But hidden in the space between the light they are there. The dragons. I can see them sometimes flying on a cloudy day.


You can just make out the golden edge of a wing as it dips and weaves between the cumuli, cheekily hoping that humans confuse it for a trick of the sun’s dance. A land of intensity and intense opposites,


extremes of light and dark, Svalbard is a land like none other. During the winter months of November to February it is dark all the time. During summer – May to August – it is light all the time. And the two sets of two months in between – September to October and March to April – the sun and moon do a violent yet peaceful dance and change shifts. Despite the extremes, nothing is done in a hurry


here and nothing can be done in a hurry. Nature is violent. Nature is in control. And you must submit to her forces. When the snow comes in blizzards, you cannot change it. When the sun makes slush of the snow tracks out of town and you risk falling through the ice crust, there’s nought you can do.


It’s December The city – this city of the Arctic – has become a


glowing ember. An apparition. A ghostly ebullience of red and yellow light, floating in inky black above the world. There is no solidity here, no path, no concrete matter. All seems phantasm. A place outside time. Like me.


Patches of snow reflect the warmth of the lights but otherwise a deeply embedded night encases the town. It is the time for all manner of creatures to wander about undetected.


A time for gifts to be deposited without the faintest notion of when and where it happened. They say Santa lives in the abandoned mine.


The children place their Christmas wish lists in the letter box at the bottom of the hill, from where you can see the faintly lit entrance. The little forlorn Christmas tree sent up from


Tromsø looks less despairing than desperate. A tree with a heart who stands there, in the middle of the town square, as tall as it can overladen with Christmas lights and burdened by a cold arctic that only a tree with more clothing could stand. But nevertheless there it stands, in the middle of the town square, tall as it can as if saying, “I’m here. I can do it. I can be the Christmas tree. I am cold. I am little. I am forgotten. But I will still stand here


JULY 2015 7


for you for Christmas.” What does this sentiment, this personification of the little tree say about me? About my state of mind? Something peculiar at least, imagining the slender being with half-grimace-half-smile, stoically tolerating what ought not to be naturally tolerated for its species. One year I have been here, by fortune, or mistake. I had come looking for


myself. After the end of my marriage, the end of my career, I had walked away from it all, from the unhappiness. Lost amid the flurries of the world, I had wandered off track, all the way to the Arctic. When I first arrived I felt like the snow drift wandering across the roads up


here. The whole 40 kilometres of it. Always drifting, always across the same well ridden road, the pattern inexplicable, hidden. I believe I came up here to find the Moirai, my weavers of fate, and they are here. I can feel them, but I do not know which way to look. At once they seem on my right and on my left, above me and under my feet, behind me and in front. The wheel they spin is forever moving-so perhaps they are in all of these positions, or none of them, or always moving through at such a pace that I cannot catch them. Or perhaps I am just out of time, at odds with the machinery. It feels this way.


But no matter the direction, one must eventually move.


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