Authors: Deb Caletti
My father eats a packet of peanuts in his astronaut suit. He strikes up a conversation with two students who are heading to Svalbard to see polar bears and the northern lights. I’ve gone past exhaustion and am heading back where I began what
seems like days ago now when we left home—excited anticipation. Nylon rubs on nylon whenever we move. It means we’re almost there.
* * *
The plane lands in winds and snow, and we hang on tight, because outside, there’s only white and gray and snow and haze and it looks like we’re headed for the climactic scene in the disaster movie. But the pilot sets the plane down fast and neat. The cold—you feel it as soon as they open the cabin door. We climb down the stairwell to the tarmac and then we are hit with the full force of it. But we are here; there’s the low black building of the airport with
SVALBARD
on it in silver letters.
Once he’s on the icy ground, my father turns to me and shakes a victorious fist in the air, and I shake one back at him. It’s too cold to talk. The air is so piercing, my lungs burn with the freezing temperatures. I am in another world. It looks like a different planet, even here at the airport. On the ground, beneath those blizzard clouds, the late-afternoon light is blue. Everything is blue—eerie blue snow and blue mountains and blue sky. It’s beautiful and otherworldly. My father stops to try to take a picture of me for everyone back home. This takes some doing, taking off a glove with his teeth, fumbling with the camera; me hopping from foot to foot, the snap, and then camera away and glove on again. I wish I could send it to Henry. I wouldn’t even care how stupid I look. Henry is with me on this trip, of course he is. I’ve got our compass in my pocket.
Dad and I retrieve our bags and take the local bus into Longyearbyen. On the ride, he elbows me and points. He stares up at something out his window, up on a mountainside.
“Is that it?” I ask.
“I think so.”
Yes. You can see it there, right above where the airport sits. The tall rectangle, the glowing blue-yellow window in the blue sleet sky.
The vault.
* * *
We are in Longyearbyen.
We are in Longyearbyen.
I keep telling myself that because it’s so hard to believe. It looks just like the pictures of it, rows of pointed-roofed buildings painted red and green and blue, bright colors to cheer up the often dreary winters. The late-afternoon lights of the buildings glow yellow against the blue.
The shops on the main street are quirky and cuter than you’d think. On the right, you can see the northernmost co-op shop in the world, with its stuffed polar bear next to the entrance, and on the left there is a red food truck, advertising the northernmost kebab in the world. We leave the bus in front of Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg Hotel, where we are staying. After little sleep and all those hours on the plane, it is dream upon dream upon dream. The Polarrigg is a group of wooden barracks where the early miners and trappers of the town used to sleep for the night, now turned to tourist lodging. Inside the main building, it’s warm, with a fire going in a coal stove,
plank floors, rugs, red leather chairs, and wood beams overhead, mixed with odd trapper paraphernalia—stuffed Arctic foxes and a polar bear head. Singsong accents are everywhere around us. There’s a sign in Norwegian with a picture of a shoe.
Dad elbows me and beams. He’s thrilled. We read about this—it’s local custom to take your shoes off when you enter a building. “It’s true!” He’s a little loud. It’s embarrassing. But then again, this isn’t exactly the kind of place where you can fake being a local. If you even watched us trying to get our boots off, you’d know we weren’t from around here.
Our room is in one of the buildings that look like the sort you used to make with Lincoln Logs, with wood slats and a low, pointed roof. Our room is small, almost like a train car. It’s painted stark white, and there’s a pine desk and—
“Stop laughing,” I say.
Bunk beds. Yes, bunk beds, and he thinks this is hilarious. “I haven’t slept in a bunk bed since I stayed overnight at Tommy Valero’s house in the fifth grade,” he says. “I get the top.”
“Aww,” I say in pretend disappointment.
We decide we’re completely exhausted, but starving. So we go outside to the now searing cold, Indigo-blue moonlit night (boots on, gear on) and into Koa Restaurant (boots off, gear off), which looks like a saloon in an old movie, except for the bust of an old guy behind the bar, which someone has dressed in a red satin scarf and a pair of glasses.
“Grandfather Leopold,” I say, and point. It’s how I imagine him, anyway.
“Lenin,” my father says.
Our waiter’s name is Lars. There is seal steak and whale stir-fry on the menu. I kid you not. Dad orders the Reindeer Wrap “with apologies to Santa,” a joke poor Lars has probably heard a hundred times. I order the Arctic Char. A sealskin hangs on the ceiling above us. As we wait for our meal, Lars brings us a snack of polar bear meat and Norwegian berry pickles.
“Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore,” my father says.
* * *
After dinner, we walk in the frigid, bone-crushing cold from one end of town to the other. It is still out, the still and silence of below-freezing temperatures and a mining village readying for sleep. It’s a village old enough to be set away from time itself. We go into the single open shop, where the sign reads
ALL THE POLAR BEARS IN THIS SHOP ARE ALREADY DEAD. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR WEAPON WITH THE STAFF
. I buy a few postcards, and my father gets us each some wool mittens with reindeer on them.
“To remind us of that great dinner I just had,” he says.
We hurry, though. The cold is too intense to want anything except warmth. Back in my lower bunk, I spread out my postcards. There are many I need to send, but only one person most on my mind. I choose a beautiful, eerie, blue-tinged photo of Longyearbyen, the one that most looks like what we saw today, and I write this to Henry:
Thoughts. Love.
There.
But then I change my mind. I think of us poor, old human beings doing the best we can, struggling with being either too much of who we are or too little. I choose a second postcard. I write Henry’s address on the back of this one too. The image is of an up-close polar bear face. I write,
My dinner tonight. Love, Sis.
I smile. So will Henry. And that night, even with my father sleeping in the bunk above me, even with the bite of frigid cold in the air, I sleep better than I have in a long, long time.
* * *
Pix’s seeds, from the one perfect berry of my mother’s carefully tended plant, are in their Mylar pouch, which is in the GORE-TEX bag, which is zipped into the pocket of my nylon pants, under layers of my long wool shirt and fleece jacket and down expedition-wear coat. In the other pocket, I place the compass. We lace up our boots in the lobby of the Polarrigg Hotel.
“I’m nervous,” I say.
“Me too,” my father says. His hair is tucked inside his hat, and so it is only his own familiar face I see, outlined in gray wool. The balaclava will go over the top, and the hood of his jacket over that.
Outside, our rides arrive. Students from Polar University, Lars Bruun (another Lars—this is the Land of Larses) and Gunther Fjerstad, will drive us up the mountain. Two snowmobiles, “skooters,” wait out front, looking like landed insects with long, folded black legs. Lars and Gunther are both blond and blue-eyed. Gunther is a bit older with a beard; he hands
us helmets and another “skooter suit” to wear over what we already have on. They show us how to secure our helmets, their accents rising and falling in a way that sounds perpetually cheery.
What is hard to describe is the light and color of this planet Svalbard, pastel pink and purple everywhere today, this monumental day. And the cold, too, how it drives directly to your bones, no matter how many layers. The visors on our helmets come down, and we sit on the backseat of our scooters, more low-to-the-ground motorcycle than anything, a rounded nose on skis, with a curved windshield. Then Lars looks over his shoulder and gives me the thumbs-up, and we accelerate.
I hold tight to the back of Lars’s seat, my boot pressing hard against the running board, shoving an imaginary brake, but then it is clear I am in good hands with Lars, and I put my fear to the side and take in what’s real but can’t be real. The cold pierces even under all those layers; it slices right to the center of me. My father is off to the side of us in his own black insect capsule, speeding crazily, a neon-orange flag screaming behind him, the flag our point of visibility should a blizzard begin.
But there is no blizzard, no snow even, just wind so loud it’s a driving blast around my head, and I’ve never been so cold in my life, nor in such a dreamlike place. We drive along a flat plane of ice, and there are more of us, more of these black insect scooters with their single glowing headlights, so many
black speeding insects that it looks like we are being chased in a spy movie, surrounded by bad guys.
The speeding scooters thin out in the great space. There are only a few now, and off to our side, we see a long line of sled dogs. It is actually many sleds, four dogs per sled, maybe eight sleds in all. The dogs are shaking off the cold, ready to be on the move again, with their packed crews behind them. We see reindeer, four of them together. We see a red sailing ship frozen in ice, an eerie double-masted ship with many lines rising in the pink-purple sky, and I would be sure I was imagining it, but there is the name of the frozen boat, the
Noorderlicht
, painted on its side. It is the
Dawn Treader
caught by the White Witch and frozen until spring.
We are climbing high up the switchbacks now, and there is only mountain and more mountain and we are going slower, moving forward in bursts and starts, and it feels precarious. I don’t stop to imagine the film version of this moment because this is the film version. I don’t stop to imagine home and the people in it, because this is so far from home, I am another person entirely.
We are at the top of this road now, and it seems we’ve reached our destination, because Lars and Gunther slide us to a stop, and there is a man in a red and black polar suit waiting for us. We unfold ourselves, numb from cold, and lift up our visors. Then we take off our helmets and we meet Anders Thorstad from NordGen, the organization that operates and maintains the vault. Anders tells us that they’ve spent the
morning chiseling ice off the door after it had warmed up yesterday, causing water to drip and then freeze after temperatures dropped in the evening.
From where we are, I can’t see the vault; we leave Lars and Gunther behind, and we walk, making conversation impossible. My father and Anders Thorstad are in front of me. I am concentrating on the slick ground, and when they stop, I do too, and then there it is. My God, it’s so much larger than I thought, so much more oddly magnificent, this rising triangle of iron and concrete set in this pink-purple land of ice; from the front, a narrow rectangle with prisms and mirrors reflects a beam of blue-purple.
It’s our destination, and I feel choked up, and I just stop for a moment to feel this: an arrival, an ending.
* * *
Anders is able to open the door quickly after all that previous chipping, and we hurry inside, into the first section of the vault. The door clangs shut behind us. This area isn’t sealed off completely from the outside, and you can tell. The floor is sloped concrete, and there is a fluorescent light above us, and there is frost on the walls, and Anders, a to-the-point man with a thin red face and burst of yellow bangs under his hat, tells us to watch our step because the floor itself is icy.
I look around at the concrete walls, while trying to watch my boots on the slippery floor. Soon there is another door, another mighty, echoey clang as it closes behind us, and now we are in a tunnel made of ridged metal, and the floor is no
longer treacherous. Anders and my father are talking, but their words turn to muddled reverberations, and I can’t make them out. And now here is another chamber, and we are in a hallway with rough rock walls and silver pipes overhead. We are inside a mountain. It is a rock cave, Batman’s lair.
The hallway ends at a large concrete wall with a door to a rock-walled room, with a table and a guest book and some shelves with seeds. Anders gestures to the guest book, indicating I should sign, and as I write my name, I see what they have done for me. I see how large this is. Because there is a president’s name, and the British prime minister’s. And now there is mine, and now there is my father’s.
I think we’re finished. I’m sure this is as far as we’ll go. But then Anders Thorstad says, “Ready?” His voice echoes.
“Ready.”
“Every packet that arrives is scanned through x-ray. We’ll assume yours is free of terrorist devices.” I am glad my father only chuckles. He is keeping his mouth mostly shut. This is a good thing. He is the sort of person who needs the reminder not to joke about guns or explosives in the airport security line.
We follow Anders into another rock hallway, deeper inside the mountain, where there are frost-covered walls again, and then Anders stands before a single ice-covered door. Of course, this is
the
door. You can feel it. It is the way he stops with import and reverence, but it is also the way that
this particular door stands guard. “Come close,” he says. “We need to let as little cold air out as possible.”
We huddle. My father’s gloved hand finds mine. “One of only four keys in the world,” Anders says, and he unlocks the door, and, oh, Henry would love this. We hurry in, and it is even colder there, in the actual room of the vault where the seeds are kept, so cold that my nostrils burn when I breathe in. It’s like breathing ammonia. The exposed skin on my face stings. Inside, there is a metal gate and rows and rows of marked boxes behind it. Rows and rows of seeds, seeds that will last and last, even if the rest of the world doesn’t. Right there is the promise of new life.
“Here,” Anders says.
Here. I reach under layers and more layers and unzip the pocket and remove the GORE-TEX bag and hand over the Mylar package.