“He’s great at those,” I say, nodding toward Mr. Kalman.

  “He’s good at real ones too,” Betty says, resting her hand on Mr. Kalman’s arm.

  “That will draw them away from the entrance just as you go inside. The rest, I’m afraid, is up to you. I can’t risk jail time, but I can facilitate your capture of the vault because, children, I support your cause.”

  He looks out the tall glass windows at the sea lions and the sea beyond.

  “This route we’ve sailed, through some of the most pristine, untouched landscapes on Earth, gives me a profound connection to nature. The animals we see—above water and below—are all the proof I need that the planet has a soul and must be saved. Now get some food—which Alistair has prepared—and some rest, which you’ll need for the kayaking.

  “Tomorrow we take Svalbard.”

  18

  Perpetual Repercussion

  In August, 150 miles from the North Pole, the sun looks like a pale yellow beach ball being slow-motion tossed back and forth, east and west. You might see it dip behind a floating iceberg, but it’s always somewhere in the sky. Night never comes. It’s light out at ten p.m. Still light out at two a.m. Even at five, when the captain’s steward wakes us. We pull off our sleep shades and rise from bed.

  Today, we take Svalbard.

  Our resolve comes from outrage: the island of plastic in San Francisco Bay, the sea lions suffering from cancer, massive wildfires and floods, the incredibly crappy job humans have done caring for the planet. First, we were shocked; then, we got mad; now, we’re here.

  Our strength comes from Alistair’s 750,000 kroner oatmeal. A banana scent rises from steaming bowls. The dining room is quiet except for blowing on spoons and, later, scraping the bottoms of bowls.

  After breakfast we bundle up in our new-old clothes from the summer-winter swap. My pink parka isn’t exactly camouflage, but it’ll keep me warm on the icy water.

  We meet up on C deck. The crew lowers kayaks into the water, then lowers us into the kayaks—two at a time—and when we’re all loaded, Captain Knudsen guides us into Adventfjorden, the narrow inlet that runs to the bottom of the mountain where the seed vault stands.

  It’s six a.m., but Zoe is wide-awake. We share a boat, but she’s not paddling. She’s too busy pointing out birds.

  “Guys, look—an Arctic tern. And there, on the rocks, those are Canada geese. And there in the water, common eiders.”

  We float by a row of black and white ducks with yellow bills.

  “Know why those slopes are so green?” she asks.

  “Sunlight?” I guess.

  “Fertilizer. Look up.”

  We do, and there on the ice-free cliffs above we see hundreds of tiny black and white birds.

  “Little auks make a lot of poop. It fertilizes the plants that feed the geese that feed the Arctic foxes. A perfect balance.”

  It’s as if Zoe has a sixth sense for the living things on Earth.

  We paddle closer to the shore. Zoe calls out more birds. Fulmar. Skua. Kittiwake. Puffin. Glaucous gulls. Funny-looking birds with funny-sounding names.

  We paddle past two seals lounging on an iceberg. They have long beards and droopy eyes.

  “No closer than that,” the captain warns. He widens the curve of our line of boats. We paddle softly toward shore.

  Toward, but not all the way onto the shore because, about a hundred yards away, walking like he owns the island, we spot a lone polar bear.

  Everyone gets quiet. We’ve seen them on Nat Geo, in documentaries, and in pictures on the internet. We’ve seen them in books too. I remember in first grade Ms. McCloud read us The Three Snow Bears. She unrolled a clean white carpet over the stained blue rug where we always sat for story time. Today, we’re going to the Arctic, she said. And she read us a version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” only it was Aloo-ki and three polar bears. I remember wondering why the polar bears needed sweaters.

  The illustrations were cool, but there’s nothing like seeing a polar bear in the wild. It takes your voice away. Even Zoe stops calling out the names of birds. The polar bear eyes us, pads along the ground, and wades into the cold sea. A wave ripples out; our kayaks sway.

  “Don’t worry,” the captain tells us, “his appetite for humans is low this time of year.”

  I wouldn’t want to meet him in spring.

  As soon as the bear is out of sight, we beach our kayaks, wave goodbye to the captain, and start on the mile hike along a switchback trail up to the vault. Jaesang and Zoe practically carry Betty while Alistair and I guide Mr. Kalman. A sign at the trailhead says SVALBARD HIKING TOURS MEET HERE. CAUTION: POLAR BEAR CROSSING AHEAD. We start up the trail.

  About halfway up, we fall into a heavy mist. We can hear but can’t see the birds. We can smell but can’t see the flowers growing from the cliff. We can barely see each other now.

  It’s one careful step at a time, until we reach the top, and the mist fades away, and a flash of gray and white darts past: a family of Arctic foxes. The larger ones—I’m guessing it’s the mother and father—are ripping a dead bird to shreds, eating it raw. One of the younger foxes sneaks up, tries to steal a piece for himself, but a parent snarls at him. He skitters away.

  Then the other young fox creeps up from the other side, steals the same piece of meat, and runs to join his brother or sister.

  Zoe tells us that Arctic foxes are famous for their survival skills. “Once, a young fox crossed the ice from here all the way to Canada. She walked over two thousand miles in just seventy-five days.”

  The pups, she tells us, learn to fend for themselves early on.

  When the ground levels out, we practice posing as kids on a field trip, which is kind of what we are, and Mr. Kalman and Betty rehearse as a married couple, which is hilarious because already they’re bickering over how bad the fake injury should be.

  “It should cause me to grunt,” Mr. Kalman says.

  “Scream,” Betty says. “A broken leg at the very least.”

  Zoe tells me not to worry. Betty was an actress when she was young. She played comedic roles on Broadway.

  “Mr. Kalman can act too,” I tell her. “He can fool a hospital.”

  Alistair, though, has probably the hardest role to play. He pulls a blond girl’s wig from his backpack.

  Mr. Kalman looks confused. “What are you doing?”

  “There’s a satellite dish at Svalbard. If the guards watch MasterChef Junior, they’ll know who I really am. It could compromise the mission, so I picked up this wig in San Francisco.”

  He puts on the wig.

  He turns to Zoe. “Lipstick?”

  Zoe turns Alistair’s lips an electric shade of pink. Mr. Kalman and Betty peel off from the group.

  We trek up the hill, Alistair carrying the backpack with snacks and supplies, Zoe carrying a backpack of her own with something big and bulging in there. Twenty minutes later Mr. Kalman and Betty veer onto a side trail. Up ahead, we see a huge rectangle sticking out of a mountain, like a concrete robot poking out from its lair. The mouth is a heavy steel door. The forehead is a wall of blue and green glass lit from within. It looks like someone trapped the northern lights in a giant glass box.

  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

  We stand there, awed by the power of the building, the beauty of its sculpture. Catalina read up on it while we were at sea. “The light sculpture is called Perpetual Repercussion,” she says. “The artist, Dyveke Sanne, wanted people to think about reflection. The sculpture reflects the northern lights, which makes it beautiful. But it’s also a shattered mirror, so it makes us think about what we’re doing to the planet. Beauty or destruction, what will each of us make? The seeds inside are humanity’s last hope.”

  She steps toward the Norwegian soldier standing guard, shotgun hanging from his shoulder by a leather strap.

  “Good morning,” she says, “I’m Catalina Gladys Consuela Martinez, captain of our school’s nature club. These are our students come all the way from Los Angeles.”

  The heavy steel door opens, and a woman steps out to greet us. She’s tall, with blond hair and a yellow construction hat. She wears glasses and an ID badge: ASTRID LARSEN.

  “Welcome to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I am Astrid, your guide. You’ve made such a long journey. Are you excited for your visit?”

  We look at one another and nod like eager schoolchildren, which in a way we are.

  “Before we go inside, let me ask you, why seeds? Why spend seven hundred and fifty million kroner each year on a giant freezer for seeds?”

  “Seeds are awesome,” Alistair says.

  “Yes. But most countries have their own vaults. Why have a backup here?”

  “In case of global disaster,” I say. “An asteroid or a nuclear war.”

  “And to maintain diversity,” Zoe says.

  “Exactly. We’re the backup of the backups. Twenty years from now, many crops will have failed from drought or climate change. Farmers may need to go back in time to a variety of seed that is heartier, can grow in a harsher climate. Those seeds may be gone from Nigeria or Nebraska, Peru or Lebanon—but their backup copies will be here.”

  “Food forever,” Alistair says.

  “Food forever,” Astrid says.

  Just then a hysterical woman comes racing up to the entrance—pushing her walker, which would have blown our cover if she wasn’t such a good actress. “Please, can you help me? My husband has fallen on the trail. He can’t get up.”

  It’s Betty. She’s so in character that for a second even Zoe doesn’t recognize her.

  Astrid turns to the young soldier, tells him to go for help, she’ll be fine on her own with the children.

  He nods and walks off with Betty—and his gun.

  “I think it’s a broken ankle,” we hear Betty say.

  We follow Astrid inside.

  She leads us down a long, wide concrete tube, its walls coated in ice.

  “Fog breath,” Alistair says, breathing a white mist from his mouth.

  “Me too,” says Jaesang.

  Astrid explains that the vault was dug 350 meters into the mountainside. Even if global warming melts the ground ice outside, the seeds in here will remain in permafrost.

  “If we lose power, the natural temperature inside will stay at zero degrees Celsius. As long as it stays cold, the seeds are safe.”

  We go through another door, following the tunnel deeper underground. Colder too.

  “We have nearly a million unique seed packets from 233 countries, with about 500 seeds in each packet. The total number of seeds in the collection so far is 560 million—150,000 types of wheat and rice, 80,000 kinds of barley, 35,000 kinds of maize, 15,000 varieties of peanuts, 4,000 lettuces, 3,000 tomatoes, and 3,700 types of potatoes. Have you ever had Mormon tea?”

  We all shake our heads.

  “How about giant hyssop, wall rocket, bastard cabbage, or skullcap?”

  We try not to crack up at these funny names.

  “I didn’t think so,” Astrid says. “No one, not even a botanist, can name all the seeds in Svalbard. Anyone like to cook?”

  We all look at Alistair.

  “She does,” I say.

  “But just as a hobby,” Alistair says. He’s still worried she’ll recognize him.

  “You could scan all the recipes ever written and still not find all the varieties of food grown from the seeds in this vault. Even the ones that are no longer cultivated are saved from extinction here.”

  I ask her if any of the countries has ever had to take their seeds out.

  “Yes,” she says. “During the Syrian Civil War, scientists in Aleppo evacuated eighty percent of their backup seeds to Svalbard. In those boxes were drought- and heat-resistant varieties of wheat, fava beans, chickpeas, and the world’s largest collection of barley seed. If the Aleppo seed bank got bombed or even lost power to its freezers, those seeds could be lost forever. They decided to build a new seed bank in Lebanon, and they came to us for our first withdrawal.”

  There’s an expression in English—getting cold feet. It describes that feeling of all of a sudden being unsure about something that, a minute ago, you were 100 percent determined to do. People get cold feet when they’re about to jump out of a plane or zip-line across a huge crevasse or, so I’ve heard, get married.

  Right now, we’re all getting cold feet. How can we take seeds as hostages when they might have to feed people in a war zone? Or all of humanity in a climate catastrophe?

  We go through another door and then another, and past each door you can feel the temperature dropping, until it’s not figurative cold feet we’re getting, but literal ones. Multiple body parts are freezing in here. Even snot freezes.

  “Catalina,” I say, “did your snot freeze?”

  “Yeah. Yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Benny could never survive here,” Zoe says. “Lizards can’t live below forty-five degrees.”

  “How long you think we can?” I say.

  Astrid tells us we won’t stay long, but she wants to show us the actual vault. She waves her badge in front of a sensor. Another steel door opens.

  “This is vault number two. As you can see, it’s nearly full.”

  We’re in a room way colder than the cold room at Costco. Rows of metal shelves make aisles of the open floor. They’re filled with boxes, sealed and stacked two high.

  “It’s like the United Nations, with each country represented by their seeds. Here you have North Korea”—she points to a red box with the words DRK PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA written on its side—“back to back with the United States. No politics, just preparation.”

  “How long will this place last?” Jaesang asks.

  “The seed vault was built to last two hundred years, the maximum under Norway’s building code. But its inner structure—where we are now—is encased in a mountain, and that will last ten thousand years.”

  She turns to Zoe. “Where are your ancestors from?”

  “Russia on my mom’s side. Lebanon on my dad’s.”

  “In 1903, when your great-grandmother was making borscht for the family, there were probably two hundred and eighty-five varieties of beets she could choose from. Today there are about fifteen. Ninety-four percent of the cultivars are gone.”

  She turns to Catalina. “And you?”

  “My great-grandmother made papas a la Huancauna. Creamy, cheesy potatoes. She lived in Peru.”

  “We’ve collected more than seventeen thousand individual tuber seeds from Peru. Peruvian potatoes are the most nutritious in the world. Did you know that NASA is experimenting with them for growing on Mars?”

  Catalina smiles.

  “My great-grandma had a recipe for pear upside-down cake,” Alistair says. “It calls for Ansault pears, but I can never find them in a market.”

  “And you never will. We’ve lost more than twenty-six hundred pear varieties since the 1800s. There are only three hundred left.”

  She turns to Jaesang. “What does your family like to eat?”

  “In-N-Out,” he says. “But also Korean barbecue and rice.”

  “Here at Svalbard we have one hundred twenty thousand varieties of rice. Just in case.”

  It’s been about forty-five minutes since we entered the vault. On our way back out, before we reach the main door, I nudge Zoe, who nudges Catalina, who nudges Alistair, who turns to Astrid and says, “I’m sorry, Astrid, but I’ll need your badge.”

  19

  We Take 500,000,000 Hostages

  “Why would I give you my badge?”

  “Because if you don’t . . .”

  Alistair reaches into his backpack and pulls out his Bernzomatic TS8000. There’s a whoosh and a flash of blue light as he fires up the blowtorch.

  “It’ll break my heart, but I’ll start burning seeds.”

  She stares at him, wondering if this kid is serious. He doesn’t flinch.

  She hands him her badge. Alistair passes it to me; I pass it to Jaesang, who passes it to Catalina, who passes it to Zoe.

  “Now your radio, please.”

  She hands him her radio.

  “You are committing a serious crime,” she says. “It can only end in your arrest and incarceration in Tromsø Prison.”

  “A risk we’re willing to take,” I say.

  “But why? You’re just children.”

  “No one else seems to really care about climate change,” Catalina says.

  “We’re this close to doing something that could save the planet,” Jaesang says.

  Alistair tells her about our amendment to the Constitution. “It’ll ban all fossil fuels.”

  “It’ll make plastic illegal,” I say.

  “And pollution a crime,” Catalina says.

  “And end cruelty to animals,” Zoe says.

  “If it passes, it’ll set an example for the world, so that no country ever has to make another withdrawal from here again.”

  We look at her. She looks at us.

  “What’s your demand?”

  “There are ten states that haven’t voted. If we don’t get nine of them to vote yes by this Friday, the amendment dies. But if we do, it becomes a part of the U.S. Constitution. It’ll be a game changer for the planet.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Let the Norwegian press know we’re here. Tell them why.”

  She looks at us . . . Zoe and Catalina and Jaesang in their fierce stance by the front door. Me in my pink parka and Alistair in his blond wig, wielding a blowtorch.

  “I’ll need my radio back,” she says.

  Alistair hesitates. He hands her the radio. We all watch her as she presses the talk button and speaks in Norwegian. We hear the words Svalbardposten. Barn. Pressen. Ja. And blåsebrenner. The radio crackles, then cuts off.

  Astrid hands it back to Alistair. “They’re sending a crew to film you. They’ll upload the feed to CNN.”

 

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