Icebreaker

by Horatio Clare

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What’s it like cooking on a ship?’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  He is very shy and it is not fair to interrogate him. Let him finish his cigar in peace. Try this guy instead.

  ‘Hello! I’m Horatio.’

  ‘Ey.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Mumble – sounds like Jouni?

  ‘May I ask what you do?’

  ‘Ey?’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Engineer.’

  ‘Ah right! So, what did you do today?’

  Pained look. Pause. ‘Some little bit.’

  ‘And what will you do tomorrow?’

  Agonised look. Hand to head. ‘I don’t know.’

  Right. I had expected this. Sometimes I will meet men who do not have much English, who are shy and who have a Finnish reserve which is reputed to out-reserve even the British version. This is a Finnish silence! They are famous. They come in different grades. There are relaxed silences, companionable, puzzled, contented, unhappy, charged and thoughtful silences, even lyrical silences.

  I will join Jouni in a thoughtful silence. He stares at the steel bulkhead, a good move given the alternatives are Heather’s bum or Kyra’s boobs. The bulkhead is pale yellow. Painted like that or nicotined over? Practice, a Finnish silence is just a question of practice. I can do this. Jouni is rubbing his jaw as if he has toothache. We can do this. We are in heavier ice now, the ship grating and vibrating. Jouni has half of his cigarette left. He is greyed and lined by cigarettes as I will be if I do not quit. I am doing this wrong. I am eating his silence – we can both feel it. No, worse, I am listening to his silence. Of course! How can you hope to share a silence if one of you is eavesdropping on the other? Quickly, I must listen to my own silence. Crash, thump, scrape, gripe goes the ice against the hull, and then if I can hear mine, and he his, might we then begin to hear, to share – clash, clash, grate – something? This is hopeless. Something just whimpered. Was it Jouni? Was it me? The women on the wall are laughing.

  ‘Bye! Have a good evening.’

  ‘Unph,’ says Jouni.

  I want desperately to apologise.

  On the bridge we study the ice map, a satellite picture of the whole Gulf of Bothnia. The gulf has the outline of a squeezed figure of eight. The ice chokes the Bay of Bothnia, the northern oval, where we are, but it tails off south of us in the Kvarken Strait, the pinched neck where Sweden and Finland are only fifty miles apart, which divides the bay from the Bothnian Sea.

  ‘Up here below Kemi they are cutting this piece off,’ Tem says, the cursor moving across the bottom of a huge comma of ice. An icebreaker is making multiple passes along it, hoping the wind will move it west.

  ‘Look at the long-term ice trend,’ he says, bringing up a graph. ‘From 1965 to 1986 most of the gulf was covered at this time of year.’ Around the north and east coasts tonight there is a fat rind of ‘fast ice’, sheets that are attached to the land, and a thicker swelling of drift ice in the middle. The southern gulf is largely clear.

  ‘This would be so nice!’ Tem says wistfully, indicating the old seasonal average. ‘We need a high pressure over Murmansk.’ He points to the Russian port on the White Sea, far to the north-east. ‘Then you get nuclear winter in Bothnia! Not rain. The low pressures are coming too far north. Everything goes OK as long as the Brits get the rain. I think it’s Brexit. They are going to leave the EU, and they don’t want the rain any more so they send it here.’

  At midnight we are parked in what looks like tundra, snow on ice shining in the searchlight beams. Our lights are a blazing array fore and aft, two white arms reaching out ahead of us, while a bank of smaller lamps creates a wobbly lens of light around the ship. We are a space station, a tent of light and power hovering until our charge comes out of Raahe, a small bulk carrier. She appears, and now the engines scream, Sampo deploying all four as we set off through consolidated brash ice, a packed jumble, wind broken and wind reformed. The coaster is close behind in our black wake, small and vulnerable, following us like an eerily obedient child. We turn her loose at the edge of the pack and steam back into thick ice. Sampo brings us to the most gentle, inching stop. Our speed through the water shows zero but the instruments still display a speed over ground as Otso drifts with the ice.

  ‘You aren’t going to anchor?’

  ‘No, no, never. If you put the anchor down the ice won’t give it back! We just park in the ice. It’s moving at zero point three knots,’ he says, ‘So a mile every three hours. Should be fine.’

  Still wakeful, I poke around my cabin. Time has paused here, leaving a cassette player built into a shelf and relics in the drawers. Here is a cup of Norwegian krone, holes punched through their centres, on top of a copy of Newsweek from 1995 – will Michael Jordan return to basketball? Underneath is a National Geographic from April 1979. The big question of that spring edition was WHAT ABOUT NUCLEAR ENERGY? There are advertisements for brown BMWs, Rolex watches and Beechcraft aeroplanes; there is a long feature on Old Prague, a city behind the Iron Curtain which the magazine treats as a lost world. The lead story comes from east Africa. Mary Leakey writes about her discovery and excavation of the Laetoli footprints, a set of bipedal tracks made by three of our ancestors around 3.6 million years ago in what is now Tanzania. My sense of time totters. From feeling old – I remember those antique BMWs, just – I am now too recently born and too soon dead to register on a timeline which would also show our forebears. Otso’s keel would have been riding where the top of her mast is now if she had been here when that little group left their footprints. There was no ice cap in the northern hemisphere. Sea levels were twenty-five metres higher than they are tonight. It was the Pliocene period, when global temperatures were two to four degrees higher than pre-industrial modern averages – ‘In fact conditions were rather like those we are heading into as we modify our own climate,’ Peter Wadhams writes in his Farewell to Ice. Agriculture would not have worked for the Laetoli hominids, who lived in downpours and heatwaves, but during the Pliocene earth’s atmosphere cooled as the planet entered a series of ice ages separated by tens of thousands of years, the modern cycle.

  We are a spaceship submerged under the ghost of a Pliocene sea at an echo-junction of climatic change points, our earth warming as theirs cooled. In a few decades there will again be no ice here; Otso’s descendants will be in the high north, defending Arctic oil rigs from fragments of the polar cap. Perhaps the most significant difference between us and the beings who made the footprints, across those millions of years, is that we know that change is coming, though we can only guess at its magnitude. I envy our ancestors their innocence and their solidarity. There has been speculation that the three sets of footprints were made by a family group going down to a waterhole, but there is no evidence for this. We do know that one of them was walking in the tracks of another, placing his or her feet in the leader’s footprints. Was this a game? A ruse? Perhaps it is another echo. Perhaps we have always made tracks for our charges to follow. The wind has dropped outside. Otso is as silent as she can be, her ventilation humming.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ice and Albedo

  DAWN IS A pale high blue, minus ten and colder with the windchill, ice showing in black scars where the wind has cleared it of snow. The pack is streaked with breaks, fractured lakes and linear pools called leads. The vocabulary of sea ice is a lovely mush of different languages. From Russian come polynyas, irregular lakes enclosed by ice, and sastrugi, sharp wind-formed ridges on floes, and nilas, a thin and bendy ice crust. From North America come bergy bits and growlers, different grades of iceberg; from Old High German and Swedish comes firn, a frozen crystallisation halfway between ice and snow.

  Breakfast is turgid frankfurters and tasteless eggs. I vow not to get up for it again. Outside the cold makes your eyes cry. You inhale, and the frigid air makes your stomach lurch. We steam back to Raahe, in the early light a low shore, a sentry line of wind turbine
s and a steaming steel mill. Radios chirrup and growl in Finnish. Some of the voices sound as though they come from sea dogs, hard as rocks, surely bearded. Ville takes us close to the port, opening the channel, passing the little orange pilot boat, which looks bound in ice.

  ‘When it freezes hard the pilots use an aluminium sledge to get to the ships,’ he says. ‘Three years ago one fell in.’

  ‘Was he OK?’

  ‘No, he died. Caught between the sledge and the ship. One of the crew was fishing at home last year, he heard a man fall through the ice. Screaming. They got him out, but brain damage.’

  ‘How long do you have, if you go in?’

  ‘In about five minutes you lose consciousness, in fifteen it’s game over.’

  ‘Have you ever been scared, Ville?’

  ‘When I was young. Going from Holland to the UK there was a small hurricane in the North Sea. It was very rough. But I grew up on ships. My father was a chief engineer. I’ve been on ships since I was three years old.’

  ‘Born to the sea!’

  ‘It is hard sometimes, with my wife. But well paid and lots of holiday. And on icebreakers lots of steering! Every day is different.’

  Tem says his wife understands. She was on ships too. ‘We met on a ro-ro between Belgium and Middlesbrough. She was my senior officer.’ (‘Ro-ro’ is short for roll-on, roll-off, most commonly referring to vehicle and passenger ferries.)

  ‘How is it with your children, when you go away?’

  ‘When they are little it is not so bad; when you go away they don’t say anything. But now … my son is seventeen, my daughter is ten. It is harder. They say why, why are you going away for three weeks? When are you coming back? I got home and my daughter wouldn’t speak to me at all.’

  He shakes his head. Then he brightens. ‘I have a plan. In the half-term I am going to bring them aboard one at a time.’

  ‘They will love that!’

  ‘I hope so. But I am a little worried they will get bored. The Internet is quite slow. Perhaps I will bring some games. Xbox or something …’

  It is the only anxiety I have seen in Tem. The children of these icebreakers can lack for nothing financially. The cars and houses they talk about suggest high salaries. And when he is at home a father is soaked in time.

  ‘I am the taxi driver,’ Tem exclaims. He looks so happy at the thought. ‘I do all that when I’m home! You want to go somewhere? You want Daddy to wait? OK! Let’s go!’

  ‘Supermarkets!’ Ville exclaims. ‘Being on the ship is no cooking, no washing-up and no supermarkets. I hate supermarkets.’

  Perhaps Dad extends the house, buys and builds, like Sampo. When he is gone he is not far away and will be back soon. ‘This is as close to seafaring as you can get without having to be always out there,’ Sampo says. But ‘not far away’ and ‘back soon’ are poor currency as you offer them at the door, gently detaching yourself from your child’s hugging arms.

  We all send messages and love, hugs and photographs, and wait for anything back, any news. It is horrible to trade your presence for their security. All the officers and engineers have been on ships which took them away for weeks and months – they know it could be worse, it could always be worse. And the silence of wives and partners surrounds every conversation. The rhythm of the sailor’s partner’s life is single parent, spouse, single parent, spouse. Single parent: up at dawn, the school run, work, shopping, school run, cooking, children’s bedtime, work, your bedtime, up at dawn – for half the year, in fragments. Nothing the men are doing out here is hard compared to that – highly skilled certainly, psychologically tough and increasingly draining as the voyage goes on (the navigating officers work six hours on, six hours off) but not hard.

  The sea is ice-white to the horizon. Soft lavender and pink spreads where the sun rises into a white-blue sky.

  ‘We are waiting for the ugliest ship in the Bay of Bothnia to come out,’ Ville says. ‘A barge and pusher.’

  A barge and pusher looks like one craft, with a wheelhouse at the back and a huge cargo hold at the front, but the two parts can be decoupled.

  ‘What’s she doing?’

  ‘There’s a big vessel in the gulf – there. See?’

  The electronic chart shows Arkadia stationary to the south-west.

  ‘Arkadia has coal from Poland. She’s too deep to unload in the port so we lead the pusher out to her, and when she is loaded we bring her in. And we’ve got iron-ore carriers from Sweden coming down.’

  A magenta light spreads across the horizon until the whole western sky glows. The sun now is orange in the east. Instead of warming, the temperature drops to minus twelve and I am nipping in and out of the bridge, trying to miss nothing of my first sub-Arctic sunrise. Luminous blues pool in our track. The ice is blue-sheened white. The forested shore looks like black moss around the rim of the ice. We steam down the fairway, broken ice now refrozen into thumping white cobbles. The noise and rumble are reassuring: we are working.

  Reidun is discussing the ice map with Tem. There is rueful laughter at the diminished coverage and hope at the promise of colder winds and high pressure. The Polish coal Finland is importing this morning will kill the ice, of course. Otso would seem to be conniving in the destruction of her livelihood, but paradoxically the shrinking of the ice has increased the demand for icebreakers. In the Arctic glaciers are calving bergs of hard multi-year ice which thin or non-existent first-year ice now fails to contain. There will soon be many more ships running north of the Arctic Circle, in need of protection, rescue and cleared channels.

  Now the pack is pinking as our shadow deepens to a dark and glowing petrol blue. The chief electrician comes up to fix a radio. Tem is fiddling with small cameras and mounts, and there is a happy chatter on the bridge, the sound of men with small fixable things to play with, equipment to assemble. You can feel their pleasure in occupation.

  Wind-driven, the pack squeezes tight behind us, closing over the fairway almost as soon as we break it open. We keep the pusher barge within half a ship’s length as we lead her out to Arkadia, the turbulence of our wake clearing a few metres of water in which she can move. The barge is a square-bowed brute, her bridge narrow and winged like a submarine’s. Behind her comes the pilot boat carrying the crane operators who will work Arkadia’s derricks, transferring her coal into the barge. Fairy fires sparkle on the ice as the sun climbs. There are no birds flying, no seals to be seen, no planes overhead, and no movement anywhere but our convoy, shepherding coal buckets across ice like a blazing white moon. At the edge of the ice we pause, turn and escort the pilot boat back in. We turn again and set off into the pack. Now we park in the ice and let down the ladder. We are free until this evening and are going for a walk.

  Can it possibly be safe? I have never stepped off a ship at sea before. Sampo is going to fly a drone. The quadcopter is as big as a suitcase. ‘The ice is over twenty centimetres thick,’ he says encouragingly, ‘At forty you can drive a truck on it.’

  ‘So you just … step off,’ I tell myself, and do.

  I can feel the sea underneath, I am sure. Something is not right, your feet insist. Is there some internal human gyroscope which senses that the sheet is moving with us on it? There is an apprehension of movement, something neither solid nor liquid under the snow. Scuffing the powder away reveals what looks like sinister black glass. Lifting your gaze to the horizon brings a giddiness of space; from down here the range of view seems infinite, a desert, an elation of light. Out of the ship’s shade the glare is exhilarating, light flinging blue-gold out of the heavens, shadowless and ethereal. An elemental realm this, part desert, part sea, all its own. You feel dizzy, you feel like laughing, you feel like setting off for the horizon. There are no reference points but the ship.

  Otso’s blue hull rises out of broken slabs of green-white ice like jumbled tables. The slabs are topped with snow and underlaid with a layer of darker ice. In a Bothnian calm, molecules on the sea’s surface freeze, forming crystallin
e lumps in the water. This is grease ice or frazil; we steamed through it coming out of Oulu, and it rubbles the edges of the pack and the fairway.

  Without wind or waves the crystals join, becoming a thin sheet called nilas. Nilas divides the atmosphere from the water. Now congelation growth begins, with water molecules freezing on the bottom of the sheet. In the darker layer at the base of these slabs you can see a vertical shading, columns of crystals growing downwards, first-year ice which may thicken to a metre and a half up here, and to half a metre in the Antarctic. Because all the crystals in a first-year ice sheet are oriented in the same direction the sheet is mechanically weak, easily broken by an icebreaker’s bow. The immediate question is how it reacts to compression forces, as I am standing on top of it.

  We step gingerly around our vessel, which seems neither afloat nor aground, as if she had hovered down onto the surface. Her stern is an extended shelf, notched to accommodate the bows of a towed or pushed ship, padded with thick rubber mats and two giant rugs woven from heavy mooring lines. We stoop under Otso’s bustle. You tread lightly near her, uncertain of how far she has cracked the ice beneath the snow.

  ‘The crew make these mats; you cannot buy them,’ Sampo says. A half-woven rug of massive rope plaited over steel cables is suspended above the deck. At the stern the whole assembly, rubber and hemp, is torn, buckled, hackled with icicles and dusted with snow. ‘That’s where that ship hit us,’ Sampo says. ‘There’s a crack under there.’ At the waterline Otso wears a belt of stainless steel, which reduces the friction of the ice. The inner hull has been reinforced and reinforced again with tonnes of struts and girders, Sampo says. Thus belted, and with her shallow, rounded keel, Otso is descended from the first icebreakers, built on the White Sea in the twelfth century by the Pomor people, Karelians and Russians from Novgorod. They navigated in koches, flush-planked sailing vessels with rounded keels. They were designed to be squeezed. Pressure on either side of the hull would pop them up on to the ice, undamaged.