Surrender: What I learnt hiking up a mountain at 78° north
For most of us who live outside the polar regions, darkness is promised every day when the sun sets and cloaks the neighbourhood in the gloom of dusk. For others it still manifests in the blackout of a theatre, dark recesses of a cupboard, or when we close our eyes to dream. For many, darkness is a source of fear, disguising our surroundings, allowing the possibility for anything that lurks. For me, darkness is womblike.
Confrontation of the Brazen Serpent, Melissa Clements, 2022. The blackness in the background gives the eye a place to rest and contemplate the subject matter
When I paint portraits, I often frame my subjects in darkness too. From the blackness of a flat and dark background, brightly lit and dynamically posed figures can emerge like phantoms. In Confrontation of the Brazen Serpent, I’ve painted myself holding a red-bellied black snake, a meditation on Moses’s Old Testament transformation of a serpent into brass. As the snake strikes violently at my face, which is focussed and stern, the eye finds a place to rest in the murkiness of the background, navigating through it with their intellect. The quality of this darkness is not dazzling like other values and hues, it doesn’t blind or distract the viewer like a high key primary colour, or the starkness of white. In “blacking out” parts of the picture to erase and destroy, what remains contains the value of whatever I was feeling, often ideas associated with the interior, justice and analysis. So, when I first experienced a white out, I felt absolutely, totally destabilised.
Hiking Trollsteinen
Two days after I arrived in Longyearbyen, a small village of around 2500 people at 78° north, I was booked to hike up Trollsteinen with a local guide. Trollsteinen is an 850m high peak cloaked in snow and ice, hiding behind the white fog and smaller peaks of the Longyear Valley. Although not especially high, Trollsteinen is one of the harder day hikes you can book from Longyearbyen, approximating six-seven hours if you include a stop in the ice cave on the way down. The hike is split into three sections beginning with a twisting ascent up the moraine, before crossing the Larsbreen glacier and making the final, steep hike to a summit capped by the enormous “Troll Stone” from which the mountain gains its name. I knew it would be tough, maybe even reckless considering my lack of experience hiking in snow, but I booked it anyway.
Longyearbyen is a small village on Svalbard at 78° north, made up of around 2500 people
I dressed as you’d expect for the Arctic Circle: thermals, mid layer, outer coat, buff, beanie, liner gloves, outer gloves, hiking boots and an extra wool jumper in my backpack, which also stocked hand warmers, my Leica, sunglasses and a packet of biltong. At 9am Martin from Svalbard Wildlife Expeditions picked me up in a little yellow and red van with five other hikers and we travelled down to the guide lodge dodging pot holes as we went. Here each of us were fitted with crampons for the icy terrain, a thermos and dehydrated packet of chicken curry and a hard hat and headlight for the ice cave. We also met Tequila, our lovely blue and brown eyed white husky, polar bear spotter and moral support animal with the strength to pull any of us up the mountain if necessary. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let that happen, no matter my exhaustion or how adorable Tequila was. I wanted to make it to the top of that mountain even if it destroyed me. A quick look at the map and we left for the start point, the end of the road at Nybyen, just above sea level. Trollsteinen was not yet visible, still hidden behind the equally menacing cliff faces looming over Longyear Valley, “Where we’re hiking is about twice the height of that,” said Martin, pointing to the largest visible mountain at the end of the valley, which rose like a sheer and sharpened arrowhead.
Section one of the hike up Trollsteinen is a moraine landscape, see the tiny people in the centre for scale.
It ended up being one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. I write that now with a grin on my face, but combine the difficulty of the hike with jet lag, broken sleep amid midnight sun and waffles for breakfast and I felt totally incapable of getting myself up that mountain. Each step was an agonising effort. Left foot up, left foot down, left foot sinks 30cm into snow, snow fills boot, right foot up, right foot down, right foot sinks 20cm into snow, snow misses top of boot, lift left foot up 30cm higher to lift left foot out of snow, step forward, left foot sinks 40cm into snow, repeat at agonising pace, watch distance from group mates grow. My internal monologue swiftly and hilariously shifted between “yep this is fine, easy even,” to “How the hell did I get on the side of this god forsaken mountain?” At my lowest point I questioned “I wonder what would happen if I just pretended to fall down the side of the ridge and slide back home to the guesthouse like my bum is a sled?” I’ve never felt so terribly weak and bad at something in my life.
We stopped for biscuits after crossing the glacier and the hot solbær we drank was an injection of energy which I burnt off just as rapidly as it manifested once we began the final ascent. This part of the hike felt impossibly steep and the height was made more dizzying by how rapidly the visibility declined. At this altitude the snow was powdery, soft and deep. I followed the footsteps of the hikers before me, carefully wedging my foot in each imprint, the compacted snow building a staircase that etched the only mark on the endless white of the mountain face. I forced each leg up one slow step after slow step.
Every now and then a glint of sun, or shift in the hue of sky will break the white out, revealing gorgeous threads of colour and light.
White out
Around 3/4 of the way up the mountain, the intoxicating blue of sky faded into a haze of cloud, first a veil of silver, quickly a thick fog of white. The white out engulfed us before I could even comprehend which foot was where and what my breath was doing. Like the first time I saw a glacier 18 months before, experiencing a white out for the first time took me by surprise, and with it, my breath. Picture the familiar sensation of darkness; nighttime, the theatre, your wardrobe, before dreaming, and imagine that instead of darkness cloaking your senses, it’s an all consuming, unfathomable light. On occasion, a glint of sunlight would break through the cloud, or the sky would shift to a hue of darker grey, revealing threads of colour and light. But mostly, it’s white, white, everywhere. Aside from the visibility of hands, legs, feet and arms, a total white out is non-bodily, and yet, the whiteness itself is hardly empty. It’s composed of spirit and energy and in it you are enveloped in oneness.
Among the denseness of the fog, my body totally exhausted and breath hard to catch, I suddenly felt suffocated by an all-consuming panic. Nothing was real, and yet everything felt connected. It was beautiful and strange and at any moment I felt I might slip and fall off the edge of the path, down the ridge, into the abyss. But we still had another 150 meters or so to the top, and although it was less steep, the path to the summit was a challenging 50cm wide walk way, with a sheer drop on either side, all of it cloaked behind fog. My legs felt like wood. My throat closed. I needed to get off the mountain. “I can strap her to you if you like, she’s pretty good at helping people up,” Martin said. But I carried on, one slow step after slow step.
Even Tequila was frozen at the summit
The temperature at the summit was -12°C, accounting for wind chill, and the white out persisted. For the most part, there was no visibility beyond a cloak of white, but in some directions specks of grey and blue could be seen in the distance, faint indications of neighbouring peaks. This was the coldest I felt the whole time I was in Svalbard. My fingers prickled with numbness and even Tequila grew a frosty beard of white around her muzzle and whiskers. I slumped against the base of the Troll Stone and let my body collapse into the snow. My ego was shattered. The mountain had made me feel weak, incapable and inescapably mortal. The panic, the terror, the breathlessness on the ridge was one part exhaustion, a large part my own human fragility and I hated how it made me feel. But that sensation is one I now relish, it taught me one of the biggest lessons all humans need to learn: We are not bigger than nature, not our inner nature nor the sublime nature of the planet and universe. I sat at the summit, cold and fragile and small, let myself be engulfed by the light and observed as the fear and panic of my ego transformed into a blissful surrender.
I reached the summit and was thrilled to learn that the journey down was indeed via bum-sled, almost all 850m of it.
Reflections
I was in a daze the next morning, mulling over the experience on my daily walk into the village. When considering the concept of surrender, I realised I couldn’t paint it with the same darkness of my shadowy portraits. All these works have an intellectual focus, referencing mythological or biblical stories, or alluding to existentialist notions. “Blacking out” sections of my paintings offers a gentle space for the eye to rest and get lost in contemplation, but the surrender of a white out doesn’t allow this. A white out is blinding, it doesn't give you room to think, it’s without thought. I’m reminded of Brett Whiteley’s Alchemy which follows the journey towards awakening. From bodily, visceral existence in the right, to golden serenity in the left, a monolithic “IT” holds the fulcrum at the point of transformation.
Alchemy, Brett Whiteley, 1972-73
I love painting dark, shadowy, philosophical portraits. They feel important and necessary. In painting them I purge feelings and thoughts, often despair and anguish, fear and rage, but also more mellow moods of nostalgia, yearning and curiosity and hope that they offer the viewer the same. But there remains another part of the story of life that needs investigating; the part that we are kept isolated from when we are trapped in the safe comfort of our homes. When we brush our teeth and tie our shoes, when we catch the bus and sit down at the computer, when we turn on Netflix and go to sleep, and wake up 50 years later while, in the meantime, wars have been waged with money we go to work for. This is the part where the bodily, logical and dark, is transformed into the spirit, sensation and light. It’s here where we can be free from the psychological enslavement of modernity and the sleepwalking through life that prevents us from reaching our full potential, as individuals and as a society. For Brett Whiteley, it was akin to transforming iron into gold.
It’s mountains like Trollsteinen that everyone ought to hike, particularly our leaders, particularly in a white out. Mountains like Trollsteinen which don’t tickle the ego, the kind that you do not conquer, but the kind that conquer you. It was there, atop the ridge, shin deep in snow, the horizon a ribbon of weightless steel among the white, my body and breath dissolving into the haze, that I had my “IT” moment.
The Incomprehensible Urge to Curl up Inside an Ice Cave, Melissa Clements, 2022