Erling Kagge and his buddy Børge Ousland went for a pretty epic ski traverse. They skied from Ellesmere Island to the North Pole in 1990. They dragged everything they’d need, no caches, no support, or dogs. The ski took 58 days. The temperature was -62 Fahrenheit when they started.
Erling Kagge wrote a book about this voyage called After the North Pole, but most of the book is not about their trip. Instead, it is about the history of our human relationship to the North Pole. The written history begins around 1500 BC with the Hindu scripture called the “Vedas”. Prior to the Vedas being written down, which began around 1500 BC, they had been passed down orally for who knows how long. Within the Vedas is mentioned the idea of the North Pole, as speculated by people based on their observations of the night sky. To me, that is some pretty amazing speculating. There was more and substantially less spectacular speculation after that, but no shortage of curiosity and courage.
Kagge takes us through this history, from Aristotle’s day through Zoroastrian Sufi mystics, Magellan, Ptolemy, and Mercator. And then into all the expeditions to find the pole that began over 500 years ago and stretches through to the present. Throughout this history lesson, Kagge blends his own story with the story of this ski-to-the-pole. Kagge’s telling exudes a very Norwegian form of macho stoicism. He wants us to know what he did, and that it was damn hard, but also that it really wasn’t no big deal. Even though it really kind of was. This makes the writing a little dry at times, which is actually quite fitting.
