Snow.
God have mercy, there was so much snow.
I had been warned multiple times against a dogsled trip to the North Pole. There were records going back a hundred years of expeditions that had set out and failed to make their way back -- countless explorers who had embarked on that most Borealic of conquests and never returned. I thought those lights -- the Aurora so northern -- would afford me some modicum of comfort. In reality, they merely reminded me of what I had left behind.
There was no safety net in that frozen waste. If we failed there, we failed for good.
I wasn’t scared. Neither was my team. Any fear we felt was merely the fear of never being acknowledged for our triumph. Truly, we never thought we wouldn’t reach the North Pole. The closest any of us ever thought of coming to failure was in not coming back.
But even that was not enough to stop us.
We pressed on for three weeks. The conditions were harsh. Gods be damned, they were inhospitable in the extreme. It probably doesn’t bear saying, but there’s no food in the Arctic: no fish is cold enough, and no mammal is stupid enough to come that far north -- except for man. We could only eat the unsavory dried rations we had brought with us.
At least there was water. Oh, was there ever. But water is a tremendously fickle Madam. One minute, she is denying herself as fiercely as any man has ever known rejection; the next, she is threatening to immerse us head-first, destroying our entire voyage.
That’s how we lost Janoth, and a good quarter of our supplies -- the ice grew too thin.
Still, we pressed on.
A full sixteen days after departure, the incessant snow stopped. We thought that would be the end of our difficulties, but it was only the beginning; that was when we encountered the ice boulders.
It’s inexplicable, for someone who hasn’t been there. Even for someone reading what I’ve written, it wouldn’t make any sense -- we moved from ice-sheets so thin that a man would fall through, to giant masses of ice constituting walls, as though some giant creature had rolled them up and left them just to torment us; where is the sense in that?
But it’s true. Our biggest obstacle was not only thin ice, but excessive ice.
We spent what could only have been several days plotting our path through the boulder field. I still have no valid explanation for what we encountered -- frozen boulders simply shouldn’t exist in that environment, where rocks sink to the bottom of the sea, and ice floats barely above the surface. The landscape should be as level as a chess board. Yet here they were, standing as monolithic opponents of man’s progress; and progress it was, though I’m sure many since have said differently. If man has ever succeeded, it was pressing on the limits of his own nature, and propelling himself into places in which he did not belong. Humanity has only ever advanced through the sacrifice of people like us -- explorers who were willing to die for the benefit of those we left behind. Yet I digress.
After the boulders were crossed -- a period that took several days and was excruciating in the extreme, during which we had to bury one of our dogs -- we entered a period of relatively calm climate. In truth, the excessive warmth of the summer season (the only time we could attempt this journey, as it was the only time during which the sun would be shining) had melted a good deal of the ice on which we were sledding, so there was always the risk of falling through -- but we were much more confident of the ice as we approached the Pole. That was until we encountered the stranded sub.
We don’t know if it was US, German, or Russian -- none of us were adept enough to identify it. All we knew was that it was dead. Not empty -- we were foolish enough to check inside. The hull had held surprisingly well despite the lack of regular maintenance (presumably, the extreme cold had prevented much of the iron hull from oxidizing, maintaining its integrity longer than would ordinarily occur in the extremely high presence of sodium-chloride you find in the sea), and the below-decks were well-preserved. Which isn’t to say that anyone was alive. It was quite obvious to us, when the hatch opened with barely any resistance, and the air was musty and stale, smelling of mothballs and hypochlorite -- cold and preserved, like a refrigerator in a morgue -- that nobody would be left aboard to greet us. We didn’t honestly expect any different.
There’s just something that exploring a ghost ship does to you that you can’t readily quantify. I suppose it’s like a funny moment that only makes sense if you were there. If you hadn’t been in that ship, smelling that air, counting those bodies, estimating how long they’d been down in that frozen hell, hoping, cynically, that they had left some rations before expiring -- well, there’s no way you could ever really know how it feels. Just reading about it will never do it justice.
That’s what we all felt, thinking we’d seen it all, after we left that ship and continued north. We were confident that we’d been everywhere that no one else had been -- until we saw the downed 747.
We all knew that carriage, even among those who had never flown. That was only the start.
When we saw the broken fuselage, with the seats strewn across the tundra, and, most horribly, the bodies -- frozen, in a crawling motion, hundreds of feet from the wreckage -- well, I think a good portion of us gave up then and there. The death of so many innocent people was enough to break most of our spirits. At least, with the sub, those men had been prepared for death. They had been trained. Death was something that they could have expected, if not welcomed. But this was different. This was a civilian liner. The deaths of these people were incidental. None of them had boarded this plane thinking that they might die. In fact, I doubt any of them had ever suspected they’d be flying over the bitter north in the first place. Their crash was probably due to either navigational or pilot error. My money was on the pilot. That wasn’t much consolation to the dead passengers, I figured.
Many of us turned back at that point. I completely understood why so many people wanted to give up on our expedition to the North Pole upon this discovery. However, I worried that the desertion of such a large part of my expedition would render the rest of the excursion fruitless, yet I pressed on with only a few of us left. I hoped that my enthusiasm might push us on to success.
But, ultimately, that’s the terrible reality of what the North Pole held for us: It wasn’t the untarnished plains of adventure that we had hoped for -- it was the great blemish of hubris that we felt on our own collective face. We’ve lost many good men to the horrible cruelty of nature -- but we’ve lost many cowards as well, of whom I don’t wish died, but I can only hope live in less glamor and luxury than I will upon my return, my own pride even interfering with their happiness when I’m likely to freeze to death in this despicable wasteland. We reached our goal of the North Pole, but I rather doubt that anyone else ever will -- or, at least, I hope no one else will ever try, at least for their sake. Nonetheless, I will leave this book tied firmly to a flag that I am most vehemently planting at the very most northern point that we can reach. Even if we should all die on our expedition home, this record should serve as a precedent for what humanity can achieve when it doesn’t look back -- and as a warning for what humanity can achieve when it doesn’t look forward.
-- Capt. Gresh Vinkam, 2nd Polar Expedition Team
