By Staff
Winter is my reading time and I'm especially fond of true accounts of outdoor adventures. Recently my wife found a book at a library book sale that now ranks as my all time favorite. It's so good you can't put it down. It's one of those rare gems that you can hardly bear the thought of it ending so you carefully pace yourself, stretching it out as long as you possibly can. It's "Arctic Adventure" by Peter Freuchen. I'd never heard of him but I've now learned this Danish adventurer is quite well known in Europe for his exploration of Greenland and Northern Canada in the early 1900s.
All my life I've been fascinated with the Polar islands like Baffin, Prince Of Wales and Greenland. I've briefly roamed some of the Arctic tundra country of Labrador and Alaska but that gives you little insight to real far north life. I've always wondered how the natives could possibly survive in a frozen land without modern clothing and equipment? I've read numerous books of early expeditions to the Polar region but, like me, these explorers were just brief visitors. Peter Freuchen is unique in that he pulled up stakes from his native Denmark and moved to Greenland, one of the most inhospitable places on earth. "Arctic Adventure" is an extremely well written account of life in a land of ice and snow and the people that did so in the 1920s and 1930s, before snowmobiles, radios, cell phones and Thinsulate.
To be honest, I wasn't even aware Greenland was even inhabited by native people. I assumed it was so inhospitable that life was impossible. That's pretty much true but the native Inuits and Peter Freuchen didn't know that. This is an unbelievably tough land with inconceivably tough people teetering on the ragged edge of human endurance.
One thing I'd never been able to fathom is people living up there with only animal skin clothing. If you've been around animal skins it defies your logic. A bear or caribou skin is really heavy. And sure, the hair is probably fair insulation but at 40 or 50 below and worse? And then there's the issue of being wet. How do you live in snow without being constantly soaked. This book finally cleared all that up for me. Their pants are two layers of polar bear skin, the inner layer fur side in for insulation, the outer layer fur side out. Their parkas are caribou skin, the hollow hairs providing enough warmth. Heavy, yes, but when you never take them off you get used to it. As for being wet, the outer hairs are constantly frozen and great care is taken to keep it that way. If it were to thaw out water would soak through. They carry special wooden knives to occasionally scrape the ice out of the hair when it gets too heavy. This clothing is so efficient they routinely fall through the ice into the water and barely get wet.
These people have a special mindset. Patience is everything and time is nothing. When they get caught adrift on a sheet of ice they just calmly kick back on their dog sleds and chill out for a few days until their "boat" ties up with solid ice – somewhere. When traveling they don't make camp. They simply lie down on their sled. They live off the sea, hunting seals, polar bears, whales and walrus. No carbohydrates whatsoever yet somehow they don't get protein poisoning. Fuel for fire is blubber. The gathering business is sporadic and it's routine to go many days without food. Up there it's either always light or always dark. They don't have meal times or sleep times. When they're hungry they eat. When they're sleepy they sleep.
I've also always wondered about hygiene at 50 below zero. Bathing wouldn't be a thing to relish. Simple solution, they don't bathe, ever. Buckets serve as toilets and the urine is kept for hand washing and delousing of the hair. Ummm – ummm. I'm tellin' ya, ya gotta read this one. Though written in 1935, it's still in print and available on the Internet. Carpe diem.