Highways and Byways: Longyearbyen

By Maik Strosahl

Last month I went back to my hometown for my 35th high school reunion. It was really nice to catch up with old friends, get to know classmates I could not recall (we had a large class), and just relive the days of our youth.
    I didn’t really keep in touch with my high school crew through the years. Truth be told, those days were tough times long ago buried. But I finally decided to attend a gathering in 2016, the 30th reunion. I was very nervous about the whole event.
    In the days leading up to my six-hour trek back to the Quad Cities five years ago, I was doing some research for another piece and staring at a map of Norway when I noticed a large icy island far to the north named Spitsbergen.
    In 1901, an American named John Munro Longyear visited as a tourist, then returned to start a mining business. They named the town that formed around the workers Longyear City. In 1926, the town was renamed Longyearbyen, and it has become the world’s northernmost settlement, with a population of more than 1,000 people. As of 2002, the town has become an official Norwegian municipality and the de facto capital of the Svalbard region that includes the island.
    To me, the town’s name was a great metaphor for the time that had passed since seeing my old classmates and thus, this poem was born.
    By the way, the “city of mills’’ mentioned in the poem is my home town of Moline, Illinois. We Maroons had a drink, told old stories, and tried to recapture all the moments we dreamed that have somehow escaped us.
    Can’t wait until the 40th rolls around!

Longyearbyen

Thirty years.
And I suppose
it is my own fault
I feel this distance,
like Svalbard to Norway,
striking out on my own
to plant a flag
as close as I could stand
to the cold of the pole,
a place where only the heartiest
of Santa’s Caribou
wander the summer
in the midnight sun.

But after thirty years,
I feel the calling to return,
back to the mainland,
back to those with whom
I spent my awkward youth,
the ones who
looked forward with me
at the brightness of our futures
and could only marvel
as we shielded our eyes.

Those eyes,
now heavy,
drift the clouds below,
wondering if she will be there,
the one who was with me
in those visions I had.
Yet I never
shared those plans with her.
Even if I had,
would we have made it this far?
Would the years have
somehow been better,
perhaps spent enjoying
summer in the sun
with only the passing shadows
of the cumulus
darkening the skies
above the city of mills?

My, how fast,
these thirty years,
and as I fly free from my island,
headed for home,
I wonder if their dreams came true,
wonder if they realized
even a sliver of those
glorious plans,
or was their time
just as lost as mine
back in the cold,
back in the darkness
of an overcast Longyearbyen?

Copyright © 2021 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.