The Alaska State Highway system ferry MV Columbia. Columbia is named for Columbia Glacier, which is named for Columbia University which is named for the personification of the North American Continent. Generally seen in assorted art of the mid-1800s glorifying Progress and Science and other high-falutin’ concepts, Columbia was generally shown in sisterhood with Europa and Britannia, although sometimes separate European countries were identified with their own personifications as well.
I will be on this ship for two more days. The above picture was taken an hour before the rain started in earnest, so the clouds are dramatic and the sightlines longer than I am currently experiencing. The assorted weather forecasts I can find predict some sun in a day or two. When that happens, I’ll find a new picture with the sun in it, but it will still be astoundingly gorgeous.
The lovely people at the gift shop at Castle Hill requested some extremely local pieces, which I am happy to oblige. They look like this – a collection of seasons.
I keep wanting to spell that (k)new knee, but it is a different word and thus a weirdly pointless joke.
It was done a little over 8 weeks ago, and I am sporting a fabulous scar, and some stiffness, but I am walking around, and I can see how it might be going to hurt less that it did before I got cartilage-free bone swapped out for titanium. The funniest thing is that I think it has changed my specific gravity? One side of me sinks when I am doing the water aerobics. I can’t decide if I am imagining it or not!
So that is why I’ve not posted anything. I have been doing rehab, instead of art. The plan is to change that soon!
I’m thrilled with all the things showing up in the garden. I ordered a lot of bulbs from the amazing Fedco and they arrived while I was in the North. My generous offspring planted them for me, and we have all been awaiting the results. Here are the frilly goth tulips, the not-peonies tulips, the frilly and flames yellow tulips and (of course) the vibrant red tulips. I added in checkered lilies (also called snakes head lilies or checkered frittilaria) and the most forward of the lilacs (also from Fedco – they send you a stick, and then it turns into a raging bush in a couple years – magic!).
Working on new coasts – can you recognize anyplace?
If you guessed Woods Hole, Rockport, Plum Island or Isles of Shoals, you get a sticker! Woods Hole Massachusetts, is important to me for many family reasons. Plum Island because I have a thing about sandbars and longshore transport. Rockport has that great breakwater, and I don’t think anyone has seen Motif #1 quite like this before. I know Isles of Shoals are a favorite of many people, but I am in it for the underwater topography (just look at those shoals! next to that deep channel! I love it!).
Having the laser cutter installed and working feels like a huge milestone, and I have been celebrating by cutting things. The first thing I did was make some miniature magazine holders to hold the Field Notes notebooks. I love these things, but I had to cut myself off because I was acquiring them much faster than I was using them. Right now they are used for logbooks – keeping track of materials and settings and hours logged on the laser, reminding myself of ways to use QGIS, so I can go back and repeat a process that works (or avoid a process that does not work) and keeping track of my thread inventory, so I don’t get three of a particular blue and completely forget I am out of two different browns. Having the notebooks corralled into Used and Ready to Use means there is counter space for putting other things that need homes.
The second thing I did was test cut a five layer rabbit. There is a designer I found on Thingiverse who makes three layer animals – a center layer that is mostly head and body, and a layer on each side that is legs and ears. The results are evocative. I made a bunch in cardboard for the kids I was sort of teaching in 2022, and tried to get them to design some of their own. And now the same man has a pair of five layer rabbits. So I have a couple of them on the windowsill keeping me company.
The next project was to cut all the parts for ten new tiny boxed coastlines. I was looking at the New England coast trying to find places that looked interesting and that might also be iconic enough that people would recognize them. I settled on a fairly eclectic list, including Provincetown (a characteristic hook) and Monhegan Island (with Manana just beside it) and a couple others. The parts required include pieces for the box, the plexiglass for the ocean, and the cardboard that makes up the land (both over and underwater). The final pieces need to be composed of fabric and then stitched before they can be laser cut.
And finally, to warm up my sewing machine skills, I made an abstract river. I had a vision of birch bark circles originally, but the colors I chose for the river valley do not have enough contrast that birch bark would be visible, so I decided on green silk circles. I have a lot of punches for holes of different sizes; they need sharpening and they have to be hammered into the fabric to cut the circles, but they are useful. I had found the punches, and the hammer, and was in the process of hammering on folded fabric when I remembered – silk is imminently laserable! So I drew up some circles on the computer and sent them off to the laser and within fifteen minutes I had a couple hundred circles in various greens. I was so pleased with myself.
Next week I will get the fabric stitched and cut for the little coastlines, and see how well they work. I have my doubts about a couple, but I won’t know til I try!
After a lot of help from friends, I can start making work in my studio.
The laser is focused, and vented (thank you Jared! all your climbing about on the windowsills, and your cheerful gargoyle impression) and fabrics are unpacked and sorted and filed into bins (thank you Cathy! your suggestions are still on my desk and sorting goes so much better with you) and the rest of the boxes are unpacked and put away (thank you Jeanne! your help and good cheer when it was So Cold in here was so valuable). I still have the label maker here, but almost everything has a label now. Having more than enough space for the things I have here feels so expansive – there is room for my work, friends’ work, a friend to visit. There are still things uncategorized and in boxes, but for the most part, it is time to buckle down.
There were stars and aurora that night too, around sunset and after supper. We all stood around on deck with our heads craned back staring at the sky and pointing to different parts of it, and exclaiming. We moved the ship around a corner from the active front of the glacier – there was a LOT of ice moving away down the fjord and towards the sea. One did hit the ship, but it was more like a zodiac bumping the hull than a Titanic kind of experience.
The following morning we set two groups ashore, but one of the participants wanted to collect big pieces of ice, really clear ice, to photograph things through, and another wanted little pieces to form into temporary jewellery and photograph people wearing it, and I went with them. We set off, with the 3rd mate driving, looking for the clearest pieces of ice. The woman who wanted small pieces was extremely enthusiastic, and I felt like I should be sitting on her legs or holding her belt to keep her in the boat. I helped grab little pieces. The person looking for big pieces needed help getting them into the zodiac – they were oddly shaped, and had some places you could cradle your hands under, but impossible to get a grip on.
We got two really big bits, and a bag full of smaller pieces, and returned triumphant to the ship to realize we had no easy way to get the big ice up out of the zodiac. The mate decided to use the winch that lifted the zodiacs aboard, and successfully lashed one big ice big up in ropes and lifted it out. The second had no places for rope to go, so we ended up using a net, and hauling it onboard like fish. Once aboard, they were skidding about the deck endangering people, so we lashed it to the pinrail that goes around the base of the mast and holds all the ropes that raise the sails.
Around lunch we headed out of Woodfjorden, sneaking out sideways to the west between some more islands. We ghosted south, under power with one sail up to minimize rolling. We passed Magdalenafjorden, and seven glaciers, numbered and named One through Seven. We were counting down, and once we passed One, we turned east into Kongsfjorden towards Ny-Ålesund. Ny-Ålesund was once a mining town, but when mining was closed down because of mine safety (or lack thereof) it was maintained instead as a research station. Areas of research are atmosphere, birds, some cold water oceanography and some cold weather survival stuff. I’m pretty there’s a fair amount of discreet spying as well, but we don’t talk about that. NASA has a presence, as do several other nations’ research arms. It reminded me of Woods Hole, but colder and smaller – the year round population is about 40, and it swells into the low hundreds in the summer. We were welcomed by the harbormaster, and invited ashore. The town is small, and all the doors are unlocked because of polar bears (if you see one, you walk to the nearest door and walk in, it is local protocol). There is a museum of local history, open 24 hours a day, and a store, open by appointment, and a bunch of places we were not allowed to go. I was so delighted by the idea of a midnight museum that when we were allowed ashore, that was my destination.
There was some discussion before we got to Ny Alesund about phone etiquette – both the dissemination of information from those who kept their phones on (most people didn’t want to know anything, “unless Trump has died” piped up one person and the consensus was yes, that was the only piece of outside information anyone wanted) and also the use of phones at all. All wifi and bluetooth had to be turned off because it is a radio silence location, so we relied on cell service if we didn’t turn on airplane mode.
I found the tiny museum, and had a nice time working my way through it. People in general have only come to Svalbard for extractive purposes – whaling, then seal, walrus and polar bear hunting, then coal mining, and now tourists. Oddly, aside from the hunting, all the extractive industries were heavily underwritten by assorted governments that seemed to feel a presence in the high Arctic gave them some kind of bargaining advantage. Ny-Ålesund is no different, having been developed specifically for mining coal. Because the coal mined is older and thus deeper than the coal near Longyearbyen, the hazards were worse, and the casualties much higher. The museum explained this in more elliptical terms, alluding to government intervention and government support for miners and government incentives for miners, and now researchers, to work there and bring their families to make it more permanent and more town-like.
The following day everyone went ashore for a leg stretch and some serious shopping. Ny-Ålesund, at 79° north, has the highest latitude post office, gift shop and candy store. Having been on the ship for a week and a half, everyone wanted candy. Most people also wanted postcards and stamps, and several people wanted something from the store. It must have been an extremely profitable hour for them!
Going back to the ship I stopped to admire a weird rock that had almost caves carved into it by the sea (it was a very lumpy conglomerate, delightful!) and was encouraged to try a swim. I knew I wanted to try it once in the far north, and this was a beach (with bits of ice grounded off it) so I could walk in rather than having to gather courage to jump in off the ship. So I peeled down to my underwear and waded in, telling myself “don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop” all the way in. I got neck deep, and swished about for a moment, and then came back out. Weirdly, I was more distracted by exactly how cold my bare feet were in the sand and what clothes to put onto my sopping wet body than by how cold the water had been. I finally got organized and figured out what to wear and what to carry and went back to the ship feeling powerful. Not entirely sane? But definitely powerful. Sarah said that a hot shower after a cold swim essentially negated all the effects, so I dried off and got dry warm clothes on but stayed salty for the rest of the day. I know I was salty because I licked my arm after lunch and I could still taste the sea.
We got a salute from the harbor master’s cannon as we left, which made everyone jump and shriek, and we were off again, to the last parts of the trip.
Heading out of Kongsfjorden, we stopped at the northernmost tip of Prins Karls Forland, a long narrow island that runs up the western side of Spitzbergen. It was astonishingly green? It was mostly moss (I spent some time face down in it, admiring the tiny flowers) but more green than we’d seen for our entire time in Svalbard. We saw reindeer and ptarmigan while we were there, and hiked across the width of the point, past one of the actual lighthouses (I could touch the top if I stood on tiptoe) and looked out west across the vast Atlantic. There was nothing between us and Greenland. We watched the sun set, and the full moon rose, and we waited as dusk came down.
Once we were back on the ship, we worked our way south between Prins Karls Forland and Svalbard – a tricky navigational process with one piece of very shallow water that almost completely blocked the passage. As we went along the moon rose further, and was reflected, with the stars, in the still ocean. There were brief aurora, but the moon outshone them. We travelled through the night, and, poetically, ended up in the same place we first anchored, Ymerbukta. It looked entirely different – no one believed Sarah that it was the same – but the charts and the captain agreed with her, so eventually we did as well.
Nearly everyone went ashore, in part because we could go right up to the glacier in ways we had not been able to do with those that ended in the ocean. This one was grounded and melting back, and much more stable. Some people went on a long walk up along the side of it, the rest of us stayed down closer to the base at sea level. I tried to leave a hand print on it, but failed. I think I did leave a butt print on it – I just lay on it for a while, and then sat up and thought about glaciers until my butt froze. Then I went and looked at all the weird shapes that melting ice makes in the landscape. A fresh moraine is a wild and scrambled terrain, nowhere near as neat as geology texts make it seem. Later I went with some people in the quiet photography zodiac, going along the front of the glacier as close as we could. The metric is to hold out your arm and hold up three fingers stacked, horizontally, and if the glacier is hidden by your stacked three fingers you are probably far enough away. As the glacier gets taller, you stay further away. We stayed a safe distance away, and alternately motored and glided along in silence. A harbor seal was deeply curious and followed us for a bit.
That was our last night on the ship, and it was raucous. There was drinking, a disco ball (one of the stewards had been hiding it in his room) and endless talk of what we might do together next, how to keep in touch, what it was going to feel like being done with this adventure. I finally bailed around midnight.
I woke up around 4 when we started getting the anchor up. The moon was so bright I could see both the moonlight through the porthole making a circle on the wall, and reflections of the moonlight off the water making a long wavery streak on the overhead. I watched it shift directions as we headed out, and then finally I got up around 4:30, when we were underway. We were going directly away from the big full moon, the reflection of it wavering in the wake.
We pulled into Longyearbyen about 8am. My friend Captain Peg was there to meet us, and got a very quick tour of the ship, and then she went off on her own adventures while we organized ourselves and our baggage ashore. The non-sailors were surprised at how much they loved the ship herself, and the crew who had taken such good care of us. Everyone cried, a little. Sarah gave a short speech, and we went ashore for the last time.
I know I will go back to Svalbard again. I have not seen it in summer, with the flocks of breeding birds, I have not seen the full dark of the polar night, or the long day of the polar summer. It feels dreamlike from here, but also urgent to return.
This is the end of my Arctic adventure, but I am certain the experience will inflect my work for years.
After that very blowy day the wind eased some over night, and the following morning we set off. Because the wind had blown us completely around we had to untangle the anchor chains, which required some clever use of the anchor winch. And we were off, wending our way down the fjord (Murchinsonfjorden) and out to the open ocean. The sky cleared some, and the sun was visible, and we raised some sails, and then opened up all four big square sails since we were going dead downwind, and we really sailed – turned off the engine and everything. It was GLORIOUS. The wind was still blowing hard, but only to produce a lot of whitecaps, not to peel the foam off the tops and hurl it about. Plus, we were going downwind, so there was less wind on us. The worst waves were from the stern, and they weren’t bad, so we just hammered along, sometimes exceeding nine knots. I don’t know if everyone was as thrilled as I was, but everyone looked really happy to be moving, to be doing things with the ship instead of thinking about work, to have the engine off and be going like that. As I might have said before, there were not many sailors in our group of artists. When we were talking about our applications and if we’d applied before, I allowed as how I’d applied several times, but was likely not accepted because my essays were basically “yes I make nice art, lemme on the BOAT!” which is not generally conducive to acceptance.
We sailed away from Nordaustlandet, and across the deep channel between it and Spitzbergen, and then across what looked like a channel but is instead a deep fjord that goes almost all the way into Spitzbergen to Longyearbyen, but there is 30km of land we’d have to drag the ship over (joke), so we went around and further along to Woodfjorden (I am spelling like this because I loved hearing Sarah say it). Woodfjorden is deep and narrow – we went a ways south in it, and anchored off a low spit of land (another delta from a melting glacier) and sent several parties ashore. Some were landed farther away from the spit and hiked in, others were landed on the spit for projects. I went with the second mate just to keep him company in the zodiac. We dropped off two sets of shore people, and then looked at the way the water changed color near the spit and traced out where that happened. I think it was mostly melt-water taking the finest of the sediment away, but it was rusty red instead of the usual milky blue green.
Later that afternoon we all went ashore and gathered driftwood. Svalbard has a law across the archipelago that any man made thing older than 1946 is a historical remnant, and has to be left alone, so we could gather all the wild driftwood we could see, but anything that looked worked, or had square ends had to be left alone. It still left us with plenty of things to burn, and (it turns out) even the wettest things will burn with enough gasoline poured on them. We got to stay ashore with the fire as the night darkened around us, and slowly the planets, and then some stars became visible. The combination of the dusk settling and the sparks rising was magical. What I though twas Venus turned out to be Jupiter, over one of Orion’s shoulders, with Mars over the other. The dipper, and Cassiopeia were easy to find, and the Pleiades. We had to go back to the ship, being out in the dark was hard on the guides. One of the women wanted to try to take pictures of the stars, so we left her camera pointed away from the waning fire and the guides picked it up after we had supper aboard.
We left Woodfjorden later that evening, staring at the remains of the fire, and the stars overhead. As well as stars, there were aurora flickering around the southern horizon, starting small but then swelling up the vault of the sky. I went to bed early but woke up when we turned out of the fjord and headed west again. There were big swells leftover after the big wind, and they were catching us on our quarter and making the ship roll a lot. After getting up five or six times to secure things that were banging, I gave up on sleep and went up to the wheelhouse to keep the third mate company. We slowed down substantially, so that we’d round a corner into a new fjord just as the light came up. It was stunning – the ragged peaks of the big western island really were spiky, the origin of the name Spitzbergen, and were caught in the dawn light. We worked our way further in and anchored, and I tapped out of the morning having essentially stood a watch.
The space at the end of the fjord was filled with floating ice from the glacier, and amongst the ice were small rocky islands, reminding me irresistibly of Maine. After lunch, I was with a group that landed on one island to make videos of two artists doing things on the other island. One was dancing, which was lovely; wild and mysterious. The other was cleaning the island. She had swept all the snow off a previous island, one about the size of a small room and flat as a tabletop. The snow was fresh, and she pushed a broom back and forth, clearing the snow off like it was cleaning a room. This island was harder to clean, in part because it was not flat but very humped up, and also the snow had frozen on it in patches. She got a bucket of sea water and went after some of it with a scrub brush. Sitting on the other island watching and recording these antics was fun, watching other artists accomplish their things.
After that, I stayed in the zodiac with another performance artist who wanted to record some things in front of some of the floating ice. Just after we finished, the glacier calved While We Were Watching – a great chunk of it just plummeted into the ocean, in front of our eyes, with a plume of ice dust and a big wave radiating out from it. The zodiac surfed the wave easily, but a room sized piece of ice floating near by rolled over while we were watching, and then broke up into two big pieces and endless bergy bits. We were so stunned watching all this happen we were speechless, just sitting and looking at the ice and back at each other with our mouths hanging open in astonishment.
Eventually things stopped happening – the ice floating near us seemed stable, so we could get around it to get to the ship, and no further bits fell off the glacier, so we headed back, still stunned, asking each other “did you SEE that???”
Lee Thomson 