cruising the
top
w orld
of the
F
rom three decks up, the sea ice surrounding
our ship looks like so many Styrofoam
picnic plates bobbing on a dark blue pool.
Some plates are big enough to contain a
suburban house and yard; others have barely enough space
to park a bicycle. Many are almost perfectly round from
jostling against their neighbors in the wind. Tiny tracks
crossing one plate look birdlike from my perch, until I
check them out with binoculars and realize that this is the
trail of a polar bear.
I’m standing aboard the Ocean Nova, a converted ocean-
going ferry that’s home to me and 60 other passengers for
11 days while we explore the coast of Svalbard, one of the
most remote — and northerly — places in the world.
Svalbard lies due north of Tromsø, Norway. At the
archipelago’s far-northern end, where we’re exploring the
sea ice in hopes of spotting a polar bear, we’re less than
700 miles from the North Pole. The Nova noses slowly
but steadily along the rocky coast, its reinforced steel hull
reverberating like a gong as it pounds the pack ice.
It was from this barren collection of islands that hopeful
adventurers set off a century ago — sometimes never to
return — to be first to reach the North Pole. In that golden
age of exploration, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen,
who in 1911 had become the first human to reach the South
Pole, disappeared in a plane in 1928 while searching for
six members of an Italian expedition that had headed north
from Svalbard in a dirigible.
In 1893 Norwegian Fritjof Nansen allowed his ship, the
Fram, to freeze into the ice pack north of Siberia. Drifting,
according to his radical plan, in a northwestern arc, it
wound up nearly three years later — both ship and crew
intact — near Svalbard, propelled by currents in the ice.
Add in some tough overland sledding and Nansen came
within 350 miles of the pole.
Today Svalbard is populated by a different kind of
adventurer — high-end tourists.
Driven by baby-boomer bucket lists, cheap airfare and
12
October 5, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
GUIDE ALICE YANG DRIVES PASSENGERS IN A ZODIAC
an urgency engendered by climate change, polar tourism
— almost unheard of half a century ago — has grown
immensely in the past decade. Virtually unvisited in the
recent past, Svalbard now gets more than 40,000 cruise
ship visitors a year.
You once had to organize your own expedition to see
places like this. Now you can buy a ticket, assuming you
have the $10,000 per person it takes to book a cabin on this
cruise. (Our trip was heavily discounted because our son,
Noah Strycker, works on the ship as an onboard bird guide
for Quark Expeditions.)
Champagne flowed on the Nova the afternoon we
crossed 80 degrees of latitude — 690 miles from the
North Pole. That evening, when we reached 80 degrees, 12
minutes and 3 seconds north of the equator, John Rodsted,
the trip leader, decided the sea ice was too tight to keep
grinding our way north and turned us south again.
We were nearly two full days in the ice and hadn’t seen
a single polar bear.
Getting to Svalbard usually means flying to the tiny
town of Longyearbyen, where our jet from Oslo touched
Ele ven days looking
for bears in the
Norwegian arctic
by Bob Keefer
down just past midnight on a bright, drizzly June night
— all of Svalbard is above the Arctic Circle, meaning 24-
hour summer daylight. The Longyearbyen airport is better
appointed than Eugene’s; you can actually buy a sandwich
and a latte there at 1 am. A taxidermied polar bear stands
guard over the baggage carousel, the first of several such
bears we would see in town, all with signs reading “Do Not
Touch!” in English and Norwegian.
Inside the bustling Fruene Kaffe & Vinbar in a shopping
mall downtown the next day I joined Mark Sabbatini,
editor of icepeople, which advertises itself as the most
northerly alt-weekly (circulation 500) on the planet. He
reads Eugene Weekly online each Saturday, he says. A
journalistic roustabout — he’s worked at the Los Angeles
Times and the Juneau Empire and once ran a newsletter at
Antarctica’s McMurdo Station — Sabbatini has lived on
Svalbard for nearly nine years.
He handed me his most recent issue, a photocopied
16-page newsletter. Its top story was about the town’s
new library; headlines inside include “Employment in
Longyearbyen drops 12 percent” and “Polar bears shift
from seals to bird eggs as Arctic ice melts.”
Like everyone here, Sabbatini is from elsewhere. No
evidence has ever been found of indigenous people on
Svalbard, whose islands constitute a 24,000-square mile
outcropping of barren rock, windswept tundra and glacial
ice populated today by roughly as many polar bears as
people (about 3,000 in each case). The current human
population comes mostly from Norway and Russia with a
large Thai community thrown in.
Svalbard, a Norwegian territory, exists in a legal
loophole: If you get there and can make a living, you don’t
need papers to stay, Sabbatini says. The islanders don’t
even pay taxes to Norway.
That might sound like a libertarian paradise, but only
up to a point. Get pregnant and you’ll be flown elsewhere
(usually Tromsø) to have your baby. This is explained in
terms of Tromsø’s better medical facilities but also reflects