Chill with Cal Discoveries

March 12 – 18, 2009:
Alaska Aurora Borealis, The Greatest Light Show on Earth

August 4–12, 2009:
The Norway Fjordlands

August 10–29, 2009:
Voyage of the Vikings

The first night in the hotel I had run into a bar patron near the entrance. He was a bit drunk and made a beckoning gesture in my direction, as if to invite me inside. If I were staying longer, I might end up there one evening.

“How long are you here for?” inquires the tattooed man.

“Oh, just a few days.” It is suddenly quiet. “And you,” I ask, “what has kept you here?”

“It’s safe on Spitsbergen,” he says. “In the ten years I’ve lived here I haven’t locked my front door once.” That too appears to be an old custom on the archipelago. If you’re menaced by a bear, it’s handy to be able to dash indoors. “The polar bears were here first,” the man says, grinning. “We’re just guests. We do well not to get in their way.” Recently a bear was seen on the road from the airport to the town center. He was rummaging in a garbage can.

“I don’t even lock my door when I go on vacation,” says the mechanic.

“Our children aren’t in danger here in Longyearbyen,” adds the electrician. “If one of us two is at work and sees the other one’s kids on the street, he stops just to make sure everything is going OK.” He stands and walks to the door. We hear the shower running and when he returns his upper body is glistening with water.

“Everyone works here,” he continues, just as if he had never left the sauna. “If you don’t have a job, Spitsbergen has nothing to offer you, because there is no social welfare.”

Be mine: Only Russia and Norway currently exploit Spitsbergen commercially; primarily for mining and tourism.

Is that why they were here, then, to escape the problems of life on the mainland—was that what drove people to this place? “There are no ethnic tensions in Longyearbyen,” says the mechanic, as if he has guessed my thoughts. “Juvenile delinquency, we don’t have that here.”

His tattooed friend prefers to avoid Oslo on trips to the mainland, but now and then he is required to be in the city. On those occasions, he finds a café with a terrace, orders himself a drink, watches people race past him as in a high-speed film, and thinks how lucky he is to know of a place called Spitsbergen.

He picks up the bucket again, and for the first time I can make out the tattoo on his arm. It’s a polar bear.

All about Spitsbergen

Travel writer Lieve Joris lives in Amsterdam. Her translated works include The Gates of Damascus and Mali Blues, and her shorter pieces have appeared in such publications as Passport, Le nouvel observateur, and New Statesman. In April she came to Berkeley to promote her latest book, The Rebel’s Hour.

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