Endurance

If you've never read of Ernest Shackleton's voyage toward the South Pole, I'll recommend again Endurance. It's a book never far from my mind living in the far north. This week has seen some of the coldest recorded temperatures ever in Bergen. Of course, they haven't been recording tempuratues that long. This whole area was under glaciers just a few thousand years ago when the Egyptians were building pyramids. Nevertheless, having our floating dock frozen into the sea ice because the NAO being so far westward is directing the wind from Siberia rather than the Atlantic is pretty cool. The phenomena that tide under ice produces are fascinating. There are holes reminiscent of the Mandelbrot Set where water wells up from the stationary ice as the tide rises. Today there were loud booms as the ebb tide turned and water started to flow back in. The ice, thick enough for us to stand on, cracks at tilts as the water flows in. The ice separates from the land and seawater flows out across it, forming a slush as it goes. Underneath that slush though is still solid tilted ice.

I think of stories my Aunt Amy has told me of the ice on the Severn River in Maryland running up against the land and destroying the wooden docks as if they were toothpicks. Shades of Shackleton's ship being crushed by the flows in the Antarctic. In Tromsø I visited a Polar Exploration Museum with Alora and Brittan. Here, like the Winter Olympics, the Norsk punch above their weight by several orders of magnitude. There they have pelts from most of the seals and relics of great explorers like Amundsen. Norway has been a frontier for thousands of years in the way the American West was only for a few decades.

It is a strange thing to now encounter these things I was weaned on stories of as a child. My uncle Bob was a mountain climber. He attempted Everest, inspired as so many were by Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. He went to the Antarctic and conquered peaks no man had before, naming one Krisjul Mountain for his daughters. I remember vividly sitting at his table in Redwood City while he regaled my brother and I with tales of almost freezing to death and snuggling bottles of his own urine to stay warm on the mountainside. Last year I concurred my first 14er in Colorado in the melting snows of May and this week Maxwell and I did a winter summit of Lyderhorn. Of course, the incredible is normal here i Norge.