The World’s Northernmost Everything: A Field Note on the Involuntary Archive

Method

One (1) participant-observer, two (2) weeks, one (1) laser rangefinder that lied by telling the truth, and a pocket that filled steadily with other people’s rope. Midnight sun throughout; no darkness against which to check whether time was passing. No control group, on the grounds that the control group would still be here, unchanged, when I got back.

Finding 1: The Superlative Is a Distraction

Svalbard runs on the word northernmost, which is a fact about a place’s coordinates and nothing else. The northernmost brewery brews the same beer as a southern brewery; the northernmost ATM dispenses ordinary money; the world’s northernmost Burger King — technically down in Tromsø, and technically northernmost only because Murmansk’s sits a fraction of a degree south¹ — sells the same burger the equatorial ones do. The adverb promises singularity and delivers, on arrival, the exact opposite: the ordinary, transported very far north and charged for the transport. This is attention degree zero² with a view. You are invited to attend to the where precisely so that you will not attend to the what.

Finding 2: The What Is Stranger Than the Where

Underneath the gift shop, Svalbard is the most concentrated preservation infrastructure on Earth: a seed vault holding a million-plus samples against the end of agriculture, a film archive in a dead coal mine holding the world’s source code and the Vatican’s manuscripts against the end of everything else, a research town measuring the end as it arrives. And underneath that is the version nobody installed: permafrost that holds the 1918 flu dead, currents that file the world’s plastic onto the emptiest beaches on the continent, glaciers hoarding forty thousand years of weather in stacked ice.

The town’s brand is remote, pristine, untouched. The town’s function is keeping everything that falls into it, forever, whether or not anyone asked. I have started calling this the involuntary archive, because pristine wilderness was taken and also a lie. One sub-note on the source code: an archive of the world’s software, filed in permafrost, is a backup addressed less to us than to whatever eventually boots it up. In the precise fortnight I was up there admiring this arrangement, at least two of that software’s more capable descendants had been quietly stood down by the institutions that built them, for reasons those institutions were not yet ready to explain in full — the kind of coincidence the North specialises in, and the reason the straight-faced version of this has a whole section on who the archive is actually for.³

Finding 3: Completion Is the One Service Not Offered

You cannot be born here (no maternity ward; expectant residents are flown south ~three weeks out). You cannot grow old here (no long-term care). You cannot, in the full sense, be buried here — the graveyard stopped taking bodies around 1950, once it was understood that the permafrost does not receive the dead so much as decline to process them, holding and slowly reissuing them toward the surface. The persistent rumour that it is “illegal to die in Svalbard” is false and, characteristically, less interesting than the truth, which is that the place has been arranged so that the beginning and end of a human life must both occur somewhere else. Everyone here is living in the middle of the sentence. The first and last clauses have been outsourced to the mainland on medical advice.

Finding 4: The Bones Agree

In temperate practice a dead thing is still warm — caught mid-exit, decomposing on a schedule, and affecting precisely because the schedule is short. Here the schedule is off. Cold suppresses the whole bacterial economy of rot; the reindeer skull, the whale vertebra, the bird in the moss are not on their way out, they have arrived at a bleached permanent middle and parked there, sometimes for decades, with a small arctic flower growing companionably out of the eye socket. This is not death. Death finishes. This is undecay: the state of having died without being permitted to complete the paperwork.

Finding 5: The Measuring Equipment Is Also Affected

I brought a laser rangefinder. It reported, accurately, distances I could not feel and slopes I could not scale, and no amount of re-reading the honest number made the glacier the right size in my body. Scale here is not available by instrument, only by walking up onto the thing and letting it be large at you. The rangefinder was never wrong. I was wrong, continuously, in one direction, for a couple of weeks — which is, I think, the correct posture for a person standing inside something much bigger and much slower than themselves, and a better souvenir than the number.

Interpretation

Descending from all this into Tromsø’s Kystens Hus — the handsome “House of the Coast,” where the ocean is presented entirely in the vocabulary of stock, yield, and sustainability-brand — I understood the two halves of the trip as the same object seen from two ends. Up on the shore I had spent a couple of weeks leaving things: photographing bones I would not take, lifting out plastic that should never have arrived, taking only the trace. Down in the hall the North was being converted, fluently and profitably, into a resource narrated for consumption — the same operation as the northernmost burger, in better lighting. The distance between the fisheries brochure and the reindeer jaw with the flower in it is the whole distance between extractive and non-extractive attention, and it is walkable in an afternoon, downhill.

Limitations

The observer arrived by expedition ship and is therefore part of the extractive phase she is complaining about; this is noted and not resolved. The midnight sun makes all timestamps aspirational. The single most important finding — that the cold which makes this archive is now failing, that the graves are working upward and the seed vault’s tunnel already flooded once — is not funny, and the register of this note is not equipped to carry it, which is why it has a paper attached.³