A Journey Into Norway’s Endless Night
After we return to the kennels, we collect in a Siberian wooden cabin very like the sort utilized by the trappers who overwintered in Svalbard within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has a low, sooty ceiling, reindeer pelts on the partitions and benches, a glowing range. We drink syrupy glogg and eat sizzling, floppy waffles. The fireplace, the nice and cozy meals, the corporate appear valuable, bulwarks in opposition to the ever-present risk of hazard outdoors. That is one other present of Svalbard’s excessive surroundings: It makes an event out of what may in any other case appear abnormal and instills gratitude for a fleeting second.
At 11:15 a.m. on March 8 yearly, when daylight hits the steps of the previous hospital in Longyearbyen for the primary time after the polar evening, locals collect on the close by church for the beginning of Solfesten, the solar pageant week. They eat solboller, yeasted buns adorned with yellow custard, and sing out to the heavens. “On the finish of the darkish season, you are feeling somewhat ragged from lack of vitamin D,” Wing, the chef of Polfareren, tells me. “It’s a robust expertise when the solar returns, when you’ll be able to lastly really feel it in your face.” Elizabeth Bourne, an American artist residing in Svalbard whom I meet for dinner later, describes it as “a primal emotion.” She says that “a few years in the past, [a friend and I] noticed the solar streaking via one of many valleys, a pointy line of sunshine, so we rode on the market [on our snowmobiles] and took our helmets off and screamed like kids — two middle-aged ladies screaming their heads off as a result of we have been within the daylight.”
Emboldened by my expertise sledding, I resolve the following day to hike within the tundra. This time there will likely be no canines to chase away predators. Vlad Prokofiev, a Serbian information, drives a bunch of us, together with a younger Peruvian and a pair of older Germans, to the foot of Breinosa, a mountain to the southeast of Longyearbyen. Once more, there’s a flashing purple gentle over the valley, however at present our information is extra involved. Prokofiev stops the automotive. “Keep inside,” he tells us, shining his headlights onto the snow. He fetches his rifle. Massive tracks lead from the street into the tundra. “Think about if we see a bear,” one of many Germans says, laughing nervously. “Poof, we’ll be gone.”
Prokofiev returns. “I don’t assume so,” he says. “However Mom Frost, she comes and goes as she pleases. She isn’t afraid of individuals, of the city. She’s introduced her cubs up the identical. Murderers. Eight of them, and 6 shot in self-defense.”
