At two in the afternoon, we take off again and fly three hundred feet down the valley. As we fly over Pat’s cabin, we spot a large solitary bull moose beneath us, and then . . . a brown grizzly swimming off one of the banks, just yards from where we’d been sipping coffee. Don banks around, and we watch him walking onto the shore—a marvelous brown figure silhouetted against the white beach.
{Harold Lassers}
The Pribilof Islands are home to birds found nowhere else, also known as the Galápagos of the north.
From there, we go to the Kobuk River for one very Alaskan final adventure: a canoe ride. On this, a beautiful and serene afternoon, we row all the way to the rapids, where we turn around and spend a few moments on a sand spit. We take photos of each other and when we look up, there’s a flock of Arctic loons flying over our heads. “Impossible to believe that we’re only two hundred miles from Fairbanks, isn’t it?”
“No roads whatsoever,” Jorie answers, “and the only access is by floatplane . . . not even an airstrip.” Thanks to that, this area probably will never be spoiled like so many other national parks.
{Jorie Butler Kent}
A floatplane, the Land Rover of Alaska.
Don allows me the chance to copilot with him back to Iniakuk Lodge. The three of us strap in and idle around the lake for thirty minutes to let the engine warm up, then we throttle full bore, and a thunderous roar shatters the lake and the whole valley. Streams of spray hit us, and we’re climbing like a Spitfire.
What a sensation.
No sooner do we level off than Don swings the whole stick and column over to me. “You’re trained, Geoff,” he says. “Go on, fly us!”
We soar down the valley, bank the Cessna, and Jorie snaps photographs out the window. I hand the stick back to Don, and we buzz the lodge cowboy style just before we land on the lake.
The morning of August 12, before we leave the lodge, I sit down for a meeting with Pat Gaedeke, who tells me she is open to do anything it would take to work with Abercrombie & Kent. “You’ll be a great success in Alaska,” she says. After breakfast, the rain is pouring and the visibility is zero, but Pat’s son knocks on our cabin door and says Don has spotted a way out for us to get to Juneau.
With rain pouring off the windshield, Don revs the engines and we take off into no more than three hundred feet of visibility. We crawl at eighty miles an hour and try one valley—no good—just a black wall of mist and fog. Don eases around and goes up another valley, slowly, until finally there are some shafts of light. Finally, the visibility opens to half a mile. Jorie turns to me and lets out an inconspicuous exhale—she’d been holding her breath, but now we’re in the clear.
We transfer at Bettles to a commercial flight to Juneau, a city that’s flooded with sunshine and cruise ships. We check into the Westmark Baranof Hotel in the heart of downtown Juneau. Our final dinner is an incredible surprise: excellent salmon ravioli followed by halibut with a delicious black olive sauce and fresh, fresh zucchini. The chef comes around, informing us that he’s working to bring better food to Alaska. Maybe this is the start of a new trend.
The morning that we prepare to fly home to Vero Beach, I catch up on the Wall Street Journal: corporate legal battles, union workers fighting for health care benefits, a company that’s running tests to potentially manufacture bulletproof jockstraps for the military. Immediately I think back to Alaska, how we could leave our cabin doors wide open and find everything as we’d left it. What a contrast to experience the difference between Alaska and the “lower forty-eight”—or, as we know it, the real world.
{A&K staff}
On my way to the North Pole.
Chapter 16
The North Pole and Antarctica
1999
Business takes a treacherous turn come the mid-1990s. Until now, 70 percent of our business has been to Egypt and East Africa, but after George H. W. Bush declares war in the Gulf, very few of our clients are keen to travel anywhere near the Middle East.
It so happens that in my life, I need a new frontier to conquer as well. In 1996, I suffer a near-fatal polo accident that crushes not just my face, neck, and spine, but also my hopes to continue in the sport I’d been playing for more than forty years. The worst consequence of being forced to accept that my time as a champion on the ponies is over is that I become a bear to live with. A broken man, Jorie might have been able to nurse back to wellness—but a broken spirit, no woman can fix. Polo was my passion, and without the daily adrenaline rush, I’m growing bored living in Florida.
Divorce is on the horizon and my business is on life support. Approaching the twentieth century, if hell were a location that I could pinpoint on a map, I could guide the first tours into it—I’d been there, and I knew the place better than anyone. I need to take some serious risks to get my power back, and I ask myself, What would it take for me to be on top of the world again?
Then I realize: I could go to the top of the world.
Maybe I could even bring business there.
With fast research, I learn that there’s an expedition to the North Pole in July 1999—the last cruise of the century. With an optimistic resolve to brave what’s next in our marriage and our business, Jorie and I make a reservation, and we share ideas about the possibilities of opening the North Pole to clients. This would be a new location to crack, we know, no matter how impenetrable the location seems to most.
I quickly learn, however, that nine feet of solid ice is pretty impenetrable.
I predict that our twelve-day journey to the North Pole may be one of the most lunatic endeavors on which we’ve ever set out. But, there’s no denying that a journey on the Arctic Ocean would give any man new energy—or, at the very least, one hell of a story.
The itinerary reveals that we will depart on an icebreaker from Murmansk.
This should have been my first clue.
Murmansk is Russia’s largest submarine port and, frankly speaking, a horrible Communist naval city that lies in the Russian Arctic, north of Saint Petersburg and just east of Finland. After one night’s stay in delightful, orderly Helsinki and a two-hour flight to Murmansk, I take a morning bus tour of the city to kill time—and am immediately troubled to see how the Soviet Union has fallen apart. Factories sit idle. Hulks of old vehicles lie scattered aimlessly. The tour guide on the bus explains that Murmansk took a tremendous hammering in World War II—after Stalingrad, Murmansk was the second-most-bombed city in Russia.
Considering the city’s location on the Arctic, I’d expected that it would be cold, but instead it is a brilliantly hot day. The people of Murmansk are sunbathing on the hills and next to the ponds, looking like seal colonies with their white bodies spread out against the rocks and the water. Even with the temperature blazing, the city itself feels frozen—both in its sentiment and in the less-desirable days of Eastern European politics.
{Harold Lassers}
The Radio Room at Port Lockroy, Antarctica. During the Second World War, the British established a secret base here. Wireless telegraphy by Morse code was used for routine communication and was the only form of communication with the outside world in the winter.
I’m enthusiastic when it’s time to exit the bus near the Murmansk harbor. From there we’ll set out onto the Barents Sea, which opens to the Arctic Ocean north of Finland and Russia. Now, of all the vessels I’ve travelled in or worked on, I don’t know much about this particular icebreaker, and when I spot the black-and-bright-red ship with the jaws of a shark painted on her bow, I determine that it may be a good thing.
Familiar with my work in the travel industry, the captain, as bearded and brawny as King Neptune, comes out to welcome me. Once I’ve found my way around his robust Russian accent, I come to decipher what’s unique about this ship. “She’s called Yamal,” he says. “It’s the Nenets word for ‘the end of the earth.’” He’s referring to the language spoken by the indigenous Nenets tribe in northern Arctic Russia. She’s a nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker, he
continues, more than 500 feet long and 160 feet keel to masthead. She cruises at an average of eighteen knots on open water, three knots through ice with one propeller—that has three blades, each blade weighing ten tons. Ten tons. The design sounds somewhat archaic, but on the other hand, what would I expect for a journey to the barest point in the world just to see what’s there?
Before we embark, I travel to the helm and look down, noticing how sharply pointed the bow is to drive directly into packed ice. The front of the ship will hit it hard, and the bow of the ship will crawl fast up over the ice and crush it under the boat’s weight. Considering the mass of our three propeller blades alone, I have to trust that this boat’s got things under control.
When I reach my cabin, the accommodations on board strike a very Farthest North feel: The rooms are bright and spacious; the decor is basic and clean. The blinds and curtains are the thick European blackout kind, which makes sense as even nighttime in the North Pole will shine with daylight. Impressed, I figure that I’ve roughed it much worse than this, and it will feel fantastic to climb into a cozy bed after a day out exploring a land off the beaten path.
Off any path, really.
The engine revs beneath us and I start immediately off the deck, toward the cabin level. At first it’s pure pleasantry and smooth sailing, until just after lunch when I hear:
Baaaahhhhhrrrrrm
PKOW!
My God, I tell myself, we’re going to die on this thing.
Crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch.
The ship lurches again, and for another few seconds we’re moving steady.
Then:
Baaaahhhhhrrrrrm
PKOW!
Crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch.
The Yamal blasts and rumbles with the work of its mammoth propeller. I step out of my cabin, searching for life. Down the wood-paneled and brightly lit corridor, I spot a maintenance worker who is examining what looks like a fuse box on the wall. “Excuse me,” I ask him. “Are you busy?”
“No, sir.” He closes the panel and braves the thunder under our feet to approach me. In sincerely intended English, he asks me: “Is there a problem?”
“I believe I booked one of the antinoise cabins.”
“Yes sir, you’re in one.”
Baaaahhhhhrrrrrm
PKOW!
Crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch.
He laughs. “You’ll adjust, Mr. Kent. Would you like to see how it works? I’ll show you the engine room.”
I pace behind him through the corridor to a dimly lit stairwell, then down a steep spiral staircase. He opens a portal door into what looks like a nautical factory.
Everything inside the engine room is supersized. Two cylindrical nuclear reactors lie as the engine room’s centerpiece, creating a level of noise that I haven’t experienced since my time driving tanks in the British Army. “Is it normal for the engines to sound this loud?” I shout.
“Yes, sir!” he tells me. “They’re producing enough energy to light a city the size of Paris!”
“My God,” I murmur, the vibration in my throat as the only evidence I’ve just uttered a word. The power is impressive, but the noise is enough to drive a man insane.
“We’re thirty feet under the waterline,” he hollers. “Don’t worry—if there were a problem, we could insert control rods and the chain reaction would stop in half a second!”
{Harold Lassers}
The crew from Sports Illustrated setting up to photograph Kate Upton for the cover of the 2013 swimsuit issue, the bestselling magazine in the world.
“Literally?”
“Yes!”
The thought is hardly more comforting. He leads me around the engine room, hollering over the nuclear-powered raucousness to explain the different pipes and meters and switches. The engines are so well protected with steel and concrete, he says, that even if a small airplane were to crash into the ship, the engines would almost certainly remain unaffected. He shows me the water desalination system—“If we were to get stuck on board,” he says, “we collect some seawater from the Arctic Ocean and distill it for bathing and drinking.”
“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.”
He laughs. “We always hope!”
He leads me to the massive fuel tanks, explaining how much money they save compared with vessels that are run on diesel. “When is the last time you all would’ve changed the fuel?” I ask him.
“Last week,” he says. “Before that, probably 1995.”
“How much would it cost to build a ship like this in the US?”
“In the US, five hundred million dollars. But the nuclear reactors have to be reprocessed every three years. That costs three million.”
“Every time?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s the thickest ice this ship has seen?”
“She’s only meant to break through five meters when she’s moving—but I know for a fact that she’s broken as thick as nine meters.”
“Isn’t that bad for the boat?”
“It’s not good, sir. Sometimes there’s no other way.”
When I head to bed that night, I realize that one does not exactly hear the noise of the ice breaking as much as one feels it. As the captain drives the ship, she mounts the ice and smashes downward in one shuddering, violent crunch. The clash penetrates the ship’s thick steel hull and travels all the way to the bridge deck, enveloping those at the helm. It’s a piercing sensation, a thud and a grind all in one.
Under us, the ship backs off, lurches, heals, summons her strength, and thrusts itself onto the ice once more. Friction-reducing bubbles hit from her flanks as the sound resounds throughout the ship. Finally we are free . . . free at last . . . until the next pressure ridge.
I begin to wonder how I’ll manage this for twelve days. The ship bounces backward and forward, large, thunderous jolts as the icebergs crash into the hull. All the time I’m seesawed and whiplashed around my double bed.
It’s a nightmare.
I search for a thought to bring me peace, and finally, I think of the few thousand people who have ever visited the North Pole. I think how the first explorers to come this way froze just for the sake of arriving here, losing their limbs to frostbite and sometimes their lives, and doing it all with great honor. I remind myself that I knew when I signed up that this really is an expedition, not a vacation cruise.
I spend the next three days working quietly in my cabin and taking advantage of the open-deck policy to climb up to the bridge any time a crew member comes over the speaker system to announce that Arctic wildlife are in view. We seem to be moving at a pitifully slow pace, and during his smoke break, the first mate tells me the ice packs have thickened significantly. We are travelling at only one knot an hour, and sometimes even less than that. On occasions the Yamal even has to stop, back off, rev its engines, and go at full speed into the pack ice. I watch, entranced, as huge ice floes are pushed sideways. Certainly it would be impossible for the ship to break through if they didn’t drift. As it is, all twenty-three thousand tons of the ship power their way into the ice floes, creating a new passage through the fissures and cracks, like a pattern of frozen spider webs.
As we move farther north, the temperature drops steadily—today, thirty degrees Fahrenheit. The captain has announced that from this point, he highly recommends we wear a parka, gloves, and a balaclava to step onto the deck, but I’m surprised that I don’t find it all that horribly cold. With my vision shielded from the sun, I look out over the Arctic landscape, searching for polar bears or their footprints.
The cetacean biology lecturer on board offers a presentation on the beluga whale, also known as the “white whale” for the pure color it turns in adulthood, and as the “sea canary” for the noises it makes underwater, which are so high-pitched that they’re audible both above and below the sea’s surface. He tells us that the beluga lacks a dorsal fin, which would get in the way under the ice, and that it possesses a flexible neck beca
use the vertebrae are not fused. It’s difficult to spot the beluga, he says, among the floating ice or whitecaps, and the best way to do it is to scan the water and waves for a white arc that appears, grows, shrinks, and then disappears. He tells us that if the conditions are calm and quiet, we might hear the “blow” of air when a beluga exhales from several hundred yards away.
There’s a helicopter on board, which we fly once a day above the ship—quickly, because in minus eight Fahrenheit, the chopper freezes almost as soon as we take off. During our quick flights, we track the Yamal’s progress and view the polar bears that stretch their necks when they see us hovering. Their fur is a soft shade of yellow against the perfect white of the snow, their eyes and noses like the coal buttons on a snowman. Their walk reminds me of a male lion, graceful and seemingly self-aware, even with those giant webbed paws that give them a paddling effect when they swim. Back on board, we step onto the deck of the boat with binoculars for a glimpse of the adorable waddling seals.
The Arctic air rushes at us so fast that it nearly chokes me, but when I manage my breath, what comes over me is a sense of exhilaration that I haven’t felt since the last time I climbed on a polo pony almost four years ago.
After our fourth day in the Arctic, we passengers gather at the windows to take it in: at 5:10 in the afternoon, the captain announces that his compass indicates that we’re here. “We’ve reached the geographical North Pole,” he says. “Ninety degrees north, the exact top of the world—the very spot where the earth’s imaginary axis of rotation meets the surface of the planet.” The crew leads our entire group out onto the deck, passing around champagne. Amid dazzling sunlight, sparkling ice, toasts, and cheers, I’m pulled away from the crowd toward the railing. Above the crystal blue-and-white glaciers and a solid ground of ice flies a black guillemot, a seabird that looks, dives, and waddles like a skinny penguin with a long, slim black beak. It’s extremely rare to see this type of bird anywhere, and especially at this latitude. I take it as an omen of luck. Perhaps I’m finally turning a corner in my life. Perhaps this journey will help me turn my life around.
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