COVER STORY | Continued
that’s what helps you get going, but that moment when the ice gives from below your feet and you start to sink into the Arctic water is definitely a Kodak moment. It definitely shakes you to the core. CEM: What are some of the challenges you faced?’ SC: Unlike 100 years ago, you no longer can walk back from the North Pole to land because the ice breaks too quickly. The melt season is really accelerated, the spring period comes very quickly and everything breaks up, so it is impossible to get back to land safely. There is a floating base station called Barneo, which is about two degrees south of the North Pole. When you’re doing a crossing they come and pick you up at the Pole and fly you out, but the station closes on April 26th, so if you do not make that date, it’s much more complicated and possibly very dangerous not to rely on them. In order to reach the Pole in time you sometimes have to drop some of the weight that you have. Food and supplies, and they are heavy.The bottom line is we let go of a little too much food and were operating on the last ten days on very limited rations, which was tough. It was tough to be hungry out there.
ty, efficient and great, but there is always an adjustment when you re-enter reality, society, and you get encumbered with all that nature of reality in general. We spend so much time being cluttered with information overload, saturation of telecommunication, social media, noise pollution, overwork, and all those different things. When you walk into a blank canvas like the Polar regions, where your sensory perceptions are reduced to quite a limited spectrum, it gives you a lot of time to self examine. CEM: What goes through your mind when walking those long hours in silence?
What’s interesting about venturing out on long trips like that is that you have the opportunity to remake the world and remake yourself in many ways.
CEM: Tell us about your personal journey. Did you find yourself? SC: Did I find myself? Yeah I think so. What’s interesting about venturing out on long trips like that is that you have the opportunity to remake the world and remake yourself in many ways. When you operate in a vacuum, it’s very easy to reinvent everything and make it look really pret74
SC: Well I think you examine your failures and successes. I spend a lot of time meditating. I am a Buddhist so I spend a lot of time chanting when I’m on the ice. It’s a good time to recite mantras ad infinitum. I am not a very disciplined Buddhist in the sense that I have a really tough time meditating and quieting my mind in the context of the work environment, so I make up for it on those trips. CEM: How did you feel when you actually got to the North Pole?
SC: Well the North Pole is really a fleeting moment because it is a static point at the bottom of the ocean, and on top of that everything is floating and always in motion as a result of it. The moment you actually reach the North Pole where the GPS numbers line up to zeros, it really only happens for one brief instant, and after that no more. There’s a great sense of gratification but it’s also very ephemeral because it’s immediately gone. And there’s something nice about that as well. The realization of all this effort, months of training and preparation, and all of a sudden it’s over. That’s a good metaphor for life itself because life is fleeting. You can’t hang onto moments. You just have to live those moments as they happen. The other aspect of it is you reach the North Pole and it’s still bloody cold. There’s not a team of journalists, or cheering friends, family and fans, or anything like that. That’s what sort of interesting about the whole experience. It’s quite humbling really. In your mind, it’s such a big deal to get there, and then in the end it’s just your experience. So it’s all those things together. When you get to the North Pole you get a great sense of accomplishment, and then you
| COCO ECO MAGAZINE | May - June 2011
COVER STORY | Continued www.cocoecomag.com