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Wall Street Journal
7 days ago
- Science
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: Donald Niedekker's ‘Strange and Perfect Account From the Permafrost'
Between 1594 and 1597, the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz piloted three voyages through the frozen seas of the Arctic Circle in failed attempts to discover a northerly trade route to the Orient. In the last and most disastrous of these expeditions, Barentsz's ship became trapped in ice and his crew was forced to improvise a lodging on the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya—or Nova Zembla, the New World—to survive the winter. Depleted by scurvy, cold and exhaustion, the captain died at sea during the return voyage a year later. Donald Niedekker's evocative fictional reckoning with the expedition, 'Strange and Perfect Account From the Permafrost,' is narrated by an imagined member of Barentsz's crew who would ultimately perish on Novaya Zemlya. The book, translated from the Dutch by Jonathan Reeder, takes as its inspiration for the character an unnamed sailor found in the diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the real-life surviving shipmates, and invents for him a biography, making the narrator an itinerant poet who joins the crew to document its adventures. He duly records the wonder and terror of spouting whales and huddles of walruses ('an arbitrary patchwork of tails, heads, skin folds, tusks'), of polar-bear attacks and bewildering arctic mirages. The wrinkle is that the narrator delivers his account 400 years later from the vantage of his grave in Novaya Zemlya, which the warming planet is beginning to thaw. He thus exists outside of time and space, and his omniscient gaze fixes not only on his own life and death but on the fortunes of others in the age of exploration, including the cartographer Petrus Plancius, whose assurance that the Northeast Passage would offer clear sailing planted the seed for Barentsz's catastrophe. Tragedy has not slowed in the centuries since the narrator's death: He has witnessed Stalin's gulags fill Siberia and seen his island used as a Soviet test site for a hydrogen bomb. The quiet of the grave gives the narrator a serene detachment from all this havoc. The reflections, which drift in elegant patterns like blown snow, frequently muse on the vision of eternity inspired by the arctic void: 'Novaya Zemlya is the Nothing you must come to terms with. You do that by grasping that this Nothing is All, that All and Nothing are the same thing.'
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- The Guardian
Experience: I fought off a polar bear with a saucepan
I've had 35 close encounters with polar bears during my time as an explorer and campaigner for the Arctic Ocean. There's always that surge of adrenaline when you see one – that sense of: 'Oh God, it's happening.' I've learned how to deal with bears over the years. Although I take a shotgun and special cartridges – they're to scare them off – I've never hit a bear with a bullet. But there was one occasion when the closest thing to hand turned out to be my mother's saucepan. It was back in 1990 – I was 28, and early in my career. I was on the east coast of Spitsbergen, the largest island of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago. Svalbard has a high concentration of polar bears in the spring, gathering for the mating season. When a bear is hungry, it essentially becomes a meat-seeking missile – it can smell you from many miles away. If you're unwashed in a dark tent out on the floating sea ice, you can look (and smell) not unlike an oversized walrus. I'm the world's heaviest sleeper, but when I'm exploring, my amygdala – the part of the brain that controls fear – goes into overdrive and I sleep very lightly. For three or four nights I'd been waking up repeatedly because I thought I'd heard the dreaded crunch of bear paws in the snow. Getting up to check was an ordeal. Condensation from my breathing and cooking would freeze into a thick coating of ice crystals on the inside of my tent, which would shower down when I brushed against them. If I touched the outside of my sleeping bag with bare fingers for too long I would get frostnip – an early stage of frostbite. The least arduous way to check for a bear was to get up on to my knees while still inside my sleeping bag, unzip the tent and poke my head out of the top to get a 360-degree view. It was cold, awkward and miserable, and, often, there was nothing there. On the day it finally happened, I was finishing breakfast inside the tent. I'd made porridge in my mother's saucepan, which was one of those heavy old-fashioned ones with a plastic handle. The camping stove was still on, to melt snow for my Thermos flasks – the roaring noise was loud enough to drown out a jumbo jet. When I turned it off, there was initially silence. Then, I heard crunching in the snow. Because of the previous false alarms, I felt quite nonchalant as I unzipped the tent's entrance. It was a tremendous shock to see a huge, fully grown polar bear facing me, only an arm's length away. I had a loaded gun in the tent to scare it off, but the gun was behind me and I knew that if I swivelled to get it, my salivating visitor could attack. So my hand instinctively reached for the nearest combat-ready thing I could see – the porridge-encrusted saucepan. Holding the tent flap back, I hit the bear as hard as I could on its head. I clearly remember it wrinkling up its face and tilting its head almost quizzically to one side. I think the noise of the pan startled it as much as the impact – we could both still hear the reverberations. As I wondered whether to hit it again, it wheeled round and cantered off and out of sight. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Surprising polar bears is crucial. I've been in situations where I've heard the bear pump-priming itself with oxygen as it prepares to launch itself for the kill – the heavy breathing sounds like a London tube train. That's when you've got to use your firearm to maximum effect – holding your nerve and firing immediately above its head. Most crucially, you need to remember they have more of a right to be there than you. Polar bears are the charismatic megafauna of the Arctic Ocean – and I have now dedicated my life to campaigning for the protection of them and their habitat. As a young adventurer I used to feel it was me against my surroundings, but then I realised I could work with nature. Many years later, I would become the first person to complete a solo trek from the tip of Canada to the north pole while pulling all my supplies – a feat that still hasn't been repeated. There have been times, alone in the Arctic, when I have felt more in tune with the world than anywhere else. It breaks my heart that, because of the rapidly melting sea ice, I have witnessed a wilderness habitat that others may never see. As told to Rachel Halliburton Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@
