Eugene weekly., October 05, 2017, Page 13, Image 13

Norway’s reluctance to create a class of people with
birthright citizenship claims in a place that has no citizens.
Internet lore holds that it’s illegal to die in Svalbard.
That’s an exaggeration, though you’ll also be sent away
when you’re old or ready to pass on. Svalbard has no
nursing homes. The only graves are historic sites — about
1,000 whalers, trappers and explorers, by one count, before
burials were halted in the 1950s. Permafrost makes digging
difficult and tends to push bodies out of the ground.
As our ship makes its way along Svalbard’s spectacular
west coast, we nose into narrow fjords, one after another, that
terminate in ever-more-spectacular glaciers. The only way to
get off the ship is aboard its fleet of rubber Zodiac rafts, and
we quickly settle into a routine of daily cruises — usually past
the front of a glacier — and wet landings on gravel beaches,
from which we can explore abandoned mining settlements,
check out enormous bird colonies of kitiwakes, guillemots
and puffins nesting on cliff faces, or simply hike straight up
the nearest ridge to stand on a local peak.
On a shore excursion one afternoon, our trip leader John
Rodsted stops our small group of hikers at a weathered
wooden cross that toppled years ago onto the spongy tundra;
next to the cross, among stones placed on the grave, you can
just see part of a human thighbone sticking out. The owner’s
name has long since weathered away from the cross. A trio
of short, plump Svalbard reindeer watches from 50 feet
away with the dull indifference of cows. Reindeer, reindeer
antlers, reindeer poop and clumps of white reindeer fur are
everywhere we walk.
After becoming bored with a commercial photography
business he ran in Australia, Rodsted headed for Bosnia
in 1986 and became a freelance conflict photographer. He
and his Norwegian wife, Mette Eliseussen, whom he met
while they were both working in Kabul, now guide polar
tourists here and in Antarctica on adventure cruise ships
like the Nova.
As our group strolls up a rocky path toward a glacial
moraine, Rodsted keeps us walking by telling endless
entertaining stories of arctic exploration, always promising
a new installment at the next stop. He carries a bolt-action
rifle slung over his shoulder and a flare gun in a holster on
his hip. On Svalbard you’re not allowed to venture outside
settlements like Longyearbyen without serious polar bear
deterrent. Most people take rifles, and the Nova maintains
a small onboard armory.
One morning after breakfast Rodsted announces on
the ship’s address system that we are going ashore to see
walruses — lots of walruses. We take to the boats as usual
and land on a windy beach, where the 60 of us walk in silent
single file for a quarter mile along the water’s edge toward a
distant noisy brown blob, our rifle-toting guides spread out
alongside us. For a moment I feel like we’re prisoners of war
being marched to camp in a World War II movie.
When we finally get within a long stone’s throw of the
blob, we can hear — and smell! — about 40 walruses, all
lying in the sun more or less on top of one another, burping
and farting and grumbling and occasionally laying into each
other with their ivory tusks, sometimes drawing blood. We
fan out and spend 45 minutes looking at, listening to and
photographing the compelling spectacle before returning
to the ship for lunch.
Finally we see bears. A planned afternoon beach
landing suddenly becomes a Zodiac cruise instead when a
guide making a safety check from the ship spots a mother
and two cubs ambling along the gravel beach near our
planned landing site. Moments later another guide spots an
enormous male following them half a mile behind.
That begins an extraordinary hour-long bear encounter,
with the Zodiacs carrying us just offshore from the bears,
who seem unafraid of and even mildly fascinated by our
presence. The female and cubs — the crowd favorite —
eventually reach a stretch of beach behind rocky outcrops
that stop us from following, so we circle back to the male
for an orgy of bear watching and photography.
Our last full day on Svalbard we land at the Russian town
of Barentsburg. A short boat ride from Longyearbyen, the
town was built in the 1930s by a Soviet mining company
that still operates a coal mine there. Named for a Dutch
explorer, Barentsburg is home to one of two giant Soviet-
era heroic statues of Lenin on the archipelago.
Barentsburg is also home to the only known house
cat on Svalbard, a big ball of orange fur. Cats are banned
everywhere on the archipelago — as are, curiously, ferrets
— and so people tell you with a straight face that it’s a fox.
With a population of about 500, Barentsburg boasts an
art museum, an old Eastern Orthodox church, a large brick
school, a hospital, a restaurant and bar — where several
of us stop for a morning beer — and a community center
with a sports arena and a performance hall the size of
Springfield’s Wildish Theater.
There we see a sweet show put on by eight local women
who dress in traditional costumes and sing Ukrainian folk
songs in front of a painted backdrop. Our passengers don’t
come close to filling the hall, but cheer enthusiastically
when the emcee asks, again and again in his rich accent,
“Let’s have some applause for these bee-YOU-tee-ful
ladies of the Arctic Show!”
PHOTOS BY BOB KEEFER
eugeneweekly.com • October 5, 2017
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