“How would you like to go to the high Arctic?”
It was the National Geographic calling, and no one turned down Big Yellow. Not because the prose was great—it wasn’t—but because the money was, and they sent you places you would otherwise never go. Since I knew nothing about the Arctic, I put the editor off until I could do some reading: The sun doesn’t set from May to mid-August… The vastness of the area is difficult to imagine… If we fail to appreciate the challenges we can expect to meet with difficulties…
Daunting photographs of harsh botanical deserts full of nunataks (rocky peaks on glaciers), fluvial braids, hanging tributary valleys, and lichen fields. Ptarmigans exploding from snowbanks and white wolves casting along silt-laden rivers and fjords gouged out by glaciers. Narwhals with twisted tusks in mythic, inky seas, ghosted by white belugas and killer whales stalking you under black ice. Polar bears doing with you whatever they please.
I agreed to go. “We want you to write for the armchair traveler,” the editor said. “No politics, nothing fancy, strictly factual.”
But no one at National Geographic seemed to know what I would need. The editor sent me down to the Geographic basement, full of old tenting, moldy sleeping bags, outdated frame backpacks. So for weeks I hounded clerks in Appalachian Outfitters, Hudson’s Bay, and other enablers of the wilderness-struck, lavishly spending the Society’s money for a down coat Michelin might have designed and a raucous little pack stove that would have to boil water for a hundred pounds of freeze-dried food. Ten thousand dollars went just for traveler’s checks. My editor didn’t even want me to think about buying a gun, but my contact in the Canadian interior department explained that a 12-gauge pump shotgun with a slug barrel was standard issue for anyone of their own in the Arctic. A friend in Virginia bought one for me, and I drove up to another friend’s house in Pennsylvania to practice with it.
Six white plastic buckets stand in a row on a freight platform at National Airport, scrawled over with Magic Marker hearts by my daughter Susanna to bring me luck. I collected them from Dunkin’ Donuts, washed out the smells of raspberry and chocolate mousse, and filled them with dehydrated lasagna, scrambled eggs, beef stroganoff, shrimp creole, all in foil. My interior frame pack holds an audio device the size of an aspirin tin for playing Pachelbel’s Canon, The Four Seasons, Patsy Cline. Also, a North Col sleeping bag, two pairs of gloves, a chamois shirt, a heavy wool sweater, wool trousers, goggles, binoculars, cook kit, fuel bottle, canteen, maps, a compass, a Buck knife, a Sierra cup, matches, parachute cord, Gortex rain gear, biodegradable toilet paper, insect repellent.
The ticket agent regards my shoal of utilitarian gear without enthusiasm. My jeans and corduroy jacket sharply contrast with the surrounding corporate tack. But I have a seat in first‑class—this is the old Geographic. I’ve just had a good night’s rest in Montreal, where I’ve been put up in a fancy hotel that sends up salmon and chardonnay on a trolley while my pack rests against flocked wallpaper: lip balm, antiseptic ointment, elastic bandage, moleskin, surgical blade, pemmican, suturing strips, tea bags, Hav‑A‑Wipes, morphine. I’m well provisioned, in great physical shape after working at it for a month, and scared.
Frobisher Bay’s radar dome beckons like a giant, teed‑up Titleist at the edge of a cerulean sea. This is the northeastern corner of the continent: sculpted gobs of melting glacier under white, desolate headlands, sunlight glinting off them in one continuous searing. Plumes of steam rise among a cluster of sheds and steel mesh nearby. The heavy equipment operators who got drunk as soon as we left Montreal noisily deplane. Out the window I see a coffin go into the hold, watched by an Inuit couple in matching Velour jogging suits, their soft, round faces passive. Then we are aloft again.
The plane’s bias is northwesterly, across an inky Arctic Sea, without the contracting longitudinal lines on the maps I have studied, all of which converge on the Pole. I am bound for Ellesmere Island, a vast orogeny still birthing after 300 million years, with an intermediary stop in the town of Resolute on Cornwallis Island under glaciated hills, the adjacent sea littered with ice shards. Distant cliffs levitate and then are gone, then back again, shimmering in the thermals. (...)
The oversized tires on the stubby Twin Otter transport plane have been cut down on a lathe to provide the soft-skinned buoyancy necessary for landing on tussocks. The pilot and co-pilot grip the overhead throttle as we accelerate, the big droning De Havilland engines changing tone once we’re in the air. I can smell the fuel in fifty-gallon barrels stowed behind my seat.
We fly over a pink smear on the sea ice below where a seal was recently killed by a polar bear—Ursus arcticus. I’ve already heard too many stories about the polars: an archeologist on Admiralty Inlet pulled by his head from his sleeping bag, two roughnecks on a drilling rig in the Beaufort Sea walking out onto the metal deck to relieve themselves and a bear crouching in the darkness breaking the neck of one with a single blow. Twice I’ve been told that the last thing you see in a blizzard is a black tennis ball, which is, in fact, the polar bear’s nose.
by James Conaway, The Hedgehog | Read more:
[ed. "How nature is revealed when you are most helpless." And completely alone.]
It was the National Geographic calling, and no one turned down Big Yellow. Not because the prose was great—it wasn’t—but because the money was, and they sent you places you would otherwise never go. Since I knew nothing about the Arctic, I put the editor off until I could do some reading: The sun doesn’t set from May to mid-August… The vastness of the area is difficult to imagine… If we fail to appreciate the challenges we can expect to meet with difficulties…
Daunting photographs of harsh botanical deserts full of nunataks (rocky peaks on glaciers), fluvial braids, hanging tributary valleys, and lichen fields. Ptarmigans exploding from snowbanks and white wolves casting along silt-laden rivers and fjords gouged out by glaciers. Narwhals with twisted tusks in mythic, inky seas, ghosted by white belugas and killer whales stalking you under black ice. Polar bears doing with you whatever they please.
He sent me to a resident expert in Washington, DC, who dreamily twisted his Salvador Dalí mustache. “It will be summer there, which means daylight all the time. And flowers—mountain avens, locoweed, poppies, bumblebees. Maybe even songbirds.” (...)
But no one at National Geographic seemed to know what I would need. The editor sent me down to the Geographic basement, full of old tenting, moldy sleeping bags, outdated frame backpacks. So for weeks I hounded clerks in Appalachian Outfitters, Hudson’s Bay, and other enablers of the wilderness-struck, lavishly spending the Society’s money for a down coat Michelin might have designed and a raucous little pack stove that would have to boil water for a hundred pounds of freeze-dried food. Ten thousand dollars went just for traveler’s checks. My editor didn’t even want me to think about buying a gun, but my contact in the Canadian interior department explained that a 12-gauge pump shotgun with a slug barrel was standard issue for anyone of their own in the Arctic. A friend in Virginia bought one for me, and I drove up to another friend’s house in Pennsylvania to practice with it.
Six white plastic buckets stand in a row on a freight platform at National Airport, scrawled over with Magic Marker hearts by my daughter Susanna to bring me luck. I collected them from Dunkin’ Donuts, washed out the smells of raspberry and chocolate mousse, and filled them with dehydrated lasagna, scrambled eggs, beef stroganoff, shrimp creole, all in foil. My interior frame pack holds an audio device the size of an aspirin tin for playing Pachelbel’s Canon, The Four Seasons, Patsy Cline. Also, a North Col sleeping bag, two pairs of gloves, a chamois shirt, a heavy wool sweater, wool trousers, goggles, binoculars, cook kit, fuel bottle, canteen, maps, a compass, a Buck knife, a Sierra cup, matches, parachute cord, Gortex rain gear, biodegradable toilet paper, insect repellent.
The ticket agent regards my shoal of utilitarian gear without enthusiasm. My jeans and corduroy jacket sharply contrast with the surrounding corporate tack. But I have a seat in first‑class—this is the old Geographic. I’ve just had a good night’s rest in Montreal, where I’ve been put up in a fancy hotel that sends up salmon and chardonnay on a trolley while my pack rests against flocked wallpaper: lip balm, antiseptic ointment, elastic bandage, moleskin, surgical blade, pemmican, suturing strips, tea bags, Hav‑A‑Wipes, morphine. I’m well provisioned, in great physical shape after working at it for a month, and scared.
Frobisher Bay’s radar dome beckons like a giant, teed‑up Titleist at the edge of a cerulean sea. This is the northeastern corner of the continent: sculpted gobs of melting glacier under white, desolate headlands, sunlight glinting off them in one continuous searing. Plumes of steam rise among a cluster of sheds and steel mesh nearby. The heavy equipment operators who got drunk as soon as we left Montreal noisily deplane. Out the window I see a coffin go into the hold, watched by an Inuit couple in matching Velour jogging suits, their soft, round faces passive. Then we are aloft again.
The plane’s bias is northwesterly, across an inky Arctic Sea, without the contracting longitudinal lines on the maps I have studied, all of which converge on the Pole. I am bound for Ellesmere Island, a vast orogeny still birthing after 300 million years, with an intermediary stop in the town of Resolute on Cornwallis Island under glaciated hills, the adjacent sea littered with ice shards. Distant cliffs levitate and then are gone, then back again, shimmering in the thermals. (...)
The oversized tires on the stubby Twin Otter transport plane have been cut down on a lathe to provide the soft-skinned buoyancy necessary for landing on tussocks. The pilot and co-pilot grip the overhead throttle as we accelerate, the big droning De Havilland engines changing tone once we’re in the air. I can smell the fuel in fifty-gallon barrels stowed behind my seat.
We fly over a pink smear on the sea ice below where a seal was recently killed by a polar bear—Ursus arcticus. I’ve already heard too many stories about the polars: an archeologist on Admiralty Inlet pulled by his head from his sleeping bag, two roughnecks on a drilling rig in the Beaufort Sea walking out onto the metal deck to relieve themselves and a bear crouching in the darkness breaking the neck of one with a single blow. Twice I’ve been told that the last thing you see in a blizzard is a black tennis ball, which is, in fact, the polar bear’s nose.
by James Conaway, The Hedgehog | Read more:
Image: BlueIce64 via reddit
