Stone Home
February 29, 2024
Svalbard, Norway
We were asked to not remove any natural or historical objects from Spitsbergen, but others sure did. Frankie stumbled over a giant reindeer antler and audaciously tied it to his backpack. It was dyed a natural pink from the lichen last summer. We walked together through the 24 hour darkness, to the post office in Longyearbyen, speculating about bubble wrap large enough to send the 8-pointed chandelier-like structure - longer than his arm - home to his studio in Los Angeles.
Being the rules girl I am, I left everything behind. But I had been enviously watching the others for over two weeks now, picking up lichen, bringing ice back to the ship for whiskey cocktails, filling vials with arctic seawater and loading plastic baggies full of soil. All I wanted was a stone. In this land of ice and moraine, it would not be missed. I would pick it up and put it in my pocket. No one would ever know. The prospect of this felt dangerous and invigorating. But I tempered my desires.
Most of the rocky moraine was hard edged and pointy-sharp, yet to be softened by the slow tumble of ice and time and tides. These stones were unappealing to the hand and difficult to walk across. One of these was not my stone, though I traversed many in the wake of receding ice. We crossed miles of moraine, traversing the distance from where the glaciers were last year to where they are now.
Near the meltwater channels, in the pockets beneath the glaciers, that's where the soft stones lay. I caressed dozens of them. I would pick them up, put them in my mittens, and walk for a while, warming stones with the heat that fled my hands from warm to cold in an instant. I rubbed these stones until they were the warmest they had ever been, and traced with my thumb their ice-dug grooves, then set them back down again.
By day 15 the expedition was drawing to a close, and I was overcome by a penetrating need to bring a piece of the Arctic home with me. As my sense impressions faded from the present to the past, I was afraid that I would get home and forget the magnitude of the expedition, without something tangible from Spitsbergen. I stood atop a windblown glacier, imagining my arctic rock back in my studio, placed on the shelf next to the other stones from adventures that have shaped my person and practice as an artist.
On day 16, I crossed over into the land of the lawless. There it was, a gorgeous stone on a quiet beach, at the perfect moment. I was relatively alone, within the polar bear safety perimeter, but apart from the group. I bent down for a closer look, admiring a very smooth stone, white like the head of a Beluga and gray like the sea and sky in winter. In a small but knowing way, it completely embodied the interplay of landscape and atmosphere we had been navigating for the past two weeks.
I checked left and checked right, looking around to be sure no one was watching. I flexed my thermally-clad knees and extended my mittened hand toward the ground with unwavering focus on the perfect stone, my perfect stone. At the last possible moment, i stripped down to the glove liner in the biting arctic wind. I grasped the stone and gave it a tug, but could not lift it. I gave a good yank. It was anchored to the earth by some unseen force. Then, I gave the stone a kick with my giant insulated boot. Not to be dislodged. I tried for another stone, and another, but all were frozen in place. It is the arctic in winter, and not all stones are fit to be carried. I remittened my hand, and trudged back to the group, wordless, and pebble-less, but virtuous.
So, today, working in the studio, I'm longing for a stone. I ache for the sensation of holding in my hand the weighty magnitude of the experience as a whole. Something I could place in the palms of loved ones and say "Here. This is from the Arctic!" When a place really goes deep, it leaves you longing for a piece of it. But sometimes the pieces you really need just can't be stolen.