Svalbard Women Trapper

Way north of Norway

There are an awful lot of beards in Longyearbyen. I’m not even out of the arrivals hall of the airport – surely the only airport in the world to feature a luggage carousel with a stuffed polar bear baring its teeth slap in the middle of it – when I realise that Norwegian men are built on a different scale from elsewhere. All around us are great man-mountains, grizzled and perma-tanned, with the beards of Arctic explorers and faces that look as if they’ve weathered years of sub-zero temperatures and winds that have blown in straight from the North Pole.

But then they probably have. Because Svalbard is not just up north , it’s about as far north as you can possibly go. I’m still in a mild state of shock from the casual glance I took at Google Maps roughly half an hour before I caught my flight. It’s further north than most of Greenland. It’s as far north from the furthest tip of Scotland as Athens is south. It is extreme north. And yet, even more incredibly, it’s just two shortish flights from London. One minute you’re wondering around Heathrow Terminal Five looking at designer sandals and a few hours later you’re plunged into the kind of landscape that’s vaguely familiar from documentaries about doomed men stranded on pack-ice trying to decide whether to eat their dogs or each other.

It is, says Brita, the managing director of Basecamp Explorer, the company I’m travelling with, a “borderline place”. The weather can change in an instant, which means that when we arrive at Longyearbyen airport, though the sun is shining and the sky is clear, we’re led off to be kitted out in vast insulated drysuits. They’re like huge, orange Babygros and we waddle off, sweating, to our boat – a rubber rib – that is going to take us to Isfjord Radio, a remote former radio station that Basecamp has turned into a hotel.

In fact, it takes about 10 seconds to be grateful for the survival suits. The sun may be shining and the sea sparkling but it’s an optical illusion of the Arctic variety: it’s properly freezing out on the water as we bounce over the waves, guillemots and puffins circling overhead. A couple of hours later, we see the transmitter masts and vast satellite dishes of Isfjord Radio, defunct now but preserved as a reminder of Svalbard’s past, when it was a crucial communications centre. It’s impressive that such recent history has been protected – the station stopped functioning only in 2004 when fibre optic cable arrived, and Svalbard some of the fastest broadband in the world. But then when it comes to history in Svalbard, most of it is recent.

Two women on Svalbard

Svalbard has always been a man´s place, of natural reasons. Mining, trapping and exploring have traditionally been a man´s thing, and those activities are of course still dominated by men (although it´s slowly changing, nowadays quite a few women are exploring, doing science, trapping and hunting on Svalbard, and many women are directly involved with the mining). Most of the myths and stories from Svalbard have been told by men too, and they tend to be glorifying existence here, and dwelling on the heroic and tough side of life. Christiane came to Svalbard because of her husband, who had already made several trips to Svalbard. She describes her ambivalence at leaving her civilized Central European life, to keep house in the far north for her husband and his hunting and trapping buddies. But after a cold and foggy start, she comes to love the arctic, and her depiction of raw nature and isolated beauty is wonderful. I enjoyed the "down-to-earth" descriptions of everyday life in the cabin, how they while away the long winter-days in their different ways, and how they arrange themselves to make it as comfortable as possible. They have no yeast with them, and despair because they won´t be able to make proper bread - until they find a old dried-up lump in the cabin. They care and nurture this into a swelling dough, and rejoice because they´ll be able to make sour-bread for the rest of the winter. Basic needs indeed! A small detail that puzzled me, and schocked me a little (being a mother), is the sudden revelation well into the book that they actually had a little daughter left behind in Austria. She is only referred to twice, I think. I assume that she is taken care of by some relative, but it´s strange how they both live happily far away from her, without a chance to communicate with the world through the long winter. But things (and parenthood) were different 70 years ago, it seems. " (1955) (North of the desolate sea) is written by Liv Balstad, the wife of the Sysselmann (governor) Håkon Balstad. They lived 9 years in Longyearbyen, from 1946 to 1955. Balstad is a good storyteller - her writing style is simple, but endearing. She describes happy times and troubled times, and you´re left with a good idea of how life was in Longyearbyen just after the war. Housing conditions take up a big part of the book: when she arrives, there are plans of a new house for the Sysselmann, a house worthy a governor. But it takes several years, and a lot of frustration, before the new house is actually built. In the meantime, they have to make do with a crowded barrack with flimsy walls. Guests arrive and expect to be housed and fed, all official matters have to be conducted in the cramped living-room, and at night rats run across the floors - during all this, Liv Balstad is expected to function as secretary, receptionist, cook and in all matters be the hostess. Without pay, naturally. She is, after all, the Sysselmann´s wife. Living the comfortable life today, with air planes coming and going almost every day, excellent restaurants, fresh fruit and vegetable in the shop, running water in the tap, and warm houses, it´s hard to imagine how it must have been here all those years ago, in the dark season - and in the muddy season, but it´s interesting to learn about. Also, having read these two books about the primitive beginning on Svalbard, it occurs to me that there should be written biographies that cover the later years - 1960 and onwards or so. I hear people who have lived here for 30-40 years talk about how it was when the plane came only once a week (and thus post came only once a week) - when all you got in the shop were big boxes of provisions, and all TV-programs were taped on the mainland, sent up and broadcasted in Longyearbyen - several days delayed. All that is past now, and will be forgotten within a few years.

Svalbard, a Norwegian outpost

Spitsbergen, Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, & Jan Meyen

Spitsbergen, Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, Jan Mayen

Polar bears, proceedings of the Twelfth Working Meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, 3-7 February 1997, Oslo, Norway

Norway