Conquering the Impossible (39 page)

Once I made it over the pass I was sheltered from the wind. I skied downhill to the tent where Nikolai was waiting for me to spend our last night together. From Pevek he would take a plane back home to Anadyr. His contract required him to accompany me to Ambarchik, on the border with Yakutia, but he was exhausted, frostbitten, and terribly homesick. His three-year-old daughter was waiting for him at home, and he was in a hurry to get back.

When he asked me if I would mind if he left me a little earlier than planned, I accepted eagerly, despite the friendship that had grown between us. The faster he went back home, the sooner I would have freedom of operation.

If everything went according to plan, his plane would leave Pevek even before I got there, just two days from now. So we settled our accounts. We had agreed on a fee of one thousand dollars per month; we had left about sixty days before (mid-December to mid-February), so the total worked out to two thousand dollars. That was two years' salary for the average Russian and a good deal for him. Of course, though, he had also been an invaluable help to me. Nikolai had been crucial to me in administrative terms. He had cost me time, money, and effort, but he had taken an enormous risk in vouching for me, a risk that had allowed me to push on.

I figured that we were all square.

*   *   *

To get over the pass and join Nikolai, I had had to travel for eighteen hours instead of ten in order to make my twenty-two miles. That was an average I was determined to maintain, whatever the cost. I would do anything to avoid suffering through a third Arctic winter, which I felt more and more certain every day would be my breaking point.

I was pushing the envelope every day now. I was driving myself a little too hard without a doubt. I wouldn't stop until I could no longer feel my hands, my feet, my face—just before the frostbite really took hold. I wouldn't start off again until feeling returned in my limbs, or else I could easily lose my fingers or toes. But each evening, as I warmed up my GPS in my sleeping bag, I would have the satisfaction of reading my progress.

Two days after Nikolai left, by following the valley and river that Alexei had told me about, on what amounted to a straight line, I beat my own Russian record with thirty miles covered in eleven hours of effort.

The next day, February 7, at a temperature of forty-seven degrees below zero, I had the sensation that frostbite had penetrated down to my bones. But I had finally reached Pevek. I spotted this “urban” wasteland from a distance, because the coal and oil heat that got residents through the winter blighted the sky with its sooty fumes and pollutants and sent runoff into the sea.

An old woman who looked out her window as I arrived through the grayish snow, like a statue carved out of hoarfrost, ran downstairs and embraced me. She insisted that I come into her house to warm up. I thanked her but declined the offer in the few words of Russian that I had picked up, and asked her to point me toward the weather station. She refused to listen and insisted on giving me a cup of hot tea.

Just then a police car sped by. The instant the driver saw me he jammed on his brakes, and the vehicle swerved to a stop in the middle of the street. Four men in uniform piled out and lined up in front of me, Kalashnikovs at the ready, to block my way.

“Dokument!”
barked the chief. I was frozen to the bone, I had been marching for days, and I had marched even longer than usual to reach Pevek in a single day. I was well beyond fatigue, and the words that I wanted to hear from my fellow human beings did not include “
dokument
.”

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 experienced 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.