White Sands Page 9

  ‘Why?’ I asked, and it was obvious that the single word was followed, inaudibly, by two others: on earth, as in Why on earth would anyone want to spend their time in a hellhole like this? Well, they liked the social life and the slow return of daylight. And today had been a joyous experience for them. Birgitte had been away on vacation for ten days. When she had last been out here there was no light at all; today there had been a glimmer. So the polar night, though still immense, was receding. There was light at the end of the tunnel.

  ‘Which still begs the question,’ Jessica said later, ‘of why anyone would choose to live in a tunnel.’

  We spent the so-called ‘afternoon’ in our room. Jessica told me about the Annie Dillard essay she was reading, about polar explorers and the solemn reserve of the prose in which their adventures were recounted. Dillard wonders if this was part of the selection process—‘or even if some eminent Victorians, examining their own prose styles, realized, perhaps dismayed, that from the look of it, they would have to go in for polar exploration.’ I remember making a cautionary mental note about that—Avoid solemn splendour—after which I don’t know what I did. I think I had frostbite of the brain or something, because I just sat there and thawed—thawed about nothing—until it was time to head out to the bar of the nearby Radisson Hotel for dinner. In any normal part of the world this would have involved a ten-minute walk, but by now the idea that places existed where the simple act of stepping outside did not require careful preparation and planning seemed quaintly implausible. It was the coldest and darkest night in the entire history of the planet, possibly of any planet. I looked up occasionally in case the Northern Lights showed up, but mainly I kept my eyes on the ground in case I slipped.

  The bar of the Radisson was awash with information and rumour about the Northern Lights. Tourists and residents all had their stories. The Lights could be seen at any time, but the best chance was in the evening. From six o’clock onwards. Others said there was more chance of activity from about eleven onwards. I liked this word ‘activity’ with its suggestion of the paranormal, but mainly I liked the way that it was being said inside a restaurant. Then someone claimed that we were actually too far north for the Northern Lights. We were feeling confused and more than a bit dejected, so it was reassuring to hear the barman announce that they would now be showing, on a large-screen TV, live football from the Premiership. Arsenal–Man City! Fuck the Northern Lights with their unscheduled, possibly even mythical appearances. This floodlit game was scheduled and was going ahead on time, exactly as advertised. The bar filled up. Midway through the second half, the barmaid, who had nipped outside for a cigarette, told us the Northern Lights were happening. We dashed outside. There was a faint glimmer in the general night-glimmer, but light pollution from the town meant that we could see almost nothing. We went back in and watched the rest of the football, unsure whether to feel relieved—because we were back inside, out of the cold, or depressed because, although we could watch Premiership games any old time, this was our only chance to have the once-in-a-lifetime experience of the Northern Lights Experience.

  In the so-called ‘morning’ the cheerful young woman at Basecamp reception asked if we had seen the Northern Lights the night before.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but we did see the football!’ I was only joking even if, strictly speaking, I wasn’t joking. I was actually deeply disappointed, but, in a weird Nordic turnaround, we had become the source of disappointment to our hosts. The implication was clear: not seeing the Northern Lights was a result not of their non-appearance but a failure on our part, a failure of perception and attitude. Finding this a little hard to take, I found myself saying that I ‘took umbrage’ at such a claim, even though this was a phrase I never normally use. It was like If you’re going to get all Norwegian-mystic with me, young lady, I’ll get all middle-England-tourist with you, even if this amounted to standing there looking downcast and crestfallen. We wanted to see the Northern Lights. We had come all this way, to this blighted place, to see the Northern Lights. We came at what, from every other point of view, was a ghastly time of the year, to see the Northern Lights. But seeing the Northern Lights can apparently be a much subtler affair than the photographs—swirling geysers of psychedelic green—lead one to expect. Sometimes they are so subtle that your eyes and mind have to be attuned. Seeing is believing—and believing is seeing. Once you have seen the Northern Lights—once you know what you are looking for—you believe you can see them again. In this respect it reminded me of early attempts to get stoned (which in turn reminded me that there is a famous strain of pure indica called Northern Lights). You could not get stoned—this was in the days before skunk, before you knew without doubt that your brains were in the process of being blown out—until you knew what it was like to be stoned. The more conversations we had, the more the Northern Lights—which, I had assumed, came as standard in this part of the world, at this time of the year—took on some of the unverifiable allure of the Loch Ness Monster or the Abominable Snowman.

  Our spirits worsened. There seemed a correlation between the lack of perceived ‘activity’ in the skies and our own deepening inactivity. We skulked in our room, became steadily more cast down and crestfallen. The explanation for this might have been that we had not adapted properly to the extreme cold and the endless night, but the opposite was true. Many visitors apparently enjoy the novelty of three days of Arctic night while finding it hard to believe that anyone could spend years living here. Our responsiveness to Svalbard was so intense that we skipped this honeymoon period and experienced three days as though they were three years—and promptly plunged headlong into the gloom that can gnaw away at people who have spent years here. On the third or fourth morning—which might as well have been the thirtieth or fortieth morning—Yeti knocked on our door so that we’d be ready for the snowmobiling trip that we’d signed up for. I got out of bed, opened the door a crack and told her that we would not be going.

  What would have been the point? I said when we saw her again at the reception desk later in the day. The same freezing cold, the same nothing-to-see darkness that we had experienced on the wretched dog-mushing trip. No, thank you very much, I said, before turning on my heel and shuffling back to bed. It was miserable in our room, but it was better than not being in our room.

  ‘The Northern Lights could knock on our door now,’ I said to Jessica, ‘and I wouldn’t even give them the time of day.’

  We spent the whole so-called ‘day’ in our room, downcast and crestfallen, and then, in the so-called ‘evening,’ forced ourselves up and out into the frozen night. We trudged to the restaurant on the edge of town in the freezing cold and the pitch-dark darkness. There were polar bears in the area, but we had been told that if we kept to the road we would be safe, and at some level polar bears were the least of our worries. As we walked we naturally kept an eye open not only for polar bears but for Northern Lights. We looked. We were ready to believe. We were ready to see. We retained the capacity for belief, but deep down we had started to believe that the Northern Lights, if they existed, would not be seen by us. We chewed our reindeer steaks and trudged back again through the freezing night and the implacable cold. There was nothing to see, and the only point of the walk was for it to be over with, to know that we had not died from it, that we had lived to tell the tale, the tale that eventually became this tale.

  We left the following day, empty-handed and empty-eyed. Relations with the people running the Basecamp had become somewhat frosty. My joke about Yeti’s name had caught on to the extent that Jessica and I referred to her only as ‘the abominable Yeti,’ but it had not endeared us to her, and while nothing that had happened since had caused her to feel more warmly towards us quite a few things—not least my singing that song from Full Metal Jacket—had contributed to an increased frostiness. We were like skeptics among the faithful at Lourdes and they were glad to see the back of us. That was fine by us, because we were glad to see the back of a place which we ha
d taken to referring to either as ‘this ghastly place’ or ‘this fucking hellhole’ before settling on ‘abominable’ as the adjective of choice. We had had the experience of a lifetime but it was not the experience that we had hoped for; it was like a lifetime of disappointment compressed into less than a week, which actually felt like it had lasted the best—in the sense of worst—part of a lifetime.

  The cheerless bus took us back through the abominable city to the airport, to the terminal. Our experience might have been expected to put a strain on our marriage, but the experience of being so thoroughly crestfallen and downcast had made us closer, even though this would not have been obvious to an outsider as we sat silently in the depressing terminal, waiting for the plane, which, to give credit where it is due, took off exactly on time. When we landed at Tromsø an English couple we had met in the bar of the Radisson said, ‘Did you see the Northern Lights?’ Apparently, the Lights had put in a special guest appearance as we were flying—but on the other side of the plane. It was like there was a blight on us, and even though I’d assumed our spirits could not sink any lower they did sink even lower, and then, after we’d changed planes yet again, in Oslo, they sank still lower. I found myself in an unbelievably cramped seat, with zero leg room, in spite of being assured that I had an exit-row seat. The flight attendant—a once-blonde Norwegian woman in her fifties—came by and asked if there was anything we would like. She meant in the way of food and beverages, but after being cooped up in our room in Longyearbyen I started ranting about the seat, the abominable seat with its abysmal lack of leg room, how I was cooped up like a chicken with deep vein thrombosis. Jessica had sunk into a kind of catatonia, did not say anything, but for the first time in several days, like a limb that has been frozen and is coming painfully back to life, I felt energised by my anger and outrage. Unlike the abominable Yeti and the other girls at Basecamp who had taken against us because of our poor attitude, the flight attendant was entirely sympathetic, agreeing that conditions were intolerably cramped for a tall man like me. She gave me some orange juice—free!—and I calmed down, even though, in my head, I continued to formulate expressions of outrage and hard-done-by-ness. And then, as we were about to begin our descent into Heathrow, something extraordinary happened. The flight attendant came back and knelt in the aisle with her hand on my knee. She looked into my crestfallen eyes, the eyes that had not seen the Northern Lights, and said again how uncomfortable I must be, how sorry she was. Without taking her eyes from mine she said that one day I would surely get the seat I deserved, and as she spoke, I believed that this would happen.

  6

  My mother grew up on a farm in the village of Worthen in Shropshire. I never liked going there to visit my grandparents: house and surrounding countryside shared an atmosphere of dank unhappiness (my grandfather had allegedly been cursed by a Gypsy) but this was not without its own brooding allure. Everything seemed far older than where we lived in Cheltenham. Marton Pool, a nearby lake, was said to be bottomless. It was held to be dangerous, because swimmers could get caught in the reeds that grew on the lake bed. As a boy I was oblivious to what I realize now was not a contradiction but an authentication or verification that this place existed in the realm of the mythic.

  I also heard, many times, about the Robber’s Grave in the churchyard in Montgomery. As my grandfather and mother told the story, a man had been hanged for stealing a sheep. On the scaffold, insisting on his innocence, he prophesied that if he was telling the truth no grass would grow in an area the shape of a cross on his grave. The execution went ahead, and the sky, which had been clear, grew suddenly dark (a meteorological detail easily dismissed as after-the-fact atmospheric elaboration). We drove to Montgomery to visit this fabled place when I was about fourteen. The grave was easy to find in the dismal churchyard and, pretty much as claimed, there was a bare patch of ground in a shape approximating a cross—more like a diamond. The grave had become a tourist attraction, and even at that young age I suspected that it was preserved and maintained as such (by weed killer?). Still, the whole package—hearing about this place and visiting it—evidently stayed with me: I wrote about it in my English O-level exam.

  White Sands

  My wife and I were driving south on Highway 54, from Alamogordo to El Paso. We’d spent the afternoon in White Sands and my brain was still scorched from the glare. I worried that I might even have done some permanent damage to my eyes. The sand is made of gypsum—whatever that is—and is as bright as new-fallen snow. Brighter, actually. It’s really quite unbelievable that anything can be so bright. It’s a very good name, White Sands, even though we thought the place a bit disappointing at first. The sand was a little discoloured, not quite white. Then, as we drove further, the sand started to creep onto the road and it became whiter, and soon everything was white, even the road, and then there was no road, just this bright whiteness. We parked the car and walked into it, into the whiteness. It was hard to believe that such a place really existed. The sky was pristine blue, but the thing that must be emphasised is the whiteness of the sand, which could not have been any whiter. We would have liked to stay longer in this unstained wilderness, but we had to get to El Paso that night. We walked back to the car and headed out of the park.

  Jessica was driving. It was early evening. We were about sixty miles south of Alamogordo and the light was fading. A freight train was running parallel to the road, also heading south.

  ‘Hitchhiker!’ I said, pointing. ‘Shall we pick him up?’

  ‘Shall we?’ Jessica was slowing down. We could see him more clearly now, a black guy, in his late twenties, clean and not looking like a maniac or someone who smelled bad. We slowed to a crawl and took a good look at him. He looked fine. I lowered my window, the passenger window. He had a nice smile.

  ‘Where ya going?’ he said.

  ‘El Paso,’ I said.

  ‘That’d be great for me.’

  ‘Sure. Get in.’

  He opened the door and climbed into the back seat. Our eyes met in the mirror. Jessica said, ‘Hi.’

  ‘’Preciate it,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome.’ Jessica accelerated and soon we were back up to seventy and drawing level once again with the long freight to our left.

  ‘Where’ve you come from?’ I asked, twisting round in my seat. I could see now that he was perhaps older than I had initially thought. He had deep lines in his face, but his eyes were kind and his smile was still nice.

  ‘Albuquerque,’ he said. I was slightly surprised. The logical way to have got to El Paso from Albuquerque would have been to go straight down I-25. ‘Where you from?’ he asked.

  ‘London,’ I said. ‘England.’

  ‘The Kingdom,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’ I was facing straight ahead again, because I worried that twisting around in my seat would give me a cricked neck, to which I am prone.

  ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘I love your accent.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Arkansas originally.’

  ‘That’s where my mother’s from,’ said Jessica. ‘El Dorado, Arkansas. Before she moved to England.’

  ‘I’m from Little Rock,’ he said.

  ‘Like Pharoah Sanders,’ I said. It was a pointless thing to say, but I have this need to show off, to show that I know things; in this instance to show that I knew about jazz, about black jazz musicians. The guy, evidently, was not a jazz fan. He nodded but said nothing, and we prepared to settle into the occasionally interrupted silence that tends to work best in these situations. We had established where we were from and where we were going, and a pleasant atmosphere filled the car. Then, less than a minute later, this pleasant atmosphere was changed absolutely by a sign:

  NOTICE

  DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS

  DETENTION FACILITIES IN AREA

  I had seen the sign. Jessica had seen the sign. Our hitchhiker had seen the sign. We had all seen the sign, and the sign had changed our relationship totally. Wh
at struck me was the plural: not a detention facility but detention facilities. Several of them. The notice—and I took some heart from the fact that the sign described itself as a Notice rather than a Warning—did not specify how many, but there were, clearly, more than one. I did not glance at Jessica. She did not glance at me. There was no need, because at some level everyone was glancing at everyone else. As well as not glancing, no one said a word. I have always believed in the notion of the vibe: good vibes, bad vibes. After we saw the sign the vibe in the car—which had been a good vibe—changed completely and became a very bad vibe. This was a physical fact. Somehow the actual molecules in the car underwent a chemical change. The car was not the same place it had been a minute earlier. And the sky had grown darker— that was another factor.

  We soon came to the facilities which had unmistakably been designed with detention in mind. Both places—there were two of them, one on the right and one on the left—were set back from the road, surrounded by high walls of razor wire, and brightly lit by arc lights. There were no windows. In the intensity and single-mindedness of their desire to contain menace they exuded it. At the same time, both places had something of the quality of IKEA outlets. I wished they were IKEA outlets. It would have been so nice if our hitchhiker had said that he had come to buy a sofa or some kitchen units and that his car had broken down. We could have sympathised with that. As it was, no one said anything. No one said anything, but I know what I was thinking: I was thinking that I had never been in a position where I so wished I could wind back the clock just one or two minutes. I would have loved to wind back the clock, to say to Jessica, ‘Shall we pick him up?’ and heard her reply, ‘No, let’s not,’ and sped past, leaving him where he was. But you cannot wind the clock back in this life, not even by two seconds. Everything that has happened stays happened. Everything has consequences. As a consequence, we couldn’t have not picked him up, but I could have asked him to get out. I could have said, ‘Look, man, I’m sorry, but in the circumstances would you mind getting the fuck out of our car?’ I could have done this but I didn’t, for several reasons. First, I was worried that if I did suggest he get out he might go berserk, might kill us. Second, I was worried that by asking—by telling him, really—to get out I would be being rude. So instead of asking him to get out we drove on in tense silence. The car sped along. There seemed no point slowing down. In any situation there is always something positive to emphasise. In this one it was the fact that there were no traffic hold-ups at all. Jessica was gripping the wheel. No one was speaking. The silence was unendurable but impossible to break. Unsure what to do, I turned on the radio. We were still tuned to a classic rock station that we had been listening to earlier in the day, before we got to White Sands, and as soon as the radio came on, in the fading light of New Mexico, I recognized the piano tinkle and swish of ‘Riders on the Storm.’ I am a big fan of the Doors but I did not want to hear this song now. It was unbelievable. A few moments later we heard Jim Morrison crooning: