I learned about it years and years ago in a listicle of interesting factoids about the world. A format inherently and intentionally scrubbed of nuance. Something like: the doomsday vault contains the world’s seeds for the apocalypse. I pictured a tunnel into a mountain, a heavy lead-lined door, a blighted earth, a repopulation. Archetypes of apocalypse, echoes of a story I seemed to know.
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It was my first summer in the desert and the heat shocked me with its ferocity. It knocked me on my back, flattened me. I craved the outdoors, missed walking, missed the sensation of letting my feet propel me forward and through. Too hot to be outside, I spent my days parked in front of my window AC unit, willing it to cool down my casita.
The man I was involved with had left town for a bit. Things were already falling apart between us, and I felt his absence with a sharp clarity, the way you feel a stool after it’s been kicked out from under you.
I had moved to Arizona for graduate school for writing and was experiencing my first summer break in years. Unbounded by the constraints of classes to teach or take, no meetings or deadlines to hem me in, I was adrift. I stared at a screen, the dreaded blinking cursor and the blank page, trying desperately to write something, anything. But my brain felt sluggish. I tried to remember what it felt like to have fully formed sentences plop from my fingertips and onto the page, like the ripe oranges that litter Tucson sidewalks in the winter. I missed that feeling so much, but nothing I did could conjure it. Mostly, I watched TV with the blinds drawn and played guitar, cooked elaborate meals on my mini stove, felt my face cooking too, did the crossword, and waited for rain. I started drinking more to outrun my loneliness, to still the anxiety of a seemingly endless expanse of time I needed to fill. Sometimes I biked to the library in the middle of the day, willfully ignoring admonishments to stay inside from 10-4, the familiar landmarks blurring past me as I barreled down the gravelly road, hot air made mobile as I displaced it with my moving body.
It would be nice, I thought, to be cold again.
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When I first learned about Svalbard, I was enthralled. I wrote:
Even in tiny images on my iPhone screen, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is striking. The grey building slices into the snowy mountain. The door to the vault, which is located on an island off the Norwegian coast, is, of course, locked. It contains more than a million seeds, back-ups of the world’s seed banks, all sequestered under the permafrost and polar bears, under the aurora borealis and the endless midnight sun. Here the seeds wait for pandemic or earthquake or civil war, or for smaller disasters: a blown fuse, a building fire. I’m drawn to this place, as so many people are. The locked door, the seeds within, the ice above. I want desperately to go, to wander the cement tunnels, to see the glass vials and black boxes and envelopes full of seeds. To spin these images into words, to write the seeds and their evolution from food to idea to living treasure. Until I can, I read and think of it and of the seeds—hard-won and impossibly dear—under the ice.
I cringe now, reading it. Swept away by the symbolism, by the poetry and the drama, I wrote breathless, overwrought prose about a place I’d never been.
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I’ve always collected moments, shiny tokens in my magpie beak, for safekeeping. A beautiful one:
Wandering the Met on a day off, finding myself in a room full of reliquaries, glass pendants filled with miniscule golden figures, tiny precious worlds glittering, entombed behind airless glass—another silent mausoleum.
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That fall, the relationship burned bright and flamed out. I was left only with desire for who I was when I was with him, for the idea of what we could have been to each other, for the long days we spent walking through the desert together, admiring. I let myself believe he was a conduit to beautiful things. The vibration of a thunderclap between my molars, a shooting star arcing above our sleeping bags, the smell of rain hitting hot skin.
After he ended things, I drove a winding path up the nearest mountain and pulled off at a quiet spot. Giant thunderheads lit up cotton candy colors, and I wept as I watched the monsoon rain sweep across the glittering valley.
A wanting that can lift you out of the fragile envelope of tissue and sinew and bones, out of your small life, the accident of DNA, out of history and time.
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The desire itself is something to desire. Something to organize my days, plan around, look toward. When I found Svalbard and decided I wanted to go, it felt a little like relief: Now my writing can begin.
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The vault is ultra-secure. Nearly everyone who writes about it notes that it is built to withstand a nuclear bomb, not to mention fire, flood, and other acts of God. It was built on a remote island not easily accessible to tourists. They don’t let just anybody in. I talk to another writer who, at one point, wanted to write about it too. She wasn’t able to visit for reasons she doesn’t elaborate on, that seem vague and political. It would have been cool, she says, but she had to put it down. Life went on, she tells me. There is a part of me, one I am not proud of, that is glad she never made it to Svalbard.
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A moment: Hiking down a mountain at dusk, feeling the sweat drying on my neck, thinking about the way the ground cools the air that sits on it, condenses it. How the now-heavy air rolls down the side of the mountain like a carpet being unfurled, like a flag; there it goes. The miracle of the impalpable given weight and form. Reaching out, my fingers wide, and feeling it filter through the spaces between, an insistent and unyielding push.
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We need seed banks. Because all the many crop varieties that represent hundreds of years of selection and accumulated knowledge passed down, locally adapted plants, indigenous farming practices, all are being steadily snuffed out by the practices of large corporations, driven by neoliberal trade policies, the ravenous extracting from the global South. The drive toward monoculture puts crops at risk of disease and pests and represents a devastating loss to culture and history. Seed banks are an attempt at saving what is so quickly disappearing.
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When I tell people in this field—scientists who work on plant pathology or cryopreservation, directors of lesser collections, curators who work to pull together seeds in jars on dusty shelves—about my project: a book on seed banks, they ask me about Svalbard. They use the same tone, the one locals use to talk to a tourist about their city’s most famous attraction.
“I’m sure you’re going to the Eiffel Tower.”
“So, you must be writing about Svalbard.”
A tone of expectation, like it’s obvious, hardly needs to be said. It makes me glow, affirms my desire is good and right.
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There are polar bears on Svalbard. I can’t help but think of them as cartoons, pure white and fluffy and immobile, part of the charming landscape. Or chubby and molded out of marzipan, with tiny, rolled, black eyes and a splash of red for the mouth. I look online for images of photogenic white puffballs and land on the website of the Svalbard tourism board. It screams, “POLAR BEARS ATTACK EXTREMELY QUICKLY WITHOUT WARNING. BE ACCOMPANIED BY A GUIDE OR A LOCAL WITH A FIREARM WHEN LEAVING THE SETTLEMENTS.”
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People have been saving seeds for the duration of the human practice of agriculture, but the first large-scale plant-collecting expeditions were conducted by the British Empire. These forays into its colonies were undertaken specifically to extract valuable botanical interests. From rubber to quinine to tobacco, protected plants indigenous to Latin America, Asia, and Africa were stolen and brought back—precious seedlings carried onto boats in glass terrariums, like jewels nestled in museum vitrines—where they were grown out, developed, and used to pad the coffers of the Empire.
It becomes impossible for me to look at Svalbard and not see the shadows of botanical imperialism.
What good is a mausoleum, seeds hidden away in tombs? What good is a collection? That word is not precise enough. Collection implies something plucked from the ground and placed into a box, both ground and box neutral and equal states of being. Whereas, the reality is that there has always been the taker and the taken-from.
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A moment: Standing on the roof of the shed in my backyard to see the moon rise. It was full, and I could just barely see the sky lighting up over the tops of some trees and buildings as it began its ascent. And then there it was. Stupid big, like a mistake. It moved up the sky fast enough that I was surprised when I looked away—at another part of the sky or down at my lukewarm can of beer—and back up to see how far it had risen. Not fast enough to visually perceive its movement; though, I wanted to see it move, wanted to track its arc, watch it slice through swaths of space and duck behind clouds so that it made a photo negative of the sky. But I stared and stared, and all I could see was the jumping of my own heartbeat in my eyes.
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The opening to the vault is beautiful. Poured of grey cement, it rises like a tower or spaceship out of the side of the mountain. Its face is divided into three rectangles, and the top one appears to be covered in diamonds. It is the work of Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne, made of mirrors and polished steel and crystal prisms and fiber-optic cables. It sparkles, refracts the midnight sun, traps and shatters light in equal measure. In an interview with the Believer, Sanne says, “It became more and more clear to me that the Vault was really a signal more than anything else.” A signal, a beacon, a tower, burning and fragmenting the light, more than beauty—more than what it contains and protects.
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Maybe I want to go to Svalbard because I want to figure out how I feel about it. Sometimes an experience is illuminating but not in the way that you would expect. Sometimes you want something that is bad for you, and you know that, but you need to feel the sting of the flame on your fingertip to believe it.
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In writing, I can imagine things that did not happen and, with sheer force of will, bring them into being. Writing is perfect control or, perhaps, merely the appearance of it. I ask myself as I write, would I have made the same choices, knowing now that he lied?
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Things I wanted: more time, better air conditioning, a flatter stomach, a house full of plants, greater stamina, to go outside during the daytime and not feel attacked by the air and sun, a good relationship with my father, another tattoo, an excellent reputation, an espresso machine, to feel okay.
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To want something because you are supposed to want it. To want something because you are not supposed to want it. To sit in the wanting of something because that’s easier than getting it. To want something abstract and far away and beautiful, something easy to want. Easier than holding it close to your face and really studying it. Than to understand what the wanting says about you.
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There is not always dignity in wanting. Slowly, with time and distance, my feelings for him became charged with the understanding that he had always held a part of himself back. He’d hidden so much from me and, in doing so, chipped away at my agency. I grew to hate the part of me that wanted him despite this.
Much later, after I’d written the book, I was sitting at a window seat in a cafe and saw someone riding a bike that reminded me of his. A streak of red and chrome. Instead of the burning flash of pain that thoughts of him had elicited in me for so long, I felt a deep sympathy welling up for the version of me that had wanted so badly.
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Cary Fowler has been touted by some as the man who will save us all. A profile of him in the New Yorker compares him to Noah. He is the brain and the heart behind the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The savant who, through his ceaseless advocacy and devotion to this project, single-handedly willed the vault into being. The seed guru using the power of science and good old American confidence to secure a safe future for the world’s crops. I must confess I am suspicious of this narrative.
As the shine wore off, the wanting hadn’t lessened. But it no longer felt pure and good to want it.
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A moment: Visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House, watching the midmorning light filter through his carefully considered spaces, the crystalline decorative windows with their abstractions of plants, the work of a man in love with the symmetry of wisteria. What he called his “sun traps.”
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That fall, I gave a talk about my work to a group of plant people. They sent me home with thanks and packets of local wildflower seeds that I threw into a drawer when I got home. Weeks later, I found them again while searching for my bottle opener, intent on spending the evening drinking and crying. Instead, I pried open an envelope and poured the seeds into my palm. Featherlight, irregular, so small as to be insignificant. They looked like bits of nothing, litter. I dug up an old terra cotta pot in my shed that once held a rubber tree and now housed a family of spiders. Poured in some soil, dumped the packet of seeds overtop. Flushed with water. Dared them to grow.
It took a week or so, but tiny green shoots poked their way out of the dirt, because of course they did, because that is the way this works. A reminder that it’s about apocalypse and white saviors and colonization and death, but it’s about this too.
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I sit with a woman who went to Svalbard, and we talk for a while. I ask her about the quality of the light, about how she felt when she walked into the vault. She pulls out a sheaf of pictures, otherworldly shots of a place I’d only ever imagined. My heart is in my throat as I flip through them. Later, I spin the interview and the pictures and weather reports and what I know about the sky at that time of year into words. In my writing, I am there; I see the exact shade of lavender of the sky. I see the vault and feel a quickening in my core. I read the words I’ve written over and over, and I can almost pretend I was there.
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As the days began to shorten, I assigned my students some beautiful words I used to love, and in class we remarked on their beauty. We described their various facets and the quality of the sparkles they emitted. We held the words up, watched them catch and splinter the light, turned them over in our hands. It was nearly unbearable for me.
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Rilke wrote: “All beauty, whether that of animals or plants, is a quiet, enduring form of love and longing.”
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I carefully collected those moments, savored them for the express purpose of writing them down. It no longer feels good to search for beautiful things to look at. It no longer feels sufficient to write about beautiful things.
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Things I wanted: an even tan, good luck, for the stain to come out, a garlic knot, to forget, a hand on the base of my spine, a moment’s reprieve.
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But I haven’t been honest. In my quest for perfect control, I’ve left out so much. How he figured into my life that summer: leaning over to smell the woodsmoke in his hair, the taste of the tiny plum he brought me from the farm, the way he looked at me as he told me he had lied, my desperate need to grow something in the aftermath. His chin on my head as we watched the moon rise. His voice as he told me about the cold air rolling down the mountain, his fingers outspread next to mine.
I didn’t want to write that kind of an essay. Svalbard is more than just a pretty little thing to put in my pocket, a beautiful moment to affix my longing to. It is not just a metaphor for him—it precedes him, outlives him too. I wanted to go; do you understand?
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Here’s the thing about wanting: it doesn’t really go away, only changes.