Conquering the Impossible

by Mike Horn

  Day after day the winds shifted, and the temperatures changed radically, rising from forty degrees below zero when the Siberian anticyclone froze the tundra to five degrees Fahrenheit. The snow, which clung to the sled like sandpaper, turned to slush when the thermometer rose. The Canadian winter had not offered such sudden rises in temperature. But there my average distance was never more than nine miles a day or so, while here it was twenty-two miles a day. This was because I had made the best of the experience of my first Arctic winter, and the hostile terrain had by now become familiar. I was operating like a well-oiled machine.

  In the almost complete darkness, I skied along hunched over to push against the squall. The wind blew so fiercely that it regularly tore my hood off my head. It was hard to put it back on because my gloves were so thick. I had to take them off to put my hood back on and then slip them back on as quickly as possible, and then warm up my hands. Each yard was a victory.

  When I got about ten miles from Nutepelmen, I was literally pinned down by the power of the wind, which was driving the temperature down as well. My face turned into a mask of ice, which my blood could no longer warm. My facial muscles became temporarily paralyzed. I could no longer open my mouth. My nose was frostbitten again, as were my left cheek and my eyelids. My hands were still working so that I was able to pitch my tent quickly and get out of the wind, but the cold was so extreme that even inside the tent I couldn’t manage to warm up.

  The next day the violence of the storm kept me trapped in my tent. It was impossible to move. I was now one day late for my rendezvous with Nikolai, and he was going to start worrying about me. Twenty-four hours later, I decided to try to make some forward progress, but the instant I put my nose outside of the tent, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to cover two miles.

  A few more hours went by, and the wind died down a bit. I set out again, and that same evening around six o’clock I arrived in Nutepelmen, an old village of 150 inhabitants, half Chukchi and half Inuit. The darkness was pierced by a few dim lights barely visible through the filthy windowpanes. The dogs barked all around the dilapidated old huts that were heated by the coal furnaces and lacked running water.

  It seemed that all the doors opened at once. Nikolai had warned the entire village that I would be coming, and the dogs had just announced my arrival.

  When I told Nikolai that the wind had been blowing so violently that it made it impossible for me leave my tent, he answered that it must be because I had marched over a grave. The spirit of the dead man was furious, and this was how he showed his displeasure. Or, of course, it could be the new moon, which always washed its face with a strong wind before reappearing.

  * * *

  Mys Shmidta, 125 miles away, was the next checkpoint where I had to report my presence to the authorities. Throughout the Cold War, Mys Shmidta (mys means “cape”) was a military base with a garrison in a state of almost permanent alert with missiles, radar, and fighter jets ready to take off at any moment. I could expect to see some ghosts from that bygone era.

  A few miles from Nutepelmen lay the burned-out wreckage of a helicopter that crashed there a year earlier. Seven people had died in the accident. The villagers insisted that I should avoid the place, even if I had to detour around it. The Chukchis, despite being capable of murdering their old people when asked, were also fearful and superstitious where death was concerned. When I refused to change my route, someone confided in me the secret of warding off the attendant bad luck: I would need to carry a small bottle of vodka and empty it at the crash site.

  The weather had cleared up when I got near the orange-and-blue wreckage of the plane, which had been chartered by a scientific team to film bears. The helicopter had been following a bear a little too closely, at too low an altitude, when it turned sharply and the blades brushed the ground. In order to make my friends from Nutepelmen happy, I performed the ritual libation.

  The reason that the scientists had come here to meet their fate a year before was that this coast is a Mecca for bears. I didn’t see any bears at the moment—if those specks on the horizon weren’t a mother and her cubs—but their tracks were everywhere. I made camp well inland and away from the shore where the breaks in the ice attract bears.

  The cold and the wind were so harsh that my pulmonary alveoli began to freeze in my lungs again, triggering that same horrible sensation of being strangled. According to schedule, I was supposed to pass through here four months ago. This was definitely turning into a bad habit with me: being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Nikolai had gone on ahead and would wait for me in Mys Shmidta. Finally I could make progress unhindered, without having to worry about him.

  Our thorny relationship had gradually developed into a genuine friendship. I had come to understand that he was a humble and sincere man. He told me that he had learned more in the course of a month traveling with me than he had in the rest of his life. This touched me deeply. And when he needed my help, I didn’t forget that I was indebted to him for even being there at all. He was the only one who had the courage to vouch for me, with all the risks that that involved.

  * * *

  I wondered what it was that the FSB wanted to keep me from seeing by requiring Nikolai to keep me on a specific itinerary. A rocket-launching pad? An atomic power plant? As far as I could tell, there was nothing anywhere in the region—nothing but mountains and tundra.

  In any case, there was little danger of me seeing even the outlines of the landscape, since my horizon was restricted to the beam of light from my headlamp. And that was just as well. These identical valleys and mountains never seemed to stop rising, one after the other, and it was enough to sap your courage and turn you into a defeatist. At least the darkness offered the spice of the unknown. I would find out that there was an uphill climb only when it became necessary to start climbing, and therefore I wouldn’t have to dread the impending uphill struggle. Moreover, as is the case with blind people, my other senses became more acute. I had become so accustomed to anticipating danger that I could sense it on the other side of a hill or a pile of ice. I knew the significance of each and every noise. I could hear a seal rubbing itself on the ice, or a bear or wolf heading in my direction.

  * * *

  When I got to Mys Shmidta, the wind was blowing at speeds of over forty miles an hour, and I couldn’t see any farther than two yards straight ahead of me.

  The town’s gray and broken-down buildings stretched along the coast. With their shattered windows, its barracks were as much relics of a bygone age as its abandoned control towers. In the distance I could make out the lights of a gold mine that was still operating. These relics stretched for twenty-two miles.

  The first people I met were the border guards. I was looking for a place to camp, and I happened upon their station. Once again I found myself face-to-face with human brick walls who were assigned to enforce pointless regulations. They began with the suspicion—of course—that I must be a spy. And who would be paying me? To spy on what? These questions never passed through their minds. Nikolai, who was waiting for me, returned to help me with this situation.

  For me, urban, military, or commercial centers in the Arctic generally contained two sorts of people: those who had the power to complicate my life and those who wanted to take my money. The two categories often overlapped. That was why I did everything possible to avoid them.

  The former military base, which was now a huge fuel dump, was a sort of capital for the practically nonexistent population. The governor was also the chief of the fire brigade, as well as a physician. In this icy hamlet, depressing and windswept, no one said hello, no one spoke to me, and no one answered my questions. In the darkness, hoods pulled over their faces, people would run to buy the black bread or the canned food that they needed, before returning to hole up in their houses again. I would see them crossing the streets, dark and fearful silhouettes that always seemed to be running away from something. I had no desire to stay here a second longer
than was strictly necessary, but the storm pinned me down there for twenty-four hours.

  * * *

  As soon as possible I got back on the road—on the ice, actually—along the coastline. After 155 miles of marching on the Chukchi Sea, I reached Billings, my next checkpoint. My sled was growing lighter, and my average daily distance was about twenty-five miles despite the darkness and the still very harsh cold.

  At Billings I stayed in the home of a hunter named Alexander Machkov, whose wife, Elena, made me reindeer-skin socks and gloves. He wanted to give me a bear skin that was eleven and a half feet long, the largest one I had ever seen. Unfortunately, I had to refuse the gift because I had no room on my sled.

  Alexander taught me some interesting things about local customs. He explained that the chief of police, who pushed the art of corruption to the verge of caricature, had reportedly gone into the house of a trapper who had taken more than his quota of foxes and had impounded his pelts without a word. The trapper, who was on the wrong side of the law, was in no position to object, so the police chief nonchalantly sold the furs for his own personal profit.

  I noticed that the merchants selling snowmobile fuel were hard at work. But Alexander said that the fuel that these street-corner swindlers were pawning off on certain unsuspecting visitors was diluted with water, as much as fifty percent! If used, the water would freeze in the carburetor and the engine would explode. Having been duly warned, Nikolai bought his fuel at a polar weather station that wasn’t far off.

  * * *

  I left after two days. At a rate of twelve hours of marching each day, I worked my way along the length of the Chukotka Peninsula, gradually progressing toward Long Strait.

  No other human beings lived in this part of the world. At least that’s what I believed, until I happened on an out-of-the-way hut, no bigger than a table. I pushed the door open. Between the bed and the heating stove, a man, his chapka (warm Russian hat) pulled down over his eyes, was snoring, collapsed against the wall, obviously drunk, on the verge of slipping into an alcoholic coma. He woke with a start, startled by the light of my headlamp, and yelled, “My God! Oh my God! Take whatever you want, but don’t hurt me!”

  I left him to sleep it off, and I moved into the cabin—even smaller than his—next door. The next day he discovered that I wasn’t just a bad dream, and—after some laborious attempts at explanation on my part—he welcomed me warmly.

  His name was Alexei. He was a prisoner of the vast wilderness that surrounded him, like some prehistoric beast trapped on an island by the continental drift. How had he wound up here? The few words that we managed to exchange despite the language barrier allowed me to guess that the Komsomolsky mine, not far from Pevek but farther inland, bought his fishing catch to feed the miners during the summer. In the winter he lived on his savings and hibernated. I got some idea of how intoxicated he had been the night before when he told me that he made his own homebrew, called samogon, and that he drank the one hundred and ninety-proof alcohol that the mine supplied him to burn in his heating stove and his lamp!

  To him I was not a spy but a long-lost brother. We immediately hit it off. Alexei admitted that he missed civilization but that the simplicity of his life was sufficient to keep him happy. I could see what he meant, looking at the permanent grin on his face and the twinkle in his eye. He was happy with what little he had, and he didn’t want to accept any help or supplies from me. I learned a great deal from Alexei and his own ways. I hadn’t appreciated anyone’s company so much since I had entered Russia.

  I spent two days with him. He wanted me to stay longer because he said that the sixty-degree below zero temperatures would never allow me to make it to Pevek alive—but I needed to keep on moving toward my goal.

  * * *

  The little town of Pevek was located on the Chaunskaya Bay. The shortest way there was to hug the coast, staying on the ice. But Alexei had warned me that the area around Cape Shelagski, just outside the mouth of the bay, was nothing but a dumping ground for huge blocks of ice that were impossible to traverse on foot. The only way through, according to him, was to cut across inland by climbing over the mountains. There was a valley that led to a frozen river, which formed an ice route that would take me straight to Pevek. But the important thing was to find the pass leading to this all-important valley. And in the permanent night, I would be very lucky to find it.

  I walked through valleys and climbed over mountain passes. My face was completely frozen. I had the sensation that someone was stabbing my face over and over. A number of wolves followed me from a distance from the moment I left Alexei’s hut. I felt that I would never find the pass that he had described to me.

  In the meantime, I needed to rendezvous with Nikolai. He was coming directly from Billings, and I had entered the position of our rendezvous point into his GPS. I wasn’t far from the rendezvous point when a furious windstorm blew up.

  As I approached the pass on the other side of which we were supposed to meet, the windstorm threw up a veritable wall of air and snow, blocking my way. I struggled mightily to get through. Each time I got close, I would hit a breaking point where, fuming with rage and helplessness, I would feel my skis begin to slide inexorably backward. When I would turn to regain my traction and my balance, my sled would be hit sideways by the howling squall, which, like a crashing breaker, would sweep it off the ground and hurl it down the slope, dragging me with it as it went.

  I had to get through somehow. Nikolai was waiting for me on the other side, and he had no camp stove and no provisions. That is the only thing that gave me strength to keep on pushing and, finally, to make it through, despite the frostbite to my face and the indescribable cold. Otherwise, I would just have camped at the base of the mountain until conditions improved a little.

  This battle that I came so close to losing left me with some scars. I began to wonder for the first time in so long: Why am I doing this? Why should I keep on suffering the way I am? No one lives or travels like this, in the dark, in the worst weather conditions on the face of the earth. Why should I? But I shook myself out of it. In my situation this defeatist state of mind could be the most dangerous toxin of them all. I was disturbed to see that I had let it creep up on me, caused by my anger at having to travel this region during the worst season of the year, when I had planned everything carefully to avoid this very thing. It was caused by the suffering and the humiliation, after having hauled a sled weighing 330 pounds up the side of a mountain, to be hurled back down the other side, ass over elbows and tangled in my harness.

  Once I made it over the pass I was sheltered from the wind. I skied downhill to the tent where Nikolai was waiting for me to spend our last night together. From Pevek he would take a plane back home to Anadyr. His contract required him to accompany me to Ambarchik, on the border with Yakutia, but he was exhausted, frostbitten, and terribly homesick. His three-year-old daughter was waiting for him at home, and he was in a hurry to get back.

  When he asked me if I would mind if he left me a little earlier than planned, I accepted eagerly, despite the friendship that had grown between us. The faster he went back home, the sooner I would have freedom of operation.

  If everything went according to plan, his plane would leave Pevek even before I got there, just two days from now. So we settled our accounts. We had agreed on a fee of one thousand dollars per month; we had left about sixty days before (mid-December to mid-February), so the total worked out to two thousand dollars. That was two years’ salary for the average Russian and a good deal for him. Of course, though, he had also been an invaluable help to me. Nikolai had been crucial to me in administrative terms. He had cost me time, money, and effort, but he had taken an enormous risk in vouching for me, a risk that had allowed me to push on.

  I figured that we were all square.

  * * *

  To get over the pass and join Nikolai, I had had to travel for eighteen hours instead of ten in order to make my twenty-two miles. That was an average I was de
termined to maintain, whatever the cost. I would do anything to avoid suffering through a third Arctic winter, which I felt more and more certain every day would be my breaking point.

  I was pushing the envelope every day now. I was driving myself a little too hard without a doubt. I wouldn’t stop until I could no longer feel my hands, my feet, my face—just before the frostbite really took hold. I wouldn’t start off again until feeling returned in my limbs, or else I could easily lose my fingers or toes. But each evening, as I warmed up my GPS in my sleeping bag, I would have the satisfaction of reading my progress.

  Two days after Nikolai left, by following the valley and river that Alexei had told me about, on what amounted to a straight line, I beat my own Russian record with thirty miles covered in eleven hours of effort.

  The next day, February 7, at a temperature of forty-seven degrees below zero, I had the sensation that frostbite had penetrated down to my bones. But I had finally reached Pevek. I spotted this “urban” wasteland from a distance, because the coal and oil heat that got residents through the winter blighted the sky with its sooty fumes and pollutants and sent runoff into the sea.

  An old woman who looked out her window as I arrived through the grayish snow, like a statue carved out of hoarfrost, ran downstairs and embraced me. She insisted that I come into her house to warm up. I thanked her but declined the offer in the few words of Russian that I had picked up, and asked her to point me toward the weather station. She refused to listen and insisted on giving me a cup of hot tea.

  Just then a police car sped by. The instant the driver saw me he jammed on his brakes, and the vehicle swerved to a stop in the middle of the street. Four men in uniform piled out and lined up in front of me, Kalashnikovs at the ready, to block my way.

  “Dokument!” barked the chief. I was frozen to the bone, I had been marching for days, and I had marched even longer than usual to reach Pevek in a single day. I was well beyond fatigue, and the words that I wanted to hear from my fellow human beings did not include “dokument.”