Conquering the Impossible (45 page)

At that very instant, flexing under the opposing pressures of the wind and the effort I was exerting on it, my extra paddle snapped like a dead branch, with a sharp crack. That's what saved me. Freed from the downward pressure, the kayak lifted its bow. I continued on with my “Indian-style” paddle. The two pieces of the other paddle remained fastened to the kayak, and I would find a way of fixing them sooner or later.

The waves carried me and the wind pushed me to the mouth of the Khadutte River. Just as I entered the river, the storm tossed me onto a sandbar. This final accident, after coming so close to going under entirely in the middle of the bay, confirmed my decision to take the southern route across the inlet. The people working on the pipeline were right—if I had gone across to the north with the wind against me, I would never have made it.

I would store their second piece of advice away for the near future: be sure that the weather is favorable before venturing out across the twenty-mile-wide Gulf of Ob, an inlet where storms are frequent and violent. Gazprom had lost barges there that were certainly much sturdier than my kayak.

I pitched my tent on the tundra alongside the Khadutte River. The next day I was delighted to still be alive when I set out to make my way through the countless meanderings and terrible currents of this river. I embarked after the wind had died down and allowed the seawater to flow out of the river. Unfortunately, once the wind died down, the mosquitoes also began attacking.

I was determined to avoid all unnecessary risks. I was still more than six hundred miles from Tobseda, so this wasn't the time to ruin everything. I could afford to be cautious, but not overly cautious.

The curves of the Khadutte River protected me from waves, but they slowed me down terribly. With the river flowing against me, the sixteen to eighteen hours that I spent paddling each day only yielded about twelve and a half miles of forward progress. On average I made about half-a-mile's progress for every two miles I traveled.

Maybe I should have turned north, now that the storm in the Tazovsky Gulf had died down. In any case, it was too late to head back. I focused on Tobseda, my goal.

I didn't stop even to pee during my long days. When I got out of my kayak, the blood had long since stopped circulating in my legs and I had a hard time standing up.

After three days on the Khadutte River, I finally discovered the bridge that they had told me about and a paved road that led to Yamburg on the Gulf of Ob.

I hauled my kayak out of the water, determined to stop the first truck that came by and ask the driver to take my kayak to Yamburg. I would go on foot.

Soon a big semitrailer came to a halt. The driver happily agreed to take my kayak and leave it at the police station in Yamburg, where I could show up later and claim it.

While my kayak was traveling ahead by truck, I walked along the road. It was an amazing sensation! I could hardly remember when I'd last walked on a paved road—in Provideniya, perhaps? The weather was nice. It all seemed too wonderful to be true.

*   *   *

And so it was. Thirty miles from the bridge, I found a roadblock in my way, sternly guarded by armed soldiers. On the ground outside their barracks, I saw my kayak. This spelled trouble.

“Where do you think you are going?” a soldier asked me.

“To Yamburg. Why?”

“Do you have a
proposk
? A permit?”

I pulled out my passport, I showed him my Russian visa, and I showed him all my various permits. However, at the Gazprom construction site, they had forgotten to tell me that Yamburg was a major private gas field, and access was strictly forbidden to all unauthorized individuals. The only way to get in was with a special permit.

The soldier told me without missing a beat that I needed to turn around and go back to Novyi Yurengoy, 250 miles to the south! That's where I would find the office that could issue permits for Yamburg. However, permits were issued only to people with a professional reason to gain access to the site. I was not going to travel five hundred miles on foot, round trip, just so someone could refuse to issue me a permit.

I insisted, explained, and argued for hours. But I might as well have been talking to the wall.

Even as I argued with the uniformed soldiers, I was wondering whether I should leave the road and go overland, across the tundra. The guards had warned me that if I tried that, they would have every right to shoot me! Another option was to return to the Khadutte River, paddle up it a few dozen miles and portage my kayak over to the Gulf of Ob. A third possibility was to double back to the Tazovsky Gulf, risking the choppy waters in my kayak. However, each of the two latter options would take an extra ten days, and I couldn't spare ten days. Moreover, the water level was dropping quickly in the Khadutte River, which would soon be impassable even by kayak. I had to make some forward progress by any means necessary.

I promised the soldiers that if they let me through, I wouldn't even go to Yamburg—I would go around the site and set out to sea immediately. The answer was still no, and they employed the eternal excuse: “We're just doing our job.” How many times would I hear that phrase? They agreed to call their superior officer, and he insisted that I not be allowed to proceed.

Since I was required to wait at least twenty-four hours before leaving, they showed me to a sort of tiny lumber room next to the guard post, with a metal table for a bed. I called Sergei in Moscow.

“It's Friday night,” he said. “I can't do a thing until Monday.”

I had three days to wait, and after the three days Sergei made it clear to me that there was no certainty he would be able to get me through.

I had to make a choice: either I relied on Sergei and waited here, or else I decided not to run the risk and turned back, which would cost me fifteen days.

Maybe there were other options. I spent most of Saturday tinkering with my kayak, moving it, unpacking and repacking my equipment. Once the guards grew used to my presence and lost interest in me, I innocently moved the kayak to the other side of the barrier.

I still didn't know how I would make my escape, because once I was on the “right side” of the roadblock I wouldn't be in a much better position. The road stretched out, straight as an arrow and as flat as my hand for dozens of miles. There wouldn't be a thing in sight but me, and I would make an easy target, especially if I was dragging a kayak behind me.

But thirty yards past the gate there were two huts that served as warehouses for maintenance supplies. After three days of acrobatics, I managed to hide my boat behind them.

*   *   *

I had been stuck there for four days. To think that I had been congratulating myself for following the advice given me by the people back at the pipeline worksite. I might have done better if I had stayed with my original plan to follow the Tazovsky Gulf all the way to its mouth at the Gulf of Ob.

A plan began to take shape in my head. Trucks, after passing the roadblock, would sometimes stop by the maintenance service huts. If I could convince one of the drivers to load my kayak onto his truck and take it to Yamburg, then I might be onto something. I had walked from the roadblock to the maintenance warehouses a number of times without alarming the guards. Once my kayak was gone, I would only need to escape across the tundra, where they would never catch me.

I asked each of the drivers arriving from Yamburg if they could stop on the next trip just long enough to load my boat onto their truck. One finally agreed—the promise of twenty or thirty U.S. dollars helped him to make up his mind. He would pass through again on Tuesday and would load my boat on his way through.

The guards at the gate had seen me come and go, disappear and reappear, so many times that they hardly noticed me at all. I would head out farther and farther along the forbidden road, as far as sixteen miles, but I would always come back. Whenever anyone asked what I was doing, I would simply answer that I was exercising to keep in shape.

I hoped that I blended into the background so well by now that on Tuesday, at the changing of the guard—there is a change of shift every twelve hours—the soldiers would forget to tell the new shift to keep an eye on me. If that was the case, I would be able to make my escape easily.

On Monday Sergei told me that he didn't think he would able to resolve the situation through official channels.

On Tuesday there was no reaction from the guards after a whole day went by without their seeing me. That was a good sign. It seemed that my window was approaching. But my truck driver was late.

Just to see what was happening, I gave Sergei a call. He was ecstatic, “I did it, Mike! You can go! My friend from Murmansk, the general, spoke to the head of security for Yamburg. You have a green light. You can go when you want.”

By the time I checked this out with the guards, the truck pulled up. Without wasting a minute, I loaded my kayak and got in. We set off for Yamburg.

The driver dropped us off—me and my kayak—at the harbor. I gave him a healthy tip.

The soldiers at the guard post had warned me that my permit was good for twelve hours, not a minute more. So there was no question of lingering here. I couldn't even get a night's sleep.

I went to see one of the security officers in Yamburg. His boss knew that my authorization had a twelve-hour limit, but he didn't. After a few minutes of friendly conversation, he agreed to keep an eye on my kayak while I took care of a minor formality, the sixty-mile round-trip that I needed to do on foot from Yamburg to the guard outpost and back in order to keep from breaking rule number one of my expedition.

In an alternating regime of walking and jogging, I spent most of the day covering that distance, taking advantage of a communications gap among the various offices. It was strictly forbidden to travel along that road except aboard a vehicle that had been properly authorized to do so. When I returned to Yamburg, the security officer was in a state of extreme agitation. He asked me where I had been. I gave him an evasive answer, saying only that I had been out for a stroll. He insisted that I leave immediately. Now he knew all about the twelve-hour limit. With my business accomplished, I was ready to leave anyway.

I paddled up the eastern shore of the Obskaya Guba—the Gulf of Ob. But after covering about sixty miles on foot, I lacked the strength to paddle much farther than six miles. I pitched my tent on a magnificent beach with the satisfaction of having solved a seemingly insurmountable problem and recaptured my freedom.

*   *   *

The next day I covered thirty-five miles, and I camped at Cape Parushnie, named for its tall, smooth cliffs. This is the narrowest stretch of the Gulf of Ob at twenty miles across. I had been warned that the crossing was dangerous because of sudden shifts in the weather. All the same, I set out at dawn on a calm, flat sea that, according to my barometer, should have stayed that way until I reached the far shore.

But when I was just three miles out from the eastern shore, a powerful north crosswind began to blow. The sea grew choppy and waves began to smash into my right side. If I turned so that I was facing into the rollers, then I would have a sixty-mile paddle ahead of me before I reached the next coast. Currents were forced together through the narrows, kicking up a chaotic series of waves that smashed together and down upon me from every direction at once. Twice, rollers swept right over me, coming very close to capsizing my kayak. I managed to keep upright and more or less on course. The Gulf of Ob had earned its reputation.

In front of me, high atop Cape Kamenny, I saw one of the radar surveillance stations that are the Russian equivalent of the American DEW Line. This station was doubtless designed to warn of any hostile forces approaching the nuclear submarine bases on the islands of Novaya Zemlya, between the Kara Sea and the Barents Sea. And after all, this spot was only 1,200 miles across the pole from Alaska.

After eight hours of nightmarish sea conditions, I was almost glad to be arrested once again by the Russian Coast Guard. From a distance they had noticed my sail heading for Cape Kamenny, a place—like so many others in this country—that was strictly off limits. My kayak was surrounded by men in uniform the instant it hit the rocky beach. Soaked, chilled to the bone, my legs numb, I couldn't think of anything but getting out of the kayak and relieving my intense need to urinate, a need that had had a veritable lockgrip on my bladder for hours. I came very close to peeing on a pair of freshly polished boots.

The boat stayed on the beach, guarded by two men armed with Kalashnikovs, while I was taken to the Coast Guard station. From there I called Sergei, who explained to me that because of the three-month period during which I had been stuck between Nome and Provideniya, most of my permits and authorizations—including the authorization to cross the Yamal Peninsula—had expired. There was no point in hoping that the soldiers would overlook that little detail. Fortunately, though, Sergei was as resourceful as ever.

“Give me a minute,” he said, “and I'll make a phone call to my friend, the general, in Murmansk.” Half an hour later, the officer in charge of the base hurried into the office and humbly begged my forgiveness for the inconvenience. It went without saying that I was free to continue on my way. And welcome to Yamal!

*   *   *

The bad weather and my exhaustion kept me from starting off immediately. I was given a place to stay in a building where the technicians who manned the neighboring air control tower stayed. Cape Kamenny was on the long-distance flight path between Europe and Japan, so planes needed to check in here on their way over.

One of the technicians brought me up-to-date on the weather conditions around Baidaratskaya Bay, which I would need to cross once I made it to the other side of the Yamal Peninsula. The bay should still be free of ice at least, which meant I could paddle across in my kayak. Still, it was at the very least forty-seven miles of open sea. If I sailed around it, it would take two or three days instead of one. It would become clear once I got there.