Conquering the Impossible (5 page)

I finally made it out of my sleeping bag, after warming the zipper between my hands, and I crouched, ready, finger on the trigger.

If I shot through the cloth, I would lose my tent. Better to wait and see what happened next. Of course, if the bear's next move was to attack the tent with a swipe of his claws, I might not be quick enough on the trigger.

Luckily, the bear lost interest in my synthetic shell. With the delicacy of a tightrope walker, he picked his way over the guy wires of my rigged-up alarm system without touching even one of them, and focused his attention on my sled. He shoved the sled with the tip of his snout (I could hear the runners scraping across the ice) as he tried to lift the tarp to see what was concealed underneath. All of my food was vacuum packed, and so there was nothing to smell. Despite the tense situation, all I could think about at this moment was a cartoon that appeared in a Swiss newspaper before I left: it showed me walking across an ice field, while a crowd of bears, attracted by the smell of Philippe Rochat's fine cuisine, followed me, licking their chops.

Finally, my visitor wandered away, and my pulse returned to a normal rate. The next morning, the paw prints and other tracks in the snow provided an eloquent account of the scene that I had experienced the night before through my ears and in my imagination.

*   *   *

On day thirty-five, a powerful blizzard whipped up, and I was forced to hunker down in my tent. That same night, the ice floe I was camping on began to drift. The next morning, I discovered that in the time it had taken to get a little sleep, I had lost twelve and a half miles without taking a single step. And I was still pinned down by the blizzard. Another twenty-four hours went by, and the ice cap began to crack loudly all around me, shattering into a jigsaw of unstable sheets of ice. This was beginning to look dangerous. I was unsure whether I should wait for the weather to clear up or push on in spite of it. The latter option would be riskier and inefficient, but at least I would stop losing ground.

I did a quick reckoning. I had spent two days in the tent and had lost twelve and a half miles—distance that I would still have to cover again—and five days worth of food subtracted from my supplies. But I still had enough food to trek all the way from Russia to Canada via the North Pole.

I decided to wait.

Forty-eight hours later, there was no break in the weather, and the cracks in the ice were getting dangerously close. Suddenly, a crack yawned open almost directly under my tent, and my sled was hanging precariously over the edge of the ice.

That mishap rang an alarm bell. I called Børge and explained how things stood. I wanted to ask him if he had ever found himself drifting south at this stage of an expedition to the North Pole.

“Never!” he replied. Still, even after I told him that I was still drifting south, he recommended that I wait out the blizzard.

“But the ice is breaking up! I can't stay here.”

“Well, it's your call,” Børge replied. “You're the only one who can make that decision. You've made it this far; trust your own judgment.”

*   *   *

The blizzard was showing no signs of letting up. The ice was cracking all around me. Since I had to make a quick choice, I decided to move out. And fast. I folded up my tent, hooked up the sled to my harness, and set out. I marched north, heading into the wind, but I was drifting south the whole time. The storm was howling into my face, burning my skin, freezing my lips and the tip of my nose … I wasn't doing that badly, considering everything that I had going against me. And then I noticed the loose bootlace.

Under normal conditions, an untied bootlace is a tiny problem; retying it takes a few seconds. But for me, in these conditions, it was a full-fledged disaster. Every morning I would spend twenty minutes getting my boots on. I could only do it inside the tent, because I had to take my gloves off to tie the laces. It was an iron-clad rule that I could never remove my gloves outdoors. Especially when it was more than twenty degrees below zero. Well, that day the ice storm had caused the mercury to drop to seventy-six degrees below zero!

It is impossible to keep trekking with a lace untied. Just as with a pair of cross-country skis, my boots were fastened to the snowshoes only at the toe, and the heel would lift with each step. My foot would pull out of the shoe with the first step I took. That would slow me down and bring on a fatal case of hypothermia.

My only option was to attempt to tie my bootlace without removing my gloves. That's just about impossible to do under normal conditions, but at seventy-six degrees below zero, with a blizzard whipping my exposed flesh and howling in my ears … well, you can only imagine.

While I was struggling futilely with the bootlace, I began to notice the first warning signs of hypothermia: shivering, blue nose and lips … I was never going to get this done. Okay, it was time for drastic measures: I pulled off my gloves and wedged them under my arms in an attempt to preserve even a little body heat. But the gloves slipped out and fell to the ground, where the wind filled them with snow.

Before I was done tying the bootlace, my fingers were half frozen. I pulled my gloves back on: they were frozen, too. And my hands were unlikely to warm them up. I jammed my gloved hands under my arms, but it was doing no good. Now I could feel my entire body beginning to freeze. There was only one thing to do—get moving—since my frozen hands would keep me from setting up my tent. For six hours straight, I plunged forward into the blizzard like a madman. It warmed me up a bit, but my hands remained lifeless. I tapped the tips of my fingers on my ski poles. Nothing, no sensation. Now I was screwed. I took off one glove to assess the damage. The razor-sharp shards of ice had cut through veins and nerves while slowly freezing my hands; my thumb had split wide open like meat in a freezer set too low. The cold flesh was translucent all the way to the bone.

I stopped to set up my tent, using my teeth to help, as I had lost virtually all control of my fingers and was working with a pair of useless stumps. It took me two hours to set up camp, instead of the usual ten to twenty minutes. The simplest tasks had become impossible: undoing the Velcro on the tarp that covered the sled, lifting the tarp to pull out the camp stove, turning the fuel valve to light the stove so that I could melt a little snow in a cook pot. It was impossible to turn the flame-adjuster wheel with my frozen thumbs. I tried to work it with my teeth, but my tongue froze to the metal, and I ripped it half off to pull it free. My breath had coated the wheel with a film of ice, which made it even harder to turn. I finally managed to turn it with my teeth, but now I needed to pump up the fuel pressure. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't manage to work the little pump handle with my teeth, so I finally gave up and opened the fuel tank. Flammable liquid spread all over the place.

At these temperatures, a lighter is useless. The liquid gas inside is frozen solid. Only matches work in this cold. But try extracting a match from the box and striking it without using your fingers—it's virtually impossible! I tried to strike a match with my mouth, but the matches broke one after the other, without lighting.

For half an hour, I made futile attempts to catch the fuel on fire. I wasted a vast number of matches. This was serious. In order to lighten my load as much as possible, to shave ounces off the total weight, I made all sorts of sacrifices. Among other things, I cut off half the handle of my toothbrush, snipped the labels off all my clothing, and rationed myself to two matches daily.

I had an idea: I put my lighter in my mouth to thaw out the liquid fuel inside. After fifteen minutes, I figured the fuel had thawed. The problem was that, since I couldn't grip it with my fingers, I couldn't use the lighter at all. I finally wound up wedging it between both hands, and running the wheel against the floor of the tent, where it was soaked with fuel. Finally, I managed to produce a spark and the fuel burst into flame. But I had slopped so much fuel out of the camp stove that I set off a genuine conflagration in my tent! Now it looked like I might go from being frozen solid to charbroiled in a few seconds. I hastily put out the flames with my sleeping bag, at the same time trying to avoid putting out the camp stove, which had finally lit, thanks to the flames that had leaped up its side.

At first, the heat of the camp stove allowed me to regain some use of my hands. I could now bend my fingers. At first, I thrust my fingers directly into the flame, in order to try to thaw them out as fast as possible—if it wasn't too late already. Bad idea—the nerves were numb from the cold, and I felt no pain at all, but a stench of burning flesh soon filled the tent. I would need to take this gradually. The partial mobility that I had regained in my extremities made it possible for me to heat a little water. I soaked my hands in the water, but I couldn't tell if the liquid was getting hotter. And so I tested it regularly, just as if it were a baby's formula, until the water reached a temperature of ninety-seven or ninety-eight degrees to judge from the tip of my tongue. I sat there for two or three hours soaking my hands before feeling the first tinglings in my fingertips. Or seven fingertips, anyway. My right thumb, index, and ring fingers were no longer responding.

My first reaction was one of despair at the idea that I might lose my fingers when I had done everything I could to keep that from happening. Then, determination took over, and I told myself that with luck, I shouldn't have to lose more than three partial finger joints, maybe even just the pads of the fingertips. It could have been much worse: all ten fingers, or the toes … Let's admit it, I knew from the beginning that something like this was going to happen to me. Just like I had known perfectly well that sooner or later I would wind up in the water. The only thing I didn't know was when. I had no suicidal tendencies. I just had a well-controlled sense of fatalism, a full awareness that without testing me to my limits, the Arctic wouldn't really be the Arctic.

The next morning, I didn't even poke my head out of the tent. I spent the whole day soaking my fingers in lukewarm water. I smeared my fingers with Betadine and I swallowed large amounts of aspirin to thin my blood, so that it could flow more easily to my fingertips. The ice that had formed inside of my flesh was beginning to thaw. I drove the blade of my knife into the frostbitten portion of my three injured fingers in order to determine the exact point where I could still feel the pain. In the end, I discovered that the dead portion was very small. If that's all that they would have to cut off, well … I'd survive. After all, I have lived without the last joint of my right middle finger for many years now; it was crushed in the breech of a machine gun in Angola back when I was serving in the South African Army in the war against the Cubans. That finger was more or less always frozen, and I managed to survive just fine with it.

*   *   *

These first thirty-six days had been horribly difficult. And yet, I was getting close to eighty-five degrees north latitude, while all the other expeditions had long since given up and gone home. My fuel and food supplies were dangerously low, and I was continuing to drift on my little fragment of the larger ice field. But I was still in good shape, and I felt as if I would be able to catch up on my schedule—which would make up for my supply shortages. I'd already done the hard part. Right now, there was a broad avenue stretching out before me. I had only one handicap slowing me down: my fingers. Each evening, I stopped two hours early to disinfect them and soak them in warm water. In order to prevent them from freezing again on contact with the air when I took them out of their “bath”—since even inside the tent it was thirty or forty degrees below zero—I developed an elaborate routine. I would extinguish my camp stove, carry the water, which was already starting to get cold, over to my sleeping bag, and then I would slide into the sleeping bag, quickly pull my hands out of the water, zip up my sleeping bag, and wedge my hands between my legs to keep them warm. And that's when the real ordeal would begin: it felt as if my fingers were being clamped to an anvil and slammed repeatedly with a blacksmith's sledgehammer. And it lasted all night! Actually, I should have rejoiced because this pain meant that my fingers were thawing. But it was so painful that I would almost have preferred amputation.

In the morning, as soon as I had broken camp, stowed all my equipment, slipped on my mittens, and resumed my trek, my fingers began to freeze again, despite all my best efforts. The veins that had been cut by the ice crystals were now preventing the blood from flowing to the last joints of my fingers.

Then Cathy's voice over the satellite phone made the ice field plunge beneath my feet: “Franziska is dead.”

Our friend, who was also an accomplished mountain climber, had just been killed during an ascent in the Alps. A ledge had given way and taken her with it as it fell. The shocking news made me forget my injuries, my pain, the terrible cold that was burning my flesh …

“Franziska is dead.”

 

*   *   *

I called up Philippe Rochat on my satellite phone. I'd developed the habit of calling him every so often, as I did all the men and women who had lent me their support. This time, of course, it was different. I was speaking to a man who was shattered, destroyed, and I spoke words of comfort and reassurance to him, words whose emptiness, whose uselessness, I could sense even as I spoke them. All the same, Philippe seemed pleased to hear from me, and the irony of the situation struck me. I, whose injuries had almost rendered me helpless, I, who was surviving under hellish conditions, I, who needed all the help that I could get, found myself providing moral support to a man who, without ever having ventured away from his own home, was going through an ordeal far worse than mine.

*   *   *

A couple of days later, a number of large, swollen blisters appeared beneath the skin of my frozen thumb, index finger, and ring finger on my right hand, as well as on the thumb of my left hand. I knew perfectly well that they were warning signs of gangrene.