hot and cold

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Jess on polar bear watch.

I was already half awake when I heard Audrey’s voice at the door of the tent. “Hi ladies,” she said quietly, trying not to wake the others sleeping nearby. “It’s your turn.” My tentmate Jess stirred; it seemed like she had managed to actually get some rest, but I just couldn’t stay asleep with a balaclava over my face. We wordlessly pulled on the thick down pants, jacket, and boots we’d been issued a couple days earlier by our trip organizers, and stumbled out of the relative warmth of our tent.

Outside, the sun continued its endless loop around the sky, painting the mountains blush and bruise purple. It was early April in Svalbard, an archipelago about halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and we’d just crossed the line into nightless days. Audrey, a physiologist, had come to study an expedition of women skiing to the North Pole; Jess was a physician helping her collect data, and I was writing about it for WIRED. While the expeditioners made their way north, Audrey suggested we go on our own (albeit much less rugged) adventure. She booked a trip through a French tour company, who handled all the logistics for five days of snowshoeing and dog sledding. This was only day 2 of the trip, but about a third of the group had already bailed back to hotels in Longyearbyen. They were wealthy French women who were visibly panicked when the snowcat that brought us to the wilderness began to pull away, and complained loudly about the tents’ lack of heat, lights, and running water. They forced our guide to call them another snowcat, which cost them at least a thousand dollars. Initially, I’d scoffed at their pricey decision: why book a trip to the Arctic if you weren’t prepared to be cold?

But as I stepped out of the tent, I wondered if they were right after all. The temperature hovered around 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and Jess and I were on the hook for two hours of polar bear watch. (Originally, it had been 90 minutes, but because several people went home, we had to extend our shifts.) To keep warm, Jess did yoga and I danced. We spoke in whispers so as not to wake our sleeping tripmates. I tried to take photos of the landscape, an endless expanse of white, broken up by bits of black rock peeking through on towering mountains too steep for snow to cling. But the cold had frozen my camera’s lens cap in place, so all there was to do was peer into the distance, looking for phantom polar bears. If we saw one, we were to wake up Tito, our guide, who slept with a shotgun beside him. One night, I thought I spotted one, but as it got closer, we realized it was just an arctic fox.

The rest of the trip went swimmingly. We snowshoed through a white-out storm, and were flagged down by a ranger who told us a mama bear and her cub were nearby. To our excitement and terror, we came across their prints around a mile from our tents. We walked through a magical canyon with thousands of Svalbard rock ptarmigan, and used the sledges we’d packed with gear to slide down trails off the mountain. Once we returned to civilization, a tripmate who’d bailed the second day rewarded us with magnets from a tourist shop that read: “Svalbard: Do not come here to die.” (It’s an oft-cited but ultimately incorrect “fun fact” that dying is illegal on Svalbard, but really, it’s that the dead must be moved elsewhere for burial because it is so cold that bodies do not decompose.) I was relieved to have made it through the trip without frostbite, and I told myself that I would never again complain about being cold.

I thought about this trip a lot last week, when it hit 108 degrees in Seattle. As I sweat through my clothes, I tried to remember the mind-numbing cold, but I could not conjure it amidst the thick heat. And then, I thought: if I make it through this, I will never again complain about being hot. And I realized how foolhardy and carefree I must have been to seek out climactic extremes. Back then, I took comfort for granted, that I could always return home somewhere it was comfortable. But for so much of the world, that hasn’t been true, and it’s beginning to fall apart here, too. The northwest heat wave was a “once in a millennium” event; there was no escape from it, no snowcat to call to take you back to a cozy hotel. Northwesterners were expected not only to weather the heat but also to work through it. (Employees at Portland’s famed Voodoo Donuts walked out once it hit 96 degrees in the store, and were then fired.) The summer before, I was shut up in my house for 10 days to avoid the air poisoned with wildfire smoke. Once it finally rained, I ran outside with grateful tears in my eyes and vowed to never again take clean air for granted.

In the days after our frigid snowshoeing journey, the temperatures in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s largest town, shot up above freezing. The icy roads turned to slush and for the first time, I needed to remove my puffy jacket while walking to town. Warming has become part of life there; the Svalbard seed bank has undergone renovations after it flooded, and homes have been condemned after thawing permafrost destabilized a building’s foundation. Last summer, the town had its hottest day ever (21.7* Celsius, or 71* Fahrenheit), and the average temperature there has increased by nearly 3* Fahrenheit. I’d like to go back there someday, but I wonder if it will be the same, if I will ever feel cold like that again. Or maybe it’s me who’s changed: it’s now impossible to look away from the growing climate crisis, to wonder if every aberration is a sign that something’s gone wrong.

One thought on “hot and cold

  1. As seemingly everything is either on fire, melting in record heat or drowning in floodwaters I have spent the last 3 weeks wondering if this is how the planet will be for the remainder of my life. And how much worse it will get. It’s been a depressing month.

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