Snow melts at the North Pole and you are still staring at your phone

Svalbard archipelago, made up of several larger and smaller islands, dominated by a chain of pointed, icy mountains of Spitzbergen is about 1000 kilometers from the geographic North Pole, and 1,500 kilometers from the nearest land at the top of Norway. It used to be  a no man s land  or everyman s land until 1920 when the five nations signed an agreement on joint exploitation of Svalbard s incredible natural wealth. Since 1596 when this world was discovered by the famous Villiam Barentzs, after whom is named one sea and one Moreuz, started the genocide of seals, walrus, white bears, polar foxes, reindeer and whales.

The agreement of 1920, is perhaps the first ever dealing with the protection of nature, animals, plants, birds and cultural heritage of the Arctic. You will think what cultural heritage possibly exists in the wilderness, in the eternal ice, inhabited by 2,000 people and 2,000 polar bears ... maybe the  whale hunters cemetery,  orthe huge intact Russian Orthodox cross, the only surviving German Meteorological Station of the Second World War, the remains of Swedish and Russian scientific stations, or disused mine shafts ...

To set foot on Svalbard is to enter into another dimension of life, where the night lasts five months, the midnight sun beats 5 months and the sun rises and sets one month eachtime ... where nobody is born and nobody is buried. A place where on one side of the mountain passes the last leg of the Gulf Stream, the temperature does not fall below minus 20, while on the other side of the same mountain rule unimaginable minuses of 60 degrees and even lower ..

At the very polar dawn, after 2 days of travel, 4 aircrafts and overnight in Oslo, accompanied by my young student of film direction, I turned up near the screw on the globe, at the end of the world or on top of the world, at the last piece of land before  the point called the North Pole.

 I was expecting snow, ice, polar night with the aurora borealis. Instead,  I was  greeted by slush and plus 2 degrees. In a week, three feet of snow went down. The frozen soil does not absorb water so there are  puddles all around. Snowmobiles can not move, dog sleds are in place. In the unfrozen sea there are no holes through which occasionally seals stuck their heads  ending up in the jaws of a hungry polar bear. Glaciers are melting. Last year, avalanche has shifted one row of houses. Last week, the new avalanche endangered 200 people, or ten percent of the population of the only town of Longyearbyen 

... I  have never seen such a sad sight in my whole life. Watching Global warming live. I look at the consequences of human arrogance, mileniums of crimes. I turn Facebook on and read what is happening on social networks. My virtual friends were happy that I am not cold. And I feel awful. 

 

Listening to the stories of the locals I find out about last week's visit of the  desperate mother polar bear with two hungry cubs  who roamed the streets. They are protected by law, but nobody  can legally protect them from famine and natural extinction. There is no regulation that can protect from melting glaciers and floes.

People in Svalbard are also special kinds of people. 37 nations were counted a few years ago, and today there are more. No crime, flats are not locked, all are equal, all too well paid. One Serb, 2 Croats, 1 Bosnian from our own and ex own. At the end of the main street there is  a large cube in which people leave unnecessary things when they leave Svalbard and those who come  pluck  whathey need. From cutlery to a winter jackets, warm boots and studs to the cap, gloves, books ... No charge.  

Everywhere is required taking off the shoes, so people go in woolen socks, no matter whether it is  24 hours open and warmed church,  with a perfectly tuned piano, tea and biscuits,  a supermarket with a stuffed polar bear imported from Canada or Guverner s  offices. Nobody  wears makeup. If you do not want anybody to see, you won t see anybody.  It is a perfect  place to read and stay in a warm library. Or if you wish to meet someone, there is always the cult tavern  At the end of the world, where Lenin bust stands next to the walls decorated with memories of Russian miners.  In another bizzare hotel, run by a strange 70 years old Norwegian ex party girl,  there is a framed bone in a table - polar bear s penis. On the wall  hangs  a huge vertebra of a whale.

 Outside, the night, the full moon. 

In the lobby of the hotel  a satellite alert blinks when the aurora borealis appears in the sky. Few pedestrians with fluorescent labels step aside to let pass the only bus with tourists chasing Aurora borealis with some hot tea.

I witness a scenery from Mars or the moon. The chilling silence. 

Noone is leaving the village  without guns and signal pistols. Only one blonde and her student of film directing  fearlessly  wander around.  the black statue of a miner in downtown looks at them as if wishing to join them. 

I Hear the roar of the wind and melting of snow. Drop by drop.

The next day was a little lighter. The temperature dropped below zero, but still remains too warm for this time of year. Student Alyosha and I are going to shoot around the city. We need  some good photos from some height. So, we climb up the hill,  which is so iced and slippery to walk that I have to go on all fours, legs or arms... I sit up, turn around, it was just about to dawn again on  the tenth of February. But I know that only Around 20 th the sun will pray above Spitsbergen. I see tracks beside me in deep snow, I think that they may be reindeer. Definitely not. Round, with  3 points. Polar bear. I know he is  inteligent as a primate and that he runs at a speed of 60 kilometers per hour, so  when I see him in the distance of, 200 meters, I have exactly 14 seconds to react. And I can not move.  He can smell  food at the 5 kilometers distance. I know that  I smell like raspberries that I ate for breakfast .... Somehow I manage down the hill toward the church. I'm entering the warmth.  I sit at  piano and play the first gimnopedia by Erik Satie ,. Somehow,  melancholy  befits this place. 

God hides my cap and gloves. I can not get out of the church. The Cap and gloves have mysteriously disappeared. Vanished in a black hole of a ninth dimension. The girl from Guatemala pulls from her pocket a spare cap and a pair of black gloves and give them to me. Mercy at work. First tje Warning for stupidity and then mercy ... I understand it all. I see it all. 

Guy from Miami smuggled Californian worms and now  in the ice and dark  he is feeding them with organic food waste from restaurants and hotels and making humus. Under artificial light, blue and red LED lamps, grows arugula, mustard, clover, cheri tomatoes, potatoes ...

 Nasa closely monitor the development of these small  Perma culture farms at the North Pole,  as they will need the experience for the colony on Mars ...

I feel that somewhere around there is a russian submarine cruising under the ice. In the Russian centre  trips  are organized to the abandoned Russian settlements on the other island.  Enormous ocean cruisers, each with 2,000 people stop by these shores in summer. So many people must be entertained somehow.  So, come  bands, choirs, orchestras, traveling actors ....

One persistent Norwegian, after 7 years of begging, waiting for permits, paperwork and negotiations with gurverners had finally got permission to make the Svalbard beer. The brewery looks  like something from the Highlander 1, 2, 3 ... an angry Husky attached in front with the thick chain, does not allow access. Above the room with metal barrels and cans packed, several tables where people sit, drinking beer. Boots are of course piled  around the entrance ... even boots for minus 100. They look like the most ordinary galoshes. Only In these there are 5 cm thick pads of compressed wool. Here they  despise cotton. Wool is the law ,

.

Telekom here experiments with the latest technology G8 whatever that means. This is the richest city on planet earth with ultra modern high Technology, but friends ask me, do you have anything to eat? How little do we know about each other.

 I'm  getting accustomed to the night. I'm sleepy at noon and two in the afternoon and 4 and 6  ... Kind of like that hibernation. To Hibernate .... to dive into the world of Jules Verne's novel. 

Yes i am actually on the south side of Spitsbergen, where the Verne heroes are  searching for buried treasure ... if they have waited a couple of hundred years, the treasure would have just appeared on the surface under the melted snow

Aljoša compass points in the direction of the magnetic north pole which is not the same as the geographic north pole. I really feel like I'm on top of the globe, and everywhere I look, I see the South .... clouds are passing swiftly as in some accelerated film. I can even see a ship trapped in the ice some hundred years ago as she smoothly glides with ice to the North Pole, while the crew is dying of toxic cans ... they thought the technology will save them but instead they were killed by technology ... and suddenly I see the Greek seaman Pithias of Massalia, pointing a finger from Greenland in the third century BC, toward the Ultimate Thule as  this place was called in his time... Hole into which the compass needle declines ... in his time the floating magnetic north pole was on far side of Greenland, but now it is inexorably and rapidly moving from Canada to Siberia ... on the other side of the planet, in the magnetic South Pole, a hero of another  novel is chained in shimmering crystals, inextricably blended with the magnetic pole by his metal riffle.  I feel the attraction. I want to go there ... I hold to  the meridian not  to fall into the vortex ...

I wake up with the new attempt of dawn.  It is A bit brighter than yesterday. Around me  thereare shades of gray, blue and white, with a pale pink sky in the background.  Almost Immersed in canvas of the local painter  I go ashore and get into a lonely house with a bench from which the flights and migration of hundreds of thousands of birds are monitored. On the inner walls of wooden houses there are drawing of those birds..... I simply do not want to go home. Fluttery colombian girls are knocking on the door, calling me out because the Northern lights, Aurora Borealis  appears in the sky. As if Aurora knew this was my last night on top of the world. I'm going out in a ski suit, bougth at our flea market and stare at the sky. I imagine  Apollo of the North, painting the skies with those  green waves. Finally I am in the space. At the last frontier.... The Greek called the North  Voreas or Boreas . Northern dawn is caught somewhere in the Balkans too, in the echo of the  northeast wind  Vardar.... the wind in Greece, the river in Macedonia ... 

I'm going to Noah's Ark, the entrance to the vault where seeds of planet Earth is stored. Every country has given samples of seeds  of their characteristic agricultural plants.  the seeds of flowers and seeds of trees are kept Somewhere else. Here the stored seeds can survive all changes of magnetic poles, all nuclear disasters, explosions and ice ages. The only question is, who will have to plant them when we're gone? 

Serbia therefore did not send not one single native  plant seed.  Why bother, when, there will be the flood after we re gone....

A scotish girl, student of climate changes at the high tech university in Svalbard, which looks like a spaceship from Star Trek, advises what we can individually do to prevent this catastrophe that is taking place largely at the poles of the Earth. She says, do not  buy plastic bags. Do not buy things from companies that are polluters. Do not make trash. Recycle everything. The head echoes with her words STOP BUYING STUFF. And people  just continue to buy and buy ...