Conquering the Impossible (43 page)

When I reached the rendezvous point, I had to wait for my team. I learned that they had arrived safely in Moscow, but apparently the representative of our travel agency had taken them all out to enjoy a pleasant lunch while waiting to catch the flight to Norilsk, and he had forgotten the departure time! Incredible, but true!

I chose to wait where I was until they could catch the next flight.

*   *   *

I waited for six days in the middle of nowhere. If I waited much longer, I would be unable to cross the Yenisei on foot. Already the water was rising around me, and I was forced to move my tent.

At last they arrived from Norilsk. Helicopters carried the journalists to Dudinka, where I joined them on skis. Then I returned with them to Norilsk, even though I had sworn that I would avoid the town, for a few photo sessions and concluding interviews. Once they were back on their plane, I set off for Dudinka.

The Yenisei River, now in full thaw, carried only fragments of ice, bobbing along on its rushing torrents, which were fully four-and-a-half miles across! I hardly need to point out that it was useless to think of crossing in anything other than a kayak or another type of boat.

Unfortunately, my kayak, which was supposed to be delivered with my supplies, was still stuck in customs in Moscow. So, I improvised. I fitted a sort of inflatable dinghy around my sled, which made it look more or less like a motorless Zodiac, and I paddled across the river perched atop this odd contraption.

However, once I was on the far bank, I realized that it would be impossible to make any further progress, due to the lack of snow. I had planned to go on skis to the Tazovsky Gulf, but this waterlogged tundra was wholly impassable by skis. I couldn't even drag my equipment across it. That six-day wait for my team had proved to be very costly.

I returned to Dudinka to drop off my sled. Sergei, who was providing crack support work for my expedition from Moscow, would have it shipped back to Norilsk with my winter equipment. I set off carrying a seventy-pound backpack for the relatively short trek over the tundra toward the Messoyakhta River. My team would send my kayak there for me by helicopter, and then I would paddle along the river to the open waters of the Tazovsky Gulf.

I was carrying fifteen days' worth of provisions, an ultralight tent and sleeping bag, clothing that was waterproof and windproof, a smaller version of my camp stove, and a minimum supply of fuel. Where I was going, the rivers carried sufficient driftwood to make a fire whenever I needed to.

It wasn't long before I chanced upon the gas pipeline that Gazprom, the Russian company exploiting the vast natural gas reserves of the region, used to transport natural gas to Norilsk. The town required huge quantities of fuel to operate its nickel mines, which were among the biggest nickel-producing facilities on earth. The mines were the reason for the town's existence, and they were also the cause of the monstrous pollution that has ravaged the surrounding countryside.

The gas pipeline is about thirty years old, and it was built by the last prisoners of the neighboring Siberian gulag. These were the descendants, as it were, of the prisoners who built the Trans-Siberian Railroad on Stalin's orders. Around here there are still people who talk about those unfortunate souls who died of cold, sometimes frozen to the rails they were working on.

The enormous rusty pipeline—five feet in diameter and raised above the ground—runs for hundreds of miles all the way to the Messoyakhta gas field.

That was the direction I was headed, so I climbed on top of it and played at being a tightrope walker. It wasn't always easy to keep my balance. My backpack acted like a sail in the wind, which would shake me and make the pipeline sway at the same time. To make things harder, the pipeline was covered with a greasy rust-proofing that was horribly slippery. I would walk slowly and diagonally with my arches curving to the arc of the pipeline, but I still fell off and hit the ground a number of times.

On some long sections—especially rivers—the pipeline was suspended as high as fifty feet over the brown water in which I could see my shadow. I sometimes broke into a cold sweat as I carefully focused on staying upright and not tumbling into the river below.

Because the pipeline expands and contracts with changes in temperature, it is built in a zigzag formation between joints, where a little play was built into the structure. This gives it an accordion effect that allows the pipeline to become longer or shorter by a whopping two hundred yards over its total length of three hundred miles! The zigzagging shape was the cause of some minor added distance, but the countless rivers and lakes in the region were also the cause of more significant detours—when they were too broad, the pipeline didn't cross them, it went around them.

*   *   *

At the banks of the Malaya Kheta River, the “little Kheta,” the pipeline vanished underwater. So I no longer had the option of walking on it. Wearing my waterproof suit—large chunks of ice were still bobbing in the water—I swam across, pushing my backpack ahead of me in an old can that had been sawed in half.

Another river, the Bolshaya Kheta, or “big Kheta,” forced me to repeat this exercise (without a can this time because I couldn't find one). The river was a good half-mile across, and when I finally reached the opposite shore after an hour of swimming, its rushing currents had swept me two and a half miles downstream. It took me four hours, bogged down in a marsh where I felt as if I were running an assault course, to get back on course.

Between crossing the two rivers, the marsh, and the time that I spent getting back on my route, I had made just over a mile of actual progress in an entire day! And the two icy rivers, despite my waterproof suit, left me in a state of partial hypothermia that caused numbness and slowed down all my actions.

The weather had improved drastically, but it changes incredibly quickly in the Arctic. On a regular basis, short but furious rain showers soaked the tundra, giving it the rough consistency of a sponge. I had a pair of very high waders, like the ones fly fishermen wear, and they kept me from getting absolutely soaked when the winds grew so strong that I was forced to get down from the pipeline. I would alternate them with a pair of light, quick-drying sport sandals from Salomon that water gets into—and out of—easily. These shoes gave me an ideal degree of agility on the tundra, even if my feet did get a little chilly.

At night I wasn't exactly warm in my single-walled summer tent. The air no longer circulated between the double walls, and the tent would mist up quickly with the regular downpours and my own moisture and body heat.

During my hours of walking, I would hear no sound other than the uninterrupted whistling of the wind, broken now and again by the harsh cry of an Arctic bird, including a species of owl that communicates with other members of its species by gazing into the other's eyes—over distances as great as a half-mile! My feet would sink into the muddy soil with a regular hissing sound at a pace that has been stamped into my subconscious; the slightest slowing in the rhythm of that endless sloshing would alert me that I was getting tired, even before I began to feel the fatigue in my body.

In the permanent night of the Arctic winter, my sense of hearing had become as acute as a blind person's, and on the thawed tundra I felt as if I could now hear the seasons changing. My other senses developed equally. I could savor the smell of the sea for a long time before actually coming within sight of it. I could also smell the presence of any Arctic animal you care to name. I had become an animal myself—at least in part. That was the only way to survive.

*   *   *

After crossing the Bolshaya Kheta, I climbed back onto the gas pipeline. A few miles later I happened upon a cabin where a man lived who was responsible for monitoring the pressure in the pipeline. That was all he did, twenty-four hours a day, in shifts of fifteen days, just like all the other Gazprom employees in the region. Every four hours he would send in a pressure report to the main station, using a code name.

The gas-pressure measurer was named Tola, and I invited myself into his house to warm up and recover my strength after my two river crossings. He was delighted to have a visitor, and he pampered me. He gave me a haircut and treated me to a
banya
—a Russian sauna.

When Cathy told me that the customs people in Moscow were still holding onto my kayak and that I would have to wait another day or two for it, I told myself that I was as happy here, in “Chez Tola,” as I would be on the banks of the Messoyakhta River.

*   *   *

When I set out again after two days, there was still ice on the lakes, but after forty-eight hours of relatively mild temperatures, there wasn't a speck of snow on the tundra itself. I saw this as a hopeful sign. This time, winter was really over. The Arctic had officially entered the season of mild weather.

In the land of ice, there are only two seasons: winter and the season that was about to begin. It lasts just two weeks. The brevity of the season means that when the snows melt, it is like watching a film being run fast-forward. The tundra shifts from brown to green in twenty-four hours. In the light that never dims, all you need to do is sit motionless and fix your attention on a given point and you can see the grass grow and the plants bloom—literally, not just as a manner of speech! From one day to the next, the tundra is suddenly dotted with nests. Life bursts out all over. Little ones must be raised to the age of molting so that their feathers will allow them to fly south before the brutal cold returns. Their apprenticeship in survival is a crash course—the foxes are out stalking them almost from the start. The tundra mice are out, sniffing and lifting their snouts into the air; ducks and swans rummage along the riverbanks; wild geese wheel through the sky.

The vegetation was in full bloom. I could sit down wherever I liked and stock up on mushrooms, stuff myself with blackberries by just reaching out my hand.

Unfortunately, the birds were stuffing themselves with blackberries, too, and there was now an abundance of bird shit on the pipeline, making it even slipperier than before.

And as soon as the lakes were done thawing, it was time for the mosquitoes to make their appearance. Swarms, hordes, clouds of mosquitoes were ready to devour on the hoof or the foot whatever animal they chanced upon, including humans. They only relented when the tundra winds swept them away. The rest of the time you just had to deal with them because they were an indispensable link in the chain of life there—they, in turn, would be eaten by fish and other insects.

My experience crossing the Amazon jungle four years earlier had given me a Zen-like attitude toward mosquitoes. Moreover, Tola gave me a very loose-knit sweater, over which you put on a sort of mosquito-net shirt. The little monsters couldn't get to me through the netting because of the thickness of the woolen yarn in the sweater beneath. As for the sweater itself, it was reminiscent of a fishnet, and it didn't keep me too warm, thankfully. On certain days during this short Siberian summer, the thermometer would rise to over eighty-five degrees!

If I compare this temperature with the coldest temperatures that I experienced during the course of this expedition—around seventy-five degrees below zero—then I can say I experienced total temperature swings of 160 degrees!

Just like the landscape, I changed in appearance at a startling rate myself. My frostbite blisters formed scars, and the skin on my face that had been scorched by the cold healed. I even had a suntan that any vacationer would envy.

My daily habits and routines changed just as quickly. For instance, when in conditions of extreme cold I needed to make a bowel movement, I wouldn't give in to the urge until the “third call,” and I would be in such a hurry to get dressed again that I often lacked the time to relieve myself completely. During the summer, I would answer nature's call promptly, but I continued to get dressed again very hastily as soon as I was done relieving myself. This time it wasn't because of the hostile cold, but the millions of mosquitoes that would swarm like a tornado onto my excrement, my buttocks, and my private parts just as soon as I dropped my drawers.

*   *   *

The pipeline took me toward the little village of Yuzhno-Solynensky (“south bank”) on the banks of the Messoyakhta River. It was the site of the last gas-drilling stations on the line, as well as the compression station that sends the natural gas three-hundred–plus miles to Norilsk, with a stopover at Tola's cabin.

Yuzhno-Solynensky was where I was supposed to pick up my kayak. It was going to be delivered to me in conjunction with the bimonthly staff rotation between here and Norilsk, via Gazprom helicopters. At least this time I could be certain that everything would run on time.

However, when I was twenty-five miles away from the rendezvous point, Cathy called to report that my kayak was lost! The shipping office confirmed that the kayak had been sent to Norilsk, and that's where it had vanished.

I thought my situation over. In the worst case, I could always hike as far as the Tazovsky Gulf, or even to the Gulf of Ob. But I would be stuck there, unable to cross twenty-eight miles of open water. And going around the gulf would force me to drop below the Arctic Circle, which I had stipulated I would not do if at all possible. In short, I absolutely needed the damned kayak.

A new logistical nightmare was beginning, in which I expected to go on a devious Russian bureaucratic scavenger hunt with the following goal in mind: to find the person holding my property and persuade him to hand it over with a smile in exchange for a sufficiently thick bundle of dollars. If the person failed to turn up, that would be part of the game as well. The longer it took me to find the kayak, the more urgently I would need it and the more I would be willing to pay for it.

The next day, a new and surprising development played out. My kayak had been found … in Moscow! It had never left the city, despite what the Gazprom office had claimed. There was another agreeable surprise: no one was asking for cash. Sergei, my contact in Moscow, promised me that my boat would be in Yuzhno-Solynensky in four days. We would see about that.