Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  Frankly, the functionality of the gear surprised me. I wore the Wrangler jeans Al recommended because the inseam is stitched on the outside and doesn’t cause saddle sores. My hat and ankle-length riding slicker kept me bone-dry in heavy rains. The way my boots fit the stirrups had a lot to do with my new confidence on Josh. The leather chaps I wore, provided by the ranch, took a lot of punishment from snapping sage. I liked the way they felt against the saddle—leather on leather—and imagined they contributed to the extraordinary fact that in over fifty hours of riding, I failed to fall off my horse even once.

  Some of the riding was even a little demanding. The seven of us learned to herd cattle, to ride drag and swing, to read brands. John, the novice in our group, learned to ride at a gallop, and on our last day, we competed in an arena, racing around barrels and passing mailbags to teammates at a full gallop. The arena work seemed almost easy after a week of range riding, and I found myself doing things “a-horseback” that I thought only rodeo cowboys could do.

  This is not to say that I am, or will ever be, a cowboy. I still have areas of invincible incompetence on a horse. Tight galloping 180-degree turns have me bamboozled. Josh never liked the way I did them. He would nearly stop, get all tangle-footed, and sometimes rear up a bit.

  Al Brown’s advice was to look at it from Josh’s point of view.

  “What do you tell him when you get to the turn?” Al asked.

  “I tap on the reins to slow him up a bit.”

  “Are you perfectly balanced?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What do you do to get your balance?”

  And I saw it very clearly: On a tight turn, when I begin to feel unbalanced, I tend to clamp my legs tight around the animal. This causes my boot heels to touch his ribs, which is, of course, the signal to go. Meanwhile, I’m pulling back on the reins. No wonder Josh gets tangle-footed. No wonder he rears up.

  I had to look at it from his point of view.

  What I knew for sure about Josh and his point of view was this: The horse just purely loved to run. In our time together, we opened it up all the way and did 180 miles an hour out there on the range. We did it lots of times, with the rain or the sleet or the snow blowing in our faces. There were rainbows or storm clouds, or both, spread out all across the sky, and the wind blew the brim of my hat back flat against the crown, and I was welded into the saddle, shouting “Ya-hoo” or “Yee-hah” or just “Go, Josh.” What I felt in those moments was something so far beyond exhilaration that it was, well … it was almost cowboy.

  North Pole: The Easy Way

  Ice.

  The air was filled with a light snow that didn’t precisely fall but seemed to drift aimlessly under a pearly, opalescent sky. Everything else under that crystal dome was flat, an endless prairie of sea ice, white with the newly fallen snow, and I could see the curve of the earth in the far distance of my vision in any direction I cared to look. That direction was south.

  I was, for the moment, facing due south. Behind me, the direction was due south. It was due south to my right, due south to my left, and if I wanted to quarter off on my left side, I’d be facing south by south-south.

  It was August 8, and the temperature stood at about 36 degrees Fahrenheit, as warm as it was ever going to be here at the geographic North Pole. So sure, several of us agreed, why not take a brief refreshing dip in the Arctic Ocean. The massive icebreaker that brought us here had formed a nice swimming hole in its wake.

  I stood on the edge of the ice in my swimming suit and stared down about four feet into the open water of the Arctic Ocean, which was an uncomfortable-looking iridescent black.

  It was 11:00 A.M. by my watch, but in my hometown in Montana it was much earlier. Or was it later? All the lines of longitude crossed at this point, and longitude is how human beings reckon time. So for just these few seconds I was standing on every line of longitude at once. Or none at all. Depending on how I wanted to look at it, I had no time whatsoever; either that or I had all the time in the world.

  The thing is, it was cold standing around in a bathing suit at the North Pole. So I dove, because at this point, it seemed that there was no more time. The water, saturated with salts, was super-cooled, which is to say it existed in its liquid state well below the freezing point of fresh water. We’d measured the temperature at 30.2 degrees.

  At four or five feet below the surface of the sea, there seemed to be no light at all, and the body that I was inhabiting did not register temperature. There was no pain involved at all, which, I suppose, is one of the first manifestations of shock. Cold did not, for instance, punch the breath from my lungs. None of that.

  Time, on the other hand, took an immediate 180. The world bucked furiously, then lurched into extreme slow motion and began slowly fading to black. It occurred to me that my life, such as it was, had suddenly become a malfunction at the Plaza Cinemaplex. Swimming toward the surface seemed an unreasonable chore.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight, a number of Western tour companies, among them Quark Expeditions, approached Russia with a proposition. I imagine the pitch went something like this:

  Look, you guys have all these icebreakers, right? Best icebreakers in the world. You need them eight months of the year to convey freighters along the frozen north coast of Russia and Siberia, from Murmansk near the Scandinavian Peninsula all the way to the Bering Strait. But, look. That route, the Northeast Passage, it’s pretty much ice-free during July and August, right? So the question is, What are you guys doing with your big icebreakers during the summer? Uh-huh. Well, what if we could come up with a summer use for those ships that could earn you guys several million in hard currency. Yeah, we’re talking American dollars.

  Which is how, one day late in July, I came to be standing on the tarmac at Murmansk, Russia, discussing the price of our trip to the North Pole with an elderly gentleman from Brooklyn, New York. We had just stepped off a charter flight from Helsinki, and the airport wasn’t set up for tourists. There was, in fact, no terminal at all, just a single soldier in a metal shed checking passports for seventy-eight people who were standing on the naked tarmac, watching Russian workers sitting on huge tractor tires smoking cigarettes while Aeroflot refueled our charter plane. There were two wooden outhouses and some of the passengers lined up to relieve themselves.

  “Figure a thousand dollars a day,” the gentleman from New York said. “Twenty days. Subtract out for sleeping.” He was a short, vigorous man—a sailor all his life, he said—and he expressed himself in a comical manner. He was Popeye personified. “It costs sixty dollars a waking hour.”

  We watched one of the passengers, an elegant-looking woman of about sixty-five, step into the left-side outhouse. There was something wrong in that one, something, judging by the faces of those who had fled previously, that was fairly disgusting. No one had ever stayed there for long.

  “Time her,” Popeye said.

  Presently the door burst open, and the woman, who looked like she was about to be sick, ran behind a ramshackle olive-drab armored personnel carrier.

  “How long?” Popeye asked.

  “A minute, almost exactly,” I said.

  “Cost me a dollar,” Popeye observed.

  Buses ferried us over the countryside, which was alive with wildflowers and dwarf birch, with blueberries and wild strawberries and mushrooms. There were small lakes everywhere, over every ridge, and people were out picnicking or canoeing or collecting berries in wicker baskets on this warm weekend afternoon. The land rose and fell like ocean swells. It had, clearly, been molded by glaciers, and was dotted with drumlins and moraines and erratic boulders.

  Murmansk was a town of some two hundred thousand people and until 1991 was a supersecret military outpost, a repository for the most awesome nuclear arsenal on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The town consisted, for the most part, of blocky rectangular apartment buildings all thrown together and set against one another at bullying and discordant angles. Most
of the buildings seemed in urgent need of repair: lots of peeling paint and crumbling cement. The personality inherent in the buildings was that of the Communist party and was expressed vertically. Khrushchev had built four-story apartment blocks; Brezhnev had built them to nine stories.

  And then we were at the port, all of us stepping onto the icebreaker Yamal, which looked a bit like a snazzy Brezhnev apartment building set a bit forward on a huge whaleboat hull. The ship was newly painted, neat as Grandma’s kitchen, and the passengers were offered a bit of bread and a pinch of salt on boarding. A uniformed Russian official said something about bread and salt and Russian tradition. It was hard to hear him because a young man nearby was playing a stand-up Yamaha electronic organ. He was playing “Those Were the Days,” with the rhythm section set to polka.

  Soon enough we were sitting in the ship’s lecture room, which seated over a hundred and looked like one of the better classrooms at an American junior college. Greg Mortimer, the Australian tour director, laid out a few facts. The ship was powered by two nuclear reactors pumping 75,000 horsepower to three massive four-bladed screws.

  The Yamal was the most powerful icebreaker on earth. It weighed twenty-two thousand tons and could crack through fifteen feet of ice at six miles an hour. The passengers were to be housed in the officers’ cabins. The officers themselves had doubled up in rooms with the crew. There were over a thousand rooms aboard the Yamal.

  We would visit a number of Arctic islands on our way to and from the Pole. It would be, Mortimer said, a historic voyage: “Only some twenty-five hundred people have stood on the ice at the North Pole.” This was nice to know, though I didn’t suppose it would earn me any permanent notice in the annals of polar exploration. Greg Mortimer, however, is one of the few human beings to have climbed Mount Everest without oxygen, and I figured he had a better shot at the history books than any of us.

  Dinner—Dover sole, veal Oscar, that sort of thing—was served in a large, well-appointed dining room: white tablecloths, white cloth napkins, white wine. Red wine. Cognac. The kitchen staff was German and Austrian; the waiters, for the most part, Russian.

  My cabin was spacious enough: good toilet, good shower, a down comforter on the starched white sheets of the bed. We were steaming north, out of Murmansk, through ice-free seas. I fell asleep at ten-thirty, missed the sunset at eleven-thirty and then the sunrise two hours later at one-thirty. Too bad. It would be my last sunrise and sunset for at least two weeks. From now on the feeble Arctic sun would simply wobble around in the sky like some guy’s badly set glass eye.

  It started with what is called plastic, a thin transparent sheen of ice laid over the surface of the sea in widely spaced patches. Later there was frazzle, slightly thicker ice that had formed in long, rectangular crystals. And then, after dinner on the second day, we saw a bit of pancake ice, crystal lily pads of varying sizes. Further north, winds and currents would collect the sea ice into floes, solid blocks of ice the size of football fields, of whole city blocks, of entire cities.

  At about two in the morning of the next day I woke to a grinding, thumping sound. The sky was clear. The sea was flat calm, and it mirrored the pale blue of the Arctic sky. Floating in this shimmering sea were widely separated wind-driven aggregations of ice: misshapen lumps and hummocks that stretched out from horizon to horizon as far as the eye could see. Some were the size of coffee tables; others were about the size and shape of an eighteen-wheel truck.

  The sun was low in the sky, balanced on the edge of the sea, and its light cast a golden trail across ice and sea.

  I took a walk on deck, listened to the crash and thud of ice against our hull, went down to the small library, and read about polar bears in The Arctic, a book by Joseph Wallace. “One of the most completely wild and independent animals on earth,” it said of the ice bear. Big males could weigh up to seventeen hundred pounds. They have been spotted within a few hundred miles of the North Pole itself; they have been seen swimming in frigid seawater twenty miles from the nearest land. They are, except when breeding, lone travelers.

  The polar bear feeds mostly on ringed seals, animals that can weigh well over a hundred pounds. In the Arctic winter, when the sea freezes over, the seal maintains a series of breathing holes and gnaws away at the always-forming ice with its teeth. The seal must surface every ten minutes or so to breathe. The polar bear knows this, and he waits by a hole in the ice, standing motionless, sometimes for fifty hours straight in the bitter Arctic night. An ice bear can crush a seal’s skull with a single blow.

  In the summer, when the floes begin to break up, the seal likes to sleep on the ice, but always near the escape of open water. Evolution has blessed those seals that sleep fitfully; most wake every minute or so to check the ice for bears.

  Wallace said there were two flaws in this system: one, each individual seal sleeps about the same period of time, almost to the second; two, the sleeping animal twitches before it awakens. And the great white bear knows these facts as well. He advances on the sleeping seal, notices the telltale twitch, and stands immobile—just another hummock of ice among many. The only thing that might give the bear away is his large black nose. Some biologists insist that as the bear draws close, he covers his nose with a large, shaggy white paw. This is a matter of some controversy among experts, but it seemed a charming detail, whether proven fact or fond fiction. A bit grim from the seal’s point of view, however. Imagine death rumbling out of that gray Arctic haze like a giggling geisha.

  I wondered, then, why I saw something of my own inner life in the polar bear. Indeed, there was something of everyone’s life, some universal identity. It was about three in the morning, a rather hopeless time, when you think about the loved one who died, the broken relationship that was supposed to be forever. We’ve all been there: wounded; weak. We retreat into isolation, perhaps self-pity. If we survive—and we will—the broken parts heal over. We are, perhaps, stronger than we were. Whatever hurt us, whatever nearly broke us—it’s still gone. We’re lone travelers across a barren icescape, but in time, we begin to move through it with assurance—powerful, completely wild, and independent. Like the ice bear.

  With this thought in mind, I went below decks to a half-court basketball court and shot baskets for a time while the Yamal cracked through the ice. I rode a stationary bicycle for half an hour. It was still three hours until breakfast, and I was completely alone.

  The trip was costly, in terms of both time and money, and the passengers had plenty of both—which is to say they were generally retired and wealthy. Other than that, they were a fairly disparate group. In addition to Popeye, there was the Dreaded Couple Who Did Not Share My Political Opinions; the Man Whose Luggage Was Lost; the Woman Who Climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at Seventy (“Our flight was canceled and we had two weeks free,” she explained). The Swiss contingent included a man who’d climbed the Matterhorn fifteen times. The Japanese group, as if to shatter lingering stereotypes, was dominated by a female hotel owner who drank scotch straight and loved to dance. She was the Tina Turner of the Orient.

  The rascular density—defined as the number of bona fide sons of bitches per hundred—was remarkably low: a mere 1.282 percent. The man in question bullied his wife mercilessly. Walking by their cabin, I sometimes heard him discussing the affairs of the day with her. “Shut up,” he shouted. “You don’t know anything. Shut up.” The man often found himself eating alone in the dining room, while his wife was invited to sit with large, happy parties. He would look up from his lonely dinner and stare in puzzlement at the folks chatting with his wife, who didn’t know anything. What was wrong with those people? He was the Man Who Didn’t Get It.

  Shipboard entertainment consisted entirely of lectures on the history, geology, glaciology, and biology of the Arctic. Nikolai Druzdov, a Russian biologist affiliated with the University of Moscow, was perhaps the most likable man on board. He had a gangling, goofy dignity and a gift for the unforgettable image.

  He spoke of the snow g
eese that nest in the Arctic, on Wrangle Island, in the summer. The birds winter in the U.S. and Canada and are protected internationally, but that protection, Druzdov said, didn’t apply to the tax extracted on the snow geese by polar foxes.

  On Wrangle Island, Druzdov explained, the birds nest on the ground, which leaves their eggs vulnerable to the foxes. A large female, rising off her nest with wings spread, is generally enough to drive off any fox. But the bird cannot, for any reason, leave her nest. The fox is always lurking about, ready to snatch unguarded eggs.

  “Sometimes,” Druzdov said, “it snows in spring and summer, and then you see the geese sitting on their nests with just their heads above the snow.” The next day, the temperature may rise well above freezing. The bird has been sitting for days on ground that is permanently frozen a few inches below the surface. Her body heat has formed a kind of cup in the permafrost. Snowmelt cannot drain away and is contained in that icy cup, so now the goose is sitting in water halfway up to her neck. And if the temperature should drop below freezing again, the goose is frozen up to her neck in ice. The polar fox strolls from nest to nest, casually nipping the heads off the helpless geese. Then he sits and waits for the feast of the next thaw.

  The question-and-answer period at the end of each lecture was invariably dominated by the same individual. He asked questions that had nothing to do with the subject at hand; either that, or the answers he sought were so glaringly obvious that the only appropriate response would be to walk up and slap the guy, hard.

  “These geese nest on Wrangle Island, right?” asked the Man Who Didn’t Get It.