PWAC Victoria: Lyn Hancock, Writing Sample

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Winging It in the North

by Lyn Hancock © 1996

Writer/photographer Lyn Hancock has been "winging it" to adventure in the North for over 20 years. Through the stories and photographs in this new book, she shares some of her northern adventures. An excerpt.

The reason that I winged my way to Resolute on March 2nd was not to join polar adventurers in prime time, but to surprise my husband for his fiftieth birthday. Frank had been living there for six months, working around the clock in temperatures that got to 60 below during the long arctic night and baching in a bunkhouse with the construction crew of the complex he was building.

He didn't know I was coming. Nor did I till the last minute.

Frank says he hates surprises, but I believe they are a good way to combat SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder, a depression brought on partly by lack of sunlight and by confinement indoors. Ironically, SAD symptoms often show themselves more at the end of winter when increasing light makes people want to get out but increasing cold and wind-blown snow keeps them in. In the High Arctic, for instance, the coldest months are often February and March just when it's getting light. It's a time that looks like spring but feels like winter.

I have followed sudden impulses before in the pursuit of romance--getting engaged above an eagle's nest on my first date, marrying ten days later in Australia on the other side of the world, flying across the Northwest Passage in a teddy (under my parka), kidnapping a husband by float plane for a tryst at a lonely lake, spending Christmas in a semi-subterranean sod hut and draping Christmas lights on an iceberg. Women's magazines call it adding spice to a relationship or bringing magic to a marriage. The aim is the same even when some of the methods are unorthodox.

So it was entirely in character on the morning of March 1, 1995 that I made a sudden decision to fly from Fort Simpson to Yellowknife to shop and the next day to fly from Yellowknife to Resolute to carry out the surprise. I even had the blessing of the Church. "It's a wonderful idea," laughed Blanche, the wife of the Anglican Bishop of the Arctic, when she picked me up to shop for goodies not found in Resolute. I filled my cart with such delicacies as imported cheeses, gourmet sausages, fancy breads, exotic fresh fruits, nuts, chocolates, oysters, candles, wine--and a giant, luscious-looking, personally-inscribed Black Forest birthday cake.

Even the First Air flight attendants grinned as they turned a blind eye to the scales at the check-in counter and helped stash my stuff--pizzas under this passenger, muffins under that one, daffodils in the overhead bin, Black Forest cake in the galley. I was especially lucky, as government bigwigs were aboard that day doing their annual airline inspection check. They overlooked my cargo but the flight attendant confiscated my point-and-shoot camera when I tried to take a photo of Resolute from the air. Why, I still can't fathom. Unfortunately for photography, the community was having a rare, bright, blue-sky day, one that might not come again.

The first thing that struck me after landing was the sign STAFFHOUSE peeking through snow banked to the rooftops of buildings by Resolute's most recent blizzard. Nearby, at Bradley Air, pilots were digging out a Twin Otter from under a mountain of snow; their truck was still buried, and only the handbars showed on a couple of Hondas parked high on a platform beside them. The March wind was a bit chillier than it had been during my earlier visit in July. Welcome to Resolute in spring.

I hurried into the terminal and this time in the crowd there was a familiar face.

"Frank doesn't know you're coming," Aziz greeted me with a wink. In 1978, Aziz (pronounced Aussie) had been a mechanic and later the base manager for Kenn Borek Air. He now owned Kheraj Enterprises, the company for which Frank was building a community complex. Aziz and his assistant, Wayne, helped get back my birthday goodies from the passengers (the pizzas and Black Forest cake caused some difficulty); then we gathered together my numerous bags and drove the seven-kilometre road to the now consolidated community. Only a cemetery on the beach revealed where the old village had been.

"I've arranged for you to spend the next few days in a house in town where the Queen once stayed. It'll be a change for Frank to get out of the bunkhouse and you'll have more privacy," said Aziz. "But stay inside. Don't let anybody see you till I get Frank to the house to meet you so you can surprise him. We told him to pick up some machinery from there today. Wayne will try to hurry him up."

I was grateful for Aziz's kindness but it must have been a long time ago that the Queen overnighted in his thinly-insulated aluminum-sided house, a bungalow that had once been at the Base. I think the Queen must have been winging it too. Although drifting snow obscured the view from the kitchen, wooden tulips in a vase on the table by the window stimulated thoughts of spring. A southern spring, I thought ruefully as I prepared the appetizers, marinated the steaks, and pulled on an extra sweater. The house hadn't been heated since Christmas when Aziz and his family moved in temporarily after their family house froze.

Suddenly I heard a truck pulling up at the door and then footsteps crunching on the snow. Time to put the rest of my plan into action. I slipped quickly into a long black negligee, turned on a tape of "Waltzing Matilda" to give my husband a hint to my identity, and slinked to the door with a goblet of wine.

"Happy birthday," I breathed, trying to sound sexy.

But it wasn't Frank. It was Wayne come to tell me that my workaholic husband insisted on drywalling the hamlet office before he responded to Aziz's request to pick up the generator from the Queen's house. My peculiar sense of humour overcame any sense of embarrassment, but I can't say the same for Wayne. He left, red-faced, promising to think of another excuse to entice Frank to the house.

My enthusiasm for playing the vamp waned a little during the rest of the afternoon. Three times someone came to the door and three times I started into my seduction scene before realizing it was for the wrong person. The idea of Frank's wife flying from Fort Simpson to surprise him for his birthday appealed to the construction crew, and they were making mighty efforts to keep me informed.

It was seven o'clock before Aziz finally succeeded in bringing Frank to the door. By that time, Matilda was no longer waltzing. She was huddled on the sofa in a parka trying to keep her negligee warm. Her husband, however, made a grand entrance--he was unrecognizable in a skidoo suit, with an old towel wrapped around his neck as a balaclava, goggles, mitts, and covered from head to toe in whitewash and paint.

Next day, Frank was late for work but he brought back his buddies for a luncheon birthday bash. The menu was an eclectic mix of pizza, oysters, and Black Forest cake. Coincidentally, it was Pizza Day at the school, a day when the senior class makes pizzas for the whole community. I could have left pizza off my shopping list if I had known.

As many as a thousand people lived and worked in Resolute at the time of the boom. After the oil companies and their associated services pulled out, the population dwindled to the present 190 permanent residents (179 in the Hamlet and 11 at the Base).

Resolute is a compact little community that starts at the beach and slopes uphill to the bluffs and its main landmark, Signal Hill. From the window of Aziz's house (when the view was not obliterated by ice fog, blowing snow, or chimney smoke), I could see almost all of the town at once--an assortment of snow-banked one-or-two-storey houses, the modest grey-green Anglican church, the Co-op store, the familiar boat-shaped Nursing Station, Qarmatalik School, and if I took a short walk to the end of town, an ugly block of uneconomic row-housing which had been abandoned soon after being built. Handily, right next door to me, was Bezal and Terry's High Arctic International Tourist Home and a signpost pointing to the North Pole.

As soon as Frank headed into the usual bi-weekly blizzard to go to work, I pulled on the many layers of clothing I needed to negotiate the short distance to the Jesudasons' house.

Bezal had just arrived back from Korea where he was advising the Koreans who were about to launch their assault on the Pole from the Russian side. In the 1995 season, Bezal and Terry were supporting one Korean, three Japanese, one French, and one Polish expedition. All were aiming to get there on foot while lugging sleds. Most had decided against aerial resupply either because of expense or the desire for a more physical challenge.

Already trekking from Russia to Canada via the Pole was a team of explorers led by veteran polar expeditionist, Will Steger. Members of this International Arctic Project came from the United States, Japan, Russia, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. In the first twenty-four hours of their journey, they had been turned back by shifting ice pans and open water, their dogs had plunged through thin ice, two men had fallen into the freezing water trying to save the dogs, and next day the whole team was pinned down in their tents by an eight-day blizzard.

Reluctantly, they had to use a helicopter to get them over 608 kilometres of slushy ice on the Siberian side, but they slogged on with their dogs to reach the Pole on Earth Day, a day chosen to draw worldwide attention to southern-caused pollution in the north. This team finished the rest of the trip from the Pole to Canada on foot.

World famous Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner and his brother Hubert started their trip in the same way as Will Steger's team, but the Messners were not so lucky.

Only twenty-four hours and 18.5 kilometres from the start of their ten-week expedition, they were forced to abandon their mission and return to their starting point in Siberia. As they had probably spent $100,000 and a couple of years of their time, it was an expensive day in their life.

Although some details were probably lost in the translation from Italian and German to English, it appeared that the brothers were first followed and attacked by polar bears; then, two hours later, they lost their sledge and most of their gear.

"That night was the worst night of my life," Reinhold reported after a frantic SOS call finally got through and they were rescued by a Russian helicopter.

On the first day of their expedition, in temperatures of minus 42 degrees Celsius and strong northerly winds, the men had fastened their tent into the ice and were inside melting ice to thaw their first meal when they heard crashing sounds in the darkness outside. They ran from the tent and were appalled to see huge masses of ice smashing around them on three sides.

They managed to pull their tent free of the colliding pressure ridges but their sleds and most of their gear disappeared into a deep crevasse. In trying to save their precious sleds, Hubert fell into the numbing water. Despite his frozen fingers, he managed to pull himself out in the nick of time.

With their way back to the Russian coast cut off, their boots lost under the ice and only flimsy slippers to protect their feet, their trip came to an end. The brothers were lucky to make contact with a Russian helicopter by an emergency transmitter, and fourteen hours later they were flown to a weather station in Siberia.

I found my own polar adventurers by accident, but they were the ones who finally got me to the Pole--nearly.

Resolute in March is not the place for a casual stroll. Wind often determines where you will go. You don't walk around as much as you blow around. A notice on the Hamlet Office warned EXTREME WIND CHILLS. 40 KPH. MINUS 44 CELSIUS. YOU CAN GET FROST BITE IN LESS THAN A MINUTE. So when I wanted to jaw with the pilots at the Base I had to hitch a ride on a truck or snowmobile.

Karl Zberg of Bradley Air is one of the most experienced polar pilots in the business. Since he went north in 1967, he has made more than twenty-five landings at the Pole and many more in between. Karl was entertaining me with stories of sixty parachutists jumping to the Pole from ten thousand feet, when two unassuming men walked into the office to study the map on the wall.

As talking to strangers is an integral part of winging it in the north, I soon started a conversation. "So where do you come from?" I asked brashly, oblivious to the fact they might not speak English--and they didn't.

"From Poland," the taller of the two said after my question surfaced through filters of French, English, and Polish.

"And where are you going?" I pressed on with my shameless interrogation.

"To the Pole," answered the other.

I just couldn't resist. "WITH TWO POLES TO THE POLE." The headline jumped immediately to my mind.

"Can I come with you?" was my knee-jerk reaction.

"Sure," I think somebody said.

And so it came about that after seventeen years of reading about and talking to other people trekking to the North Pole, I was about to wing my way there myself. Well, TO THE NORTH POLE NEARLY was more correct. But then what can you expect after one minute's preparation? All the way?

On the surface, Marek Kaminski and Wojtek Moskal from Gdansk, were unlikely contenders for the Holy Grail. On a slim budget, they were camped out at the back of one of Bradley Air's warehouses. Although sponsored by the Bank of Gdansk, they had money only for one flight to drop them at the traditional starting point of Ward Hunt Island and one more to bring them back--hopefully after they reached the Pole. They were travelling lighter than most. Unlike the Weber-Malakhov expedition who dined on whipping cream and chocolate truffles, the Poles had no specially developed meals (their diet of simple freeze-dried milk and nuts and power bars would run out in seventy days). "We're trying to eat as much as possible before we go," Wojtek explained.

They had no sponsors to supply the high-tech state-of-the-art equipment that other expeditionists had. "We're relying on traditional Norwegian gear. We use canvas boots because Amundsen did," Marek said simply. The men would limit their fuel by making weekly, not nightly, radio contact with Bezal back in Resolute. To defend themselves from polar bears, they intended to wrap their tent in rope rather than use flares or guns.

Compared to some of the other expeditionists, their polar experience was limited. "We met five years ago on a glacier in Spitzbergen," Wojtek said as he checked the weight of his gear on Bradley's scales. "It was like Stanley and Livingstone. A few years later, we decided to go to the Pole."

Neither could tell you why. Yes, they had a dream. "Perhaps," said Marek, "I will find the explanation along the way."

They were my kind of people.

First, the Poles had to wait for their "lost-in-transit" snowshoes. Then "something strange that's never happened before" downed our plane. Then the mechanic had to wait for new brake parts. Then a succession of blizzards obliterated the road so I couldn't get a lift to the airport. For three days, I got up at 5:00 a.m., put on a roomful of clothes, stuffed cameras, batteries, and film in every pocket, and waited breathless at the window. A series of phone calls later, I had to repeat the procedure in reverse.

"Only a fool would go out in this weather," said Frank, grumpily. "Why don't you stay home for a day and be domestic!"

Believe me, you don't have to go all the way to the Pole for adventure, you can find it on a domestic day in Resolute. As the front and only door of our house opened right into the face of the blizzard, I couldn't venture in and out without help even had I wanted to. So I had to try a day at home.

To keep the door shut against the face of the wind, I wedged a broom between it and the furnace, the first object inside the house. Outside, Frank roped it to the porch railing. But what to do about the snow that kept coming in through the cracks, snow that was piled knee-high by afternoon? "Shovel it into the bathtub and melt it under the hot water tap," Frank suggested by phone from the job site.

In between trips shovelling snow to the bathroom, I put a load of clothes into the washing machine and turned it on. It roared into action with a life of its own and thundered through the cycles as if it was about to blow up. Suddenly, it did. As the machine erupted, water gushed onto the cold porch floor and turned instantly to ice. I had my own skating rink. I wrung out the clothes by hand and threw them into the adjacent dryer. When I returned much later to take them out, the machine had stopped and the clothes were as hard as bricks. I couldn't wait to compare notes with the Queen.

Finally, on the fourth day, the wind stopped and the sky cleared. I leapt to the phone. It was Greg from Bradley Air. "Get out here as quick as you can. This storm's over but another's on its way. I can't pick you up because my truck's buried to the roof and I have to help dig out the plane." I phoned Frank. "I'll be back for dinner, okay?" Fortunately, the jet from the south was due so I hitched a ride to the Base with Canadian Airlines.

At the Bradley hangar, a Herman Nelson heater was piping hot air to the blanket-wrapped propeller to warm the oil, the Poles were taking photos of each other on the snow-moving machines and giggling as if they were kids going on a sightseeing spin, and our pilot, Russ Bomberry, a Mohawk Indian, was checking the controls. "Where's Karl?" I asked nervously. "Don't worry, Lyn, they don't come any better than Russ," Greg answered. "The Japanese on the last flight called him 'The Man Who Parts Clouds.' It was foul weather all the way up Ellesmere Island, then as soon as they cleared Canada and got to Ward Hunt Island, the sun came out just as Russ said."

Well, that was our plan, too. It was good weather at the Pole but we couldn't get there because of bad weather to the south. Two hours from Resolute, our narrow window of opportunity slammed shut, and like so many others before us, we were forced to land at Eureka. And we would stay there, said Russ, till the weather cleared. After I heard it cost $300 a night to stay at the trailer complex of Eureka, I prayed that would be soon. I could scarcely go down the street to find another motel. But, I told myself cheerfully, if I had to spend that kind of money for overnight accommodation, I'd rather spend it on a once-in-a-lifetime trip such as this than the best Hilton in the world.

We stayed at Eureka three days. Marek and Wojtek spent their time writing final postcards and eating everything in sight in a determined bid to fill up and put on weight before facing their sparse freeze-dried polar diet. As we were always on standby for departure if the weather cleared, every meal was declared their Last Supper.

Now that the sun had been peeping over the horizon for a couple of weeks and the long winter night was ending, most of the scientists at the new Astrolab were winding down their studies of the atmosphere and the night sky and were waiting to leave. Dr. John Bird--atmospheric scientist as well as marathon runner, photographer, mountain climber, balloonist, and pilot--drove me up the road with the night shift to see the colourful Astrolab perched on the summit of a six-hundred-metre mountain, fifteen kilometres from the Eureka base camp.

Despite its isolation, most people like Eureka. "I'm so glad to see a woman," were the cook's first words when I entered the dining room, but Bernadette Allen, who puts in four- to six-month shifts at Eureka, loves her job. Her laughter in the kitchen at dawn sets the tone for the rest of the day. She keeps busy and takes on extra chores such as growing vegetables under lights in the lounge. "And I try to maintain the tradition of a Sunday barbecue despite the dark, blizzards, and 50 below. You have to keep interested." Just for fun, she donned her chef's hat and cotton uniform and we hammed a picture-taking session on the picnic benches outside the dining room window at fifty below. The Poles took the pictures but from the inside. They would be outside long enough.

Not everybody likes working for months in the dark at Eureka. Karl told me that he had to haul out a mechanic affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder. "He went bananas," Karl said simply, then added, "He wanted to sit on the wing."

Marek and Wojtek were glad we were forced down at Eureka. They were delightfully candid. "Maybe tomorrow I'll be a little scared but I'm glad I have got this far," Wojtek confided.

Finally, Russ said we could go. I put on as many clothes as would allow me to stagger to the plane--thermal underwear, down-filled pants, wind pants, turtleneck wool sweater, fleece shirt, down-filled vest, Bezal's outsize parka, gloves AND mitts, ear muffs, a woollen scarf from the nurse in Resolute, down-filled cap with ear flaps, two pairs of socks, and felt-lined plastic Sorel boots (next time, if there is a next time, those Sorels will not be plastic).

My two problems in keeping warm and taking photos in the wind on the arctic ice were the two areas of my body that I couldn't cover with multi-layers of clothing--my eyes and my hands. Glasses fog and fingers freeze. I used various methods to cope. Dr. John lit the charcoal burner inside a little case I carried in one pocket and Bernadette gave me a stock of extra matches. In other pockets, I stashed a variety of handwarmers, some I brought myself and others left over from previous polar expeditions. You are supposed to scrunch them in your hands for an emergency fillip of heat but invariably, they have never worked for me, except back home in my heated living room.

At 10:00 a.m. we were ready and Jim drove us over Lemming Crossing to the Eureka Airport with its cardboard cut-out Christmas trees and sheds labelled McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Canadian Tire. I had to keep my sense of humour because as soon as we lifted into the air, all else was lost in cloud. The glaciers, icecaps, mountains, and fiords of Ellesmere Island are scenically superb but we could neither see nor photograph them during the one-hour-and-forty-minute flight to Ward Hunt Island.

And then, just as we came to the end of Canada, the clouds cleared and the sun appeared briefly from the fog. Ahead, the path to the Holy Grail was bathed in light.

Canada ended in a dramatic crescendo of mountain peaks, jumbled glaciers, pyramidal islands and steep bluffs: a symphonic landscape well worth waiting for. The land dropped down to an ice shelf offshore, but almost immediately, Ward Hunt Island reared like a volcano to be Canada's final statement before the no-man's-land of the Pole.

Before we touched down, Russ took the Poles on a reconnaissance flight over the frozen ocean to show them the terrain. From the air, the sea-ice looked flat, a swirling pattern of white silk crinkled here and there by creases and folds, and pleated by dark stripes. Down among them, those crinkles were walls of ice that had to be climbed, those stripes were leads of open water that had to be crossed. Previous expeditionists had reported that there were only five miles of "really bad stuff" before the terrain smoothed out. You could do one or two miles a day, they said, if you were lucky.

Marek and Wojtek were to cover only twenty-five miles in their first month. They nearly gave up after Wojtek fell into icy water, but they persevered and made it to the Pole before their food ran out by covering 435 miles in their second month. Terry told me that they lost a lot of weight.

After a couple of trials to find the best landing spot, Russ brought us down. A big swoosh as snow obliterated our window view, a lot of bumps as we careered along the ice, a final engine roar, and then we stopped. This would be my furthest north.

We had only forty minutes. Any longer and the instruments could freeze. One of our engines had to be kept running. No Herman Nelsons on the ice pack. Clutching the cameras that were strung from my neck, I clambered down from the plane and teetered onto the ice to take a picture of the Poles taking their gear from the plane. Almost immediately, the scene disappeared as my breath and the warm air from the engine hit the cold arctic air and condensed.

While the Poles assembled their gear, took their pictures, and checked their positions, I struggled with taking pictures in the cold. Not known for keeping things simple by doing only one thing at once, I tried to take movies, colour slides, and black-and-white prints. I didn't know which camera would survive in the extreme conditions, so I brought them all--Sony, Pentax, Nikon, and Canon. I had tried to prepare myself so well that I had too much stuff hanging around my neck and too many things in too many pockets. I probably looked comic trying to reach through a tangle of scarves, idiot-stringed mitts, and layers of arctic clothing to locate a new battery or my emergency point 'n shoot. Things had to be done by feel as my glasses fogged, but after half an hour on the ice, I didn't have much feeling left anyway.

Russ, his eyebrows covered in ice, stood by watching the action and counting the minutes to take-off. I gave him my video camera to keep warm in his parka, but the cold had already frozen the shutter button. One by one, the cameras and the batteries died. With the wind chill, the temperature could have been sixty below.

My last shot was of two lonely figures trudging away from the plane on their way to the Pole.

"Do you want to go with them?" asked Russ with a smile.

No, I didn't want to go with them. I was cold and tired. I could go back to the plane and eventually a heated house. For the next couple of months, they would be always cold, always tired. As they strained forward like dogs, pulling their heavy survival gear, their world would be restricted to one tent, two sleds, and many, many steps.

And why do so many adventurers do that? For the challenge, they say. Perhaps, we've watered down the word so much in our worship of political correctness, that we need people like Marek and Wojtek to take such challenges for us.

Back in Resolute, Barry Gaulton had told me why he wanted to stay in the High Arctic. "This is the last untamed frontier where nobody has stood since it was the bottom of the sea. The spirit of adventure still exists here. Most of us may not be able to walk to the Pole but we can at least live and work here and feel some of that adventurous spirit."

I don't need to trudge all the way to the Pole. Nearly going to the Pole is challenge enough.

Lyn Hancock
is available from the fall of 1998
to do readings, show slides and videos, and
promote Winging It in the North.

Want to have Lyn to come to your bookstore?

Contact:
Ursula Vairy
Oolichan Books
P.O. Box 10
Lantzville, B.C., Canada
V0R 2H0
Phone/Fax: (250) 390-4839

Winging It in the North, 210 pages, 16 photographs,
ISBN 0-88982-159-3, price $18.95 CDN, trade paperback,
published by Oolichan Books, shipping October 1996.
All rights reserved.

Lyn Hancock
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Last updated: June 29, 1998 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/hancoc03.html