Conquering the Impossible (46 page)

In the meantime, I planned to reach Baidaratskaya Bay by following the Yuribey River, which runs most of the way across the Yamal Peninsula. However, the Yuribey River was forty-five miles away. I could portage that distance, but I was in a hurry. Luckily for me, a helicopter pilot offered to shuttle my kayak there. All I had to do was to reach the headwaters on foot.

After two days of hiking, I lowered my kayak into crystal-clear waters. Unfortunately, however, the Yuribey River was worse than the Messoyakhta. Its oxbow curves and meandering course stubbornly refused to take me in the right direction. The river zigzagged like bootlaces, wending its way through hairpin curves, lurching northward, plunging southward, and even taking me toward the east at times! Moreover, the scrubby, overgrown terrain it ran through made portaging impossible.

My progress was pitiful. But I consoled myself with the thought that few human beings had seen the places that I was seeing.

*   *   *

On August 4, I celebrated the second anniversary of my departure. I had spent two full years in pursuit of this one goal, and yet it didn't feel as if I had been traveling that long. I paddled the whole day long, thinking about everything I had experienced in those two years. I ran back my mental home movies of Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, fast-forwarding through them. Those twenty-four months seemed more like twenty-four hours.

I had announced that this journey would take me about two years, and I would have kept my word if it hadn't been for the red tape that blocked my way in Provideniya. If everything worked according to plan, I might not take too much longer than my stated goal.

On this same anniversary day, a white gleam on the riverbank caught my eye. I discovered a giant mammoth tusk jutting out of a heap of dirt and weighing at least 130 pounds. In my mind's eye, I could
see
them, those gentle, hairy pachyderms milling around me and munching sweetly on thorn bushes in a landscape that must not have changed all that much since prehistoric times. Then I thought about all the damage we have inflicted upon the planet. For how much longer will our children and grandchildren be able to make discoveries in places like this, the way I had just done.

A few days later I experienced a slightly less dramatic throwback. The Yamal Nenets live in tepees like the Indians of North America, but, like the Chukchis, they live by herding reindeer. They settle along rivers in order to fish. Each year they migrate great distances between the tundra to the north and the taiga to the south. They showed me their harnesses, the games they play, and they invited me to eat with them. I felt as if I established a bond with them dating back many centuries.

*   *   *

When I finally paddled out into Baidaratskaya Bay, the dilemma arose: coast around it or risk a straight crossing? Based on my experience in the Gulf of Ob, I had promised Cathy I wouldn't tempt the devil a second time. I was too close to the finish line to risk drowning now, but to waste two days, maybe even three, was difficult to swallow.

Hugging the coast would also mean making my way through the breakers every night in order to come in to camp on shore, and then heading back out through the surf the following morning. That is to say, I would be risking the loss of my kayak and my gear twice a day.

I therefore decided to try to paddle straight across.

The next day, after taking the precaution of drinking nothing from the time I woke up (I wouldn't have a chance to urinate during the entire crossing), I crammed as much gear and as many provisions as I could into the waterproof compartments of the kayak. I wrapped myself in a wind-breaker, gloves, and a waterproof hood and set out, ready for twelve hours of paddling.

The first few rollers caught me breathless and hurled me back up on the beach. But I managed to get through. Soon the shoreline was lost over the horizon behind me; the far shore was still too far away to see. Since I could use neither my compass nor my GPS, I set my course by the whitecaps on the waves and the direction of the wind. The sea was rushing to the northwest, and the waves ran perpendicular to that axis. The wind was blowing in the same direction. All I needed to do was to keep the wind at a forty-five degree angle to my face. If I followed the wrong course, I could very easily sail straight out into the Kara Sea and never reach land.

After five hours of paddling, I must have been—according to my dead reckoning—in the middle of the bay. The wind rose to a squall and blew straight into my face. The weather report had called for some strong weather, but the wind was getting stronger by the minute. I was soon drenched, and my kayak was weighed down by all the water that had sloshed in between me and my sprayskirt. It was getting darker and darker, and the waves were getting bigger and more threatening. The voice of reason was whispering to turn around and let the waves and wind push me back to shore. Otherwise I would be facing at least an eight-hour brawl that I wasn't sure I would win.

For the first time in quite a while, I considered the possibility of throwing in the towel. If I was going to have to hug the coast all the way around Baidaratskaya Bay, well then, that's what I would do.

But I wasn't quite ready to give up entirely yet. I held on and continued to battle against the wind and the waves with all my strength. Even though it was almost nighttime and I couldn't make out any land at all, I guessed that I was getting close to the west shore of Baidaratskaya Bay. The waves were growing taller and were making more noise when they broke, meaning that the bottom was getting shallower.

Three rollers in a row crashed into me, and I couldn't determine where they fit into the sequence of waves to get ready for the next one. The last big wave in the series caught me full on. I suddenly found myself in the grip of a wave that was driving me toward the shore, on and on. And then the water seemed to draw a big breath, and I was sucked back out to sea.

I couldn't see land, but it must have been about three miles away. I paddled furiously, making painfully slow progress toward the shore. Soon I repositioned myself along a line that allowed me to make use of the force of the waves.

I was finally tossed back up onto the shore, like a fish that the ocean no longer wants. My kayak was full of water, and my legs were so numb that I could no longer walk. I threw my paddle as far inland as I could and rolled the kayak over onto the shore so that I could drag myself out of it. Little by little, the blood began to circulate in my legs.

The crossing had taken eleven agonizing hours during which I was forced to urinate twice in my waterproof suit. I was happy that I had made it, but I swore an oath never to try to make such a challenging crossing in a kayak again.

I was too tired to go any farther, and I ended up pitching my tent so close to the waves that they soaked the base of my shelter.

Even after getting a night's sleep, I didn't have the strength to get out of my tent. I decided to stay in and sleep all day, in an attempt to recover. Unfortunately, I didn't have a drop of freshwater to drink, and since I hadn't drunk anything since setting out on the crossing, I was completely dehydrated. The lakes up on the tundra were blocked off by a butte of sand and permafrost that rose at least sixty feet into the air, with waves gnawing away at its base. But the Kara River poured into the sea a little farther along the coast. I would be able to fill up on freshwater there.

*   *   *

I started off again along the western shore of Baidaratskaya Bay. Despite the lack of freshwater, I had recovered sufficiently to paddle for sixteen hours in a row and cover fifty-four miles. All day long to my left, I could see the northernmost peaks of the Ural Mountains, crowned with permanent snow. On the other side of those peaks was Europe.

The temperature dropped like a rock to twenty-three degrees—it was still summer after all—but that was cold enough that the wind froze the water on my gloves, gluing them to the carbon handle of my paddle. This was yet another reminder that I had no time to waste if I wanted to avoid spending a third winter in the Arctic.

Fifty-two miles, fifty-one miles … After weeks of wending my way along lazy rivers, I had covered nearly 185 miles in three days, going against the current and into the wind.

On the evening of the third day, I was in a hurry to get to land to set up camp on the narrow shore, and at first I didn't notice the polar bear enjoying a bath in the grotto-pocked section of the cliffs. Just as my kayak ground into the beach, his head surged unexpectedly out of the water, and he stared at me with a pair of small eyes. I got back out to sea as quickly as I could (bears are quick swimmers). I wasn't too worried about the large number of bear prints that I was seeing on either shore of Baidaratskaya Bay, but I knew that in this period of the year when the bears were forced to leave the ice field, which was their main source of food, the bears were hungry and might well be dangerous. While keeping my distance, I filmed the bear as it came toward me, then retreated, reared up on its hind legs, clearly uncertain about exactly how to react to this strange yellow boat out of which half of a human was protruding.

As for me, I was going to pitch my tent farther along the coast—much farther along.

I ventured a little farther out to sea, just past the line of the breakers. I was right where Baidaratskaya Bay opened out into the Kara Sea. All of a sudden, a geyser jet of mist startled me. A magnificent white whale had just surfaced so close to my kayak that I could almost pet it! An instant later, it looked as if the sea were covered with choppy whitecaps, as if a wind had suddenly sprung up. But in fact these glittering flashes of white, stretching out as far as the eye could see, were dozens, even hundreds, of other whales, all frolicking in perfect formation as if a single whale had been multiplied geometrically with a cunning array of mirrors.

This was the second time that I had the privilege of witnessing such a magnificent and moving spectacle. It was a little more beautiful each time.

*   *   *

The next day big rollers forced me to move farther offshore in order to reach the port of Amderma with a tailwind. The temperature of the Kara Sea was between thirty-seven and thirty-nine degrees. I was permanently soaked, and the fierce winds practically froze me on the spot. Fortunately, after Amderma I would be moving into the Barents Sea where I would encounter the Gulf Stream again. The water temperature could climb by as much as four to six degrees, which would make a huge difference.

During the Cold War, Amderma had been a major military base with both naval and air installations. There is still a port, accessible only by air or sea, and it's sufficiently important to appear on all the regional maps. All the same, I felt as if I was entering a ghost town once again. The wharves were in a state of disarray, the port structures looked like rusted carcasses, and the wind was blowing piled garbage around in the streets. There was not a soul in sight.

I slipped between the two wharves of the port, where rusted ships seemed to have been tied up to keep them from simply sinking outright. The wind had dropped again, and the silence was distressing. I tied up my kayak and climbed up onto the piers.

There was still no one in sight against a backdrop of tall gray buildings that reminded me of Provideniya, high-rises of communal apartments with cramped space and boilers that would heat one apartment, which then heated the apartment above it, and so on.

I walked on, freezing in my neoprene slippers, wind-breaker, and water-soaked trousers.

At last I saw someone. A civilian. The man walked toward me and, wordlessly, examined me like the martian that I must have appeared to his eyes.

I asked if I was in Amderma.

“
Da, da,
Amderma,” the man answered me.

“Is there a hotel here?”

The native stared at me, “No, why?”

“Where are the people?”

“All gone,” he replied as if in response to a painfully naïve question.

When the military base had closed, the place had turned into a ghost town. In just a few weeks, the population had dropped from thirty thousand to four hundred. There had once been two flights a day into Amderma; that number had dropped to two per week, then two per month.

My new acquaintance invited me to follow him to his house. There he offered me a glass of vodka and cooked me a plate of eggs. After that he insisted on taking me to the
banya.
I had been urinating on myself so regularly in the kayak that I must have smelled just lovely. The man was in charge of the electric power plant (a diesel generator), where I enjoyed my Russian sauna. As filthy and exhausted as I was, it was a true joy.

When I told him that I planned to leave the next morning, he objected that with such bad weather, that would be impossible. It was cold, the rain was beating down relentlessly, there was thick fog everywhere, and huge waves were battering the coast. He had a point. I decided to wait for the weather to clear up.

He put my kayak into a garage crowded with trucks dating from World War II and gave me a place to stay at his house, along with his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandchild.

I stopped by the border guards' station to report my brief presence and to receive official permission to stay in Amderma. At the nearby weather station, I asked for information about a possible window of good weather that might allow me to leave. They expected no breaks in the weather for at least the next three days. But the head of the office generously gave me some maps for the stretch of the trip to Tobseda. Since I had had no resupply since Norilsk-Dudinka, I was woefully short on maps. The maps he gave me—official military maps that were of no use to them since Amderma was no longer a military base—were wonderfully detailed and not available for purchase.

*   *   *

I had been at Amderma for two days, and the forecast was for at least three or four more days of bad weather. I couldn't afford to wait much longer. I would have to find some other solution.