by Lynne Cox
Life was better for them now. They lived in heated homes in winter, and they had food. They didn’t have to worry about starving as they did when they were younger. It was dinnertime, and they invited me to stay, but I knew that even though they had food, it was limited, and anything they purchased from the local co-op was extremely expensive.
For next five days I wandered around Gjøa Haven, trying to get a sense of what it must have been like for Amundsen and his crew to live there. It was a place they became very familiar with, a place where they felt almost at home. They had made celestial and magnetic observations of King William Island that had never been known by Europeans. They learned about the land and the sky and loved the protection the bay provided from the sea.
Each morning I stood on a rise where Amundsen’s observation hut had once been and looked up at the heavens, wishing there would be darkness at night so I might have seen a little of what Amundsen had observed. And each day I stared across the bay where the Gjøa had been anchored. I wished I could see what it would be like to put into those waters.
When I first arrived, Prince William Island Sound was frozen solid, a three-foot-thick white blanket that stretched from shore to shore. As the days passed, the ice broke, and my energy and excitement grew. Floating on azure blue waters were fragments of silver ice, as thin and as transparent as glass, broken into rough-shaped trapezoids, rectangles, triangles, and squares ranging in size from six inches to six feet long. To a navigator, the ice shapes were telltale signals that soon the waters would be free for navigation.
I listened to the ice as the ice fragments rode across the tops of the tiny waves of King William Bay and collided with larger pieces of ice. The breath of the wind carried the song of the ice and waves across the bay, and the songs resounded off the sand berms—nature’s amphitheater—and suddenly, out of nowhere, the wind increased in volume and stiffened to thirty-five knots, and the water rose into three-foot whitecaps that shattered the ice into tiny shards. The song of the bay grew louder, and the fine beige sand began to rise and swirl off each footstep. I leaned forward into the cold wind, sheltering my eyes with my hand from the blowing sand and feeling the tapping of the cold against my cheeks. And I walked down to the shoreline to hear and feel the day change from winter to spring. This song called to me as distinctively as the Sirens off Greek shores.
More than anything, I wanted to venture into the water, swim, explore, be where I’d never been, and learn something more. It had been only a few days, but I needed to swim as much as I needed to breathe, to stretch my arms, body, move through the water, balance within it, and find a path between the waves. I pulled off my sneakers and dipped in my toes.
It was cold—probably 35 or 36 degrees Fahrenheit. But the bay was shallow. Maybe it would be warm enough in a few days. I walked into the water up to my ankles. They hurt, and my feet felt like I had been walking barefoot though the snow. The distance across the bay was a mile or so. The water was transparent, and the bay didn’t look deep. I could stop and stand up if I needed to. It would be okay to swim. But I knew that was wrong, that it would have been very foolish to go off swimming alone.
Jimmy shows off his hunting stick beside a polar-bear skin. Now he waits for the Arctic char to return to King William Island.
Still restless and feeling lonely, I walked by Jimmy the elder’s small white home, hoping he would be outside working. He was. Jimmy was a medium-sized man in his seventies, thin and hollow-cheeked with bronzed skin from his genes and from working in the sun.
Jimmy showed me a fishing spear he was carving and filing down from a musk-ox horn. He held the horn up and showed me how he filed it down. His fishing spear suddenly reminded me of a picture I’d seen in Amundsen’s book about the Northwest Passage.
Amundsen’s best friend, Talurnakto, “the Owl,” had stood knee-deep in a stream and used a spear that looked exactly the same as Jimmy’s to stab trout. It was as if history had become the present within this artifact. And then I realized Jimmy must have thought about what I’d said to him, about how his ancestors had helped Amundsen learn how to survive so he could reach the South Pole.
Jimmy was teaching me how to make a fishing spear.
He turned the musk-ox horn on its side, held it with one hand, and filed with quick side-to-side hand movements with the other. He blew away the filed particles, ran his hand along the horn, and let me touch the spear so I could see how it felt.
For the next four days, I stopped by to watch him file the bone. He worked hard, taking in a deep breath, holding it as he filed, and then blowing it out. Each day the musk-ox horn was a little smoother, more refined, and the point a lot sharper.
And one day the musk-ox horn was just the shape Jimmy wanted; he attached the spear to a long wooden pole with a heavy rope. He turned the rope twice around the spear to make sure it was secure and tied it off on the bottom. He showed it to me as he worked so I would know just how to do it. We didn’t need words to enjoy each other’s company or to understand each other.
Sometimes words are just an embellishment for what is already known. On the day Jimmy finished the fishing spear, he showed it to me with great pride. I thanked him for teaching me and put my hand on my heart and said thank you in Inuktitut, the Inuit language. He smiled, and he said something; I couldn’t understand the words, but when I turned to walk away, he said, “Good-bye.” I couldn’t leave like that. I walked back and extended my hand. His was large, and his long fingers wrapped around mine. We shook hands and said good-bye again.
As I walked back to the hotel I thought about what one of the local doctors had told me, that the elders like Jimmy were the ones who held the community together. They were all in their seventies, and they were slowly dying off. How would the next generation fare without their guidance?
On the way to the airport, I thought about the trip into town nine days before and how I hadn’t known anyone in this community. And how much people had extended themselves, even though I was there for such a short time. It was hard to leave, and yet I was ready to go. It was much more difficult for Amundsen, I think. He had lived with the Inuit families in Gjøa Haven for two years, and when the ice finally broke, he sailed west toward Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island. I would follow him on the next flight out.
CHAPTER 14
Cambridge Bay
On August 13, 1905, Amundsen and his crew left Gjøa Haven, sailing 250 miles on the Gjøa through dangerously shallow and uncharted waters. There were many times the Gjøa nearly ran aground and days when Amundsen could not eat or sleep because he was so worried about the ship and his crew. On August 16, he entered Victoria Strait, and the following day anchored in Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island, the farthest point that ships traveling eastward from the Pacific had reached, thus completing, as Amundsen wrote, the last “unsolved link in the North West Passage.”
I followed Amundsen to Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island and stayed only for a couple days, just long enough to see the sad remains of the Maud in Cambridge Bay, a ship that Amundsen would use on one of his future expeditions,
Ten days after Amundsen sailed out of Cambridge Bay, the Gjøa met with the Charles Hanson, a whaling ship that was sailing east from San Francisco. For Amundsen, the sight was magical. He wrote, “I could feel tears coming to my eyes.” And he thought that he was now on the home stretch, but sea ice stopped the Gjøa’s progress at King Point on the Yukon coast. Amundsen had to anchor near shore and spend a third winter in the Arctic.
The following summer, the Gjøa sailed more than eight hundred miles from King Point until the sea ice forced a brief stop on Herschel Island, off the Yukon. Once the ice broke up, Amundsen set off again but made slow progress with the onslaught of more sea ice, heavy fog, and a dangerous uncharted sandbar. Finally he entered the smooth waters of Prudhoe Bay, an inlet of the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean, covering more than 140 square miles.
In 1968, one of the largest oil reserves in North America was discovered ther
e, and when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed in 1977, it was used to transport oil eight hundred miles south to Valdez. Today there are about five thousand transient workers in Prudhoe Bay who are involved in oil production. The oil field, which is owned jointly by BP, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron and is operated by BP, produces about 150 million barrels a year.
There was something intriguing about swimming in Prudhoe Bay. Part of it was that it was exciting to imagine swimming along the top of Alaska, and the other part was that Amundsen had found calm waters there. Through an Alaskan pilot friend who flew for BP, I contacted the head of security at Prudhoe Bay for permission to explore the waters, but my request was denied. I thought about it for a few days and decided that was the security man’s job, to keep people out of the area. What I needed to do was to figure out who would understand my vision for this project, why it was important to follow Amundsen and learn from him and connect his story with the present by swimming in his wake. I contacted Francis McLaughlin, my nephew who had worked for Senator Frank Murkowski from Alaska. Francis and I discussed a number of ideas, and he helped me figure out the best person to contact.
I had spoken for Citigroup and met Charles Prince, the former CEO. I e-mailed him and asked for his help. He had people who worked with him who knew the people at BP, and a few days later, I received a call from Alaska Clean Seas, an organization that is hired by the oil companies in Prudhoe Bay to be on call in case there is a spill and to be there to clean it up. Permission was granted.
Bob Griffith returned from California to join me, and Royce O’Brien and Tom Flynn, who worked for Alaska Clean Seas, offered to pilot the company Zodiac and accompany me on the swim.
On July 29, at around 8:00 p.m., with the sun shining so brightly on the water that it seemed like noon, we gathered on the causeway on the west side of Prudhoe Bay, which extended about two miles out from shore. The air temperature was a balmy 50 degrees, and the bright blue bay was calm and clear and sparkling diamond light. I was eager to swim, but I noticed something rolling in the tiny four-inch surf. It was round, and the size of a golf ball, and it was the color of clear Jell-O tinged with plum, with inch-long tentacles extending from its base. “Tom, what is that? Is it some kind of jellyfish?” I asked, never expecting to find them this far north.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” Tom said. Neither had Royce. And both were fishermen and had spent years fishing off Alaska.
For a moment, I wondered what other surprises could be in Prudhoe Bay, but I pushed that thought out of my mind and walked into the water. I swam parallel to the causeway, about fifty yards from shore, and each time I turned my head to breathe on my right side, I saw the elevated pipeline. At the end of the causeway was a seawater treatment plant, which processed seawater and pumped it back into the oil field. And as I swam, I pulled my hands through shoals of small plum-colored jellyfish. They didn’t sting, but when I touched them they trembled, and so did I.
When I’d reached the thirty-minute mark, Bob called out to me and waved. I swam another minute. I still felt very strong, but the water was colder than I expected. I wasn’t sure how cold it was, but I knew it was pulling heat from my body quickly.
I climbed out, and as I put my sweat suit on over my bathing suit and started walking along the shore to generate heat, Royce and Bob and Tom joined me. Royce came over and put a hand on my shoulder to feel my skin. “Wow, your skin’s freezing. Tom, feel her back,” Royce said.
“Yeah, my skin’s cold. But my core’s fine,” I said. “I just need to keep walking.”
Bob Griffith points and guides me across Prudhoe Bay while Tom Flynn keeps the motorboat on a direct course. Royce O’Brien watches the water for any unexpected visitors.
I’m swimming parallel to an oil pipeline and feeling strong in the calm 30-degree-Fahrenheit water.
Royce was walking beside me, and he said, “I’ve just seen you swim in thirty-degree water for thirty-one minutes, and from everything I know this isn’t supposed to be possible.”
Bob laughed, a big laugh—I loved his laugh—and he said, “That’s part of why she does it.”
Bob understood. He held the land-speed car-racing record on the Bonneville Salt Flats at 246 miles per hour.
Bob just smiled. And the conversation shifted to cars, and I kept walking trying to warm up back to normal.
In August 1906, Amundsen was almost at the end of the Northwest Passage, but three miles off Cape Simpson, about fifty miles from Point Barrow, he saw a big storm approaching. Amundsen wrote, “As the weather was still very hazy and the gale was stiffening to a hurricane, we sought shelter in the lee of some ground ice close by, and made fast to it.”
According to Amundsen, the Arctic current raced off Point Barrow and flowed northeast at a torrential rate. Amundsen knew it was dangerous to let the Gjøa rest near ice. He had learned that it was easy to get caught inside a mass of ice, without an outlet, as he had experienced on the Belgica expedition, but one of the Gjøa’s propeller shafts warped, and the gaff, part of the ship’s fore-and-aft rig, broke. They had no engine and no mainsail. But the crew raised the trysail, and Amundsen knew that they needed to push through the heavy drift ice off Point Barrow.
Finally in open water, under full sail, with the Gjøa increasing her speed, she violently struck the ice with her bow and parted it. Amundsen wrote:
It seemed as if the old Gjøa knew she had reached a critical moment. She had to tackle two large masses of ice that barred her way to the North West Passage; and now she charged again into them to force them asunder and slip through … a wild shout of triumph broke forth when the vessel slipped through.
Amundsen had reached the Chukchi Sea. I followed him west. Today, about forty-five hundred people live in Barrow, Alaska, which is 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle. More than 60 percent of Barrow’s population is Inupiat, and the surrounding villagers are almost all Inupiat. Traditionally, many of the Inupiat hunted bowhead whale and fished in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The Inupiat still have a traditional bowhead whale hunt. Today, most of the money coming into Barrow is from oil. Barrow is a large tourist destination, but increasing numbers of visitors are scientists who are working on global warming—studying carbon dioxide changes in the tundra and permafrost. They are observing the increasing speed at which the sea ice is melting and the erosion of the land around Point Barrow caused by the reduction of sea ice. Many of the scientists are based at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, a not-for-profit research organization established in 1995.
Three of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium employees, Lester Suvlu, Vernon Kaleak, and Henry Elegak, volunteered to help me with a swim off Barrow. I had planned to do just a simple swim to complete the journey, only a mile. And we had waited for a calm day. Bob and I thought we had nearly reached our goal, and I felt more confident about swimming in frigid waters. But Lester told us about the polar bears, and he and Vernon and Henry were tremendously concerned. Lester told me he had seen more polar bears swimming ashore in recent years than he had in his whole life before.
The ice, he explained, was receding, and there was no place for the polar bears to hunt seals, their main food source, during the spring and the summer. In 2005, the ice was more than a hundred miles offshore, and he said that the wildlife management people found four polar bears that had drowned. They believed that they were so exhausted from swimming so far that they gave out. Recently, a mother and her cub had swum ashore and stopped, exhausted, on the runway at the old airport. Eventually, she got up and moved on, but polar bears were a real problem in town. While I was swimming, one of the crew would follow onshore, riding an ATV and carrying a rifle, in case we encountered a bear.
When I stepped into the Chukchi Sea on August 2, the water was far warmer than I expected—40 degrees. The wind and current would be at my back, and I felt like my swim would be all downhill. Bob and Vernon were in the Zodiac, waiting for me to start. I looked around. I didn’
t see any polar bears, but when I put my face into the water and started swimming, I realized I had entered a liquid hell of medusae—jellyfish—everywhere. There were large ones with purple-and-white-striped domes about three feet in circumference. They were inverted on the ocean floor ten to fifteen feet below me, their ten-foot-long tentacles splaying out around them.
I had been stung before by a variety of species, across the lips and face, on my chest, along the tender underside of my arms, down my legs, across my feet, and even through my swimsuit. Some species stung more than others. I didn’t want to find out how much these stung. My muscles were tight as I braced myself for the soft brush of the tentacle that would suddenly become lines of searing pain.
In midstroke, I paused when I noticed a scarlet jellyfish the size of an apple moving right for me. The tentacles, fire red and as thick as spaghetti strands, trailed behind; they were six or seven feet long, and red in nature usually signals a warning that an animal is dangerous or poisonous. As I swerved right, my left hand grazed the red dome, and I recoiled and shot straight up in the water. I could see Bob looking at me totally perplexed. I was abruptly stopping and starting. He had never seen this behavior. But I was trying to do everything I could to avoid the jellyfish tentacles.
The wind was suddenly gusting to thirty knots, pushing the Zodiac and making it hard to hold a course. Bob and Vernon pulled two hundred yards away from me so they would not run me over with the boat. But Bob was concerned, and he yelled between cupped hands, “Are you all right?”
“Jellyfish,” I shouted. They were signs that the water conditions were changing; the natural predators had been overfished, and so the jellyfish had multiplied at alarming rates.
