To the Pole

By Kelsey Camacho

At the end of the 19th century, no one had yet discovered the North Pole. A Swedish engineer named Salomon Andrée made an appeal: What better way to do it than from the gondola of a hydrogen balloon as it passed overhead? The idea was groundbreaking. No one before had attempted or even considered the possibility. His plan was to start in Spitsbergen and cross over the Pole, landing in either Canada, Alaska, or Russia, depending on what the wind would choose.

The world was captivated. Andrée’s Arctic balloon expedition received donations, media coverage, and plenty of eager volunteers. Andrée selected two people to bring with him: Knut Frænkel, an engineer and meteorologist who had replaced a previous skeptical candidate; and Nils Strindberg, a young photographer from Stockholm. One of the primary goals of the expedition was to map the landscape through aerial photographs taken by Nils.

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The artists have different cameras. We’ve been discussing the difficulties of capturing this place. There is always something out of reach, something that slips through the cracks. You look through the viewfinder, you find the right framing, the focus. You press the shutter button. Later, when looking at the photograph, you see the colors are off. The texture is strange. The cold, quiet air is missing. And you realize the photo you took is more like a recollection of a place you visited years ago, and now it has found you again in a dream.

We spend the morning watching the landscape slip by as we head toward Fuglesongen. The coast unfolds like an accordion, one small island after another. We are wrapped in down jackets and sleeping bags, making mental maps of the mountain faces, of the reefs along the shore someone thought were whales. We memorize ice boulders deposited on the coast from the tides, chart the lonely glacial gravestones.

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Before the balloon launched, Nils Strindberg fell in love. Her name was Anna Charlier, and they had met at a family home where Anna worked as a governess and Nils as a teacher. They promised to write letters to each other when Nils left for the Arctic. Anna gave him a lock of her hair in a heart pendant, and a diary with a picture of a balloon. She had drawn herself in the corner of the picture, waving goodbye. She had written the words, “I cannot follow you.”

When the three Swedes climbed into the balloon and lifted into the northern sky in 1897, it was the last time any of them were seen alive. Fuglesongen was the last piece of land they passed over before their balloon, leaking hydrogen from the very beginning, started to go down. The precipitation in the air encased it in a heavy mold of ice. When the wind quieted, the balloon hovered in the same space, barely afloat, swaying slightly like a ghost haunting the world’s end.

Three days after take-off, Andree opened the vents to release the rest of the remaining hydrogen. It was only a matter of time. The basket landed on its side, and the silk balloon collapsed into the jaws of the pack ice at 82°N. In photographs, it resembles something slain.

According to the diaries recovered thirty years later from the expedition’s final camp, Nils Strindberg had written a farewell letter to Anna, rolled into a brass cylinder. Over Fuglesongen, in the hope that someone would eventually find it and deliver it to her, he had thrown it into the wind. It fell, it hit land, it lies undiscovered to this day.

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I want to search for the letter. I’m not the first. Others have been here before me, looking for words that have never been read, as if they would unlock something else about the story. As if finding the words would somehow change the outcome.

Spitsbergen is full of snow now. Thick coverings of loose, fresh snow that have not yet been cemented by the wind. It’s strange to see everything covered: the time-layered mountains, the whale bones, the fossils. It is all hidden, memory obliterated. If there is anything to find on Fuglesongen, it will be buried.

There isn’t much wind, the October sun hanging in the belly of the sky, the island slow-burning in the afternoon light. We climb down the ladder into the Zodiacs and head toward shore. I bring a shovel. The only uncovered ground consists of a narrow beach, big loose stones wave-washed and slippery with algae. Steep ledges of ice and snow mark the tide line. We have to dig a path inland, work our way up the slope with snow up to our knees and hips.

The artists spread out within an allotted space, and the focus they have is contagious, the way they look at the world and want to hold it. There’s a poet lying on the ground writing, a musician recording the sound of waves rattling the pebbles, a sculptor taking water samples to place under her microscope in search of diatoms and miniature worlds. A printmaker arranges ashes intricately in the snow and watches the wind scatter them. I stand on a boulder for an overview, and I think of lost balloons.

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I start digging. The act is meditative, easy to fall into the repetitive motion. The slice of the blade into the surface, the push of the handle like a lever, the heft of the catch, letting it fall to the side. Slowly, things are made new. The snow a temporary form, something that will disappear. It is lighter than water, and consists mostly of air. I hold a snowball in my bare hands, warm now, and I watch the fringes disappear. The lost words, this final letter, could be anywhere. It is a form of permanence in a place that is inherently temporary, always on its way.

What do we all search for here? The Arctic landscape lends itself to projection. There is so much space, the view is long, and if the light falls just right, we can see what we want to see. Even a lost letter can become anything — when I think of it, I imagine something immortal. Words given to the wind, maybe in the hope of them being found, or maybe just to let them live and keep living.

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Dear Anna, this might sound strange, but I always wanted to be wind. I always wanted to cover the Earth, to move without limits over the surface of everything. Dear Anna, you give me that feeling. Dear Anna, I see you everywhere I look. Dear Anna. Dear

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The light is losing its mind. As I dig, the island glows, an orange-red sheen on the surface of the snow. I look south and see the mainland of Spitsbergen, glaciers pouring from the mountains. The land is overflowing, it’s spilling from the edges. The three members of the Andrée expedition saw this island receding. They floated away in a leaking balloon toward an undiscovered place and it was their last view of anywhere.

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I’m digging into the snow and imagining all the love letters written in this place. This landscape, that somehow evades understanding, that changes in appearance by the minute. To be here is to feel longing, to watch water slip through your fingers. I see it all around me, on all of the artists now, focused in their work, their framing. We try to find the words. We try to capture scale in our images. Everyone, everywhere, writing love letters.

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Dear snow bank. Dear permafrost. Dear glacial moraine. I know you are on your way. I know you have to leave. I know none of this will last, and at the end of October, the sun will set. Maybe it’s impossible to return to this place, in this moment, but I hope I never forget.

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Nils Strindberg holds his camera and looks through the viewfinder. In the frame: ice, sky, horizon, all blending into the same shade of almost white. It keeps going, it never ends, and he thinks maybe he could watch it unwind forever. For the last time, he closes the shutter.

I have been living in Svalbard for nearly ten years, in a little town that never existed in 1897. When I go to these outer regions of the archipelago, the early explorers are always on my mind. I’m thinking of their dreams and love letters, how they studied the wind currents, the way they followed those currents to their own disappearance.

As a guide, I tell stories and answer questions. I think of more questions than I know how to answer. There are always pieces missing. The balloon has a slow leak. And maybe it’s the same concept, this relentless hunger. We feel it now in Fuglesongen, all the way north in the twilight bruise of October. We have climbed into our balloons, we are going for the Pole: the view blooms beyond us, it could swallow us whole.

Kelsey Camacho is a guide and writer who has been based in Svalbard since 2016.