Land of Perpetual Night
As we traveled northward, the twilight diminished, the sky grew darker, until finally our ship crossed into polar night.
IN LATE NOVEMBER LAST YEAR, I traveled to the Norwegian port city of Tromsø and boarded a northbound icebreaker called the KV Svalbard. The ship belonged to the kystvakt,the coast guard, and it was stout and gray with a steep bow for plowing into sea ice and a thick round bottom for crushing it. In the long blue twilight, sailors pulled supplies aboard and welcomed passengers, while below in the mess, cooks prepared salmon fillets and sang along to MC Hammer and Metallica. Many of the young crew members were conscripts, fulfilling their national service, and here and there they stood outside in the cold, smoking and soaking up cell phone signals before we sailed beyond reach.
In Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, the word svalbard could mean “the cold coast” or “a cold edge,” and either sense—geographical, metaphorical—worked to describe the coming journey: a tour of isolated outposts in Norway’s vast Arctic waters. First, northeast between the nation’s rugged outlying islands, past the town of Hammerfest and over the pipelines that crowd the sea floor there, arteries carrying gas from distant drilling platforms. Then into the open water of the Barents Sea, where we would visit lonely weather stations on the islands of Bjørnøya and Hopen before finally turning toward the ship’s namesake, the Svalbard archipelago, home to the northernmost settlement in the world.
The Barents Sea at that time of year was mostly empty, trafficked only by big trawlers scooping up their last hauls of cod, wolffish, and haddock, or military ships eavesdropping before the weather grew too rough and
