How I got through, am getting through, this heat wave

I started with the Siberian Arctic and Valerian Albanov’s 1914 trek across the frozen seas. Then I went back a couple of centuries and read David Roberts’ Four Against the Arctic, about four hardy Russian walrus-hunters whose ship is wrecked in 1743 and they end up stranded for six years on Svalbard, way north of the Arctic Circle. Their story presents a model of how to survive in grim conditions: shooting reindeer and foxes, keeping out of the way of polar bears, and gathering scurvy grass. During the long dark & boring winter days and nights, they took turns reciting the Old Testament forward and then backward, and renamed the stars.
But since I am not going to the Siberian Arctic any time soon, I thought I should start reading about where I am heading, the Canadian north. And once you start reading about that region, it seems to be All Franklin, All the Time. To say that there is a whole industry of Franklin-driven searching and Franklin-obsessed books is not to exaggerate. Au contraire.
In that remarkable British way (think Robert Falcon Scott) of deeming him the greatest hero he-who-fails-nobly, Sir John Franklin is revered. On his first voyage to the Arctic (1819) he got lost, over half his crew died miserably, and Franklin ended up eating his boots (and maybe a few of those dead sailors). On his 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, Franklin perished along with all 134 sailors and officers.
In the century and a half since the Terror and the Erebus were last sighted, dozens of expeditions have gone in search of Franklin, of the remains of Franklin and his crew, of anything at all to verify what went so terribly wrong. In the course of those searches, many more lives were lost and much of the Canadian arctic coast was mapped.
So enough of explorers.
Today I am keeping cool with Peter’s Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos, and there is nothing cooler than proper Eskimo attire. If I were an Eskimo female, this is what I would be putting on to leave my snug igloo: for undergarments, a bird skin shirt with the feathers next to the skin, hare skin stockings; then sealskin boots called kamiks that reach the crotch and are trimmed with the mane hairs of a male bear (the longest and most elegant) and short panties of fox skin. Over everything a loose fitting coat of fox fur with a sealskin hood edged with foxtails. And finally, caribou skin mittens.

Another reason all this information is useful: if this weather persists, and climate continues with its apparently inexorable slide into cauldron-hot summers, deluges at all the wrong times and tornadoes in all the wrong places, then many of us will be moving to the Arctic and it is always good to know the local culture and history.

A few survival tips

Because I am heading to the Arctic in a couple of months, a brother of mine thought it would be useful if I learned a few polar survival skills. To that end he suggested I read the excellent, In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov. This is a tale told in clear and poetic language of a journey across the frozen Arctic Sea north of Siberia in 1914, which I would recommend to you even if you are not planning to visit the Arctic any time soon.
And here are a few of the very useful things I learned from Albanov’s narrative:

Polar bear liver eaten raw – even though delicious – can kill you.

Seal blood, however, can be used to make a nourishing and tasty broth.

Seal blubber, when lit, illuminates much better than bear fat.

Providing you have a seaworthy vessel, you are generally happy to encounter a polynya. This an area of consistently open water amid the ice pack, prevented from freezing over by prevailing winds and currents. It could also be a great word for Scrabble if you ever have 2 Y’s.

Eider eggs are almost as big as goose eggs and when cooked with duck fat, they make an excellent omelette.

Malitsi are heavy, sacklike, Samoyed garments sewn from reindeer hide, with the fur on the inside. Slipped over the head, they have crude openings to accommodate the arms and the face. In you don’t mind being cold and wet and uncomfortable – which, if you are traveling to the Arctic is a given – they can substitute for a sleeping bag.

Walruses are challenging. Just when you think you have them in your sights, they slither off the ice and into the dark and chilly water. Albanov found their bloodshot eyes to be especially repulsive.

When Albanov and Konrad, the only other survivor of the Brusilov expedition, were finally rescued on Franz Joseph Land by the Saint Foka, they regaled the crew with all the usual questions: What has happened in the world? Has war broken out? And then were shocked to hear the answer that yes, war had very much broken out following an assassination in Serbia.
Five years later in 1919, after surviving those six months of hardships, near starvation and rampaging walruses on the pack ice, Albanov died in a manner so mundane that it is not even sure whether it was typhoid or a railway explosion.