Conquering the Impossible

by Mike Horn

  I had been moving forward through the storm for twenty-four hours. I could almost immediately feel the snow covering me up. But I didn’t feel cold because my exhaustion had dulled my senses.

  With my body and my face glued to the ice, all feeling lost in my hands and feet, I was letting myself slide gently under. I had demanded too much of my strength. Nature was stronger than me; I accepted my defeat. I was so tired that I preferred to die, and, for that matter, it didn’t hurt a bit. Cutting your veins in a warm bathtub must produce the same pleasant sensation of distance. With my eyes closed, I was letting myself flow into an absolute state of rest. No more pain, no more cold, no more leaden sled to haul …

  Moments before I dropped off forever, a voice that could have been mine suddenly started to question me: If I found myself in such a predicament, it was only because I had believed in myself, right? Hadn’t I believed in myself in the face of all the reasons not to, in spite of everyone who said I didn’t have a chance? And all the people who had believed in me, who had helped me, who had supported me—was I going to let them down? What about my wife and my daughters?

  As if through a mist, I suddenly saw Annika and Jessica the day I left North Cape. My boat was slowly moving away from the wharf, and my girls were calling out to me, “Papa, we know you can make it. You’re going to make it, and you’ll come back home to us.” I could hear their voices coming from far away.

  All at once it became clear. I couldn’t die that way. I had no right. It would have been too easy. A mysterious force seemed to come and lift me up, tear me off the ground, stand me up, and my feet began to count out the paces again, one after the other. I continued without stopping until the next day.

  Once the storm became a little less intense, I decided to try to pitch my tent. Exhausted by forty-eight hours of continuous effort, I desperately needed to sleep. It was fifty-three degrees below zero, and the wind was still blowing at thirty-seven miles per hour. I drove a first stake into the ice, as usual, while holding the fabric flat so that the wind wouldn’t get a grip on it. The tent opened up like an umbrella, and at that same moment, the squall ripped out the stake and the tent flew up into the air. I hung onto the tent poles, but the tent picked me up and threw me over my sled. I held on with all the strength I had left in me. If I lost my tent, I was a dead man.

  I finally managed to pin the tent to the ground by lying on top of it, and I then fastened it to my sled. After that, I succeeded in pitching it. Minutes later I was inside the tent with the stove burning, and the feeling that I was safe at last. By tossing snow into the red-hot pan atop the stove, I managed to create a sort of Turkish bath in the tent, which allowed me to heat my lungs as well as the rest of me. That did nothing to dull the intolerable pain of my frozen face, which felt as if it were being stabbed with daggers.

  * * *

  For a moment I had thrown in the towel. I had been beaten, and I had teetered over the abyss. I panicked at remembering how easy it had been and how tempting. The first time I nearly succumbed to the elements, near Committee Bay, I had demanded too much of myself due to a lack of experience. This time, however, there was no excuse for having pushed myself to that point of risk. On the other hand, I had seen once again that the determination to survive is stronger in human beings than any other force.

  When I woke up, I gobbled down a double ration in an attempt to throw a little more coal into the boiler, and I recovered my strength. That storm, by forcing me to move forward without stopping, had made me cover forty-five miles all at once! I wasn’t far from the mouth of the Indigirka. And another carrot dangled in front of me: on the satellite phone Cathy confirmed that fresh supplies were awaiting me in Chokurdakh.

  * * *

  On the tundra of the Indigirka River delta, the wind blew constantly at over thirty-five miles per hour. One evening the guy line of my tent broke; once again I came close to losing the tent. The squalls dramatically reduced visibility and—even though it was late March—kept the temperature under forty degrees below zero. Each step forward was a Herculean effort to pull my sled through the thick snow. Once again my average distance dropped sharply, even though I was out hauling my sled for the same number of hours every day. When I had the wind at my back and snow underfoot, I tried the kite. But the snow was too soft, and I bogged down in it. I started to snowplow and wound up facedown in the snow, being dragged by a crazed kite that spun madly in all directions. I held on desperately to keep from losing it.

  Once I had regained control of the situation, I folded up my kite until things were a little calmer. I didn’t want to run the risk of a broken leg at this point.

  * * *

  I did my best to follow the path of the Indigirka River, but its curves and meanderings were only lengthening the distance I had to cover. And its icy surface, covered with windblown snow, wasn’t much better to travel over than the tundra.

  Sixty miles from Chokurdakh, I spotted a tiny cabin on the vast plain. Smoke was pluming upward. As I got closer, the inevitable dog began barking, but no one appeared. Since night had already fallen, I pitched my tent outside the front door. I had just finished when headlights pierced the darkness, accompanied by the distinctive “beep-beep-beep” of a snowmobile.

  The master of the house was back. He got off his vehicle and shook his head. He wasn’t going to let me sleep outdoors.

  It must have been at least eighty-five degrees in the cabin, where a peat fire was burning. Even in my undergarments, I was sweating as if I were in a sauna. There were two real beds and a table with a loaf of fresh bread on it, baked by my host. Pavel was a Yakut, which is to say that he was a native of the region. He was the master of this hundred-square-foot palace built in the middle of hundreds of thousands of square miles of absolutely nothing. Amazingly enough, this evening he had a guest.

  In contrast with Alexei, the alcoholic fisherman I had met before reaching Pevek, Pavel had not made his cabin into his principal residence. This was his fishing hut. He lived in Chokurdakh and was planning to go back the next day. Because I was going there too, he informed me that I was to stay in his home there as well.

  After a comfortable, warm night, weighed down with provisions that Pavel had given me, I set out again across the tundra toward Chokurdakh. We would meet again in about three days.

  Chokurdakh was a small town with a population of eight hundred, where a statue of Lenin that had been spared from demolition constituted just about the only curiosity. But for me it represented a significant milestone—I had completed one-third of my Russian journey!

  I moved in with Pavel and his wife, Tanya, who were happy to welcome the first foreign visitor to their town that anyone could remember.

  After this monthlong stage starting in Ambarchik, I was left without any remaining rations or a single drop of fuel, and I was at the end of my rope. The two days’ lead that I had on my team gave me a chance to recover my strength. Pavel and Tanya fed me generously on caviar, a staple food supply here that seemed to be as inexpensive as rice in China.

  * * *

  When Jean-Philippe, Sebastian, and Raphaël arrived, we didn’t waste a minute. I not only needed to restock my provisions and my fuel; I also needed to replace certain pieces of worn-out gear that were no longer reliable. Normally this was equipment that you might use once a year. But I lived and worked with my gear twenty-four hours a day for months on end, and I was subjecting it to ordeals that went far beyond your ordinary winter excursion.

  We set off immediately after my resupply, and it was a beautiful day. Pavel and Tanya bid me farewell with lots of tears and vodka.

  Now there was nearly permanent daylight, and the thermometer had climbed back up to thirty-five degrees below zero. My team followed me to get a new set of pictures. Pavel and one of his friends escorted them in their snowmobiles.

  I started out by traveling twelve and a half miles in the wrong direction, along the Indigirka River, because I thought I could make quicker and easier progress that way
. This detour led me to a cabin where I rejoined the others for the night. The next day I headed due west toward Tiksi and found myself on the open tundra. A change of scenery!

  After three days Jean-Philippe and the others left me to my fate. There was no one but me, looking out alone over the immense Indigirka Plain, which extended all the way to Tiksi. As if she had sensed my sudden case of the blues, Cathy chose this perfect time to call me on my satellite phone and tell me that she and the girls were going to be able to come visit me in Tiksi. (It wouldn’t be too cold, so this was the perfect season for it. The idea that I would soon be able to hold them in my arms again—I hadn’t seen them since Nome, seven months before—already made me feel as if I could fly.

  Meandering between white hills and white plains, I carved my path through the snow, focused on the rendezvous with Cathy on April 22. There are few flights to Tiksi and they all require a complicated series of connections. I absolutely had to make my arrival there coincide with the arrival of my family, who would also be accompanied by some of my friends and sponsors.

  As always, my mind wandered during these long days of marching along. The tendency was accentuated during the Russian portion of my expedition because, with my mind less occupied with technical questions, it was freer to think about other things. I would randomly pick out from the shelves of the library of my memory, books that I hadn’t thought of in twenty years. Images would resurface. A classmate whose mother had bought him a pair of odd shoes for Christmas. Those boys on motorcycles who tried to steal our satchels and our lunchboxes one day when we were all bicycling to school together. My father taking me to see Vasco da Gama’s cross during a vacation.

  The sedimentary layers of new information that are laid on top of the old information every day of our lives and bury it forever were suddenly gone, and paths were opened to parts of my mind to which I previously had no access. Without becoming a nostalgic advocate of the good old days, I will say that I believe that every minute lived is a treasure that helps to make us better people. It helps to polish up those memories and lessons from time to time.

  * * *

  The wind began to work in my favor by hardening the snow, which helped me to go faster. The piles of snow it sculpted were minor obstacles now, and their angles served as compasses once again. My daily average climbed to more than twenty miles, and I was halfway to Tiksi. Despite the resolutions I made before reaching Chokurdakh, I couldn’t resist the temptation to get out my kite. That day I beat my Russian record: fifty-two miles in one go!

  When the wind died down and I was skiing across a flat and immaculate vastness, I crossed the implausibly huge tracks of a wolf. They might have been tracks of the animal that had been scouting me out at a distance for the past day or so. I remembered Simon’s lessons and tried to see whether its fur was short on the side, which would mean it belonged to a pack and was therefore a potential danger, but the tracks weren’t quite fresh enough.

  Part of my brain was permanently on guard. But when the huge white pheasants of the Arctic sailed over my route, I forgot all my concerns and stood blissfully watching them go by.

  The snowy surface had become less stable and more irregular. I would frequently happen upon stretches of “cardboard,” crusts where the ski would slip under and remain wedged there. Luckily this never happened while I was using the kite.

  In order to get to Tiksi by April 22, I would have to cover between twenty-eight and thirty-one miles daily. I was not far from that average, but the weather was deteriorating. Snow was falling heavily, visibility was dropping to zero, and I was getting bogged down in the snow.

  I could see nothing but white. My sense of equilibrium lost its points of reference, and I wobbled and pitched, seized by nausea. To see a little more clearly, I removed my sunglasses, which were misted over and covered with frost. The refracted sunlight burned my eyes, and I was soon afflicted with snow blindness. I had that horrible sensation that I had first experienced in Greenland that made my retinas feel as if they were being sandpapered. No matter what, I had to keep moving.

  Three weeks after leaving Chokurdakh, I was on the frozen water of the Laptev Sea. But the fracturing of the pack ice made my progress as slow as the cardboard crusts and the hollows of the tundra. And despite the permanent daylight, the snow was falling harder and kept applying the brakes to my sled.

  My eyes were slowly getting better, but I desperately yearned to see something—anything—that wasn’t white. A little color, for the love of God!

  * * *

  I projected out my progress, and I would be sixty miles from Tiksi, on the ice of the Buor-Khaia Gulf, when Cathy and the girls arrived there on April 22. If only all of that snow hadn’t bogged me down.

  I buckled down, though, and made double-time. A few days later, I was in the homestretch. That last day I covered twenty-eight miles over fifteen hours in spite of blinding snow conditions. I had really pushed myself to and past my limits, but it wasn’t fatigue that caused me to stop a half-mile short of town.

  There were three places on my map called Tiksi! The first Tiksi was the airport and the former military base. The second Tiksi was the outpost of the border guards. The third Tiksi was the town proper.

  I had gone well beyond my strength to get here, and I felt incapable of setting out in search of my family. Perhaps they were nearby, perhaps far away. At two in the morning, no one could tell me anything, and I was running the risk of freezing to death.

  I decided to camp on the ice near the shore, hoping that my family would find me, but I learned later that when, an hour or two later, Cathy and my daughters came down to look along the shoreline, they didn’t see me. I was hidden by the large structures of the port.

  In the morning I walked through the town of Tiksi, and I was overwhelmed by the crowd—or what seemed like a crowd to me after all the time I had spent without seeing another human being. The whole village had been waiting for me. They cheered me as if I were a homecoming hero, and they pulled me toward the little hotel, the Mariak (the Sailor), where my family was still sleeping.

  I knocked on their door. Cathy was still groggy, and she screamed with surprise when she saw me at the door. My daughters jumped out of bed. It was pure happiness.

  * * *

  The Siberian port town of Tiksi had once been a major industrial center. The machines were no longer running here either, and the population had shrunk from ten thousand to two thousand. The wharves were still haunted by the gaunt silhouettes of the rolling gantry cranes. Yesterday, more than six miles away from town, I had seen them looming over the horizon like a strange banner marking my finish line.

  A group of Groupama representatives had accompanied Cathy and my daughters. We were all invited by the mayor to a series of impromptu celebrations being held in our honor. A woman who spoke English—the only one in town—acted as our interpreter and accompanied us everywhere. The clan is a central element of the culture of the residents there, who were mostly of Mongolian origin, and they were especially touched by the fact that I had met up with my family.

  I spent as much time as I could with my daughters. I asked them about school and sports. I was interested in hearing all of their stories, no matter how trivial. I tried to make up for lost time as much as I could. Above all, I reminded them that, even when I was gone, I was still with them, that I still loved them just as much, that they were more than ever the most important thing in my life. All these things might have been more obvious if I came home every evening at the same time, so I thought it would be useful to put them into words. And in fact, what we shared during those few short days was a concentrated session of familial love and togetherness.

  * * *

  I was also proud that I had achieved a considerable triumph by crossing the Indigirka Plain and reaching Tiksi just four months after leaving Provideniya! If I kept up this pace, I would cross all of Russia in less than eleven months according to my predictions. I would disprove all those who had told me that it
was impossible to do in less than two years.

  I happened to run into a Dutch sailor, Henk de Velde, who had left Provideniya the previous August to make a run through the Northeast Passage. Not far from here, though, at Cape Chuluchkan, his sailboat, the Campina, had been caught in the ice and was still blocked in the port of Tiksi. The irony was that even though I left Provideniya on foot four months after he left by boat, I had caught up with him. And he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  * * *

  I couldn’t get any sleep in the hotel room. The heat, the bed, the curtains—I wasn’t used to any of it. In any case, I had lots to do. Using what Cathy had brought, I adapted my equipment to the change of seasons that was underway. It was the beginning of May. I would continue to march over snow, and it would remain about ten degrees below zero in the coming weeks, but I was done with temperatures of twenty degrees below zero and lower. From now on I wouldn’t be wearing as many layers of thermal clothing. I would need to wear thinner socks to reduce the perspiration, and I would wear a lighter Gore-Tex parka.

  When, five days after I arrived in Tiksi, my wife and daughters boarded their plane and flew home, I missed them much worse than the last time we had been separated. Luckily I was slowly getting closer to returning home.

  I spent the night on the iced-in sailboat of my new friend and fellow adventurer, Henk. The next day I could leave the boat and set off immediately.

  But when morning arrived, I just couldn’t go. I just couldn’t get motivated. I had devoted all my energy to leaving the family I loved. I needed to put a little space between the warmth of my family and the icy solitude I was about to plunge into. I needed a breathing space to recover my strength and prepare myself mentally for the challenge ahead. I spent another day aboard the Campina, inventorying my equipment.