White Sands Page 8
Northern Dark
Shortly after getting back from Utah, Jessica became obsessed with seeing the Northern Lights. She had been mentioning the Northern Lights for several years but now she began mentioning them all the time, telling me about friends for whom seeing the Northern Lights had been ‘the experience of a lifetime.’ Other topics were just preludes to the topic of the Northern Lights and how badly she wanted to see them. At one point she claimed that we were probably the only people in the world who had not seen the Northern Lights, that she didn’t know why I wouldn’t take her to see the Northern Lights. I wanted to see them too, I said. I just didn’t see when we would have a chance to go.
‘We could go in August,’ she said.
‘That has got to be among the most stupid things ever said by anyone,’ I said. I say stupid things too. We actually spur each other on to see who can come out with the most stupid things, so this was sort of a compliment. ‘You have to go in the winter,’ I said. ‘When it’s dark. In the summer it’s the land of the midnight sun. It’s the old Kierkegaardian either/or. Either the Northern Lights or the midnight sun. You can’t have both.’
‘Oh, I see. We can’t have both, so we’ve got to have neither. That’s what I call stupid.’
‘That’s what I call the remark of someone who has no understanding of logic whatsoever,’ I said.
This was in May. We weren’t really interested in experiencing the midnight sun, though we did enjoy hearing about it from our friend Sjon, who lives in Reykjavik.
‘When I was a kid I had trouble sleeping in the summer,’ he told us over dinner at an Indian restaurant in London. ‘In my twenties, I stayed up partying all night. Now I have very thick curtains.’
The months slipped by, the days grew longer and then, as soon as they had become as long as possible, they started to get shorter, until a day lasted only half a day, and this year became last year and next year became this year and we were suddenly in the fifth year of what Jessica had told Sjon was ‘a basically sunless marriage.’ Weather-wise, it had been the most severe December in London for over a hundred years. Snow came early, bringing ‘travel chaos’ to the road and rail networks. Heathrow could not cope. Flights were cancelled, but we were cozy at home, eating biscuits and watching the snow drift past our uncurtained windows or watching the news on TV, glad that we weren’t camped out like refugees at Heathrow, waiting out the backlog of cancelled flights, pestering airline staff for the food and drink vouchers to which we were surely entitled. Then, in January, after the snow had cleared and the country was back on its feet again, we were there, at Heathrow, waiting for a plane that would take us north, north to Oslo, then further north to Tromsø and deep into the Arctic Circle, to the Svalbard archipelago.
Having opted for the Northern Lights Experience rather than the Midnight Sun Experience, our chances of being able to have the Northern Lights Experience were enhanced by the fact that it was dark all day long. We could spend twenty-four hours a day seeing the Northern Lights, having the Northern Lights Experience, but first we experienced the Expense Experience in Oslo. How lovely it must be to live there and travel elsewhere, to arrive in London, Tokyo or even Papeete and be amazed by how cheap everything is. The train from the airport to the centre of town cost a fortune. Then we walked from our expensive hotel through the frozen city, past the frozen pond or rink where everyone was expertly skating, and ate at the most expensive restaurant in the world even though, by Oslo standards, it was modestly priced. We were stunned by the cold and the expense but not so stunned that we did not feel the first inkling of regret for coming to a frozen, dark and fiendishly expensive country.
In the morning, at paralysing expense, we travelled back to the airport to fly on to Tromsø and Svalbard. A snowstorm was in progress, a storm that would have paralysed England for six months and might even have led to a declaration of a state of emergency and the imposition of martial law. In Oslo the Norwegians took it in their stride. Part of the reason our dinner had been so expensive, I guessed as we sat on the plane, watching its wings get de-iced, must have been taxes which went towards the cost of keeping the travel network unparalysed throughout the blizzards and subzero temperatures that were such a regular feature of life that our take-off was delayed by only five minutes.
It was daylight when we took off and night when we arrived, several hours later, in Longyearbyen. Even if we had landed when we had taken off it would still have been night in Longyearbyen. We could have landed here any time in the previous six weeks and it would have been deep night and it would have been just as cold, colder than anywhere I had ever been, colder and darker than anywhere anyone in their right mind would ever have visited. We had only just got off the plane, were walking to the terminal, when Jessica said exactly what I was thinking:
‘Why have we come to this hellhole?’
‘Because you wanted to see the Northern Lights,’ I said, though at that point there was nothing to see but the Northern Dark, darkness everywhere, all around, with no possibility of light.
A cheerless bus took us from the terminal into the godforsaken town. There was nothing to see, except lights shining in the darkness, revealing—though this seemed hard to credit—people working outside, building buildings in conditions when everything required for building must have been rendered unbuildably useless by the unbelievable cold.
The Basecamp Trapper’s Hotel was a deliberately rough-hewn place, comfortable but sufficiently makeshift to impart a Shackletonian quality to one’s stay in the frozen wastes. In the breakfast room there was a polar-bear skin on the wall, like a Raj tiger in vertical mode. Best of all, there was a glass-ceilinged area where you could kick back and trip out on the Northern Lights. An extremely attractive little nook, this, because although we had only been in Longyearbyen about ten minutes that was long enough to disabuse us of the idea that we had come from a country that had endured a harsh winter. We had actually come from a mild, temperate little island, quaintly inexpensive and Mediterranean in its wintery balminess. Nevertheless, we did what you do when you come to a place for a Euro city break: we went for a walk, one of the most horrible walks we had ever embarked on. The Norwegian word for ‘stroll’ is best translated as ‘grim battle for survival’: Ice Station Zebra stuff, with elements of the retreat from Moscow thrown in. The temperature was a thousand degrees below zero, not counting the wind-chill, which sent snow streaming through the dark streets as if fleeing an invading army. We made it to the harshly lit supermarket, where we bought beer, returned to our room and sat on the bed without speaking. I sensed that the chances of having sex in the course of our stay were, like the temperature, far below zero. We had been here little more than an hour and our spirits were already appreciably lower than they had been in Oslo, to say nothing of London, which we now looked back on with bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn nostalgia.
The Northern Lights were not in evidence that night, the night of our arrival. I say ‘that night’ but we were in the land of perpetual night, the dark night of the Norwegian soul that would last another month at least. The thing about the Northern Lights, explained one of the cheerful young women who worked at reception and wished to clarify the situation for us before we set out for dinner, is that at this time of year they could appear at any moment, without warning. A state of constant alertness was required even though, it was conceded, on a scale of 1 to 9 the likelihood of their appearing tomorrow was a mere 2. But the day after tomorrow it zoomed up to 3. And it’s not like the Northern Lights were the only game in town. We may have come all this way, to ‘this frozen fucking hellhole,’ as Jessica called it, to see the Northern Lights, but there were other things to do as well. In the morning, for example, the morning that was indistinguishable from night and afternoon, we were going dog mushing.
After our trip to the supermarket we had set out for dinner as though making an assault on the summit of K2. For a morning’s dog mushing, however, more serious kit was required: three pairs of socks, thermal
s, two T-shirts, a lumberjack shirt, a thick sweater—with, rather appropriately, a Norwegian flag on the sleeve—a woollen hat, gloves and an enormous parka. This was my underwear. A van picked us up at the hotel and took us, through the awful darkness, to the large expedition HQ, where we hauled on snowsuits, full-face provo balaclavas, ski goggles, snow boots and mittens. Suited and immensely booted, barely able to move, we got back in the van and drove on to the dog yard. There were six of us, Jessica and me, a Romanian couple who had immigrated to Denmark and our two guides, Birgitte and Yeti.
‘Yeti?’ I said. ‘What an abominable name!’
The entrance to the dog yard was marked by seal skins hanging on a triangular gallows like a frosty modern artwork in the style of a skeletal wigwam. There were ninety dogs there, ninety Alaskan huskies, chained and yelping in the urine-stained and poo-smeared ice of the compound. Lights, fences and snow all contributed to the impression that we had stumbled into some kind of canine Gulag. Not that the doggies were unhappy or unloved. They were chomping at the bit, straining at the leash. Every dog has its day, and each and every one of these yelpers hoped that this would be his or hers. And that wasn’t all that was going on. Implausible though it seemed in such icy conditions, the females, somehow, were in heat, and the males were desperate to get their paws on them. To us they were friendly rather than randy, as cuddly as anything, but the yelping was like the soundtrack of a doggy nightmare. They had lovely names, the dogs. Junior, Fifty, Ivory, Mara, Yukon and—though I may have got this wrong—Tampax were among the lucky ones chosen to go out with us on this day that was indistinguishable from deepest night. Although it was dark I could see the huskies’ strange eyes, so pale and milky clear that they seemed independent of the bodies in which they were lodged: planets in a dog-shaped universe. Presumably these eyes meant that the dogs had night-vision, could see for miles in the deepest night. I was surrounded by these eyes, cold and flashing with a clarity that seemed devoid of intelligence or even life. Part of our job—part of the day’s advertised fun, even though, just as what was called day was really deep night, this fun was pure misery—was to take the selected dogs, put them in harness and fix the harness to the sled, six dogs per sled. The yelping was driving me insane and my toes were already numb with cold. Because I was thinking of my numb toes and constantly checking that not an inch of my flesh was exposed, I was not listening properly to the instructions about how to put the harnesses on, and it was not easy to hear anyway, with my parka and snowsuit hood pulled up and my head full of the sound of the yelping of ninety Alaskan huskies, half of them in heat and all of them desperate to run or fuck or both. The dogs lifted their forelegs to help with the tricky business of clambering into the harness. It was like putting a baby’s leg into a romper suit, but a baby with a lifetime’s experience of preparing for sledding expeditions in the frozen Arctic. Saddling up the three teams of dogs took ages, partly because with these multiple layers of clothes squashed under one’s snowsuit it was possible to move only at the speed of a deep-sea diver. I am tall anyway, but with all this clobber I loomed like death itself in the polar night. Death be not proud! I got into such a tangle with the numerous, often inexplicable bits of harness and rope and the dogs all leaping over each other that I slipped onto my back, landing on the hard ice, which, through all these layers of clothing-blubber, felt as soft as a piss-streaked sponge cake. There is a lesson to be learned from this: in the depths of the darkest night and the darkness of the deepest cold, mankind’s need for slapstick will never be quite extinguished.
Eventually, we were saddled up and ready to go. Whenever we hire a car Jessica always steers us out of the parking lot for the first few tentative miles, when we are unsure of the controls and the chances of an accident are at their peak. On this occasion, though, I was driving. I said that she should take the reins, but she insisted that this was my manly prerogative and plonked herself down in the sled on a comfy-looking piece of blue rug. A few moments later we were off. We had not been under starter’s orders, but we were off. First team out, second team out—and then us, bringing up the rear in suddenly hot pursuit. The huskies meant business, there was no doubt about that. I still had the sled’s anchor in my hand, was struggling to hook it to the side of the sled so that it would not impale Jessica’s head like a fishing hook in the cheek of a big human fish. An extraordinary amount of speed had been abruptly unleashed, unharnessed by even a modicum of control. We were charging downhill, at an angle, so we had to lean into the slope to avoid capsizing. Through my hood I could still hear the dogs yelping, though by now my head was so full of yelping this might have been the residue of the old yelping of dogs in the compound, not the ecstatic yelping of huskies galloping through the Arctic dark. It was hard work steering the sled, hard enough to make me sweat. It felt good being hot, but sweating was not good at all, because—I remembered this from Alistair MacLean’s appropriately named Night Without End—as soon as this exertion was over the sweat would freeze. We were zooming along, plunging down a slope. I lost control of the sled, over which I had never had the slightest control, and tumbled off the back into deep snow. The sled spilled over, but the anchor—which was supposed to serve as a brake—had not been deployed and the huskies did not stop. They had not been released from captivity in order to have their outing curtailed at this early stage. Even through my hood I could hear Jessica yelling ‘Stop.’ She was dragged for fifty metres, tangled up beneath the sled and, for all I knew, had the anchor embedded in her skull. As I ran after her, with no thought in my head except her welfare, I was silently forming the words ‘I said you should have driven first.’ It took ages to get the attention of the other teams, because they had zoomed off even faster than we had. Eventually, Birgitte and Yeti came back and pulled the sled off Jessica. She was uninjured but sufficiently shaken up to declare that she did not want to go on. I had actually enjoyed getting thrown from the sled in the same way that, years earlier, I’d enjoyed getting thrown out of the raft when I was white-water rafting along the Zambezi in conditions that, meteorologically, were the polar opposite of those here, in the deep night of the Arctic soul. We were all standing with our breath creating little snowstorms in the light of our headlamps, busy disentangling all the reins and dogs, which had got into the most incredible tangle. I say ‘we’ but I just stood there, doing nothing, sweating and breathing heavily, worrying that, if I exerted myself further, I would end up entombed like the Frankenstein monster in a glacier of frozen sweat. Actually, I did try to do something: I tried to take pictures of what I referred to as ‘the crash site,’ but my camera had frozen. Everything about this environment was quite unsuited to photography, human habitation, tourism or happiness. Jessica had had enough too, was persuaded to continue only on condition that she was driven by Yeti or Birgitte and not by ‘that idiot.’
‘She’s in shock,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’ I had no desire to drive either, and so we both ended up as passengers, each on a sled driven by one of the guides. We made much better progress like this.
And it wasn’t pitch black, I could see now. There was a glimmer of dark light around the dark contours of the mountains or whatever they were, and a glimmer of stars, but the overwhelming impression was that there was nothing to see. My toes were still numb but, despite my fears about freezing sweat, I was surprisingly warm, especially when I discovered that the blue rug Jessica had been sitting on was actually a kind of mini–sleeping bag and I was able to add yet another layer of insulation. Bundled up like this, like a frozen mummy, it was quite fun, barrelling through the barren wastes. I didn’t have much on my mind except for thinking how much better it would have been to do this in the mystic twilight of February, when you could actually see where you were, but at least there was a suggestion of light in the sky, even if, by any normal definition of the phrase, it was still pitch dark. Oh, and I had come to love the huskies. Irrespective of what the job entails, I love anyone—man or beast—who does their job
well, and these huskies, whose job was to pull a sled, were absolute in their huskiness. From reading about Amundsen’s expedition to the South Pole I knew that, if the going got tough, the huskies could be fed to each other. Yeti kept up a lovely sing-song of instruction and encouragement, which, for all I knew, constantly reminded the dogs of this fact, that the weak would become food for the less weak. So has it always been, so will it always be! Since she was singing I started singing too, one of the cadence songs from Full Metal Jacket: ‘I don’t know but I been told . . . I don’t know but I been told . . . Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.’ And then I thought of the film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), which, among its many other virtues, hotly refutes this claim. My mind was wandering, but it kept coming back to the immediate reality, which was that we were out in the open air, in pitch darkness—the brief period when a glimmer of dark light appeared on the horizon had already come to an end, was no more than a memory now—in freezing conditions, and that the Northern Lights were nowhere to be seen.
It took an hour to get back to the dog yard, back to the infernal but adorable yapping of the dogs, both those who had been out, who had had their day, and those who had not, who hoped their day was still to come, still to be had. We had to de-harness our dogs and return them to their kennels, but I didn’t even make the pretence of helping. I just stood around, thinking about my cold feet, letting the guides do the donkey work for which they were, after all, being paid—and paid handsomely if they were able to survive the punishing expense of living in Norway, even if this meant they were only paid the minimum wage, which must have been about a hundred grand a year. Once the dogs were back in their kennels we tramped over to the cozy trappers’ cabin. Just as the so-called ‘light’ in the sky had actually been dark, so, by any normal standards, it was freezing cold in the cabin, but, relatively speaking, it was toasty. The talk, as we drank hot coffee, was of frostbite. If you get bitten in your cheek you place a hand there but you don’t rub, you hold your warm hand to your cheek—assuming, of course, that your hand is not a solid lump of blood-ice too. Birgitte and Yeti were both in their early twenties and they loved it up here in the winter.