum of our ship. Like it or not, we are changing the landscape. Like it or not, we are what does not belong. A red ship in a sea of white. We begin our journey back to the south.

Where There Are Bears, Part II

On deck again and looking for polar bears. I feel the same way I do when I buy a lottery ticket – that I must win. A bear will surface from a swim and shake himself off like a great dog. I will sound the alarm, crowds will gather, corks will be popped. In truth, though, my numbers do not come up. I see nothing, but thrill to the cold of the ice and the constantly circulating rumors.

One afternoon provides our first sightings of what the Russians call the “ice bear.” The bear comes so close to the ship we think he actually touches it. He stands on his back legs and looks up at us with the same intensity that we look down at him. At times it seems as though he is begging for food, but that seems unlikely since we are the only ship that ever comes up here. We sit still in the water for perhaps 30 minutes before the bear grows tired of us and lopes away. Later that day, another sighting. We all rush out and curl ourselves over the railings. Our first polar bear had been monumental; the tension on the ship was such that even the scuff of a shoe on the deck provoked aggrieved glances. This time a sense of euphoria prevails as we watch this large, dog-like creature jump nimbly from floe to floe as he circles the ship curiously and warily. From time to time, he arches his long back and sniffs the air with a black nose.

After dinner on Friday, July 25 (the dates on the daily programs are our only signposts – they will eventually lead us back to the normal world where we can convince ourselves that things like time actually matter) we take a “flightseeing” excursion aboard the ship’s helicopter. This evening we fly over some of the small islands that make up the Franz Josef Land archipelago. The ice resembles a map to a world crowded with water and strangely shaped countries. In the tumult of the helicopter, we communicate by pointing and attempting to express our disbelief in new and interesting ways. We travel east toward the sun. The clouds have risen a bit and the landscape is drenched in an aquamarine and stormy light. We skim over islands and point out the dark forms of glaciers and how the sun drizzles down on the water, illuminating patches of wave and reflecting off the hard-packed ice. I return to the ship, now approaching Svalbard, already missing this luminescence.

Our last day on board – we are back in open water, the last small ice floes behind us, already receding quickly into memory. Because the Yamal is made to break ice, it does not have the stabilizers common to cruise ships. Consequently, we pitch and heave in the rolling waters, seasickness bags dot the corridors, and I spend the afternoon groaning in bed. Perhaps this is the cost – small though it may be – to travel to the pole. This re-acclimation that takes the form of nausea – I lie sick and dreaming of the solidity of ice, its promise and security.

Back in the World

I fall in love again with trees, with the short grass that grows in winter on the hillsides outside of Oslo, with the stars that dot the dark sky like ice crystals. In the Oslo evening, it is already difficult to remember the northern light caused by the sun rolling from horizon to horizon day and night. As the stars come out, I greet them as old friends, forgotten for a while. The place to which we return is very loud. All of us wander the city like children rediscovering the world we’d forgotten we love. Even the commonplace amazes – cobbled streets, the people who crowd them, traffic lights and speeding cars, and all the colors that shine for us in the night. This feeling is, after all, why I keep going away and coming back, traveling and returning home. The residue of the north makes everything, for a while, shine.