Conquering the Impossible (34 page)

*   *   *

It was close to 10:00
P.M.
when we sailed past the harbor tugboat. The sailor aboard waved wildly at us, yelling to make it clear that we were forbidden to tie up at the wharf. We were expected to drop anchor in the harbor and wait there for the customs agents and the Coast Guard to come out and board our vessel. We knew all of this, but we were exhausted. The ocean had wiped us out, and we wanted only one thing: to feel dry land under our feet.

The man on the tugboat pulled out a bullhorn with which to bark orders at us.

I came about sharply and yelled, “Do you speak English?”

Apparently he didn't. I sailed straight for the dock amidst a shower of
“Nyet! Nyet!”
which I pretended not to understand. Martin and Ronnie leaped to the dock to tie up. The sailor on the tugboat shined his spotlights on us and kept on yelling the whole time.

Hiding out in the cockpit, we sipped our beers and waited for the repercussions of our disobedience.

Martin and Ronnie each had a three-month visa, but it was a Russian visa without the special invitation required to travel to Chukotka, which meant that they were here illegally. They had not planned to stay in Provideniya, but setting back out to sea in such bad weather would be too dangerous. The plan was for them to charter a plane to take them back to Nome, and I would load my trimaran onto the next freighter, wherever it might be bound.

*   *   *

The Russian Coast Guard arrived on the scene in their intimidating uniforms and green-visored caps. They examined the boat with suspicious glances. We invited them to come on board to take care of the formalities under shelter from the icy rain that had begun to fall, but they refused. They demanded of us a declaration that we were not transporting any prohibited goods including ivory, drugs, or any illegal passengers; a detailed inventory of the contents of the boat; and a roster of the boat's crew. We spent a solid hour fulfilling those requests. Then the officers ushered us aboard their tugboat to fill out the rest of the paperwork.

Packed into the dimly lit wardroom, we sat there completing forms from another era. All the blank spaces for the year began with “19.” The harder we tried to break the tension, the grimmer the expressions on the soldiers' faces became.

One of the two officers on board was named Dmitry (nicknamed “Dima”). He was the customs officer and spoke a few words of English since he had studied in Alaska. He pulled out of one of his pockets a zippered leather case containing a series of stamps; out of another pocket, a case containing an inkpad; out of a third pocket, an assortment of fountain pens. He puffed a few hot breaths onto the inkpad to moisten it and then pulled out a sheet of paper to test each of his stamps one after the other. He lined up our passports on the table in front of him and began stamping them, rhythmically, in a sort of absurd, interminable dance, performed by a cog in a well-oiled bureaucratic machine. It all unfolded just like a scene out of some bizarre movie.

Once he had completed his ritual, Dmitry said with a straight face, “Welcome to the future!”

I sat openmouthed, absorbing the irony of it all. Of course, what he meant was that we had crossed the international date line, and so it was now, in fact, a day later than in Alaska.

He asked me if I had any weapons. I told him that I carried a rifle.

“Prohibited! I will have to confiscate it.” It did me no good to argue that in the wilderness that I was preparing to cross, I would need a rifle to defend myself; Dmitry would have none of it. Martin was sent to get the rifle, which was still in the boat. My GPS suffered the same fate—also prohibited. The argument that I needed it for safety purposes, in order to report my location to my wife, carried no more weight than the other.

Luckily, what we handed over were merely decoys! I had learned my lesson from my misadventure in Igloolik, and I had brought two rifles and two GPSs. The real ones were carefully stowed at the bottom of my luggage.

But I wouldn't have much of a chance of using them yet—at least according to the Coast Guard officers who informed me that I didn't have authorization to travel in Chukotka territory. I was aware this might be a problem. Because a nuclear power plant had been built in the area to provide electricity to eastern Siberia, the peninsula had become a high-security militarized zone, off limits to anyone without special authorization.

In order to help secure me a permit, one of my sponsors got in touch with the multibillionaire businessman Roman Abramovich, who was also the governor of Chukotka. Abramovich, who was originally from the capital of the Anadyr province, had reinvested part of his immense fortune in the economic and industrial revival of the peninsula. He put us in touch with Alexander Borden, the deputy governor, who was in charge of foreign affairs. Borden had an entry visa issued; authorization to cross the province was supposed to come later. Unfortunately, Borden left for Moscow and then went on vacation to Mongolia. My file, which he must have taken with him, could not be found.

Although I was allowed to enter the country, I couldn't go one step farther. After stamping a last few stamps onto our passports, the soldiers ordered us to stay on board our boat for the night and to show up at the customs office the next morning at ten o'clock, when they would inform us what they had decided about our case. Then they climbed into their old Jeep, which one of them started up with a crank.

To think that in Alaska, just ninety miles away, I could come and go without anyone even thinking of asking to see my documents. To think that in any American or Canadian port, I would only need to go to the police station, where entering the country was a simple formality.

Soaking wet and crammed together, the three of us shared two sleeping bags, and we spent an icy cold night worrying. The next day beautiful weather gave us a more complete view of Provideniya. Or what was left of it.

During the 1970s, the Soviet regime decided to make this town the chief point of entry for the Northeast Passage. It was a deep-water port with about three hundred feet of clearance and could thus accommodate large ships. Moreover, it was sheltered by a glacier, and even at this high latitude icebreakers wouldn't be needed to clear access to the harbor more than two months per year. The Soviet plan was to make Provideniya and Murmansk, an established Soviet port of supreme importance, twin port cities of equal importance, each of them the terminus of a major maritime line.

Provideniya grew at a breakneck pace until it had a population of more than ten thousand, and then, for reasons as mysterious as all the inner workings of the Soviet Union, all its great projects were cancelled. All of a sudden the city no longer received supplies of food and other primary necessities. The beer plant shut down, the industrial bakery that supplied bread for all of Chukotka padlocked its gates, and most of the inhabitants left the city.

*   *   *

The barracks on the opposite shore of the harbor were also abandoned. Their huge rundown walls housed only border guards, customs officers, and the employees of the airport. Martin and I found Dmitry there, who told me that the border guards intended to interrogate me thoroughly and that I would need an interpreter. When I assented, he called a certain Vladimir Bychkof.

Half an hour later, a forty-year-old man arrived. He was shorter than me, with a brilliant gaze. Vladimir, who had earned an MBA at the University of Anchorage and who spoke excellent English, was the interpreter aboard the
Quak,
a large Russian icebreaker that transported joint Russian and American teams of scientists. He also worked as a guide on occasion, and he owned his own company, YUR Trans Services, which managed logistics for American and Canadian mining and land companies operating in Russia. In short, if there was anyone that could help me solve my problems, it was him.

Vladimir was surprised that he had never heard of me. I explained that Alexander Borden, the deputy governor of Chukotka province, was supposed to be seeing to my file personally, but that I had not received any notification from him or anyone else. And, apparently, no one in Anadyr had thought to alert Provideniya of my expected arrival. What's more, no one had bothered to tell me what Vladimir now explained: that after one of the very few explorers who ventured into Chukotka—a Japanese explorer—had been killed there the year before, only a very few authorizations had been issued to travel there, and they all required the explorer to bring along a chaperone! So it seemed that unless I had a travel companion who was acceptable to the authorities, I would not be allowed to cross the territory.

If I had only known, I would have started looking for a companion six months ago.

Vladimir asked me to give him a couple of hours to make a few phone calls, and he parked us in a café—Provideniya had no hotels or restaurants—where they served cabbage-and-potato soup with a side of rye bread. When we got back to the boat, an enormous freighter was unloading construction materials on the same wharf. The captain, a friendly Ukrainian who spoke perfect English, told me that he was hoisting anchor the next day for Korea.

Could he take my trimaran with him?

“No problem, Mike. I'll be leaving practically empty. I've got plenty of room.” I'd just have to check with his bosses, a Dutch shipping company. Then I could turn my attention to chartering the plane to take Martin and Ronnie to Nome.

But maybe there was another option. According to the latest weather reports—supplied by the Ukrainian captain—yesterday's storm had yielded to a forty-eight-hour window of good weather. That would be long enough for Martin and Ronnie to reach Nome by sea. They were ready to give it a try, but there was still a degree of risk and I left the choice up to them. We agreed that if the six o'clock forecast confirmed the earlier predictions of clear sailing, they would start off immediately. Through Vladimir, I notified the customs officers and the Coast Guard so that everything would go off without a hitch.

At 6:00
P.M.
, half a dozen soldiers stood at attention around the trimaran while I unloaded the equipment I would need for the rest of my expedition. The weather report didn't come through until 6:30. It was favorable. The soldiers put a few more stamps on Martin's and Ronnie's passports, asked them to fill out and sign the last few forms, and the soldiers handed over to them, with an honesty worth mentioning, the rifle and the GPS that they had confiscated from me.

My brother and his skipper weighed anchor, and I gave a wave good-bye from the dock.

*   *   *

Martin and Ronnie hadn't yet piloted the trimaran out of the confines of Provideniya Bay when the chief customs officer pointed to my gear piled up on the wharf and said something that Dmitry translated for me: “Now we are going to search all that.”

“All that” meant my kayak and half-a-dozen bags containing my provisions, my tent, my sleeping bag, my fuel supplies, my camp stove, my clothing, and so on. Also in the pile were my .45 Magnum, the GPS, and the satellite phone—all illegal—which I had wrapped in a waterproof tarp and stuffed in the bottom of the next-to-last bag, under a pile of clothing.

If any of these items were discovered, I would be expelled from the country and forbidden ever to return. It would spell the end of the expedition.

I asked the chief customs officer if he wanted to dig through everything himself or if he preferred for me to empty the bags myself. Luckily, he let me do it. Starting with the first bag, I unpacked everything, each piece of equipment, explaining the whole time in great detail what it was used for and how it worked. Then I took a long time carefully repacking each object and placing it carefully back into its proper bag. I opened my fifty food rations one after the other. In short, I did everything I could to drag out the process as long as possible, but the chief customs officer wasn't fazed. And, in fact, my camp stove held his attention for many long minutes.

At around seven thirty I began to detect in him the first signs of impatience. My one-man show had been going on for more than an hour, and he had been due back at his quarters at seven. But he still wasn't giving up. We finally arrived at the bag of forbidden objects, which I opened as slowly as possible with my heart racing. In slow motion I took out a parka, some socks, a mitten, a second mitten. When there was nothing left but a thin layer of clothing on top of my gun and my GPS, I tried a poker bluff by shaking the open bag under the officer's nose.

“Look, there's only clothing.” And finally he cracked!

“That'll do,” he said, with a disgusted grimace. With an enormous—but discreet—sigh of relief, I hastily covered up the forbidden material, though I offered to allow him to inspect my repair kit and my waterproof neoprene slippers. He refused and walked away.

Dmitry looked at me and said, “I hope you aren't carrying a weapon.” I replied by asking him if it was possible to buy one in Russia.

Maybe from an Inuit hunter,” he said, “but that would be against the rules.” We piled all my equipment into an old Russian truck, and Vladimir got in and drove. The few words we exchanged demonstrated for me that he was an okay guy and that I could trust him. His wife had stayed in Alaska, and he could have done the same thing after finishing his studies. However, he harbored a profound loyalty to his country, and he returned to live in his hometown of Provideniya.

He offered me, in a neighboring gray concrete apartment building, the apartment of a woman who had gone on vacation for two months. The price was twelve dollars a day. It would be like being at home, except that at home I wouldn't be under the equivalent of house arrest.

*   *   *

The next day Vladimir Bychkof called one of his friends in Anadyr—Nikolai, a sled-dog driver—who would accompany me to Pevek when the time came. I couldn't get over my delight. All the same, my joy over this important piece of good news was mixed with disappointment that I wouldn't be able to travel alone and that I would have to adapt my style to match the pace of another person. But Vladimir explained to me that Nikolai and I would be traveling independently, and we would rendezvous just before reaching each village and military outpost along the way. We would set off together, then split, and so on—the arrangement suited me perfectly.