Prologue
Nome, Alaska. October 2003.
The world is grey. Frozen. In the main street, as wide as the Champs-Elysees and lined with square, prefabricated buildings, an icy wind rattles the odd pick-up truck and makes the drunken Inuits sway. A few metres away, the Bering Strait opens into a metallic, choppy, hostile sea. This is the end of the earth. On the North American continent, you can go no further west.
A century ago, in this forgotten land, the gold rush gave rise to a frontier town of forty thousand inhabitants, complete with saloons, cancan dancers and Colt gunfights. Some of the gold seekers made their fortune, others returned south and east – swept away like the precious dust they dreamt of – whilst still others remain here, on top of a bare hill, with a white wooden cross at their heads.
Nome, whose very existence has been forgotten by most, now boasts a population of a little over three thousand – building site labourers, oil rig workers, and a handful of gold seekers. With their tents perched on the rocky beach, they tenaciously drag up sand from the water’s bottom, hoping to sieve out the last grams of beach gold.
In the late afternoons, the members of this almost exclusively male community congregate at Breakers Bar, Polaris or the Trading Post. With one eye on the TV, which continuously broadcasts baseball, these ghosts down their first round of Rolling Rock, the local beer. The first of many…
I join them from time to time. Partly because in Jeff, Jerry and a handful of others, I have found warm and trustworthy friends, and partly, let’s face it, because I’ve got nothing better to do here.
Those who have never dealt with the Russian government don’t know what it really means to wait. Somewhere, in a Moscow ministry, my permit to cross the Tchoukotka (the Siberian peninsula opposite Alaska) is waiting to be validated and sent off. There, too, is my authorization to take a GPS, as well as the piece of paper that will allow me to carry a satellite telephone and a firearm. If I ever get my hands on these documents I will cross the violent sea that symbolically bars my way, and attack the final stage of my journey, the one that will lead me up to the Northern Cape in Norway, the most northerly part of Europe. Exactly the same Cape that I left to begin my tour of the Arctic Circle, against the winds and the currents, on 4 August 2002 – fourteen months ago.
I’m not living in Nome itself but, for most of the time, in a simple hut forty kilometres outside town, in the middle of the tundra. Jeff, who owns a motor parts and spares shop, is letting me stay – he only it uses from time to time for weekend barbecues, or as a base for wolf or elk hunting. I’ve got all I need to keep warm and to eat, and with my satellite telephone I can call Cathy regularly. Meanwhile, with the support of my team, and the assistance of several well-placed contacts, my wife valiantly does battle with ex-Soviet bureaucracy.
I don’t know whether or not she will succeed in wrestling the permits from them. What I do know is that, if she doesn’t, I’ll carry on regardless. If I had to end my adventure here, a year away from the finishing line, all that I have achieved up to now would be for nothing, because I would have failed before the end.
I have almost perished in freezing water, I have felt a polar bear’s breath against my cheek, I have survived in temperatures of –60 °F, I have faced detours of over a thousand kilometres in the pitch black of the Arctic winter, I have had frostbitten fingers, face and even lungs, I have struggled for five days and nights in my boat, its hull staved in by a tree trunk, to reach the coast of Greenland, to go on to break the world record for crossing that country. I have lost all my equipment and practically been burnt alive in a fire, and I’m only halfway through my journey! This expedition will have been one of the most gruelling of my career, both mentally and physically, for the Arctic brooks no error. But one of the most exciting too, as every challenge I have faced has been new to me. However, over these fourteen months, I must confess that at times I only found the courage to endure certain trials because I didn’t know the extent of the suffering they would entail.
Now that I know, I wouldn’t be able to start over, which is why I’m determined not to let anything prevent me from continuing.
To keep fit, I clear paths through undergrowth the height of a man with secateurs, I run across the tundra dragging a pair of 4 x 4 tyres; I climb the surrounding mountains, spurred on by the question that has driven man to explore since the dawn of time: what is on the other side? But there is nothing on the other side, absolutely nothing for millions of square kilometres. Just tundra; dry or snowy contours, steel-blue lakes, and almost not a road in sight, in this country where passengers and freight alike travel by plane. I encounter the odd moose – the giant horse of the Far North – a Kodiak bear ambles along from time to time to sniff at the edges of my hut, but mostly the silence is so profound that I can hear my own heart beating.
Not far from here, on the summit of a mountain, four angular stones rise up to the sky like teeth. They are the remnants of an abandoned Defense Early Warning (DEW) citadel, whose radars and sentinels surveyed the smallest movement of troops, the lightest marching of the boots of the Communist enemy, for forty years. Meanwhile the enemy, of course, was doing exactly the same; Russians and Americans glared at each other like china dogs for nearly half a century. And then, no more. As if those decades of madness were just a bad dream. Today these sorry mementoes of the Cold War are simply borders to nothingness, a sort-of American Great Wall, without the tourists.
Fit subject for reflection on the vanity of human ambitions. Mine don’t seem to resist even the most basic test of good sense. Yet for more than ten years, with considerable professionalism, forethought and preparation, I have behaved with what most people would consider suicidal folly. I have swum down the Amazon, and circumnavigated the globe around the equator…I am an adventurer, an explorer of extreme conditions, just as others are booksellers, teachers or butchers. I shy away from the ‘superman’ label that people try to impose on me. I don’t want to be – and I’m not – anything other than an ordinary guy who does extraordinary things. If I do have a quality that elevates me above the average man, it is a bloody-minded determination that stops at nothing. Not temperatures of –60 °F, nor the murderous rage of wildcats on the ice, nor the thrashing of Arctic seas…
Much less certain overzealous civil servants.
