Lågøya & Sorgfjorden, Svalbard
Steel-gray, the sea rose and fell like crushed silk bunting caught by a passing breeze. Black and forbidding a sliver of land lay between us and the distant mountains of Nordaustlandet that glimmered in the perpetually circling sun. Lågøya, the flat island, looked little more than a surfacing shoal from a distance but as in all cases here in the far, far north, appearances can be deceiving.
One must set foot upon the shores to know this land for treasures hide in the most incongruous places. Logs and lumber are tossed far and wide by winter ice and tides. And yet no trees grow upon these shores. Escapees from a distant land they rode the rivers northward and hitched a ride on the polar ice around the Arctic Ocean. Our curious eyes probed and pushed looking for clues of origin. But the plants and animals care little of whence they came and instead welcomed the flotsam as shelter in a storm. Tiny plants tucked themselves in the lee. Terns and gulls embraced the slight elevation upon which to perch. And a tiny red phalarope sat upon a nest tucked in a tumble of wooden rubble.
Although barely a few feet above the surging sea, freshwater ponds covered most of the island. Sabine’s gulls foraged in the shallows while purple sandpipers probed along the edges. Like a mirror the calm waters caught the silver of the clouds and cast our own images back to us as we moved along the gravelly beach terraces en route to view the mammal of the morning. Individually indistinguishable from a distance, heavy bodies piled one upon the other. Only tusks like toothpicks stuck in chocolate pudding separated one walrus from the other. With time and observation the amorphous mass defined itself into snorting, argumentative pinniped males hauled out on the strand to moult.
From death comes life and when one of the “tooth-walkers” dies a smorgasbord is laid for those who wait for the plenty of winter to once again return. The “Bay of Sorrows” or Sorgfjorden was the scene for dramatic human adventures in the past and it was our intent to discover this bit of history while on foot. Instead we found ourselves lined up like peasants at a royal feast watching the queen of the Arctic and her two cubs dine on walrus steaks and blubber.
Days are never ending here above eighty degrees north. Tonight the drifting ice of the polar pack will dance in the midnight sun.
