Eclipse Excerpt 1 of 6
In anticipation of Monday’s total eclipse, this week we’ve got a series of excerpts from the Svalbard chapter of Out in the Cold, in which we traveled up to 800 miles from the North Pole in search of totality in March, 2015. Get a copy of the whole book for yourself, or order the unabridged audiobook.
ANTICIPATION
What an extraordinary run of fine weather! A woman in the grocery grabs my arm to emphasize how lucky this all is. It has almost always been cloudy “since I came up in February” (now it’s late March) – except this string of four or five fine days. The skies, the snow, the light all shine with a high latitude clarity. And it need only hold for one more day.
We are elated. If we pull this one off, we will be three for three viewing total solar eclipses, having blundered from Budapest down to Lake Balaton in a minibus in August, 1999 and then grilled kebabs out of a van on the plains wast of Nevsehir in Cappadocia, Turkey in March 2006. Almost exactly nine years later the last minute forecast is for fine weather. But it wasn’t a given that we’d be here.
Norwegian Air Shuttle pilots went on strike three weeks ago. They were our ride from Oslo to Svalbard and there was simply no question of getting here another way. The other airline flying there, SAS, was sold out when we tried to buy tickets two days after they went on sale.
It’s the damnedest thing, isn’t it? Everything works fine until it doesn’t. You plan as if your good money, paid in good faith, assures your progress around the globe, but sometimes forces of nature or the parochial affairs of men get in the way. In this case the pilots thought they could make a better living working for the parent company rather than the Balkanized series of subsidiaries that write their paychecks in the various countries Norwegian’s flights serves.
Some 700 pilots were striking and 800 cabin crew were sent home without pay. Tension rose on one particular horse farm in the southern United States. As we packed, the airline’s spokesperson, Anne-Sissel Skånvik, was less than hopeful.
“We struggle to see how we can get to a solution,” she told Norway’s TV2.
There was some hope. An article in the Svalbard English language newspaper Icepeople reported that after missing two scheduled flights, the third, the Monday flight from Oslo, operated despite the strike. Norwegian flies the route on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Surely they would find a way to fly despite the strike.
In the end pilots and management hammered out an agreement a few days before the eclipse. Still, the strike exposed the perils of flying to an island at the end of the Earth. No backup.
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