Frost Smitten
Whale burgers, endless ice, a crazed tank ride through a Siberian forest--how could Laurel McFadden '06 NOT fall in love with life in the Arctic Circle?

Story by Christine Wicker / Photos by Laurel McFadden '06

Memories of a cold place at the edge of the world have been difficult for Laurel McFadden ’06 to put away. She still daydreams of endless nights, of icy months when the sun was never seen in a little Norwegian utopia called Longyearbyen.

Never mind that fear of polar bears required her to carry a rifle whenever she went for a walk or that exhaust from her snowmobile filled her clothes with such a burnt gasoline smell that her entire bedroom reeked. Forget that whale burgers are hardly food a typical 23-year-old Californian craves. Don’t get hung up on cars that must be left with motors running in Longyearbyen parking lots because the cold is so intense that they would not start if they were turned off. “No one was going to steal your car,” she said. “There was nowhere to go and only one road out.”

The Canadian Coast Guard ice-breaker Amundsen, photographed from the vessel's helicopter

McFadden lived in Longyearbyen, population 2,000, as part of a yearlong photographic project that took her to four of the world’s most remote Arctic locales. The prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship provided $25,000 for her study during the year following her graduation. She previously had visited another remote part of arctic Norway on a summer research trip, studying a bird known as the little auk with Assistant Professor of Biology Nina Karnovsky. Despite 14-hour days and the necessity of reaching into stinking bird holes, McFadden found the frozen beauty of the Norwegian fjords was more than enough reward. She wanted to go back, and so she did.

She wasn’t disappointed. Every day in Longyearbyen was an adventure in a place where beauty was constant and constantly dangerous, where humans had each other and little else, where there was an absence of frippery and a surfeit of practicality. “People understand respect for nature, not merely on an environmental level but on a survival level,” she said of Longyearbyen, which is located on an island north of the Norwegian mainland. “You have to pay attention to the weather to survive.” Southern California with its easy, green, multi-flowered life seems vapid in comparison. Like a smiley face poster next to Frederick Edwin Church’s The Icebergs.

“I feel so at home out there,” she said.

McFadden beset by mosquitoes in Siberia

She fit in. A farm girl from Fillmore, Calif., who thinks of herself as reserved, she was considered gregarious. A woman of unusual height, she found a place where the scale of nature gave right proportion to everything. At 6-foot-3, McFadden is accustomed to having American kids on the street exclaim, “You’re really tall,” as though she might not have noticed. In Longyearbyen, however, she was rarely set apart.

“Nobody really fits in. It’s a patched-together community” with lots of graduate students and scientists studying nature, just her kind of crowd. “Everyone is an adventurous, outdoorsy, independent spirit surviving in the high north while simultaneously being part of a space-and-time-bending gossip network. You know stories about people you’ve never even seen,” she wrote in her blog. And another awesome thing: “You wear the same clothes every day. No one cares.”

Her year-long Arctic trip had begun in Canada, where she helped do research aboard a seven-story Canadian Coast Guard ice breaker called the Amundsen. Then she was off to Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, where she taught English to schoolchildren, or tried to. In her journal she recounts a typical lesson:

An Inuit classroom in Greenland

Student No. 1: What does “pillow” mean?
Me: When you go to sleep in your bed, it’s what you put your head on. Does everyone understand?”
[Series of “yesses”]
Student No. 2: What does “pillow” mean?

She lived with a family whose daughter, exactly Laurel’s age, had been killed a year earlier in an automobile accident. The mother was still deeply depressed, a state of mind that McFadden began to share. Almost no one spoke English, which meant she had no one to talk to, but even without speaking it was impossible to ignore that the whole town seemed in the dumps.

As the indigenous people of Greenland see their culture break down—stuck between old ways that won’t support their lives anymore and new ways they don’t want to or can’t adopt—alcoholism is common. Neglect within families and drunkenness is so routine that old women lurch along streets until they collapse against buildings. Even the beauty of the arctic world could be disconcerting.

“It is easy to see how people can believe in spirits out here,” she wrote. “The way the snow moves over the roofs in the wind sounds like lonely whispers and screams. Watching figures down the road swirl in and out of view leaves you wondering what is in your head and what is outside.”

The turning point of her trip occurred when she and a teenager hiked miles across a frozen bay to a settlement that turned out to be a deserted summer camp. The trek took hours longer than she expected, partly because the shorter and less warmly clothed teenager lagged behind. As darkness began to fall, the cold intensified and spotting bears became more difficult. McFadden was forced to stop again and again while the teenager caught up with her. Alone she could have reached home easily. Hampered by the girl and more terrified with each delay, she began to consider all the ways they were likely to die. Bolting for civilization seemed sensible. Instead she gave the girl some of her clothes and urged her on. Once they reached town, McFadden made sure the teen was safe before going home herself. When she took off her boots, her feet were slightly frostbitten, one ankle has been badly wrenched and a line of dark bruises showed where the boot had banged against her leg. She was hurt and could still feel a residue of terror, but the journey had shown her herself. And what she saw reassured her.

“The Arctic forces you to know yourself....You define yourself by your actions and how you handle yourself,” she said. “It takes a lot to faze me now.”

One of McFadden's biggest challenges came when she broke her foot and had to have two surgeries

After leaving Greenland, she broke her foot during a holiday in Scotland and arrived in Longyearbyen in a cast. Dragging a cast through a mile of snow to get to work at the University Centre in Svalbard, where she helped three scientists with research, didn’t help her foot heal. Before she could continue to the next step of her journey, she had to fly to Tromso for surgery to bolt the bones together. The first surgery was done wrong, McFadden says, leading to a second one and a phone call home that involved much sobbing. That was a low point.

The last stop in McFadden’s northern adventure was Cherskii, Siberia, which once hosted one of the Soviet Union’s most infamous gulags. There a local scientist hopes to restore the Siberian taiga to the savannah grasslands they were during the Pleistocene era and eventually re-introduce large mammals. Among his reclamation tools is a Soviet-era tank with the gun turret replaced by a crane. One day he took McFadden for a ride. She rode clinging to the top of the tank, fingers ensnared in the engine ventilation mesh.

The converted Russian tank that took McFadden on the ride of her life

“Sergei drove like a man with a vendetta against trees. Oblivious to old pathways in front of us, he chose instead to verve off and pulverize everything in our path. The entire purpose of the tank is to mimic the damage that a mammoth would cause, so, in Sergei’s words, ‘the mammoth is not careful, we are not careful,’” she wrote. “... It’s like riding an incredibly destructive rollercoaster without a seatbelt. Excitement, however, slowly turned into mild terror and an ever-growing undercurrent of horror. As we snapped through trees, sometimes the older ones would explode into a hail of branches—I got a pretty good blow to the skull and whipped in the face a few times from springing branches.”

McFadden survived the strange ride, and so did her fascination with the arctic. When her year-long journey came to a close, she found it hard to leave, in more than one sense. With no direct flights between Siberia and California, she was forced to travel west, spanning almost the entire globe to get home. She zigzagged across Russia: taking a two-hour helicopter ride from Cherskii to Srednekolymsk and then a small plane to Yakutsk before transferring to a larger one for the flight to Moscow. Not that she was in a big rush. McFadden was nervous about returning home, not sure of her next move. “I knew it was going to be a huge transition.”

Months later, sitting on a campus bench while California sunshine played hide and seek with arboreal shadows, McFadden often wore the look of a woman in love, slightly distracted, a bit displaced. She’d been back in Claremont working on campus as a geology technician for months, long enough to have mothballed her arctic boots and coat. She blends in with the students, but experience has changed her. She’s writing a book about her yearlong journey. Next summer, she hopes to go back to Longyearbyen, and eventually she hopes to do research of her own in the Arctic.

The intensity of her life last year isn’t easy for other people to understand. When she tells them where she’s been, they often react as though she was a tourist in some quaint place. But it wasn’t like that. Explaining isn’t anything that can be accomplished in a casual conversation. Usually she doesn’t even try.