Conquering the Impossible (15 page)

The Inuit woman was looking at me with a sense of concern that I could clearly read on her tanned features, prematurely aged by a life that was as harsh as the climate. “You come back with us to Arctic Bay,” she said. “Winter coming; night fall; temperatures drop real low; bears in migration. You go die.”

I replied as diplomatically as I knew how that I was deeply touched by her concern, but that with all due respect for her and her family, I knew what I was doing, why I was doing it, and that I was quite determined to continue. Again, the man and the woman tried to persuade me to go back with them, to give up, to turn around, and after we said good-bye, they came after me again to beg me to reconsider one last time. Once it became clear that they could not change my mind, the Inuit man told his son to offer me his second pair of fur gloves.

By the way, the only reason I hadn't adopted the local style of dress, which would certainly have been less complicated, was that it was not well suited to long expeditions like the one I was undertaking. The natives of the Far North go out into the wild to hunt or fish, but when the distances grow longer they allow themselves to be pulled by their sled dogs or else they ride on their snowmobiles. To each his own way of life and to each his own equipment.

The friendly harassment to which I had just been subjected might seem excessive, but I didn't see it that way. It is theoretically impossible for human beings to survive at the extreme temperatures that prevail here. You cannot survive in the Arctic winter unless you stay in one place, as the Inuit do, living on their supplies of food and on their body fat. Walking requires considerable effort and uses up an enormous amount of calories—in my case, between eight and ten thousand calories a day, five times the normal rate. Chocolate, nuts, unsaturated fats, starches, butter, and vegetable oils—my entire diet was swimming in oils and fats. I was basically living on fats. All the same, I was losing weight every day, which was a bad thing for two reasons: first, because every extra pound of fat on my body would offer extra protection from the cold; and second, because if I was carrying that weight on my body then I wouldn't have to weigh down my sled with unnecessary supplies.

I drank nothing more than the strict minimum during the day in order to spare myself the ordeal of urinating outdoors in conditions of extreme cold. After my breakfast—tea or coffee with a big bowl of cereal—I filled two thermoses with a hot vanilla-flavored energy drink with a milky consistency. I took a few gulps of this drink approximately every two hours. This “liquid nutrition,” as I called it, rehydrated me, warmed me up, and quenched my thirst and hunger. However, that didn't keep me from munching all day long on cashew nut bars or dried fruit, chocolate, or homemade brownies packed for me by Cathy. I also avoided wearing red-tinted sunglasses because experience taught me that the color red tended to make me hungry.

*   *   *

Ten days after leaving Arctic Bay, I called Børge Ousland on my satellite phone to give him a progress report. But instead of receiving congratulations, I was greeted with a brusque, “That's too cold! I have never traveled in that territory during that time of year. Head back to civilization.”

In my situation I needed someone to urge me to outdo myself, to win, not to give up. The situation was eerily reminiscent of my earlier attempt to reach the North Pole. I ignored his advice, but each time I turned a deaf ear to good advice—each time I refused to heed the call to reason—I could feel a heavier burden of responsibility on my shoulders.

*   *   *

A few days later, I met my first polar bear.

It was one of those days when my kite, buffeted by only a slack breeze, dragged me forward with intermittent jerks like an old jalopy on its last legs. The polar bear that suddenly ventured across my path about a hundred yards away seemed less interested in me than in the large colorful rag that I appeared to have on a leash. Startled by the bear's presence, my reflex was to shake the kite with all my strength. The result was immediate. Frightened by that unidentified flying object, the bear turned and galumphed away. I could see his sizable white posterior as he took off at full speed over the ice.

I had just discovered a secondary use for my kites, unexpected but valuable.

Since I couldn't sleep with a kite fluttering overhead, I also used a nocturnal antibear alarm system that was developed by my friends Laurent and Daniel during their time in the Swiss army. This system, which we refer to as “bearwatch” required that I surround my tent with a wire hooked onto three stakes about twenty yards away from the tent and about a foot and a half above the ground. Polar bears, which drag their paws as they walk, have almost as much difficulty stepping over the wire as they would slipping beneath it. The slightest contact between the wire and a foreign body will trigger the launch of a flare. The sound of the flare blasting off would frighten the animal, and the light of the flare as it drops back to the ground suspended by a parachute would allow me to see the bear clearly.

My bearwatch alarm system allowed me to sleep soundly. It had only one small defect—its sensitivity meant that it could be set off by a moderately rough windstorm.

*   *   *

One day the roar of a snowmobile in the distance announced the arrival of a visitor. When the engine drew close and came to a halt, I discovered to my joy that it was Claude Lavallée. It had only taken him a single day to get here from Arctic Bay, whereas I left two full weeks ago. Before the ice got too thick, he was going fishing one last time on a lake not far away from here for fish to feed to his dogs.

“I needed to come,” he said, “to give you one more chance to turn back.” And, once again, I politely declined. Since accompanying him to the lake did not involve much of a detour, I agreed to go. During the forty-eight hours that we spent together, I slept under his canvas tent and I fulfilled my duties as apprentice by helping him to set his nets and haul the big fish out of the icy water.

*   *   *

Before long, the weather started to turn ugly and Claude was forced to hurry back to Arctic Bay. Otherwise he ran the risk of being pinned down out here. While breaking camp and packing and loading his equipment, he asked me one last time if I was absolutely dead set on going on.

“We are friends now,” he said, as if to excuse his nagging. He already knew my answer, but I could sense that he wasn't so much trying to keep me from going on as he was trying to be certain that I understood what I was taking on.

For a good long while, Claude Lavallée would be the last person to have seen me alive. I was hoping that this “good long while” would not take on a sense of finality.

This time, roles reversed, it was Claude who left me. I found myself alone again in a night filled with ice and rock and hellish cold.

I was alone again and contemplated my situation. What had driven me to ignore so stubbornly the advice of everyone I knew, including people who live here and know this country much better than I do? Pride? Stupidity? As the days went on, I determined to stop questioning myself. If I let myself be consumed by doubt, I was certain to be beaten by the forces of nature, which sharply outnumbered my own.

*   *   *

The landscape around me slowly shifted as I marched along day after day. The Admiralty Inlet extended before my skis like a broad boulevard, except when the tides complicated matters. Winter was still young, and the ice had not yet reached its full thickness. Each flow of the tides lifted the ice and moved it away from the shores, making it impossible to reach the shore. I was forced to wait for the tide to ebb and push the ice back against the shore before I could reach dry land and pitch my tent.

In this part of the world, where a few inches of ice was all that stood between me and an ice-cold bath, everything seemed to be moving and shifting continuously.

“Everywhere you go around here, the ocean is alive,” said Claude. “Never forget that you are walking on a living creature.” He also warned me to be especially careful of every bulge or unusual rise in the frozen surface. “Sometimes it's ice, and sometimes it's snow. Put your foot on it, and down you go.” This advice, which I took to heart, saved me more than once, even though it was hard to make out the level of the ice in the darkness, and the snow, which fell intermittently, made the night even darker.

I continued to travel on the frozen Admiralty Inlet, and not only because the flat frozen terrain provided me with a corridor leading in the right direction. In the winter on Baffin Island the temperatures are even harsher than at the North Pole, where the thirty-six or thirty-seven degree temperature of the water, radiating up through the ice field, makes the air a little milder. On Baffin Island's permafrost, forty degrees below zero really was forty below. On the frozen ice field of the Pole and of Admiralty Inlet, forty degrees below zero might moderate to, say, twenty-two degrees below zero due to the influence of the “warm” waters flowing beneath the ice.

In spring and summer it's the other way around, though. On the ice, the wind and the humidity drive the thermometer down, while dry land turns darker once the snow has melted and tends to absorb the heat of the sunlight. Thus, in the spring and summer I would try to stay on dry land as much as possible.

These nuances may bring a smile to the lips of experienced veterans of Nordic trekking, who claim that these minor effects are totally imperceptible. Personally, I believe that they make a substantial difference. For that matter, every time I got out of my tent I would play a little game. I'd try to guess the temperature before looking at the thermometer. I was rarely off by more than four or five degrees.

Every morning—so to speak, because sun never actually rose—I started my day by putting on a pair of heavy wool socks. Over the socks I slipped two plastic grocery bags, which in more technical terms I call anticondensation liners; they prevented my sweat from soaking through to my third layer, a pair of virgin-wool socks. The fourth layer was a pair of orange booties made of Polartec, a quick-drying fleece material that repelled moisture. When the temperature dropped below fifty degrees below zero, I added a fifth layer, a sort of large slipper made of polar wool. To facilitate circulation, none of these layers was very close-fitting.

Finally, I put on my boots—and all the layers that I just described should give you some idea of their size—and laced them only from the third hook up to give my toes plenty of room and not impede the blood flow.

These boots are the same as the ones that I wore to cross Greenland and to travel—almost—to the North Pole. They were custom-made for me out of Cordura, a material that would not break at sixty degrees below zero, and they were much lighter and more flexible than their bulky appearance might suggest. I had tried all sorts of footwear, and most of them, like modern ski boots, tended to restrict circulation in the ankles and force the knees to do all the work. Such boots might work for a few days of hiking, but no more than that. For long-distance trekking, they would be disastrous. In order to cover long distances, the whole body has to be working in unison. Plenty of trekkers, banged up or exhausted by excessively stiff boots, have been forced to give up in the middle of a trip.

I insisted that my footwear and clothing be as flexible and soft as possible, so as to help all of my joints to work together—ankles, knees, hips, shoulders. Moreover, they could not constrict any part of my body. These boots should allow me not only to hike, but also to ski, and even to climb.

They had only one shortcoming. After several thousand miles they would begin to crack where the toes flex, but I couldn't do anything about that. Any rigid structure must necessarily have a breaking point to allow the entire assembly to withstand strain. I would rather see my boots crack—I could always fill in the gaps—than come loose from the ski bindings.

Speaking of the bindings, I used three-point bindings that allowed my heel to rise with each step and at each turn, in accordance with the same telemarking principles that my skis are based on. Applying my three requirements of “solid, simple, and easy to repair,” I chose these bindings because they are the least complicated model on the market. For that matter, they included a safety release, which, if I fell in the water, would allow me to get out of my skis in a single move. (The skis, unfortunately, would go straight to the bottom, dragged down by the weight of their edges and the metal bindings.) It was Børge Ousland who especially recommended adding the release. He knew all too well the mad-dog side of my personality that encouraged me to run risks.

*   *   *

The temperatures were soon flirting with forty degrees below zero, and they kept dropping.

*   *   *

Before setting out on each new day of trekking, I followed an old Eskimo custom. I blew my nose on my fingers and smeared the snot over my face. Don't be too grossed out. It's just a transparent liquid, and it froze to form an antifrostbite mask more effective than any creams available on the market. Moreover, it was one less item I had to carry in my sled because my nose was dripping constantly.

*   *   *

During each day's hike, I wore three layers of clothing on top: a long-sleeved mock-turtleneck pullover made of power-dry fabric; over that, an Eider wool-and-polyester jersey for its warmth and moisture absorption; and finally, a layer of power-stretch, a silk-based fabric whose ultratight weave held in a layer of warm air, preventing cold air from getting in. As the word
stretch
suggests, it hugged my body, following all my movements instead of hindering them. I had the shoulders reinforced, putting seams in the middle of the back and on the outside in order to keep the chafing from the sled's harness from rubbing my skin raw. I had openings placed at the armpits to allow perspiration to escape, and I added a breast pocket—a sort of bag—to hold the GPS that I wore around my neck. Last of all I cut a slit into the end of each sleeve with my knife. I stuck my thumbs into these slits, and my power-dry stretched out into an extra pair of mittens.