I called Paul’s room and asked if he’d seen my blue plunge mitts. Nope. I called Craig, then David. Double nope.
After one more trip to the truck and back I was in a state of panic.
I had no recourse but to call my new friend Matt at Valhalla Pure Outfitters.
“Hey, it’s me again, do you have any really really warm mittens? You do? Excellent! What time do you close? In ten minutes? Uh, um, okay. Do you think it would it be possible for someone to bring a pair of those gloves to me? It would? You’re awesome, man!”
Twenty minutes later, I had a spanking new pair of two hundred-dollar mitts. I gave Matt a hundred-dollar tip. I also gave him a Great Aspirations! Expedition patch and my eternal thanks. He seemed happier with the patch than the money.
Tuesday, April 13: It was 6:25 A.M. My blind terror from the previous night’s exertions had worn me out, giving me six hours of uninterrupted sleep, the most I’d gotten in five days. The curse of my missing mittens had turned into a blessing. Amazing.
But a sudden spiral of doubt started turning again. What if I didn’t have the energy to make this trip? What if, despite all my training, I really wasn’t ready? What if I was just totally nuts? One conclusion seemed clear: I had no business being on this trip. None whatsoever.
I opened one of the notes Debbie and the kids had secretly packed in my bags. Without me finding out, they had packed a collection of small, folded notes in every nook and cranny of my pack. I had found them the day before and placed them all in a plastic bag. I’d decided to open one whenever I really needed a boost of confidence. This seemed like one of those moments.
I grinned at what I read:
My wife had the kids secretly stash notes in my backpack.
My wife Debbie’s support for this crazy idea went far beyond what would be considered reasonable.
Instantly, I had more courage. My family’s faith in me was greater than my faith in myself.
At breakfast, in front of the whole team, Paul asked about the status of my blue plunge mitts. Terrific, I thought. Expose me as a total fool for losing my mittens.
With a big, pearly white, totally engaging smile, Paul told me he’d found them in the truck and put them in the spare clothing bag.
Paul found my mittens and enjoyed the site of watching me panic. I didn’t mind being the “fool” as long as I had my mittens.
What a relief! On second thought, what the hey?!?! If he’d found my mitts in the truck, then, well, you get my drift. What kind of psychological magic was he working now? What lesson was I supposed to learn? Or was my role to be the entertainment for the team?
I remembered something Paul had said in an interview in the New York Times. “Trips are too predictable when everyone’s a veteran. It’s much more interesting to watch a bunch of people who are still trying to figure out what to do.” It looked like I would be providing lots to watch.
By 7:30 A.M., we were packing the dogs, sleds, and gear at Canadian Air Cargo. It took two hours to load it all onto the shipping pallet that would go into the plane.
The scene was a bit chaotic.
Paul was negotiating on the fly, so to speak, with the Canadian Airways representative, working to make sure all our gear was loaded. The issue was weight. The airline was used to this game. The seats had been removed from the front half of the passenger compartments. A set of doors on the side of the plane allowed for loading pallets. Our eighteen dogs in their crates with our sleds filled one pallet. There were also several pallets of perishable goods like eggs, lettuce, and bacon.
The dogs were loaded into kennels and onto a pallet.
At 11:30 A.M., we finished loading, and I took my seat in the rear for the flight through Yellowknife to Resolute. I’ve never seen so much carry-on luggage before or since.
A woman in front of me shrieked when I went to put my bag in the overhead compartment. “Watch my donuts!” she hollered. She must’ve been packing six dozen.
I settled in next to Paul Pfau, the last person to join the expedition. A deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, Paul had been climbing mountains for thirty years. He’d led four expeditions to the summit of Mt. Everest. In fact, he was climbing Everest—”gratefully so,” he says—when his colleagues stood in the global spotlight prosecuting the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
You meet the strangest people on an Arctic expedition.
Eager to talk, I shared some of my anxieties. I asked Paul how he dealt with fear.
“It’ll be good to be home,” he responded.
Huh?
He spoke with quiet intensity. I felt like I was listening to Yoda from Star Wars. Certain phrases rose to the surface:
The front of the plane held the pallet with dogs and gear.
“Honor the process … Do your best each day … Burst your comfort zone … Value each step … Make each day’s steps better than the steps you took the day before.”
He was on a roll, and I listened intently.
“Focus on both the big picture and the small details … No detail is too small … Never underestimate what goes on in your head and heart … Goals are wonderful, but staying alive is the real goal … On the adventure you’ll find yourself getting into a rhythm, but it’ll still be nice to be back. It’ll be good to be home.”
I madly scribbled notes. Maybe somewhere in all this, I might get the answer to why I was obsessed with taking this crazy trip.
“The overall experience of such an expedition keeps feeding you—whether it’s good, bad, or in between—until the day you leave this planet,” he said.“For me, there’s been an ever-changing motive for taking on major challenges. Over the years, this has evolved into the pursuit of intangible, enriching experience.”
I kept scribbling, not wanting him to stop. And he kept going, speaking in ornate phrases, as if he’d prepared the talk before we left.
“The act of climbing a difficult mountain results in the convergence of the physical, mental, and spiritual realms,” he said. “I expect to experience the same sense of coming together here. I know the Arctic zone is a wonderfully beautiful part of the planet and anticipate that it will yield the kind of enriching experience that’s been a life force for me. And I know it will be one of those ever-enriching experiences that will stay with me forever.”
Our conversation lasted nearly an hour. In some ways, what Paul said disturbed me. Who were these crazy people? In other ways, I found it fascinating.
I dozed briefly, then was awakened by a flight attendant offering café Franklin—a combination of coffee, brandy, and whipped cream. She said it was named after the “famous polar explorer Sir John Franklin.” I flinched. He was “famous” because he DIED. He was killed along with 128 men in the greatest disaster in the history of the North and South Poles.
I mumbled to myself, “I don’t want to be that famous!’
Three-and-a-half hours later we arrived in Resolute Bay, Nunavut.