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We sail slowly down the coast. Traveling south, the air and sea grow warmer, and when I stand up on deck I can actually smell...life. A humid green scent missing from the high arctic ice.
We travel to Crossfjorden and its' glaciers, hanging from ragged mountain peaks. They're all but lost in low gray cloud cover, but when even the smallest ice breaks away, the fjord echoes with thunder. In the gray light at the end of our trip, everyone seems subdued.
I don't recognize the man in the mirror. Gray stubble, baggy eyes, face slack and jowly as a depressive basset hound. My clothes smell of dead whale. It is so time to go home.
As we sail past Prins Karls Forland, a thin strip of island that protects this coastline from the North Atlantic swells, winds rip the fabric of cloud cover to let in beams of sunlight over the peaks. We are here late in the summer season. The mountain peaks have shed last winter's snow from all but the most shadowed and protected clefts. Brown dust coats the glaciers in streaks. Within a few weeks, autumn snow storms will return, coating these peaks in white, freezing the sea and putting the land back to sleep.
Sometime after midnight, the sun emerges tentatively through a break in the clouds. Glowing orange and low on the horizon, it sends a pale glow across the mountains lining Isfjorden and onto the boat. We put down the last dregs of our celebratory wine, scurry up on deck and take one last round of pictures before we go.
August 20, 2009 - Spitsbergen Island, Norway
Polar bears are blessed with an extraordinary sense of smell. It's critical to their survival on the arctic ice. A whiff of seal, the scent of fresh prey, mean food and survival for the bear.
When a 40-foot Fin whale carcass washes up, stinking and bloated in the late summer sun, it feels a little like cheating. Still, it was an opportunity too good to refuse, either for us or the bears.
We motored for six hours to reach Sallyhammna. The bears had to walk, but it seemed worth the effort. The table was set and the guests have arrived.
Our first mistake may have been anchoring downwind of the carcass. We had a lovely view of a parade of bears swimming out to feed on the whale which lay grounded in the shallows, floating on the tide. The boat, already rank with the scent of wet socks and unwashed long johns and dubious cooking skills, now stank of cetacean road kill too. We smell worse than a fish monger's dumpster. During a sanitation strike. In August.
But the bears seem to mind not one whit.
We count as many as twelve in the surroundings hills, though it's hard to keep track as waddle off into the snow to sleep off their blubber hangovers. They swim out to the whale one or two at a time, ceding their spot to any bigger bear that comes along. It looks like tough going though. The blubber has gone slimy and fibrous and soupy and the bears struggle to get a purchase even with their sharp teeth. All but the smallest loner cub, who comes out during the small hours of evening and scuttles away at the first sign of competition, look well fed and glossy. They gorge, then go off to swim and play in the 36° water.
It's not a bad life if you can suppress the gag reflex.
August 18, 2009 - Sallyhammna, Spitsbergen Island, Norway
In life, there's the hard way and the easy one. The path of noble purity, and just getting the job done.
In our quest for the perfect polar bear image, the noble white lord of the arctic on the pristine polar ice pack, we spent long hours on the righteous path, sailing to the edge of the pack ice, then motoring slowly for more then 50 nautical miles of constant critter hunting.
I climb 35 feet up the mast, straddle a cold, metal slat half a butt cheek wide, then tie into a safety line and scan the horizon through my binoculars from a uniquely uncomfortable perspective.
The trick to spotting polar bear on the ice is looking for their subtle color difference. Sea ice is white and blue. Polar bears fur shades toward cream or yellow. Under the high arctic midnight sun though, every patch of snow and ice within a hundred miles was bathed in a golden glow. Lovely to be sure, but it lent every hump, nook and hollow a distinctly bear-like appearance.
It made for a very long night, and by seven we were all bleary eyed and hallucinating. And the total bear count? Zero. Nada. Zilch.
We turned to each other, shook our heads and said "Screw this," and headed for the dead whale.
Sometimes you just need to get the job done.
August 16, 2009 - Latitude 80° 40', Svalbard, Norway
I am alone, forty feet down, under the ice. I told the people who love me that I wouldn't do this. A massive iceberg looms above me, blocking out the sun, cutting me off from the surface. One more broken promise. There might be a rule in the scuba diving canon that I'm not breaking at the moment, but it's not for lack of trying.If I swim close enough, the iceberg's surface is a finery of ancient frozen bubbles and gentle melting curves. From a distance, it seems a hulking beast. The sea, flirting with freezing even in the height of summer, is cloudy with life of an almost primordial nature. Hundreds of small jellyfish float past, their tendrils fragile enough to dissolve with a touch. Above me, there is light and air. Below is 1200 feet or more of cold, still water. I hang suspended, listening to the pop and crack of ice, my hard breathing, blood rushing in my ears, the weight of my conscience. I am alone and adrift in a cold sea, looking hard into the darkness. Below me, the green fades to a lifeless black, but I don't have the courage to go deeper, to plumb the depths in search of judgement or redemption or finality. I turn instead to surface, swimming back toward the light, the sun and the world of the living.August 16, 2009 - Hinlopen Strait, Svalbard, Norway
The big bear stands atop the island like he was king of the hill. He was certainly lord of this square mile or two of weathered dolomite rock, filled with bird nests in summer and surrounded by endless seal-populated acres of ice as far as his beady little black eyes could see. It doesn't look like a bad life, all things considered.
He was easy enough to spot as we motored through the archipelago in the zodiac in a morning of fog and cold. A small cream-colored spot on the ancient brown rock. He glared down at us from his perch, but soon grew bored and went back to sleep. The big boat joined us, but we had to wait until nearly midnight before the bear finally woke and deigned to visit.
A quick bank of fog arrived at the same time he did, and the six of us jockeyed for position on deck, shooting into the misty half-dusk. I finally slipped down into the zodiac for a better angle, and Heinrich hopped in top paddle me closer.
Steve practically leapt off the deck to get into the boat, like it was the last lifeboat off a sinking ship. Smart boy, that.
August 13, 2009 - Nordaustlandet, Svalbard
Today we played a game called "Let's Sneak up on a Enormous, Shit-smeared Pinniped."
It went about well as you'd expect.
The prospect of a break in the weather on Lågøya Island in Nordaustlandet got us moving early. The rising sun made some small effort to burn through the fog, and we gulped down scalding coffee and headed for the walrus haul-out here at five in the morning. Two dozen of the brutes were heaped on the black sand beach, belching and farting with contentment.
We slowly worked our way up to within ten yards of the nearest set of tusks, then five, and finally it turned into some sort of low-grade contest of machismo. I was the last man left, approaching within a yard or two of an enormous bull. I knelt carefully beside him, photographing the herd at rest. As he breathed, I was enveloped in a calming, warm cloud, and I felt an almost benevolent tolerance of my presence.
When I tried to swim with the walrus later, the greeting was a bit cooler. Sliding into the water, I slapped my fins like a playful brother walrus, and one big bull with two young acolytes circled me, taking my measure, before approaching. The enormous male swam a bee-line for me, not stopping until he gave me a single, hard head butt with his snout and tusks. They could hear the crack of ivory tusk on my glass camera dome back on the boat.
That was enough of a warning for me. I scurried back to the skiff, crawled in and unceremoniously announced my retirement from undewater pinniped photogtgraphy.
August 11, 2009 - Lågøya Island, Nordaustlandet, Svalbard
They could almost be sleeping.
Lying in this cold island, blanketed in fog, two polar bear cubs lie within a few yards of each other. Abandoned, starved, silent in death.
It's about the saddest thing you could ever see.
Lågøya, Low Island, is a flat slab of crumbling dolomite somewhere north of 80° latitude, in Svalbard's Northeast Lands. A few dozen runty reindeer call it home, a marginally less inhospitable home than the surrounding bleak wastes at the northern edge of their domain.
Walrus haul out on the beach here too, a mountain of flash and ivory tusks. Maybe that's what drew the cubs' mother here, in some desperate attempt to pull down some larger, stronger prey. If she had died on land, the cubs would have stayed by her side, mewling and crying until they fell still. She may have died on the ice, or simply walked away when the cubs faltered. There's simply no way to know what happened.
In the end, the cubs had only each other.
An arctic fox may find them soon, or another polar bear sniffing for carrion. This is an unforgiving, unsentimental land.
For now, they lay almost untouched, their eyes closed, fur coats damp with the mist, sleeping on.
August 10, 2009 - Lågøya Island, Nordaustlandet, Svalbard
We sail slowly down the coast. Traveling south, the air and sea grow warmer, and when I stand up on deck I can actually smell...life. A humid green scent missing from the high arctic ice.
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