Melting Away

Lynne Quarmby always wanted to see the Arctic. “For much of my life,” she writes early in Watermelon Snow, “I yearned to visit the north of my imagination.” As a young girl whose great-grandfather was in the Klondike gold rush and whose father modelled an outdoorsy independence, she imagined “a romantic, ultimate wilderness of sublime landscapes.” At ten, she built a raft and tried to pole her way across a small pond, toward that wonderful place, only to have her vessel sink into the mud. Now, almost fifty years later, the cell biologist wishes she could tell her younger self that “one day I will travel to the far north on a beautiful ship.”

Watermelon Snow is the story of that ship and Quarmby’s fifteen-day journey across the High Arctic in June 2017, when she was among thirty passengers — twenty-eight artists and two scientists — assembled by the Arctic Circle...