81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  Ahead of Crane was another fin of snow. The sledge, without a curled-back bow to ride over the snow, became a bulldozer in the drifts. It piled up snow in front until it sometimes forced Crane to a full stop. He would then slip out of the rope harness and clear away a path.

  Crane had been lucky so far. In a few places, the ice snapped in protest at the combined weight of man and sledge, but he never felt in danger of its giving way.

  Crane leaned forward to build up some momentum to push through. He stepped into the snow.

  His foot kept going.

  He could hear ice cracking. His right foot dropped through with a sickening, bottomless sensation. Crane’s reflexes were fast, but not fast enough. His mukluk was soaked. Instantly, ice began forming. The thermometer had fallen back. It was at least minus twenty. At this temperature, wet material can freeze in seconds. Crane batted off the ice with his ax and waited—his heart pounding—to see whether he could feel any seepage into his socks. Seconds passed. Then a minute. The water didn’t penetrate.

  Of all Crane’s near misses so far, this one shook him the most. He would have to be more careful. The next time, it might be far worse. It was the same thought that ethnologist Osgood mused over years before as he navigated frozen Canadian rivers. “In the subzero weather, I revolted from the sight of deep flowing water as from a horrible and deathly trap,” he wrote. “To burn in molten metal would be preferable to the torture of slipping into that rippling steel-blue torrent.”

  For two more days, Crane marched. His neck cramped badly from the harness. The sledge, to his surprise, held together rather well. But it was not built for speed. It fought back at each step. At least the strain took his mind off the cold, which stayed well below zero. His breath turned his now-shaggy beard and mustache into an ice muzzle that melted off only at night before the fire. At times, it felt that he was breathing through a pipe. Everything seemed to narrow. Crane’s world was whittled down to the act of a single step. And then the momentary terror on whether the ice would hold.

  Crane also was not the same man who thought about giving up more than seven weeks earlier. His engineer training—the ability to think through problems—perhaps helped to some extent in his rebirth as a survivor. But the ranks of the Arctic dead are full of men of science and reason, almost all with far more wilderness credentials than the pilot from Philadelphia. What Crane learned was gathered in increments, plucked like stray threads from crises and moments of doubt. His transformation bound him, in ways he probably couldn’t yet imagine, to some of the greatest feats of resolve. In the words of one famous polar odds beater, it just comes down to putting one foot in front of the other.

  Early-twentieth-century Australian explorer Douglas Mawson was fond of quoting a bard from the other end of the earth, Yukon poet Robert W. Service: “It’s dead easy to die. It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.” Mawson did just that. His early 1913 ordeal through the Antarctic has become a well-studied case in the psychology of survival.

  Mawson was a geologist and veteran of Antarctic expeditions. He once joined the indomitable Ernest Shackleton onto the ice sheet. Mawson’s grand plan, however, was to lead his own expedition in the antipodean summer to set up a research base and draft the most comprehensive scientific treatise to date on the frozen continent. On November 10, 1912, Mawson left the group’s home base, bound for the Antarctic interior. He was accompanied by two others: an affable British army lieutenant who served in the Royal Fusiliers and a Swiss explorer and mountaineer named Xavier Mertz, who was a rare mix of bon vivant and rugged alpinist in his native Basel. In Mertz’s signature, a line slashes through the M of his last name, as if to say nothing stood in his way.

  About a month after setting off, the young British officer, Belgrave Ninnis, plunged into a crevasse along with a dogsled and most of their supplies. Mertz and Mawson yelled down into the blue abyss for hours, but heard nothing but the whimpering of an injured dog. The surviving pair then started a dash back to camp—about three hundred miles away—using dead reckoning and a surveyor’s theodolite. What few rations they had were soon exhausted. They were left to cull the remaining dogs, one by one, for food over the next weeks. It also possibly exposed them to dangerous levels of vitamin A from the livers of the Greenland huskies. The dogs’ names paid homage to the greats of their fields, including Shackleton, Franklin after the lost-in-the-Arctic commander John Franklin, and Pavlova after the Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, who gave Ninnis a dancer doll as a good-luck token.

  Mertz soon became disoriented and delirious, symptoms consistent with extreme amounts of vitamin A flooding the body, according to a 1969 study by the Medical Journal of Australia. Others cast doubt on the theory, suggesting Mertz had simply pushed himself beyond the limits of endurance. Either way, he couldn’t go on. He had to be strapped to a sledge and hauled, like Crane’s rig, by a human harness for several days. Mertz died about one hundred miles from base on January 8.

  Mawson, too, was suffering badly from possible vitamin A poisoning, and his body was ravaged by the cold. His hair fell out in clumps, and his skin dropped off in sheets from his legs and hands. Some accounts say the soles of his feet became detached in minus twenty temperatures, and Mawson was forced to secure on the flapping flesh with cloth wrappings just to keep walking. But, like Crane, Mawson benefited from remarkable luck. Near death, Mawson stumbled across a cairn covering supplies left by fellow expedition members. He was now less than thirty miles from camp.

  And, also like Crane, the ice was a constant concern. Mawson was haunted by fears of slipping into a crevasse like the unfortunate British lieutenant. Finally, it happened. The ice opened up. Mawson dropped into the abyss. Then he stopped. By sheer good fortune, his sledge was just a bit bigger than the mouth of the crevasse. That little differential kept him from plunging to certain death.

  “There,” Mawson wrote, “exhausted, weak and chilled, hanging freely in space and slowly turning round as the rope twisted one way and the other, I felt that I had done my utmost and failed, that I had no more strength to try again and that all was over except the passing. . . . There on the brink of the great Beyond I well remember how I looked forward to the peace of the great release—how almost excited I was at the prospect of the unknown to be unveiled.”

  Instead, he mustered the will to climb up the rope, wondering every second whether the sledge would hold.

  When Mawson staggered into camp alone on February 8, 1913, he was unrecognizable from illness and fatigue. One member of the team was said to ask: “My God! Which one are you?” The expedition’s ship, Aurora, had remained as long as it could with the southern summer ebbing. Incredibly, it had pulled anchor just hours before Mawson appeared. A small group was left behind to continue the search for Mawson and the two others.

  They were forced to spend another winter in Antarctica—in one of the windiest spots on earth—before their ship could return. It was all glory for Mawson when he reached Australia in February 1914. His story dazzled his homeland and fitted well into the age’s narrative of “heroic” exploits at the poles. But later, whispers and rumors began—never proven and vigorously denied by Mawson—that he may have resorted to cannibalism and eaten parts of Mertz’s body.

  Mawson, instead, talked endlessly about the perils of the ice in speaking tours arranged to help defray the costs of the expedition. One wrong footfall, he told rapt audiences, and it could be your grave. Sometimes, the margin is decided by inches.

  For Crane, it began like so many frozen misfortunes. With a crack.

  Ice again folded under Crane’s feet. This was different—bigger, louder—than when his foot plunged in several days earlier. Instinctively, he gulped a breath as he felt the surface give way. This was it, he thought. I am going under. Just like the suicide he contemplated two months before. Crane wondered, in what he guessed could be his last conscious thoughts, whether the current was strong and how far he
would drift under the ice before blacking out.

  Then it all stopped. His chest was squeezed by the rope harness. It pulled at his armpits like a parent dunking a child in a pool. The sledge, Crane realized, had halted his fall. That stubborn, irascible sledge nudged forward a few paces, but held its ground, just as it did for Mawson decades before. Had Crane built a more streamlined model, it might have saved him some hardships while hauling it. But it also could have cost him his life. If the sledge slid forward through the hole, or even just to its edge, Crane would have had no chance.

  He twisted around and grabbed at the rope. He slapped at the ice with Berail’s mittens, looking for some leverage. The ice around the hole creaked, but held his weight. Crane was soaked and panicked. He hauled himself out, watching always the sledge’s runners and praying they held fast.

  A skin of ice formed the instant the air hit his waterlogged clothes. He could feel water leaking through the tops of his mukluks and finding its way through layer after layer to every part of his body below his chest.

  Crane was shivering uncontrollably and having trouble catching his breath. His body, literally, was wondering what had hit it. A sudden drop into cold water sets off a cascade of responses. Nerve endings fire wildly. Heart rate and blood pressure spike to the point that it can bring on pulmonary failure. Some survivors report feeling their breath knocked out of them as if punched in the gut. At the same time, Crane was on a fast track toward hypothermia. Water below seventy degrees robs body heat far faster than cold air. When the water is just above freezing, like the midwinter Charley, exhaustion and unconsciousness can begin to set in after less than fifteen minutes.

  At least his head was dry. That bought him a few precious minutes.

  Crane had to act fast. He yanked at the harness and ran toward the bank with the sledge in tow. It may have resisted a bit, but Crane couldn’t feel it. He surged onto the rocky shore. Where are the matches? They were in a sack near the frying pan. Thankfully, there were dry pine needles and small branches scattered at the base of the trees. Crane was shaking so much he could barely strike the match. It caught. Soon, he had a fire. Each movement broke away bits of the ice film forming on his clothes. He was careful not to let them fall into the fire.

  Now, a rope. Crane yanked it free from the sledge and strung it between two trees near the fire.

  Where’s the tent? He was having trouble thinking clearly. He forced himself to concentrate. There it was. The tent was right on top of the sledge pile.

  Crane draped it over the rope, forming a shelter that was almost on top of the fire. There was no time to think about whether the tent would go up in flames. Crane yanked off his flight suit, long underwear, mukluks, and socks. He was naked and losing body heat. He wrung out the clothes as best he could and laid them near the fire. He eyes stung each time the breeze would push the smoke into the tent. For ten minutes or so—until he could see the moisture evaporating away in silky swirls off his clothes—Crane cowered naked, his knees drawn up to his chest. He let the warmth of the fire slow his shivering.

  Crane was never an overtly spiritual man. He attended synagogue sporadically—and apparently without much enthusiasm—after his bar mitzvah as a young teen. But it’s not unreasonable to imagine that Leon Crane, in that primitive tableau of flesh and fire along the Charley River, wondered whether there could be higher powers at work, protecting him and helping him survive. By rights, he shouldn’t have lasted that first night. His father’s letter and matches grabbed on the run gave him a chance. Then came the life-saving supplies and shelter of Berail’s cabin. And now the sledge. Crane would have been excused if, for just a while, he put aside his prized logic and surrendered to the idea that something he couldn’t explain wanted him to make it home. It’s often said that most of the Arctic languages don’t have a word similar to the concept of luck. The closest they come is what an English speaker might call fate, destiny, kismet. Death is in store for you at that moment or it’s not.

  Tears rolled down Crane’s cheeks from the smoke. They froze as soon as he turned away from the fire.

  Crane’s clothes were still damp, but somewhat warmed by the fire. Crane dressed and hastily arranged his camp. He pushed himself deep into the sleeping bag and thought about the sinkhole in the ice. It was minus thirty at least. A fresh crust of ice would soon cover the break and the side-by-side gashes where the rope held him from sliding under.

  The next day, Crane was back on the move. The Charley valley was narrowing and made big, sweeping turns. The land rose sharper from the banks, and the lines of frozen feeder creeks cut the landscape like scars. Still, there was no sign of the Yukon River.

  Just before sunset, he shot a squirrel and roasted it until the meat was crispy and the tiny bones gave a satisfying crunch.

  A week passed.

  Crane managed no more than four miles each day. He knew the sledge must be growing lighter as he ate through his supplies. But he couldn’t feel the difference. It seemed the same exhausting weight that pulled on his shoulders and forced him to bend forward to keep his balance. Crane’s legs kept moving, but the steps would shorten to a near shuffle. It took only about an hour of pulling now before he needed to rest.

  At times, he would stop for long stretches and just stare at the river. Was there any change in the landscape from the day before? If so, he could not recognize it. Without a landmark—a visible goal—Crane saw only sameness: more hills, more bends in the river, another subzero day and even colder night. He could now see how mountaineers muster the superhuman effort to keep going. The summit was closer with each foothold. The monotony of the river brought the reverse effect: it seemed to drain him. It was maybe as much a burden as the piles of gear and food on the sledge. Crane had read stories of shipwreck survivors tipped toward madness by the sharp horizons of the sea in every direction. At least, he thought, they didn’t have to walk. Every time Crane stopped to rest, it was harder to rise again, strap on the harness, and push toward that next turn in the river.

  After more days of walking, Crane came upon another deserted cabin.

  It had to be many years since it was last occupied. The roof was partially collapsed, and animals had long ago scoured the pantry looking for any scraps. There were some things they couldn’t get, though. Crane was amazed to find a few supplies left untouched. And more than that. Here were some incredible luxuries. There were canned vegetables and—Crane could scarcely believe it—a tin of Vienna sausage, which were jokingly called Yukon shrimp by some of the Alaska-based GIs. He gobbled them down and licked up the juices. He was grateful for the shelter. The temperature was falling again. The morning was as cold as he had felt since bailing from the B-24. It was near minus fifty.

  It simply was too much to go on. He stayed in the cabin to rest.

  Far away in Washington, letters had been mailed to families of the Iceberg Inez crew. The one addressed to Crane’s father was dated February 16 under the reference of Crane’s Army serial number: 0409175.

  It begins with the mention of the terse December 29 telegram. Now, for the first time, Crane’s family had more information. The letter, from the office of Colonel T. A. Fitzgerald, said Crane was aboard a B-24 out of Ladd Field on a “weather experimental mission.”

  “Full details are not available,” continued Fitzgerald, whose lavishly looping signature seemed out of place on the thousands of bad-news letters during his five months at the Air Adjutant General office. “The report states that your son’s plane was last seen when it took off from its base.”

  Fitzgerald noted the last radio contact shortly after eleven in the morning. “It has not been seen or contacted since then,” he added.

  Fitzgerald repeated Ragle’s keep-hope-alive theory that fierce winds may have blown the B-24 off course and the plane was forced down somewhere in the Yukon Valley. The letter, however, closed with a grim reality check about the search. “Neither the missi
ng craft nor its crew members were found,” wrote Fitzgerald.

  “The above facts constitute all of the information presently available,” the letter went on. “The great anxiety caused you by failure to receive more details concerning your son’s disappearance is fully realized. Please be assured that any additional information received will be conveyed immediately to you.”

  Fitzgerald added the names and addresses of the next of kin of the others on Crane’s plane: Wenz, Sibert, Pompeo, and Hoskin.

  Thirteen

  September 15, 2006

  Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii

  Each piece uncovered from the crash site above the Charley River was cleaned with a soft brush and tap water. A full inventory was made.

  Possible human remains from the B-24 wreckage were set aside. They would undergo study later. For now, the job was to catalog and photograph items tagged as material evidence.

  one U.S. Army metal button cover, badly corroded

  one stainless-steel watch body, burned and stained

  one type A-11 watch body, known as a “Hack” model, burned and corroded

  one presumed watchband buckle, corroded

  one metal key ring with four keys, corroded but “Made in USA” mark legible

  two pocket knives, one corroded and burned, the other with blade open and less stained

  one U.S. Army officer’s cap insignia, intact but stained gray-black by scorched soil

  The Hoskin case, file number JPAC CIL 2006–124-I-01, had moved from the chilly Alaskan dig site to a temperature-controlled room in Hawaii lit by fluorescent lights. The space is filled with tables holding carefully arranged skeletal remains and shelves with boxes containing other artifacts found at dig sites. The black flag honoring America’s POWs and MIAs sits near a glass wall. The forensic experts wear white lab coats, making the room seem like something between a coroner’s office and a biotech research facility. Their mission is a bit of both. It’s here, at the Central Identification Laboratory on Oahu, that analysts hope to give an identity to the remains and relics uncovered in the search for missing American military personnel.