Visiting Svalbard

Mid-afternoon last Sunday, I was couch-potatoing after a hike and a shower, and wasting time until dinner.

They say mental patients are extraordinarily focused on the next meal.

I’d already done that day’s NYT Sudoku puzzles, Medium and Hard, the Mini-Crossword and Wordle, so my go-to time-wasting activities were spent. On a whim I opened Google Earth on my iPad.

Beau and I have been watching murder mysteries set in Scandinavia, and that’s probably why Google Earth opened in the far north, so doggone far north that the longitude lines are pinched silly-close to one another.

I saw an icy island labeled Svalbard, and decided to visit for an hour, before dinner. The main settlement is Longyearbyen, population just north of (get it?) 2000. Longyearbyen is the northernmost inhabited place on our planet, and because I doubt I’ll get to any other planets (Not with that attitude, Max would say), I’m going to say it’s the northernmost inhabited place.

Bee and EJ have been talking with us lately about going on a trip together to see the Northern Lights, once Stupid Covid makes it okay to travel again. Well, Svalbard is the place to go, folks! From late October through February, you’ll have a better chance of seeing aurora borealis there than anywhere else on the landmass of planet Earth. You can even see it during a winter day, if you’re lucky. But the colors aren’t as vivid, because the pitifully weak winter light interferes, at least for a few hours. If you want the full deal, it’s better to take your photos and make your memories of Aurora in the dead of night. Which in winter is approximately twenty of twenty-four hours.

The other unusual thing you’re likely to see during a trip to Svalbard is a polar bear. Also arctic foxes, but the Visit Svalbard website spends more words and photos on polar bears. We mid-planet people get all excited about really big, dangerous animals, more so than arctic foxes, whose puppies are probably as cute as little samoyeds.

There are also reindeer and rodents on Svalbard, but I don’t think they’re native, as the polar bears and arctic foxes claim to be. Visit Svalbard speculates that rodents probably hitched a ride on a supply ship, back in the day. They don’t mention how the reindeer got there, but maybe they bummed a ride with the rodents, hiding deep in the hold, behind giant stacks of Spaghetti-O’s and Beanie Weenies cans.

Or! I wonder if the unexplained presence of the reindeer is a consequence of the North Pole Information Suppression Treaty of 1939, in which all facts about Santa and Christmas-present distribution systems have been classified, worldwide. Look at Google Earth—the North Pole is about one inch away from Svalbard, for heaven’s sake. A few malcontent reindeer could have escaped from Santa’s compound and walked across an ice bridge, one particularly cold winter back in the 1800s. Or Ms. Donner and Mr. Blitzen could have slipped behind a snowbank after Santa delivered presents to Longyearbyen during the whiteout blizzard of 1871.

Have you ever noticed that in the early representations Donner and Blitzen look different from their later images? The other reindeer look the same. Check it out. You have to look closely.

I cruised around the Visit Svalbard website to decide where the four of us would stay, on our Northern Lights excursion. There are all kinds of accommodations, from nice hotels to trappers’ cabins and campgrounds. I figured we'd be better off in the greater Longyearbyen metropolis, and I chose Basecamp Hotel, equal parts funky and comfortably warm-looking. I was too lazy to look up the currency conversion rate to find out whether it’s within our budgets. Rooms start at 800 NOK per night.

I’m pretty sure the N of NOK stands for Norway. Svalbard is affiliated with Norway, because Denmark had already called dibs on Greenland.

The official guidelines for Svalbard make good reading. The first rule is about not littering and the second is about not annoying the birds. The third tells you not to pick flowers, and the fourth says don’t take anything of cultural value. Now, I discarded number four right away, because we’d be going during High Snow. Five said, Don’t provoke polar bears. Duh. But then, holy pineapple upside down cake! Guideline six punched me in the face. Here it is, verbatim:

6. Do not leave the settlements without a suitable gun, and experience in using it.

What the…?

The next rule, the seventh, is clearly intended to calm you right down, as if nothing happened: Be considerate of others. I wasn’t ready to be calmed. I consulted with Beau, who was about to grill the scallops.

Beau said I would have to carry the gun, because he’d have his camera equipment. Also, he’s Canadian.

I remembered just then that I don’t like cold. I’ve told my family that I’ve had enough snow and cold for a lifetime, having gone to college in a northern New England state called New Hamster. During my first winter there was a two-week period when the temperature didn’t get above zero (Fahrenheit! That’s like, minus forty-five Celsius!) for three weeks.

Sidebar: You might want to check my math on the F-to-C conversion, because I just picked a number that sounded cold. The formula has four-ninths in it, so doing the calculation in your head is just not possible. I remember having to figure out the formula during seventh grade algebra, knowing only the freezing and boiling temperatures of water in F and C. I remember it because it was the only word problem that year that had any lasting practical value. End of sidebar.

After winter break, my roommate and I drove back to college in her silver Chevette, a fashionable car back in the mid-century. We’d driven from her home in New Jersey, and it took us all day, what with the winter weather and stopping twice for warm brown beverages at Dunkin Donuts. When we got to our dorm, we were too tired to unload the car, so we went to bed and left most of our stuff in the Chevette, parked in the student lot next to our dorm.

In the morning we started unloading the car in the minus-twenty (Fahrenheit! Calculate Celsius yourself!) cold. I fumbled with one of her pillows as I crossed the parking lot to the dorm, and I dropped it. It broke.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we say to one another, Wasn’t it cold this morning! It was thirty-six outside my house, how ‘bout yours?

Now that I think about it, I saw the Northern Lights once, walking home from a late-night something-or-other in college. It was a black-and-white Aurora, but spooky and impressive nevertheless. Black-and-white not because it was so long ago, but because we were only in New Hamster, not Svalbard.

Perhaps a black-and-white aurora borealis is good enough.

[You can find the Visit Svalbard website at en.visitsvalbard.com]