A Woman in the Polar Night

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Northern lights of incredible intensity stream over the sky; their bright rays shooting downward, look like gleaming rods of glass. Looking at the convoys of cruise ships rounding Cape Horn and exploring the Alaskan fjords, we don’t feel we want to contribute to the commercialisation of once wild places and would rather leave the wildlife and wild places in peace. Them - as mentioned above, I didn't like any of them, I didn't care what experiences they went through or how they felt about it, but above all, I couldn't stand they sense of self entitlement that came with their experience. We get psychological insight, sometimes raw, sometimes incredibly moving, as well as lots of delicious and not-so-delicious details of life in such an inhospitable place.

The hut is a covered hollow, without which we would freeze; the primitive food must be eaten, for it keeps us alive. I've been meaning to read this for years (I love me a good off-into-the-frozen-wilds real-life adventure story), but I'd been putting it off because I'd gotten it in my head that it would be a serious, grim account of survival in those frozen wilds, and instead it's.

She spends a full year there with her husband Hermann and his Swedish friend Karl, enduring not only loneliness (Hermann and Karl frequently leave on hunting trips, plus they are the only two humans she sees for much of that year) but terrible storms, extreme cold, food insecurity, and a lack of light. The author is no self proclaimed or experienced explorer and that makes this book all the more interesting. This book was one of my favourite reads in 2020, but of course I love everything arctic, and especially reading about the women that went there before me.

Vielleicht muss sie fühlbar werden, diese letzte Verlassenheit, damit der Mensch zu Kreuze kriecht, um dann das Eigentliche zu erleben. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to “read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content”, but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive. My copy of the book contains a number of quaint little drawings by Christiane and three neat black and white photos of Christiane and Hermann, the shack in summer, and the shack in winter with just the stove pipe sticking out of the snow. But it says something about Ritter's writing that by the end of the book even I (well, part of me) was hoping(!It was the 1930s, and this was the sort of adventure that was acceptable for men (her husband had been in Norway for several years at that point) but not for women.

There are the mildewed clothes that she finds under a mattress and, after investigating their provenance, chucks into the sea.

Perhaps in centuries to come men will go to the Arctic as in biblical times they withdrew to the desert, to find the truth again. One of the first things her husband does when she gets there is to leave her alone for 12 days while he goes hunting with his male friend who also lives with them. The author spent a year in Spitsbergen in the Arctic, with her husband and another hunter, in a tiny cabin miles away from civilization and other people, isolated by the weather and the long polar night.