{"id":2043,"date":"2020-09-10T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2020-09-10T12:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2020\/09\/10\/what-challenged-andrea-pitzer-to-write-what-she-calls-her-best-work-ever\/"},"modified":"2024-03-07T17:16:25","modified_gmt":"2024-03-07T17:16:25","slug":"what-challenged-andrea-pitzer-to-write-what-she-calls-her-best-work-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2020\/09\/10\/what-challenged-andrea-pitzer-to-write-what-she-calls-her-best-work-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"What challenged Andrea Pitzer to write what she calls her best work ever"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n W<\/span>hen she set out from Russian port of Murmansk on a 60-foot sailboat headed to Novaya Zemlya in August 2019, journalist Andrea Pitzer<\/a> had few expectations. She hoped to visit historical sites central to the book she was writing about the 16th century Dutch explorer William Barents, who perished on an ill-fated expedition to the remote Arctic island 400 years earlier. Accompanying her on the voyage was a Russian crew who spoke little English, a pair of biologists documenting trash in the Arctic, a high-latitude mystic, and a host of worries about health problems plaguing her family back home.

What she found was, in her own words, \u201ca million times more than I thought I would.\u201d Along the way, she battled seasickness so intense she was unable to work for days, triggering panic that the trip would be a sheer waste of time and money. She experienced the sense of isolation and exposure that Barents and his team must have felt as storm after storm battered their ill-equipped camp. She oversteered \u2014 both at the vessel\u2019s helm and emotionally \u2014 veering abruptly from starboard to port, despair to elation. And despite their lack of a common language, she and her fellow sailors found community as they navigated the splendors and perils of a world few humans have seen.

\"Andrea<\/a>
Andrea Pitzer<\/figcaption><\/figure>

In \u201cMy Midlife Crisis as a Russian Sailor<\/a>,\u201d a longform story published in Outside\u00a0<\/em>magazine in August 2020, Pitzer brings those characters to life with very few of their direct words. Instead, she deftly sketches them through their actions, with memorable scenes such as Sasha, the archetype of a Russian sailor, playing his accordion for an audience of walruses, and Andrey, a tattooed boxer-turned-sailor, trying to mend all the boat\u2019s \u2014 and by extension the world\u2019s \u2014 constantly broken bits.

The story defies categorization, but probably comes closest to an odyssey. Pitzer begins her tale neatly by walking the reader from land, down the dock to the moored Alter Ego, <\/em>and neatly winds it all back up with a reverse walk at the voyage\u2019s end. But in the course of the narrative, she reaches back 400 years to Barents\u2019 time and forward to the repercussions of those \u201cheroic\u201d polar explorations seen in today\u2019s rapidly degrading Arctic environment. With telling details \u2014 often the result of an extraordinary amount of research \u2014 she binds the two worlds together. The same masterful weaving is seen in the interplay of opposing images and emotions \u2014 emptiness and abundance, grief and joy, hopelessness and wonder. And ultimately, Pitzer shows us, we can experience all this at the same time, because it\u2019s all part of being alive.

Pitzer came to that epiphany when she realized that the waves crashing on the side of the boat brought a rush of delight, even while making her seasick. \u201cIt’s kind of this paradox,\u201d she says of this metaphor for life. \u201cThere’s no pristine pure experience of joy. There’s usually some nausea that’s gonna accompany it.\u201d And, she says, \u201cit’s okay to have them both there side by side.\u201d

Pitzer describes herself as a \u201cjournalist who loves to unearth lost history.\u201d Her forthcoming book, \u201cIcebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World,\u201d<\/a> on the three Arctic voyages of Dutch navigator William Barents, will be published in January 2021. In addition to \u201cIcebound,\u201d she is the author of\u00a0\u201cOne Long Night:\u00a0A Global History of Concentration Camps\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cThe Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov.\u201d<\/a>

Her writing has appeared many places in print and online, from\u00a0The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Outside, GQ, The Daily Beast, Vox, Slate, and\u00a0USA Today\u00a0to Longreads and\u00a0Lapham\u2019s Quarterly. Events and ideas that were once common knowledge but have fallen from public memory fascinate her, as does humanity\u2019s tendency not to learn from history. She feels most at home in libraries or on a boat in the far North.

She previously worked as an editor of Nieman Storyboard, a freelance journalist, a music critic, a portrait painter, a French translator, a record store manager, and a martial arts and self-defense instructor (but not all at the same time). She grew up in West Virginia and currently lives with her family near Washington, DC.

I spoke with Pitzer about her experience spending nearly a month on a sailboat crossing the Russian High North, learning to accept the Arctic on its own terms, and why she considers this story the best thing she\u2019s ever written. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

T<\/span>his strikes me as a story that morphed during the reporting. What did you conceive it as initially and how did it change along the way?
<\/strong>It was really a research trip for \u201cIcebound,\u201d the Barents book. Seeing the cabin where Barents and his men sought shelter, along with the other sites. I had pitched it to Outside, but I hadn’t actually heard back when I left. That honestly was kind of freeing because it meant that since the magazine hadn’t paid for it, I was free to focus on what I wanted. I just wrote down everything, took pictures of everything. What I ended up with was a 200-page journal, handwritten, that I carried with me everywhere. And there was a point halfway through the trip, before the engine broke down, where I just kind of had this revelation about what this experience was and what was happening on the boat. I turned to Sasha at one point and I said, \u201cThe thing I’m going to write about this trip is going to be the best thing I’ve ever written.\u201d It was just this sense that this little community that we had formed out on the water was going to be a perfect thing to tell a story about.

You hardly include any quotes. Why did you make that stylistic decision, and what are some of the ways you tried to bring your characters to life without their words?
<\/strong>There were a couple of reasons that I didn’t use a lot of quotes. One of them was thinking of this almost being a fairy tale. It’s this strange quest trip to the ruins of something from hundreds of years ago. Including a lot of quotes can really start to make it feel like a news story instead of a narrative story. I wanted to keep that sense of almost repeating something\u2026 I wanted to not break that enchantment. And there also was just a very practical reason, which was that much of what was said to me was relayed via translation. I had an interpreter with me, because I couldn’t speak Russian and most of the crew couldn’t speak English.

I found that actually, the tone of the story for me was fine without those quotes. By telling you the things that they did \u2014 particularly Andrey, who was always fixing things on the boat, or Misha, who was so often at the wheel and explaining things to people \u2014 you start to get better sense of who they were than through what we could say in our distorted form of communication.

So much of what happened on the trip didn’t involve talking to each other. I wanted that experience of feeling like you’re in the place, and not the conversation about the place. The conversation about the place almost seemed one notch less real than actually being there.

What were you looking for on this journey? Did you find it?
<\/strong>\u00a0There was so much going on in my life before I left that I was like, it’s fine if it happens, it’s fine if it doesn’t happen, especially with all that complicated paperwork that you have to get approval for to go to these places. It was almost like accepting fate \u2014 either I’ll go or I won’t go.

\"Journalist<\/a>
Andrea Pitzer raises the mainsail on the Alter Ego<\/figcaption><\/figure>

But if I do go, I’ll see the ruins of the cabin. From the reporting that I’ve done before, and the kind of reporting I’ve done for my books in general, I found that being in the place, even if it’s something that was from centuries before, just tells you so much in terms of the physical landscape and the setting that your characters have moved through. There’s a real value to being there. Other than that, I had no expectations. And what I got was really a million times more than I thought I would.

There was something about going to the Russian Arctic and being dislocated, outside my language, outside the geography that I knew, outside of where there’s a whole bunch of other tour boats and people milling around. It just kind of stripped it down to its essence and helped me to encounter the Arctic in a very different way than I had thought about it before. There were a lot of really generous moments, and a chance to re-envision the Arctic \u2014 not just as this research subject or just this place that\u2019s in tremendous jeopardy \u2014 but sort on its own terms, because I didn’t have expectations other than that I hoped that we would be able to get to Barents\u2019 cabin.

Do you think of this piece mainly as historical writing, travelogue, personal experience, or something else?
<\/strong>I don’t want a category on it. I know that that’s how people will think about it. But my whole goal is to write something that they don’t quite know what it is. My whole goal is to try to write outside those categories. If I’m wanting to do a really original piece of writing, I want people to encounter it where it is, to really receive it as its own thing that isn’t like anything else in the universe.

Why do you consider this the best thing you\u2019ve ever written? What really makes it stand out for you?
<\/strong>It was partly because I had this very clear idea of what the story should be. And I came closer to realizing that vision than I have with pretty much anything else I’ve written.

In the last decade, I have tried to do things that take some important historical event, add to the knowledge about that event in some way, do an experiential thing, where I’m going to a place or talking to the people who were involved in that event, and then relating it in some way to what’s happening, right now, in the world. In this case, we have the opening of the High Arctic to Europeans, which had tremendous historical consequences. We have this dramatic survival story from 400 years ago. We’re recreating part of the adventure by sailing on, in our case, a boat, not a ship, but one which was exactly the same size as the one that carried my characters 400 years ago. Repeating that, which is a wonderful element.

And then unexpected things happen that I couldn’t control, but it ended up working out really well for the story. It’s all about what’s happening now. So part of it was the personal side, what’s happening in my life right now; all these family tragedies. But it’s also what is happening to the Arctic, what is happening to the world.

You and I have both spent a fair amount of time in the Arctic. I think we may both have what is sometimes called \u201cice fever\u201d in the old books about the Arctic explorers \u2014 we just can\u2019t get enough of it. What does the Arctic mean to you, and what keeps you going back there?
<\/strong>I think it’s important to say that historically, the Arctic has been a place of enchantment for people who don’t live there. It’s been this kind of tabula rasa<\/em> onto which all kinds of colonial and imperial and personal dreams are projected. It can be used as a blank canvas in a way that I think is really unhealthy. For indigenous populations, it’s a terrible thing to act as if this place where they are is nothing, just a blank thing for you to come and put something on top of. So in my prior Arctic trips, I’d always tried to avoid that and not to have this sort of romanticism about being there. And what I found was that this time, I felt like I had a way into that feeling. That’s the valuable and useful and legitimate part of feeling what the Arctic is presenting to you, rather than what are you trying to sort of paste on top of the Arctic. It was the first time I felt successful in sort of capturing that sense of enchantment.

A<\/span>nnotation:<\/strong> Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Pitzer\u2019s responses in blue. To read the pitch without annotations, click the \u2018Hide all annotations\u2019 button, which can be found below the contributors list on the right-hand side of the web page, or at top of your mobile screen.<\/em>


\"\"<\/a>
Glacier at Russian Harbor on Novaya Zemlya, August 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>

My Midlife Crisis as a Russian Sailor<\/strong><\/h1>

July 27, 2020<\/p>
Outside Magazine

<\/div>


For a book project about 16th-century polar explorer William Barents, Andrea Pitzer needed to reach the remote Arctic island where he and his men came to grief. She booked passage on an expeditionary boat out of Murmansk, then headed north on a trip marked by unforgettable scenery, unexpected loss, and wild magic that changed her life.<\/em><\/h4>
 

<\/div>
I\u2019<\/span>m heading to the Arctic thinking about death. <\/a>Stunning opening \u2013 as shocking and immersive as a polar plunge. It foreshadows the big reveal at the end and also evokes the image of the Arctic as a barren, lifeless place. Is that the way you see it?<\/span>I don\u2019t see the Arctic that way. Part of what I hoped to move toward was this reveal that it’s incredibly alive. You know, it’s incredibly vibrant. Certainly, I was playing a little bit. So I’m going to surprise the reader with that if they aren’t already thinking that is part of my goal there. But on the train, I was thinking about all the people who have set sail and gone to their deaths. I wasn’t afraid of dying, I wasn\u2019t thinking I’m going to die or anything like that. But just, you know, with all the polar narratives that you read, somebody has to come back to tell the story that somebody died. I do like to think that with a long story, you either go for broke with a really long, lyrical sentence, or just punch the reader in the face with a short declarative sentence. I think that those are often the two ledes that strike me the most in other people’s writing. And I feel that the short declarative sentence is often what has launched my best pieces. So I’ll often start with something like that.<\/span><\/span>

 

Lying facedown in the top bunk of an overnight train inching from Saint Petersburg toward the Russian port city of Murmansk, I have a berth waiting for me on an August expedition sailing north.

I\u2019m working on a book about Arctic explorers, and that means swimming in a sea of sorrow. In my train compartment, dead adventurers haunt me: Faithful sled dogs eaten by humans or swallowed by chasms in the ice. Sailors devoured by polar bears or their own shipmates. Even when no animals or people are stalking them, polar explorers have a tendency to starve or freeze or succumb to disease.

I\u2019ve come to Russia at age 51 to re-create parts of William Barents\u2019s third voyage to the Arctic from 400 years ago. Crossing and recrossing the sea northeast of Scandinavia, Barents, a Dutch navigator, went looking for a passage to China, but he and 16 men were trapped by sea ice during the summer of 1596. For nearly a year, they were stranded hundreds of miles above the mainland on Novaya Zemlya, a pair of large islands extending all the way to 77 degrees north. Five sailors died, including Barents himself, who perished at sea after they abandoned their ship and he and the remaining crew tried to get home on small boats. His quest to find the lucrative route to China was a brave but dismal failure. <\/a>What made you interested in telling Barents\u2019 story?<\/span> Two things. The first, in terms of how I encountered him, was that where their cabin was 400 years ago was a critical part of my first book. It\u2019s what the Russians call Novaya Zemlya, and that’s how I refer to it in the story because it’s Russian territory today. But the Dutch called it Nova Zembla. That was a really important plot point in my first book, which was a sort of literary biography of Vladimir Nabokov, and Zembla comes up as a Magic Kingdom in one of his novels that is narrated by a madman. So I read the entire history, the little that we have, and I found a lot of things that have been forgotten, some pretty incredible things. So this story (Barents\u2019 journey) shows up in a very short passage in my first book. And I thought, how do we not know more about this voyage? It’s incredible that 400 years ago they went up there, got stranded and tried to survive the winter. The more I read about it, the more fascinating it became. What intrigued me was that these people, who were so manifestly unfit to do the things they did \u2014 how did they do it and just wake up day after day and keep doing it? And how did they fit into their world at that time? What would make you do that? What would be the value of doing that? It also was also intriguing to me that it wasn’t well-known. We know all the big stories of the 19th and 20th century explorers, because there are photos and letters, and there are messages, and we have all these narrative tools. I really liked the challenge of figuring out how to tell a story from 400 years ago. How do you reconstruct that? How do you make that possible without making anything up?<\/span><\/span>

Once we leave Murmansk, our boat will sail the same formidable waters. Setting out with a Russian crew aboard a yacht called\u00a0Alter Ego,<\/em>\u00a0I\u2019ll follow in Barents\u2019s wake over the sea that now bears his name.

But Barents isn\u2019t the only thing on my mind. Other grim news is preoccupying me as much or more.\u00a0Arctic sea ice is collapsing<\/a>, with few signs of reversal. I\u2019ve been to the far north twice to report on climate change, and in the meantime it\u2019s only gotten worse. <\/a>I can see the change from year to year in my own trips to the Arctic \u2014 glaring differences like glacier shrinkage, declining ice cover, fewer and fewer birds. What are some of the personal ways you\u2019ve observed this over your repeated trips up there?<\/span> I’m always careful because despite any individual thing you observe, there’s such fluctuation in Arctic climate that it could always be just an individual anecdotal event that you’re witnessing. But we went into an ice cave on my first expedition in 2018, a dog-sledding expedition to the interior of Svalbard, and part of the ice cave had collapsed because they had rain. In January. They had mudslides. They\u2019d never had mudslides before, because they\u2019d never had mud. I was reporting a story for the Washington Post on climate change in Longyearbyen, the world\u2019s northernmost town, and I interviewed the mayor. He talked about how literally every pipeline, all the roads, everything that made it possible for people to live in this harsh environment was not built for the things that it was going through. They were having to reinvent their whole way of being in the Arctic.<\/span><\/span>

My family seems equally vulnerable. The night before I left home, my cousin Joe messaged me about the trip. As kind a man as I\u2019ve met, and a traumatized veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, he had checked himself in for alcohol rehab earlier that summer at the age of 47. By the time I was packing my bags, he\u2019d been sober for more than a month. On the last day of July, I sent my love and told him to hold down the fort while I was gone.

But I\u2019m wondering if the fort will be standing when I return. Weeks before, my father and stepfather were diagnosed with cancer; my mother is now deep in the throes of paranoid dementia. My two teenage children are fine, but I feel bad about leaving my husband parenting solo for so long while he\u2019s working full-time. Meanwhile, the contract I signed before all this happened says my book is due by Christmas. <\/a>How did you cope with all that on your mind, being so far away?<\/span> I had some practice with that because I like to do geographically immersive journalism. For my first book, I went to Russia, Germany, Switzerland, France. For my second book, I went to four continents to research concentration camp sites all over the world. So this was not the first time that I had things about which I might feel stress or guilt or anxiety. I just had to set it aside so that I could do the work that I’m doing. Of course, to do it when people’s lives are on the line, with the cancer in my family, my mom’s dementia and things just getting worse\u2026 But I also realized that on a practical level, if I’m not getting work done and paying the bills, I’m not in a position to help other people in my family. So I’m going to put it in a silo and not think about it for this time so I can get other things done. I won’t pretend that it\u2019s a smooth thing.<\/span><\/span>

I feel both grateful and ashamed to have a chance to go off the grid to focus on research. I\u2019m running from looming family mortality into the arms of historic\u2014and historical\u2014tragedy. Part of me thinks I shouldn\u2019t go. But I know it might be the journey of a lifetime.

 

M<\/span>y traveling companion on the train, Tatiana Ponomareva, spent nearly two decades as director of the Nabokov Museum<\/a>\u00a0in Saint Petersburg, until political machinations pushed her out. She helped me in 2011 with my first book, a biography of Vladimir Nabokov, and I invited her along this time as my interpreter. The year before, Tatiana connected me with\u00a0Vicaar<\/a>, the Russian polar-expedition agency that matched me with this boat and crew. I\u2019m using my book advance to cover passage for Tatiana and me. We\u2019ll set sail with ten people aboard. <\/a>Your first 10 paragraphs are in close-in focus and mainly about you. How did this approach shape and possibly constrain your storytelling?<\/span>I was thinking that I want to be the proxy for the reader. I want to bind them into my life, so that they\u2019re going to see the story through my eyes. I want them to have some emotional investment in me. And I was setting the stage so I don\u2019t have to come back and talk about who Barents was, who I am, how did I get there. So the goal was, in the first section, to have all the outside things that aren’t involved with people in the boat laid out before you. And of course, in the foreground is the family stuff, because that’s what I’m going to be coming back to at the end. Certainly, this is like a quest narrative, and you have to know who your journey person is before they step out, let them know what the stakes are.<\/span><\/span>

 

Rolling into Murmansk, we\u2019re met by a tall Russian whose dark mustache and beard are kissed with gray. He\u2019s our expedition leader, Evgeny Fershter. Smoking cigarettes with the furious commitment of a French Resistance leader, he walks us out of the train station. We cross a footbridge over the tracks and make our way to the harbor. A single long dock stretches before us. On its left squats a black behemoth of an icebreaker, with blocky white Russian letters on the side spelling \u201cLenin.\u201d

Directly opposite the nuclear-powered ship, which is now a stationary museum, a lone vessel is moored to the dock: the\u00a0Alter Ego.<\/em> Painted white and autumn red, it seems small from a distance, but I looked up its specs before the trip. At just under 60 feet, it\u2019s almost exactly the same length as the ship that carried Barents and his men to Novaya Zemlya. <\/a>Nice detail bringing the past and the present together, tying the narrative back to the Barents theme.<\/span>If you’re somebody who wants to write this kind of story, to get that level of detail, it involves going and seeing the replica that they’re building in the Netherlands. It involves communicating with the person who’s in charge of that. It involves finding and buying a copy of the book he co-wrote about it, which has the architectural schematic for building the replica. That’s like 16 folded-out, large diagrams. And it\u2019s me one night thinking: I wonder exactly how long this boat is, and measuring it, and looking at the specs of the Alter Ego<\/em>, and realizing that they are almost exactly the same. That’s a lot of work for one little telling detail. I find that often the best details of a story are just like that.<\/span><\/span>

To the right, past a flock of cranes hoisting cargo, the city stretches up into hills. On the summit of the closest slope stands an enormous statue of a soldier. This is Alyosha, a symbol of Russia\u2019s Arctic forces, which suffered brutal losses holding this corner of the world against German onslaughts during World War II. <\/a>This is an image you will keep coming back to. What does it mean to you?<\/span>I laid out in the first section that I have this cousin who is a traumatized veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that we\u2019re in crisis. And Alyosha is a monument for when Russia was in crisis. Also, if I’m painting the picture of Murmansk, it’s the<\/em> visual, recognizable symbol. When you look at the landscape of Murmansk, it has this huge, huge statue overlooking it. So I’m trying to do about three different things here on a visual level. I’m trying to give readers Murmansk in a nutshell. On the foreshadowing level, we now have a second soldier in the story: that is the memorial to a lot of lost soldiers. I’m starting to signal that soldiers are going to have a tough time in these situations in which we put them. And also this sense of history, that we’re traveling inside history \u2014 that we aren’t just going into the Arctic with some kind of blank slate, we’re going from a place that has a bloody history. We’re going from a country that fetishizes its soldier heroes. I am going as an American, with what I would call a soldier hero who is suffering from his involvement in these wars. With any strong visual element like that, the more roles I can have it playing in the story, the better. At this point, it’s just a throwaway sentence to sort of just give you Murmansk in a nutshell. I’m sort of winking at it being more like a travelogue here, but I’m also trying to plant a seed that I’m going to use later.<\/span><\/span>

We cross a wooden plank and board. Mikhail Tekuchev, the ship\u2019s captain, is clean-shaven and almost as tall as Evgeny. Greeting us with a smile, he warns us to fill up on food tonight, because we probably won\u2019t feel like eating for a while once we head out.

We unpack our bags, finding the odd cabinets and crevices that are essential to life at sea. Our cabin mate, Olga Chumachenko, is the designated ship\u2019s cook, but her real trade is photojournalism. She has already traveled to the North Pole and Antarctica.

Next we meet Andrey Ianushkevich, who makes a vivid impression with a full beard and a right-arm tattoo of Saint George killing the dragon. <\/a>Nice detail.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Formerly a boxer and a businessman, he\u2019s also a licensed captain and will serve as first mate.

The last crew member, Alexander Bogdanov, nicknamed Sasha, has a salt-and-pepper crew cut and knows some English. In his striped shirt, he looks like the archetype of a Russian sailor. In fact, he\u2019s the newest member of the crew, and spent decades as a professional paraglider before setting foot on the\u00a0Alter Ego.<\/em>

Feeling tense and overfed from lack of \u00adexercise, I go on deck to do push-ups and sit-ups. This might mark me as strange to my new companions, but it\u2019s probably too late to kick me off the boat. Before long, I learn that others already have their own shipboard workout routines.

 

T<\/span>hat evening, we leave the harbor without fanfare, abandoning Kola Bay and heading east along the coast. I meet two other passengers, marine biologists Marthe Larsen Haarr and Michael Pantalos, who work for the marine consulting group SALT and are joining the expedition with support from a Norwegian-Russian partnership. They\u2019ll be mapping the amount of trash in the Barents and Kara Seas north of mainland Russia. <\/a>I was on a research voyage across the Fram Strait last September where they were studying microplastics in the Arctic. They found enormous amounts in some places. Did you see much trash, and how did that impact your sense of the place?<\/span> Plastic bottles, nets, just all kinds of trash in general, but particularly plastic trash. It didn’t surprise me because I’ve been to Svalbard before and seen even more along the western coast that had washed up there. But it was really dismaying. We have this huge, huge problem.<\/span><\/span>

 

The last passenger, Alexey Neumoin, is a tourist. A Russian mystic as intense as any character in Dostoevsky, Alexey comes with some 21st-century updates: he\u2019s also a web designer and martial artist. He intends to meditate along the entire route of our expedition and sees himself, quite seriously, as having a personal mission in the far north.

Before we can land anywhere up there, though, we have to cross the Barents Sea, traveling hundreds of miles to reach Cape Desire, a spot on the northeastern corner of Novaya Zemlya in the protected Russian Arctic National Park. There we\u2019ll pick up the last member of our party\u2014a ranger, whose presence is required on any expedition visiting the preserve.

 

I<\/span> volunteer to help with the sailing whenever possible, and since I can\u2019t speak Russian, I ask Tatiana to tell the crew that I hauled lines on sails during a prior Arctic expedition. I don\u2019t have much experience, I say, but I\u2019m strong. \u201cIf you\u2019re so strong, why don\u2019t you pull up the anchor?\u201d Sasha replies. He\u2019s a smartass, but he\u2019s already impossible to dislike. <\/a>When and where was this prior expedition? What did you do?<\/span> The Arctic Circle residency program, in September 2018. We were at sea for just over two weeks. We sailed the west coast of Svalbard in a tall ship. I learned a good amount, although I knew very little to begin with, and for me to be on a tall ship, sailing the western coast of Svalbard \u2014 Barents is the first person in recorded history to have been there. He\u2019s actually the person who named it Spitsbergen (the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago).<\/span><\/span>

 

That night, as we sail along the shoreline, I step out from our skylit cabin into the dark coffin of the hallway just as the ship rolls in the trough of a wave. I brace myself against the wall. Nausea drives my lurching stomach up into my skull. <\/a>Perfect description! I get seasick and I know how miserable it is. But could you really will it away? That\u2019s some tremendous willpower!<\/span>I had never at any time before been seasick, so I had foolishly assumed that I never would be. I remember that physical reaction very strongly because it was completely unexpected. I’m trying partly to take the reader with me in that moment. And in that moment, I don’t know if I’m going to spend the next four days seasick. What I found later, was when I was on deck, was that it was much, much better if I had the line of horizon in my eyes. Then I could tolerate it. Now I have great empathy for those people who routinely suffer.<\/span><\/span>

I will my internal organs into obedience and go up to the deck. First mate Andrey is at the wheel, and he tosses me a piece of an \u00adorange. He speaks little English, but there\u2019s no need to talk. I notice that the compartments on deck are filled with bananas, apples, oranges, leafy greens, and carrots. Whatever else might go wrong, we won\u2019t die of scurvy.

Mist and clouds linger above the long plateau of an offshore island that we pass, its rocky surface glowing mossy green in the predawn light. As waves break along the sides of the boat, I feel a rush of delight. <\/a>I know exactly that feeling, too. I get it whenever I\u2019m sailing. What was it for you?<\/span>There was actually a line that in the story that we cut because there was so much more. When I first wrote the story it was 20,000 words. I did not give that to my editor. I cut it like down to like, I think 8,000 words, and it ended up being 7,000, something like that. But in terms of the line that came out, it was my recognition that in that moment when that rush of delight happens, that is the same thing that’s making me seasick. It’s kind of this paradox. It’s part and parcel that, like there’s no pristine pure experience of joy. There’s usually some nausea that’s going to accompany it.<\/span>I think that’s a theme that comes out in the book \u2014 pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy. That you can have pure joy and pure misery, all mixed together.<\/span><\/span>That afternoon, Captain Misha hands me coveralls to wear. We go on deck, where he leans in close to the long boom that nestles perpendicular to the mast. Inside one end is a set of levers.

\u201cLook,\u201d he says, pointing to his eyes and then to the levers. After he adjusts something, he holds up three fingers and has me find the third metal ring in the sail, which sits accordioned atop the boom. After leveraging the ring, called a cringle, onto a nearby hook, I haul the sail into position. I\u2019m not prepared to captain the boat just yet, obviously, but if the entire crew becomes incapacitated, I think I have a fighting chance to reef and hoist the mainsail, on which I could scrawl an SOS.

As we prepare for the open sea, all passengers get basic safety training. If we smell smoke at any time, we should alert the crew immediately. We must always wear a life jacket on deck. We practice putting on our flotation suits and learn what to do if we encounter a\u00a0polar bear<\/a>.

At the end, Evgeny tells a joke about a new expedition member who\u2019s advised that, if he comes face-to-face with a hungry bear, he should smear shit on the animal\u2019s nose. \u201cWhere does the shit come from?\u201d the trainee asks. \u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d the instructor replies, \u201cthere will be plenty.\u201d

S<\/span>ailing in the season of the midnight sun, we see daylight around the clock for most of the trip. The temperature usually hovers just above or below freezing.

\"Crew<\/a>
First mate Andrey Ianushkevich (L) and captain Mikhail Tekuchev (R) at the wheel of the Alter Ego on the Barents Sea<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Our last hour close to shore, the waves are a vivid teal, the color of some alien gemstone. Sasha appears on deck, cradling a Russian button accordion, and starts playing Eugen Doga\u2019s haunting waltz\u00a0\u201cMy Sweet and Tender Beast.\u201d<\/a> We sail between two long spits of rock toward the horizon, a thin, blurry line that becomes more indistinct in the days that follow. Below us, the water darkens to slate blue. Above, the clouds sit like some pale country, as if the sea is a shadow of the sky. <\/a>The blurring horizon \u2014 another unique and wonderful thing about the Arctic. And I love the mood you create with this song! Is the \u201cshadow of the sky\u201d a foreshadow of the mirage at the end?<\/span>The sky in the Arctic feels so much livelier than it does where I live. It seems so changeable, and you have one kind of sky over the top of the landmass, and right next to it, it’s a totally different kind of sky. There is something about it that either the light filters through it differently, or the weather is literally more changeable there so that you have different systems sort of building up together more often. I wanted to capture that sense of the sky becoming more real in some way sometimes than the plane that we’re on now. The sky became this kind of thing<\/em>.<\/span><\/span>

We leave land behind on the morning of August 8, two days into the trip. When we hit the open sea the going gets rough, and nobody shows up for breakfast the first morning, not even Olga the cook. I spend the next three days thoroughly nauseous, with my body rejecting food and sleep. I\u2019m able to keep tiny meals down only by constantly reminding myself not to throw up.

Taking the edge off my misery, Captain Misha invites me on deck to learn how to steer. The wheel is almost as tall as me; it looks like an oversize steering wheel on a toy dashboard.

Pointing and demonstrating, Misha tries to show me how to use a gauge to maintain our current bearing. It quickly becomes apparent that steering a boat is just like driving a car\u2014that is, if wind regularly blows you off the road, and the road moves up and down like a roller coaster. I have a tendency to oversteer, waiting too long to correct the course, which leads to sweeping turns that necessitate corrections of their own, slowing our progress. <\/a>Great description of sailing. You really convey what it\u2019s like learning to handle the helm.<\/span>People have read this story and seen it as self-deprecating. And if that’s true, maybe I went too far with it. I wasn’t trying to make myself look bad. I think I’m pretty badass, sailing in the Arctic. I’m proud of myself for being somebody who jumps into things and tries things and takes chances. But I don’t like the kind of narrative that jumps in and pretends to an expertise that the reporter just does not have. And since this story is written in present tense, I’m taking readers along, literally as it happens, moment to moment, with me. I wanted to bring the eyes of the beginner to the reader. I messed things up, I learned a lot of things. I got some new skills. But I didn’t want to pretend to be really good at things that were really new to me that I made mistakes at.<\/span><\/span>

With more gestures and a handful of English words, Misha explains that the gauge and digital map of our course are lagging indicators. He shows me how to watch the \u201clittle magicians\u201d\u2014short plastic strips fastened to the sail and a cable securing the mast. Like tiny windsocks, they provide instant feedback on whether the boat is really catching the breeze.

While we\u2019re at it, I learn that we have other vessels on board. One is a bright red boat called\u00a0Mikhalych,<\/em>\u00a0attached to the back of the\u00a0Alter Ego<\/em>\u00a0and lowered into the water by a motorized winch.<\/em>\u00a0(It will ferry us to shore on Novaya Zemlya, if we live long enough to get there.) The second is an inflatable raft,\u00a0Pchyolka<\/em>\u2014\u201cbee\u201d in Russian\u2014which is folded neatly and strapped to the deck before the mast. The captain\u2019s drone, nicknamed Zhuzha\u2014\u201cbuzzbuzz\u201d\u2014makes regular circuits to survey the sea and sky when Misha isn\u2019t at the wheel.

During this sloshy ride I keep trying to take notes, but my aggrieved stomach makes writing an ordeal. Others have it worse. Apart from Michael, no one even sees Marthe for several days\u2014and it\u2019s not easy to vanish completely on a boat this size. I watch with wonder as Andrey, when he\u2019s not on duty, manages to sit quietly with his e-reader, devouring a historical novel set in the time of Peter the Great. Among the passengers, \u00adTatiana alone floats unperturbed through the unsettling waves.

I take to using bungee cords on the bedframe to strap my legs in at night, so I won\u2019t roll onto her if I ever manage to fall asleep again. But sleep doesn\u2019t come, and in my darkest hour on the longest night, I hear the rustle of cellophane. I look over the side of my bunk to see Tatiana calmly eating crackers and scrolling through pictures on her phone. <\/a>But it\u2019s early August and still nearly 24-hour sun, as you mention earlier. So what do you mean by \u201clongest night?\u201d<\/span>I literally just meant the night of discomfort and distress from the seasickness. It was literally \u201cnight time\u201d even though it wasn\u2019t dark, but it was sort of the darkness of the soul, if you were, on the third day of being seasick. I really was hopeless in that moment, because I was in a new situation \u2014 I had never been seasick before. I was making these short notes at the beginning, but now I couldn’t even sit and look at a page for very long. I just thought, what if I have left my family in dire straits, spent so much of my book advance to be able to get up here, and then I\u2019m so seasick that I can’t even get what little bit I needed to get for this book? Feeling like I’ve thrown this money in the trash can, that my mom might need for her care. I’m making a little fun of myself right now, but actually, there was a lot of anxiety. So the darkness of the darkest night there was entirely metaphor.<\/span><\/span>

Hours later I sit at the dining table, feeling despondent. Expedition leader Evgeny sprawls in the seat across from me. It\u2019s day four, and I realize I can\u2019t remember ever seeing him eat. Like some 1970s supermodel, he appears to subsist entirely on cigarettes.

I ask him if he feels sick. He doesn\u2019t answer but says that if I\u2019m feeling bad, the best medicine is to take the wheel. I go on deck, where we\u2019re still surrounded by endless water. <\/a>Lovely description of being at sea.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0The sun has come through the clouds, turning stretches of the sea\u2019s surface a milky white.

 

W<\/span>e sail all day and night for almost a week. Crew members take the helm in four-hour split shifts: two hours steering and two as backup. Tuesday morning we spot land. As we approach shore, the collective nausea begins to subside. Sasha makes blini for breakfast and lets me practice doing a stovetop flip. <\/a>Nice job of building up tension with pacing, then releasing it with collective relief. The reader feels better, too!<\/span><\/span>

 

Working our way around the same coastline that Barents mapped, we come to Cape Desire. Lowering\u00a0Mikhalych<\/em>\u00a0off the back, the crew gets ready to take us ashore. Once we hit the beach, Tatiana and I, along with a ranger from the station, walk up the bluff and climb exposed lighthouse stairs to look at the sea. Birds wheel and scream, creating a wild melody of their own invention. Due north, nothing is visible but the Arctic Ocean.<\/a>So evocative! The Arctic is the kingdom of seabirds, and you bring the cacophony to life with these few, well-chosen words.<\/span><\/span>

The next morning, leaving Cape Desire behind, we cross into the frigid Kara Sea, east of Novaya Zemlya. As if recognizing that we\u2019ve abandoned normal space-time, the GPS glitches and for a while shows the boat sitting off the coast of West Africa. <\/a>Wow!<\/span><\/span>

The ranger who\u2019s joined us for this leg of the voyage turns out to be another Sasha, blond and quieter than the one we already have. The day after Sasha II\u2019s arrival, we aim the boat toward a legendary place called Ice Harbor\u2014home to the ruins of William Barents\u2019s cabin, which he and his men named the Behouden Huys, or Safe House. It was built using driftwood and lumber from their icebound ship. <\/a>And now we\u2019ve shifted back to the historical, back to Barents. I really like the way you talk about the wheels that were set in motion then that eventually delivered us climate change, and how you connect the thread to the present. And bringing it back to a process abetted by the characters in your book. That’s a really powerful and significant connection.<\/span>Thank you. It was important to me to not have this just be some picturesque story, but to sort of say, what are the implications, let\u2019s bring in history. The truth is that a lot of the exploration that’s been done has been done in the name of the empire and colonization, and has had tremendous repercussions. <\/span><\/span>

Barents wasn\u2019t the first European to reach the high Arctic, but he sailed his ships farther north of Europe and Asia than any prior explorer on record. A journal narrating his discoveries\u2014and his months spent stranded\u2014was printed in five languages almost immediately after his death, becoming an international bestseller. Commercial European whaling soon exploded along the Barents Sea and points west, over time nearly driving the North Atlantic right whale to extinction.

Europeans never left the region. A similar push for trade routes and imports expanded worldwide and brought industrialization, which in modern times eventually delivered climate change. As we sail toward Ice Harbor, I brace myself to witness the bleak late stages of a process abetted by the characters in my book.

In the last hours before we arrive at Barents\u2019s cabin, Andrey helps me modify a weak clasp on the GoPro I\u2019ll use when we land. He will later fix the broken hinge on my glasses, the controller on a winch, and whatever is making a mysterious thumping sound near the engine. In his spare time, he sits grinding the rust off an old drawing compass with a dremel, cauterizing frayed ends of ropes, or regluing leather on a shipboard game, like some benevolent god whose gift it is to make the world whole again. <\/a>Here you build on that tack again, Wonderful phrase, \u201csome benevolent God who’s gift it us to make the world whole again.\u201d Isn’t that just what we need right now?<\/span> That’s the fantasy of the whole story, that that’s possible. And the recognition that it’s not possible is an important part of that story. Andrey is so good at fixing everything and so devoted to it. And yet, the engine can’t be fixed at the moment. The Arctic is in peril. Everybody on the boat wants to save it, and yet, you know, we can’t. I didn’t even realize how deeply, deeply in jeopardy Joe was. It’s our failure to be able to restore the world that’s so much of our sorrow in it, but we still move forward. I think that, in some ways, that paragraph is the heart of the story, because Andrey is always doing these small things to fix it. You can do these little things, and sometimes that\u2019s maybe all you can do.<\/span><\/span>

At Ice Harbor, we land in mist and fog. Evgeny, Misha, and I disembark with the ranger, then head up the slope and start hiking toward the ruins of the cabin. They don\u2019t appear immediately, so I pull out a book that has a map of the site.

\"Crew<\/a>
Sailor Alexander Bogdanov, ranger Alexander Morev, and expedition leader Evgeny Fershter (L to R) near the ruins of William Barents’ cabin on Novaya Zemlya<\/figcaption><\/figure>

One more march over a low rise and a cross marker comes into view. The relics sit not far from the edge of a low plateau bordered on three sides by a rock-strewn beach. It\u2019s \u00adterrible to imagine how lethal the conditions would have been in this part of the world during winter, exposed to the wind in every direction and the sea on three sides.

Now, 423 years later, we see the long timbers that formed the base of the shelter where Barents and his men spent months praying not to die. Blizzard after blizzard came, until more than an inch of ice built up in the cabin\u2019s interior.

Pacing out its dimensions\u2014roughly 36 feet long by 22 feet wide\u2014I walk through the space where the crew huddled in fear as a polar bear rampaged on their roof, trying to claw its way in. I stand on the site of the fireplace that couldn\u2019t keep them warm, at one point nearly killing them with toxic fumes from ship\u2019s coal they burned. I wander along the beach where the men dragged makeshift sleds over ice and snow for miles, scavenging firewood. <\/a>Nice weaving of historical and present time in this section. Was that hard to work out?<\/span>Again, it\u2019s about the value of repetition. Here I am repeating his voice. For me, that threw me immediately back to what it would have felt like for them. I had no idea, even though I looked at geographical maps of the site, what it would feel like to stand on that little rise just off the shore and imagine blizzard after blizzard, just completely exposed. I mean, there’s nothing you can do, there was nowhere to hide, nothing they could have built that the wind wouldn’t have torn through. To be so far from home or help, and nobody knows where you are, just standing up on that little rise and feeling how exposed it was \u2014 was just a real revelation in that moment that I don’t think I could have talked about without going there. Without having felt and imagined what they felt 400 years ago, because it was just so stark.<\/span><\/span>

Evgeny comes over and pulls a flask out of his pocket. I swallow a mouthful\u2014whisky\u2014and hand it back. I can hardly believe we\u2019ve arrived at the end of the world. <\/a>Nice!<\/span><\/span>

 

W<\/span>onders keep coming, day by day. A bird lands on Sasha\u2019s head while he\u2019s at the wheel. We spot a polar bear running on the beach. The Arctic makes itself known to us, though not always on our terms. <\/a>So true! That really encapsulates the Arctic.<\/span><\/span>

The trash-studying biologists have the most worthwhile mission of anyone on the boat: by scanning the ocean and exploring shorelines on foot, they\u2019re using equipment to map where washed-up litter is and isn\u2019t found in the Arctic. But ultimately, the sea and sky decide what they will allow. Plans for exploratory landings can blow up at the last minute. A bear sighting or fog can kill any chance to gather data from a particular spot. It becomes apparent that my ghost-chasing forays, Alexey\u2019s meditation, and the natural challenges thrown up by the sea will make it harder for the scientists to get their work done.

On August 16, we head toward the Orange Islands\u2014the Oranskys, in Russian\u2014with a plan to visit the two main land masses, Big Oransky and Little Oransky, which together total about one square mile. Evgeny has heard of a memorial placed on Little Oransky more than a century ago, commemorating its discovery by Barents. Watching for bears, we go ashore amid thrashing waves and fan out to find it. Soon a memorial slab comes into view on the rocky ground, cracked but legible.

As we quickly discover, Little Oransky is also a wonderland of birds. Gulls and their aggressive cousins, skuas, shriek and cry their own improvisations\u2014birdsong that Andrey will later call \u201cmerry and badass jazz.\u201d They wing back and forth along populated cliffs like morning commuters in some vertical city.

Elegant murres with dark eyes and black feet nest in the rock face near the top of the island. They turn their sleek heads to look at us but don\u2019t fly away. Puffins sit in vague wonder, their black and orange beaks just inches out of reach. They don\u2019t seem to know that it\u2019s wise to be wary of humans. <\/a>Wonderful descriptive passages, really puts us at the scene. I\u2019ve spent a lot of time around puffins myself, including a week with puffin-hunters on Gr\u00edmsey Island, off the north coast of Iceland. I have to say that they are cute, but they\u2019re actually very aggressive. Really sharp beaks and claws!<\/span>They were not spooked by us at all. It made me wonder if they even had encountered humans before.<\/span><\/span>

When the time comes to go back to the boat, Alexey is nowhere to be found. I run along the rocks above the water calling his name. After a while, he appears on one corner of the cliff, as if stepping in from another universe. He had been off meditating again.

The next day, the biologists land with their gear and get some surveying done before we head toward Big Oransky, a split stone slab rising out of the sea. Suddenly, we see walruses on shore and walruses approaching. They\u2019re all around us. They\u2019re huge.

We had dropped the anchor, attaching a bobbing, bright yellow buoy to mark its position. The walruses take up the buoy and start playing with it.

The crew has seen an anchor buoy stolen by playful walruses before, so it has made them harder to pilfer. But Andrey is worried that a walrus might get caught in the line. The buoy is exiled from the water and brought back to the ship. The walruses stare with what is surely disappointment.

But we aren\u2019t done here yet. Sasha appears on deck with his accordion and begins the same Doga waltz he played before. Dozens of walruses swim to where he perches near the gunwale, on the port side of the boat. They listen, watching him. Occasionally, a small mosh pit forms, then dissolves. Mostly his audience floats before him, snorting and hawing with rapt intensity while we look back. <\/a>The walruses swimming and listening to the concert \u2014 that must have been an incredible moment!<\/span>I can\u2019t say how amazing that was in the moment for them to just gather there and be staring at him and be so obviously fascinated. In fact, that was a whole scene at one point. And then there was no room for it because so many amazing things happened. But it was one of the neatest things in my life that I’ve ever experienced.<\/span><\/span>

 

E<\/span>ventually, we move on to run Sasha II back to Cape Desire. As we leave the Oranskys behind, the original Sasha calls belowdecks. He\u2019s spotted a bizarre sight: buildings or smoke or something on the bigger island.

Baffled, we watch through camera lenses and binoculars, trying to understand the terrain shifting before our eyes. Someone asks if it could be an optical illusion, which reminds me that a polar mirage had amazed Barents and his men, too. <\/a>Do you think it was a Fata Morgana, where you see upside-down images of distant cities reflected in the sky because of Arctic air inversions?<\/span>The inversion layers actually bend the optical effects that you see over distance in the Arctic when you have variations in temperature at slightly different levels. This was one of those. Barents had, I believe the first recorded sighting of something that would eventually come to be called the Novaya Zemlya effect. It wouldn’t be truly understood until more than 300 years later. In fact, that passage in the journals from the trip is one of the things that made a lot of people say they were just making stuff up. But they knew their cosmological calendars well enough to know when the sun should be coming back after polar night, and it came back early. They couldn’t reconcile because they knew it wasn’t that day yet, but they also knew what they had seen. So they just recorded what they saw, and sort of left it to posterity and then hundreds of years later, it turned out that (Norwegian explorer Fridtjof) Nansen actually saw the same thing. Scientists have since figured out what it is. What we were seeing was parts of the landscape sort of being pasted and replicated on top of each other. But it was happening in motion. So it literally looked like buildings were going up. Even with the benefit of knowledge that we have, it was astounding how disconcerting and confusing that was.<\/span><\/span>

When we get to Cape Desire, I jump out of\u00a0Mikhalych,<\/em>\u00a0as I\u2019ve done before, to drag it to shore. But today I leap too early and end up waist-deep in freezing water. I haul the boat in all the same, but there\u2019s no way to ignore my gaffe. I slip off my boots to pour out water, standing barefoot outside the station in the Arctic air, stripped to short pants and wringing out my clothes in shame.

We leave the next day and keep following the beleaguered Barents route back along the coast of northern Novaya Zemlya. Meanwhile, it\u2019s become a pleasure to eat again, and I do so continuously\u2014fried cottage cheese patties, lard, dark bread, borscht, sour cream, and dried fish. Kasha\u2014hot porridge\u2014is a breakfast staple most mornings. Olga cooks a fish and tomato dish. Sasha flips more blini and leads the crew in singing Russian songs after dinner. He offers to teach me a sea shanty, but we\u2019re hard-pressed to find one that isn\u2019t about the problems caused by bringing women on a boat. <\/a>The narrative takes an abrupt and distinctive tone and mood shift here. What precipitated that?<\/span>I was so anxious about getting what I needed from the trip and then thought that I wasn’t going to get. That and all the loss and potential loss. Once we’d made it to Barents\u2019 cabin, once we’d seen that and visited Little Oransky, which is where the memorial is because he discovered and named the Oranskys, I\u2019ve hit all the Barents sites. So now my obligations to the book are done. There’s a real liberation in that moment. It\u2019s funny, because I hadn’t thought of it particularly that way until you asked this question.<\/span><\/span>

 

W<\/span>ith visits to the Barents sites wrapped up, we leave the national park and go ashore near the Chaev glacier on the western coast of Novaya Zemlya. Nearly everyone heads out on a morning hike to see a series of tiny, exquisite waterfalls that reveal themselves from above, one after another, as we scramble along the rocks. Afterward some of us stay on shore to climb a low mountain, unnamed on our maps, that sits between the waterfalls and the glacier.

Surveying the coastline as we sail, Sasha has noted that the glaciers we see have retreated far from the leading edges shown on his map. I recall that in 2017, researchers found a new island near Chaev, made visible by the disappearing ice.

We raise toasts that evening and play a word game, going to bed around 2 A.M. Sasha and I wake up in the middle of the night. We ride\u00a0Mikhalych<\/em>\u00a0back to shore, this time with Andrey along, and then climb the same mountain we\u2019d climbed earlier.

In the quiet morning hours, the birds still silent, Sasha moves up the steep, smooth dome of the slope like a mountain goat, while Andrey chooses more ragged rocks that let him climb vertically for a stretch. I also head for the rocks, falling behind in my thick muck boots but catching up in the second half when the footing becomes simple again.

Prior to this book project, I spent seven years researching and writing a history of concentration camps. The work was a litany of grief. During that time, the suffering of the living and the dead never left my mind, and I think about it now.

My cousin Joe and I grew close in those same years, with our shared love of music and grim jokes, and a lack of faith that things will turn out well in the end. I worried about him the whole time.

For a moment, all that falls away. We stay awhile at the top of the cliff, looking out at the boat, the speckless sky, and the sea. I am filled with a happiness vast enough to break me. <\/a>In just a few short paragraphs, you swing from a litany of grief, suffering and worry to \u201chappiness vast enough to break me.\u201d That\u2019s a gorgeous line, by the way. But the whipsawing of emotions there is jarring. How did you decide how to handle that?<\/span>It’s what happened, so I felt the need to reflect it. I felt whipsawed by it. And that’s why that word \u201cbreak\u201d is in there. This is a thing I tried to thematically develop throughout the article: the same thing that makes you seasick is the same thing you love rolling along the side of the boat. You can’t separate it out. And if you’re going to feel that tremendous joy standing at the top of the cliff in the Arctic, you’re going to feel that tremendous grief in the face of the history of concentration camps, or in the loss of your cousin Joe. You don’t get to pick and choose which parts to keep if you’re going to feel things in a real and vivid way. I wanted to communicate that those two things are sometimes right up against each other, and that it’s just part and parcel of being alive.<\/span><\/span>

 

O<\/span>n August 20, we wind up at the old polar station of Russian Harbor, our last stop before we set out to cross the Barents Sea again. Evgeny warns us that polar bears are common; we have to keep a wide berth when we go around the corners of abandoned buildings. He hands me a small firecracker pistol to startle any animals I meet. Fresh tracks appear everywhere, but we see no more bears.

Andrey, who dislikes compliments about himself but is quick to praise others, has already told me that Evgeny has gone on expeditions that in recent years made crucial Arctic discoveries. The next afternoon, while we\u2019re still sitting at anchor, I prod Evgeny into telling me stories about Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land\u2014tales of 19th- and 20th-century explorers saved or damned by their own choices or fate.

We take leave of Novaya Zemlya late in the day, most of us standing on deck to watch the shabby ruins of the polar station grow tiny with distance before the island \u00aditself vanishes.

 

I<\/span> wake up that night to the smell of smoke. After lifting my head to scan the cabin in the dim light, I see that Olga is awake, too. Tatiana rolls over and, joking or still half-asleep, says, \u201cSomeone has burned the kasha.\u201d

Olga hits the hallway and is intercepted by a crew member and sent back. I\u2019m dying to know what\u2019s going on, and after waiting a few agonizing minutes, I sneak out to the dining table in my long underwear. All four of the crew are sitting in grim silence; when they start talking it\u2019s in Russian, and I can\u2019t understand. After 15 minutes, Sasha turns to me. \u201cYou probably have questions,\u201d he says.

Basically, the workhorse engine that powers our boat\u2014designed in the last years of the Soviet Union\u2014is running too hot. Over the next two days, I watch Andrey and Sasha try to fix it. Seals have deteriorated. Coolant has gotten into the crankcase, spoiling the oil\u2019s viscosity and making the engine useless. We\u2019ll have to travel from Russian Harbor on Novaya Zemlya back to Kola Bay\u2014a journey that took us five days on our way out\u2014using sails alone, just as Barents and his men did more than 400 years ago. <\/a>How did you feel when the engine quit?<\/span>At first there was a little sense of peril, like, okay, this isn’t good. This is a bad thing. Then they identified that it was overheating and that there was not an immediate emergency. Then the journalist in me took over. It became an intellectually interesting thing for me, like, what’s wrong with the engine? Will it be fixed? It wasn’t until it became clear, sometime between 36 and 48 hours later, that it wasn’t going to be fixed, that we realized we were going to be at sea quite a bit longer. For everybody else, that was a bad thing. But I was not ready for the whole thing to end, especially since I had come into this point of joy with it. I just wanted to keep going.<\/span><\/span>

We have enough food and cookies for an army, so we won\u2019t starve, but there will be a lot of time to kill. Misha gives me a book on sailing, and I practice tying basic knots. Those of us who are able to take shifts at the wheel do so, to spell the crew. We get one fast day of sailing, but soon the wind subsides and we sit, becalmed.

That afternoon, Michael, the marine biologist, looks out and notices a bird beside us in the water. It\u2019s a gray and white northern fulmar, paddling with its feet. The bird, he points out, is moving faster than the boat.

 

W<\/span>ith the trip unexpectedly extended, I\u2019m in heaven. There\u2019s no engine working at cross-purposes with the waves to make me queasy. No storms threaten. Because of the quiet, dolphins begin to appear in numbers, a dozen or more at a time. I whistle to them. Though they aren\u2019t as responsive to our faces as the walruses were, they swim in sync with the boat and play for long stretches, the choreography of their splashing becoming the snare drum to the crashing cymbals of the sea.

The delay is bad for almost everyone else. The crew will likely arrive late for the start of their next trip, which means they\u2019ll have to cancel it and lose income. Marthe will miss her daughter\u2019s birthday. Olga will be gone past the window of vacation she has arranged at work. The crew, which has already tried to manage our conflicting agendas for more than two weeks, must stay on duty much longer than planned.

Somehow, everyone is becoming dearer to me. But I have the vague sense that, thanks to all my push-ups and sit-ups, off-key singing, restless enthusiasm, and the long hair I shed like a dog, I\u2019ve gone from amusing to oppressive.

I worry about imposing, but I\u2019m still freakishly happy about the whole experience. I spend more time alone on deck, perched out on the prow of the boat, where I watch for whales that never come and I sing to the sea.

 

D<\/span>estiny arrives in the form of a tugboat. The vessel was assigned days before, and it looks as if we\u2019ll get close enough to port for the tug to start hauling us on Friday.

It\u2019s August 30, late enough in the season, and far enough south, that night has begun to move in again. But in the last hours of daylight on our last evening at sea, I hear Misha call my name and say\u00a0\u201cdel-feen\u201d<\/em>\u00a0in a musical voice from on deck. I climb up to look. I know this will be it\u2014the final gift the sea will offer.

Dolphins soon surround us, arcing in groups of four or five to jump along either side of the boat, then splitting to chase one another ahead or dive under our keel. Several people are on deck now. I whistle and step from port to starboard and back as the creatures retreat. They disappear only to leap up before us once again. They have come to \u00adescort us home. <\/a>Lovely!<\/span><\/span>

A half-hour later they leave. Soon after that, tugboat lights appear in the distance. Once the tug is hauling cleanly, most of us go below. Alexey brings out a plastic liter bottle of moonshine donated by a local just before we set out to cross the Barents Sea. I figure that if the liquor hasn\u2019t eaten through the plastic in three weeks, it\u2019s probably safe to drink. They pull out a variety of shot glasses\u2014ryumki<\/em>\u2014and we make toasts.

 

I<\/span> set my alarm for 5 A.M., by which time we should be approaching Murmansk. As we draw near the Lenin<\/em>\u00a0again, I join in the work of moving our fenders from port to starboard. Andrey and Misha moor the\u00a0Alter Ego,<\/em>\u00a0and I go back to bed. We\u2019ll have one last day together on the boat.

A few hours later, I wake up to the first cell service I\u2019ve had since we left. Scrolling through a month of messages with a mix of regret and nervousness, I feel pleased. There seems to be little I missed that matters.

Then I see a note with \u201cJoe\u201d in the subject line. Dread hits me like a wave, but I open it. My cousin has died\u2014exactly how isn\u2019t clear, but my mind goes to the darkest place. I\u2019ve already missed the memorial service. <\/a>Delivered like a punch to the gut. To know that something terrible had happened, while you were experiencing all this joy, did it make you feel guilt?<\/span>I didn’t know what to do with all that joy once I sort of got swamped by the grief. There was guilt, that was a little part of it. But it was also more of even a fundamental reaction than that. I didn’t know how to feel those two things at the same time. And I was<\/em> feeling both of them at the same time.<\/span><\/span>

Standing up from the table, I go to the ladder and climb blindly up on deck. I can\u2019t sit in my perch at the prow, which faces the harbor and anyone who might approach the boat. I go to the stern and hunker down near the trash and cry.

The whole trip, which had filled me with such happiness just a few hours before, turns to ashes. Joe is gone, with his PTSD, his alcoholism, his terrible jokes, and his love for so many people. He\u2019s already been gone for more than a week, while I was out in the Arctic, heedless of his disintegration.

I\u2019m suddenly sure the crew is sick of me, and that they regret our whole voyage. Why did I need to see where Barents and his men had suffered? I\u2019ve wasted everyone\u2019s time. All my delight in these people and this place dissolves. I know I\u2019m oversteering emotionally, just as I did with the boat, but I have no defense against this news.

After a visit from Tatiana, who wants to know what happened, I pull myself together and go downstairs. Sasha offers to make me fried eggs, but I can\u2019t think about eating. If I lie in my bunk, I\u2019ll inflict myself on Olga and Tatiana while they pack. I stay put while we work out new airline reservations. It takes hours and gives me something to focus on.

As we finish, Sasha again offers to make fried eggs. Throughout the voyage, he has continually tried to find the one thing that might make each person happy in the moment. I still don\u2019t feel like eating, but I say yes to his kind offer. He comes back shortly with an exquisite open-faced omelet that the phrase \u201cfried eggs\u201d can\u2019t begin to represent.

Soon, however, I feel myself running back to despair. Tatiana needs to mail a package to Saint Petersburg. I realize I have to do an interview the next day in Moscow. I have no shoes with me but my muck boots.

I\u2019ve bragged about how much I loathe shopping, and in truth I would rather clean the deck with a toothbrush. But shopping will get me off the boat and give others some peace. If I don\u2019t go buy boots, I might end up in a bar. I head for the mall.

 

L<\/span>ater, Tatiana and I return with a pair of ankle boots so femme that the idea of me wearing them makes the crew laugh. Olga has already left for the train station. The scientists are in a cab headed across the border to Norway. Out of the blue, Alexey asks if I want to go on a hike before dinner to see the Alyosha statue, with its eternal flame that marks the sacrifice of countless dead. Physical activity off the boat sounds perfect. While packing, I discover that my passport is missing, but surely I\u2019ll have time to find it when I return.

On deck, as we\u2019re about to leave, Andrey laces up his shoes and comes along. During the voyage he has become friends with Alexey, and he\u2019s good company. I feel the stirring of the same deep pleasure I felt on the mountain, one for which I don\u2019t have a good name. An electric, unsettling joy.

My new boots are too dressy and high for the climb up to Alyosha. It\u2019s a hot summer afternoon\u2014a day for tank tops and T-shirts, even here in the lower reaches of the Arctic. I\u2019m stuck wearing my knee-high muck boots through town.

Not far into our two-mile ramble, we\u2019re away from the crowds. We\u2019ve begun what novelist Walker Percy called the painful process of reentry, the bumpy ride from transcendent experiences back to daily life. <\/a>\u201cThe bumpy ride from transcendent experiences back to daily life.\u201d So well-described!<\/span><\/span>

We climb the hill that leads to the statue and reach the top. Then, flashing his palms in the universal gesture for wait, Alexey runs off. He\u2019s left us to go meditate again. Our story has not quite ended. Andrey and I wait for Alexey one last time.

When he returns, we walk down the long hill, stopping at grocery stores to gather vegetables for dinner. Back at the boat, Sasha weaves his culinary spells. I finish packing and strip the linens from my bed. I find my passport. I\u2019ll have to leave after all.

 

A<\/span>t some point, they call me for toasts. I missed the first round, but the second is for those who are not present, wherever they may be. I bring my hand up to chime our ryumki<\/em>\u00a0together, but they stop me. For this toast glasses don\u2019t touch, they explain, and there are no jokes.

I think of Joe, but I don\u2019t know if they\u2019re thinking of him. We begin to eat. <\/a>Beautiful \u2014 simple and aching.<\/span>I still don’t know if they were thinking of Joe or not. I suspect that they were, but some of this I wanted to leave, like, it’s okay not to know everything.<\/span><\/span>

Andrey talks about going partridge hunting with a friend. When he found out that it was mating season, and realized the birdsong he\u2019d heard was a mating call, he quit the hunt. He couldn\u2019t bring himself to kill anything singing a love song.

Eventually, we start toasts again. Alexey has gone off to sleep. I present the crew with a wild scheme: a second, future expedition next August for a different project. In some mix of fantasy and seriousness, we begin to shape an idea of what it could look like. I\u2019m already thinking of how things will have to be different. It\u2019s not possible to re-create whatever wild magic just took place.

The crew brings out another bottle, and I am helpless before all of it. I have no more way to gird myself against the wonder of these people and this boat than I do Joe\u2019s death. A little after one, we gather our bags to leave. Tatiana and I will go with Evgeny to get on a 4 A.M. flight to meet a Russian explorer in Moscow. Though Evgeny was a stranger before the trip, he has set up this interview for my book and invited us to stay at his house.

Sasha and Andrey carry our luggage. Back we go over the gangplank, down the long dock, out the locked gate, and through the park to a waiting taxi. A dead soldier watches over us from a distance, now finally cloaked in darkness.

I hug Sasha and Andrey goodbye. \u00adEvgeny, Tatiana, and I climb into the taxi. A few hours later we\u2019ll be airborne, vaulted away on the wind in a mechanical bird with functioning engines, leaving the Arctic behind.

If there\u2019s something I could have done that might have saved Joe, I didn\u2019t do it. And I won\u2019t find a way to save my parents, either.

The future we\u2019re digging for ourselves is at the bottom of a cliff that grows higher every day. But that\u2019s not the same as saying nothing can be done. There are eggs to fry. There is history to remember and glaciers to measure. There is trash to count.

So much is already going or gone. But what\u2019s still there is vast, stupendous.

I\u2019ve come back to say that this place is singing a love song. It may be shot through with grief and danger, but if you\u2019re listening and you can hear this, it means we\u2019re not dead yet.

<\/a>Beautiful and bittersweet closing section. \u201cThe wonder of these people and this boat.\u201d \u201cA dead soldier watches over us from a distance.\u201d Braiding grief and joy, helplessness and resolve, death and life, the past and the future. Bound with the reminder that while so much is already gone, what’s still there is vast and stupendous. That’s a vital message for the Arctic. And for all of the natural world. Please walk me through your process of figuring out how to conclude your odyssey and wrap it all together.<\/span>Somehow at that moment when we were going up to see the Alyosha statue, the joy came back. And that’s when I began to realize it’s okay to have them both there side by side, the joy and sorrow. I knew I wanted to come back to Alyosha at the end. And I wanted to bring Joe in and I wanted to bring climate change in. And I wanted to bring the joy of the trip, which was all the adventurous things, the walrus concerts and getting to the Barents site and all that. But as much as anything, it was Andrey fixing things on the boat, and those guys working on the engine, and Misha teaching us how to steer. It was the small advances in understanding and caring about the world that just can happen on a daily basis through frying the eggs and measuring the trash. We look for these big mystical answers, but really so much of it is in attending to daily life and the things that we’re capable of doing right now. The challenge for me at the end was less how to situate it, because it was so clear, we were unwinding the arrival. Back down the long dock we go, unspooling\u2026 In terms of what information I was going to convey within that moment, I wanted to keep that tone of fairytale enchantment, but also mention these really practical things. One of the things that helped me keep that enchantment was that Andrey just happened on the last night on the boat to tell the story of the partridge hunt. Music and singing and the bird songs and walrus concerts and all that had been such a leitmotif of the whole story that I felt like I could use that to bring it home. To say: this place is singing a love song.<\/span><\/span>

 

Cheryl Katz<\/strong> is a Bay Area-based independent science and environmental journalist. She has a special interest in the polar regions, and has reported from both Antarctica and the Arctic.<\/span><\/em>

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hen she set out from Russian port of Murmansk on a 60-foot sailboat headed to Novaya Zemlya in August 2019, journalist Andrea Pitzer had few expectations. 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