by Mike Horn
I lowered my head and kept on walking, ignoring the uniformed men completely. One of them walked toward me, and for his trouble got the metal tip of one of my skis full on his tibia. He howled and shouted again, “Dokument! Dokument!”
I kept on going. The four men jumped into their Jeep and went ahead to set up a roadblock a half-mile down the road, in front of the police station. Once I got there they forced me to make a sharp right turn to enter the police station and continued to ask for my papers.
I answered that I urgently needed to go to the bathroom. No response. I was exasperated by this point, my nerves were on edge, and I finally cracked. There, in the middle of the police chief’s office, I dropped my trousers and squatted to take a crap. After a horrified moment of silence, the shouting broke out twice as loud, and they literally carried me to the toilet.
* * *
I showed them my papers and explained that I had a guide. Luckily, Nikolai’s plane had not yet taken off. They found my former guide at the polar weather station, brought him to the police station, and he confirmed everything that I had told them. When the policemen continued their nitpicking, he rose to the occasion: “You wouldn’t be capable of going where this man has been!” And when they asked him for his authorization to cross Chukotka, he answered, “I don’t need one. I am in my own country here! You are the ones who should have to show me your authorization!”
In fact, the border guards had been informed that I would be coming. But they wanted to show their power, using me as a demonstration of their authority. And, admittedly, when we first met, I hadn’t been very cooperative.
* * *
After Nikolai’s lecture, the border guards’ attitude improved. They offered me tea and even showed a certain degree of respect. Their colleagues in Provideniya had never believed that I would get to Pevek, which could be reached only by sea or by air. But I had arrived there, and moreover I had done so during the coldest months of the year.
They questioned me at considerable length concerning the exact route that I had followed to get there and everything that I might have seen along the way. I answered the first part of the question with my GPS, which recorded all my successive positions. As for the second part, if there had been anything “sensitive” for me to see, they needn’t have worried. I had been traveling in the total darkness for two straight months, and I had barely seen the ski tips mark out my path in front of me.
* * *
I spent another night in Nikolai’s company at the polar weather station on the outskirts of Pevek. I waited for him to leave while treating my frostbite.
I had told the border guards that I would be leaving Pevek on Friday the thirteenth. They had written that date down and explained that I absolutely had to leave Pevek on that day. But Nikolai’s flight was delayed by bad weather, and so was I.
The atmosphere grew tense. In the tiny, cockroach-infested room we were sharing, the soldiers—usually drunk—would burst through the door at any time of the day or night, demanding to see my passport, inventing all sorts of excuses to extort money from me. I would invariably reply, “Ya ne ponimayu,” which means “I don’t understand.” Nikolai was uncomfortable. The Russians hate the Chukchis and tend to treat them like dogs. Fortunately, he was one of the representatives of his community to the government in Anadyr, which made him something of a VIP.
Finally, his airplane arrived. This time we said good-bye for good.
* * *
On February 15, I still couldn’t leave because of the bad weather. That day, a policeman came to see me and told me that, since I had not left on the thirteenth and was also without my guide, I was once again in violation of the law. I explained that none of that was under my control. I suggested that I could leave immediately. He refused to allow that. It was too late now. He was going to arrest me and send me back to Switzerland.
With that, he left and went to find his fellow policemen. It was now or never. Seizing this unexpected opportunity, I packed my gear and got ready to leave.
“Stop!” a friend of Nikolai’s shouted, someone whom I had got to know there. “Before you leave, everybody has to take turns sitting on your sled.
I sputtered, “What?”
“It’s Russian tradition. Before a traveler starts off, he and everyone who is present need to sit one by one on his baggage. Then you can be sure that the traveler will have a good trip.”
It did me no good to explain to him that if I waited another minute before leaving, there would be no journey at all. He insisted. I relented, if only to save my breath. One after the other, we all sat on my sled together, and then they wished me bon voyage.
By the time the soldiers got back, I was gone.
I set off straight across the ice, over Chaunskaya Bay. Once I had crossed the peninsula at the far end of the bay, I would hug the coast again. The soldiers wouldn’t chase me over the ice. They weren’t equipped to go out in extreme cold. They would be risking their lives, and they knew it. And just like that, once again, it was just me.
* * *
Behind me, Pevek was vanishing into the distance. Ahead of me—215 miles away, but ahead of me all the same—Ambarchik and the Yakutia border, along the Kolyma River. No more FSB, no more guide. I was finally free!
There was only one problem: the last time I had been resupplied was two months ago. The authorities had refused to allow my team to come to Pevek, and I was beginning to run short on fuel and food. The food that I had been able to obtain along the way was both too heavy and too low in calories, but I had nonetheless purchased some provisions in Pevek. I used them to make my regular rations last longer, but they weren’t enough. In such frigid conditions I needed to ingest ten thousand calories a day. I burned two thousand calories just while sleeping.
I absolutely had to get provisions in Ambarchik.
* * *
I had only one goal in mind, to cross into the territory of Yakutia. This region is one of the most deserted places on the planet. There is not a single inhabitant in the entire Kolyma Plain, all the way to the village of Chokurdakh on the Indigirka River. There would be no one to cause me any trouble.
Of course, I would need a permit to travel through Yakutia, and I still hadn’t received it, even though I had requested it at the same time I asked for the permit for Chukotka—four months ago! The border “town” of Ambarchik, which had once been one of Stalin’s most terrible gulags, was now nothing but a weather station manned by three people. There were no police, no border guards. I should get through without difficulties.
Cathy suddenly dampened my optimism by telling me that the authorities were refusing to issue permits to my team to travel in Yakutia. They would only authorize them to spend one hour with me in Ambarchik. One hour!
Jean-Philippe and the others would have to charter a helicopter in Chersky, ninety miles to the south, on the Kolyma River to travel to Ambarchik—and then leave again after one hour! That wouldn’t be worth the cost, and we had too many things to do.
So it was decided that we’d try to rendezvous again farther along. But farther along meant Chokurdakh on the Indigirka River, roughly the same distance away as the distance that I had already come from Provideniya. Since there was no alternative, my team set about getting the necessary documents to travel to Chokurdakh, and they were successful.
As for me, I would simply have to adapt my route to these new plans. I had originally planned to stay on the ice of the East Siberian Sea as far as Tiksi, just before the mouth of the Lena River. But Chokurdakh was well before that, and far inland. I would therefore have to cross the entire Indigirka plain overland to reach Tiksi.
* * *
I skied along on the ice, and the beginning of the day promised nice weather. I was only a few days away from Ambarchik, but since I no longer had any reason to stop, I decided to cut across the bay so that I could pass between nearby Cape Bear and Bear Island.
The north wind began to blow. Soon it was blowing harder than I had experie
nced during the entire expedition, roughly seventy-five or eighty miles per hour. The wind swept away the layer of snow, and the bare ice became a skating rink where my skis no longer had any traction. I was constantly being knocked to the ground where I would continue to slide on my belly like a curling stone.
As soon as I recovered a semblance of stability, I turned southward so that I would have the wind at my back. When the wind was blowing from the side, it tended to lift my sled up in the air and take me with it.
I was literally being pushed toward Ambarchik, along the cliffs that kept me from seeking shelter on dry land in the shelter of their lee.
Since it was impossible to pitch my tent in these conditions, I had no alternative but to keep on moving.
I marched on without stopping for forty-eight hours, lashed by blowing snow that reduced visibility to zero. The wind pressure on my harness was such that it crushed the layers of air and clothing that normally protected me from the cold, and frostbite started to afflict my sides. I had set up a system that allowed me to transfer the pressure from my sides to my shoulders, but then my arms began to lose circulation and my elbows froze.
In the midst of this windstorm, which was blinding me and preventing me from using my GPS, I managed to set my course by moving forward at a consistent angle to the wind, and I ran straight into the polar station of Ambarchik.
At that moment I was thanking heaven for my first Arctic winter, the one that I spent getting from Arctic Bay to Committee Bay. The experience that I had gathered during that winter had certainly just saved my life. I could have easily died. And there was no reason to think that I might not die yet.
Despite everything, I have less appreciation for the nice weather in the Arctic than for those moments when nature is on a rampage. Its demonstrations of power trigger in me a mixture of fear and respectful enthusiasm. I had needed to come this far in order to witness the true power of the elements, a power in comparison with which it is really understatement to say that we are insignificant creatures.
* * *
I moved into the Ambarchik weather station to wait for the provisions and the fuel that Nikolai had appointed someone else to bring me, via Chersky. Thus I would have enough supplies to reach Chokurdakh, where I would have my next real resupply.
My courier was, in fact, the man to whom I had sold Nikolai’s snowmobile in Pevek with the condition—these vehicles are in short supply up here—that he would use it to help me out, in case of need. I waited eight days, and then two natives of the Sakha, as they call Yakutia here, arrived. They brought me three gallons of fuel instead of the five gallons that I had been promised, and a very incomplete array of rations. What was missing had been stolen or lost. Their muddled explanations kept me from understanding.
Two gallons less fuel meant twenty-four days without fuel. Even more serious was that the diesel fuel had soaked into much of the food, making it inedible. I separated out what could be salvaged, and I supplemented it with provisions that the occupants of the polar station generously gave me out of their own reserves.
* * *
The Kolyma Plain, which began beyond Ambarchik, is an expanse of thousands of square miles of wet tundra with countless small lakes and deep rivers whose waters melt the permafrost, stretching out in immense, slow curves and twists. This is the most frigid part of the Arctic. During the coldest part of the winter, a record temperature was set here of 101 degrees below zero!
During the winter it is covered with a thick layer of ice that smoothes the surface and makes it relatively easy to cross. All the same, I chose to reach Chokurdakh from the sea, which represented a detour of 125 miles. And that’s not counting the obstacles presented by pack ice, stretches of open water, and bears. However, I knew from experience that it would be seven or eight degrees warmer on the ice of the East Siberian Sea than on the permafrost of the tundra. What’s more, this was the beginning of March and the sun was beginning to appear again, which meant that I could hope for a very slight rise in temperature. That rise in temperature—since the sun would be reflected off the ice—would be more noticeable on the sea ice than on dry land.
I skied across the frozen sea in a permanent blizzard, without a compass or a GPS, once again orienting myself by the angle of my course against the direction of the wind. In this absolute whiteness, it was impossible to see the shoreline between the ocean bristling with ice and the tundra absolutely without relief, just a few feet above sea level and just as white as everything else.
Two days after I left Ambarchik, one of my tent poles broke in two, smashed by the power of the raging storm, something that had never happened to me before. As it broke, the aluminum shaft tore the fabric, creating an L-shaped gap through which wind and snow entered the tent. The cold made it impossible for me to take off my gloves to fix the tear with needle and thread, so I warmed up a roll of silver duct tape, and I used it to close the hole. When I folded up my tent, I would just need to take care that this bandage stayed flat; otherwise, the duct tape would freeze and shatter like glass.
But twenty-four hours later, my do-it-yourself repair was beginning to show signs of fragility. I was forced to stitch it back together from the outside. I had to work bare-handed because it wasn’t a job that could be done with mittens on. It was forty degrees below zero outside, and every thirty seconds I had to go back into my tent to warm my hands over my stove.
* * *
For five days running I had managed to follow a straight trajectory that took me close to land, between the Kolyma Plain and Bear Island. But my average daily distance dropped steadily because of the difficult surface of the pack ice and because of my growing weakness, which resulted from my inadequate diet. Each night I had to stop a little earlier. It would take me a full hour to brush off the snow that covered my clothes, filled my boots, and blew into my tent. By economizing on food, I had affected changes in my metabolism that, for the first time, made me gradually, almost undetectably, lose control of my own organism. To make up for the shortfall in calories, I drank more water. Any extra effort would then make me sweat excessively. A layer of ice would form on my skin under my clothes and chill me to the bone.
Days and days passed without the tiniest sign of human or animal life. This frozen desert is desolate in ways that make it even emptier than any of the actual deserts that I have crossed. There was not a footprint or paw print anywhere in this part of the world, not even the bear tracks that I had come to expect. It was as remote and surreal as if it were on an alien planet. I suffered almost physically from the sense of abnormality I experienced there. I walked along as if I was in one of those dreams in which you wonder when it is going to topple over the brink into the realm of nightmare.
When Cathy told me over the satellite phone that Annika and Jessica had won their ski competitions, I felt a sense of pleasure and pride that made me briefly forget about what I was enduring. I wanted to share my fatherly pride with someone. When, as I got closer to land, life finally manifested itself in the form of a fox, I climbed up onto a small butte to yell after the fox, with all my strength, “Annika and Jessica won the slalom and the downhill competitions!”
To conserve on the fuel I still had, I began to melt less snow and drink less water. As a result, my exhaustion became so extreme that my body finally refused to obey my mind’s commands. My legs worked in slow motion. When my sled hit a bump, I stopped short. It took an incredible effort to haul it over the tiniest obstacle.
I was covering just five and a half miles per day. I was practically standing still, and I didn’t even realize it. Cathy made me aware of it by asking me over the satellite phone what was going on. I would never make it to North Cape at this rate.
Just as I was reaching my breaking point, a will greater than my own took charge and forced me to stop, spend a day or two in my tent, eat until I had my fill, and drink until my thirst was quenched. The provisions and fuel that remained might not get me as far as Chokurdakh, but one thing was certain—I woul
d never get there at all if I kept on moving like this.
* * *
This complete halt restored my strength and my speed, and now my daily distance was hitting twenty-eight miles on the good days. I was back to eating ten thousand calories a day, which also helped to lighten the sled and increase my speed. But Chokurdakh was still far away, and even at a quickened pace my provisions would be gone long before I got there. I considered the possibility of hunting. But hunting what? And how? There wasn’t the slightest sign of life in the surrounding area.
The four months of that terrible winter had worn me down. I was making mistakes that I didn’t used to make. One day when I was hauling my sled along, I suddenly felt an abnormal cold around my crotch. I lifted my parka and realized that I had left my fly open. It was impossible to grab the zipper with my mittens. I had to stop, pitch my tent, light my heating stove, warm my hands, and unfreeze my zipper before I could close my fly—an hour and a half to do something that would have taken two seconds if I hadn’t been so careless in the morning.
* * *
The mouth of the Indigirka River, which would take me to Chokurdakh, was about sixty miles away when a bank of dark clouds appeared on the horizon. The day had been dead calm with hardly a breath of wind. But there was a sort of palpable menace in the air, something electric and indefinable. And suddenly the dark line advanced from the horizon straight at me. In the space of a few seconds, it swept over me like a tidal wave, and everything went white.
I told myself that it was a passing weather front and kept trudging along, assuming that it wouldn’t last.
It lasted two days.
Once again I found myself turning my back to the wind to keep my sled from flying away, obliged to keep on moving because the raging storm kept me from pitching my tent. The wind kept me from even opening the sled. Without food or drink, I was growing weaker. The stronger gusts would regularly throw me to the ground, push me along the ice, and pile swirling snow up on me. And each time, I got back to my feet. Until I had been battered one time too many, and I stayed down on the ground.