by Deb Caletti
“Ripe flavor?” Even my sarcasm feels effortful.
But my father—he’s energetic, I realize. His eyes dance now that he’s not stoned anymore. He’s here.
“Any questions from the audience? Yes, you in the pajamas.”
Of course I haven’t raised my hand. That would require lifting five thousand pounds of dead weight.
“Phone,” my father announces.
“Nooooo,” I say. It’s ringing somewhere in my room, which is hundreds of miles away. I don’t care. Whoever it is, or whatever it is, I don’t care.
“Phone!” he insists.
I sit there. I rest my head on my arms. I don’t even see that he’s left the room. I only hear him answer my phone as he heads back to the kitchen: “Tess’s House of Hell,” he says cheerfully. “What? Can you say that again? I can’t hear you with all that noise.” I lift my head. He makes his eyes large for my benefit. He drops his jaw dramatically. He’s acting like it’s the California Lottery calling to tell me I’ve won the Triple Million. “Let me get her.” He hands me the phone. “You gotta hear this, I promise.”
Uhh. Damn him. “Hello?”
I don’t know what to expect. I have no idea who it is. Certainly I don’t expect this. It’s Sasha. It’s Sasha, and she’s shouting. She’s talking a million miles an hour. I can barely hear what she’s saying, though, because there’s all this noise in the background. A party, music.
“Where are you, Sash?” I ask. “Jeez, it sounds crazy.”
“Bud’s. We’re all at Bud’s. The whole damn island is here. Wait! Nathan is waving! He says hi! Oh my God. Margaret is drinking a beer the size of a toddler!”
“Margaret?”
“I told you, the whole town is here. We did it, Tess! We did it! Wait. Larry wants to say something.”
Here is Larry now. “Mission Impossible is Mission Possible!” Larry screams. “Whoo-hoo!” He sounds a little tipsy. Actually, a lot tipsy. Now Sasha’s back.
“We got the letter, Tess. You’re invited! We did it! The Norwegian government! The letter even has a seal on it! It’s silver! You, child, are bringing your seeds to that vault!”
“Sasha . . .” I don’t know what to say. My father is standing really close to me, breathing his peanut butter breath on me, trying to listen in.
“Nicky says hi,” Sasha says. “He’s flashing me two thumbs-up!”
“Nicky?”
“Talbott. Java Java Java? He says he knows you!”
“Right! Of course.”
“You should see how happy everyone is here, Tess. And drunk. Okay, that too. But happy! This is incredible! I got the letter right here. I faxed it to Dr. Harv and Abby—”
She hasn’t mentioned him. Not a single word. “Henry?” I ask. None of this would have been possible without him.
“Of course he’s here. He’s actually standing right next to me, trying hard not to say a word.”
“Sash!” It’s Henry all right. My heart goes thumping around. It’s going to have to stop that.
“You probably don’t want to talk to him.”
Yes. No. I don’t respond.
“Okay. Just for a second, then,” Sasha says.
And then there he is. “It’s yours, Tess.” His voice is sad and thrilled and triumphant and a little broken. Full and empty, high and low, tide in, tide out. “It’s all yours.”
* * *
“So? What do you think?” My father asks. We are sitting at the kitchen table. We haven’t eaten a meal in the living room even once since we got back. We are in our old spots, me in my chair, him in his, my mother’s empty chair across from us. My father’s Thai chicken salad is arranged artfully on the plate. Points for presentation.
“I think it’s surprisingly delicious.”
“Not about that, you monkey butt.”
I just shake my head. I mean, the whole idea is crazy.
“You and me,” he says.
“Me and you?” The only thing crazier than me going to Svalbard is me and my father going to Svalbard. I mean, he’d have to really pile on the old concert T-shirts to stay warm.
“You don’t say no to something like this.” He’s shoveling in his dinner. Someone—Jenny—should have taught him not to talk with his mouth full.
“You don’t?”
“Hell no!”
I shake my head. Maybe I grin ever so slightly. Just picturing it.
“Right now, the difference between going and not going is going.”
“Very philosophical, Father.”
“Fucking awesome road trip?” He wiggles his eyebrows up and down, in a How Could You Resist manner.
There are things I’ve learned by then about Longyearbyen, the tiny, remote capital of Svalbard, that settlement built on stilts on permafrost, the town nearest to the vault. Polar bears wander into its streets, hungry and curious. You must wear a rifle outdoors. Reindeer wander through too. Transportation is by snow scooter. It is home to the northernmost church, the northernmost post office, and the northernmost airport.
“Did you know they’ve got a gourmet restaurant there?” my father says. “It’s true. And one of the best wine cellars in the world.”
He’s been reading up. I can tell by his eyes and his goofy smile that he’s caught vault fever, same as the rest of them.
I am clearly outnumbered.
I smile just a little.
My father lets out a whoop. He shoves his chair back. He trots down the hall, ponytail bopping up and down. “Where is it?” he yells.
“What?”
“Never mind. I found it!”
He returns, and of course he’s wearing that balaclava. He’s a deranged Arctic burglar.
“Get that thing off. You look scary.”
Henry is right. This—the seeds, Svalbard, this triumph—it is mine. Mine and my mother’s. But it is also Henry’s. And it is also my father’s, and it is Grandfather Leopold’s and Jenny’s. It is Sasha’s and Larry’s, Dr. Harv Johansson’s, and Dr. Abby Sidhu’s. It is Margaret’s and Nathan’s and Cora Lee’s; it is Joe Nevins’s and Nicky the coffee guy’s. It is Bud’s, from the tavern. It belongs to every one of us who makes this trip from here to there. Every one of us who can use some reminding that even after the worst disasters, down deep, the truest things endure.
chapter twenty-four
Salix arctica: arctic willow. This plant has evolved to survive its unique and extreme Arctic conditions and now can live as long as 264 years. Its roots have developed to withstand permafrost; its leaves have grown fuzzy hairs like its own sweater, and the plant itself has created its own pesticide against insects like the Arctic woolly bear. But the seeds . . . They have changed over time to become sticky, so that when they are dispersed in high winds, they don’t travel too far; they have evolved to stay on the island where they belong.
We take a Lufthansa jet out of San Francisco, 5,871 miles to Munich, eleven hours and twelve minutes, and then Munich to Oslo, 979.6 miles, five hours and fifteen minutes—
“Stop that,” my father says. “No more counting. Just . . . live it.”
He rolls up his coat to use as a pillow and gets his big legs up on the airplane seat. After so many hours in an enclosed space high above (I won’t say how high) the earth, my head feels full of explosives. I watch movies on the little screen that is on the back of the seat in front of me. I like when the other passengers laugh at the same spots in the film where I laugh, all of us with our headsets sharing a good joke in the otherwise silence of the plane.
We board our SAS flight to Tromsø, a town that sits at the northern tip of Norway. It is a clear day, and outside my window, I can see the fjords in the sea, icy humped lands, which resemble the surfacing back of a San Juan whale. The white fjords, the blue-green sea surrounded by snowy mountains, it doesn’t seem real, except that my father is leaning over me to see too, and he’s squashing me.
Back home, kids are slamming lockers and studying The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in AP Engl
ish and buying roses for the stupid student body Valentine’s Day fundraiser. And I am here, getting closer and closer to the vault, landing in Tromsø, in a small blue airport out in what feels like the middle of nowhere, a modern airport of glass and tall, exposed architectural rafters.
This trip, this mission, has brought us through our first Christmas without my mom, which we spent eating a big Indian dinner my father made while we watched Orion’s Belt, a Norwegian film set in Svalbard, and then The Golden Compass, because the armored bears in it are from there too. We spent the anniversary of her death, ten days before we leave, in REI. My father buys a small GORE-TEX bag for the seeds and two pairs of wool socks.
That day, there is a postcard from Henry Lark in the mail. On the front is an antique drawing of a strawberry plant, with its various parts labeled in Latin. On the back, Thoughts and love in the small and geometrically perfect letters I recognize.
In the airport, we take our bags into the bathrooms and do what everyone is doing here, shedding our travel clothes and changing into our carefully planned gear. I am finished before Dad, and I wait out in the lobby in front of the men’s room. I crack up when I see him in his boots and snowsuit. He’s got his largest parka over one arm, but he still looks like he’s about to jet off to the moon.
I point and laugh. “You’re stuffed,” I say.
“If we have to go to the bathroom, we’re screwed,” he says.
We wait for our plane on blue chairs. I shove my hand down into my bag again to check for the seeds, which I’ve done about a hundred times since we’ve left. It’s actually pretty crowded in the airport. You wouldn’t think it’d be anyone but us, but Svalbard is a destination for adventure travel, and so there’s actually a couple on their honeymoon and a group of guys in jackets with patches that say ANTARCTIC SURVEY 1996, and even a couple of old ladies in fur-lined GORE-TEX parkas.
My father eats a packet of peanuts in his astronaut suit. He strikes up a conversation with two students who are heading to Svalbard to see polar bears and the northern lights. I’ve gone past exhaustion and am heading back where I began what seems like days ago now when we left home—excited anticipation. Nylon rubs on nylon whenever we move. It means we’re almost there.
* * *
The plane lands in winds and snow, and we hang on tight, because outside, there’s only white and gray and snow and haze and it looks like we’re headed for the climactic scene in the disaster movie. But the pilot sets the plane down fast and neat. The cold—you feel it as soon as they open the cabin door. We climb down the stairwell to the tarmac and then we are hit with the full force of it. But we are here; there’s the low black building of the airport with SVALBARD on it in silver letters.
Once he’s on the icy ground, my father turns to me and shakes a victorious fist in the air, and I shake one back at him. It’s too cold to talk. The air is so piercing, my lungs burn with the freezing temperatures. I am in another world. It looks like a different planet, even here at the airport. On the ground, beneath those blizzard clouds, the late-afternoon light is blue. Everything is blue—eerie blue snow and blue mountains and blue sky. It’s beautiful and otherworldly. My father stops to try to take a picture of me for everyone back home. This takes some doing, taking off a glove with his teeth, fumbling with the camera; me hopping from foot to foot, the snap, and then camera away and glove on again. I wish I could send it to Henry. I wouldn’t even care how stupid I look. Henry is with me on this trip, of course he is. I’ve got our compass in my pocket.
Dad and I retrieve our bags and take the local bus into Longyearbyen. On the ride, he elbows me and points. He stares up at something out his window, up on a mountainside.
“Is that it?” I ask.
“I think so.”
Yes. You can see it there, right above where the airport sits. The tall rectangle, the glowing blue-yellow window in the blue sleet sky.
The vault.
* * *
We are in Longyearbyen. We are in Longyearbyen. I keep telling myself that because it’s so hard to believe. It looks just like the pictures of it, rows of pointed-roofed buildings painted red and green and blue, bright colors to cheer up the often dreary winters. The late-afternoon lights of the buildings glow yellow against the blue.
The shops on the main street are quirky and cuter than you’d think. On the right, you can see the northernmost co-op shop in the world, with its stuffed polar bear next to the entrance, and on the left there is a red food truck, advertising the northernmost kebab in the world. We leave the bus in front of Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg Hotel, where we are staying. After little sleep and all those hours on the plane, it is dream upon dream upon dream. The Polarrigg is a group of wooden barracks where the early miners and trappers of the town used to sleep for the night, now turned to tourist lodging. Inside the main building, it’s warm, with a fire going in a coal stove, plank floors, rugs, red leather chairs, and wood beams overhead, mixed with odd trapper paraphernalia—stuffed Arctic foxes and a polar bear head. Singsong accents are everywhere around us. There’s a sign in Norwegian with a picture of a shoe.
Dad elbows me and beams. He’s thrilled. We read about this—it’s local custom to take your shoes off when you enter a building. “It’s true!” He’s a little loud. It’s embarrassing. But then again, this isn’t exactly the kind of place where you can fake being a local. If you even watched us trying to get our boots off, you’d know we weren’t from around here.
Our room is in one of the buildings that look like the sort you used to make with Lincoln Logs, with wood slats and a low, pointed roof. Our room is small, almost like a train car. It’s painted stark white, and there’s a pine desk and—
“Stop laughing,” I say.
Bunk beds. Yes, bunk beds, and he thinks this is hilarious. “I haven’t slept in a bunk bed since I stayed overnight at Tommy Valero’s house in the fifth grade,” he says. “I get the top.”
“Aww,” I say in pretend disappointment.
We decide we’re completely exhausted, but starving. So we go outside to the now searing cold, Indigo-blue moonlit night (boots on, gear on) and into Koa Restaurant (boots off, gear off), which looks like a saloon in an old movie, except for the bust of an old guy behind the bar, which someone has dressed in a red satin scarf and a pair of glasses.
“Grandfather Leopold,” I say, and point. It’s how I imagine him, anyway.
“Lenin,” my father says.
Our waiter’s name is Lars. There is seal steak and whale stir-fry on the menu. I kid you not. Dad orders the Reindeer Wrap “with apologies to Santa,” a joke poor Lars has probably heard a hundred times. I order the Arctic Char. A sealskin hangs on the ceiling above us. As we wait for our meal, Lars brings us a snack of polar bear meat and Norwegian berry pickles.
“Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore,” my father says.
* * *
After dinner, we walk in the frigid, bone-crushing cold from one end of town to the other. It is still out, the still and silence of below-freezing temperatures and a mining village readying for sleep. It’s a village old enough to be set away from time itself. We go into the single open shop, where the sign reads ALL THE POLAR BEARS IN THIS SHOP ARE ALREADY DEAD. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR WEAPON WITH THE STAFF. I buy a few postcards, and my father gets us each some wool mittens with reindeer on them.
“To remind us of that great dinner I just had,” he says.
We hurry, though. The cold is too intense to want anything except warmth. Back in my lower bunk, I spread out my postcards. There are many I need to send, but only one person most on my mind. I choose a beautiful, eerie, blue-tinged photo of Longyearbyen, the one that most looks like what we saw today, and I write this to Henry: Thoughts. Love.
There.
But then I change my mind. I think of us poor, old human beings doing the best we can, struggling with being either too much of who we are or too little. I choose a second postcard. I write Henry’s address on the back of this one too. The image
is of an up-close polar bear face. I write, My dinner tonight. Love, Sis.
I smile. So will Henry. And that night, even with my father sleeping in the bunk above me, even with the bite of frigid cold in the air, I sleep better than I have in a long, long time.
* * *
Pix’s seeds, from the one perfect berry of my mother’s carefully tended plant, are in their Mylar pouch, which is in the GORE-TEX bag, which is zipped into the pocket of my nylon pants, under layers of my long wool shirt and fleece jacket and down expedition-wear coat. In the other pocket, I place the compass. We lace up our boots in the lobby of the Polarrigg Hotel.
“I’m nervous,” I say.
“Me too,” my father says. His hair is tucked inside his hat, and so it is only his own familiar face I see, outlined in gray wool. The balaclava will go over the top, and the hood of his jacket over that.
Outside, our rides arrive. Students from Polar University, Lars Bruun (another Lars—this is the Land of Larses) and Gunther Fjerstad, will drive us up the mountain. Two snowmobiles, “skooters,” wait out front, looking like landed insects with long, folded black legs. Lars and Gunther are both blond and blue-eyed. Gunther is a bit older with a beard; he hands us helmets and another “skooter suit” to wear over what we already have on. They show us how to secure our helmets, their accents rising and falling in a way that sounds perpetually cheery.
What is hard to describe is the light and color of this planet Svalbard, pastel pink and purple everywhere today, this monumental day. And the cold, too, how it drives directly to your bones, no matter how many layers. The visors on our helmets come down, and we sit on the backseat of our scooters, more low-to-the-ground motorcycle than anything, a rounded nose on skis, with a curved windshield. Then Lars looks over his shoulder and gives me the thumbs-up, and we accelerate.
I hold tight to the back of Lars’s seat, my boot pressing hard against the running board, shoving an imaginary brake, but then it is clear I am in good hands with Lars, and I put my fear to the side and take in what’s real but can’t be real. The cold pierces even under all those layers; it slices right to the center of me. My father is off to the side of us in his own black insect capsule, speeding crazily, a neon-orange flag screaming behind him, the flag our point of visibility should a blizzard begin.
