The light of Kaamos

The light of Kaamos

The melting Arctic is a crime scene, and I am like CSI Ny-Ålesund. Trond is the anonymous perpetrator who leaves me with evidence and hints, like breadcrumbs that lead back to him. When we first met at the research institute, he had told me, "Jonna, if you are going to make it up here, don't lock your doors." Instead of being a survival guide, it appeared to be a life philosophy. It is ironic. Out on Kings Bay, the coal miners came first, then the science outposts. Trond was already out here mining the Arctic when I was still just a bright-eyed undergrad, out to save nature from the ravaging capitalists.

When we met, we both understood immediately that we were on opposite sides. I guess sleeping with the enemy isn’t out of the question when it is seventeen below. At winter’s end, we both got the tattoo “79 ° North” on our shoulders. After flask after flask of bittersweet Jägermeister Mule and a night of cross-country skiing on the fjord to observe the Northern Lights, there seemed to be a permanence in the gesture. A holiness to it. Sacramental and sacred. We weren’t big drinkers and we had used a month of drinking credits to line our shelves, to consecrate the occasion.

Throughout the entire polar night, we had shared a home in the world's northernmost settlement on the southern bank of Kongsfjorden. The tattoo served as a keepsake and a memento of that period. The promise of an unbreakable bond. Then, with the first sunrise, everything changed. As a biologist, I should know by now that what is forged in the endless night, seldom survives the spring thaw.

Trond would remain and look for work while Store Norske Mining Company shut down the Gruve 7 mine once and for all. Plans were made. Treaties of peace were arranged. And the wartime between us seemed like a distant memory. The mine was given a stay of execution when the Ukraine war broke out. Trond was called back. “See you in the spring,” he had said and was gone the next day. Neither of us doubted the war would end quickly. Surely, neither side would willingly sacrifice their young for some fields of oil and a strategic port? But we were wrong. We underestimated the Soviet greed and also the resolve of a people yearning for freedom.

A weekly phone call replaced biweekly video chats. Before long it was an occasional lazy text. Finally, a message, at the end of January: “They need me to stay.” Then nothing. He will have been absent for a whole year soon. I look out at the stars as the MS Nordstjernen, headed for Svalbard, cuts through the night. When I reach Svalbard, my Swedish colleagues, Clare, Leah, Julio, and I will document the mysteries of the polar night. Especially the variations to the krill and phytoplankton, brought on by the shedding of the light. I finally have the impression that I am about to embark on a real adventure after all this time in the Arctic Circle. I try not to think of Trond removing his headlamp and reclining in the Gruve 7 breakroom next to the coal mining tunnels, miles below the Arctic mountains, risking his life more and more with each day underground. It would be lunchtime now in Adventdalen. Trond would have a thick coat of black dust on his forehead. Under his gloves, his hands would be doused in the dark soot, the calling card of the dark lords of the mine shafts. Trond wouldn’t bother washing up or wiping his forehead before unwrapping his sandwich. He is, without a doubt, a genuine Norwegian. Savages. They are numerous. I prefer the polar night. A perpetual full moon hugs the horizon transiting in a perpetual loop like a beacon from a distant lighthouse, circling the outpost. The blue light of the afternoon fades to velvety black after midday. And on the ship, the seas sleep soundly. Kinetic energy accumulates all around us. A limitless supply of ancient sunlight, stored like grain in underground silos. Just below the concealing ice. 90 billion gallons of oil. A third of the world’s natural gas. Coal basins salt the earthen caves; pressure cookers compact the carbon in the leaves of ancient ferns. And at every level, life thrives. From the ocean bottom to the mountain peaks.

But we marine biologists are concerned with the most alluring mysteries. Eyes of a krill. Sensitive enough to see only by the light of the moon. The effect of werewolves. Where all living things become more active and restless under the light of the full moon. Making sleep a scarce commodity during the whole season. Diel vertical migration. The magnetism of marine life being pulled upward by the light of the sun. Light. Like sprinkles of fish food from the hand of God, those nurturing rays call forth the phytoplankton and krill. A strange world of algae, bacteria, plankton, and swarms of shrimp-like arthropods feast on the energy trapped in the melting ice beneath the ice shelves. Stored sunlight, and its byproducts, locked in a frozen lunch box, churned and warmed by the rolling seas. The light banquet above ceases completely during the polar night—leaving the upper levels of the ecosystem dark and void. Only the icy dance under the sea continues, unimpeded, unaware of the nocturnal slumber above.

Amazingly, nature finds a way. Animals buried deep under the sea begin to emit their own light, like floating mermaids, carrying their own lanterns, searching the depths for a fresh meal, or a companion. Anything that sustains. There is also polar gigantism and marine snow. The Ice Dragonfish has anti-freeze in its blood to keep it from freezing. This also comes as a surprise and is amazing. I imagine my blood adapting to the ice in my veins as I grow in size, my skin emitting light, and so on. At last, growing so large that I am a beacon that can even be seen from miles below the Norwegian permafrost, where Trond toils silently in the darkness of the void.

The MS Nordstjernen docks at Svalbard and we pack our bags quietly, fuel ourselves with bitter coffee and sweet cream, and prepare to go ashore.

* * *

“Hallå,” Clare says. “Are you ready for a hyttetur?” That means a cabin trip. We will be traveling by snowmobile, over the sea ice, out to a remote cabin in Sveagruva for some crew bonding and cross-country skiing out in the mountainous moonscape, aided by headlamps and plenty of layers, and a healthy pack full of booze.

Clare smiles through the biting cold and revs the motor of her snowmobile, blasting her headlamps to repel the enveloping blanket of darkness. Clare hands back a cup full of flour tortilla-wrapped sausages as if she knew how hungry I would be.

“Dani, Framät,” she says to her Siberian Husky. Dani hops to his feet, from where he is lying in the snow.

“Hey, ‘framät!’“ Clare repeats.

Dani begins racing along by the side of the snowmobile, panting happily, his breath coming out in clouds that he pierces with his gait, and which break in pieces and trail behind him like the exhaust of a locomotive. We traverse the cold ridge to Clare’s cabin for supplies, grinding through the fresh powder as a flurry of snow falls and coats our ski goggles. It is not even a mile away. Clare has the stove ready, stuffed with chords of wood. And we drink tall mugs of coffee and recline in warm blankets, in her oceanfront cabin, as the small cabin warms with fresh heat.

“It is beautiful,” I say.

“Wait until you see Sveagruva,” she says. “Det är bättre än himlen.”

“Better than heaven.”

“Vänta och se,” she says—wait and see.

A few hours later, we have the trailers for our snowmobiles packed, and we are ready for our adventure.

Compared with Svalbard, the coastline route to Sveagruva is terra nullius. No man’s land. We wouldn’t dare venture out in the polar night without GPS and Garmin inReach Sat Phones in tow in case of emergency. And rifles, in case of a run-in with polar bears. Glaciers border the route. We stop at massive ice caves carved in the glacial housing of thousand-year-old ice around noon, when the blue light gives the landscape an eerie hue. If only Trond could see this.

“Titta där,” Clare says, Look there, pointing at what looks like a polar bear den. It burrows into the mossy permafrost and is concealed beneath a ridge of Dwarf Birch and Mountain Sorrel roots, framing the den with living iron walls. The polar bear peaks her head out from her maternity den, her clipped white ears checking for sounds of movement.

“Let’s call her Nadia,” I say.

Nadia sniffs, gimbaling her head about as she picks up a familiar scent. Nadia smells a wolverine far in the distance. Her dark black eyes scan the line of the horizon for other dangers. She finds none, so she comes out and takes a snow bath while rolling around in the playground's frozen snow outside the den. She yawns, revealing her long canine teeth, and stretches, grabbing the ground with her sharp claws and black foot pads, and slowly connecting with the earth, reclining on the snow, rolling over onto her back. Two young pups begin to crawl out and play fight, scuttling over to the mother bear and feeding from her exposed nipples.

“Look at that!” “Trond would die if he could see this,” I mutter out loud. “You haven’t spoken to him, have you?” Clare asks.

“Oh, no. Of course not.”

“Att försvara ett fel är att fela igen,” Clare says.

“Once bitten, twice shy,” I say, nodding.

* * *

Out here in the icy valleys of the moonlike cliffs and eerie glacial rivers, the sheer expanse of the landscape, immense, and imposing is a thing of wonder.

Nature’s imagination is vast. Almost as vast as the reaches of space. Additionally, her enormous moods appear to encompass galaxies. Dazzling displays of light and dark are her trademark. In all her mercurial palettes. Take, for instance, polar night. You have to seep in the emancipating darkness long enough to appreciate being pulled out into the overbearing light.

Cold and dark. They go together like warm coffee and cold cream. One hides all mundane things, leaving only the magical. The other strongly warns of nature’s power and cautions against overindulging. After all, all magical things are deadly. Polar bears Ice floats. Plunging temperatures. groups of wolves. The reorienting wind that blows where it wills. Loneliness. Regret. For every magical night filled with the Northern lights is an evening where the seas hurl daggers the size of Buicks at the land and send icy gusts with murderous intent after every creature that crawls, slithers, or walks.

But what we can't see in the light, we can see in the dark. a thousand distant suns' light. They blink their celestial eyes like eyelids, squinting to catch a glimpse of an oasis in an unimaginably vast desert of ice.

The Nordic nation blows away the sun like a child blows out a dandelion when polar night falls. It then reappears one month later. Blue twilight is a reminder that days are real. A long sunrise without a sun. Soft and pink. Cold pastels are used to portray the world. We shudder at the anticipation of the sun's return and the realization that it will be like seeing the sun for the first time in our entire lives when it finally arrives. After what seems like an eternity in my own thoughts, clinging to Clare’s coat and hugging her for warmth, we arrive at the cabin, which stands enormous against the landscape.

Since Leah and Julio have already left, they are busy clearing the snow from the drifts, filling the water tank, bringing dry wood for the furnace, and getting our sanctuary ready for a long weekend. * * *

I glance at my phone. The little green bubble says, “I know you are over this. I don’t know what I did or what happened. But I worry about you and hope you are well, my love. You are thought of… often.” a few weeks back. Long enough to stop hoping for a response. However, one never knows. Like the sun’s rays that seem lost forever in the long travail of the polar night, things that feel lost forever can return suddenly and unceremoniously, crying out that they were never gone at all, but always there just out of reach, only inches below your line of sight, sending out diffuse blue signals as evidence of their constancy.

I know the question is coming before she asks it because it hangs over the proceedings. Clare hands me a mug of hot cocoa that Julio prepared for us, complete with floating marshmallows, as we crowd inside and unpack our bags.

“Kommer du att stanna till våren?” she says. Will I be staying for the spring? That is the inquiry. However, I am undecided. “Do you think I should stay?”

“But of course.” Her teeth sparkle in the blue light as she smiles. "You have to, bebis. Now you're a part of our Grabbarna. I guess I am part of the gang. Science nerds gone Ernest Shackleton.

We have found so much out about the world below the ice. However, there is so much more to learn. The Krill find phytoplankton in what way? When there is nothing to nourish them during the cold season, how do those little energy packets manage to survive in the dark reaches of the polar night? How does life continue in darkness? How do the jet stream's winds bring energy back into the Arctic? This is a genuine hyphen. No plumbing, no running water, and no electricity. Candles are lit throughout the cabin by Leah. Julio starts the generator, which we will only use to heat water sparingly. and also stores small camp stove propane tanks. Leah comes outside in her down jacket with a bottle of Italian Grappa.

Leah passes the bottle around and says, "Skl." I take a long swig and the fire of the burning liquid coats my throat and warms my chest, reminding me that there is still some life within me. Leah starts playing some electronic dance music, which echos off the ice canyons that run through the Arctic valley. I was going through my e-mails while we played Monopoly with hand-crafted Harry Potter figures. And I was thinking of Trond. Worrying. As usual. Then I saw an e-mail from Trond. I gave in after debating for an hour whether or not to open it. “I don’t know why I’m writing you this. Why I am writing now. Kongsfjorden is different than I remember. Everything seems to have changed. Reindeer sleep by the trams, out on the graded snowbank, which is pitched so they are shielded from the wind. I never noticed before.

Today, we gathered in Fruene to discuss Peter's plight. At Peter's mass, Pastor Skaaheim said, "We who live in the north in darkness, we know how much the light means." Sigurd, Jakob, and Luka were down with me in the tunnel when it happened. We met with Mayor Olsen and he represented Peter’s family in the union negotiations. You are aware that prior to becoming Mayor, he served as our spokesperson. At $45 a ton, it hardly makes sense anymore to mine coal. Looks like the Greta Thunberg brigade has won at last. Congratulations. We comply. This is how it happened. We had cleared out of the mine for the day. Right in the middle of the polar night. But the glacial melt had been flooding the mineshaft. It was so bad that the conveyor belt was going on the fritz. To get rid of the flood water, Peter stayed back in the shaft and used a pump. Just like that, in an instant, the South wall caved in. He was struck by a rock avalanche. We spent the night with an excavator trying to find him in the dark. We tried TNT. Wedges. Everything. We never found his body. It is now three days his body has disappeared underneath the frozen rock. We’ve re-opened the tunnel, but search and rescue is still looking for Peter’s remains. It is almost like he disappeared into thin air. I keep pondering the possibility that it was me. And we would have never spoken again. Anyway. I don’t know why I’m writing you. Please pray for Peter. Leah says it again, seeing the scowl on my face. "Skl," she says. And she passes the Grappa bottle around the table, where Dumbledore has just passed Snape to buy Park Place. I take a long gulp.

“Whoa cowboy!” Leah states However, I need a moment. I walk out into the polar night, my crampons crunching the deep snow. I gaze at the belligerent moon which stands at the far end of the world, taunting me. At once so close I feel that I could reach out and touch her. The incalculable distance and icy journey are also still so far away that they border on infinity. Not impossible, but very close. Like the past.

And right here and now, I finally understand the polar night. I am unable to return to Trond's Kongsfjorden. And Trond can’t stop being a miner. Like the creatures adjusting to the ever-present polar night, everything that has happened has changed us permanently. I pick up my phone, write back the only thing I can think of that is true. "I'd like to see you. I am in Sveagruva for a hyttetur. Nothing is the same without you.”

And at that very moment, a small crown of yellow against the horizon displaces the blue twilight and the sun returns.

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