Second View: “…cold inside, cold everywhere”
Excerpts from Victor Boyarsky’s book “Seven Months of Infinity”.
December 11, Monday, 138th day. I saw the Pole at 11:40 a.m. A small black dot, next to which a small white hill was visible, appeared just two degrees to the right of our course. It was an unforgettable moment of my life…
We hugged. The Pole was ours! Despite the difficult start, loss of dogs, bad weather, fuel problems and all the other hardships inevitably associated with such a journey, we reached the Pole. And it happened 138 days and nights after the start.
January 6, Saturday, 165th day. Dogs are truly amazing creatures – so different in the manifestations of their character, just like people! There are smart and dimwitted, good-natured and evil, vindictive and forgiving, cunning and simple-minded, phlegmatic and impulsive, hard workers and loafers. But all of them are now participants in our expedition, and they have endured the hardest trials, and, unlike us, they do not know where they are going, and therefore cannot count how many days remain until the end of their suffering. They know how to rejoice in each day, and sometimes you just sincerely envy their ability to settle down in the loose snow after a hard day of racing.
January 13, Saturday, 172nd day. The expedition had been going on for almost half a year now, and we wanted to finish quickly. Etienne was determined. “When I get to Mirny,” he said, “the first thing I’ll do, even before champagne, is burn my skis. I’m so sick of myself in these skis – no matter how you look down, it’s all the same.” And although I understood his condition perfectly, I still cautiously advised: “Don’t rush to burn them. Maybe they’ll still be useful to someone else!” Etienne didn’t insist: “If I don’t burn them, I’ll definitely take them off!”
January 16, Tuesday, 175th day. The sixth month of the journey was ending. I had begun to catch myself thinking that I perceived everything around me, all this very simple, measured life as something inseparable from myself, as if from birth I had been waking up in a cold tent, cooking oatmeal on a primus stove, speaking an incomprehensible language, ironing the snowy virgin land with skis for nine hours straight, seeing only three things all day (a compass, the horizon, and dog sleds), setting up the tent again with the sole thought of dinner, and after dinner, crawling into my sleeping bag to wake up again the next day in a cold tent, light the primus, and...
January 28, Sunday, 187th day. This evening, at the 327th kilometer of the Vostok – Mirny route, a historic meeting of two expeditions took place: one used huge, heavy, roaring tractors exhaling black, foul air and clanking with iron tracks for its movement; the other used small, light, growling dogs exhaling weightless white steam and clacking white teeth.
Stepping aboard our tractor, I felt partly like a host: everything here was familiar to me from numerous previous trips; moreover, it was in this very tractor that I spent an unforgettable month in March 1986 on a trip in the Mirny area. For my friends from “Transantarctica,” all this was new, and they looked with interest at the interior of the huge machine.
Three hanging soft bunks, a hatch leading to the tractor cab, a radio operator’s corner separated by a colorful curtain, a radar stand located in close proximity to an electric stove, wall cabinets from which Andryusha from time to time, to the approving exclamations of those gathered, extracted another delicacy. It was very warm, and when after the dumplings Andrey passed around a frying pan with fried potatoes and chicken, we had to quickly undress. The feast ended with excellent coffee. By 9 o’clock, the most disciplined part of “Transantarctica” dispersed to the tents, while Keizo and I stayed with the guys and listened until midnight to Andrey’s magnificent guitar playing.
February 8, Thursday, 198th day. “For all people,” said Jeff, “Antarctica is above all cold, but cold as if from the outside; for us, Antarctica is above all cold inside, cold everywhere”… Antarctica is Antarctica, and its behavior is very often unpredictable… Today was a wonderful quiet evening, real twilight, warm (minus 30), it was pleasant to fall asleep. Camp coordinates: 72.12° S, 96.55° E.
The morning of March 1 was gray and bleak. A strong wind was blowing from the southeast, visibility was no more than 50 meters... The mood was depressed. I could not get rid of the thought that our comrade, with whom we had traveled about 6,000 kilometers, survived 200 days of one of the hardest roads on Earth, was now somewhere nearby, on the brink of death, and we could do nothing to help him. All this simply did not fit in my head and seemed so absurd and terrible that I just did not want to believe the reality of what was happening. But the wind continued to rage, and the concentrated and serious faces of my comrades sitting nearby indicated that this was not a bad dream…
Having barely waited for dawn, at 4:30 we went out to search again. The snowstorm was still raging, dawn broke reluctantly. And suddenly, at the end of the second, last circle at that spot, the word flashed down the chain: “Found him!” To be honest, it was scary to run there and see what we had found. But within a minute we were hugging a completely intact, alive, not even frostbitten, happy and crying Keizo…
As Keizo later recounted, he really went to feed the dogs and thought he saw them, but it was a mistake, and when he turned around, he no longer saw the tent. At first he did not realize he was lost – everything happened so fast – but after half an hour of wandering in the 'right' direction, he understood this and made the only correct decision: to stop and wait. Using pliers – the only tool he had – Keizo dug a small hole for himself, which only fit his legs, and tried to shelter from the wind in it even a little. It didn't work well – snow penetrated everywhere, so he had to crawl out of the shelter from time to time and warm up. Early in the morning, hearing distant shouts, he crawled out of his den, where he had spent thirteen hours!
On the morning of March 3, we started for Mirny. The weather was improving before our eyes. The storm, which had raged for two days, had broken the fast ice near Mirny, and now from here, from the dome, we could clearly see the dark surface of the ocean shimmering under the sun breaking through the clouds, with scattered chunks of icebergs. Descending the dome was very easy; the skis ran by themselves, especially for me, since Natasha was supposed to meet me at the finish in Mirny. The widening strip of blue sky in the eastern part of the horizon supported this hope in me. It was not hard to understand my state when, about ten kilometers before the finish, I saw two familiar red-winged planes in the sky, on one of which Natalya was supposed to fly.
My comrades, knowing about this, danced a jig on the snow, chanting with emphasis on the last syllable 'NA-TA-SHA! NA-TA-SHA!' and pointing at the planes approaching Mirny. Omar was especially frantic. We walked with stops, hoping to time the finish exactly at 19:00. About five kilometers from Mirny, when we had already descended the dome, I saw a light all-terrain vehicle hurrying towards us. We stopped. Suddenly, from the hatch of the all-terrain vehicle, a figure in a red jacket with a raised fur-trimmed hood emerged, looking very familiar to me.
The all-terrain vehicle stopped about a hundred and fifty meters away. The figure in the red jacket, jumping out of the hatch very nimbly, stumbling and slipping on the steep slick snow ridges, ran towards us. It was Natalya! I spurred my skis and dashed towards her. From behind me came the well-known parting words in the professional skiing community: 'Victor! Don't forget to take off your skis!' A minute later, I was holding the crying Natalya in my arms. The 'Transantarctic' expedition was over for me. The 221st day of the journey was ending...
To be continued.
Prepared by Oksana KISLITSYNA,
«Gazeta.Ru».