Tristan Jones

by Ice! [V2. 0]

  One good thing about being alone in the Arctic, or out in the oceans anywhere, is that there are no cold germs, no lice, and no fleas. All the time I was up in cold latitudes I never had a headache. Nothing but my regular bouts of rheumatism when the weather gauge dropped and a stiff blow was on its way. Also "chinky toe-rot," as sailors call athlete's foot. How this came about I've no idea. It must have been from the previous owner of the sealskin boots, but the itch was murderous at first, until I finally ground up some chalk and cured it by that method.

  But mentally and spiritually I had changed. The man who went into the ice was not the man who came out. Going in, I had not known the true nature of fear. I had not known, that is, the natural animal part of man, always lurking, waiting for the slightest chance to overcome his intelligence; always lurking in the shadows of man's mind, to spring upon him and drag him so easily, should he not purposefully resist, back into the murky dark cave from which he has so painfully, so slowly, so bloodily, so heroically, dragged himself over the millenia of human history.

  When I went into the ice I had not known, either, the true nature of loneliness. Over the months of waiting for death, I had realized that the emotion we know as "loneliness" is, in fact, learned. If there were no one to tell us we should be lonely, we would not be.

  Animals herd together for two main reasons: for protection and for procreation. Along with these two instincts man adds another: to try to hide from himself the fact that everyone, in the long run, is alone. Absolutely alone. In the whole vastness of the wastes of space, every human is on his own. To admit this, and to accept it, is the key to freedom from so-called loneliness. The more it is accepted, the more the company of other, likewise "alone" people can be appreciated, and the more they can be respected, liked, and even loved.

  The intelligent man need never be "lonely." We can, if we are prepared to make the effort, keep the company of thousands of other intelligent men who have gone before us. We can learn from them, cry and laugh and hope with them, and recognize our places in the thrust of humanity from the corner of the cave to the outermost reaches of the firmament. Then we need never believe that any one of us is useless, disdained, or unwanted, for as long as there is blood in our veins, or a dream in our hearts, or a thought in our heads, we are, each one of us, an inescapable part of humanity, part of a whole. We are all a part of a spirit, a force, a will, which is irrepressible. A spirit which, even after inconceivable aeons of time, even after the whole universe collapses upon itself, will continue to be. A spirit the form of which is unknown to us; we have only an inkling, about which we can only guess.

  It is towards this spirit, this unity, that we all strive. All humans, regardless of our faith or our political colorations, strive towards the eventual unity of the human spirit in eternity. We strive towards this, consciously or not. Some of us fail, some of us lean on others. Those of us who can perceive the paradox of our aloneness and yet at the same time our unify with the Whole can defeat fear. We can triumph over the worst death of all, the death of the human spirit!

  As Cresswell neared the haze of land to the east, I reflected on all that had passed, and wondered if I could rejoin the human race.

  On the sixteenth of June, anxious and hopeful, I saw land. Magic, wonderful, solid, faithful, eternal land. True, it was the silver white, snow-topped peaks of the Barentzburg, but under the sinister white there was a glimpse, a shivering smudge of darkness down on the horizon. Rock! Terra-bloody-firma!

  Excitedly, I trimmed the sheets and fussed about like a weekend racing man, even though the wind was very weak and the boat was hardly moving. I grabbed the bucket and the deck scrubber and went to it like a maniac, scrubbing the ice-gashed, torn canvas deck covering, wiping the spars, washing down the porthole lights, fussing and tidying the grubby, stinking blankets below, squaring up the oil-smeared books in the repaired library, nailing down the floorboards, a mass of broken wood, and running up the red ensign, hardly recognizable, just a pale pinkish yellow shaggy-edged rag. The treble-stitched cross and triangles of the Union Flag, now pure white, bleached out of their colors, were still whole and sound.

  It took another thirty-six hours to reach the lee of Prins Karls Forland, even though the wind was up to gale force three hours after I sighted the land. I dared not push her too hard, for fear of opening the garboard strake even more. There was a serious risk that the amount of water leaking in would be more than I could get rid of, so I made my way into the channel between the Forland and the mainland of Spitsbergen under spitfire jib only. Of course this tiny sail would only move her very slowly, no more than two knots, but at least she was only pounding the seas, not dropping off them, as she would under the normal gale rig of mizzen, trysail, and spitfire.

  On the evening of the eighteenth of June, I found myself in flat water, in the shallow sound east of the Forland. While I worked the boat through the fluky winds as they swept round the island, I stared about in wonder and delight. There were beaches, and rocks, seals, walruses, birds, and in the calm water by the shore of the island, hundreds of jumping fish. The temperature was just below freezing, and there was ice and snow to within yards of the beach. Above, the sky was black with storm clouds charging for Siberia. Rain stabbed down at intervals, but now and again sun-rays slanted down through the gaps.

  No tropical island with white sandy beaches shining beyond the dazzling surf under the high sun of Capricorn ever looked to me as sweet, as inviting, as beautiful, as did this Godforsaken hump of half-frozen primeval rock, sitting in the raging, ice-spume-blown Arctic Ocean. The sound of the anchor chain coming out of the hawsepipe for the first time in fourteen months was to me like all the trumpet blasts of the heavenly hosts; the wind-torn wisps of ice-laden clouds whistling over the high ground of the Forland seemed like the very banners of Caesar's triumph; the walruses snouting out of the knife-thin ice by the shore and the birds gliding up on high, like a vast crowd of welcome. As I gazed around the small bay through the sleety rain, waiting to see the anchor dug in properly, I could feel the life force in everything about me. Suddenly my eyes blurred and I lifted my gloved hand to wipe away the sleet from my wet cheeks. But it wasn't raining.

  I staggered down below, to sleep on the makeshift shelf I had fixed six inches below the top of the cabin, so that the rising water would not reach me if I overslept. Pulling the blankets, still damp from the washing, over me, I cried myself to sleep like a baby. I was safe from the clutches of death. I was back among living things, that swam and flew and dreamed.

  Two hours after I fell asleep I was awakened by a far-off noise. It was an engine. I scrambled out of the blankets and clambered aloft. There, away to the south, was a boat, coming towards me. I delved into the after dodger for the siren and started to hoot. Then I realized that this was futile. They would not hear me at this distance, above the noise of the engine. Nelson jerked up and down on his foreleg, yelping a welcome. Sadly, I sunk down into the cockpit bilge to bail out two feet of icy water.

  When the boat was only a mile away and I could sense the human presence, could feel the nearness of their souls, I hooted the siren, again and again. The answer came loud and clear through the now dying wind. I saw a figure waving from the small wheelhouse. It was a man! It was that wonder of all the wonders of a wonderful world—a human being!

  I could not speak as they came onboard, and I could hardly see for the tears. The skipper sang out something, but I could not understand. In that state, at that moment, I would not have understood the Lord's Prayer in plain English. A crewman, a large, ruddy-faced, clean-shaven, blue-eyed giant, jumped onboard with a line, his heavy weight thudding on the deck. He looked at me and said quietly, "My God!"

  He walked along the deck, to where I stood clutching the mizzen shrouds, tears streaming down my face, sobbing. He put his arm around my shoulder and spoke again. The sound of his voice, this rough fisherman on one of the most forlorn, remote, cold islands in the world, was overwhelming. He held me for a full m
inute, while I struggled to put a round turn and two half-hitches on my emotions.

  It is said that when a man drowns he sees all his life flash through his mind's eye. The moment Olaf touched my shoulder, it seemed as if I could feel all of humanity, past, present, and future, pass, like an electric shock, through my whole being.

  Then the skipper of the boat leaning through the wheelhouse noticed my ragged flag. He spoke to me in English—the first time I had heard it since Reykjavik, two years before. He called the time-honored words of welcome the world over.

  "Hey, where you come from, friend?"

  "Reykjavik, byway of Greenland!" I croaked.

  The skipper repeated this in Norwegian to Olaf and the other two crewmen, who stared at the boat in disbelief. There was hardly a patch of paint left on her hull, she was all dirty grey wood where the ice had scraped and hammered her. Her wounds and gashes seemed to bleed.

  "When you sail from Reykjavil?"

  "July 1959!"

  "Goddamn!" the skipper ejaculated, then turned and spoke rapidly to Olaf. Another crewman jumped onboard my boat. I was feeling claustrophobic with two other highly complex nervous systems observing, computing, and analyzing, so very close to me that their thoughts, as they silently poured out, almost seemed audible, touchable, and visible, like the balloons of speech in the cartoons of kids' comics. It was as if, all at once, I could feel every sensation, every emotion, that these men had felt all their waking lives, and see before me all the visions of their long-past dreams.

  The voice of the skipper broke through. "I put Olaf and Gudar onboard your boat, and I tow you into King's Bay. You come onboard, come, eat, drink!"

  "No, captain."

  "It's okay. They good seamen, they bring her safe—come onboard, bring the dog!"

  I shook my head. I wouldn't leave my boat until she was safe and sound at her destination. I wouldn't leave her, even if she sank under my feet. She was my vessel, she was my responsibility. That is the hard law of the sea, immutable and fixed. I came to, squaring my thin shoulders, and nodded to Olaf as he fixed the towing line around the tabernacle. I could see, as soon as he picked up the line, that he was a fine boatman. His mate looked horror-struck at the Arctic Ocean creeping up through the boat. Grabbing the pump, he worked away at clearing the bilge. I'd not been able to completely clear the boat of water for days. He did it in fifteen minutes flat.

  I steered Cresswell in, with the fishing skipper taking it very slowly and easily, right down the deep fiord of King's Bay. There were all of twenty wooden structures! There were houses and buildings, and a church steeple even, and although it was lightly snowing, it seemed to me like we were going up under London Bridge, with the great city all around, or up the Hudson into New York harbor.

  Olaf anchored the boat, while I deflated the dinghy and dragged it out of the cabin. Then Olaf reinflated it for me. But I went ashore in the fishermen's jolly boat, which they drove straight up onto the pebble beach. I didn't weep for joy as Nelson and I stepped our five feet onto the scrunching pebbles, but I surely felt like it. Instead I glanced back at wounded Cresswell, looking battered beyond belief.

  All the inhabitants of the small outpost were on the beach to watch us go ashore. Within the hour I was sitting in Olaf s house with an electric light bulb shining miraculously over roast beef and creamed potatoes, cabbage and, the running gift of a breathless lady, Colman's Mustard! And the miracle of a hot bath with water from kettles boiling on the big potbellied stove.

  During the three weeks in King's Bay I tried to explain what I'd been doing, but it came hard, because for the first days my mind simply refused to remember. I would try to recall a date, or the weather, and a curtain would drop, and then I could think of nothing but the immediate present and the future. Above all, I could think of little else besides getting away from the Arctic.

  The Norwegians of Svalbard are quiet, sturdy, stolid folk, and they understood well enough how the long, long solitude had affected me. By instinct, for the first few days, they confined their solicitude for me to the needs of the moment. Did I sleep well enough? (I was sleeping dreams of relief.) Did I have enough to eat? (I was eating enough to feed a horse.) Was I warm enough? (I was warmer than I had been for many months.)

  The rest of the time they left me to sit in a corner, silently drinking in the sights and sounds of human interplay, like a thirst-crazed man sipping cool water at an oasis. Then, little by little, I talked to Olaf and his mates, at first babbling away incoherently in basic English, about the Kalatdlits and the bear; about the stars and the ice; about escaping from the Arctic and the everlasting numbing cold, away from the ever-present threat of a soul-freezing death in the cold, cold darkness of glittering ice. I told them how I longed for warmth and the sunshine and gentle seas, and waving palm trees in the clear, starlit heavens of the tropics.

  The Norwegian air force ran a weather station at King's Bay. Their doctor, when he examined me, was amazed at the complete absence of any fat on my body; yet, though skinny, I was very strong. He pronounced me fit and gave me some lotion for my rheumatism. Then he asked me what I was going to do.

  "I'm sailing as soon as I can, before the weather closes in again, before there's any chance I might get stuck here for a whole winter."

  "But you can winter safely here. You have your boat up on the beach. You can take off in the early summer next year. We can even arrange work for you here, if you are concerned about earning money."

  "No, doctor, I have enough money to buy five weeks' food. With what I already have, there will be enough to reach Canada, or, if worse comes to worst, Iceland. At least I'll be out of the Arctic Circle. I can work there a season, then sail on for Canada."

  "Why Canada?"

  "Well," I said, "look at all that bloody marvelous boat-building timber, pitch pine, Douglas fir—"

  He patted my shoulder. "I know your type. We've got them, too. I won't try to stop you. You sense your destiny and you follow it."

  I bought food: potatoes, dried egg, canned milk, canned meat, flour, sugar, chocolate, and canned vegetables and fruit. The kind folk of King's Bay, together with the air force men, donated another six cases of canned goods, and Olaf, with Gudar, helped me paint the boat and test the engine. On July tenth all the good folks in King's Bay turned up at the jetty to wish Cresswell, Nelson, and me farewell and Godspeed for Canada. "Send me a card!" cried Olaf. "A card?" I called back. "I'll send you a book!"

  "When?" He and all the crowd were laughing. "When I've something to write about!"

  I patted Nelson. The breeze picked up. Cresswell lurched to the first wavelets beyond the pier. The new, blood red ensign fluttered. We were off on the long trail again, across the ocean!

  Envoi: A last thought from and for America—

  Wild Nights- Wild Nights!

  Were I with thee

  Wild Nights should be Our luxury!

  Futile—the Winds—

  To a Heart in port-Done with the

  Compass-Done with the Chart!

  Rowing in Eden— Ah, the Sea!

  Might I but moor—Tonight— In Thee!

  Emily Dickinson, "Wild Nights."