Inhospitable 78.2253° N
78.2253° N. – That makes this location Svalbard, 650 miles from the North Pole. You make mistakes when you're cold enough long enough. The mind begins to skip about like loose apples in a bouncing apple cart. A thought hit me, is the root word of “inhospitable” hospital? That question dragged itself sluggishly through my decelerating, glaciate mind as I bit my lip because my teeth were chattering so uncontrollably. I realized it didn't hurt. It's supposed to hurt. Was it numb? Why was it numb? The lip wasn't frozen. Was it? I noticed I referred to it as "the lip", not "my lip", in my mind. My hands were. Numb that is. Thank goodness. They hurt like freezing fire a few hours back. They'd quit working. But I could still use them as crude instruments to poke or paw with. I could still press the shutter, the camera hadn't seized up and the lens hadn't iced over. I decided to drive on. It was just that beautiful up there in the land of silent light giants.
It's funny what goes through your head when faced with overwhelming, staggering exquisiteness, superlative evidence of forces greater than us, and you're freezing to death. There were so many untamed photographs taunting me to catch them. I could see them flashing past everywhere, flawless short stories flitting through haunting remains of the previous century's grand ambitions; frost-burned wooden scaffoldings, abandoned mining carts lonely, empty, stationary and mournful with their perpetual, silent, open-mouthed howl, the fading echoes of poor men past, hard men made bold by poverty, promise and desperation, the naked and scattered remnants of their madmen's charges for mineral wealth and power all swirled about with light and shadow and reflection and ice and snow and raw, unrelenting glory.
My lens was a keyhole through which I was secretly peeping, watching those forces work effortlessly, anonymously. I heard the shutter click definitively in the wind. Just one more...
