HAUNTING

SVALBARD, NORTHERN NORWAY

They touch you, these ghosts, whose haunts this arctic frontier so well preserves. Chills rise like smoke from abandoned hunters’ huts. Spook our thoughts as we sail up Isfjorden.

What do we know about this place? That anyone who ever lived here comes from elsewhere far away. That being mammothly icebound it is severely inhospitable. That those who survive polar night will likely succumb to Svalbard Fever, a virulent passion for testing human limits. That there have been waves of contagion among explorers, hunters, miners, adventurers. And now glaciologists, doubly plagued by this climate of no return.

Curtains flutter from broken windows, wave at us from past utopia. A former Soviet coal-mining venture, Pyramiden attracted most migrants after Perestroika renovations. To the edge of the ice cap at the end of the ice age, industrial modernism arrives. In timely fashion. Accommodating workers from mainland Russia in state-of-the-art communal housing. A bust of Lenin looks over the town, and out, where Nordenskjöld Glacier meets the eye. Inside the Cultural Centre, the glacier reappears as a wall-size mural.

But not even here stays frozen in time. We witness the organic integration of labor and life. Disintegrate. Before our eyes. Into nonhuman afterlife. A skeleton staff guards against vandals while polar bears and arctic foxes enjoy a run of the town, and while the melting ice germinates a new species: scampering herds of “glacier mice.”