Flight of the Reindeer

by Robert Sullivan

  The statistics tell the tale: Claus must travel nearly 75 million miles each December 24 – 25, his team progressing at a rate of 650 miles per second—many times the speed of sound, though of course not near the speed of light.5 Even at such a phenomenal rate, Claus needs all the darkness that the night of December 24-25 can afford. Thanks to the rotation of the earth, and the fact that the more populous Northern Hemisphere is in its season of longest nights, he has not twenty-four but a full thirty-one hours to work with. “He uses all of it,” says Oran Young. “Every second. In fact, at the westernmost edge of the dateline, those islands in the Pacific are loaded with reports of someone or something banging around at dawn, creating a ruckus. He’s not a vampire, after all, and there are lots and lots of people who swear they’ve seen him in daylight.”

  When the Santa Claus express is traveling at top speed, it seems but a streak.

  “He told me he has gotten better at the operation over the years,” says Steger. “But he said, ‘Then again, I had to.’ ”

  What Claus was alluding to is the way civilization has changed in 2,000 years. “The first few years, Santa was finding his way,” says Steger. “In fact, early on, he did not visit the entire world. And once he decided to visit everybody, he took several nights in December to do so. Then he got better at it, the reindeer got better and faster, the training methods were improved, the shuttling back to the Pole for more gifts became smoother. The planning of his route became more and more sophisticated. Santa has extraordinary navigational skills, and his main hobby is cartography. In back of his house he has a bunker he calls the map room. The walls are covered with maps of the earth, and there are hundreds of books that he has compiled himself on celestial navigation, lunar navigation, oceanic navigation—you name it. In the map room he has shelves filled with airline schedules, mountain altitudes, climates in all zones of the planet. He has everything.”

  Gillette made his way over the Hillary Step (bottom) and was about to press on for the summit when he stumbled upon the cache (top). “It was unquestionably Santa’s,” he says. “It even was marked with an emblem.” Gillette did not open the box, and reburied it immediately after a fellow climber recorded the find on film.

  “Frankly, I’m surprised the experiment worked. When Oran approached me, I thought he was out of his mind.”

  – JOE MEHLING, photographer

  WHERE DID HE GET THOSE materials that he didn’t create himself ? From “Santa’s Helpers.” Says Young: “It’s not an organization, it’s not a fraternity, it’s not a club. It is a loosely organized network of specialists around the globe who do what they can to make things easier for him. To grease the skids of Santa’s sleigh, as it were. Some do trivial things to help, others do very substantial, very important things. Even us Helpers don’t know who all the other Helpers are. No one does, except him—Santa. He likes lists, as you know, and I’m sure he’s got a very detailed list of all the Helpers in his computer at the Pole.”

  “Santa didn’t always need so many Helpers,” says Steger. “This big Helpers network is only the latest of a lot of adjustments.”

  Steger explains, as Santa Claus explained it to him: “In the old days, Santa could pretty much do it himself. His maps were way ahead of anyone else’s—just look at ‘The Norway Map’—and his sleigh was the finest vehicle on earth. Santa’s operation was just about as sophisticated and well oiled as anything, anywhere. In fact, in the Middle Ages he had time on his hands. He was finishing early each year—three, four o’clock in the morning. So he started to play around with refinements. But many of these didn’t work out. For instance, rather than keep racing back to the Pole, he started goofing with elves shuttling the presents to him in small sleighs with apprentice reindeer, transferring the gifts in midair at supersonic speeds. Well, as you might imagine, there was a lot of spillage. Dolls were raining all over Australia one year. Santa gave up that idea.

  “And just as he did, he found all of a sudden that he didn’t have quite so much time left over any more. The world was getting to be a bigger place. More people in Europe, many more in Africa. More places colonized. And, sadly, more and more and more poor people. The poor are the ones dearest to Santa, the ones who need him most.

  “So he abandoned all his newfangled ideas and concentrated on becoming an absolute master of the task at hand.”

  In order to stay on top of the game, Claus developed ever more sophisticated routes of flight. He added more retreats to the Pole for gifts, so he was never traveling in an overburdened state. Speed was the key, and each year he would tweak this or that, and squeeze a few more miles per hour from his sleigh. In approximately 1750, Claus seized upon a brilliant idea: He would work east-to-west (following the sun) and would start each leg near the South Pole, where late December is sunniest. The flight plan became a zigzag on top of a zigzag, with tangents and U-turns thrown in for good measure.

  Racing Through Christmas

  The Mehling = Young Speed Test , 1991

  Fig. 1

  The Concept: Oran Young helps Santa Claus plot his Christmas Eve flight routes—crunching distances, wind speeds and other statistics in Institute computers. Therefore, he knows with some precision where Claus is positioned at any given time on the big night. For instance, over New Hampshire.

  The Execution: Young and photographer Joe Mehling floodlit the Dartmouth green to allow for Mehling to use a reasonably fast film for night shooting. Setting the lens at th of a second, Mehling let his camera run for nearly ten straight minutes. At that point, something streaked across the sky.

  Fig. 2

  Fig. 3

  The Evidence: When the film was developed, these three frames—recorded over ths of a second—were among thousands of images. By dividing time into distance traveled (Young measured it at 1.9 miles, using local landmarks), a velocity was arrived at: Santa Claus speeds along at 650 miles per second.

  But each time he conquered the earth, it changed again. More people in America, new countries forged, new lands discovered. Small islands were settled, and ones that were sparsely populated—Oahu in Hawaii, for instance, not to mention everything else in the Pacific—experienced exponential growth. Places where Claus once stopped for rest were now towns, and towns were now cities. Cities were “metropolitan areas” a hundred miles wide.

  Santa Claus has overcome man-made hazards, and at least one blunder of his own.

  And then, even as balloons were appearing over the Pole and the sleds of European adventurers were sliding over the Arctic ice cap, a new and troublesome presence was visited upon The Christmas Mission. The airplane.

  THAT WAS THE CLINCHER,” says Steger as he stirs embers in the hearth. “He said so. Up until then, he figured he could handle whatever came along in the way of population growth or whatever else. Because, you see, the sky was his highway, and he had it to himself. He was more clever than the rest of us, so he could stay a step ahead. That’s what he thought, anyway.

  “And then, one Christmas Eve early in this century, he’s zooming along, singing and having a wonderful night of it. The weather’s crisp, and the stars are out. He’s coming in for a landing in Washington, D.C., which is always his first stop in the United States. He’s coming in and—brrrrrp!—this little plane zips right in front of Dasher’s nose, and the whole team rears up. He lost a bunch of presents on that one. “Well, he found out what it was soon enough, but he didn’t do anything about it right away. It was a few years later when airplanes were everywhere that he realized he needed help. He decided to reach out, and ever since then he has done so, on a case-by-case basis.

  “No one, not even Santa, can succeed alone. When times got tough for him, he asked for help. It’s to everyone’s credit that he found it.”

  THE AID THAT HAS BEEN extended to The Christmas Mission in our time is a story worth telling. It is the story of Santa’s team. This team includes nine famous reindeer, of course, but also the much less well known Helpers who, upon being summoned by t
he elf, have excitedly, happily answered the call. It is a story that reflects well on our world.

  PART FOUR

  Eight Tiny Reindeer (Plus One)

  Santa’s Starting Team and His Helpers

  THEIR NAMES WERE bestowed by Santa Claus himself—in the elfin language, of course. “Santa said it was easy,” says Will Steger. “Each reindeer has a very distinctive personality that showed itself early in life—hundreds and hundreds of years ago. For instance, Dasher was a sprite when he was a kid. He was hyperactive.”

  AND NOW, STEGER POINTS OUT, Dasher’s job is to get the team off the mark quickly. He digs his forepaws into the ice, he grunts, and he just goes. Apparently he spends all of November practicing his starts.

  “Comet, a small deer even for a Peary, can race all night long,” Steger continues. “He can run forever at high speeds. I saw him training casually at the Pole—he was the only one of the elite eight that wasn’t sleeping when I was there. He was doing this light workout—not even approaching supersonic speeds, just traipsing across the ice fields—and he looked like a marathoner with the speed of a sprinter. On the night itself, he gives the team a boost whenever anyone starts to lag.”

  Steger laughs lightly. “I asked Santa how Cupid got his name,” he says. “He just smiled. I guess Cupid sometimes causes problems during the off-season, because he’s constantly getting distracted—falling for this young deer, then that one. It’s hard to keep Cupid focused. What a lot of people don’t know is that Cupid is a male. Dancer, Prancer and Vixen are female. Blitzen and Donder, both males, are the biggest deer. They’re the engine for the team, they’re the power. They each go about three hundred pounds—oversized, for a Peary. They’re like the offensive linemen on a football team or the lead rowers on an eightman crew. They’re set back near the sleigh, to push and prod the others.

  The Russian Peary built a brilliant stairway to the stars.

  “Yes, Santa named them all. He said the only one he didn’t name was Rudolph, who came from a Peary family in what is now Russia. Rudolph had already been named by his parents when Santa discovered him. You see, Rudolph—as opposed to the others, all of whom were handpicked as youngsters by Santa more than two thousand years ago—wasn’t earmarked for the team. He wasn’t raised to help Santa. It just happened that way because of one extraordinary circumstance.

  “Nowadays, of course, Santa says he doesn’t know how he ever got along without Rudolph.”

  And yet he did for nearly 500 years. It was 463 when the snow came to Europe like it never had on December 24th, and never would again. The idea to use Rudolph that night was Claus’s and Claus’s alone, and turned out to be a stroke of genius.

  He had found Rudolph only two years earlier. In 461 he had just finished delivering gifts of food to the Yakut people of Siberia, and he was back at the Pole filling up with presents for the Huns, who had been behaving better since the death of the tyrannical Attila eight years earlier.6 “It’s awfully foggy down there tonight,” he told his polar assistants. “It’s warm, so there’s an extremely thick fog. We’ll be all right, but landing’s going to be awfully tough.”

  The 5th century knew of fire, of course, but not of any kind of unnatural light. So imagine Claus’s astonishment when his team came hurtling out of the high altitudes down into the fog, slowed for safety and then suddenly picked up a beam of light shining heavenward like a beacon. “To say I was surprised,” Claus told Steger, “is to say the obvious. I remember Dasher looked back at me as if to ask, ‘What is this?’ ”

  It was the light from Rudolph’s nose, and Claus steered his sleigh down the beam, descending the brilliant staircase with all the beauty, serenity and elegance of a bride. Why the young Peary was standing in the center of a village quite near what is now Moscow, silently calling to his kindeer, has never been explained, and probably never will be. But there are sixth, seventh and eighth senses at work in the world of Santa Claus, and almost certainly there was some measure of communication between the several Peary in the air and the solitary Peary on the ground.

  THAT VERY NIGHT Claus asked Rudolph if he wanted to help the team. Who could refuse? So while Santa and just six deer worked the region that is now the southern Ukraine, Prancer and Vixen gave Rudolph a crash course in flying. The youth had some natural talent and even more potential, and by the time the Christmas missionaries returned to the European Plain with an empty sleigh, Rudolph had been sufficiently schooled to follow the team up and away, and back to the Pole.

  “Could Santa Claus succeed today without computers and radar? That’s a very good question.”

  – KEN CAMPBELL, technician and Helper

  That was the extent of Rudolph’s participation in 461. In 462 the sky over most of the earth was cloudless, and the eight-deer team had little problem making the rounds without him. But Claus knew he had hit on something special in Rudolph. The elf had often thought about glowing animals: Certain lizards glowed, several marsupials in the southern hemisphere glowed. Why couldn’t a reindeer glow?

  Then he found Rudolph, and soon—a little too soon, perhaps—he had an opportunity to find out whether this anointed Peary could perform in the unique way Claus hoped and dreamed he could perform.

  FROM WHAT I CAN glean from ancient records and charts,” says Ken Campbell, a meteorologist with Weather Services Corporation of Lexington, Massachusetts, “four-sixty-three was just about the worst Christmas Eve you can imagine. England got four feet of snow in a day, and though the winds were worse there than elsewhere, the continent got even more snow—five feet in France, perhaps that much in Rome. It was unbelievable. It was an Armageddon of snow and wind. It made the word ‘blizzard’ inadequate.”

  Steger says that Santa Claus not only remembers Rudolph’s first big year, but he talks about it often. “Santa loves to tell stories, which is good since he has more and better stories to tell than just about anyone,” says Steger. “The Rudolph story is his absolute favorite.

  “Until then, he had been training young Rudolph to follow the team or stay alongside as the sleigh went along—not to lead. Santa figured a general cast of light from that nose would be enough to guide the way through any weather, and that perhaps Rudolph could sit with him in the sleigh. But when Santa saw ‘The Winter o’ Sixty-three, ’ as he still calls it, well, he knew Rudolph needed to be up front.

  “Santa had already gone out once that night, and for the first time ever had come back without being able to land. It was clear that what he needed was a headlight. That’s what Rudolph was, the world’s first headlight.”

  Rudolph was also in trouble. He was harnessed at the front of the squad ahead of Dasher and Dancer. Claus’s team was supportive but concerned. Rudolph had a prodigious talent in his nose, but his flying skills were suspect, his mettle untested, his strength below average. Could he lead the team in a slight breeze, never mind a raging storm?

  All Claus knew, as he landed back at the Pole with undelivered gifts, was that he had to try. And so, with a hesitant “hup, hup,” he urged the team up, Rudolph leading. They ascended slowly, and as they went this slightest Peary was blown side to side. At high altitudes—Claus cruises at 26,000 feet on the longer carries, 35,000 over mountainous terrain—Rudolph was steady and firm, but as soon as the sleigh descended again into the thicker atmosphere, the little reindeer was buffeted by every wind. Every wind except the worst wind.

  Weather Services Corporation monitors training missions for Claus, and works with air-traffic control to clear Peary airspace.

  THAT WAS THE STRANGE THING. Rudolph would be thrown left, right, up and down—he’d be all over the place, with the glow from his nose whipping around the night sky as if a drunkard was searching with a flashlight. But then the team would enter the thick stuff, and Rudolph would turn into a rock. When the going got truly tough, the tough Russian deer got going. In the worst gales, Rudolph would resolutely streamline his small body, becoming a satellite of firmness and force. He would thrust his nose f
orth and make straight for the target. He could not only show the way but also see it.

  “Santa told me that many times over the years he would steer one way, but Rudolph would take him another,” recalls Steger. “Now, Santa had never, ever been overruled by a deer. Not even the sagacious Donder had questioned his judgment. But in these cases Rudolph was seeing things that Santa just couldn’t see from the sleigh. Santa was slow to realize this. But gradually—and grudgingly, because he’s a pretty proud elf—Santa yielded whenever Rudolph was at the helm.”

  In our time, Rudolph has become the most famous reindeer of all, a star of song and network television.

  WHAT WOULD BECOME RUDOLPH’S long history of routine courage and fortitude began in that awful year of 463. It was already nearly midnight when the new traveling squad made its way south over Iceland toward London, and then plunged into the maelstrom. Claus was astonished when Rudolph kicked into gear as soon as the sleigh was engulfed by the blizzard. He watched the youngster take it upon his slender shoulders to pull The Mission through. Innately sensing what was necessary, Rudolph shone his 1.2-million-lumen nose here, then switched it over there.7 He flew like Santa had never seen a reindeer fly before. Rudolph hit each landing perfectly, including one on the top of a steepled cathedral in Rome. Claus still considers that the most deftly executed of his many billion landings. “Morluv said that Santa talks about it all the time—that and everything else that happened in 463,” says Steger.