Spring

I can't stop taking texture photos.  I take them with my eyes when I don't have the camera with me.  

Snow on plastic buoy: Langøysund.

Last week Two weeks ago (!) was a busy blur of cake-construction, thanks to 17.mai, aka the Norwegian National Day.  2014 marked the 200th anniversary of the signing of Grunnloven, the Norwegian Constitution, so it was a special bicentennial year for modern Norway.  For five days straight I constructed cakes and thought about textures and slept and swam and did it again.  Tyler and I have been swimming in the evenings a lot recently, which feels wonderfully refreshing.  It's good for his shoulder rehab, and I've been enjoying the pleasant experience of subtly getting stronger.  My pace in my laps has just recently improved by about 20%, but I wasn't even really trying.  I think I just popped off the husk of winter hibernation.  Even so, I was tired out by Friday.  My strategy was to keep a tight schedule, remember to eat lunch, and not freak out when the sheeter inevitably ate two rounds of marzipan instead of helpfully, ahem, sheeting it for me.  It worked; everything was done, but I was spent.  I forgot to take photos of my 17.mai cakes.  It's a shame because they were my best yet, but you'll have to take my word for that!

I did save, however, just a bit of energy for an adventure we had planned for Friday evening: Tyler, Dagmar and I were all signed up to take the boat over to Borebreen, a glacier about 2 hours' sail across the fjord from Longyearbyen.  All week, Tyler and I had been scanning the mountains on the other side, trying to guess which glacier front it was exactly, and resigned ourselves to finding out in person on the exciting night.  Unfortunately, the clouds rolled in and the waves picked up and we spent most of the sailing portion of the trip lying on a bench trying to sleep through the dizziness and nausea.  I had just gotten through explaining to Dagmar that I hardly ever get seasick, and about five minutes later, I was the first one to go down.  When we came to for the brief pause in the calm bay beside the glacier, all identifying features of the landscape were hidden by fog, including the glacier front itself.  No matter, when you've found yourself suddenly able to stand and wobble about the deck under a softly falling snow.  The jagged plates of the ice pack rattled about in a gentle delicate swell.  I contented myself with the sheer pleasure of survival, thinking to myself in the norwegian wording: jeg overlevde!  Literally, I over-lived.  

Snow, ice, lacquer, sea: Langøysund at Borebreen

Ice.

And then we were faced with over-living the sail back across the fjord.  As soon as we hit the swells on open water, we were all down and chasing sleep to evade the bedeviling motion-sickness.  I really don't get seasick super easily, but golly it's the worst thing ever when I do.  No wonder that I slept through the 17.mai tog the next morning.  Tog literally means train, but in this case refers to a parade, and on the Norwegian National Day it pretty much involves all the children dressed up and waving flags.  I had planned on spending my first and maybe only Norwegian National Day being charmed by the bunads and tow-headed babies, but I ended up spending it languishing in the afternoon sun on the patio of the hotel pub drinking Irish coffee and trying to regroup from the previous week's many tiny hurdles.

Springtime in the arctic is like this, though.  You can't count on the weather and you can't count on the sun and you can't count on your own body to get along with the conditions.  Everything is punctuated by fits and starts.  Two months ago I felt the first stirrings of excitement over the first brief spells of thaw, but it is only within the last week or so that I have actually walked anywhere without my long underwear on.  We'll have a warm day, two cool days, a freezing blast of wind for 72 hours, snow flurries and then another weekend thaw where everything goes immediately slushy.  I love the midnight sun that shines into our apartment and lights up the whole place with a honey-colored brightness, until I can't sleep for the beauty of it and wake up still exhausted when the alarm goes off.  Snow falls again and I feel relieved for the relative gloominess-- happy to catch up on sleep and lazy time after several days of unremitting sunlight and dazzlingly compelling sky.  But then I forget to wear the thick gloves or the extra sweater and start swearing that I am cold again; put them on and start swearing that I am sweating half way through the walk.  It's hard to be satisfied for long in all the rumble of transitional change.  Just the last few days since the river started running, I have begun to sense that the season is turning the corner.  Soon the precipitation will be rain, the snowpack will spend the summer months shrinking away and things like grass and flowers will start to pop up in ever little crevice.

The geese are back, though: ready to harvest the yellow grass that has been buried under snow for several months.  Hundreds of barnacle and pink-footed geese.  We've been scanning the flocks closely, and have been rewarded with sightings of many occasional visitors among their ranks-- Tyler saw a tundragås, and we saw greylag and bean geese together, plus this lovely snow goose:

Snow goose.

So that is the greatest joy of the thaw: new bird friends.  Someday I am going to make a sweater inspired by the plumage of the common teal.  And I can't get enough of the snøspurvs, seriously.  The only songbird that breeds in Svalbard, making them pretty much the entire chorus of springtime.

While I hate to end on a negative note, there is one great sadness of the thaw, and that is the incredibly disappointing accumulation of trash all over this town.  It seems for every snowbank there is a bin's worth of broken bottles, torn plastic bags, beer cans, forgotten hats, lost socks and scrap metal.  I found a very new-looking shower head, complete with the cord, tangled in some seaweed on the beach the other day. The entire area of Sjøområdet was covered in those creepily compelling oil-slicked puddles after our first big thaw: an alarming reminder that all these half-defunct snow-scooters and vans that are parked all higgledy-piggledy are just rusting away and leaking their insides out onto the bare ground, miljøet-be-damned.  What is the deal, Longyearbyen?  A year ago when I arrived, I had higher hopes for Scandinavia.  I'd still like to have higher hopes for the future.  Do you guys think it's possible?  You use reusable bags when you go to the store, right?  Tell me someone out there is trying!

Textures of Longyearbyen

Over the last month, I've been collecting photos to try and capture some of my textural memories of living in Svalbard.  I have a lot of sweeping landscape photos, some decent wildlife shots and the occasional photo with friends.  But there is something missing in these big photos, which is a thing I actually spend a very large portion of my silent, internal time thinking about.  I like the way things feel and the way that they look like they feel.  The colors and the moods they impart, and the contact of different materials on one another: this is my real daily life, everywhere I go.  The patterns in surfaces that change depending on the lighting, the surprise of a pretty color on an ugly thing like a dumpster.  These are things that enter my dreams, and they have enough power to bother or delight me depending on whether I find their balance satisfying or not.  They are also the things that can bring a place back to my memory most strongly.  I might have a photo of the most beautiful view of the landscape, but it is always much smaller, more specific textural elements that can reintroduce my body to the memory of being there.  I won't know exactly what my memories of Svalbard will be until I leave and have to recall them, but I imagine that they will be things like the way the worn wood floor of our apartment feels through the cushioning layer of my house shoes, or the squeak of the wheels on the rusted old speedracks at work.  The obnoxious sound of snow-scooters.  Crunching snow.  The lichen and moss and reindeer skins.  All those fantastic Norwegian knit sweaters!  On babies in the crowded coffee shop full of wood chairs that knock into each other like sets of bulky building blocks.  I decided to try to collect a few of the specific impressions I could, things that I passed on my way to work or walking through town which I noticed and which made me feel that I like it here.  I want even more things in this collection that are impossible to capture: the creamy-white backs of the beluga whales that I spotted from our window the other day!  But this is a start.  Spring in the arctic, 2014.

Snow on tundra: Bjørndalen.

Rocks, ice and salt: Sjøområdet.

Shadows, mountains, moon.

Water, shadows, winter plumage (black guillemot; teist).

Rocks, ice.

Caitlin this one is for you!

Rocks/coal, plumage (Svalbard rock ptarmigan; svalbardrype), snow.

Flaking paint, rust, cargo straps.

Flaking paint, rust, snow.

Paint and rust (detail).

Paint and rust (detail).

Paint, rust, tire treads (detail).

Wood, antlers: Maryanns Polarrigg

Water, shadows, plumage (king eider; praktærfugl).

Corrugated steel, rust, snow: Gruve 2.

Weathered wood, coal: Gruve 2.

Weathered wood: Gruve 2.

Rocks, lichen, snow: Gruve 2.

Midnight sun through the curtains.

Ice, grit, and plastic netting.

Iron, salt and snow: steel plate

Icicles at sunset.

Icicles at sunset.

Wooden poles, ice, rocks, water, sunset.

Flaking paint, rusty chain, snow.

Corrugated siding, shadows, sunset.

Shipping pallets.

Snowplow blade.

Weathered wood, shadows, sunset: Svalbard Seilforening.

Weathered wood, rusty nails: Sjøområdet.

Half-pipe.

Ski trails.

Skooter tracks.

Skooter highway: aerial view from the footbridge.

Coal dust and dirt on canvas.

Meltwater stippling the snow on our front doorstep (another wooden shipping pallet).

Reindeer skins hanging to dry.

Asphalt siding on a ski-hut.

Antique track vehicle (rear view).

Antique track vehicle (front view).

Flaking paint and door handle: LNS Building.

Painted cement: Bakehuset.

Paint on brick: Bakehuset.

Bread, oats, stainless steel: Bakehuset, kl 6,00.

Bread (underside): Bakehuset, kl 6,00.

Flaking paint, cement, linoleum, grit: kjøleskap, Bakehuset.

Baked-on grease: Bakehuset

Baguette pans: Bakehuset.

Cake plates, shadows: Bakehuset.

Steam and grease on painted particle-board: ceiling, Bakehuset.

Grease, seeds, steel: bread plate, Bakehuset.

Snow on glass: Bakehuset.

Ice on glass: Bakehuset.

Ice pick, uniform: Bakehuset.

Stainless steel countertop: Bakehuset.

Chipped paint and grease stains: fryer, Bakehuset.

Green crate and shadows: Bakehuset.

Kurbadetbrød packaging, Bakehuset.

Button on the suede break couch: Bakehuset.

Granite and neon lighting: breakroom, Bakehuset.

Inside the office, outside the office: dirt, wood, and linoleum, Bakehuset.

Apron, pants: Bakehuset.

Meltwater flowing under a thin layer of ice.

Worn wood ceiling: Sjøområdet.

Cotton thread and polyester ripstop fabric: winter wardrobe.