In Kodiak, they’d put skis on the plane. In Fairbanks, they had gotten Eddie a reindeer parka, and when she glances back, she sees his shaggy brown form hunched over his desk as though in this dream of polar night her only companion has been magically transformed into a beast. He’d had the remnants of a black eye when they left Hawaii, but it had faded to nothing, now seems as illusory and dreamlike as the rest of their tropical hiatus. She doesn’t know how he’d gotten it. The Fairbanks recon boys, who fly high latitudes almost daily, had given Eddie some last-minute tips, but he had listened only casually, without concern. He seems unbothered by the Arctic’s tricks and deceptions. He handles his charts and tables and astrocompass with the calm assurance of a priest readying communion.
As they near the Svalbard archipelago, long black crooked leads of open water fracture the ice into a sharp-edged silver jigsaw of drifting floes. Still the weather holds. It is almost noon; to the south the horizon is lit with a narrow band of weak dishwater light. The shapes of islands appear, shadows against shadows.
One afternoon in Hawaii, Caleb had convinced Marian to fly them to the Big Island. A friend of his, Honi, a younger guy who’d been in the Pacific and was also a paniolo, had picked them up at the little Kona airport, taken them out on his rusty old boat. In the evening, as they drifted offshore, drinking beer, Honi had given them masks and snorkels purloined from the navy.
“They like this spot,” he’d said, gesturing at the inky water. She’d known she was supposed to ask who they were, but she resisted the bait, splashed in.
Emptiness below, cobalt fading to black. Caleb grasped her wrist, tethering her to him. A bright beam of light slanted down: Honi was shining a big flashlight into the water, attracting the floating sea motes. Some silvery fish glinted in the depths, like coins in a well. The first manta ray had appeared as an undulation in the murk, far below, barely perceptible. It curved upward, ascending, mouth opening, gills flexing, underside glowing white. As it arced under her, belly to belly, the water had shifted between them like wind. Descending, it became a winged shadow, briefly vanished before looping back up. Again and again it looped through the spotlight’s slant, feeding, and she had fallen through a gap in time and felt the giddy weightlessness of spooling loops over Missoula in the Stearman biplane.
Eddie hands forward a note. Might be in range Isfjord Radio. Will try.
When she’d radioed their flight plan from Barrow, she had been promised all possible Svalbardian assistance, and now the operator tells Eddie the sky is clear and everyone in Barentsburg and Longyearbyen has turned on lights for them.
The Nazis had taken Svalbard twice, wanting it for weather stations. Free Norwegians had glided over the glaciers on skis, chasing radio signals that came and went like will-o’-the-wisps, sometimes finding and killing the Germans at their source, sometimes not. Always more Germans came, deposited in the northern islands by submarine. The last Germans to surrender in the whole war had been in Svalbard. Four months after V-E Day. They would have surrendered sooner, but no one bothered to go get them.
Marian approaches from the west, low over the sea, passing through the frozen mouth of Isfjord, flanked by flattopped white mountains. They pass the lights of the Soviet mining settlement at Barentsburg. The fjord’s frozen surface gleams patchily where the snow has blown thin. They will try to land up the valley from Longyearbyen, at Adventdalen, where the Luftwaffe had made an airstrip.
Caleb had given her the manta rays to tell her he loved her. He knew how to tell her so she would hear him. She and Eddie had left on January 20th, the day they received word the delayed Norsel had finally crossed the Antarctic circle, nearing the continent. Caleb was at work on the ranch when she’d gone to the airport. No goodbye, of course. Their love meant everything, changed nothing. Their trajectories would continue along, unbowed by it.
She turns down a small inlet off the Isfjord, passes over the clumped yellow lights of Longyearbyen and the rickety wooden structures and cables that support mining trams. Already the transit across the North Pole, the stars and auroras and ice, has taken on the disintegrating strangeness of a dream.
The narrow valley is hazy. A coal fire still burns in one of the mines, started by a shell from a German battleship. They land on smooth snow marked by burning flare pots. A crowd has gathered to greet them.
When you are truly afraid, you experience an urgent desire to split from your body. You want to remove yourself from the thing that will experience pain and horror, but you are that thing. You are aboard a sinking ship, and you are the ship itself. But, flying, fear can’t be permitted. To inhabit yourself fully is your only hope and, beyond that, to make the airplane a part of yourself, also.