Conquering the Impossible (18 page)

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We spent the three days that followed taking photographs, updating my Web site, sending information to my sponsors and notes to friends. Then the weather turned ugly. A blizzard and angry winds pinned down Claude, Adam, and Jean-Philippe for three more days before they were finally able to set out again for Arctic Bay. It was becoming more and more difficult to tear myself away from my friends. That is no doubt because there are few opportunities to make new friends in these parts.

Before heading back, Claude and Adam admitted to me that, despite my history and my reputation, they never thought that I would get this far, but now they were sure that I would achieve my goal. For the first time, nobody was urging me to give it all up. Now they were encouraging me to go all the way, to give it my all and succeed.

I no longer felt as if I were the only one who believed in myself. And that was what I needed most, even more than provisions and supplies. All the more because I was about to face the iciest months of the Arctic winter and the harshest terrain in this part of the globe, the Committee Bay region.

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First, I would have to travel along the eastern shore of the Gulf of Boothia and cross the Fury and Hecla Strait to reach the Melville Peninsula on the Canadian mainland. There at least, whenever a body of water lay across my route, I would have lots of room to maneuver around it.

I would need to cross the Fury and Hecla Strait at its narrowest point. I wanted to spend as little time as possible in the danger zone where the islands caused turbulence in the water flowing beneath the ice, breaking up the icy surface and making it uneven. The smoother the surface, the faster I would be able to move.

I found an ideal passage at the mouth of the strait, the seventeen-mile stretch between Baffin Island and Nuvaluk Point, the northeastern cape of the Melville Peninsula. I had been told that there was a hunter's cabin there, a little larger than the hut on Saputing Lake.

Despite this new plan, I longed to shorten my route by crossing the Gulf of Boothia. I had been warned over and over that this would be impossible given the current state of the ice, but I had been on foot for two months now, and I had only made two miles of westward progress, so I had not completely accepted the idea that I would have to make a huge detour around Committee Bay.

They say that it's impossible? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I didn't go and see it with my own eyes.

Before I made it across the Fury and Hecla Strait, I cut off to the southwest. But after six or seven hours of hiking, I stood looking out over an immense expanse of moving pack ice. And on the horizon I could make out clouds that were a distinctive shade of gray. It was the gray shade of clouds that formed over water warmer than the air above it. If you know how to identify these clouds, you can change your course and skirt around the open water beneath them. But here, this foggy layer extended as far as I could see to the South and to the North.

I had wanted to see. Now I had seen.

I wasted no more time complaining, turned around, and set my course for the Melville Peninsula. I was now resigned to the idea that I would have to travel all the way around the Gulf of Boothia. At least after the resupply I now had all the food supplies I would need.

But over the satellite telephone Cathy told me that, ahead of me, the ice had broken away from the mainland, creating an impassable liquid barrier. So I was now trapped. The tides and currents had rendered the rocky shoreline inaccessible to me, and the pressure of the ice had lifted huge blocks of ice, giant dominoes that piled up into stacks towering as high as fifty feet in the air all around me.

There was nothing to be done. While I waited for conditions to become more favorable, I pitched my tent on the Gulf of Boothia, on the continental side of the Fury and Hecla Strait. From my campsite I enjoyed an incomparable view of the Melville Peninsula.

I had just lit my camp stove when it suddenly ran out of fuel—something that happens on average every two or three days. I left the tent to get a full bottle from my sled. I stepped back into the tent with the new bottle and separated the camp stove from the empty fuel bottle. Then I opened the new bottle before inserting it into the stove to replace the old one.

This routine procedure would not even be worth mentioning if I hadn't overlooked two details.

First, a tiny pilot light had remained lit on the camp stove, even though it was supposed to go out, in theory, as soon as the bottle of fuel was removed.

Second, my benzene bottles had been filled at a temperature of about fifty degrees below zero. However, for the past few days now, the thermometer had risen to a balmy temperature of ten degrees below zero, due to a completely unseasonable and inexplicable heat wave.

As a result of that forty degree rise in temperature, the gas inside the fuel bottle had doubled in volume. And despite the pressure valve, my fuel bottles had all become pressure cookers and were on the verge of bursting.

The instant I opened the new bottle, its contents exploded like a bottle of champagne shaken up by a winning team in the locker room.

The benzene expanded until it came into contact with the pilot light, and then …
KABOOM
! It caught fire instantly!

My face was covered with burning fuel. By smacking myself violently, I managed to put out the fire that had consumed my beard and my eyebrows, but my forehead was all one scorched blister, and the tip of my nose was an open wound.

But I had more serious worries. My survival instincts had led me to drop the bottle, and the quart of gas had spread everywhere. In a moment's flash I imagined my parka, my trousers, my boots, my satellite telephone, my GPS, my gun, my distress beacon, my mattress, and my sleeping bag—
all
burned to a crisp! All burned at the same time! I was surrounded by flames, and a wall of fire was crackling between me and the opening of the tent, preventing me from escaping. I thought of trying to get out the back of the tent by ripping open the nylon, but it was too strong to fight my way through it. I wanted to try to cut it, but in my panic, I could no longer find my knife.

The tent was fire resistant, so it was the only thing that didn't burn. Instead, it melted. Incandescent drops of liquid nylon rained down on me, setting my thermal underwear on fire, as well.

Suddenly, in place of the vestibule, which had melted from the blazing heat, there was nothing but a gaping hole. Instinctively, I plunged through the flames and leaped outside where I rolled in the snow to soothe the burns on my face and to put out the flames on my seared clothing. It looked like I would get away with minor injuries, but I had just narrowly escaped being roasted like a chicken.

At that instant I realized that unless I managed to save at least one GPS and my satellite phone, it would be impossible to contact Cathy to ask her to send new gear and give her my coordinates so that she could send help. I knew that the closest village, Igloolik, was at least ten days away on foot.

Without the slightest hesitation, I plunged back into my tent and plucked out of the flames a bag that held one of the GPSs, a battery, my satellite phone, and a gun. On my way through, I managed to snatch up a few other items, but I couldn't save my parka, my pants, or my mittens.

A few minutes later, standing in front of my campsite, now reduced to ashes, I took stock of the situation. It wasn't a very reassuring inventory. I stood on the ice field dressed in thermal underwear and socks; I had a spare pair of gloves and another cap in my sled; my boots were still usable. However, I no longer had a tent, no more sleeping bag, no more warm clothing, and no more heating stove because part of the stove had actually melted in the fire. Moreover, the rise in temperature that had been the cause of my catastrophe was not likely to last—these Arctic “heat waves” are always short-lived. It had been pretty mild that day, but the weather forecast for that night was calling for a blizzard and a return to bad weather and more seasonable temperatures.

While I waited, I needed to find a way to stay alive.

To ward off the cold, I started to build the only conceivable type of shelter given the location and the circumstances: an igloo.

In contrast with what is commonly believed, igloos aren't built with slabs of ice but rather with bricks of compacted snow. But compacted snow, unfortunately, was still hard to find so early winter. Still, saw in hand (I had one in the sled), I went hunting for any small pile of snow on this piece of slowly drifting pack ice. Because of my lack of experience in building igloos, I took quite a while. And as I was feverishly working to build a shelter, the blizzard started blowing and the thermometer dropped back down to twenty-two degrees below zero. After many difficult and frigid hours, I was able to build my shelter.

Once I was in my igloo, I called Cathy to explain the situation—taking full responsibility for this incident. As a professional, I was expected to make sure that this sort of catastrophe didn't happen. I should have checked to see whether a pilot light was still burning on my stove, and since I knew perfectly well what effect a rise in temperature would have on the benzene, I should have checked the pressure in the fuel bottles. In short, I was guilty of a lack of vigilance.

I gave Cathy a long list of everything I had lost—luckily, back home I had replacements for everything—and asked her to bring it all to me at Igloolik.

In my sled, I found a packet of small round candles, known as nine-hour candles. I lit one, and fifteen minutes later it was as if central heating had been installed. I was still in my underclothes, but I was no longer cold. While the blizzard was howling outside, I used my candle to melt a little snow for drinking water.

I called Claude Lavallée and asked him to contact Johannessy in Igloolik. Lily's father, who had already done me one favor by bringing my gear and supplies out to me once, would certainly do me the favor of coming back out again. To keep anyone from panicking, I told him that I could last for four or five days, or even reach a nearby cabin. “Okay,” Claude replied, “call me back in an hour.”

One hour later he had talked to Johannessy. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police—had asked Johanessy to find a teammate to come out and rescue me. A call from the authorities confirmed it, “Stay where you are; we will send a team to transport you to Igloolik, where you can wait for your supplies before starting off again.”

In the Arctic even tiny incidents tend to take on the dimensions of affairs of state. I sensed a feverish quality bordering on panic in what had already become a large-scale rescue operation, a rescue that would result in my losing forty to sixty miles, since Igloolik was at the far end of the Fury and Hecla Strait! And to think how simple it would have been just to bring me my gear and provisions so that I could set off again from there.

I told the policeman that I would stay put for one day. Then I would start hiking toward Nuvaluk to move toward my rescuers and help them to find me, because in the pack ice where I was situated it would be hard for them to spot me. “That's out of the question!” shouted the policeman in a rage. “We organized this rescue operation, so we're telling you what to do! Don't move an inch!”

There was nothing left for me to do but make myself as comfortable as possible and wait. I had my nine-hour candles, enough food and fuel to withstand a siege, and all the time I needed to sit and relish the joys of meditation. While digging through the embers of my campsite, I found the fuel bottle that was responsible for the fire. I sawed it in half, I perforated it like a colander, and I stuffed the remains of a charred polo shirt, which I had soaked in benzene, into it. I lit it, and it provided a perfect burner to heat my coffee. It actually got too hot inside the igloo, and the snow started to melt. A little chimney, practically at the top of the igloo, let out the excess heat.

Back in Igloolik, Johannessy issued a call for help on his citizens band radio. He was looking for a volunteer, available and ready to start out immediately, for a nonemergency rescue mission on the Gulf of Boothia. Simon, an Inuit who lived in the village, answered the call. He added that he had a family and dogs to feed, and that if there was no emergency, then he would take advantage of the trip to hunt seal. The two men purchased a number of heat-and-eat meals at the local co-op, hooked sleds up behind their snowmobiles, and loaded the sleds with extra fuel. The rescue office of the RCMP underwrote all the expenses.

Twenty-four hours after their first radio call, Simon and Johannessy set off into the night. Since they knew my GPS position and my condition, they took the time to stop occasionally along the way, searching for seal holes.

As for me, I sat listening for the slightest engine noise. The RCMP had told me that the rescue party would arrive the morning after setting out, but that evening arrived and no one had shown up.

The next morning I called the police in Igloolik again to tell them that I intended to set out for Nuvaluk. Once again, the policeman flew into a rage and ordered me to stay where I was. “The rescue party left twenty-four hours ago,” he said. “If you leave your present location, they won't be able to find you!”

That wasn't completely true. They had a radio, too—even though they would have to stop and set up an antenna in order to use it. I could have easily radioed my new position to them. Once again, however, I obeyed his order.

Another twenty-four hours went by before snowmobile headlights began to dance in the distance. From the doorway of my igloo, I watched the firefly lights as they flickered on and off among the massive mountains of ice. In order to help them find me in the vast mosaic of pack ice, I shot off one of the flares from my “bearwatch” system. Simon saw it. Johannessy didn't, and he continued to wander around, lost, in huge, looping circles.

Simon—I only knew his name from having heard it over the radio—was the first to pull up and stop at the igloo. He was a fur-wrapped Inuit, dressed in caribou skin, with caribou gloves; on his feet were mukluks, the traditional Inuit boots. He was a true man of the Far North, like so many whom I had already met, but there was something distinctive and familiar about him.