Salix arctica: arctic willow. This plant has evolved to survive its unique and extreme Arctic conditions and now can live as long as 264 years. Its roots have developed to withstand permafrost; its leaves have grown fuzzy hairs like its own sweater, and the plant itself has created its own pesticide against insects like the Arctic woolly bear. But the seeds . . . They have changed over time to become sticky, so that when they are dispersed in high winds, they don’t travel too far; they have evolved to stay on the island where they belong.
We take a Lufthansa jet out of San Francisco, 5,871 miles to Munich, eleven hours and twelve minutes, and then Munich to Oslo, 979.6 miles, five hours and fifteen minutes—
“Stop that,” my father says. “No more counting. Just . . . live it.”
He rolls up his coat to use as a pillow and gets his big legs up on the airplane seat. After so many hours in an enclosed space high above (I won’t say how high) the earth, my head feels full of explosives. I watch movies on the little screen that is on the back of the seat in front of me. I like when the other passengers laugh at the same spots in the film where I laugh, all of us with our headsets sharing a good joke in the otherwise silence of the plane.
We board our SAS flight to Tromsø, a town that sits at the northern tip of Norway. It is a clear day, and outside my window, I can see the fjords in the sea, icy humped lands, which resemble the surfacing back of a San Juan whale. The white fjords, the blue-green sea surrounded by snowy mountains, it doesn’t seem real, except that my father is leaning over me to see too, and he’s squashing me.
Back home, kids are slamming lockers and studying The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in AP English and buying roses for the stupid student body Valentine’s Day fundraiser. And I am here, getting closer and closer to the vault, landing in Tromsø, in a small blue airport out in what feels like the middle of nowhere, a modern airport of glass and tall, exposed architectural rafters.
This trip, this mission, has brought us through our first Christmas without my mom, which we spent eating a big Indian dinner my father made while we watched Orion’s Belt, a Norwegian film set in Svalbard, and then The Golden Compass, because the armored bears in it are from there too. We spent the anniversary of her death, ten days before we leave, in REI. My father buys a small GORE-TEX bag for the seeds and two pairs of wool socks.
That day, there is a postcard from Henry Lark in the mail. On the front is an antique drawing of a strawberry plant, with its various parts labeled in Latin. On the back, Thoughts and love in the small and geometrically perfect letters I recognize.
In the airport, we take our bags into the bathrooms and do what everyone is doing here, shedding our travel clothes and changing into our carefully planned gear. I am finished before Dad, and I wait out in the lobby in front of the men’s room. I crack up when I see him in his boots and snowsuit. He’s got his largest parka over one arm, but he still looks like he’s about to jet off to the moon.
I point and laugh. “You’re stuffed,” I say.
“If we have to go to the bathroom, we’re screwed,” he says.
We wait for our plane on blue chairs. I shove my hand down into my bag again to check for the seeds, which I’ve done about a hundred times since we’ve left. It’s actually pretty crowded in the airport. You wouldn’t think it’d be anyone but us, but Svalbard is a destination for adventure travel, and so there’s actually a couple on their honeymoon and a group of guys in jackets with patches that say ANTARCTIC SURVEY 1996, and even a couple of old ladies in fur-lined GORE-TEX parkas.
My father eats a packet of peanuts in his astronaut suit. He strikes up a conversation with two students who are heading to Svalbard to see polar bears and the northern lights. I’ve gone past exhaustion and am heading back where I began what seems like days ago now when we left home—excited anticipation. Nylon rubs on nylon whenever we move. It means we’re almost there.
* * *
The plane lands in winds and snow, and we hang on tight, because outside, there’s only white and gray and snow and haze and it looks like we’re headed for the climactic scene in the disaster movie. But the pilot sets the plane down fast and neat. The cold—you feel it as soon as they open the cabin door. We climb down the stairwell to the tarmac and then we are hit with the full force of it. But we are here; there’s the low black building of the airport with SVALBARD on it in silver letters.
Once he’s on the icy ground, my father turns to me and shakes a victorious fist in the air, and I shake one back at him. It’s too cold to talk. The air is so piercing, my lungs burn with the freezing temperatures. I am in another world. It looks like a different planet, even here at the airport. On the ground, beneath those blizzard clouds, the late-afternoon light is blue. Everything is blue—eerie blue snow and blue mountains and blue sky. It’s beautiful and otherworldly. My father stops to try to take a picture of me for everyone back home. This takes some doing, taking off a glove with his teeth, fumbling with the camera; me hopping from foot to foot, the snap, and then camera away and glove on again. I wish I could send it to Henry. I wouldn’t even care how stupid I look. Henry is with me on this trip, of course he is. I’ve got our compass in my pocket.
Dad and I retrieve our bags and take the local bus into Longyearbyen. On the ride, he elbows me and points. He stares up at something out his window, up on a mountainside.
“Is that it?” I ask.
“I think so.”
Yes. You can see it there, right above where the airport sits. The tall rectangle, the glowing blue-yellow window in the blue sleet sky.
The vault.
* * *
We are in Longyearbyen. We are in Longyearbyen. I keep telling myself that because it’s so hard to believe. It looks just like the pictures of it, rows of pointed-roofed buildings painted red and green and blue, bright colors to cheer up the often dreary winters. The late-afternoon lights of the buildings glow yellow against the blue.
The shops on the main street are quirky and cuter than you’d think. On the right, you can see the northernmost co-op shop in the world, with its stuffed polar bear next to the entrance, and on the left there is a red food truck, advertising the northernmost kebab in the world. We leave the bus in front of Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg Hotel, where we are staying. After little sleep and all those hours on the plane, it is dream upon dream upon dream. The Polarrigg is a group of wooden barracks where the early miners and trappers of the town used to sleep for the night, now turned to tourist lodging. Inside the main building, it’s warm, with a fire going in a coal stove, plank floors, rugs, red leather chairs, and wood beams overhead, mixed with odd trapper paraphernalia—stuffed Arctic foxes and a polar bear head. Singsong accents are everywhere around us. There’s a sign in Norwegian with a picture of a shoe.
Dad elbows me and beams. He’s thrilled. We read about this—it’s local custom to take your shoes off when you enter a building. “It’s true!” He’s a little loud. It’s embarrassing. But then again, this isn’t exactly the kind of place where you can fake being a local. If you even watched us trying to get our boots off, you’d know we weren’t from around here.
Our room is in one of the buildings that look like the sort you used to make with Lincoln Logs, with wood slats and a low, pointed roof. Our room is small, almost like a train car. It’s painted stark white, and there’s a pine desk and—
“Stop laughing,” I say.
Bunk beds. Yes, bunk beds, and he thinks this is hilarious. “I haven’t slept in a bunk bed since I stayed overnight at Tommy Valero’s house in the fifth grade,” he says. “I get the top.”
“Aww,” I say in pretend disappointment.
We decide we’re completely exhausted, but starving. So we go outside to the now searing cold, Indigo-blue moonlit night (boots on, gear on) and into Koa Restaurant (boots off, gear off), which looks like a saloon in an old movie, except for the bust of an old guy behind the bar, which someone has dressed in a red satin scarf and a pair of glasses.
“Grandfather Leopold,” I say, and point. It’s how I imagine him, anyway.
Our waiter’s name is Lars. There is seal steak and whale stir-fry on the menu. I kid you not. Dad orders the Reindeer Wrap “with apologies to Santa,” a joke poor Lars has probably heard a hundred times. I order the Arctic Char. A sealskin hangs on the ceiling above us. As we wait for our meal, Lars brings us a snack of polar bear meat and Norwegian berry pickles.
“Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore,” my father says.
* * *
After dinner, we walk in the frigid, bone-crushing cold from one end of town to the other. It is still out, the still and silence of below-freezing temperatures and a mining village readying for sleep. It’s a village old enough to be set away from time itself. We go into the single open shop, where the sign reads ALL THE POLAR BEARS IN THIS SHOP ARE ALREADY DEAD. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR WEAPON WITH THE STAFF. I buy a few postcards, and my father gets us each some wool mittens with reindeer on them.
“To remind us of that great dinner I just had,” he says.
We hurry, though. The cold is too intense to want anything except warmth. Back in my lower bunk, I spread out my postcards. There are many I need to send, but only one person most on my mind. I choose a beautiful, eerie, blue-tinged photo of Longyearbyen, the one that most looks like what we saw today, and I write this to Henry: Thoughts. Love.
There.
But then I change my mind. I think of us poor, old human beings doing the best we can, struggling with being either too much of who we are or too little. I choose a second postcard. I write Henry’s address on the back of this one too. The image is of an up-close polar bear face. I write, My dinner tonight. Love, Sis.
I smile. So will Henry. And that night, even with my father sleeping in the bunk above me, even with the bite of frigid cold in the air, I sleep better than I have in a long, long time.
* * *
Pix’s seeds, from the one perfect berry of my mother’s carefully tended plant, are in their Mylar pouch, which is in the GORE-TEX bag, which is zipped into the pocket of my nylon pants, under layers of my long wool shirt and fleece jacket and down expedition-wear coat. In the other pocket, I place the compass. We lace up our boots in the lobby of the Polarrigg Hotel.
“I’m nervous,” I say.
“Me too,” my father says. His hair is tucked inside his hat, and so it is only his own familiar face I see, outlined in gray wool. The balaclava will go over the top, and the hood of his jacket over that.
Outside, our rides arrive. Students from Polar University, Lars Bruun (another Lars—this is the Land of Larses) and Gunther Fjerstad, will drive us up the mountain. Two snowmobiles, “skooters,” wait out front, looking like landed insects with long, folded black legs. Lars and Gunther are both blond and blue-eyed. Gunther is a bit older with a beard; he hands us helmets and another “skooter suit” to wear over what we already have on. They show us how to secure our helmets, their accents rising and falling in a way that sounds perpetually cheery.
What is hard to describe is the light and color of this planet Svalbard, pastel pink and purple everywhere today, this monumental day. And the cold, too, how it drives directly to your bones, no matter how many layers. The visors on our helmets come down, and we sit on the backseat of our scooters, more low-to-the-ground motorcycle than anything, a rounded nose on skis, with a curved windshield. Then Lars looks over his shoulder and gives me the thumbs-up, and we accelerate.
I hold tight to the back of Lars’s seat, my boot pressing hard against the running board, shoving an imaginary brake, but then it is clear I am in good hands with Lars, and I put my fear to the side and take in what’s real but can’t be real. The cold pierces even under all those layers; it slices right to the center of me. My father is off to the side of us in his own black insect capsule, speeding crazily, a neon-orange flag screaming behind him, the flag our point of visibility should a blizzard begin.
But there is no blizzard, no snow even, just wind so loud it’s a driving blast around my head, and I’ve never been so cold in my life, nor in such a dreamlike place. We drive along a flat plane of ice, and there are more of us, more of these black insect scooters with their single glowing headlights, so many black speeding insects that it looks like we are being chased in a spy movie, surrounded by bad guys.
The speeding scooters thin out in the great space. There are only a few now, and off to our side, we see a long line of sled dogs. It is actually many sleds, four dogs per sled, maybe eight sleds in all. The dogs are shaking off the cold, ready to be on the move again, with their packed crews behind them. We see reindeer, four of them together. We see a red sailing ship frozen in ice, an eerie double-masted ship with many lines rising in the pink-purple sky, and I would be sure I was imagining it, but there is the name of the frozen boat, the Noorderlicht, painted on its side. It is the Dawn Treader caught by the White Witch and frozen until spring.
We are climbing high up the switchbacks now, and there is only mountain and more mountain and we are going slower, moving forward in bursts and starts, and it feels precarious. I don’t stop to imagine the film version of this moment because this is the film version. I don’t stop to imagine home and the people in it, because this is so far from home, I am another person entirely.
We are at the top of this road now, and it seems we’ve reached our destination, because Lars and Gunther slide us to a stop, and there is a man in a red and black polar suit waiting for us. We unfold ourselves, numb from cold, and lift up our visors. Then we take off our helmets and we meet Anders Thorstad from NordGen, the organization that operates and maintains the vault. Anders tells us that they’ve spent the morning chiseling ice off the door after it had warmed up yesterday, causing water to drip and then freeze after temperatures dropped in the evening.
From where we are, I can’t see the vault; we leave Lars and Gunther behind, and we walk, making conversation impossible. My father and Anders Thorstad are in front of me. I am concentrating on the slick ground, and when they stop, I do too, and then there it is. My God, it’s so much larger than I thought, so much more oddly magnificent, this rising triangle of iron and concrete set in this pink-purple land of ice; from the front, a narrow rectangle with prisms and mirrors reflects a beam of blue-purple.
It’s our destination, and I feel choked up, and I just stop for a moment to feel this: an arrival, an ending.
* * *
Anders is able to open the door quickly after all that previous chipping, and we hurry inside, into the first section of the vault. The door clangs shut behind us. This area isn’t sealed off completely from the outside, and you can tell. The floor is sloped concrete, and there is a fluorescent light above us, and there is frost on the walls, and Anders, a to-the-point man with a thin red face and burst of yellow bangs under his hat, tells us to watch our step because the floor itself is icy.
I look around at the concrete walls, while trying to watch my boots on the slippery floor. Soon there is another door, another mighty, echoey clang as it closes behind us, and now we are in a tunnel made of ridged metal, and the floor is no longer treacherous. Anders and my father are talking, but their words turn to muddled reverberations, and I can’t make them out. And now here is another chamber, and we are in a hallway with rough rock walls and silver pipes overhead. We are inside a mountain. It is a rock cave, Batman’s lair.
The hallway ends at a large concrete wall with a door to a rock-walled room, with a table and a guest book and some shelves with seeds. Anders gestures to the guest book, indicating I should sign, and as I write my name, I see what they have done for me. I see how large this is. Because there is a president’s name, and the British prime minister’s. And now there is mine, and now there is my father’s.
I think we’re finished. I’m sure this is as far as we’ll go. But then Anders Thorstad says, “Ready?” His voice echoes.
“Ready.”
“Every packet that arrives is scanned through x-ray. We’ll assume yours is free of terrorist devices.” I am glad my father only chuckles. He is keeping his mouth mostly shut. This is a good thing. He is the sort of person who needs the reminder not to joke about guns or explosives in the airport security line.
We follow Anders into another rock hallway, deeper inside the mountain, where there are frost-covered walls again, and then Anders stands before a single ice-covered door. Of course, this is the door. You can feel it. It is the way he stops with import and reverence, but it is also the way that this particular door stands guard. “Come close,” he says. “We need to let as little cold air out as possible.”
We huddle. My father’s gloved hand finds mine. “One of only four keys in the world,” Anders says, and he unlocks the door, and, oh, Henry would love this. We hurry in, and it is even colder there, in the actual room of the vault where the seeds are kept, so cold that my nostrils burn when I breathe in. It’s like breathing ammonia. The exposed skin on my face stings. Inside, there is a metal gate and rows and rows of marked boxes behind it. Rows and rows of seeds, seeds that will last and last, even if the rest of the world doesn’t. Right there is the promise of new life.
“Here,” Anders says.
Here. I reach under layers and more layers and unzip the pocket and remove the GORE-TEX bag and hand over the Mylar package.
It is so, so cold, and this happens so, so fast, but I shut my eyes and I imagine her face before I hand over Pix’s seeds. Her hair is in a ponytail, and she is in shorts and a tank top, her shoulders bare. She is laughing. Her eyes dance, and she is happy.
“Forever?” I say. I can barely speak, from frigid air and because my heart is in my throat.
Even to-the-point Anders’s face softens. “As close as you can get,” he says.
We hurry out. Doors and hallways and doors and tunnels. We are quickly back on the icy floor leading outside. It feels nearly warm out there after the vault. Anders is busy shutting and locking and closing things up. My father turns to me. He has ice crystals on his cheeks, and when I raise my hand to my own, there is ice on my glove.
“It’s done,” I say.
And then he takes me in his puffy, layered arms. He says the only thing that matters. “She would be so proud of you.”