Tomorrow is August 1st, which means one week left in Longyearbyen, and after that 16 days in Sweden and then we'll be done.

I'm really looking forward to returning to Sweden for a few hours of darkness each night. Here the sun just circles around in the sky, the same steep angle at noon as at midnight. I go to bed at 11:00, about the same time that the sun comes around the edge of the mountains and on cloudless nights shines brilliantly into my room. Even a sleeping mask isn't enough to induce the feeling of night time. I've lost my ability to even imagine darkness.

We're staying at the Spitsbergen Gjesthuse, a fancy name for a hostal-style bunkhouse of converted coal miner dorms. There is a group of 13 bunkhouses at the top of the valley, huddled at the foot of two glaciers, about a mile from the main town. This little outpost was part of the reconstruction efforts after Germans bombed the main city and the coal mines in WWII.

The town seems caught in a struggle between Scandinavivan tidiness and the aquisition and sprawl of junk, common to all rural and arctic areas. The city center consists of a grocery store, several outfitting shops, a couple bars and as many souviner boutiques as daily cruise ships of French tourists can support. Two hotels and brightly colored vacation homes surround the center and sprawl up the mountain to the East. Further North is the University and beyond that the industrial area and harbor on the Fjord.

Everywhere you look there are snowmobiles. Some carefully parked on pallets next to houses and protected from the sun with sleek, stretchy sleeves. Others are left at random, along the side of the road and in the middle of empty lots in town, as though the snow melted suddenly and the owners, knowing how quickly winter returns, decided it wouldn't be all that long before they could be driven away.

I've met enough locals to learn that nobody is really local. Norwegians and other Europeans move here for a few years for adventure or escape, or both.

I think it would be an eerie place to live for long, being so constantly surrounded by such tragic history. All structures and artifacts, even piles of garbage, from before 1945, are protected as cultural relics. The town is surround by remains of an intensive mining industry that is no longer profitable, blown-up bits of buildings, piles of charred wood and an occasional cannon pointed towards the sea. Perhaps this contributes to the sense of place people get from living here. Nothing can be taken for granted since everything lies exposed. Even the town's entire infrastructure is visible, since water mains, electric wires and sewage pipes must be carried above ground since the permafrost prevents anything from being buried.

All in all, it has the feel of a small tourist town anywhere else in the world. People who overwinter have wan smiles for tourists and a silent wish for summer to end and darkness to bring some peace to their corner of the world, at least for a little while until the snowmobiling tourists show up with the light in March.

As a visiting scientist I'm no more than a tourist, worse even with heavy equipment and experiments that leave vegetation muddy and trampled. I'm more than happy to oblige the wishes of the overwinterers and go home.