Conquering the Impossible (33 page)

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I was paddling against wind and waves that occasionally kept me from making any headway at all. Battered by rough currents on the approach to Icy Cape, I took shelter between the coastline and the sandbars. Wading through coastal lagoons where the water level fell once the wind veered, I pulled my kayak behind me, two miles from the shore. From the beach, which I could barely make out, I must have looked as if I were walking on water. Once the water got a little deeper, spotted seals started to cluster around my kayak, diving beneath it, leaping over it, orchestrating a spectacular show in an apparent attempt to make me capsize and fall into the water.

On August 10, I reached Point Lay after traveling 140 miles in four days. I got there at dawn on foot, hauling my kayak behind me through the lagoon. Far off on the horizon, I could make out a white spot that I immediately identified. It was my sailboat! Martin had arrived the night before and had called to assure me that I wouldn't be able to miss it. Its presence symbolized the end of the North American portion of my journey.

I had not seen my brother for more than a year. Our reunion was deeply emotional, and we set sail together on a course for Point Hope. It gave us a chance to talk, and he brought me news about our mother and the rest of our family.

In a few days I would experience another joyous reunion because my wife and my daughters were waiting for me at Point Hope; I hadn't seen them since Gjoa Haven six months before.

*   *   *

Cape Lisburne and the squalls blowing down out of the Brooks Range were living up to their reputation. After some trying moments at the helm, Martin and I drew close to Point Hope. The big swells seemed to be trying to warn me that I needed to hurry up and get across to Russia. Autumn would be upon me soon enough, and conditions were going to deteriorate fast in the Bering Sea.

We reached Point Hope around three in the morning. Because it wasn't possible to pull the trimaran out of the water at that time of night, I dropped Martin off on the beach and anchored off shore.

A few hours later, Cathy, Annika, and Jessica appeared on the shore. I sailed toward them, and I held in my arms the three people who mean the most to me on this earth. Once again, my daughters had grown while I had my back turned.

In the blink of an eye, people were crowding all around us, ready to help haul my boat out of the water and onto its trailer. One kind Inuit moved his entire family into his grandmother's house so that we could stay in his house.

Jean Baligand, the president of Groupama; many of the company's executives; the mayor of Château d'Oex, the village in Switzerland where I live and sponsor of this next phase in which I would leave the American continent and start across Russia; along with all the inhabitants of the village and friends who had decided to make the trip up to Point Hope, came to greet me. A local resident named Steve Umatuk was there, too.

When Martin came here to pick up my trimaran and sail it up to Point Lay, he had contacted Steve, whose number I had gotten from Christine Lambert in Barrow. Steve was the captain of the fire brigade there, and he had given Martin a place to stay in the firehouse. He had fed him and helped him to unload my sailboat from the barge that brought it. In short, he had helped Martin in every way possible.

During our stay in Point Hope, an old whaling town with a population of four hundred, Steve took us to see the cemetery where whale bones served as headstones for the captains of whaling vessels.

Like all North Slope Inuit villages, he explained to us, Point Hope lives off its annual quota of whale. According to the philosophy of the people of the Far North, it is the whale that offers itself up to the hunter in order to provide sustenance to the village. Legend has it that a whale possesses three lives, and so it can offer itself up three times before dying completely. The hunters set out after the whales in dugout canoes covered in oiled walrus skin. Sometimes the whale, three times the size of the boat, will dive and pull the hunters down into the depths. But when the hunters are victorious, they carry the whale's body back to the village before returning its soul to the ocean. Thus the whale will be able to be reborn and offer itself up during the following season, ensuring the community's survival.

As he described this vital bond between men and the giants of the sea, Steve illuminated an important spiritual concept. From that day forward, whales would be more to me than just majestic sea mammals.

*   *   *

We were treated to performances of traditional dances and a special display of Inuit culture. The mayor of Château d'Oex, Jean-Jacques Mottier, handed out Swiss chocolates and cheeses to everyone in the village. An artist who specialized in decoupage, a Swiss specialty, taught her art to schoolchildren and presented the mayor of Point Hope with a tableau that featured me, standing between depictions of the town of Point Hope and the village of Château d'Oex.

The mayor of my hometown christened my sailboat by shattering a bottle of champagne against its hull before the startled eyes of Inuit bystanders, who lived in a “dry” town devoid of alcoholic beverages. I had a difficult time explaining to them that in our culture, this was a libation offered to Neptune, the god of the sea. In the end, they remained skeptical.

At Point Hope, Martin met up with Ronan le Goff, also known as Ronnie, a French skipper who had come to help him to take my boat back once I left it in Provideniya, Russia, on the western shore of the Bering Strait. Ronan le Goff is a noteworthy individual in the adventure world since he was a member of Ellen MacArthur's sailing crew when she tried to break the record for the Jules Verne Trophy in February 2002. My trimaran would be in good hands with him.

I had originally planned to cross the Bering Strait by kayak and then continue along the Russian coastline until the East Siberian Sea forced me to continue on foot. But I was only authorized to enter Russia through the official portal of Provideniya, which forced me to cross the Bering Sea, waters much too rough for a mere kayak. So I would bring the kayak with me aboard the trimaran, and I would embark from Provideniya in my kayak.

Since there were no flights between Provideniya and Point Hope, Martin and Ronnie flew to Nome, at the southern end of the Seward Peninsula. They planned to reach Provideniya by Bering Air, a small airline that was the only one to provide service but whose flights were not regularly scheduled.

*   *   *

Just as I was getting ready to set sail, I was surprised to run into Christine Lambert, my guardian angel from Barrow. She had brought me a special package containing a .45 Magnum.

“It's from one of my girlfriends,” she said. “It belonged to her late husband. She is happy for you to have it.”

*   *   *

I left Point Hope in good weather, heading west by southwest toward the Chukotka Peninsula. Soon I was within sight of the two Diomede Islands—Little Diomede and Big Diomede—which lie squarely in the middle of the Bering Strait. The border between the United States and Russia runs right between the two of them, and so, during the Cold War, each had served as an advance observation outpost.

As I sailed by, I found myself in the middle of a school of about fifty humpback whales—the first of that species that I had ever seen. Summer was the season when they migrated from the south, passing through the Bering Strait on their way to the Chukotka Sea and the Arctic Ocean—they would retrace their route come autumn. These sixty-foot-long mammals were frolicking all around my sailboat, which was only twenty-four feet long. As I stood admiring them, I thought back to Steve Umatuk's words.

*   *   *

Off of Cape Prince of Wales, where the waters of the Bering Sea rush through the narrowest part of the strait, the wind whipped up short, choppy waves. When the Ice Age ended millions of years ago, it brought about a rise in sea level and the separation of the two continents. It also created this “muddy pond,” a relatively shallow stretch of sea that is said to be one of the coldest and most treacherous places on earth to sail. When the wind blows over the Bering Sea, the currents flow more rapidly and the chaotic waves crash in every direction, rushing into the funnel of the strait and triggering whirlpools in the Chukotka Sea. One Frenchman who tried to windsurf across the strait vanished, never to be seen again.

*   *   *

On my satellite phone, my brother was telling me that, because there was no flight available to Provideniya, he and Ronnie were stuck in Nome. They would have to charter a plane and wait three days for authorization to land in Russia.

Between the prospect of a major expense that would cut seriously into my budget, and the idea of landing in Provideniya without anyone there to sail my boat back, I decided to go meet up with Martin and Ronnie at Teller, a village sixty-eight miles north of Nome. They would take a taxi to meet me there.

Just ten or so hours away from Provideniya, I was turning the boat about. That was when my battery decided to go dead so that I had no automatic pilot to allow me to take my eyes off the course for even a minute. I called Martin and asked him if he could find me a spare battery.

Clamped on to the tiller twenty-four hours a day, soaked through and frozen solid, I was surfing over stiff waves, each coming so soon after the other that when the triple hull of my trimaran often plowed into the next wave, I was oh so close to tumbling forward, ass over elbow. With my rudder suspended helplessly in midair, I lost control of the sailboat twice, and I was just seconds away from capsizing. With my sails winched up, I zipped along at sixteen to eighteen knots. I bent every nerve in my body to master my speed in such a way that I would climb up the face of the waves instead of plunging into them. Land wasn't far off, but if I was swept overboard, there was no way I could swim to it. In these icy waters, I would be dead of hypothermia in minutes.

I was beginning to regret having acquired a twenty-four-foot sailboat; it was much too small for the Bering Sea, which was definitely living up to its reputation. This error in judgment might wind up costing me dearly.

*   *   *

Three days after setting course for Teller, I entered its natural harbor, where the water was finally calm. Martin and Ronnie were waiting for me on the beach. A guy named Joe Garney took us in and fed us a spectacular pancake breakfast complete with salmon that he had caught and smoked himself. Joe remains one of the outstanding faces of true generosity that I met in the Far North.

The next day the weather reports were favorable, so Martin, Ronnie, and I set our course for Russia. For the first five or six hours, we sailed along in fine weather, making ten or twelve knots. When night fell—or the shadowy dusk that passes for night at that time of year—the wind died down, and so did our speed.

When morning came, everything changed in a few minutes.

A cyclone and an anticyclone were converging in the Bering Sea at the very moment we were sailing across it, and we were battling sixty-knot winds. With all sails reefed except for a storm jib, we were zipping along at fifteen knots. Clamped onto the tiller, I suddenly saw the vertical wall of a breaking wave off to one side.

There was a good chance we were about to capsize. And Martin and Ronnie were belowdecks, poring over their charts. I steered sharply to head the boat straight into the wave, which broke right over me! Only my instinctive reflex of grabbing onto one of the boom sheets kept me from being swept overboard.

Once I regained control of the boat—and of myself—I discovered that I had lost all my bearings. At that very moment Martin burst out of the hatch and pointed.

“Over there!” he said. I obeyed without thinking, and as a result we narrowly escaped being hit by another breaking wave. The waves were rushing in all directions, completely unpredictable, and the squalls were driving the rain horizontally and tearing off white cascades from the crests of the breakers. Visibility was practically zero. Ronnie and I were taking turns struggling to maintain control of the boat.

The coast blocked the wind. The water began to grow calmer as we approached it, and I played out some sail. But at the mouth of the Provideniya Bay, we were brutally battered by a sixty- or sixty-five-knot wind, which turned the boat over on its side! It skidded along on just one float, like a car on two wheels. Ronnie was at the helm, Martin was in the cockpit, and I was on deck. I lunged at the mainmast to free the halyard and then went forward to pull in the sail to keep us from capsizing completely. I had the sail half rolled up when the boat landed on its “feet” with a resounding “sla-a-a-ap!” and reverberations that we could feel in our shoulders. The wind on the bare mast alone pushed us along at six to eight knots.

*   *   *

Tired but content, we sailed into Provideniya Bay. Once we entered the shelter of the harbor, the wind died away as if by magic and the sea became calm. Ronnie unfurled a bit of sail, Martin pored over the charts, and I sat holding the tiller.

Soon the town came into view, and then the massive outlines of its blocky buildings. It had been thirty-six hours since we left Teller, but time seemed to have run backward. As I looked at Provideniya, I felt as if I had fallen into a hole in the space-time continuum and traveled fifty years back in time.

6

Welcome to Russia!

T
HERE WERE PRACTICALLY NO LIGHTS VISIBLE
in the windows of the rows of buildings. Only fishing nets containing a few meager provisions—in the absence of electricity they served as refrigerators—gave any sign of human life. Looming over the phantom construction yards, cranes that had been frozen in place for months stood like skeletons over heaps of smoking coal. Coal is the only fuel used for heating there. Military vehicles that had been abandoned for decades cluttered the wharfs. Rusted hulks of half-sunken ships obstructed the port.

The grim grayness and decay of the place was strongly reminiscent of the Soviet Union under Stalin. I suspected that the rest of town would be in keeping with what I had seen already.