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Outside Magazine September 2002

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Let's All Chill (Cont.)

FOR THE FIRST PORTION of my journey, I would fly eight hours from New York to Oslo, and then nearly three hours north to the island of Spitsbergen, an isolated mining outpost far north of the Norwegian mainland. Three hours north from Oslo? I would have assumed you'd wind up in Russia. And Spitsbergen was merely the jumping-off point, as Børge informed me when I finally stumbled off the plane.

When Børge skied from Siberia to Canada through the North Pole—82 days alone on the ice—he dragged a sled weighing 375 pounds.

"From here it's only two and a half hours more by jet," he said reassuringly. "Then a little by helicopter, then we ski." I just nodded. Sure. Whatever. "We go in that plane." He pointed to a stubby, strange-looking twin-engine jet that sat on a runway bathed in the perpetual far-north twilight. "Antonov 74. Short takeoff and landing. Russian."

Børge was less ferocious than I expected: tall and handsome, with a quick smile, a soft voice, and the easy physical grace of a professional athlete. As I'd learned more about him and his preposterous feats, I'd envisioned a Nordic superman, heir to all those Viking badasses who charged out of longboats cleaving skulls with bloody axes. And he was a tough guy, all right—though he'd grown up in a family of artists and intellectuals in the Oslo suburbs, he'd always been drawn to risk, working as a professional diver in the North Sea and as a Norwegian navy commando before becoming a full-time adventurer in 1994. He and his longtime partner, Wenche Spange, have a 14-year-old son, and Børge came across more like a hipster dad than a Viking warrior.

"There is just one problem. Not such a big problem, but..." He shrugged, conveying the ridiculousness of trying to do anything on schedule in the Arctic. "The runway up north, it has cracked. Cricket will explain."

Cricket was a Frenchman named Christian de Marliave, 51, one of the four French polar junkies who run a small private outfit called Cerpolex that specializes in logistics for Arctic travel. Every April, with help from a couple dozen Russians, Cerpolex creates a temporary ice-pack air base some 75 miles from the North Pole. For fun, they call it Barneo, making it sound like a transplanted South Seas never-never land: the Barneo Ice Airport.

I met Cricket after a short drive that took me to a small guest house in Spitsbergen's main town, Longyearbyen, where the trip's four clients had already arrived. None of us knew the others yet, so we exchanged vague hellos, glances, and nods, everybody trying to look unflappable as Cricket calmly related the absurd-sounding situation. "The runway has cracked, but the Russians are filling the crack with water and it should freeze the repair, no problem," he told us. We nodded. Of course.

Before making the Arctic his life, Cricket had been a mathematician. He still looked like a professor: wiry, intense, and chain-smoking, with a perpetual air of fatigue. "We should be able to leave in a day or so," he promised.

It took three. Every morning there was more delay as the Russians used ice axes, shovels, and a bulldozer to repair the runway. "The water fix, it didn't work," Cricket explained. "I'm not sure why. So now they just extend the runway another 500 meters in the opposite direction. It's hard work."

Børge told us not to worry. "I know they are French," he said of Cerpolex, "but they have always come through in the end."

Eventually we took off, temporarily parting ways with Børge, who took a different plane with a group he was guiding on an overnight trip to the pole. (Børge had guided with Cerpolex since 1998—two trips every April.) After a long flight over the frozen polar ocean, we landed and stepped off the plane at Barneo. Suddenly I couldn't stop laughing. It was a giddy, senses-overwhelmed, nearly hysterical laugh. At minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, the air was so cold it felt like pure refrigerant. Everything was brilliant white and busy and confusing. The engines of the jet were screaming and the Russians were shouting and the Ukrainian pilots were passing out bottles of vodka from a hidden compartment.

We landed amid what looked like a frigid outdoor aviation museum. An old biplane was sitting off to the side, as if awaiting its next bombing run over the Somme, and a faded pair of blue-and-orange Russian helicopters, big things, sagged on the ice. One side of the runway was lined with large, posh tents, while on the other, about a hundred yards away, stood a motley collection of multicolored tents that looked ready to blow away in the wind.

"Does anybody know where we are going to sleep?" someone in my group hollered over the noise.

"Cricket said we could sleep in the mess tent," I yelled. We started walking to the large tent closest to the runway. It was banquet-sized, and I figured it had to be the right place.

"No, no!" Cricket shouted as he rushed ahead of us. "That's the Russians. We're over there." He gestured toward the smaller tents that were now barely visible in the blowing snow. They seemed a long way off. We started walking.

What followed was the coldest night of my life—if night is the correct word for the pole's 24-hour sunlight. We ended up not in the French mess tent, but in an unheated supply tent, where we pushed aside frozen loaves of Russian bread and loose heads of cabbage that rolled around like cannonballs, clearing space for our bags, the five of us piling together like so many bear cubs. Helicopters seemed to take off every few minutes and dogs howled constantly, competing with the screaming wind.

By a stroke of luck, my bag ended up next to a huge box filled with frozen but tasty French cookies. I'd doze a little, wake up shivering, eat some cookies, listen to the dogs, and doze again. Every now and then, I'd bolt up, convinced I was freezing to death, and then I'd drag myself over to the mess tent and talk to Brigitte Sabard, a 40-year-old Frenchwoman who ran Barneo's kitchen. Somehow she conjured up an incredible meal: vegetable soup, crepes, and a reindeer stew. I would spend a lot of time in the next few days thinking about those crepes.

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