Sinking into the Arctic

THERE’S A JOKE in Norway that goes like this: if you’re lost in the forests of Svalbard, just stand up. I’d heard the joke before I traveled to that Arctic Archipelago last summer, and I heard it again as I sat with my traveling companions at a pub under the midnight sun in the small village of Longyearbyen. We’d been talking about climate grief and recounting the day’s hike up steep slopes, when another patron, perhaps pegging us as naive Americans and therefore a good audience, sidled over and asked if we’d heard the joke about being lost in the forests of Svalbard. Yes, we told him, somewhat wearily; we had. But the truth is we hadn’t yet learned what those miniature forests can do to a person’s sense of scale.

Carrying an old dream and plenty of guilt about air travel, carbon, and the luck of the privileged, I arrived in Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago 650 miles from the North Pole, a few months after I turned seventy. For years, I’d anticipated being moved by a landscape that, from a too-innocent distance, I’d imagined as dramatically solid, a place so forever frozen it has preserved the remains of a mammoth thirty-nine thousand years old. A place where one might forget about the beginnings and endings of ice and snow or anything like the rest of the world in the spasmodic flux of a climate crisis. The Arctic I dreamed of was undergirded by ancient permafrost, unchanging and therefore clichéd, a maker of stoics, a place of desolate stillness I’d once linked, longingly, with the out-of-the-way swamps and bogs of my Appalachian home. There, shallow bowls of underlying clay have protected relict communities of cotton grass left behind when the last ice age ended. Here, buried permafrost underlies everything and has, until recently, kept the polar cap intact.

But when I finally set foot in that almost mythic land, what I saw first