A Journey to the Arctic with Malthe Agard

Before I begin writing, dear reader, I must first beg your forgiveness. I am a journalist. I pride myself on that fact and I have always tried to be respectful of that title, to uphold the highest standards of the profession. Over the course of my career, I have had the privilege of working for, and alongside, a number of outstanding editors and journalist colleagues, all of whom have taught me things about the profession that have made me a better writer, reporter, and observer of the human condition. If there is one universal tenet that has been instilled in me, though, it is this: never write yourself into the story.

Which brings me to the reason for my apology. For you see, it would be impossible for me to write this story without doing so from the first-person. The “evil I” as my first editor, the venerable Bob Newmark at the Milwaukee Sentinel, once called it. I have tried. On the floor of my insulated tent approximately one hundred eighty miles from the geographic north pole, sits a small mountain of crumpled papers, false starts written in accordance with proper journalistic standards and protocols. So I am breaking the rules. I hope that you will forgive me.

I also feel that it is only right and fair to warn you ahead of time that this is likely to be the last story I will ever file. Indeed, I do not know whether these words will ever grace your pages. If you are reading this, then one possible explanation is that I, by some miracle of miracles, have lived to tell the tale. I hold out little hope of that outcome. More likely, these pages have been found by some intrepid explorer or a brave would-be rescuer and that this story is being filed posthumously. If that is the case, then let me say this, dear reader: it has been a pleasure. I have regrets, as any human being does, but I have worked hard to keep those regrets to a minimum. I am grateful for the opportunity to have served you. I hope that you have learned something, some small nugget even, from my reporting. That somehow my writing has enriched your experience.

It has now been at least two days since the original subject of my reporting, Malthe Agard, passed away. I say “at least” because I find it nearly impossible to keep track of time. The reason for this is straight forward; at the eighty-fifth parallel in the month of July, there are no nights. The sun moves from in a tight circular motion at the top of the sky. Three o’clock in the morning is just as bright as three o’clock in the afternoon, and vice versa. It is enormously discombobulating. Maddening, perhaps.

On May 20, 1990, Agard became the second man to successfully, reach the geographic north pole by cross-country ski, making him a household name in the explorer community and something of a national hero in his native Denmark. Since then, he created numerous acclaimed documentaries about the Arctic region, including The Great Melting, winner of the 1996 Academy Award for Best Documentary and the film widely credited with bringing the issue of climate change into the mainstream. It was that documentary that first hooked me on the idea of tagging along with Agard on one of his explorations.

Beginning in the early spring, and over the course of the following four months, I spoke with Agard about the logistics of such an undertaking. We discussed my proposal for a feature-length magazine article. He wanted to know whether I was physically capable, whether I could carry my own supplies, weather I would be able to deal with the emotional stress of extreme isolation. I grew to like him during our many conversations. He was cordial almost to a fault. Our discussions felt at times like something from a bygone era. He used phrases like “into the great unknown” and talked about his need to answer the big questions about man’s relation to nature. His respect for the natural world and the Arctic region in particular bordered on religious awe.

He had a great sense of humor too. During one of our phone calls, he convinced me that Denmark and Norway had been on the verge of breaking off diplomatic relations over whose citizen was the first to reach the geographic north, Denmark emphatically claiming that the competing Norwegian had stopped two miles short, according to available data, and that the King of Denmark had amassed a tank battalion at the sea border with Norway in case the conflict escalated to armed conflict. For a full half hour, he recounted in gory detail just how close the two Nordic neighbors had come to war before finally telling me that he had been “pulling my leg,” an English phrase he was clearly quite fond of.

Those conversations led, eventually, to me sitting on the lower bunk of a cramped and dreary below-deck cabin of a Russian icebreaker eight-hundred nautical miles north of the Russian port city of Murmansk sharing a bottle of cheap, very high-proof vodka with the increasingly red faced Dane. In most ways, Agard was just as I expected. His physical appearance had changed little in the fifteen years since his he had graced the pages of National Geographic. Now fifty-two years old, his close-cropped hair was still strikingly blonde. Only the slight creases radiating from the outside corner of his eyes and the flecks of grey in his thick mustache and beard suggested that any time had passed at all since he had skied solo across nearly fifteen hundred miles of barely chartered Arctic wilderness carrying one hundred pounds of supplies on his back, avoiding the hazards of shifting ice, open water, and the odd polar bear while maintaining constant vigilance against the ever present threat of hypothermia.

Our joint adventure was tame by comparison. Agard’s mission was to take a series of ice core samples in order to try to better understand the effects of human beings’ relentless emitting of pollutants into the atmosphere. My mission was to document Agard documenting. The piece would be a study of the man in his element, doing what he loved. It was a compelling pitch and I got a good deal of initial interest. At three thousand words it would make a nice feature piece in a big-name newspaper’s weekend magazine, perhaps. If Agard turned out to be as compelling a character as my many preparatory phone conversations had led me to believe, there might even be enough material for a book. To be frank, dear reader, my career had started to feel stagnant, and I had hoped that this would be the story to reinvigorate it.

As our ship, the Taymyr Sevmorput, churned and groaned and freed itself from the ice and then slowly made its way out to open water and over the horizon, I felt the palms of my hands start to sweat inside my thick Gore-Tex mittens. There are a few things that one notices upon being left alone, or nearly alone, in the middle of the Arctic ice. The most immediate and surprising is the sense of claustrophobia. The defining physical feature of the far north is the shocking emptiness of it. There are no landmarks to speak of, and this makes it very difficult to get one’s bearings. In this void, it is easy to feel trapped, as though one is not in a vast space, but is rather stuck somewhere very small. Compounding this feeling is how difficult it is to breathe. The lungs recoil with each frozen inhalation. The mucus in one’s nose and mouth crystalizes and constricts the air passages.

For the first time, I truly recognized the magnitude of Agard’s achievement fifteen years ago. In a moment of panic, I glanced back toward the horizon, but saw only the faintest trail of diesel smoke from Taymyr Sevmorput’s exhaust stack. 

Agard was anxious to move inland. His face had assumed a new expression. The smile that I had grown accustomed to, the easy-go-lucky mannerisms had vanished, replaced by something much more serious. We had come much further north than he had expected and still the ice was too thin to collect good core samples. We would have to trek. He had warned me that this was a possibility. The Arctic was changing, he had told me in our phone calls. It had become unpredictable.

I put on my snowshoes and hoisted my heavy backpack over my shoulders. Agard dragged behind him a sled packed with scientific and communications equipment and topped with a large cooler that would store the ice core samples. For the next four hours we hiked, speaking little and stopping only very briefly so that Agard could test the ice under our feet, using a small metal axe to test its brittleness. I could tell that he was growing agitated and I did not interrupt him until I absolutely had to. I had become dehydrated and told Agard as much. He took out a small camping stove, filled the metal pot with the top layer of freshly fallen snow, lit the burner, and handed me a cup of boiling water. I had only a minute to gulp it down before it started to refreeze. It didn’t matter. Agard was not in the mood to wait. Before I could finish, he had packed up the gear, grabbed the sled, and was on the move. He was a man possessed, fully in his element. I sensed that I was no longer a travel companion. I had become a chore. I was slowing him down, inhibiting his progress.

Eventually, we stopped and made camp. Agard warmed a dinner of Danish military MREs and I tried to sleep under the midday sun. Over the following days, we settled into a quiet routine. I accompanied him while he collected his samples and tried my best to be helpful. Mostly, though, I stayed out of his way. He was agitated. He spoke to himself frequently in Danish. I took notes and started to mentally redraft my expose. It had taken on a new narrative: what does a person do when confronted with an existential threat to the thing that he loves most?

A week after we made camp, I followed Agard to the edge of an ice ridge. It must have been a kilometer from our tents. The cores that he’d taken near our camp site weren’t good. The ice was too thin and brittle. It was all melting, he said. He stopped on the cusp of a sheer drop, a mighty crevasse where one block of ice was drifting apart from another. Finally, Agard turned to me and spoke. How could we be so stupid, so careless, so ungrateful, so totally unappreciative of the wonders of the natural world, he asked. He removed the drill from the sled and started the gasoline engine. He raised his voice to be heard. “They’re doing tours now,” he shouted to me. “The company called me to ask if I wanted to lead one. Twenty-five thousand euros. They fly you straight to the north pole.” He was agitated. “There’s nothing left. No great wild. No untouched place. They are turning it into your Disneyland.” He shook his head. I have a photograph, still undeveloped, of course, of this moment. Agard standing on the edge of a steep precipice, hunched over a drill bit, the black and red of his parka contrasting sharply against the endless white surroundings. 

It was just after I snapped the photo of Agard that I heard his cry. I ran to him. The fabric of his leggings was ripped, exposing a deep gash in his thigh. The ice shavings at his feet were stained a deep red. The bit on the core drill had come detached from the engine. Agard clutched at the wound. I ran to the sled and grabbed the first aid kit. I wound the gauze tightly around his leg and helped him to his feet. I told him he needed stitches, that we should radio for help. He cursed at me and told me that it had been a mistake to allow me to come. I couldn’t have imagined, he scoffed, what he had endured fifteen years earlier. How close he had been to death. How the frostbite had nearly cost him the fingers on his right hand. How he had persisted, despite it all. He was not going to turn back now. He should never have brought me with him. I was responsible, he said, for spoiling this place. My magazine article would just bring more people. It would destroy everything.

I awoke the next morning to the sounds of the fabric of the tent flapping violently. I was alone. The equipment that had crowded the far end the night before was gone, as were my typewriter and camera. I called out to Agard but got no response. Outside the tent, fresh sled tracks led off toward the precipice where Agard had cut himself the day before. I could make out his footprints too, uneven from his limp. I started to run. I screamed his name. In the distance, I could make out the flames. They must have been ten feet high. The sled that carried our equipment, our food, my typewriter and camera, was engulfed, a thick cloud of black smoke billowing. I ran toward the flames hoping to salvage what I could, hoping to find Agard. Even before I looked, I knew that he would be there, lying at the bottom of the crevasse.

I now find myself completely and utterly alone. It will be at least another four days until the Taymyr Sevmorput returns. Even if I had the strength, I fear that I would not be able to find my way. Agard skied a thousand miles by himself, only his instincts and a compass to guide him. I can’t even bring myself to try to hike back to our drop off point. I don’t know which way to start. If only the sun would set, I could at least try to figure out east from west.

I have tried these last few days to figure out what Agard was thinking, what drove him to do what he did. I think it was loss. Perhaps he realized that he too was responsible for this place’s destruction. Or perhaps he just felt powerless to stop it. Maybe he didn’t want to stick around to see it disappear completely. I don't pretend that I will ever know.

So I sit here, scribbling out my last story, my fingers too numb to hold my pen, my strength dissipating from hunger, preparing to zip myself into my sleeping back for what will probably be the last time.

It has been quite the journey. Farewell, dear reader.