South with the Sun

by Lynne Cox

  We celebrated that afternoon in the hotel lobby, along with new friends we’d made during our stay. Gretchen, Bill, and Bob couldn’t stop smiling, and neither could I. We decompressed the next day, just relaxed and spent some time with Konrad and Karen taking in the sights and beauty of Ilulissat. We talked about wanting to return to explore Greenland more, one day.

  I’m with (from left to right) Bob Griffith, Bill Lee, and Gretchen Goodall, each thrilled to complete the swim, about to walk past Greenland polar explorer Knut Rasmussen’s historic home and pay a brief tribute.

  I called an official to thank him for his help making some initial connections. He said, “I heard you only swam for five minutes. All of that work and you only swam for five minutes.”

  That surprised me, and I said that it was the first time I’d ever swum in 28-degree water. I had really extended myself. And I told him that if I hadn’t swum for those five minutes, I wouldn’t know what I could do. This was the beginning for something more. Sometimes it took time. Sometimes you had to build on experience. Often it didn’t happen all at once.

  When Amundsen left Disko Bay, he sailed north along the west coast of Greenland through dangerously thick drift ice and dense ice fog in Melville Bay, near what is now Thule Air Base. Amundsen described this area as the most dreaded and desolate part of the Arctic Ocean. He and his crew were fortunate. The water in Melville Bay was calm, and the ice was manageable. When the Gjøa reached Dalrymple Rock, Amundsen and his crew were suddenly surprised by two Inuit men emerging from the swirling cloud and fog and paddling directly for the Gjøa. Suddenly six more kayaks appeared; one was draped with a Norwegian flag, and another was covered with a Danish flag. In this group of six kayaks, Knud Rasmussen and Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen appeared.

  Rasmussen and Amundsen, two of the world’s great polar explorers, met joyously among icebergs at the top of the world at the beginning of their careers, and this meeting would begin a long-lasting friendship.

  Mylius-Erichsen handed Amundsen a letter from Captains Milne and Adams, two Scottish whalers whom Amundsen had arranged to place provisions on Dalrymple Rock for Amundsen and his crew. The letter from the captains wished Amundsen success on his voyage. Amundsen and his crew were eager to continue their journey.

  · · ·

  At the airport in Kangerlussuaq, we sat in the waiting area, in seats where we had sat only a week before. We were fortunate that the weather had been bad, or we never would have been stuck at the airport and met Samantha East and Brian Gomula, nor been able to gather weather information for the swim. We wondered how they had fared. Had they made their meetings in Ilulissat? Were they on their way to the Russel Glacier now? Just at that moment I turned to look out the airport window and saw them.

  Samantha and Brian joined us. I think we were as excited about seeing them in the airport as Amundsen had been when he met Rasmussen in the Arctic Ocean. There is always something special that happens when travelers reconnect; perhaps it is just knowing that there are stories to share, and perhaps it was just because I had enjoyed meeting them so much before. In any case, it was great seeing them again.

  “Did you swim yet? We didn’t see anything in the papers,” Samantha said.

  “Yes, I did. I swam a quarter of a mile in twenty-eight-point-eight-degree Fahrenheit water in a time of five minutes and ten seconds. I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever swum.”

  “Three point two degrees below freezing, it must have felt so cold,” Brian said.

  “It was,” I said, and smiled and thought Brian knew freezing. He flew on the Greenland ice cap and in Antarctica.

  Gretchen said, “We were freezing in the Zodiac. I was crouched down low in the boat, to use the bow to block the wind. I could feel the cold water radiating through the Zodiac’s floor.”

  “I had no idea you were so cold. I thought you had on clothes that were warm enough,” I said.

  “That can happen with an LC-130 in a survival situation. The aircraft can cool down so that they become like giant freezers,” Samantha said.

  We swapped stories with Samantha and Brian, and Bob and Bill joined us, and we bragged about one another. I longed to hear more about what they were doing, but our plane was boarding. Samantha and I exchanged contact information, and I gave her a copy of my book to share with Brian. Samantha told me I didn’t have to hurry, they were taking the same plane as us back to the United States. We sat beside each other, and for most of the flight Samantha asked me about swimming, and I asked her about flying. And when we reached Baltimore, I sensed that maybe someday we might meet again.

  CHAPTER 12

  Baffin Island

  Bob, Gretchen, Bill, and I flew south to return to our normal lives, and for the month of June 2007, I worked out and waited for the Canadian Arctic to thaw. I trained differently and increased the intensity in my workouts to a level I had never reached before. I knew I had to do this if I wanted to be able to achieve something more significant. Each day I did hour-long spinning classes in the gym and then, for a second hour, a variety of other classes: moderate weights with high reps, yoga, Pilates, and a step class, or cardio. In the afternoon, I did only sprints in a backyard swimming pool for half an hour to an hour.

  On August 17, 1903, Amundsen turned west, leaving Greenland behind, and crossed Baffin Bay. Often, I thought of him and how he had sailed across through those treacherous waters. On that five-day passage, the ship’s magnetic compass, because of his closeness to the North Pole, stopped working, and they sailed into the unknown and for the most part blind. The feelings Amundsen had had when the Gjøa sailed into Lancaster Sound and anchored in Erebus Bay across from Beechey Island were dramatic and profound. This was where Amundsen’s hero, John Franklin, the British Royal Navy officer, and his two ships and his men had been lost in 1845.

  This loss was one of the reasons Amundsen was so motivated to find the Northwest Passage. Amundsen wrote:

  I pictured to myself the splendidly equipped Franklin Expedition heading into the harbor, and anchoring there. The Erebus and Terror in all their splendor; the English colors flying at the masthead and the two fine vessels full of bustle.… Certainly these brave men had succeeded in discovering much new land, but only to see their expectations of accomplishment of the North West Passage that way brought to nought by impenetrable masses of ice. (The Northwest Passage, vol. 1, 47–48)

  John Franklin and his crew of 129 men succumbed to starvation; some of the men resorted to cannibalism. Their ships were crushed by the ice and lost to the sea. It must have been eerie for Amundsen to stand on those desolate shores, contemplating the path he and his crew in the Gjøa would choose.

  I thought of following Amundsen and Franklin to Beechey Island, but it was a remote island connected to Devon Island by an isthmus. On Beechey Island there was a graveyard where some of Franklin’s men were buried. Somehow it was just too bleak for me to swim near a graveyard, and Devon Island was so desolate that NASA sent its astronauts there to train to simulate a landing on Mars. What attracted me to loosely following Amundsen’s route was that I would meet people in these far reaches of the world, have the chance to see how they lived. I got back in touch with Adam Ravetch, my friend who lived in Canada and who had spent a lot of time in the Canadian Arctic creating documentaries on polar bears and walrus and Greenland sharks. After discussing some options with him, it seemed like Pond Inlet, on Baffin Island, was the place to swim. Baffin Island, the largest island in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago in the Nunavut Territory, was directly south of Beechey and Devon Islands. There were Inuit living near Pond Inlet and there would be much to explore.

  The path Bob and I took was not direct. Flights to the Canadian Arctic were infrequent, weather dependent, and often delayed. From Montreal, Canada, I flew in an Aérospatiale two-engine turboprop to Baffin Island. The island is shaped like a lobster. We flew to the southeast coast of the island and landed on the lobster’s tail in Iqaluit, a city of roughly six thousand people. While we were
gathering our luggage, we met two strong middle-aged construction workers who said they had worked on many of the hotels and government buildings in Iqaluit. They offered us a ride to the Frobisher Hotel, where we would be staying. Bob and I eagerly accepted. What could be more exciting than having the men who built the town showing us around?

  We jumped into their dark blue Ford F-150 and rode from the airport along a two-lane brown dirt road, past artist’s studios and tourist shops, beyond which were some sled dogs tied off near a stream so they could be near a constant source of fresh water. The workers showed us the attractive bright-red-painted wooden Canadian government office buildings that they had built, the hospital and hotels that they had worked on, as well as the modern library and tourist center close to the bay. They said that with the opening of the Northwest Passage, and with the melting of the ice, there had been an acceleration of construction to accommodate the growing city of Iqaluit and to support development in the Arctic. There was promise of oil and mineral wealth in the north, and the Canadian government was supporting growth to ensure that the land remained Canadian.

  The construction workers let us off at the hotel, and they wished us well as they drove off with a swell of dirt rising from their truck tires, trailing behind them and becoming airborne as a cold stiff wind ripped across Frobisher Bay, making the day feel like February when it actually was the second of July.

  In the morning, we took off from Iqaluit in an Aérospatiale bound for Pond Inlet. Just beyond Iqaluit, Baffin Island was covered with a wavering carpet of soft golden grasses, a reminder that fall had been captured by a sudden white winter snow. And now in early July, with the extended days of Arctic sunlight, the hard, frozen land was thawing, softening like a down pillow, and the sparkling rivulets pulled by gravity were collecting in shallow basins, growing into silver and blue-black ponds. There were patches of green grass and a feeling of spring.

  Flying above Baffin Island, named for William Baffin, who searched in 1615 for the Northwest Passage with Captain Robert Bylot aboard the ship Discovery, the same ship used by Henry Hudson to try to find the Northwest Passage. The same ship was used on other expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage as well as the establishment of Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia, in 1607.

  As we flew farther north, Baffin Island looked like Greenland’s cousin. Mountains rose abruptly from the sea, but they were rounder and smoother than Greenland’s glacier peaks. The valleys below were more U-shaped, and they cradled frozen rivers. The island was encased in a thick enamel of dark glistening ice. There was something austere and troubling about the scene. It looked as if the island had never awakened from a winter’s slumber.

  We flew north of the Arctic Circle through bright blue skies superinfused by brilliant Arctic light, along the craggy eastern edge of Baffin Island, and above the silky blue waters of Baffin Bay. The pilot announced over the PA system that he would attempt a landing at Clyde River, a hamlet of 820 people, about halfway up the lobster-shaped island.

  Attempt a landing? I thought. That didn’t sound very promising. A robust woman in her fifties with a kind face, sitting across the aisle from me, must have noticed my puzzled expression. She explained that landings and takeoffs around Clyde River were always like that. She flew in and out occasionally. She was a psychiatric nurse, and she visited all of the communities on Baffin Island and provided medical care to the local people. The airport was often foggy, the runway short, and it was surrounded on all sides by mountains that made takeoffs and landings challenging. More often than not, she explained, the pilot had to fly over Clyde River and land somewhere else.

  The pilot turned the aircraft west, directly toward the mountains. Within minutes they filled the horizon and loomed above us. Suddenly it felt like the aircraft had been shrunk to the size of a dragonfly, and we were riding inside the dragonfly, magically suspended between the craggy mountain faces, the deep blue fjords, and the wild white cresting sea.

  We were heading for a long serrated cleft between two mountains. The hamlet of Clyde River was supposed to be at the base of the cleft, but all we could see were white clouds shaped like pinfeathers and smoky fog swirling on an updraft out of the cleft. The pilot apologized that the visibility was too poor to attempt a landing, but he said he would circle a couple more times, with the hope that the fog would lift enough for him to land.

  What this told me was that weather conditions could change quickly around Baffin Island. But that afternoon the fog didn’t lift. The pilot said that he still couldn’t see the runway, and we began a gradual ascent as he turned the aircraft north toward Pond Inlet.

  As the plane flew higher into the Arctic Circle, toward the top of the world, my excitement grew. I had been to remote places in the world, but few as remote as Baffin Island. To the left was the Arctic Cordillera, a snowy mountain chain that rose up seven thousand feet and ran along the northeastern section of the island. The Arctic Cordillera must have seemed like an icy fortress to the Vikings during their explorations around A.D. 1000. The stark glacial mountains looked unwelcoming, like frozen death.

  Flying over Pond Inlet, an Inuit town of about thirteen hundred people named in 1818 by James Ross for John Pound, the British astronomer.

  The pilot lined the aircraft up with the two mountains on Bylot Island. He flew over Eclipse Sound between Bylot Island and Baffin Island. It was July 3, 2007, and the sound was frozen solid. The ice looked like a sheet of blown glass with whorling patterns of opaque white on a transparent blue background, and the patterns within the ice changed in different places. In some areas the blue ice was spotted with white ovals, cratered moons, and rings shaped like those around Saturn. In others it looked as if the sea had captured the globular clusters of stars from the sky and frozen them into the sparkling ice.

  As we began our descent, I stared at the sound, trying to find a crack in the ice or a space of open water. All that spread before us was ice. As we descended I hoped to see thin transparent ice, but this ice was opaque and thick. How long would it take to break up? We only planned to be in Pond Inlet for nine days. Would the ice melt soon enough to swim?

  We landed on a dirt runway, and we walked to the one-room terminal. Jared Arnakallak, the manager of the Sanuiq, the hotel were we’d be staying, met us in a beaten-up white van and drove us a quarter of a mile to the hotel, a single-story building painted chocolate brown that looked like a large double-wide trailer.

  The rooms were clean, with twin beds and a bathroom with a shower in each room. Bob’s room overlooked the dirt parking lot, and I had a view of wooden homes built on a slope and a wedge of the ice-covered sound and Bylot Island. Prices were high, around $250 per room, and more if meals were included, but this was the only place in town that served food, other than the Co-op store where people who lived in the hamlet bought food and day-to-day items, most of which were sent by barge once a year or flown up at an incredibly steep rate throughout the year.

  Adam Ravetch suggested that I get in touch with David Reid, who ran a company called Polar Sea Adventures. David took photographers, adventurers, filmmakers, and tourists on wooden qamutiks—dog-pulled sledges—to the surrounding areas. Adam said that David was concerned foremost about safety when he ran these trips, and he was very open to new ideas and exploring.

  We walked down the hill through one section of town, on a dirt road, past colorful single-and double-story homes, some recently painted, and others faded by the weather and wind. The town seemed vacant, although we could hear the sounds of construction: hammering and sawing. We passed the large new health clinic and turned right and walked to a white house with a van parked out front with POLAR SEA ADVENTURES written on the side.

  The van had a flat tire, so we suspected that David was at home, but there was no sign of life or movement inside. We decided he must be asleep, so we reluctantly continued our walk around Pond Inlet. There was a large new blue-gray library overlooking the sound, and a small building housing the National Parks Depa
rtment, where one small, lean Inuit man, wearing a park service uniform, was standing by the doorway.

  He invited us in to see photos of Sirmilik National Park. There were photos of kittiwakes nesting in cliffs and old photos of the Byam Martin Mountains and their glacial peaks. By comparing the old photos inside the building and having us step outside and look at the Byam Martin Mountain glacier, across Eclipse Sound, the park service guide showed us how quickly the glaciers on Bylot Island were receding.

  At that time of the year, the only way to land on Bylot Island was by helicopter, and while we were there, the helicopter was booked for the summer by geologists who were studying the glaciers and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which was filming a documentary on global warming.

  We continued our walk through town, noticing caribou skins hanging outside homes, snowmobiles parked beside houses, and beaten-up trucks. Two young children playing outside said hello and waved, and dogs fenced or tied up outside barked. It felt like a lonely place.

  By the time we returned to the hotel, Jared had reached David by phone, and he joined us in the hotel cafeteria. David was a six-foot-tall Scotsman, with a buzz cut, sunburned cheeks, and the bluest eyes. He had just returned with a tourist group from the floe edge, which was about fifty miles from Pond Inlet, where the frozen waters of Eclipse Sound met the open waters of Baffin Bay.

  Narwhales were waiting at the floe edge. They are called unicorns of the sea, or moon, or polar whales because of their white bodies. When they matured they could be thirteen to sixteen feet long. Male narwhales are known for the giant eight-to-ten-foot-long spiral tusk that grows out of their upper lip. Scientists believe that their tusks have a variety of purposes. Some think the tusks are sensory organs used by the narwhales to detect temperature changes, pressure changes, and salinity. Others believe that they are used for courting or displays of dominance. Often people observed male narwhales tusking—rubbing their tusks together to clean off crustaceans and other unwanted sea life, a form of brushing their tusks.