Shapeless Fulfillment

The animated blue dot on the pixilated computer screen morphed into purple with an unholy black center as the storm increased in strength over the ice-choked waters of Baffin Bay. In two days’ time, this Beaufort force-10 storm with 100+ kilometer-an-hour winds and 30-foot seas would be right on top of the Akademik Ioffe before making landfall along the coast Although the situation onboard was unsettling, the expedition team thought only of me, their friend and co-worker who, only two days before, set off alone into the Greenland backcountry. The idea was simple when viewed on a map from the comfort of my living room thousands of miles away: move two wheels from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ along the Arctic Circle by any means necessary. In this case, ‘point A’ would be the Russell Glacier, a tongue of ice extending off the Greenland Ice Sheet, and ‘point B,’ Sisimiut, the second largest ‘city’ in Greenland, roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles) to the west. Sparsely shrubbed tundra, scoured-gneiss rock slabs and gigantic lakes lay between the two points. To simplify things, there was a route (not-so-creatively named the Arctic Circle Trail), scratched into the landscape by cloven caribou hooves and the Vibram soles of a few European hiking boots.