Outpost , livre ebook

Dan Richards is the co-author of Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood), and the author of The Beechwood Airship Interviews , Climbing Days and Outpost . He has written for the Guardian , Economist , Caught by the River , Monocle and Quietus . Dan teaches creative non-fiction at the National Centre for Writing and Arvon Foundation. His next book, Overnight , is set to be published in 2023. @Dan_Zep
Also by Dan Richards
Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood)
The Beechwood Airship Interviews
Climbing Days




For David
The paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
canongate.co.uk
Copyright © Dan Richards, 2019
The right of Dan Richards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions
For permission credits please see here
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 157 0 eISBN 978 1 78689 156 3
CONTENTS
I HOTEL CALIFORNIA, NY-ÅLESUND
II SÆLUHÚS, ICELAND
III SIMON STARLING – SHEDBOATSHED
IV DESOLATION PEAK, WA, USA
V MARS, UTAH
VI BOTHIES, SCOTLAND
VII PHARE DE CORDOUAN, FRANCE
VIII FONDATION JAN MICHALSKI POUR L’ÉCRITURE ET LA LITTÉRATURE, SWITZERLAND – NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017
IX NAGEIRE-DŌ, SANBUTSU-JI, MOUNT MITOKU, JAPAN
X SVALBARD, NORWAY
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PERMISSION CREDITS
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
– Wendell Berry 1
I
HOTEL CALIFORNIA, NY-ÅLESUND

Hotel California, Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, 1982. Photograph: Tim Richards

Dear Dan Richards,
your travels will not be easy, but I think you have a fascinating project in the making . . . I wish you all the best, in particular in the Svalbard archipelago.
Best,
Werner Herzog 1
I grew up fascinated by the polar bear pelvis in my father’s study.
My mother, Annie, tells me that when my father, Tim, returned from his final Arctic expedition, a month before my birth, it was night and raining hard. From Svalbard he’d flown down to Tromsø, then Luton, caught several trains to reach Swansea and finally a bus to Penclawdd – a village on the Gower where my parents lived. Annie had sat by the window all evening, waiting, and now she could see him walking up the shining road, pack on his back. She was listening to Gladys Knight & the Pips, a cassette. Once home he was amazed to see how pregnant Annie was, how round her belly. He was also very taken with the carpet, Annie remembers – it felt so good on his tired feet.
Tim had been away for several months on Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, situated north of mainland Europe, about halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole – exploring the Brøgger peninsula and the glaciers, fjords and mountains east of Ny-Ålesund, the northernmost civilian functional settlement at 78° 55' N.
Next morning he unpacked his bag. Everything smelled of smoke. The smell permeated the whole house – Trangia smoke and unwashed man – and from deep in the stuffed mix of wool and down he drew out the pelvis, abstract, sculptural, bleached, and placed it on the table. Strange object from another world.
Years later, he told me that he’d found the bony frame on the ice and glaciers of Kongsfjorden although, as time passed, the story changed and he’d swapped it for cake and kit with the expedition doctor. The pelvis lived in the study of our various houses throughout my childhood; less trophy, more alien artefact. It looked so pure, supernaturally white. When held it was heavier than one might expect. It enthralled me; an almost feathered line of peaks ran over the sacrum and coccyx, the broken ends of the flaring hips revealed a coral interior. The hollow eyes of the femur cups, the sinuous lines of the iliac crest, its conch shell-like fissures, cracks and apertures – all these tactile features thrilled and intrigued. The idea of my father having discovered it on a glacier – an impossibly far-flung landscape of mythical beasts – caught my imagination. And the names! Ny-Ålesund: I rolled the word round like a marble in my mouth; Svalbard: it sounded so cold; and Spitsbergen: somehow colder still. i

Polar bear pelvis, Bath, 2016. Photograph: Dan Richards
The pelvis was full of story. To hold it was to think of Tim as a young man in that great white silence, imagine polar bears, the life of that particular bear, and feel my horizons expand.
There’s a photograph of Tim on his expedition. In it, he stands with four others outside the front door of a small wooden shed. A sixth, unseen behind the camera, takes the shot. Everyone smiles. Behind and around them stretch moonland cliffs and dunes. On the back of the photograph is written Hotel California, Ny-Ålesund . Tim, dressed in a wool hat and striped jumper, dark trousers and big boots, stands holding two pans. At his elbow, leant against the shed, is a long black rifle, for bears. Or rather, in case of bears . . . He was the expedition marksman and took a shooting course before the party left England but never fired a shot, he reassured me.
They never met a bear.
Which is lucky, because Hotel California doesn’t look like it would stand up to a bear. ii An unremarkable garden shed, the only thing that makes it a shed of note is the fact it’s there, stood on Svalbard. Once you notice the shed, the sheer blunt ordinary shed-ness of the shed, it’s hard to see anything else. It has the sheepish air of a shed out of place, a lost shed stumbled into a shot. The idea of six people sleeping inside it seems implausible and rather eccentric. Yet they gave it a name and called it home and there they are, Tim’s party, stood beaming outside their shed, an incongruous cabin at the top of the world.
What has become of that shed? As time went on it became inseparable from the pelvis in my imagination, part of an Arctic triptych – my father, the pelvis, the shed. It stood clear of the mêlée of his recollections. The anecdotes about his team being buzzed by Ranulph Fiennes’s spotter plane, iii climbing mountains, an incident with a boat full of advocaat, sleeping out in the midnight sun, keeping watch for bears, receiving a care package from Annie – fruitcake and tea wrapped in newspapers posted up to the world’s northernmost post office – all these recollections subtly shifted and changed as the years went on but the fact(s) Tim went to Svalbard, stayed in a shed and brought home a polar bear pelvis remained solid.
I’d read that in recent years, due to melting permafrost, wooden buildings in the far north have begun to thaw and rot for the first time. Has the shed gone the way of that bear on the ice – fallen down, picked apart, disappeared? At some point I decided to go and discover for myself.
—
During the course of climbing and researching my last book, Climbing Days , I stayed in a number of high mountain huts. Some were new and state of the art, some, like the Bertol Hut above Arolla in Switzerland, had been rebuilt on the site of earlier sheds, and some stood apparently unchanged since my great-great-aunt and uncle, Dorothea and Ivor, were mountaineering in the 1920s and 30s.
I found such cabins, often perched on the edge of sharp landscapes, to be a set of secret worlds. These were slightly arcane altitudinous hostels full of enthusiasts and eccentrics – the deeply-tanned leathery fellow in his seventies who took me through his idiosyncratic lethal-looking gear one breakfast, explaining each gizmo and tool in turn with obvious pride and glee; the Swiss guardians who sat in crow’s-nest judgement – their duties of care and hospitality tempered by the immediate assessment of the shape and possible liability of everybody who crossed their threshold.
This was a very different setup from the unmanned refuges I’d encountered in Snowdonia and the Lake District – bothy Marie Celeste s which I always found empty of people but full of their traces – chairs pushed back in the act of leaving, scuff marks on the floor, faint cooking smells . . . The interior lives of these austere short-stay cells put me in mind of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Home is so sad’:

It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. 2
When Dorothea and Ivor stayed in the Bertol Hut it was little more than a wooden Wendy house set up on a crest of rock overlooking the Mont Miné Glacier. Dorothea captioned a photograph of it in her memoir as ‘The Bertol Hut (11,155 ft.) perched like a medieval castle’. 3
I’m not sure it ever looked like a medieval castle. Examining the picture again it looks another case of a bewildered shed dragooned into service. ‘Adjoining potting sheds on a silver rock mohawk’ might have been a better caption, although ‘perched’ is exactly right.
Today, the sheds are gone, replaced with a multi-storey insulated concret