White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

5

Sites such as those painted by Vedder are not always mired in the sands of the past: they are still coming into existence, are continually being created, even if they cannot always be seen — as when a construction worker mixed a Boston Red Sox T-shirt into concrete that was being poured into part of the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, aiming to curse it.

In a photograph taken by Chaiwat Subprasom in 2014, we can see the very beginning of the processes at work in the formation of one such potential site. At first glance it seems a nice if rather pointless holiday snap. More accurately, a photograph of people taking a rather pointless holiday snap. In this respect it — the snap — is exemplary, since 90 percent of the pictures now being taken are pointless. The weather is fine, the beach is nice, the water is a gentle, unthreatening turquoise, but it’s not as if the rock in the middle is covered in ancient petroglyphs or even graffiti. That leaves the dog. A nice enough doggy, to be sure, and there’s always something fun about a dog at the seaside — until it comes trotting back and leaves sand and saltwater all over your sofa. .

Except this is the beach on Koh Tao in Thailand where the bodies of two murdered British tourists had been discovered two weeks earlier. This knowledge changes everything — including our perception of the dog, who now seems to have sensed or scented something untoward. In its modest way the picture being taken by the woman in the bikini recalls Joel Sternfeld’s photographs of parking lots or street corners in On This Site: unremarkable spots transformed into photographic memorials by captions explaining that these are places where a rape, murder or abduction took place. The couple in the photograph probably offered a similar explanatory caption when they showed the picture to friends or posted it on Tumblr. Still, their picture was not anything like as interesting as this one: a photograph showing the transformation being made. It is the act — her act — of taking the picture that invests the site with meaning. Her picture might be pointless; the act of taking it is not. Quite possibly she is taking it not to make a visual record but to offer some kind of tribute, to pay her respects in the way that, had any been available, she might have left a bunch of flowers. This is often the case: people don’t take pictures in order to have a picture; they take pictures because that is what you do. Perhaps it’s better put interrogatively: what else can you do? The man provides the answer: you just stand there.

People will continue to come to this beach. More photographs will be taken. A memorial to the dead couple will possibly be built or their names carved on the rock. Even if neither happens, some visitors to this spot will be conscious that something has happened here, will be familiar with the story of the murder. And even if that knowledge fades, this spot will still exude a faint charge of uncomprehended — possibly unnoticed — meaning. How long will that charge hold? What will remain of it two hundred years hence?

Northern Dark

Shortly after getting back from Utah, Jessica became obsessed with seeing the Northern Lights. She had been mentioning the Northern Lights for several years but now she began mentioning them all the time, telling me about friends for whom seeing the Northern Lights had been ‘the experience of a lifetime.’ Other topics were just preludes to the topic of the Northern Lights and how badly she wanted to see them. At one point she claimed that we were probably the only people in the world who had not seen the Northern Lights, that she didn’t know why I wouldn’t take her to see the Northern Lights. I wanted to see them too, I said. I just didn’t see when we would have a chance to go.

‘We could go in August,’ she said.

‘That has got to be among the most stupid things ever said by anyone,’ I said. I say stupid things too. We actually spur each other on to see who can come out with the most stupid things, so this was sort of a compliment. ‘You have to go in the winter,’ I said. ‘When it’s dark. In the summer it’s the land of the midnight sun. It’s the old Kierkegaardian either/or. Either the Northern Lights or the midnight sun. You can’t have both.’

‘Oh, I see. We can’t have both, so we’ve got to have neither. That’s what I call stupid.’

‘That’s what I call the remark of someone who has no understanding of logic whatsoever,’ I said.

This was in May. We weren’t really interested in experiencing the midnight sun, though we did enjoy hearing about it from our friend Sjon, who lives in Reykjavik.

‘When I was a kid I had trouble sleeping in the summer,’ he told us over dinner at an Indian restaurant in London. ‘In my twenties, I stayed up partying all night. Now I have very thick curtains.’

The months slipped by, the days grew longer and then, as soon as they had become as long as possible, they started to get shorter, until a day lasted only half a day, and this year became last year and next year became this year and we were suddenly in the fifth year of what Jessica had told Sjon was ‘a basically sunless marriage.’ Weather-wise, it had been the most severe December in London for over a hundred years. Snow came early, bringing ‘travel chaos’ to the road and rail networks. Heathrow could not cope. Flights were cancelled, but we were cozy at home, eating biscuits and watching the snow drift past our uncurtained windows or watching the news on TV, glad that we weren’t camped out like refugees at Heathrow, waiting out the backlog of cancelled flights, pestering airline staff for the food and drink vouchers to which we were surely entitled. Then, in January, after the snow had cleared and the country was back on its feet again, we were there, at Heathrow, waiting for a plane that would take us north, north to Oslo, then further north to Tromsø and deep into the Arctic Circle, to the Svalbard archipelago.

Having opted for the Northern Lights Experience rather than the Midnight Sun Experience, our chances of being able to have the Northern Lights Experience were enhanced by the fact that it was dark all day long. We could spend twenty-four hours a day seeing the Northern Lights, having the Northern Lights Experience, but first we experienced the Expense Experience in Oslo. How lovely it must be to live there and travel elsewhere, to arrive in London, Tokyo or even Papeete and be amazed by how cheap everything is. The train from the airport to the centre of town cost a fortune. Then we walked from our expensive hotel through the frozen city, past the frozen pond or rink where everyone was expertly skating, and ate at the most expensive restaurant in the world even though, by Oslo standards, it was modestly priced. We were stunned by the cold and the expense but not so stunned that we did not feel the first inkling of regret for coming to a frozen, dark and fiendishly expensive country.

In the morning, at paralysing expense, we travelled back to the airport to fly on to Tromsø and Svalbard. A snowstorm was in progress, a storm that would have paralysed England for six months and might even have led to a declaration of a state of emergency and the imposition of martial law. In Oslo the Norwegians took it in their stride. Part of the reason our dinner had been so expensive, I guessed as we sat on the plane, watching its wings get de-iced, must have been taxes which went towards the cost of keeping the travel network unparalysed throughout the blizzards and subzero temperatures that were such a regular feature of life that our take-off was delayed by only five minutes.

It was daylight when we took off and night when we arrived, several hours later, in Longyearbyen. Even if we had landed when we had taken off it would still have been night in Longyearbyen. We could have landed here any time in the previous six weeks and it would have been deep night and it would have been just as cold, colder than anywhere I had ever been, colder and darker than anywhere anyone in their right mind would ever have visited. We had only just got off the plane, were walking to the terminal, when Jessica said exactly what I was thinking:

‘Why have we come to this hellhole?’

‘Because you wanted to see the Northern Lights,’ I said, though at that point there was nothing to see but the Northern Dark, darkness everywhere, all around, with no possibility of light.

A cheerless bus took us from the terminal into the godforsaken town. There was nothing to see, except lights shining in the darkness, revealing — though this seemed hard to credit — people working outside, building buildings in conditions when everything required for building must have been rendered unbuildably useless by the unbelievable cold.

The Basecamp Trapper’s Hotel was a deliberately rough-hewn place, comfortable but sufficiently makeshift to impart a Shackletonian quality to one’s stay in the frozen wastes. In the breakfast room there was a polar-bear skin on the wall, like a Raj tiger in vertical mode. Best of all, there was a glass-ceilinged area where you could kick back and trip out on the Northern Lights. An extremely attractive little nook, this, because although we had only been in Longyearbyen about ten minutes that was long enough to disabuse us of the idea that we had come from a country that had endured a harsh winter. We had actually come from a mild, temperate little island, quaintly inexpensive and Mediterranean in its wintery balminess. Nevertheless, we did what you do when you come to a place for a Euro city break: we went for a walk, one of the most horrible walks we had ever embarked on. The Norwegian word for ‘stroll’ is best translated as ‘grim battle for survival’: Ice Station Zebra stuff, with elements of the retreat from Moscow thrown in. The temperature was a thousand degrees below zero, not counting the wind-chill, which sent snow streaming through the dark streets as if fleeing an invading army. We made it to the harshly lit supermarket, where we bought beer, returned to our room and sat on the bed without speaking. I sensed that the chances of having sex in the course of our stay were, like the temperature, far below zero. We had been here little more than an hour and our spirits were already appreciably lower than they had been in Oslo, to say nothing of London, which we now looked back on with bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn nostalgia.

The Northern Lights were not in evidence that night, the night of our arrival. I say ‘that night’ but we were in the land of perpetual night, the dark night of the Norwegian soul that would last another month at least. The thing about the Northern Lights, explained one of the cheerful young women who worked at reception and wished to clarify the situation for us before we set out for dinner, is that at this time of year they could appear at any moment, without warning. A state of constant alertness was required even though, it was conceded, on a scale of 1 to 9 the likelihood of their appearing tomorrow was a mere 2. But the day after tomorrow it zoomed up to 3. And it’s not like the Northern Lights were the only game in town. We may have come all this way, to ‘this frozen fucking hellhole,’ as Jessica called it, to see the Northern Lights, but there were other things to do as well. In the morning, for example, the morning that was indistinguishable from night and afternoon, we were going dog mushing.

After our trip to the supermarket we had set out for dinner as though making an assault on the summit of K2. For a morning’s dog mushing, however, more serious kit was required: three pairs of socks, thermals, two T-shirts, a lumberjack shirt, a thick sweater — with, rather appropriately, a Norwegian flag on the sleeve — a woollen hat, gloves and an enormous parka. This was my underwear. A van picked us up at the hotel and took us, through the awful darkness, to the large expedition HQ, where we hauled on snowsuits, full-face provo balaclavas, ski goggles, snow boots and mittens. Suited and immensely booted, barely able to move, we got back in the van and drove on to the dog yard. There were six of us, Jessica and me, a Romanian couple who had immigrated to Denmark and our two guides, Birgitte and Yeti.

‘Yeti?’ I said. ‘What an abominable name!’

The entrance to the dog yard was marked by seal skins hanging on a triangular gallows like a frosty modern artwork in the style of a skeletal wigwam. There were ninety dogs there, ninety Alaskan huskies, chained and yelping in the urine-stained and poo-smeared ice of the compound. Lights, fences and snow all contributed to the impression that we had stumbled into some kind of canine Gulag. Not that the doggies were unhappy or unloved. They were chomping at the bit, straining at the leash. Every dog has its day, and each and every one of these yelpers hoped that this would be his or hers. And that wasn’t all that was going on. Implausible though it seemed in such icy conditions, the females, somehow, were in heat, and the males were desperate to get their paws on them. To us they were friendly rather than randy, as cuddly as anything, but the yelping was like the soundtrack of a doggy nightmare. They had lovely names, the dogs. Junior, Fifty, Ivory, Mara, Yukon and — though I may have got this wrong — Tampax were among the lucky ones chosen to go out with us on this day that was indistinguishable from deepest night. Although it was dark I could see the huskies’ strange eyes, so pale and milky clear that they seemed independent of the bodies in which they were lodged: planets in a dog-shaped universe. Presumably these eyes meant that the dogs had night-vision, could see for miles in the deepest night. I was surrounded by these eyes, cold and flashing with a clarity that seemed devoid of intelligence or even life. Part of our job — part of the day’s advertised fun, even though, just as what was called day was really deep night, this fun was pure misery — was to take the selected dogs, put them in harness and fix the harness to the sled, six dogs per sled. The yelping was driving me insane and my toes were already numb with cold. Because I was thinking of my numb toes and constantly checking that not an inch of my flesh was exposed, I was not listening properly to the instructions about how to put the harnesses on, and it was not easy to hear anyway, with my parka and snowsuit hood pulled up and my head full of the sound of the yelping of ninety Alaskan huskies, half of them in heat and all of them desperate to run or fuck or both. The dogs lifted their forelegs to help with the tricky business of clambering into the harness. It was like putting a baby’s leg into a romper suit, but a baby with a lifetime’s experience of preparing for sledding expeditions in the frozen Arctic. Saddling up the three teams of dogs took ages, partly because with these multiple layers of clothes squashed under one’s snowsuit it was possible to move only at the speed of a deep-sea diver. I am tall anyway, but with all this clobber I loomed like death itself in the polar night. Death be not proud! I got into such a tangle with the numerous, often inexplicable bits of harness and rope and the dogs all leaping over each other that I slipped onto my back, landing on the hard ice, which, through all these layers of clothing-blubber, felt as soft as a piss-streaked sponge cake. There is a lesson to be learned from this: in the depths of the darkest night and the darkness of the deepest cold, mankind’s need for slapstick will never be quite extinguished.

Eventually, we were saddled up and ready to go. Whenever we hire a car Jessica always steers us out of the parking lot for the first few tentative miles, when we are unsure of the controls and the chances of an accident are at their peak. On this occasion, though, I was driving. I said that she should take the reins, but she insisted that this was my manly prerogative and plonked herself down in the sled on a comfy-looking piece of blue rug. A few moments later we were off. We had not been under starter’s orders, but we were off. First team out, second team out — and then us, bringing up the rear in suddenly hot pursuit. The huskies meant business, there was no doubt about that. I still had the sled’s anchor in my hand, was struggling to hook it to the side of the sled so that it would not impale Jessica’s head like a fishing hook in the cheek of a big human fish. An extraordinary amount of speed had been abruptly unleashed, unharnessed by even a modicum of control. We were charging downhill, at an angle, so we had to lean into the slope to avoid capsizing. Through my hood I could still hear the dogs yelping, though by now my head was so full of yelping this might have been the residue of the old yelping of dogs in the compound, not the ecstatic yelping of huskies galloping through the Arctic dark. It was hard work steering the sled, hard enough to make me sweat. It felt good being hot, but sweating was not good at all, because — I remembered this from Alistair MacLean’s appropriately named Night Without End—as soon as this exertion was over the sweat would freeze. We were zooming along, plunging down a slope. I lost control of the sled, over which I had never had the slightest control, and tumbled off the back into deep snow. The sled spilled over, but the anchor — which was supposed to serve as a brake — had not been deployed and the huskies did not stop. They had not been released from captivity in order to have their outing curtailed at this early stage. Even through my hood I could hear Jessica yelling ‘Stop.’ She was dragged for fifty metres, tangled up beneath the sled and, for all I knew, had the anchor embedded in her skull. As I ran after her, with no thought in my head except her welfare, I was silently forming the words ‘I said you should have driven first.’ It took ages to get the attention of the other teams, because they had zoomed off even faster than we had. Eventually, Birgitte and Yeti came back and pulled the sled off Jessica. She was uninjured but sufficiently shaken up to declare that she did not want to go on. I had actually enjoyed getting thrown from the sled in the same way that, years earlier, I’d enjoyed getting thrown out of the raft when I was white-water rafting along the Zambezi in conditions that, meteorologically, were the polar opposite of those here, in the deep night of the Arctic soul. We were all standing with our breath creating little snowstorms in the light of our headlamps, busy disentangling all the reins and dogs, which had got into the most incredible tangle. I say ‘we’ but I just stood there, doing nothing, sweating and breathing heavily, worrying that, if I exerted myself further, I would end up entombed like the Frankenstein monster in a glacier of frozen sweat. Actually, I did try to do something: I tried to take pictures of what I referred to as ‘the crash site,’ but my camera had frozen. Everything about this environment was quite unsuited to photography, human habitation, tourism or happiness. Jessica had had enough too, was persuaded to continue only on condition that she was driven by Yeti or Birgitte and not by ‘that idiot.’

‘She’s in shock,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’ I had no desire to drive either, and so we both ended up as passengers, each on a sled driven by one of the guides. We made much better progress like this.

And it wasn’t pitch black, I could see now. There was a glimmer of dark light around the dark contours of the mountains or whatever they were, and a glimmer of stars, but the overwhelming impression was that there was nothing to see. My toes were still numb but, despite my fears about freezing sweat, I was surprisingly warm, especially when I discovered that the blue rug Jessica had been sitting on was actually a kind of mini — sleeping bag and I was able to add yet another layer of insulation. Bundled up like this, like a frozen mummy, it was quite fun, barrelling through the barren wastes. I didn’t have much on my mind except for thinking how much better it would have been to do this in the mystic twilight of February, when you could actually see where you were, but at least there was a suggestion of light in the sky, even if, by any normal definition of the phrase, it was still pitch dark. Oh, and I had come to love the huskies. Irrespective of what the job entails, I love anyone — man or beast — who does their job well, and these huskies, whose job was to pull a sled, were absolute in their huskiness. From reading about Amundsen’s expedition to the South Pole I knew that, if the going got tough, the huskies could be fed to each other. Yeti kept up a lovely sing-song of instruction and encouragement, which, for all I knew, constantly reminded the dogs of this fact, that the weak would become food for the less weak. So has it always been, so will it always be! Since she was singing I started singing too, one of the cadence songs from Full Metal Jacket: ‘I don’t know but I been told. . I don’t know but I been told. . Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.’ And then I thought of the film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), which, among its many other virtues, hotly refutes this claim. My mind was wandering, but it kept coming back to the immediate reality, which was that we were out in the open air, in pitch darkness — the brief period when a glimmer of dark light appeared on the horizon had already come to an end, was no more than a memory now — in freezing conditions, and that the Northern Lights were nowhere to be seen.

It took an hour to get back to the dog yard, back to the infernal but adorable yapping of the dogs, both those who had been out, who had had their day, and those who had not, who hoped their day was still to come, still to be had. We had to de-harness our dogs and return them to their kennels, but I didn’t even make the pretence of helping. I just stood around, thinking about my cold feet, letting the guides do the donkey work for which they were, after all, being paid — and paid handsomely if they were able to survive the punishing expense of living in Norway, even if this meant they were only paid the minimum wage, which must have been about a hundred grand a year. Once the dogs were back in their kennels we tramped over to the cozy trappers’ cabin. Just as the so-called ‘light’ in the sky had actually been dark, so, by any normal standards, it was freezing cold in the cabin, but, relatively speaking, it was toasty. The talk, as we drank hot coffee, was of frostbite. If you get bitten in your cheek you place a hand there but you don’t rub, you hold your warm hand to your cheek — assuming, of course, that your hand is not a solid lump of blood-ice too. Birgitte and Yeti were both in their early twenties and they loved it up here in the winter.

‘Why?’ I asked, and it was obvious that the single word was followed, inaudibly, by two others: on earth, as in Why on earth would anyone want to spend their time in a hellhole like this? Well, they liked the social life and the slow return of daylight. And today had been a joyous experience for them. Birgitte had been away on vacation for ten days. When she had last been out here there was no light at all; today there had been a glimmer. So the polar night, though still immense, was receding. There was light at the end of the tunnel.

‘Which still begs the question,’ Jessica said later, ‘of why anyone would choose to live in a tunnel.’

We spent the so-called ‘afternoon’ in our room. Jessica told me about the Annie Dillard essay she was reading, about polar explorers and the solemn reserve of the prose in which their adventures were recounted. Dillard wonders if this was part of the selection process—‘or even if some eminent Victorians, examining their own prose styles, realized, perhaps dismayed, that from the look of it, they would have to go in for polar exploration.’ I remember making a cautionary mental note about that—Avoid solemn splendour—after which I don’t know what I did. I think I had frostbite of the brain or something, because I just sat there and thawed — thawed about nothing — until it was time to head out to the bar of the nearby Radisson Hotel for dinner. In any normal part of the world this would have involved a ten-minute walk, but by now the idea that places existed where the simple act of stepping outside did not require careful preparation and planning seemed quaintly implausible. It was the coldest and darkest night in the entire history of the planet, possibly of any planet. I looked up occasionally in case the Northern Lights showed up, but mainly I kept my eyes on the ground in case I slipped.

The bar of the Radisson was awash with information and rumour about the Northern Lights. Tourists and residents all had their stories. The Lights could be seen at any time, but the best chance was in the evening. From six o’clock onwards. Others said there was more chance of activity from about eleven onwards. I liked this word ‘activity’ with its suggestion of the paranormal, but mainly I liked the way that it was being said inside a restaurant. Then someone claimed that we were actually too far north for the Northern Lights. We were feeling confused and more than a bit dejected, so it was reassuring to hear the barman announce that they would now be showing, on a large-screen TV, live football from the Premiership. Arsenal — Man City! Fuck the Northern Lights with their unscheduled, possibly even mythical appearances. This floodlit game was scheduled and was going ahead on time, exactly as advertised. The bar filled up. Midway through the second half, the barmaid, who had nipped outside for a cigarette, told us the Northern Lights were happening. We dashed outside. There was a faint glimmer in the general night-glimmer, but light pollution from the town meant that we could see almost nothing. We went back in and watched the rest of the football, unsure whether to feel relieved — because we were back inside, out of the cold, or depressed because, although we could watch Premiership games any old time, this was our only chance to have the once-in-a-lifetime experience of the Northern Lights Experience.

In the so-called ‘morning’ the cheerful young woman at Basecamp reception asked if we had seen the Northern Lights the night before.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but we did see the football!’ I was only joking even if, strictly speaking, I wasn’t joking. I was actually deeply disappointed, but, in a weird Nordic turnaround, we had become the source of disappointment to our hosts. The implication was clear: not seeing the Northern Lights was a result not of their non-appearance but a failure on our part, a failure of perception and attitude. Finding this a little hard to take, I found myself saying that I ‘took umbrage’ at such a claim, even though this was a phrase I never normally use. It was like If you’re going to get all Norwegian-mystic with me, young lady, I’ll get all middle-England-tourist with you, even if this amounted to standing there looking downcast and crestfallen. We wanted to see the Northern Lights. We had come all this way, to this blighted place, to see the Northern Lights. We came at what, from every other point of view, was a ghastly time of the year, to see the Northern Lights. But seeing the Northern Lights can apparently be a much subtler affair than the photographs — swirling geysers of psychedelic green — lead one to expect. Sometimes they are so subtle that your eyes and mind have to be attuned. Seeing is believing — and believing is seeing. Once you have seen the Northern Lights — once you know what you are looking for — you believe you can see them again. In this respect it reminded me of early attempts to get stoned (which in turn reminded me that there is a famous strain of pure indica called Northern Lights). You could not get stoned — this was in the days before skunk, before you knew without doubt that your brains were in the process of being blown out — until you knew what it was like to be stoned. The more conversations we had, the more the Northern Lights — which, I had assumed, came as standard in this part of the world, at this time of the year — took on some of the unverifiable allure of the Loch Ness Monster or the Abominable Snowman.

Our spirits worsened. There seemed a correlation between the lack of perceived ‘activity’ in the skies and our own deepening inactivity. We skulked in our room, became steadily more cast down and crestfallen. The explanation for this might have been that we had not adapted properly to the extreme cold and the endless night, but the opposite was true. Many visitors apparently enjoy the novelty of three days of Arctic night while finding it hard to believe that anyone could spend years living here. Our responsiveness to Svalbard was so intense that we skipped this honeymoon period and experienced three days as though they were three years — and promptly plunged headlong into the gloom that can gnaw away at people who have spent years here. On the third or fourth morning — which might as well have been the thirtieth or fortieth morning — Yeti knocked on our door so that we’d be ready for the snowmobiling trip that we’d signed up for. I got out of bed, opened the door a crack and told her that we would not be going.

What would have been the point? I said when we saw her again at the reception desk later in the day. The same freezing cold, the same nothing-to-see darkness that we had experienced on the wretched dog-mushing trip. No, thank you very much, I said, before turning on my heel and shuffling back to bed. It was miserable in our room, but it was better than not being in our room.

‘The Northern Lights could knock on our door now,’ I said to Jessica, ‘and I wouldn’t even give them the time of day.’

We spent the whole so-called ‘day’ in our room, downcast and crestfallen, and then, in the so-called ‘evening,’ forced ourselves up and out into the frozen night. We trudged to the restaurant on the edge of town in the freezing cold and the pitch-dark darkness. There were polar bears in the area, but we had been told that if we kept to the road we would be safe, and at some level polar bears were the least of our worries. As we walked we naturally kept an eye open not only for polar bears but for Northern Lights. We looked. We were ready to believe. We were ready to see. We retained the capacity for belief, but deep down we had started to believe that the Northern Lights, if they existed, would not be seen by us. We chewed our reindeer steaks and trudged back again through the freezing night and the implacable cold. There was nothing to see, and the only point of the walk was for it to be over with, to know that we had not died from it, that we had lived to tell the tale, the tale that eventually became this tale.

We left the following day, empty-handed and empty-eyed. Relations with the people running the Basecamp had become somewhat frosty. My joke about Yeti’s name had caught on to the extent that Jessica and I referred to her only as ‘the abominable Yeti,’ but it had not endeared us to her, and while nothing that had happened since had caused her to feel more warmly towards us quite a few things — not least my singing that song from Full Metal Jacket—had contributed to an increased frostiness. We were like skeptics among the faithful at Lourdes and they were glad to see the back of us. That was fine by us, because we were glad to see the back of a place which we had taken to referring to either as ‘this ghastly place’ or ‘this fucking hellhole’ before settling on ‘abominable’ as the adjective of choice. We had had the experience of a lifetime but it was not the experience that we had hoped for; it was like a lifetime of disappointment compressed into less than a week, which actually felt like it had lasted the best — in the sense of worst — part of a lifetime.

The cheerless bus took us back through the abominable city to the airport, to the terminal. Our experience might have been expected to put a strain on our marriage, but the experience of being so thoroughly crestfallen and downcast had made us closer, even though this would not have been obvious to an outsider as we sat silently in the depressing terminal, waiting for the plane, which, to give credit where it is due, took off exactly on time. When we landed at Tromsø an English couple we had met in the bar of the Radisson said, ‘Did you see the Northern Lights?’ Apparently, the Lights had put in a special guest appearance as we were flying—but on the other side of the plane. It was like there was a blight on us, and even though I’d assumed our spirits could not sink any lower they did sink even lower, and then, after we’d changed planes yet again, in Oslo, they sank still lower. I found myself in an unbelievably cramped seat, with zero leg room, in spite of being assured that I had an exit-row seat. The flight attendant — a once-blonde Norwegian woman in her fifties — came by and asked if there was anything we would like. She meant in the way of food and beverages, but after being cooped up in our room in Longyearbyen I started ranting about the seat, the abominable seat with its abysmal lack of leg room, how I was cooped up like a chicken with deep vein thrombosis. Jessica had sunk into a kind of catatonia, did not say anything, but for the first time in several days, like a limb that has been frozen and is coming painfully back to life, I felt energised by my anger and outrage. Unlike the abominable Yeti and the other girls at Basecamp who had taken against us because of our poor attitude, the flight attendant was entirely sympathetic, agreeing that conditions were intolerably cramped for a tall man like me. She gave me some orange juice — free! — and I calmed down, even though, in my head, I continued to formulate expressions of outrage and hard-done-by-ness. And then, as we were about to begin our descent into Heathrow, something extraordinary happened. The flight attendant came back and knelt in the aisle with her hand on my knee. She looked into my crestfallen eyes, the eyes that had not seen the Northern Lights, and said again how uncomfortable I must be, how sorry she was. Without taking her eyes from mine she said that one day I would surely get the seat I deserved, and as she spoke, I believed that this would happen.