Light Blue is the web site of creative writer and journalist, Urszula Dawkins. Scroll down to see my latest posts – not long ago I completed a ‘delayed blog’ day-by-day from my recent, unwired trip to the Arctic. In February 2011 I also presented a related spoken word event, Cold Edge – The Arctic Circle, in Melbourne and Perth – here’s a video of my first reading from that event.
I’m excited to have begun working with book artist Peter Lyssiotis to create a limited-edition hand-bound book called What She Wants. I’ll be posting progress reports here soon!
My friend Karen Celestan reminded me the other day of swimming in Lake Superior, which remains at a fridge-like 5ºC all year round and supports no aquatic life to speak of. Karen was one of four of us, women writers in residence, at Norcroft Writers Retreat, in Lutsen, Minnesota, in 2002. Our individual writing sheds were scattered around a patch of incredible green forest, away from the main house, on the shores of the mother of all lakes.
I used to take a break from writing each day at around mid-morning and ‘slip into the lake feet first’. It was VERY cold. This is a section of a story I wrote during those weeks:
There is only one thing to do: slip into the lake feet first. Her skin opens to take me; the surface spreads to meet mine. The chill reaches in past fat-layers. I get in up to my neck.
After 30 seconds my whole body is numb or in pain, and my heart is beating ice, frantic. I taste the slippery lack of salt. When I clamber out I’m not in control of my limbs. My movements are not the way my brain wants them. I know then the deception of this water: that you think you can still function. Even climbing back up 12 inches of rock my fingers cramp and can’t find their grip. I squelch onto a slab, shaking, glistening spheres of water still stuck to me.
The dead roll around in the depths; just rocking on the bedrock this way and that. They sink lovingly, cleansed of everything. The boats that shed them have long broken up against the shoals, or splintered on rocks so the planks of their making sprayed as easily as mist into the air. Broken glass sinks, to be lathed with the bodies in the deep till each shard becomes softened, casting coloured shade.
I love the sterility of her core; barely a weed waves in the depths. I can slip into her lubricated clasp, and something colourless fills me. That is why the lake attracts: I understand its promise. Slick and unencumbered , the lake never renegs. Nothing ruffles it. Not the breeze. While the forest lets everything compost at the surface, the lake takes the body and commits it to the deep.
We’re barred from the mountains by big airport windows; they rest in blue-grey light, the full moon is risen above them, and the snow coats them thickly. At the other end of the departure hall, the mountains are very near, and the plane waits for us on grey tarmac. In between are soft-drinks and sandwiches, plastic chairs, and departing travellers with boarding passes and heavy coats draped over carry-on. There are no real goodbyes, because we are all on the same flight; but we’re scattered throughout the plane, all picking our bags up in different places, all going to different places.
And in the sky, there are fjords, deep grey-blue, and mountains, black-white, and clouds right up to their edges, and only above the clouds is the sun a fiery gold blob, and the higher we get, the higher the sun, until there is only cloud and sun and golden reflection, and I pull the shade down because I know enough, have seen enough. There is now only the transfer of being from this state to the next; the luggage on a cart in Tromsø, the passport control or the mysterious absence of passport control. And a day to myself in a new city, before the return across the planet, to home. Meanwhile, the windows are speckled with pinpoints of ice.
Flying south: Van Mijenfjorden, with Akselöya like a knife-blade across the fjord
Off the boat in the morning, 9am. The dock is unfamiliar; my last step outside is in near-darkness, and at the adjoining wharf a huge truck appears to be tipping refuse out into a small bulk carrier, shipping out Longyearbyen’s garbage. As daylight arrives, there are hugs all round, goodbyes to the crew, and lots of schlepping of gear along the slippery gangways and across to the bus. It seems sudden, and final.
Back at Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg, it’s a day for getting back to the email, getting my head round what’s got to happen next. All around me people are making their plans, talking with their partners on Skype; it’s all about connection.
The mountains are familiar now: tall and white-washed, their shape delineated by the black tips of rock, the black ledges, the black pebble beaches. The snow is a foot deep at the side of the road and on either side of the path to the bridge.
Janet talks to me about that sense of lost-and-foundness that we all carry, whether it is as artists, or as artists with this particular Fernweh – the longing for what’s far – and the longing to create a place where we belong. Outside, at only 4pm, the twilight is turning into pale, greaseproof paper against the outlines of everything caked in snow; snow which has become thick and compressed and creamy, and which is blinding, not because it is bright, but because it completely erases detail. It reflects so perfectly that there is no shadow at all to suggest line or form, not even a hint of change in tone from one spot to another. The mountains dissolve upwards into the snow’s full, possessive sky.
I have not photographed the iced-over, snowed-over creek or the giant, prickly folds of the hills behind us – I am ready to fly away and digest everything. And at the same time a voice says ‘go out and do it, before it is too late’. Each moment is another moment that I do not grasp any more of this place, a moment in which it is already ended.
I remember sounds: the thrunch of thick snow compacted by my boots, over and over and over, resounding in the shell of my goretex hood, so loud it’s as though my ears are on my heel. The thin, dolphin whistle of ice talking to ice, in a tiny bay so calm that Laurie comes back with video footage that looks like a single still frame. She wonders whether the camera has frozen.
I have not been frozen here: it has been a place of tumultuous change, strongly perceptible, day by day. No slow, glacial grind towards change and decay, no gradual wind-shearing erosion, but instead something like climbing a staircase: each day I felt the shift from yesterday, the relationship of myself to this place shifting. When I go from here, I wonder what will be left inside me: whether it will be black, ice-blue or searing white, or a dirty mix of everything, loose or conglomerate, like the rocks at Erikbreen.
Mary-Ann's Polarrigg - the lounge, with work-in-progress...
Mary-Ann's Polarrigg - the breakfast room. Yep, that's a seal-skin on the table
Stranded on the shore opposite Longyearbyen lie a ruined few huts and an ark-like wooden boat, at ‘Advent City’ – our final landing. Another windblown stretch where perhaps the curve of the mountain to the sea is simply another convex arc defined by snow…filling in furrows, smoothing out cracks and irregularities to form the perfect arc. Sticking out from the white blur are rusted posts and bits of wood, a green, unlettered sign, and the bulky boat that looks not so much wrecked as never-floated, sitting heavily on the shore, all timber, undrifting driftwood. The spot where Rebeca decides to shoot is adjacent to a bank of deep snow: there is a clearly defined ridge above, and then the rising bank of mountains, their speckled monochrome so absolute and so familiar now.
She straps me into a leather flag-harness and hands me a large, Mexican flag on a pole, and I march up to take my place on the ridge. But the ridge, as I approach it, becomes a confusing blank: it is snow against snow and the mountains and their black occasional rocks no longer create a distinguising background. My brief is to walk along the ridge while she films, but when I step towards what I think might be the right place, I find myself thigh-deep in snow; and I’m not sure whether, if I walk along the line we see from below, there may be only snow to stand on. So I step back, and navigate by the careful plod of my weighted foot, watching for yellow grassheads poking through the snow. Nothing exists but my footfall. Rebeca whistles loudly against the wind when I enter her frame, when I reach the centre point, and when I leave the frame, stage left. I gouge deep scores in the snow with the flagpole, to mark each spot.
On the cry of ‘action’ I walk towards the centre of frame, with a look of patriotic purpose, not on my face as it’s hidden, but in the bearing of my entire, trudging body. Upright but not military, determined but not posturing – as Rebeca says, “claiming polar territory for Mexico”. The flagpole is almost torn from my hands by the wind, despite the harness. I’m breathless and aware of little else, but with one ear always turned towards R’s voice, waiting for a command.
Along the shore, Chao-Ming is pacing out a measured area and placing long red marker poles in the snow, to match the dimensions of his family’s apartment in Taiwan; Saul is trying to build an igloo from large blocks of snow; Wendy and Laurie are rolling balls of snow down the hillside, and Barbara is keeping watch with her rifle. Janet has been photographing but is now doing nothing, just absorbing the place for one last time before the ship returns. When Rebeca has finished test-filming me she takes control of the harness and flag, and I operate the camera while she performs the final take.
And when we do return, the dusk is thick like smoke and the Longyearbyen lights are blinking yellow across the fjord, below the old mining structures. As the Zodiac climbs sideways across crumpled waves a big helicopter comes out, grey on grey, to surveille the ship, our landing place, and the scatter of bodies still on shore. It blinks its lights, ominous, circling, and tilts away again into the gathering dark.
Rebeca Méndez, El Norte, 2011. Still Frame. Single Channel Video. Duration: 3 mins. 40 secs. Captured in high definition video at Advent City, Spitsbergen, Svalbard.
One minute it has been crisp and clear, the next it’s snowing hard, the wind searing. The seas have been flowing and cold, or rising and falling like easy breath, or surging in all directions, white tripe-like webs of foam creasing and blurring between thickening whitecaps busy with the sound of their own voices.
We sleep, we tire, we eat, we dress for action. We go off in the Zodiac in groups: now we are in the arctic. We walk in the arctic for an hour or two or three and then are shipped back to our bunks. We take off the layers, dismiss the arctic and view it from the distance of the deck again.
Our forays into this terrifying country are brief and we prepare well, and our ship is comfortable, but we do not really move from one to the other. Instead, we are in the constant tension of ocean haven and land’s terror. We are exhausted from it, or preparing mentally and physically for it. It is always out there, and when we are in it we are grappling with the mighty bow and arrow of our need to be there, photographing it as though we are alone, and building the enormous myth of our presence there, as though we are not simply a tour group, traipsing in heavy clothes from one promontory to the next.
I walk the cold edges of these islands, never entering the interior. It is impossible, it is all glacier and bog and pointed rock. The sea smoothes the stones by the shore but they remain treacherous; it is an edge which is not completely frozen, a place that at least allows my footsteps.
The cold edge is the edge between ship and land, the constant dipping to and fro. I want to stand with my feet in one place sometimes, day after day. This constant preparation and struggle reminds me of not belonging, of always working at being somewhere, at getting there or at staying there, anywhere.
My hands are broken from writing, from hauling myslef onto my bunk against the listing boat, from not doing my yoga, from not eating what I usually eat, from not sleeping how I usually sleep. The brown but drinkable water, the smelly clothes, the last night in this bunk, which has been perfect but has got so hot the last couple of days. We turned off the heating completely last night, and it was still warm enough to sleep naked; like a Perth summer night when the westerly hasn’t come, just without the mozzie net.
The Russian town of Barentsburg, seemingly lost in time, though a mere 30 kilometres from Longyearbyen – we’re nearly ‘home’. A coal-mining town run for the purpose of staking a claim, by Norwegian accounts at least, it produces enough coal to generate the power to run the town and the mine, and little more. Once thriving, with a couple of thousand residents, now it’s down to a few hundred; the old buildings are sinking into the permafrost or falling apart, quietly.
We walk up a long slope covered in snow and black coal dust, and along a long dirty road past ramshackle sheds, in one of which we can hear the sound of pigs. At the end of that road and in the distance is a fire in the snow, a rubbish dump maybe, the flames shooting up golden up in the twilight. The fjord is magnificent, the mountains on the other side shining under piles of pretty cloud, and the sun glowing somewhere out in the ocean. In the centre of the town, Soviet-era buildings with muralled walls stand in yellow brick between multicoloured, old-style houses. A chapel, a sports field under snow, and a few people walking home from work in the dusk. The local bar is brightly lit and lined with warm yellow wood, the swimming centre is tiled and mosaiced and ornate, with the Olympic rings over the front doors. I baulk at our voyeurism, drawing the line at indoor spaces, the places where the locals are living their lives. But at the pool a man beckons to me as I wait in the foyer; I follow warily as he leads me through a women’s bathroom with fixed hairdryers, the kind that swing out on a long arm and cover your head; and through another room to the swimming pool. It is tiled in spectacular pictures of walruses and bears… I try to thank him but ‘Ukraine’ is the only word he says to me.
It’s getting dark when the last of us walk down to the railway line, where everything is now lit in bright tungsten, and the entrance to the coal mine is near. Everything is metal, wood and dirt, the narrow rail tracks disappearing into a black tunnel. We walk past a few guys welding something, and a few more who are smoking in the frosty air, and back to the wharf down the endless wooden steps, where the snow lies deep enough to hide the steps themselves. Down, down, down, steps and boardwalk, steps and more steps, winding down the steep hillside until we are back at the ship, berthed at the broad and windswept dock.
Like Longyearbyen, and like Ny Ålesund, just across the fjord from Barentsburg lies...wilderness
Barentsburg is built on a steep hillside, climbed via the long zigzagged slope of the access roads, or up a daunting series of staircases directly above the dock.
If you build directly on the permafrost, the heat of the building eventually melts the ground it stands on, and it sinks - like the green and yellow building left of centre in this photo.
We’re heading out of the Krossfjorden towards Barentsberg. A couple of sails up, the ship leaning beautifully to starboard, so that outside the starboard saloon windows is nothing but foaming sea, and lilac grey sky to port. In amongst the exhilarating slosh of the ship over the waves, several artists have been rolling and sliding around on the floor; ‘getting down’, I guess, and experiencing the arctic in another whole new way.
It is coming to an end: we are on our second last day’s sailing. We were unable to land at Farmhamna; it was unsafe due to ‘katabatic winds’ – these are winds created when very cold air, heavier than the ‘normal’ air, drops down off a glacier and over the sea. So perhaps we will not be in structure-less nature again. I am beginning to wonder what email will be waiting for me when I get back. Some people are having disaster dreams, some imagining the dramas that might have happened while we’ve been away.
I find an ease in this wind, under these sails. I love the stability of sail, the constant lean into nothingness while flying towards everything. It is pure journey, there is no sense of the difficult, because every difficulty is caught and held and used by the lines and the canvas, we roll and fly along with it, it is the moment of oneness.
If Moffen is a particular moment, a signficant, timeless moment, then standing on deck with the wind taking us yonder is another, but time-full, a moving, constant event in which what is is becoming, in which where I am is in motion, and not at odds, and the wind washing me clean, and everything a floating, travelling holding.
It makes me feel as though everything – work, love, moving, writing – are coming, can come. It lulls me into aliveness, to a state of, yes, becoming.
And now we move into rougher water and the engine comes on again. The boat is rocking in four directions, one after another. The forward movement is complicated by what happens sideways, but thankfully, my stomach is calm.
My socks lean at 30 degrees and more, the water pours out of the tap sideways, the polished floorboards take everything with them sliding. The hatches are battened, and I want to fly and fly. And to rest, alone, away from here, to feel the land’s wobble again, to feel the way memory continues to tremble, to float, to smear across my eyes, like the snow and rock-fields that come to me at night, at the curving feet of fierce hills.
The ocean is distributing it wonderful power in surges and cross-cuts and swelling rhythm that judders all through the boat each time the prow flows down again and up. I absolutely love it, am propped into my top bunk with feet pressed firmly to the side rail and back pushed into the port-side wall. My stuff seems firmly anchored, but now and then a particularly large leap occurs and somewhere on the ship, plates break, or the sound of tumbling, flying objects is heard. (Lunch, understandably, is delayed.) It is dangerous but feels like flying, standing on the deck is risky unless hanging onto something – so easy to slip and go over the starboard rail, and so certain the death at the end of that trajectory.
I hold laptop down with the weight of the balls of my hands, hoping no sudden swell will fling it across the cabin. The crew are lounging around, Barbara has broom and dustpan in hand, as though in readiness for the next breakage. The artists are mostly sprawled out on their bunks or on the lounge seats, with one or two venturing outside, like me, to breathe the purity of all that moving air, to feel the suddenness of every moment in that cold and spray and foam. If only it were not so cold, I would be out there for hours, just hanging on for dear life and sharing life with the wind.
A ship belonging to the University of Tromsø, berthed alongside us at research base Ny Ålesund
Anchored in the Kongsfjorden, at the wharf in Ny Ålesund – the world’s northernmost permanent community, a town of less than 200 scientists from several countries. It is only around minus one, but the windchill is extreme. Snow is blowing like blossom and smoke across everything. I’m not really conscious of the mountains all around, only of the difference, the grey wind, the blustering difference of this place after days in the wilderness.
The pier is shared by a large research vessel, the Jan Mayen; owned by the University of Tromsø. To get off the Noorderlicht – which has been clunking back and forth against the wharf all night, and rocking almost as though we’re at sea – we have to be helped up onto the gunwale and leap across nearly a metre of space, to be caught by waiting hands on the other side. Between pier and ship are heavy old tyres, covered in snow, and below them, the cold grey water. Again, treacherous – everything is treacherous.
I walk alongside the Jan Mayen, surprised to be in a place where there are structures, things made of other things, huts and fences and signs. The sky is dull and pure, a clean blue-grey carrying snow from the south. Blowing it all over the road in endless, smoky gusts.
Turning from the pier to face the main street, I see it: the town, a safe haven. The buildings are warm and pretty, the mountains in the background are majestic instead of threatening; there is a sense of their distance. There are roads, made of hard dirt and covered in snow, but roads nevertheless. In the tiny bay on the other side from the pier, large chunks of blue glacier ice are floating roughly, and along the shore thick strange layers of foam float and slursh around rocks and smaller bittybergs.
…..I could live here, I could live HERE, I think. Not for me the trapper’s hut, no longer for me the idea of wilderness. That romance is smashed to pieces and lies under black swathes of rubble. Here is the place, finally, where I imagine myself belonging.
The huts are many-coloured, wooden, rustic, creamy opal, mustard and light blue, and dark red. With their four-paned windows dressed neatly in white; and between them, blue and orange poles to delineate the road, which is some places bare and elsewhere under 20cm of snow. The snow is like vanilla bean icecream, not the shattering white of the northern wilds, but specked almost imperceptibly with near-infinite fragments of earth. We wait in the cold outside the weather balloon hut, for 12.45pm.
Inside the hut, the weather balloon, like a long condom, is inflated with helium from a tap, and hisses wildly until it is full and round, rolling on its axis gently clockwise until Sebastian, the scientist, attaches a little white box to it with fishing line. The side wall of the shed is opened up and he takes three light steps out before releasing the swinging globe to the wind, which today is so strong that the creamy round shape lifts and flies up and distant in a few seconds, swept higher and higher till it’s barely visible in sky that is already darkening above the mountains. I walk back towards the dock and the wind is raging, the snow is whipping away forever, whirlwinding, scurrying out of the town. At the tiny bay, the water has turned brown and is churning around the flaking, floating slush, whose surface is viscous, greasy, dirty. The ice chunks have been blown closer to land, a couple chunking around the shallows and another further out. It is a washing machine of messy water, and in a couple of hours we’ll be sailing in it.
Our tour of the Jan Mayen is interesting, in that way of machinery and the maritime thickness of green-painted deck, of white rails, of cogs and funnels and liferafts and the smell of cigarette smoke just inside the room where we take off our shoes. The bridge is spacious, a giant console centred around a big sci-fi chair and a faceted desk full of dials and screens. Down in a lab, a scientist tells us about the bathymetric data-gathering that is going on, to study the action of ancient glacier ice on the sea floor.
But I can’t wait to get back onto the Noorderlicht, and I can’t wait for lunch, and then after lunch I’m so full, stuffed and overweighted with the food, although the food isn’t even heavy. My body is well out of its comfort zone, dehydrated but eating too much, forced to adjust minute-by-minute, accepting hunger than feasting when it is put in front of me, sleeping all night and in whatever other snatches I can grab. Always in one state of bodily control and waiting for the next requirement, for the next adaptation to take place. I’m in automatic motion from one physical state and physical stress to the next, and the next, and the next.
At Virgohamna, after a night anchored at Ytre Norskøya. Rolling side to side all morning in swollen seas, and then a very wet landing in the Zodiac, and a very cold couple of hours on land, stomping around the remains of Andree’s balloon expedition, blubber cookers, and various other artefacts. Cold, cold, cold, the snow blowing in from the east, feet and hands chilled solid. Have to go so carefully, then when you find a smooth patch, more often than not it’s covered in ice. Back on the boat, pretty soaked – but my outer layers worked and underneath I’m dry.
It’s time to stop using the word ‘landscape’, because it is far from any kind of postcard. I have been walking in it day after day and I know the feel of it under my feet and the speckled, dangerous slopes of mountain after mountain, moraine and beach and iced-up stream. When I look up at the summits, which trail into the white sky, I risk snapping a bone unless I stand still first and place my feet. I can’t see properly anyway – if I cover my face with the lower part of my balaclava, so that the snow and wind don’t sting and freeze me, my breath goes straight up and clouds my glasses so I see nothing, no distance, no ground. So I take off my glasses sometimes – and then the distance is just blurred speckles.
When the snow covers the rocks deeply enough to be mostly navigable without stepping into holes, it becomes a blinding sheet: I look down at nothing but white and all perspective is lost. It got deep today, and I noticed I was walking alongside a shelf of firmer snow and thought to steady myself with one hand, before realising that the shelf I thought I saw was at ankle height and merely the edge that had been stamped down by all our feet. Very strange…
Andrée’s party are said to have taken with them dinner suits and cases of port wine – a ‘party’ in more ways than one. Their 1897 balloon flight lasted 65 hours before bad weather forced them to land. They walked across the ice for 3 months to Kvitøya (White Island), but they didn’t make it through the winter. The remains of the expedition were found in 1930, and included Andrée’s diary as well as exposed photographic plates.
