Conquering the Impossible (44 page)

Since I was forced to wait again, I decided to wait on the banks of the Messoyakhta River at the home of another Sergei, the chief engineer of a fifteen-man machine maintenance shop. After two days I reckoned that it was time to start traveling again, and I was treated to the customary ceremony. First, you have to throw back a glassful of
samogon,
a homemade blackberry vodka. Then, in accordance with the tradition that I had experienced once before in Pevek when the FSB was after me, each of the men took a turn sitting on my backpack to bring me luck. Only after that ceremony was I allowed to resume my journey. Or, perhaps I should say, my pipeline.

*   *   *

At the end of the summer on the tundra, mosquitoes are replaced by an even more challenging breed: the
moskos,
known in English as noseeums, from “no-see-them.” The tiny creatures don't suck your blood, they tear off patches of flesh. The resulting itch is even worse than what you get from a mosquito bite. The
moskos
got into my eyes, my nostrils, and even climbed up my sleeves as far as my wrists, causing an intolerable case of itching. Luckily, Sergei provided me with an effective remedy, a bottle of
samogon
. I only needed to rub it on the most sensitive spots to drive off the
moskos.
It worked like a charm!

*   *   *

This stroll of some 185 miles along the Siberian pipeline hadn't been easy, far from it. However, because of the extraordinary spectacle that it provided and the new experiences that it allowed me to enjoy, it had been a complete pleasure from one end to the other.

In Yuzhno-Solynensky, the Gazprom station chief, alerted to my arrival by Sergei, offered very generously to let me stay in his house while waiting for my kayak to arrive. Not once since Dudinka had I enjoyed anything less than an open-armed welcome, warm and generous. In this entire region where most of the jobs are linked to the natural gas industry, each person I met informed someone else farther down the road of my arrival. Each time I was greeted like a long-lost brother. It was a good excuse for a celebration as well, since most of the people here told me themselves that they had never seen a foreigner come through.

Russian bureaucracy is one thing, but the Russians are quite another—wonderful people, indeed. I'll miss them.

 

8

The Last Man

A
T YUZHNO-SOLYNENSKY
I carried out a number of scouting excursions along the banks of the Messoyakhta River to find the easily navigable stretches. Three rivers flow into the Messoyakhta so that I should be able to paddle as far as the Tazovsky Gulf. Although the rivers and streams swell and overflow when the snow melts, once the thaw is complete the water level drops until the riverbeds are practically dry. The period when most rivers are navigable, even aboard a kayak, is no longer than two weeks.

*   *   *

Three days after I arrived, the station chief woke me up in a rush.

“Mike! The helicopter bringing the new shift in will be here any second. It's bringing your kayak!”

I couldn't imagine how Sergei took care of the problem so quickly in Moscow. Certainly he had called on one of his many contacts and acquaintances, but in any case, he had done a great job.

I made an inventory of the damage the kayak had suffered: one broken paddle, various pieces of equipment missing. But the mast and the floats were still there, as well as the waterproof bags designed to keep my luggage dry. Part of the food rations that had been sent to me along with the kayak were missing, but I wouldn't need as many calories in the warm weather: four thousand calories a day would be enough. Thanks to the fishing net that Tola had given me, I would be able to fish. The Messoyakhta River was teeming with fish.

This river, like all the streams of the Arctic, would soon freeze over again. When I left again, the water was already so shallow that I had to slalom between the sandbars.

The river had plenty of curves that lengthened the distance I had to cover. After covering four and a half miles, I had gone no more than a half-mile westward. After covering thirty-seven miles of meandering, I had only covered nine miles in the right direction! One consolation was that it had started raining again, which lifted the water level a bit and accentuated the favorable current.

All around, the animals were full of vigor. The caribou waded into the river to escape the fury of the mosquitoes. Only their heads stuck out of the water, topped by their majestic antlers. Because they rarely heard me coming, they wouldn't notice me until the last instant, and then they'd start suddenly, their hulking bodies splashing me in the face with buckets of water as they hurried out of my way. The savage, magnificent spectacle continued. I didn't get tired of it and—after all the months I had spent in the icy, dead darkness—I would never tire of it.

To keep out of reach of the brown bears—less dangerous around here, but I was still not interested in running risks—I would camp in the middle of the river on the sandbars. I avoided pitching my tent on spits of land where they were likely to come to catch fish or play. After all, this is where they live. It was up to me to respect their territory.

While I slept, my fishnet, submerged in the water, prepared my meals for the next day. And the eggs, mushrooms, and blackberries with which the tundra abounded allowed me to vary my menus.

The days went by, and I hadn't seen another human being since Yuzhno-Solynensky.

*   *   *

The wind sprang up on me, blowing so furiously that it tore sand off the shoals and blasted it into my eyes, nostrils, and mouth. I had sand grinding constantly between my teeth. My paddle would catch the wind so that I would have to push it through the air on the up stroke before plunging it into the water. This effort, added to the work of pulling the 265 pounds of gear and food in addition to the weight of the kayak, made my upper body musculature undergo a sudden beef-up.

Since I hadn't paddled in quite a while, it took me five or six days to get back into the necessary shape.

My daily distances, fairly modest at first—nine, sixteen, seventeen miles—now began to reach twenty-five miles, just like when I was traveling on skis. The only difference was that the oxbow curves of the Messoyakhta River forced me to paddle more than sixty miles to travel the twenty-five miles of useful distance!

On July 16, I drank a toast to myself—of river water—and gave myself a birthday present of twenty-four hours of nonstop paddling, from midnight to midnight. The wind was soft, the weather was ideal, and I enjoyed a front-row view of the wilderness and magnificent fauna all around me, beneath the midnight sun. I felt like the most privileged man on earth.

*   *   *

As if it had been honoring a truce for my birthday, the wind began to blow hard the next day, making it virtually impossible to paddle. When the wind shifted, I took advantage of the opportunity to hoist the sail and put out the floats. The Americans who provided me with these accessories assured me that they were all-terrain and ultra-strong. I made the mistake of taking them at their word; at the first strong gust of wind, the whole assembly fell to pieces. This was all the more catastrophic because I was going to need that sail all along the course I planned to kayak from here to Tobseda, on the Barents Sea. I was going to need to cross that sea by sailboat before the storms produced by the series of autumn depressions made navigation impossible. I wasn't interested in waiting till next winter so that I could cross it on foot.

The failure of my mast support and float-arm structure would force me to paddle all the way to Tobseda. At my current rate of paddling, by the time I was on the Barents Sea, there wouldn't even be any windows between storms!

I was furious at the manufacturers. I felt as if they had stabbed me in the back! Their equipment might be guaranteed to “stand up to anything,” as long as that was limited to summer sailing on Lake Geneva! To top it off, now the structure was deadweight. It would only slow me down to have to pull that much more weight with every paddle-stroke.

*   *   *

As I got closer to the mouth of the Messoyakhta River, with nary a human being nor a village anywhere in sight and nothing marked on my maps, I suddenly heard what resembled the distant roar of a tractor. The closer I got to the Tazovsky Gulf, the louder the sound grew. As if a small army of invisible steam shovels were working away somewhere nearby.

Suddenly, as I paddled out into the estuary, I saw an army of bulldozers moving earth—ships, tugboats, machine-tools, and prefab houses being built. It seemed as if a city was being thrown up here out of nothing. If they were building a city out here, it ought to be possible to find someone to fix a mast support and a float-arm structure.

The first worker that I stopped and asked told me that the construction site was for the future natural gas field, which had just been discovered. It would be hooked up with a new pipeline that would run underwater for seven and a half miles under the bay. Workers were already welding together sections extending over many miles and then sinking them to be buried under the floor of the estuary. The future pipeline would deliver Russian natural gas to two of Gazprom's biggest customers: Germany and France.

*   *   *

I asked to be taken to the office of the chief engineer, a mobile home that could move with the project and that would soon be on the far side of the estuary. The engineer asked me where I had come from.

“Provideniya,” I replied.

He paused for a beat.

“Buketa de Provideniya?” (Provideniya Bay?)

“Da. In Chukotka.”

He jumped up and then plopped back down into his chair as if somebody had hit him on the head.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

I explained briefly.

Instantly, the entire construction site—which must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a day to operate—came to a screeching halt. The entire staff gathered around my kayak and wracked its brains. There was no aluminum on the worksite, nothing but pieces of pipeline and welding materials. Each worker suggested solutions to my problem. Seeing how tired I was, the chief of the site suggested that I go get some sleep.

“When you wake up,” he told me, “your boat will be fixed and ready to go.”

Someone took me to the cafeteria, where I enjoyed a lavish meal and was given supplies of fruit and cookies. Then they showed me to a mobile home with two beds and a bathroom, where I had my first hot shower since Yuzhno-Solynensky.

Before letting me go to sleep, the chief engineer took me to his private den and pulled out a magnificent box lined with red velvet. It contained a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label Whiskey—a gift from a supplier whom he had helped to get a contract. He set two vodka glasses on the table and filled them until they were almost overflowing. We clicked our glasses and drank them down.

“Davai, davai! Yesho raz!”
he cried. (Come on, come on! Let's have one more!) The Russians, I was beginning to understand, are never content with a single glass. My host threw back his precious scotch as if it were water. I drank more cautiously, since I hadn't had a drop in such a long time—except when, at each resupply, Jean-Philippe would bring one of the now-traditional bottles of Val de Travers absinthe from our friend the restaurateur, Pierre-Alain.

As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was asleep. When I opened one eye, seven hours later, my kayak was waiting for me on the doorstep. It was brand-new, ready to set sail. In that short period of time, the Russians had quite simply cut out of the alloy that made up the pipeline—and trimmed to the tenth of an inch!—an exact replica of my float arm and mast-support structure. And considering the metal they used, this one really might stand up to anything!

And in fact they told me, “Russian-made. Will never break!”

*   *   *

Because it is impossible to lay sections of the pipeline except when there is no wind at all and the sea is perfectly calm, the construction site has the most reliable weather forecasts. They warned me that bad weather was coming and that there would be a strong north wind. They expected the wind to whip up such heavy waves in the bay that it would be impossible for me to leave as I had planned. My only option, they told me, was to follow the Khadutte River. If I went up that river, paddling against the stream, following it in a south by southwesterly direction for about thirty miles, I would reach a bridge that does not appear on any maps. That bridge links up with a road that would lead me to the village of Yamburg on the Gulf of Ob.

*   *   *

I thanked everyone, but it seemed a feeble way of responding to the incredible generosity that I had been shown in that village that had no name. Soon the north wind was filling my sail, and I was zipping over the waters of the Tazovsky Gulf. Like the Bering Strait, it was shallow and therefore the waves were especially steep. As I went sliding over one of these towering waves, my extra double paddle fastened to the kayak acted as a wing flap that drove the bow of the kayak down and plunged it into the following wave. Suddenly I was almost vertical, my kayak nose down in the water, driven deeper by the wave that was coming up from behind me. I paddled furiously in the opposite direction to restore my equilibrium, but I could feel myself tipping over forward. If I capsized in the middle of the bay, three miles from shore, I would never survive!