I can’t say exactly when, but it was during this time that I turned to stone. It was a quiet process. I didn’t notice when it began, or while it was happening—only that it was complete. One day, it seemed, I was myself; the next day, a geological feature. I could look around and perceive the emptiness of my world, the ascetic squalor of my cabin, the intelligence and curiosity of my animal friends and neighbors. I could still, in theory, feel the acute sting of loneliness. The change was that I no longer dwelt upon those things. I experienced them until the experience was over.
This affected my routine. When I woke in the morning, for example, I no longer lay there for a swiftly fleeting hour, held flat by bleakness. Or, in the midst of gutting a seal, shoulder-deep in fat, I was no longer captive to my inner monologue—lists, concerns, investigations of despair, snatches of song. The transformation was a great relief. Without the nuisance of my own gregarious psyche, I could better hear the hiss of gas from a slightly punctured stomach sac, or the ever-present wind. I could stay very still for a long period without dwelling on the vicious cold, or the tasks yet undone. At last I was becoming calloused and deliberate, like the country in which I lived.
The change was not immediate. After MacIntyre’s departure in July—he stayed with me for three brief weeks, an idyll of conversation and companionship that nourished my mind for months to come—I languished a little in confusion and loneliness. But in a day or so I set myself to the task that I felt he’d laid down for me, if only by tacit expectation: making a solitary life that one could not only endure, but thrive within.
For me, an active mind had always meant a steady stream of inner chatter. Assessment and banalities in equal turn. Songs and critiques. This type of incessant flow gets in the way of peace. It impedes survival. But alone in Raudfjorden, I ran clear of things to tell myself. Except for the dog, of course, I woke up alone. I performed my ablutions alone. I checked traps, cleaned traps, and set traps alone. I hunted, shot, skinned, and salted ptarmigan alone. I hung furs, shored up the cabin, and fought for my life against the furious water and wind, all alone. I faced the darkness and ate meals alone. My burlap dinner companions remained, but only because it did not seem right to force them out—we had long since stopped speaking to one another.
In the absence of companionship, time slows. The mind follows suit. If human existence is one long interaction with stimuli, then the human must adjust to the stimuli around him, or else he must break. At first I watched the weather obsessively, for it moved, changed, and spoke with something like the speed I expected from the society of man. But soon it became one seamless movement instead of a series of staccato events. Of course there were exclamations from the sky—gales that threatened to capsize my tiny life, for example—and from the earth, in the form of the ice bear, and yet even these were part of a continuum. So I began to perceive that everything in Raudfjorden crept along with the same inexorable sluggishness as the glaciers themselves.
In summer and early fall, I strode the red iron oxide rocks, some splashed with orange like irradiated birdshit, and the lumped and snaking moraines. In the past I might have been preoccupied with judgment, noting a cast-off feeling to the world around me, as though the mountains had rejected everything they deemed not satisfactorily pure. And I would have pitched myself in opposition to it all. Now I merely took note of subtle changes. Minute shifts in scent and stone. I felt that Eberhard and I had found an even greater communion than ever, for now both of our minds were clear. And I stopped fearing the silence, whether at mealtime, in the evenings, or over the course of the long dark winter to come.
Into this void, for the void is by definition receptive, I placed MacIntyre’s books. I digested them carefully and cleanly, for they had little else in my mind to contend with. Before all this, I was a kind of frenetic, distracted reader, moving back and forth across the page, reading and rereading, stopping to consider, or mired in contemplation of something that had been said pages earlier. It made me slow, and the pace drove MacIntyre to distraction. He often expressed his ill feelings about my unreadiness to discuss one particular point or another. Now my brain was a rock-pool at low ebb, empty and brackish and yet perfectly shaped to welcome the incoming tide.
The cabin burned down almost a year after MacIntyre’s visit, in the spring of 1925. My maintenance routines had become fairly comprehensive by this point, and yet there were still some tasks that proved elusive. One of these, which I never disregarded again, was the cleaning of my chimney. For when a person burns whatever will burn, and much of it is driftwood or chunked-up pieces of soft timber, creosote will grow like a mold until the dreadful black tar, gummy and flammable as an oil-soaked torch, finally goes up. It may just burn itself out, but in most cases it will burn down the person’s home. So it did mine.
Fortunately this happened on a late evening when the spring twilight, otherwise almost blinding after its long absence, was dimmed by a low mat of clouds. Something flashing in the corner of my eye caused me to look up from a book. (In a world of stones, anything out of the ordinary is noticed.) And what I saw in the window glass were two lights—one a reflection of my oil lamp, and next to that, almost behind it like an aura, a sickly yellow light reflecting off a few beached ice shards on the shore. I stared for a moment, then put on my boots, and my fur coat over my long johns, and walked outside. Only then did I hear a quiet roar, like the officious purring of a cat, and lift my head. The flames erupting from Raudfjordhytta’s chimney had already spread to several sections of the roof.
“Hell and death,” I said without enthusiasm.
I could fill buckets from the ocean, for the spring was much too far, but by the time I returned from the beach with two pails—there was no hope of carrying more—the fire might have become an inferno. And then what would two buckets do? Could I get the water onto the roof?
I did not panic. I doubt even that my heart rate increased noticeably. The choice to let the cabin burn seemed easy, for there was nothing really to weigh it against. I reentered and began methodically to take the things I needed and shuttle them outside, creating a pile on a dry stretch of beach that seemed sufficiently far away. I would have ferried it uphill, knowing that the ocean might decide at any minute to rise in anger and swallow my meager belongings, but there was no door on the uphill side of Raudfjordhytta, and I needed economy. I also needed my books. To my credit, though I had failed to learn the art of chimney cleaning, I knew that fire was a perpetual risk and had prepared for it. My precious gifts from MacIntyre were stored meticulously in crates next to the door. These I moved first, even before the food and skins.
By the time the pile was complete, and everything that needed saving was saved—including my burlap table companions, whom I found I couldn’t do without—the roof had partially collapsed over the east side of the hut, and sooty flames were flicking tendrils out the broken window. I watched, Eberhard by my side, as the cabin was consumed. The whole process took, I think, no more than twenty minutes.
And so I rebuilt the cabin. I say this with calculated austerity, for the way in which I went about addressing and redressing the crisis—failing to perceive it as a crisis at all, in fact—would have been unrecognizable to the man I was two years earlier. Of course, I was lucky it wasn’t winter.
That night I raised Tapio’s old tent and filled it with everything I owned. I slept well. In the days that followed, I moved timber from my store of broken logs, which must have drifted to Spitsbergen from unknowable rivers in Siberia, and which I had gathered laboriously. The demolition and cleanup went quickly. When you build with little, and when most of it turns to ash, you have little to take away. Things vanish quickly in the Arctic, except for bodies.
There was no rush—I could have lived in the tent until October—and I knew that projects go ill when one has a pressing need for their completion. I had time, in other words, so I used it. In about a month, I had built the necessary exterior of a very ugly cabin. It was no Raudfjordhytta, though it inherited that name, and it would trouble the dreams of any self-respecting structural engineer, but it would serve.
So the rock is abraded by storm, and thinks little of it.