In a little more than a week, summer will officially end. If you feel like you didn’t quite get your fair share of warm weather, take comfort. Commentator and writer Julia Pistell actually sought out the cold. but she didn’t find enough of it.
While my friends were dusting off their barbecues and beach umbrellas, I flew to the Arctic Circle, all the way up to 77 degrees north. In Greek ‘Arktos’ means ‘bear.’ Up north, the the Great Bear constellation, Ursa Major, hangs in the sky pointing the way towards the Svalbard Archipelago’s mountains and ice floes.
But I was headed to to the Arctic circle in the summertime, where it’s daytime all night long, so I would not see a bear in the sky. But if lucky, I would see the real thing on land.
Arctic Svalbard, with its relatively recent human history, does not capture the hearts of the average traveler with only two weeks of vacation time a year. You don’t go to Svalbard to contemplate our human origins. You go to Svalbard to contemplate our end.
This year, the ice was lower than ever. To find our polar bears and their cubs, we drove to the coastline and dug binoculars into our eyes, hoping to get an inch or two closer. They huffed and hustled on land, striding across unknown territories, searching for the icebergs they need to fish for seals.
The great Arctic explorers perished when trapped in too much ice; the bears are dying off because now there’s far too little.
I knew before I left that melting ice is a problem. But actually sailing through an ocean with less sea ice than ever, I really began to mourn for the ecosystem we’ve all but lost.
It’s a tragedy so few people will see it. When we don’t ever see it, we tend not to think about it. It’s easy to forget — or never know — that up there, pods of 40 Beluga whales are swimming, right this moment. Reindeer are rooting through the tundra. Birds nest in high cliffs, driven ever-higher to avoid the polar bears, who have adapted to climb those cliffs and eat their eggs.
We’re more focused on the Huskies making three-point shots than the Huskies training to race across the ice.
But what’s happening in the Arctic is our home game. How many of us are paying attention?
Here in New England, we’re impatient for the seasons to change. For the bear’s sake, may winters in Svalbard stay long and cold.”
Julia Pistell is a writer and comedian in Hartford. She hopes to return to Svalbard before too long.