Conquering the Impossible

by Mike Horn

  I called my friend Johann Rupert, president of the Richemont group, to tell him what I was thinking and feeling. He did not have even a moment’s hesitation. “Come back immediately!” he told me.

  This was the third time that I had been given that piece of advice—or, perhaps I should say, that command. I was increasingly tempted to obey but … I had never quit before. If I gave up now, it would be the first time in my life.

  “Well,” I told Johann, “I just need a little more time to make a decision.”

  I needed time, time to get used to the idea of giving up and failing to attain my goal, throwing in the towel when I was in better shape than ever before—despite these giant blisters on my fingertips and three frostbitten fingers, which were in no way keeping me from moving forward. I needed time to get used to the idea of failure, just when I could see the finish line ahead of me. A little more time to accept the idea that I might never have a second chance. While I continued to push on, the throes of my dilemma nearly made me forget the cold, and as I continued to mull the problem over in my mind, I finally saw this expedition for what it was, first and foremost: a priceless source of lessons about myself. Among other things, it would teach me the taste of defeat and how to deal with it, a valuable lesson for someone like me who had only ever met with success. I would be forced to return to Europe, to face the judgment of others, and to look them in the eye and answer, “Well, at least, I tried.” A new experience and, perhaps, a valuable lesson in humility.

  * * *

  Franziska continued to speak to me as I unwrapped each packet of food that her husband had prepared for me. I would read the little message that came with it: “Bon appétit, and keep up your courage!” “Hang tough, it’ll be over soon!” “Just one more push, and then you can go home!” “It’s cold outside, but they’re waiting for you by the fireplace!”

  Knowing this voice that kept encouraging me belonged to a woman who was no longer alive was deeply moving and upsetting, and it gave me one more reason to outdo myself.

  Suddenly, an incongruous question came to me: What should I do with all these little messages, the last messages, perhaps, that Franziska ever wrote? Would Philippe want me to bring them back home?

  “No,” Philippe answered without hesitating. He said to scatter them over the ice field, near the North Pole. “Bestow them upon nature, give them to the wind, like Tibetan prayer flags. That is what she would have wanted, to be part of the elements for all time.”

  A few days later, I complied with Philippe’s wishes, and I tossed a handful of little strips of white paper into the howling Arctic storms. The gale was so powerful that they vanished the instant they left my hand … as if Franziska were in a hurry to rejoin that wild nature that she loved so much, even to her death at its hands.

  * * *

  I had passed eighty-five degrees north latitude. I was practically on a highway now—the ice field stretching out to the horizon before me was as flat as Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. At night I slept for two or three hours, thanks to the morphine from my medical kit, which helped to calm the relentless throbbing in my fingers. The pain returned whenever I woke back up, but I forgot about it as soon as I started moving again. I was only about fifteen to twenty full days away from the northernmost point on the planet: the North Pole.

  It was at this very moment that I felt a liberating shift. To reach the North Pole was an obsession that had so dominated my thinking that it blinded me to everything else. That was why I would actually be disappointed when I finally achieved my goal. I now felt certain that as soon as I reached that fateful spot, I would be emptied forever of the force that had driven me here and allowed me to rise above so many other challenges.

  I imagined myself circling around the Pole, sniffing at it from a few yards away—without setting foot on it. That way I would still always have that goal to achieve, that Holy Grail to grasp, like a sweet reward that you save for last, the self-deprivation making it sweeter still. I would have succeeded in dominating the elements by deciding, myself, the outcome of the battle. And even if it might seem like I had failed, I would have won a personal victory.

  It had been a week since my fingers were frostbitten. That evening it was a little less cold, and I pitched my tent by the light of a magnificent sunset. All around me there was a sort of fragile and perfect harmony. Although the natural forces of the Arctic had beaten me to within inches of my life, neither the cold, nor the pack ice, nor the crevasses had managed to kill me. Because I had merely survived, the decision was still my own.

  I was ready to go home.

  I called Cathy, and she alerted Gouram Assathiany, a young man of Georgian descent who spoke good Russian, and he took over. Because I was in the Russian sector of the ice field, Gouram contacted a number of different military bases in Siberia. He finally turned up a pilot and a helicopter that were willing to come to fetch me.

  Before they could take me home, though, they needed first of all to find me, and that was no simple matter. The good folks at Argos had offered to “lend” me a rescue beacon for a period of two years, in exchange for fifty thousand Euros. That was a little too rich for my blood. And so my friend Vincent Borde managed to obtain a beacon for me from the people at Plastimo, who sent it to Russia, and from there to an encampment near the North Pole, and then relayed it to Cape Arktichesky by helicopter. A pilot who had been asked to bring me the beacon let me know that he was coming to drop it off. But when he got there I found out that it was going to cost me ten thousand Euros! That seemed like a lot of money for a detour of a few miles along a route he follows nearly every day!

  That is why, to make a long story short, I had no beacon. And without a beacon, I would be quite a bit more difficult to find. The rescue beacon beamed out a signal that any helicopter crew could pick up and find while in the air. But in the absence of the beacon, I would have to relay my GPS position to Cathy, who would then relay it to Gouram, who would relay it to my rescuers. They would then embark on their mission as soon as the weather allowed, but all the while, I would be drifting off the mark I gave them on the constantly drifting polar ice. Because the Russian helicopter crew would have no way to receive my updated coordinates in flight, they would have to sweep 150 or 200 square miles of ice field to find me, and they claimed that they did not have enough fuel to do that kind of a search. They could only agree to come get me at some specific location and take me directly from there to their base. So I gave my coordinates to Cathy, who transmitted them to Gouram Assathiany, who then organized my rescue with the Russians. I had to keep my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t drift out of their range.

  Furthermore, in this country where bureaucracy was still the true reigning despot, to bring someone over the border and onto their territory who had neither passport nor entry visa, and who was armed as well—I carried a gun only so that I could defend myself against polar bears—would be a major affair of state, even if it was a question of life or death. I spent two days waiting, huddled in my tent. Two days of atrocious suffering from the pain in my fingers. Two days in which the ice began to break up all around me once again, and during which I began to drift on a piece of ice field once again. In a rage I called Gouram to tell him that, since I had been drifting away from my position for the entire forty-eight hours, I was going to have to break camp and hike back to it. He told me, above all, not to move. The rescue operation was underway. For the sake of peace and quiet, I obeyed and curled up, once again, in my tent, like a snail in its shell. I stuffed myself with morphine pills to assuage the terrible pain that continued to torment my fingers.

  When Cathy called me the next morning to tell me that the helicopter would reach me in eight hours, I was too weak even to try to believe her. I took another dose of morphine and slipped back into a comatose slumber. My dreams, peopled with giant ice cubes that knocked against one another in all directions, were suddenly disturbed by the hacking sound of an electric chopper … unless it was the sputtering of an Arct
ic lawn mower. Suddenly I was jolted into wakefulness by the metallic sliding sound of the zipper of my tent. The two flaps pulled open to reveal the bearded and hooded face of a Russian soldier.

  “Come on, let’s go,” he cried. “Get moving! We’re leaving! Hurry up!”

  And I, my brain still swirling and foggy, replied, “Huh? Wh-wha…?”

  “We’re heading back to the base. Right now! The helicopter can’t set down because of the condition of the ice, and there is just enough fuel to get back!”

  They hustled me out of my tent and told me to climb into the helicopter—in fact, it was hovering a few feet above the ice—and to leave all my equipment behind. I refused. I would rather stay right here than abandon everything by which, for which, and thanks to which I had survived for the past forty days and forty nights. Maybe it was the effect of the morphine, but it suddenly seemed to me that all this equipment had become a part of me. I couldn’t even imagine abandoning it on the ice.

  Faced with my stubborn refusal, the Russians chose to accommodate my demands instead of wasting another minute arguing. In the blizzard of snow being kicked up by the chopper blades, they opened the luggage hatches and tossed all my equipment inside with the distinctive brutality of underpaid moving men. It was true that there was not a single place to land between here and Cape Arktichesky, and that if we ran out of gas, we’d drop straight down into the Arctic Ocean, and that would be the end of the trip for everyone.

  I jumped aboard, and the helicopter lifted off immediately. A Russian doctor who had been sent to administer emergency first aid examined my fingers with a grim expression and a series of eloquent shakes of the head. He replaced my amateurish dressings with clean bandages, treated my frostbite with an antiseptic spray, and gave me another dose of morphine, an injection this time. Apathetically, I watched him at work and a young Russian woman from a local television station who was filming everything with a TV camera on her shoulder. I could feel nothing but a profound sense of disappointment, an overwhelming sadness that brought tears to my eyes, as the miles of ice slipped away under my feet, all that ground that I had struggled to cover in the opposite direction. I was unhappy, frustrated, angry. None of it made sense. This wasn’t how the journey was supposed to end!

  I was suffering from emotional whiplash caused by that brutal withdrawal from a wild place that had grown to be part of me. I had been there for so long, with no one to talk to except for the ice and the snow.

  They gave me vodka and steaming hot tea to drink; they gave me reindeer meat to eat. I swallowed mechanically. I was barely listening to the pilot when he came back to tell us that the fuel gauge was on empty and that we might not make it back. I listened to the signals that the navigator was sending in Morse code. Didn’t he have any other way of communicating? I noticed that we were flying so low that we were practically skimming the ice; perhaps that was to shorten the fall. When a helicopter runs out of gas, it must drop like a brick.…

  Suddenly the rotor came to a halt with a terrible clatter at the very instant that we touched down on the landing strip of Cape Arktichesky. The entire crew heaved a deep sigh of relief. Mission accomplished.

  * * *

  We quickly refueled and then we took off for Dickson, a port on the Russian Arctic Ocean that was also the helicopter’s base. There they loaded me into an ambulance, which raced through the snow to the hospital, an immense and sinister building made of cracked concrete that seemed on the verge of collapse. It was practically empty, lined with metal beds without mattresses. I found myself in a shower room whose tiles were half gone and where the plumbing was mostly just a distant memory. They filled the sole bathtub with buckets of water, which had probably been heated over a coal-burning stove. It occurred to me that I might be in an abandoned gulag.

  But after what I’d been through, it looked like a three-star health spa, and I was going to enjoy a fairly basic cleaning. I hadn’t washed in fifty days, and I was emitting a distinct whiff of polecat.

  There was just one problem: I was going to have a difficult time undressing without full use of my hands. That was when a Russian nurse showed up to help me with my washing. She was quite different from the old fantasy of the Russian sex bomb, braless beneath a sheer blouse; this nurse could easily have passed for an Olympic champion weightlifter from the old days of the Soviet Union. She was so massive that she had to turn sideways to get through the door, and when she finally came to a halt in front of me, I felt like I had finally met the Yeti, only hairier. With a muffled grunt, the abominable snow woman lunged at me and ripped off my clothing. When I was dressed in nothing but my dirt, she shoved me into the tub of boiling hot water, leaving me to simmer for a while so that the filth would loosen its grip on my skin. I barely had time to begin to relax in the hot water when she reappeared, brandishing a terrifying scrub brush. She grabbed me and lifted me out of the water as if I was a newborn baby, and then set about methodically scrubbing every square inch of my body, the way you might groom a horse. But she knew her job. Soon I was red as a lobster but impeccably clean.

  Clothed only in a pair of slippers and a hospital gown that was loosely tied, hanging open in the back so that my ass enjoyed a cool breeze, I met a Russian surgeon. He drew circles in felt-tip marker at the bases of my thumbs, and he explained to me that he planned to cut them off whole.

  I yelled, “Nyet!”

  However fatalistic I might have become since being rescued from the ice field, I was not about to allow this Siberian Dr. Frankenstein to begin to butcher me! If I lost my thumbs, it would be the same as losing my hands; and if I was going to lose my hands, then I might as well go ahead and kill myself!

  I was saved by Gouram, who called the mayor of Dickson just a few minutes later to warn him that a Learjet with a doctor on board had just taken off from Paris and was flying to Norilsk to take me back to Europe, where I would be given proper treatment. In the meanwhile, absolutely no surgery was to be performed on my body. When the hospital surgeon received these instructions, he was visibly disappointed—he would have been so happy to perform a few amputations. I was placed in a bed with a mattress and a set of sheets that they found who knows where. They gave me an old-fashioned IV: the bottle was made of glass, and I screamed when a weight-lifting nurse technician stabbed me in the arm with a needle so big that it looked like the exhaust pipe of an old car.

  A few minutes later the mayor of Dickson made his appearance. He had come in person to pay his respects to a man he’d never heard of in his life, but whom Gouram Assathiany had described as a famous adventurer, an international celebrity. He was clearly delighted that I had come to pay a visit to his lovely town, and he seemed to have only warm feelings toward me, though I could only guess, since I didn’t speak a word of Russian, and he spoke not a word of any other language. Without a word he sat down on my bed, and with a convivial smile he pulled back the flaps of his voluminous leather jacket and took out, in order, a bottle of vodka, two glasses, three oranges, a knife, a loaf of bread, and a garlic-flavored sausage. He sliced the oranges and cut both bread and sausage. He poured out two brimming glassfuls and proposed a toast before we drank together: Na Zdrovyeh! Cheers!

  It struck me as unlikely that alcohol—especially such high-proof alcohol—was what the doctor would order right now, especially since I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol for the past forty-five days, and my veins were filled to the brim with morphine, along with other medicines. But it would seem ungracious to refuse. My host explained the art of alternating mouthfuls of orange slices, bread, or sausage, and gulps of vodka, tossed down like water. My glass seemed to refill itself magically each time I set it down. I was aware that in Russia you never open a bottle of vodka without finishing it off. In these situations, you do what you have to do. The gray hospital walls began to spin. Luckily, I was already lying down, and the bottle was empty.

  But the mayor’s jacket contained a second bottle! I gave up on that bottle before it was empty, and left my host to
polish it off by himself. I expected by this point to see him collapse on the bed next to mine, but instead he took his leave, tottering only slightly, his face glowing in a radiant smile.

  During the night I spent in the hospital of Dickson, I had some time to think. The odds were good that they’d save my fingers. I had done what I had to do, and I had accomplished what I accomplished. I had no alternative at this point than to explain what had happened to the journalists, to my friends, and to all the others … and to make peace with myself.

  Gouram had arranged for me to be transported by helicopter to Norilsk the following day. There, the Learjet that had arrived from Paris was waiting to whisk me to Geneva. From there, I’d be taken to Chamonix, to be cared for in Dr. Cauchy’s clinic. But the helicopters were all grounded by bad weather, and it took another twenty-four hours before I reached Norilsk. There, envelopes filled with cash were discreetly exchanged, and I was miraculously excused from of all bureaucratic formalities.

  I later learned that the envelopes were fatter and more numerous than I had imagined, and that my rescue had been quite the Herculean undertaking, as supervised from the Paris office of Groupama Assistance.

  When I had given the green light for evacuation, Gouram Assathiany immediately reached out and contacted the three nearest Siberian military bases. The first base did have a helicopter, but its blades had been removed and placed in storage; the second base had an aircraft, but no one could find the engine. At the third base, the one in Dickson, a pilot replied that his helicopter was ready to fly … but he, quite clearly, was not. Gouram called back the next day, once the effects of the vodka had worn off. Once he was sober, the pilot demanded a small fortune to go pick me up. After tough negotiations, Gouram and the pilot came to an agreement. I was a seven-hour flight from Dickson and the pilot demanded the presence of a second crew—and they wouldn’t be doing charity work, either.