Lines Toward Ice

the whole pageantry

of the year was awake tingling near

the edge of the sea

— WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

1

Further north than I have ever been, hills emerge from the sea, obdurate, popping knuckled seams in the day's meagre heat. Sun on snow, tideline clotted with scrims of pack ice.

There are no animals here but rock itself gone swayback up from the water. My palms tingle in my pockets, singularly attuned to prairie and its capaciousness, a rigour of skyline. These hills beckon some obscure phrenology, a laying-on of hands the only way to suss out the true form of a country obscured the majority of its life by quick-moving drifts. Even now, a shifting of the wind, snow winnowed out across the rocks and just as suddenly eddied in on itself, collected again. Obfuscate and make plain, sleight of hand, the calculated reveal. A good poker face.

2

What I know is the knife-edge of boreal forest, gantry of muskeg spruce hoisting ravens against the clouds. My eyes attuned to periphery, horizon line muggy with deer flies, nascent thunderheads, prairie fleece. This land is pleached square against the skyline, unforested entirely. Over port, the gannetries rise in a consortium of granite. Birds in their millions skirl and banter, sound so all-encompassing that it ceases to be sound, becomes substance. Livewire spark, electric. The cliffs coruscate in birdlime; at midday, they are impossible to look upon. A different kind of snowblindness, those scabbed rocks, the sound they house.

3

We nose into still water leeward of the rocks, the kittiwakes haranguing, mewling low on bold wings. Shunt aside the growlers clanging against the hull, put ashore at the only strip of beach visible below the ice crust. Boreal navigation I know: wading through Labrador tea plants jittering with early bees, plush moss, the unfurled heads of ferns. On the beach, moss campion fingers itself over the south side of the rocks, blossoms frantically and in miniature.

Here we expect pebbles, find instead a midden, narwhal and harp seal, gannet wingbones thinned to needles. A landscape where one goes slowly, eyes on the ground, a thousand years of human habitation rustling under our boots. Kneel to recover the lost feathers of Brent geese, gone now from the beach, out over the water to Taymyr.

4

At home, winter's scent is quantifiable: black spruce and frost, bistre of tamarack roiling in the wood stove. Out here, the air has been scrubbed clean. Bergs heft their indigo bones like naves in the sunlight. We look, as we have always done, to sight something looking back at us, but there is only the expanse of midden beach and its disarticulated moonscape. Nothing here precisely for us or against, just a great unembodied presence. Narwhal horns cross their shadows from the abandoned heaps, unperturbed as ice, or time.

Pyramiden

We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us. The former is important; the latter is vital.

— ROBERT MACFARLANE

1

Sasha is the lone figure on the wharf.

Momentarily, we are time-blinded, thinking Czarist Russia. He greets us in felted black cherkesska, polar bear rifle angled along his back: Sasha, improbable tenant, unconvincing miner.

What they do in this town weeping its coal ichor into the sea: harvest metal. Fourteen of them, a pack headed by Sasha, self-proclaimed tour guide. They come from Russia because there is no work; here, there is no work, but at least they can pick metal, pack it by the shipping container for the resupply vessels from Murmansk. The law leaves them to their self-imposed isolation, these men without homes, without countries.

2

Every building abandoned to gulls and gannets, a squalling, shrieking mess. Stink of guano so heavy it smothers, paints the tongue. Even the hospital has gone to birds, though Sasha explains that the plants have also taken over. Their wild, wastrel tendrils pushing through the outside vents, pressing palely against the glass. Sasha himself has not fallen ill since leaving Russia a decade ago, but others have raided the hospital for tablets and syringes. Morphine for the bad days. Sasha turns his collar, refuses to enter. Says the air is poisoned with mercury from broken thermometers after the town was left. Was left. Curiously passive, a child, a family walked away from, abandoned. But here, the whole town left, more than a thousand in clots over years.

We turn our backs on the hospital compound with trepidation, uneasy with the blank windows behind us. The greening glass, leaves spreading their veins like suicide or palmistry.

3

One room remains, half Russian teashop, half bordello. Napped crimson wallpaper and gilt mirrors resurrected from birdlime, parquet floor highglossed with lemon polish. We drink Kubanskaya, all the fugitives will touch; original, they explain. Kristall and Moscow-Petushki; we drink to times and places we do not understand, the bitter, amputated stories of these men.

They were meant to be miners. After the second war, Russia remembered Pyramiden, abandoned against the Nazis. Clapped men in ironclad contracts, sent them back across the ocean into the shankbones of the mines. But the hills bled their bones out in the 40s; left to their own devices, rain and snow took the coal out to sea, topped the shafts with inky cesspools. And so the men pick metal, the cuts on their hands rimmed with black, coal inching toward their bones. Drink vodka in the evenings, in the one room pushing back against a settlement's decay, Russia boiling out of their blood as the coal works in. For six months during his first winter, Sasha tells us, he did not leave the common room. It takes time, he says, to armour yourself against that much dark.

4

The one surviving telephone is an iron ramshorn, Cold War–era megalith on the way to the docks. It works in one direction only: outward, to Russia. Open channel in a diminished conversation between the men who have chosen this life and all they have left behind. The mine spilling its framework downslope as groundwater chases panels free, Pyramiden bleeding its story each runoff clear to the Arctic Circle.

Ornithomancy

In September, countless sand and house-martins jazz above the river, taking insects from the surface, from the air, thousands of birds kissing the river farewell. They creak, a sound like the air rubbing against itself. Summer is everything they know; they're preparing themselves, sensing in the shortening days a door they must dash through before it shuts.

— KATHLEEN JAMIE

1

Pleated bone flutes open against rock. Arctic tern caught sunning, breast jimmied open...