Svalbard
”THEY CALL THEM SURVIVAL SUITS. But if this boat goes down, you die. No one
survives the Ice Fjord. The suits are only so rescue crews can find us – like floating
red-and-white popsicles.”
It’s our guide, Odd Magne, who’s talking – a 24-year-old Finnmark native with
a rifle and a 16,000-kroner Swarovski scope. Is he kidding? Or is he serious? In
the silence of Longyearbyen harbour, no answer is provided. Then our 200-horsepower
outboard motor roars to life.
We’ve all pushed ourselves into survival suits.
We plan to motor through the Advent Fjord, out into the enormous Ice Fjord,
past Cape Thordsen and into the Bille Fjord, with Bünsowland to the east and
Dicksonland to the west. We’re bound for Pyramiden, an abandoned Russian mining
town. A place where only polar bears and ghosts live. Our purpose is to take
pictures illustrating Norrøna’s new Svalbard collection.
SVALBARD. Before you arrive, the northern archipelago is but an idea, a dream, a
fantasy. As you sit at home Googling, with a hot cappuccino in one hand and new
hiking boots on the floor beside you, Svalbard is beautiful.
As beautiful as a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. A composition by Edvard Grieg. A
painting by Picasso.
Then you travel north. You fly 900 km an hour for three long hours. Had
you headed south, you would have reached Nice by now, or Milan. The azure
Mediterranean. Umbrella drinks and tight bathing trunks. Suddenly you’re landing
someplace altogether different. They call it Longyearbyen. Riding the bus
from the airport, you realize it’s no city. You wonder what it is.
Enormous construction cranes loom over an ice-cold sea. Decrepit mine entrances
swept by the wind. Sewage lines that lie atop the earth, displaying the
communal digestive tract. Iron, coal and bits of ruin are everywhere.
Or as photographer Frode Sandbech puts it: ”It looks like Mad Max won the
Longyearbyen architecture contest.”
And perhaps you think: This is something else. It’s not what I imagined.
It’s ugly/beautiful.
It must be an illusion.
But it’s true. All true. Welcome to Longyearbyen. A suburb of the North Pole.
THEN YOU HAVE A LOOK AROUND. Small, colourful row houses. A kindergarten
echoing with children’s laughter. A pedestrian street. A youth centre with a
skateboard ramp. Miners, students, doctoral candidates. American cruise-ship
tourists wearing puffy down parkas and cowboy hats. And in the distance:
enormous glaciers, spectacular mountains. It’s as if someone had managed to
combine the Lyngen Alps, the Folgefonna Glacier and British Columbia.
And you think: This is a door onto the wild. It is a portal to the freshest of all
fresh-air experiences.
And you say: Hi there, Amundsen. Hi there, Nansen.
Hi, all you women and men with icicles in your moustaches.
Here I come! I’m coming home!
AND NOW WE’RE en route to visit that Russian mining town, Pyramiden, which
was abandoned almost overnight in March 1998. We heard it might be the best
spot in the world for a photo shoot. That’s why we’re aboard a rubber boat doing
35 knots in the Ice Fjord, wearing Alpine ski goggles and polar mittens. With us is
a delightful pair of photo models.
Who are those models? Students from UNIS, of course – the University Centre
of Svalbard. It is the northernmost institute of higher education on the globe. At
the start of each semester, the students receive marksmanship training. Their
education involves ships, helicopters, snowmobiles and a remarkable number of
test tubes. The social scene involves everyone hanging out with everyone else
in the course of a half-year.
UNIS is like the local college where there’s always a party upstairs.
”Hope we meet a polar bear!” yells our guide. ”Though I should mention, this
rifle’s not quite itself. You see how crooked the barrel is?”
IN PYRAMIDEN, it turns out, three men have set up shop in three separate containers
to collect harbour fees from the tourists – on behalf of the Russian mining
company that once extracted coal here. They operate a rusty Toyota Hiace, a
diesel generator and a truck predating Gorbachev.
They live here – alone – amidst a thousand empty apartments beneath the
vast polar sky. Before turning in for the night, they should under no circumstances
watch Jack Nicholson in ”The Shining”.
We use Pyramiden’s big empty brick buildings as stage props. The rusty playgrounds.
The shattered beds. The thrashed cultural centre whose projection
room is strewn with reels of film. And the little cabin built exclusively out of
empty liquor bottles.
Pyramiden is a taste of the old Soviet Union, at 77 degrees north latitude.
Pyramiden is science fiction, a tale of pluck and perseverance. It’s also a sudden,
melancholy farewell.
LATER IN THE DAY, on the little island of Retretten, just a few metres from where
the Nordenskjold Glacier calves into the Bille Fjord, Rasmus Kanstad and Elianne
Ersdal (both 25) stand on a cliff and remove layer after layer of warm garments.
They want to take a swim, they say. They want to feel the temperature of the
water. On a nearby ice flow, a seal lies asleep.
We’re not sure if Rasmus and Elianne mean what they say.
But UNIS students are not like other students. Odd Magne, the guide, sits with
his rifle across his lap. Photographer Frode takes out a telephoto lens. Nothing
seems to bother the napping seal.
AFTER A SHORT SWIM, Rasmus comes ashore. He’s covered with goose pimples
and a pair of Svalbard shorts. Behind him rises the Nordenskjold Glacier. In one
sentence, he sums up not only his Arctic swim but all of Svalbard:
”Damn cold, but there’s nothing better in the world!”
Text: Eivind Eidslott
Photo: Frode Sandbech