What would have been the point? I said when we saw her again at the reception desk later in the day. The same freezing cold, the same nothing-to-see darkness that we had experienced on the wretched dog-mushing trip. No, thank you very much, I said, before turning on my heel and shuffling back to bed. It was miserable in our room, but it was better than not being in our room.
‘The Northern Lights could knock on our door now,’ I said to Jessica, ‘and I wouldn’t even give them the time of day.’
We spent the whole so-called ‘day’ in our room, downcast and crestfallen, and then, in the so-called ‘evening,’ forced ourselves up and out into the frozen night. We trudged to the restaurant on the edge of town in the freezing cold and the pitch-dark darkness. There were polar bears in the area, but we had been told that if we kept to the road we would be safe, and at some level polar bears were the least of our worries. As we walked we naturally kept an eye open not only for polar bears but for Northern Lights. We looked. We were ready to believe. We were ready to see. We retained the capacity for belief, but deep down we had started to believe that the Northern Lights, if they existed, would not be seen by us. We chewed our reindeer steaks and trudged back again through the freezing night and the implacable cold. There was nothing to see, and the only point of the walk was for it to be over with, to know that we had not died from it, that we had lived to tell the tale, the tale that eventually became this tale.
We left the following day, empty-handed and empty-eyed. Relations with the people running the Basecamp had become somewhat frosty. My joke about Yeti’s name had caught on to the extent that Jessica and I referred to her only as ‘the abominable Yeti,’ but it had not endeared us to her, and while nothing that had happened since had caused her to feel more warmly towards us quite a few things — not least my singing that song from Full Metal Jacket—had contributed to an increased frostiness. We were like skeptics among the faithful at Lourdes and they were glad to see the back of us. That was fine by us, because we were glad to see the back of a place which we had taken to referring to either as ‘this ghastly place’ or ‘this fucking hellhole’ before settling on ‘abominable’ as the adjective of choice. We had had the experience of a lifetime but it was not the experience that we had hoped for; it was like a lifetime of disappointment compressed into less than a week, which actually felt like it had lasted the best — in the sense of worst — part of a lifetime.
The cheerless bus took us back through the abominable city to the airport, to the terminal. Our experience might have been expected to put a strain on our marriage, but the experience of being so thoroughly crestfallen and downcast had made us closer, even though this would not have been obvious to an outsider as we sat silently in the depressing terminal, waiting for the plane, which, to give credit where it is due, took off exactly on time. When we landed at Tromsø an English couple we had met in the bar of the Radisson said, ‘Did you see the Northern Lights?’ Apparently, the Lights had put in a special guest appearance as we were flying—but on the other side of the plane. It was like there was a blight on us, and even though I’d assumed our spirits could not sink any lower they did sink even lower, and then, after we’d changed planes yet again, in Oslo, they sank still lower. I found myself in an unbelievably cramped seat, with zero leg room, in spite of being assured that I had an exit-row seat. The flight attendant — a once-blonde Norwegian woman in her fifties — came by and asked if there was anything we would like. She meant in the way of food and beverages, but after being cooped up in our room in Longyearbyen I started ranting about the seat, the abominable seat with its abysmal lack of leg room, how I was cooped up like a chicken with deep vein thrombosis. Jessica had sunk into a kind of catatonia, did not say anything, but for the first time in several days, like a limb that has been frozen and is coming painfully back to life, I felt energised by my anger and outrage. Unlike the abominable Yeti and the other girls at Basecamp who had taken against us because of our poor attitude, the flight attendant was entirely sympathetic, agreeing that conditions were intolerably cramped for a tall man like me. She gave me some orange juice — free! — and I calmed down, even though, in my head, I continued to formulate expressions of outrage and hard-done-by-ness. And then, as we were about to begin our descent into Heathrow, something extraordinary happened. The flight attendant came back and knelt in the aisle with her hand on my knee. She looked into my crestfallen eyes, the eyes that had not seen the Northern Lights, and said again how uncomfortable I must be, how sorry she was. Without taking her eyes from mine she said that one day I would surely get the seat I deserved, and as she spoke, I believed that this would happen.
6
My mother grew up on a farm in the village of Worthen in Shropshire. I never liked going there to visit my grandparents: house and surrounding countryside shared an atmosphere of dank unhappiness (my grandfather had allegedly been cursed by a Gypsy) but this was not without its own brooding allure. Everything seemed far older than where we lived in Cheltenham. Marton Pool, a nearby lake, was said to be bottomless. It was held to be dangerous, because swimmers could get caught in the reeds that grew on the lake bed. As a boy I was oblivious to what I realize now was not a contradiction but an authentication or verification that this place existed in the realm of the mythic.
I also heard, many times, about the Robber’s Grave in the churchyard in Montgomery. As my grandfather and mother told the story, a man had been hanged for stealing a sheep. On the scaffold, insisting on his innocence, he prophesied that if he was telling the truth no grass would grow in an area the shape of a cross on his grave. The execution went ahead, and the sky, which had been clear, grew suddenly dark (a meteorological detail easily dismissed as after-the-fact atmospheric elaboration). We drove to Montgomery to visit this fabled place when I was about fourteen. The grave was easy to find in the dismal churchyard and, pretty much as claimed, there was a bare patch of ground in a shape approximating a cross — more like a diamond. The grave had become a tourist attraction, and even at that young age I suspected that it was preserved and maintained as such (by weed killer?). Still, the whole package — hearing about this place and visiting it — evidently stayed with me: I wrote about it in my English O-level exam.
White Sands
My wife and I were driving south on Highway 54, from Alamogordo to El Paso. We’d spent the afternoon in White Sands and my brain was still scorched from the glare. I worried that I might even have done some permanent damage to my eyes. The sand is made of gypsum — whatever that is — and is as bright as new-fallen snow. Brighter, actually. It’s really quite unbelievable that anything can be so bright. It’s a very good name, White Sands, even though we thought the place a bit disappointing at first. The sand was a little discoloured, not quite white. Then, as we drove further, the sand started to creep onto the road and it became whiter, and soon everything was white, even the road, and then there was no road, just this bright whiteness. We parked the car and walked into it, into the whiteness. It was hard to believe that such a place really existed. The sky was pristine blue, but the thing that must be emphasised is the whiteness of the sand, which could not have been any whiter. We would have liked to stay longer in this unstained wilderness, but we had to get to El Paso that night. We walked back to the car and headed out of the park.