The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

by Rebecca Solnit

  Round Portholes. The ship had every charm the word ship could possibly convey. The Stockholm is from 1953 and looks like the picture of a ship as I would imagine it in ideal form. It weighs 361 tons and is 40 meters long, with round portholes and rigging and various decks and wooden boats for ornament and a Zodiac for landings and coils of thick blue rope in baskets and Swedish colors—dark blue and pale yellow—outside. Inside it has a saloon full of rich wood and comfortable furniture and a dining room studded with old colored engravings of animals from some zoological book and a map of an earlier Arctic sea journey that shows the landmasses radiating from the pole at the center, so that you see that continents don’t really describe the organization of space up here. And small cabins with bunks and round portholes and a bridge in which they kept all the old brass instrumentation even though the captain and first mate seem to steer by computer information instead.

  I once read that we crave, contradictorily, both security and adventure, comfort and challenge. Thus the child toddles forth to investigate but wants to be able to retreat to its mother’s knee. Lying in a rocking top bunk in a cozy little room while the Arctic goes by through a porthole might be the highest possible fulfillment of those two desires in combination. When the rocking of the boat brought up the horizon, I could see the mountains in the distance across the water. When it rocked down or didn’t rock at all, I mostly saw the sea and straits and fjords with birds going by. Once I saw a pod of dolphins, black fins arcing out of the water, through the porthole of my cabin.

  Russian Ruins. The population of the once-thriving mining town of Pyramiden is now two in the winter and about a dozen in the summer; and though the hotel that looks like a Soviet barracks is technically still open, when we visited, the door that said STAFF ONLY would shut, leaving behind empty corridors and a smell of boiling potatoes. The dingy creatures in the little museum were falling apart, and the teeth and claws of the stuffed polar bear had been stolen. There was a gap in the floor where the heating was being worked on and a handful of Russian souvenirs for sale: nesting dolls and Soviet badges. Next door was a yellowish brick building, much like the hotel, that was fully populated by kittiwakes. They had built nests in the rows of deep window frames, two or three messy nests per ledge, and they screamed like seabirds and sometimes cried like children. More of them perched atop the swing sets and slide. Everything else was silent.

  The delicate blue of the former canteen and cultural center was intact, but inside it the big plants had been allowed to die, so that their leaves were translucent light brown against the light of the windows, and in the big kitchen, paint was peeling everywhere and piling up on the floor. It must have once been the northernmost movie theater in the world. And across what the humorous Russian guide Dmitri called Red Square—a long, greenish rectangle planted with imported grass on imported soil—was the newer cultural center that, he told us, contained the northernmost grand piano in the world, though all the books had been stolen out of the library. In front of the center was a statue of Vladimir Lenin. “A man I never met,” declared Dmitri. It was there to be frozen and snowed upon and ignored for the foreseeable future, except in summer, when groups like ours came by and took pictures. The northernmost statue of Lenin in the world, he added.

  Perpendicular to the newer center was the swimming pool, a half-size Olympic pool tiled in pastel colors with the lane dividers still stretched across the dusty expanse. Undoubtedly the northernmost swimming pool in the world, in which no one any longer swims.

  Sleep.

  Bear: One of the three polar bears the captain spotted on the far side of Magdalenafjord our first day was napping. These bears seemed to be performing illustrations of their capacities for us. The first we saw was walking with that long-legged, ambling, shambling gait that seems so different than that of black and brown bears, just as their long streamlined profiles seem different from the dish-faced, domed-forehead faces of grizzlies. Walking alongside a hill of scree, its white that makes it invisible on the ice makes it distinct on the gray slope. The second one was up higher, tearing at something it was feeding on, with gestures of its neck. The third was recumbent upon a bed of green moss, the moss that grows in domelike hummocks, its head and tail just slightly curled in, and it periodically rearranged itself or looked up at us. It was shocking to have so quickly penetrated to the realm of polar bears’ naps and shocking to see the creature so vulnerable and so confident in its own habitat. If it was in that habitat—so far from the sea ice where I think it is supposed to be hunting—maybe it was in crisis. It was hard to tell, but a white bear on green tufts is not exactly camouflaged.

  Me: Being here was restful. It seemed both odd to be so comfortable in such a remote place and perfectly sensible to have come to the end of the world for the peace and quiet in which to nap. Which I did deeply and often, and at night I dreamed—of a forest that doesn’t actually exist at the end of my childhood street, a house on the corner of a street near Baker Beach in my city that also doesn’t exist, and then the childhood swimming pool piled higher than its deep end in wishing coins and debris thrown by neighbor children, and a visit with the infant son of an acquaintance in a house I have not actually been in for twenty or thirty years. It was so peaceful in this quiet place at the end of the world where I could only be reached by the radiotelephone that only my brothers had the number for.

  Swedish Baking. Sometimes what looked like rye bread was cake, sometimes what looked like fruit bread was rye with nuts, sometimes a great brown sourdough loaf was baked, sometimes the coffee cake that was put out on the round table in the saloon was extraordinarily moist and delicate, particularly considering that it was made by thin tattooed young women named Hannah and Erica, sometimes one wished that there was not quite so abundant a choice of sweets and starches. Spiral cinnamon rolls, cookies of various kinds with nuts, another moist coffee cake topped with toasted almond slivers and cardamom, chocolate cake, raspberry pie with whipped cream, and more. See Sleep (Me)

  Underwater Forests with Pink Lanterns. Sometimes when the Zodiac came into the shallows for a landing, you could look down and see whole forests of ruffled seaweed, long pale sheets of it in rows, and branching seaweeds, a kind of lushness that did not exist on shore, though great slimy mounds of kelp did. I said to Lisa, the guide, the forests here are all underwater, right? She beamed in approval that I had recognized this obvious fact. And there were also various kinds of jellyfish, notably, small ones like pink lanterns, like the ghosts of small cucumbers and sea urchins, like tiny zeppelins, floating by in the dark clear water, festively, so delicate, so enchanting, so unlike the massive warm-blooded animals you hear about here. There were urchin shells, tall spiraling seashells, occasional mussel shells on shore where the seabirds flew. These when alive were also wildlife.

  Walrus. The first walrus more wrinkled and pink and comic than I had imagined with its eyes invisible and its whiskery lip rising and falling like a gigantic cyclopian eyelid. A fanged eye. Its vast chest wrinkled and creased into chasms or crevasses of dry hide. Its tusks looking mildly dignified when its head is upright but also pointing sideways, and sometimes it scratched itself with its flipper and looked more agile and more like a cat or a dog. More walruses turning their heads in various directions so that their tusks looked like semaphore torches or runes, as though they were sending us messages we were inadequate to receive.

  Their Latin name is Odobenus rosmarus: Odobenus means “one that walks on teeth,” and rosmarus comes from Old Norse, meaning “horse of the sea.” So the walrus is a sea horse that walks with its teeth. “For me the walrus is a prehistoric animal. I feel like I am traveling back in time when I see them—or even smell them,” says Lisa Ström, and she tells us they can use the tusks to get up on the ice and the front flippers to walk on. They have lice, walrus lice, so they are always scratching themselves. The male averages 1,200 kilos; females, 800. Pink wart-like growths stud the male neck and breast. (“Maybe it’s attractive!” Lisa speculat
es.) “The females have straighter teeth and they don’t generate the big pink warted neck. Those with the biggest teeth can lie in the middle of the group, in the warmest, nicest spot, protected from predators. Tusks start to grow at age two, and the animals live up to forty years. Killer whales and polar bears prey on walrus but pursue only the females on Svalbard. Diet is sometimes fish, sometimes swimming birds and other seals, but mostly mussels—fifty to sixty kilos of mussels, or 4,000–6,000 per day,” she explains, guiding us to know walruses.

  A Warm West. This is what Tyrone, the expedition leader, told me to bring, grossly understating the degree of cold we would encounter. I liked the instruction, though, since I am always wearing the West in some sense. But this was the far north, and I wish I had brought my faux-fur-lined vest I wore all through my times in Montana and Wyoming in winter and much of Iceland in summer. And not lost my insulated jacket in the Frankfurt airport. A cold north.

  Water the Color of Gunmetal. See Color

  Wonder. You are north of everything on a ship out of a story, sailing onward, with glaciers, crags, peaks, mists looming up on either side, and the moment requires so many practical reactions it is not until you are sitting in an armchair forty-three degrees south of this experience that the full wonder of it sets in.

  Wood. So many long logs on the shores of this place where not even a bush grows, evidence of the great forces that drop trees into water and send them on tides far beyond the scenes of their growth. More wood in the fox traps, the graves, the houses, and other structures that are lightly scattered across the land. The bare wood houses that weather to gray, like driftwood. The house we saw on the last day that was sturdier and more expansive than the rest we’d seen, more like a farmhouse than a survival hut, with fresh wood showing that it was maintained, and inside it, penciled names from the nineteenth century onward written on the bare wood walls, and one massive table with an X, and another structure like a stool for oxen, massive and lone in the sunlight that streamed through the windows we had just removed the protective boards from.

  Zodiac. Black rubber raft used for all landings in the wild, expertly captained by Lisa, clambered down onto with a ladder on the side of the boat, and afterward heaved up onto the Stockholm’s deck by a crane and pulley. Its name suggests another zodiac, a rubber ring as black as night bearing the arctic zodiac in which the constellations are different and one is born under the sign of fox, walrus, ring seal, whale, polar bear, reindeer, pink jellyfish, ivory gull, spiral snail, scurvy grass, cod, and mosquito.

  2013

  THE BUTTERFLY AND THE BOILING POINT

  Reflections on the Arab Spring and After

  Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.

  Revolution is a phase, a mood—like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass. The women of Cairo do not move as freely in public as they did during those few precious weeks when the old rules were suspended and everything was different. But the old Egypt is gone and Egyptians’ sense of themselves—and our sense of them—is forever changed.

  No revolution vanishes without effect. The Prague Spring of 1968 was brutally crushed, but twenty-one years later when a second wave of revolution liberated Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček, who had been the reformist Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, returned to give heart to the people from a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square: “The government is telling us that the street is not the place for things to be solved, but I say the street was and is the place. The voice of the street must be heard.”

  The voice of the street became a bugle cry in 2011. You heard it. Everyone did, but the rulers who thought their power was the only power that mattered heard it last and with dismay. Many of them are nervous now, releasing political prisoners, lowering the price of food, and otherwise trying to tamp down uprisings.

  There were three kinds of surprises about the unfinished revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and the rumblings elsewhere that have frightened the mighty from Saudi Arabia to China, Algeria to Bahrain. The West was surprised that the Arab world, which we have regularly been told is medieval, hierarchical, and undemocratic, was full of young men and women using their cell phones, their Internet access, and their bodies in streets and squares to foment change and temporarily live a miracle of direct democracy and people power. And then there is the surprise that the seemingly unshakeable regimes of the strongmen were shaken into pieces.

  And finally, there is always the surprise of why now? Why did the crowd decide to storm the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and not any other day? The bread famine going on in France that year and the rising cost of food had something to do with it, as hunger and poverty do with many of the Middle Eastern uprisings today, but part of the explanation remains mysterious. Why this day and not a month earlier or a decade later? Or never instead of now?

  Oscar Wilde once remarked, “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” This profound uncertainty has been the grounds for my own hope.

  Hindsight is 20/20, they say, and you can tell stories where it all makes sense. A young Tunisian college graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, who could find no better work than selling produce from a cart on the street, was so upset by his treatment at the hands of a policewoman that he set himself afire on December 17, 2010. His death two weeks later became the match that lit the country afire—but why that death? Or why the death of Khaled Said, an Egyptian youth who exposed police corruption and was beaten to death for it? A Facebook page claims, “We are all Khaled Said,” and his death, too, was a factor in the uprisings to come.

  But when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy? After all, Tunisia and Egypt were not short on intolerable situations and tragedies before Bouazizi’s self-immolation and Said’s murder.

  Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death at an intersection in Saigon on June 11, 1963, to protest the treatment of Buddhists by the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam. His stoic composure while in flames was widely seen and may have helped produce a military coup against the regime six months later—a change, but not necessarily a liberation. In between that year and this one, many people have fasted, prayed, protested, gone to prison, and died to call attention to cruel regimes, with little or no measurable consequence.

  GUNS AND BUTTERFLIES

  The boiling point of water is straightforward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious. Bouazizi’s death became a catalyst, and at his funeral, the 5,000 mourners chanted, “Farewell, Mohammed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused your death weep.”

  But his was not the first Tunisian gesture of denunciation. An even younger man, the rap artist who calls himself El General, uploaded a song about the horror of poverty and injustice in the country and, as the Guardian put it, “Within hours, the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb.” Or a new dawn. The artist was arrested and interrogated for three very long days, and then released, thanks to widespread protest. And surely before him we could find another milestone. And another young man being subjected to inhuman conditions. And behind the uprising in Egypt are a panoply of union and human rights organizers as well as charismatic individuals.

  It was a great year for the power of the powerless and for the courage and determination of the young. A short, fair-haired, mild man even younger than Bouazizi has been held under extreme conditions in solitary confinement in a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, for the last several months. He is charged with giving hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents to WikiLeaks, thus unveiling some of the more compromised and unsavory operations of the American military and U.S. diplomacy. Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) was a twenty-two-year-old so
ldier stationed in Iraq when he was arrested the spring of 2010. The acts he’s charged with have changed the global political landscape and fed the outrage in the Middle East.

  As Foreign Policy put it in a headline, “In one fell swoop, the candor of the cables released by WikiLeaks did more for Arab democracy than decades of backstage U.S. diplomacy.” The cables suggested, among other things, that the United States was not going to back Tunisian dictator Ben Ali to the bitter end and that the regime’s corruption was common knowledge.

  Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a 1958 comic book about the civil rights struggle in the American South and the power of nonviolence was translated and distributed in the Arab world by the American Islamic Council in 2008 and has been credited with influencing the insurgencies of 2011. So the American Islamic Council played a role, too—a role definitely not being investigated by anti-Muslim Congressman Peter King in his hearings on the “radicalization of Muslims in America.” Behind the other King are the lessons he, in turn, learned from Mohandas Gandhi, whose movement liberated India from colonial rule sixty-six years ago, and so the story comes back to the East.

  Causes are Russian dolls. You can keep opening each one up and find another one inside it. WikiLeaks and Facebook and Twitter and the new media helped in 2011, but new media had been around for years. Asmaa Mahfouz was a young Egyptian woman who had served time in prison for using the Internet to organize a protest on April 6, 2008, to support striking workers. With astonishing courage, she posted a video of herself on Facebook on January 18, 2011, in which she looked into the camera and said, with a voice of intense conviction: