Conquering the Impossible (32 page)

*   *   *

I spent a last night in the cabin where we had all camped together on the banks of the Colville River (also off limits, by the way), and then I headed back out to sea. The ice had all melted at last, and despite a slightly stronger wind, I sailed straight for Cape Barrow. I camped on the tundra not far from the shore, near streams that had become, along with the rain, my sole source of potable water. The sky was clear, the sea was calm, and the summer temperatures—between fifty and sixty degrees—allowed me to wear shorts and a T-shirt. In these conditions kayaking was a picnic, an outing that I could have shared with my daughters.

The next day, July 16, I would turn thirty-seven.

“Mike, what would you like most for your birthday? A day of rest, when you wouldn't have to do anything but sleep, eat, drink, and stroll around to restore the circulation in your legs, all cramped from being in the kayak?”

I answered myself that this was certainly a tempting offer but that I would hate myself the next day for having failed to make any progress.

I had a better idea. I had been born on July 16, so I would paddle for sixteen hours on my birthday. I was born in 1966, So I would cover at least sixty-six kilometers, or forty-one miles, that day. It would be a practical, superstitious birthday gift to myself.

*   *   *

The next day at dawn I wished myself a happy birthday, gobbled down my breakfast, and hopped into my kayak. In a state of euphoria, I put my pedal to the metal, taking risks by crossing bays on a straight line from one cape to the other, which sometimes took me as far as sixteen miles from the shore. I was fortunate enough to escape the wind's punishment. After sixteen hours, I angled in to the mainland. When I finally reached shore, my GPS told me that I had covered forty-two and a half miles, which worked out to sixty-eight and a half kilometers! My personal best in the kayak, and a birthday present that I had really earned.

I fell asleep, exhausted, with a smile on my lips.

*   *   *

Obsessed with the fear of arriving too late and having to wait until the end of winter to cross the Bering Sea, I slept less and only ate when I was hungry. I paddled with all the energy that came from being in shape again. My kayak was lighter and lighter, and the wind sometimes helped by allowing me to hoist sail. Without repeating my birthday record on a daily basis, I still managed to make an average distance of about thirty miles.

The nights were filled with caribou silhouettes. One of them woke me up with a start when it slipped its head into my tent. Then we posed together for a photograph.

Less amiable were the clouds of mosquitoes, so dense that you couldn't open your mouth without swallowing a handful. It was a relief to escape them each morning when I paddled out onto the water.

To save time I would sometimes sleep in the kayak. Lulled by the immense peace of the ocean, I would set down my paddle when I felt sleep coming on. The Beaufort Sea is muddy and shallow. You can even sometimes touch bottom three miles away from shore. The currents are weak, too, so only a violent storm could blow me out to sea, but the gales would wake me up from my drifting sleep before that could happen.

*   *   *

On July 21, two days away from Cape Barrow, my GPS indicated that I was exactly midway through my trip. I had covered 6,200 miles, out of the 12,400-mile distance of my complete circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle. It had taken me nearly a year to get this far, and it might take me that long again to finish the trip. The only thing that I knew for sure was that starting from this point and this moment, I would be on my way home the rest of the time.

I memorialized the moment by taking a picture of my kayak resting on a sandbar. While taking the picture, I noticed two eider ducklings about to be attacked by a bird of prey. I couldn't help myself. I hurried over to scare the predator away and to get the ducklings to shelter. Let's just say that I saved two little lives to celebrate my triumph.

*   *   *

The thirty- and forty-knot winds blowing west for the next two days would normally have prevented small craft from venturing out to sea. But my kayak was so light that it just went faster, and my sail worked perfectly. Pushed along by the tailwind, I had the time of my life surfing over the waves. I wouldn't have traded those days for anything in the world. When I thought back on the winter months I had just endured, I felt as if I were on vacation.

*   *   *

Located on Cape Barrow, the little town of Barrow is a typical Arctic cluster of boxy houses, whipped by high winds and snow squalls. At seventy-one degrees north latitude, Cape Barrow is the northernmost point on the mainland of the continent, America's North Cape.

I reached Barrow at one in the morning. The first two inhabitants that I met were Inuit, and they were both falling-down drunk, but that didn't keep them from generously offering me the hospitality of their sofa for the rest of the night. Just before collapsing into sleep, we celebrated my arrival by opening a bottle of wine.

The next day Cathy reported a wonderful coincidence:
Vagabond
was in Barrow!
Vagabond
was the sailboat on which my friend Éric Boissier had, just the year before, navigated the Northeast Passage, which was the water route along the northern coast of Europe and Asia between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This year he was attempting to complete what he had already started and become the first man to sail around the Arctic Circle in two seasons by sailing the length of the Northwest Passage.

For the past two years we had known that, since both our expeditions were planned for the same period of time, we might be able to meet up somewhere in Alaska—without knowing where, of course.

Éric and his girlfriend, France, introduced me to Christine Lambert, who was in charge of the housing construction program for the entire North Slope. When
Vagabond
tied up in Barrow, Christine got in touch with the sailboat's occupants and offered them a place to stay. With the same spirit of generosity, she offered me accommodation as well. And so I left the sofa of my Inuit friends and moved into her house. Her older children had moved out some time before, and she adopted me immediately. She fed me, helped me with my laundry, and took me to see the only dentist in town to have a molar taken care of that had been bothering me ever since I cracked it on a frozen chocolate bar four months earlier. While I was there, I asked the dentist to take a look at an old crown that had come loose a few weeks before. I had stuck it back into place with superglue.

Truly a guardian angel, Christine Lambert even called up the governor of Alaska and asked him to intervene with the Russian authorities to try to facilitate my passage through Chukotka. When I told her about how important it was for me to have a weapon when crossing the Russian steppe and how much trouble I had had in procuring one, she promised me that she would look into the problem.

*   *   *

I had hoped to swap my kayak for my sailboat in Barrow. It was clear that I would need a boat because I would reach the Bering Strait in August, and therefore would not be able to cross it on foot. My boat was finally freed of the ice north of Baffin Island, but I couldn't arrange to get it transported to the west coast of Alaska in time for my departure. Threrefore I was in the market for a new boat. Since I was already familiar with the Corsair Marine trimaran, I purchased a twenty-four-foot model at the recommendation of the company representative. I had it built in San Diego, taken by trailer as far as Seattle, and then loaded onto a barge run by the Bowhead Transport Company, which was supposed to deliver it to Point Hope on the west coast of Alaska on the first of August.

However, because of the bad weather that was causing all sorts of problems with cargo routes, Bowhead was running late. I could have them transfer my trimaran onto one of their barges running the sea lift, which is the annual resupply of all the villages along the north coast. The sea lift would arrive in a month. Since I was ahead of schedule, I could afford the delay. But I had ants in my pants, and the urge to get across the Bering Strait was driving me crazy.

I would pick up my boat as scheduled at Point Hope.

*   *   *

A series of bad storms blowing out of Russia battered Barrow for eight days running, and the weather forecasts predicted that there would be weeks of this. There was no chance of setting out in my kayak in sea conditions this rough.

But if I couldn't go by boat, I could still go on foot. A fan of my adventures, the local manager of an air-freight company, Hagland Air, offered to ship my kayak anywhere I asked free of charge. I told him that I would be very grateful and assured him that Wainwright, a village located 125 miles away, would be more than sufficient. I should be there in four or five days. If the weather improved, I could pick up my kayak and proceed by water from there.

I shipped most of my gear and supplies with the kayak, and I carried with me a sleeping bag that a friend of Christine had sent me from Anchorage. I marched along the Skull Cliffs, behind which stretched a marshy tundra crisscrossed by streams and rivers and studded with lakes that were hard to cross. Ocean inlets regularly forced me to take detours around them, and there were plenty of large bays that lengthened my route. It was easy to understand why people preferred to travel by boat and by plane around here.

I was making reasonable progress—about twenty or so miles a day—until I reached a large, boggy peninsula. At the edge of the peninsula were a number of hunting and fishing huts, and nearby I met an Inuit named Hopkins. When I explained to him that I was planning to swim across the bay that extended from the other side of the peninsula, Hopkins told me that the bay was too big. Moreover, it was infested with spotted seals, which could be dangerous to humans. He offered me a cup of tea in his cabin and recommended that I climb down to the bay, hike to the river that emptied into it, and then follow it upstream until I reached a narrow stretch where I could easily wade across.

On the other side of the peninsula, though, I was met with a grim surprise. The shores of the bay were lined with walrus cadavers, swollen and decapitated. This was the work of poachers, ivory traffickers, who hunt the walrus with rifles and then dump their dead bodies into the ocean. The corpses had washed up on shore and lay there rotting. I also found beluga corpses with bear tracks around them.

This appeared to be the work of locals, and if so, there was no doubt that Western greed had infected their hearts and had undermined their traditional respect for the environment and the tenuous balance of nature.

*   *   *

I hiked all the way to the river. According to my map, the river didn't narrow for a good sixteen miles upstream, so I decided to try to cross it right there where it must have been about 150 feet across.

Sheathed in Gore-Tex from head to foot, my backpack wrapped in a plastic trash bag, I waded into the water. It only took a couple of seconds for it to seep through my clothing, which was not waterproof under such conditions. All at once, the cold literally took my breath away.

All around me bobbed ugly heads with the distinctive drooping whiskers of the spotted seal. The unsettling little beasts, covered with white patches as if they suffered from some skin disease, were observing me, perplexed.

I sensed that I wouldn't make it across, so I turned around and climbed back onto the near bank. Soaking wet, walking as fast as I could to restore a little body heat, I went in search of a narrower stretch of river. But the river was flowing west, and if I followed it upstream, I would be losing ground. One way or another, I would have to get across.

Carrying my backpack on my head, I waded into the water for a second time, holding my breath as the icy chill clamped down onto my skin. Once I was chin-deep in the water, I began to dog-paddle, pushing my bag ahead of me, struggling at the same time against the current that was sweeping me out to sea and against the cold paralysis that was spreading through my limbs. I was so cold—probably a result of the fatigue that I had built up during all those hours of hiking—that I might as well have been swimming naked. I nearly gave up a second time, but I hung on, knowing that I probably wouldn't have the strength to make a third attempt. At least not today, anyway. Hobbled by cramps, I finally reached the far shore.

There was no question of stopping to catch my breath, unless I was willing to freeze on the spot. I pushed on in order to warm up. About twenty-five miles of tundra and a few smallish lakes still lay between me and Wainwright. I moved forward through marshland, up to my knees in water. At the end of the day, I looked around in vain for someplace dry to camp, and I finally took shelter on a hummock not much bigger than my tent. It felt as if I were camping on a tiny island. I spent a damp night in my soaking wet sleeping bag. It was impossible to get any sleep until I could get it dry. I would have to reach Wainwright by the next evening.

On the uneven terrain of the tundra, weighed down and thrown off balance by my backpack, I nearly sprained my ankle repeatedly. The damp vegetation drenched me up to my chest, and I hiked bent over to withstand the gusting wind. After fifteen hours of slogging, I allowed myself my first break. The second halt came five hours later. And at ten in the evening, after twenty-five hours of nonstop hiking, I arrived in Wainwright, overjoyed and completely overcome by exhaustion.

My kayak was waiting for me there, and the forecast was calling for a forty-eight-hour window of good weather in two days. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity since the price of a sandwich in Wainwright—twelve dollars—wasn't encouraging me to linger there.

My trimaran was also getting closer to Point Hope, where we had arranged to rendezvous. I thought it over and called my brother Martin to ask him to take delivery of the sailboat and then sail it 110 miles north to Point Lay. I would meet him there.