Kayaking the Arctic

On my last day in Longyearbyen, in the Arctic, I wanted to kayak. In a kayak you sit close to the water, and I hoped to feel more inside of this landscape that we had been floating through on a sailboat for the past two weeks.  But also, at home in the Hudson Valley I kayak every day, so to be in a little boat on the water for me is to feel home.

In 1896 Nansen with his traveling companion Johansen end their three year expedition in the Arctic crossing open water in kayaks made of skins stretched over a wooden frame. The kayaks were boxy and stable and could carry a large load. At one point, walrus surround their boats, and a walrus “shot up beside [Nansen], threw itself onto the edge of the kayak, took hold farther over the deck with one fore-flipper and, as it tried to upset [him], aimed a blow at the kayak with its tusks.” At another point, a walrus punches a hole through his boat.

Imagine this walrus climbing onto your kayak...I think about paddling in my kayak and a walrus flopping onto the deck. I’d roll over in an instant. On our second day on board Antigua, someone thudded down the hallway and knocked on doors. “Walrus,” the call went out. Jolted from sleep, we emerged on deck to see a mother walrus with a baby lounging on a cake of ice. They both peered at the boat as we floated past. The baby lifted its head in curiosity and the mother took her large flipper and pushed it down. We were close enough to these big slug-like creatures to get a sense of the heft—and it made me dizzy to imagine such an animal sharing my kayak with me. 

A few days later we saw a pile of walrus on land. They lay on their backs, tusks pointed toward the sky. They lolled on each other, and on the sand, fanning themselves with their flappers. Two remained in the water, playfully rising up in battle. The tusks are formidable, long, wide, hard. How fast it could gouge a boat!

Cold water ready with Donald FortescueThe worst kayaking moment  for Nansen, however, is when the kayaks—with all of their gear—float off. Without that gear they are dead men. Swimming to retrieve the boats, he could also have died. But the later option is the one he had to chose.  Nansen vaults into the water and catches up to the boats.

I’ve had a boat float off without me, but swimming out into the Hudson is not swimming the Arctic. I had made three quick plunges into the icy water while I was in the North—three strokes was about all I could manage. I emerged breathing quickly, stunned by the cold. My body soon started to tingle, to vibrate with an ice cube vigor. It takes Nansen hours to warm himself.

It is for gripping scenes like this that I read these polar narratives, thrilling at the adventures. In some ways, I have spent my life trying to recreate that sense of adventure that comes with the unknown. And so certainly that was in my mind when I rented a kayak through Svalbard Wilderness Adventures and with fellow Arctic Circler Donald Fortescue headed out at 9 in the morning in dry suits, and full of instructions on the cold. We had one young Swedish guide and three other kayaks, all doubles (Donald and I were in singles). We shoved our boats into the Inisfjorden where Longyearbyen sits. The water was black-green and wind-ruffled. We flew across the Fjord and slid onto shore on the far side within forty five minutes. There a few cabins rested. Some of these rustic cabins were built (and refurbished) when coal was mined from the mountain above. Now these are summer cabins. “Norwegians like their summer cabins,” the young guide explained. And I thought: who doesn’t?

We built a fire and, wrapped in snowmobile suits, sat around shivering and eating a lunch of cheese and sausages. The Swedish boys regaled us with tales of driving the bad roads of Norway along the coast to Tromso in their Previa van. They would be road tripping back to Stockholm, looking for adventure that would probably come when their unreliable car broke down.

We walked the shoreline, enjoying a Purple Sandpiper along the beach line and the ever-present Arctic Terns. We looked at the remains of an airplane, wrecked on this lonesome shore.

The return felt like paddling across a wind-tossed Hudson River in early April, the water still snapping cold. We had no encounters with walrus or other creatures. We had no mishaps with the boats. It was an oddly tame paddle; this is what the guides guarantee. But something in me expected an adventure in this half tamed, cold land. But what I realized as my boat slid on to shore, my shoulders and arms pleasantly sore, that my outings alone, close to home, in the tame and populated Hudson Valley, are often full of more unexpected moments, mis-haps, those moments I’d call adventure.  

August 18, 2014 in Arctic, Kayaking, Travel

Life on Board

Antigua in the iceI did not grow up around boats or water. I have never lived on a ship. But I have read a lot of narratives of ship life, of exploration. No matter how much I have read, I was not ready for the round porthole that opened onto my top bunk bed, letting in the relentless northern sun. I could not have anticipated the sense that living on a ship must be like joining a cult, all of us koolaided out on the vast and incomprehensible landscape. I could not have hoped for cake—cake!—every day at four to go with the constant cups of tea and coffee.

This trip on the Barkentine ship Antigua with The Arctic Circle was not exactly a cruise, and not exactly an expedition, and not exactly an artist’s residency. It was a bunch of creative people—sculptors and painters and writers and sound artists—put on ship to sail north along the coast of Spitsbergen and create something: a painting, some music, a moment on the ice, an essay. We were sort of spoiled and often yelled at (who didn’t sign back in after going on shore? Who wore sandy shoes on deck? Who left their life vest on deck?).

I loved my traveling companions for all they showed me. I saw the land differently through the photos of the sun taken by Irish physicist Tom McCormack, or the sewn images of the Arctic Skua made by Australian artist Suzi Lyon, or the sound recordings of Donald Fortescue. In the evenings I read the comic books of Ursula Murray Husted and had conversations about sadness and shyness with the performance sculptor, Jess Perlitz. Of course I was focused on birds, and enjoyed the moment of separating out the Iceland from the Glaucous Gull with David Heymann, the architect from Texas who had designed George Bush’s house. This was all far from the experiences of my polar explorers.

Fram in the Fram museum, OsloI had moody Nansen in mind throughout this trip. I know some of the things he worried about: his men getting scurvy, the cold, and always what would be the extent of the ice and would they make it north as planned. None of these were my concern. What I wondered about: would life be claustrophobic (at times it was—there were over thirty of us on board and only one open room in which to live, work, play). Would I be seasick? (yes, on the first day). Would I miss email and the internet? (nope). Would I be able to walk on shore? (yes, but in a very limited way).

My companions and I all complained about the rules and made jokes about the daily pudding. But it all felt a bit indulgent as I thought of Nansen making it through his third polar winter subsisting only on polar bear and walrus. He would have loved that mayo drenched “salad.”  And, of course, the daily cake.

Nansen becomes fond of his ship, the Fram: “for, to say the truth, we all of us dearly love the ship, as much as it is possible to love any impersonal thing. And why should we not love her? No mother can give her young more warmth and safety under her wings that she affords to us. She is indeed like a home to us.” Nansen devotes an entire chapter of his book Farthest North to the construction of the ship, which was the first built for Arctic travel: “the whole craft should be able to slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice.” It was insulated and solid, and the name means “onward”—what more could you ask of a ship? I visited the Fram in Oslo, the boat sitting protected in a museum. It was Nansen’s boat, but Amundsen used it as well to travel to Antarctica. Stepping on board, I lost my legs, had to sit down for the thrill of walking the same wooden planks as these brave and obsessive men.

Life on board. Count the number of laptops.Through the course of the trip I asked people who or what they left at home. We were 20 women and 7 men, ranging in age from 23 to 67. Many are married, four in same-sex relationships but it was mostly dogs and cats and one rabbit left behind. A few had children, yet only two had children at home (and one claimed to have half a child since she had sold her eggs to come on this trip). We were largely solitary folks, skeptics, wanderers. On board, we celebrated two birthdays, and while I sold a house, another bought a house, and one grandmother fell gravely ill. Life goes on but we were cut off (except for the World Cup results—the German captain posted this daily, perhaps gloating in the German victory over the U.S.). It was but two weeks, yet in a world where we are used to constant contact people felt the void. When we docked in the research town of Ny Alesund, some stood in line for the phone, making surprise calls home. There was no one for me to call, and I found this a freedom. I was not pulled home or to a future reunion. I was simply there, looking at a glacier, talking in the galley, dreaming only, perhaps of a time in the future when I would eat a fresh salad.  

Arctic Circlers 2014These two weeks were nothing compared to my explorers who headed out for years at a time, safe return not assured. Nansen’s men (all men) left behind a total of 22 children. When Nansen heads out he’s 32 years old and had been married four years. His second autumn on the ice he celebrates his birthday on October 10^th. “Exactly 33 years old, then. There is nothing to be said to that, except that life is moving, and will never turn back.”  The explorer, so experienced yet still so young, knew not to look backward; he and his ship: onward.