Cold Read online

  Later, I talk to an Inupiat elder. “I see them sometimes,” he says. “Maybe once each year.” Inupiat frequently pause when they talk, leaving what might seem like an uncomfortable silence. I have been told that the pauses give them time to think and therefore to avoid the mindless patter of whites. “They like high ground,” he says after a moment. “I see them near my camp at Teshekpuk Lake.”

  The little beasts eat willow buds. I squat on the tundra to check some of the willows growing on the high ground between water-filled cracks. These willows are related to the taller willows of warmer climates, but they never stand more than a few inches tall. Their trunks can be measured in fractions of an inch. I find neither caterpillars nor gnawed buds. I pluck a leaf and pop it into my mouth. It tastes like an aspirin salad. I move on.

  Hyperactive birds fly around the airstrip. A plover screeches at me and makes threatening dives, driving me away from its young. In tundra ponds and in water-filled cracks, phalaropes swim in tight circles, their heads bobbing as if connected to their feet. A pair of snow buntings perch for a second on top of a pipeline next to the airstrip and then fly off. A long-billed dowitcher, its beak disproportionately long, flushes from the ground in front of me. Behind it, a hundred yards away, five caribou graze, their antlers imitating the beak of the dowager in their freakish length.

  Soon all of this activity will cease. The birds will fly away. The caribou will march south. The caterpillars will simply freeze. That is why I am interested. That is why I want one of these caterpillars. The little devils have figured out how to freeze solid without dying. They are slow growers. It might take a decade before they are ready to metamorphose into grayish moths. That means they survive through ten winters here in the Arctic. When spring comes, they thaw and go back to eating. For a pet lover who travels, they could be the perfect solution. Cute, furry, and quiet, and the freezer serves as a kennel. But where are they? If I were looking for oil, I would have just successfully drilled a dry hole, a duster. I have been skunked by a caterpillar.

  The polar explorers were great keepers of journals, and many of the survivors produced memoirs. Cold for the polar explorers came with a sense of pride, but also uncertainty, hunger, exhaustion, and death. The body’s boilers run on food, and as often as not, death from prolonged exposure to cold combines starvation, frostbite, and hypothermia. When one reads past the stoicism and heroics, the history of polar exploration becomes one long accident report mixed with one long obituary.

  There was, of course, discomfort. In 1909, Ernest Shackleton traveled to within ninety-seven miles of the South Pole. Realizing that his provisions would be stretched if he pushed farther, he turned around. He told his wife, “I thought you would rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.” In 1914, during a later exploration, his ship Endurance was iced in and eventually abandoned. He led his men slowly across the ice. In his travelogue, he wrote, “I have stopped issuing sugar now, and our meals consist of seal-meat and blubber only, with 7 ozs. of dried milk per day for the party.” This is at a time of inactivity, camped on ice. “The diet suits us, since we cannot get much exercise on the floe and the blubber supplies heat,” he wrote. Eventually, the ice gave way, cracking under his camp. “The crack had cut through the site of my tent,” he wrote. “I stood on the edge of the new fracture, and, looking across the widening channel of water, could see the spot where for many months my head and shoulders had rested when I was in my sleeping bag.”

  Charles Wright survived Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 Antarctic expedition and knew just how important those sleeping bags were. He — with Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who had grasped Dante’s reasons for placing the circles of ice beneath those of fire in the depths of Hell — was one of the men who supported Scott, hauling Scott’s gear south for the first leg into the heart of Antarctica. The support team turned back and waited at their base camp, but Scott and the four men who continued to the pole would not survive. Long afterward, at eighty-six years old, Wright talked to an interviewer about man-hauling sleds in Antarctica. The interviewer asked about toilet habits on the trail, the point being that getting up in the middle of the night to relieve oneself involved more than just stepping outside of the tent in your boxers. “You see,” Wright explained,

  you’ve come from your sleeping bag, you’ve taken into the sleeping bag all the frozen sweat of the previous day, and the previous day and the previous day and the previous day. There’s a log of it at the end. And during the night you first melt that frozen sweat. And very often it freezes at the bottom of the bag, where your feet are. And if you’re going to have a decent night you’ve got to melt all that before you have a chance. And even then it’s not comfortable because whatever is next door is wet and cold, and every breath you take brings some of the cold stuff into the small of your back. So a winter’s night when you’re sledging is not a comfortable thing at all. But you’ve got to, before you get anywhere, you’ve got to melt the ice. And sometimes there’s fifteen pounds of ice or something like that that’s got to be turned into water before you begin to sleep.

  From Wright’s account it is clear that Antarctic explorers disciplined their bladders and stayed in those half-frozen bags as long as possible.

  Scott himself kept a journal right up until his death. Eight months later, a search party found his camp. In the camp, Scott’s frozen body lay between two of his frozen companions. The three men in the tent, it has been said, looked as if they were sleeping. The three bodies, along with Scott’s journal, were recovered.

  Scott’s journal records noble behavior and tragedy. By the middle of January 1912, eager to be the first to reach the South Pole, Scott and the four men who went with him stumbled on sled tracks and camps left by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had beaten them to the pole by four weeks. Scott’s party pressed on to the pole anyway. “Great God!” Scott wrote, “this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.” Disappointed, the men struggled back toward their base camp.

  “Things steadily downhill,” Scott wrote in early March. “Oates’ foot worse. He has rare pluck and must know that he can never get through. He asked Wilson if he had a chance this morning, and of course Bill had to say he didn’t know. In point of fact he has none.” Later, Oates, recognizing that he was slowing the party and endangering their lives, talked to his companions. “I am just going outside and may be some time,” he said. Afterward Scott wrote, “He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.”

  Scott wrote about himself, “My right foot has gone, nearly all the toes — two days ago I was proud possessor of best feet. These are the steps of my downfall. Like an ass I mixed a small spoonful of curry powder with my melted pemmican — it gave me violent indigestion. I lay awake and in pain all night; woke and felt done on the march; foot went and I didn’t know it. A very small measure of neglect and have a foot which is not pleasant to contemplate. Amputation is the least I can hope for now, but will the trouble spread?”

  Later he wrote, “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” And after this, he had but one final entry: “For God’s sake look after our people.” Scott ended his days eleven impossible miles from a supply depot that would have saved his life.

  Frostbite is a common theme among polar explorers. Captain George E. Tyson was marooned with his crew on an Arctic ice floe in the winter of 1872 and spring of 1873. “The other morning,” he wrote, “Mr. Meyers found that his toes were frozen — no doubt from his exposure on the ice without shelter the day he was separated from us. He is not very strong at the best, and his fall in the water has not improved his condition.”

  Food, or a lack of food, is another common theme. Roald Amundsen, when he beat Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole, used sleds pulled by dogs. The dogs doubled as a food supply. Amundsen had this to say about men who pursued their destinies at the poles: “Often his search is a race with time against starvation.”

  Robert
Flaherty published the story of Comock, an Inuit. In the narrative, Comock explains how he and his family lived on Mansel Island in the Canadian Arctic early in the twentieth century. They were on the island alone, isolated for ten years from their extended families and the villages that dotted the Arctic. They were at times well fed.

  “Look at our children,” Comock’s wife said to Comock. “They are warm.”

  And Comock, in his narrative, added, “There were little smokes rising from the deerskin robes under which they slept.”

  But later, food became scarce. “We shared with our dogs the dog meat upon which we lived,” Comock reported. One of his companions said that seal meat offered warmth, while dog meat did not. Comock feared the dogs would eat the children.

  Frederick Cook, who probably reached or at least came close to the North Pole in April 1908, almost a full year before Robert E. Peary, ran into trouble and could not return to civilization quickly enough to defend himself against Peary’s own claim and what has been described as Peary’s slander. Like Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Cook concurred with Dante, but with more drama and self-aggrandizement: “We all were lifted to the paradise of winners as we stepped over the snows of a destiny for which we had risked life and willingly suffered the tortures of an ice hell.” But after two days at the pole, he described a feeling of anticlimax. The pole itself, after all, was just another frozen camp in a frozen landscape. “The intoxication of success was gone,” he wrote in his memoir. “Hungry, mentally and physically exhausted, a sense of the utter uselessness of this thing, of the empty reward of my endurance, followed my exhilaration.”

  And who has heard of Lieutenant George De Long? In an 1879 attempt to reach the North Pole, De Long and twenty men abandoned their ship to the ice. They dragged three small boats across the ice for nearly three months before finding open water. One boat was lost, but two made it to Siberia’s Lena River delta. This was early October. Though suffering from frostbite and exhaustion, the men were not complainers. De Long wrote, “The doctor resumed the cutting away of poor Ericksen’s toes this morning. No doubt it will have to continue until half his feet are gone, unless death ensues, or we get to some settlement. Only one toe left now. Temperature 18º.”

  Like Scott, though perhaps with less panache, De Long maintained his journal until the end:

  October 17th, Monday. — One hundred and twenty-seventh day. Alexey dying. Doctor baptized him. Read prayers for the sick. Mr. Collins’ birthday — forty years old. About sunset Alexey died. Exhaustion from starvation.

  October 21st, Friday. — One hundred and thirty-first day. Kaack was found dead about midnight between the doctor and myself. Lee died about noon. Read prayers for the sick when we found he was going.

  October 24th, Monday. — One hundred and thirty-fourth day. A hard night.

  The next two days contain only the date and the number of days. Then:

  October 27th, Thursday. — One hundred and thirty-seventh day. Iversen broken down.

  October 28th, Friday. — One hundred and thirty-eighth day. Iversen died during early evening.

  October 29th, Saturday. — One hundred and thirty-ninth day. Dressler died during night.

  October 30th, Sunday. — One hundred and fortieth day. Boyd and Gortz died during night. Mr. Collins dying.

  The bodies of De Long and nine others were recovered the following spring.

  It is July twenty-sixth and sunny. The mercury rises to fifty-two degrees here on Narwhal Island, ten miles north of Alaska’s North Slope. Nothing but water and ice separates me from the North Pole. I have, for the past hour, been taking my jacket off and putting it back on. Each time I take it off, a breeze comes in from the north, from the pack ice, like the draft from an open freezer door. Each time I don my jacket, the door closes and the breeze stops. I watch the ice flow past, a regatta of white and blue abstract sculptures. One could not quite step from one chunk of ice to the next without swimming, but boating just now would be a challenge. Here is an ice chunk the size of a suitcase, there one the size of a small house, several in a row the size of compact cars. The breeze comes from the north, but the ice moves to the west, propelled by currents, the bulk of each chunk hanging underwater like an aquatic sail.

  Occasionally, a chunk of ice strands next to the shore, hard aground. Another chunk butts up against the first. They grind. Water drips from their tops continuously. Pieces of ice break off, dropping into the Beaufort Sea with splashes that sound remarkably similar to those produced by bass jumping in a still pond. I wade into the sea, break off a piece of ice, and pop it into my mouth. It tastes as fresh as springwater. The molecules in ice are packed in an orderly fashion, forming crystals. There is little space between the molecules for salt ions.

  Farther out, between here and the horizon, the ice is more densely packed and in places continuous. Fog banks hover over the ice like plumes of smoke. Occasionally, maybe once each half hour, the pack ice cracks under the pressure of movement, of collisions, of one body striking another. The cracking sounds like distant cannon fire.

  The beach I stand on is a mix of gravel and sand. It looks as though someone has worked it over with a bulldozer. The ice, in places, has plowed the sand into piles, left deep gouge marks on the shore, or dumped moraines of gravel above the tide line. Although I am on the island’s northern shore, I can turn and see across the island to the other side, and beyond that the mainland, peppered with oil field facilities. A collapsed wooden shack stands on the island, the remains of a long-forgotten scientific party. A large red buoy stranded near the middle of the island speaks of storm tides or ice overrunning the land. Wandering the island, I see only two species of plants clinging to life in scattered patches. Driftwood has accumulated in bigger patches. The rest seems to be bare sand and gravel.

  An arctic tern screams at me, then swoops in, obviously protecting a nest. After four or five swoops, it connects with my hat. It leaves me no choice but to find the nest. I look for a small depression in the sand. The closer I get, the more agitated the bird becomes. It dives closer and closer, screaming “Warmer, warmer, warmer.” It backs off a bit, telling me “Colder, colder,” and I change direction. I move slowly, taking a careful step, scanning the ground in front of me, then taking another careful step. It swoops at me from behind, but I can see its shadow coming. As I get warmer, the tern gets more aggressive. I duck as its shadow closes in. And there is the nest. This late in the year, the tern has but a single egg to protect. Two feet away, a long-dead chick, its body stiff and its eyes glazed, lies on the sand. I back off, ashamed to have disturbed the nesting tern and its lone surviving egg.

  Common eiders nest here, too, in bowls scraped from the sand along the edges of driftwood piles. Their nest bowls are much bigger than those of terns, and they are lined with down — eiderdown, as it turns out, plucked from the breasts of females and prized as the best of down, soft and warm and far better than that of domestic ducks. Most of the eider nests are empty, but a few still hold as many as five pale green eggs, somewhat larger than chicken eggs.

  For both the eiders and the terns, these may be second or third nest attempts. It seems late in the year to start a family. By September, the eiders will head for open water, where they overwinter, swimming and feeding. The terns, winter averse, will fly twelve thousand miles to Antarctica and then return next spring. During its life, a tern will travel a distance equivalent to that of a round-trip to the moon.

  I migrate back to the island’s northern shore, scanning the ice through my binoculars. I hope to see a polar bear or at least a seal, but all I see is ice and water. Despite the island’s name, no narwhals frolic here today. Narwhals, with their long tusks, live beneath the ice, coming up to breathe in open leads and holes, and moving toward coastal areas in summer. They are common in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic, well to the east. The rare straggler finds its way to Alaska, but I have not seen one in these waters in the five years I have been coming here. The island, someone tells me later,
was named for a nineteenth-century whaling ship rather than the narwhal itself.

  The seals, the polar bears, and the narwhals mock me, like woolly bear caterpillars, here yet not here, here yet nowhere to be seen.

  Adolphus Greely, then a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, led his twenty-five men north in the summer of 1881. They made it past eighty-three degrees, some four hundred miles south of the pole, then turned around. The relief ship intended to pick them up could not pass through the ice. A second relief ship sank. The men froze and starved in the far north.

  Before it was over, Greely’s men experienced an intense aloneness and ate caterpillars. They also ate leather shoelaces. Sealskin lashings became stew. Sleeping bag covers in the nineteenth century were oiled to render them waterproof, and well boiled, the covers were rendered into broth. The men found crumbs of bread as the snow melted around their camp. They lamented the absence of plants and lichens that in other times would not have been considered fit for consumption. They ate hundreds of pounds of amphipods — sea fleas — using, among other things, the remains of dead comrades as bait. One man ate bird droppings, apparently convinced that undigested seeds that passed through birds’ guts would provide sustenance. The men divided the soles of an old pair of boots. Later, there would be accusations of cannibalism.

  “Everybody was wretched,” Greely wrote later, “not only from the lack of food, but from the cold, to which we are very sensitive.” Like other Arctic explorers, his narrative is one of death: “Lieutenant Kislingbury, who was exceedingly weak in the morning at breakfast, became unconscious at 9 a.m. and died at 3 p.m. The last thing he did was to sing the Doxology and ask for water.” The men shared sleeping bags to conserve warmth: “Ralston died about 1 a.m. Israel left the bag before his death, but I remained until driven out about 5 a.m., chilled through by contact with the dead.” Greely had one man shot for stealing food.