I believe we were all more than a little surprised when I went off and did the thing. It happened very quickly. Within a week I had signed a contract. Within a month I was gone. At the station, the farewells were brief. Olga never wavered. She held me by the shoulders and looked long into my face as though exacting an oath. Arvid shook my hand, followed resolutely by Wilmer. Helga would not meet my eyes. She kept her back turned, clutching Olga’s dress, until the very last moment, when the conductor announced the impending departure. At this she tore from her mother’s side, ran to me, and pummeled my body with her crabapple fists. Then she looked up, lines of tears riven in two by a fierce grin.
“You’d best have something grand to tell me when you return,” she said.
Partings are less painful when one looks forward to his destination, even if (especially if?) he cannot quite conceive of the thing he is doing, or how long it will last. Likewise, as I boarded the train to Tromsø, and from there the ship to Spitsbergen and Longyear City, I didn’t feel the apprehension one might expect. There was too much unknown. My voluminous reading had prepared me little for what I would see upon my arrival. Steamships, coal mining, life in an ad hoc work camp—these were a far cry from the danger and exhilaration of exploring unknown coastlines in a tall-masted bark. The abstraction of what lay ahead was calming, in a way. I had nothing to fear, so far as I knew. And other than my sister and her children, I left behind nothing worth a second thought.
I worked in the mines of Spitsbergen for a very short time. Some may wish for a more detailed telling of my brief career in that desperate trade. I can only hope that the truncated account which follows will not disappoint them. As things stand, more than enough has already been written about the near-infinite miseries and indignities of a miner’s life. The terrible hours and the subsequent disassociation from sunlight. The brutal labor. The noxious air. The pervasive and ever-present filth. The monotony and the boredom. The injuries and deaths, occurring at such a rate as to render the observer (or even the sufferer) numb to surprise. The criminal exploitation of miners themselves, whose meager wages are depleted further and further by the company’s stranglehold on local goods and resources, particularly in isolated areas such as Spitsbergen.
Longyear City, named for the American timber and mineral baron John Longyear, was significantly more civilized than the average mining camp, but it was still run entirely by a company—in this case the Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK), which had just taken over from Longyear’s Arctic Coal Company (ACC), the founding presence there. This change of hands accounted for the rush of new contracts and the advertising in Sweden that had caught Olga’s attention.
When I arrived, in 1916, the town had existed for only ten years. Everything was still in English—the signs, the leftover dry goods, the dirty magazines hidden under our mattresses. The place had a turbulent feeling during the years I spent there, for it had been emptied of people and refilled with new ones. There is something inherently strange about a place with no entrenched citizens. Men come and go, bringing with them perhaps a few vestiges of the cultures they left behind, but little else. I often got the distinctly unnerving notion that no one ever really lived there. They didn’t stay long enough to make a lasting impression, even if they died and left their bodies preserved for all time in the jealous ice. Civilization—if it can be called that—was, if not transparent, at least translucent. The people and their city: wraiths, living echoes. Spitsbergen: the only constant.
City is certainly the wrong word, or was. Have you ever seen a barnacle clinging to a pitted black rock as the sea assaults it over and over again? At times the tide will recede, or the waves diminish, granting the brave barnacle a brief respite, but invariably the sea returns with all its old rage to batter the creature once more. Settlements in the Arctic are like this. The difference, I suppose, is that a barnacle is tougher than a man.
Towns don’t grow much in ten years, unless perhaps there is a gold rush. There was no gold rush in Longyear—just folly. I arrived in summer, when a person can more easily fool himself that he might be in for a decent time. A few handfuls of meager buildings and huts sat perched on the hillside, some of them stilted against the muddy thaw, some jimmied into the rock. Below them, a wide beach of broken stone. Above them, the mountain, looming brown and treeless and unfriendly, as though its only purpose were to give shadow.
My impressions as I stepped off the quay were twofold: First, despite all the harrowing tales I’d read of people meeting a cruel fate in the north, I found myself feeling a bit underwhelmed. Where was my sense of being struck dumb by the awful power of the cold white death? I expected to feel a foreboding chill upon seeing the Arctic; what I felt was more like a shrug. My second impression—more accurate and enduring—was one of complete visual disorientation. The expanse of Isfjorden is so vast from east to west as to nearly cleave the island of Spitsbergen in two, with arms reaching far north and south, and Longyear sits nearly at its center. Looking behind me at the sea and at the mountains that folded one upon another, I hadn’t the slightest idea of distance. The other side of the bay could have been a hundred meters away, or a hundred thousand.
The year 1916 was a busy one for the Store Norske. The Americans had fallen into financial ruin in Longyear and the Norwegians were determined to make a proper go of it. They were building several new barracks for the miners, and they’d just introduced a paper banknote emblazoned with the company logo, which the workers were already grumbling about.
I started work the day after my arrival. Factory work and mining: the similarities are boundless. If you go into something knowing that you will be exploited to within an inch of your life, or past that, then at least you need not grapple with crushed hope. What made my situation worse, for a time, was that I hadn’t performed menial labor for several years, so my brain was sharp and my body was soft. The transition was unpleasant. Poor conversation, or even its lack, murders the finer machinations of the mind, and brutal work hones the corporeal form into something unrecognizable—a red canvas of strength and pain.
I’d somehow convinced myself that the location would be worth something—worth everything. In Stockholm, if a man had the desire and the will to take in the city’s sights after his shift, he could do so. Real cities exist outside the confines of diurnal limitation. But a desire to see the wonder and terror of Spitsbergen was worth no more than a whistle in the wind. Changing shifts made no difference. Sure, the daylight never quit in summertime, but I had no way to get anywhere.
For a time I despaired. I knew no one and spoke no Norwegian. The small cluster of contracted Swedes formed a tight-knit group, but I was no more a part of that community than I was back in Stockholm. The alienation, compounded by the geographical isolation, was almost enough to do me in. On multiple occasions that summer I considered going home. But how would I get there? The prospect was financially ruinous. And would the Company even permit me to break contract? Mine supervisors are not known the world over for their compassion.
Naturally I thought of killing myself. It had some allure. But having no stake in religion or its various ridiculous salves, I feared my own nonexistence tremendously. From the time I’d been a precocious, skeptical child, the idea of simply winking out like a light, or a star, was more than enough to nearly paralyze me with existential misery. I knew I would cease to be, and yet I could not comfortably imagine a world without me in it. It’s a form of narcissism, sure, but how do we live from one day to the next without convincing ourselves of our own fallacious importance? Children follow logic to its end, and those who do not or cannot believe in the afterlife invariably arrive at this crippling mental abyss. The only reasonable response is to shut your eyes, tuck your knees against your chest, and whimper.
During the long, brutal shift, down in the dark, there wasn’t much room for introspection. If a miner indulged in daydreaming, or private whining, something bad would happen. I saw this on myriad occasions. Railcars spilling over with coal frequently passed over the feet of the careless, mutilating toes beyond recognition as a human appendage, or severing them entirely. Spikes and pickaxes were driven into the soft flesh of men’s calves. Miners tripped in the darkness and bashed their heads and teeth with astonishing regularity. Chunks of rock fell on heads. Unwholesome air went unnoticed. Or worst of all, indolence was noted by a supervisor, loudly corrected, and rewarded with further financial attrition.
Many such slips could be attributed to fatigue and hunger, but miners—and this applies to factory workers as well—do not exhaust their flickering life-force in conversation. Life is too hard and loud for all that. So men are left to their thoughts, and while some men—perhaps most—find little to do in there, some vanish into a brown study and leave their bodies vulnerable to all manner of punishment.
I knew I was one of these, so I did all I could to keep my mind present, if not exactly active, when on the job. But at shift’s end, when the rest of the workers retired to the Company saloon to rejoice in loose talk and spend their blood-earned Company banknotes on Company beer and gin, I was suddenly a more potent risk to myself. I was invited, of course, despite my obvious and somewhat sullen indifference to the camaraderie of men. The small cadre of Swedes credited themselves nobly against the hard-drinking Norsemen. But it is like anything else. If you refuse long enough, you will cease being asked.
In Stockholm I did not particularly care. After a shift I could retire with relative complacency to my apartment and my books, or I could wander the city in search of its most beautiful, intelligent, melancholy whore. But in Spitsbergen! In Spitsbergen, alas, there was nowhere to go but a cold empty barracks, a thin mattress on a squeaking cot, a guttering tallow stub, and no books but the precious few I’d brought and read again and again until the pages fell out. The irony was not lost on me: I came to Spitsbergen to see a wider world—wider than Stockholm, wider than anything I could conceive of—and my world had become infinitesimal.
I despaired. I wrote anguished letters to Olga, ignoring any guilt that she should feel helpless or, worse yet, responsible. I counted the days, and they moved with a terrible languor. During this period I began to think more about the sailors on those polar expeditions that had so fascinated me. The dark winters trapped in ice. The lack of hope. Certain innovative officers who tried to combat lethargy (and scurvy) in their men with regimens of exercise and theatrical productions. These parts of the narratives had nearly always struck me as flat. Misery is difficult to convey when the particular circumstances do not resonate with a reader. Now they did. At last it settled into me that the truth of relentless boredom in a cold, dead place was perhaps not so romantic after all.