Kuhne’s new travel anthology adventures to the poles

At a time when images of waterlogged polar bears and carbon dioxide-laden ice cores dominate media coverage of Earth’s polar regions, the casual observer can easily forget the Arctic’s and Antarctic’s barren beauty and rich history of adventure.

Travel writer Cecil Kuhne’s new anthology Near Death in the Arctic (Vintage, February 2009) aims to provide that missing perspective. A collection of narratives by and about a variety of polar explorers, Kuhne’s selections include the stories of famed adventurers Roald Amundsen, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Peary, and Ernst Shackleton as well as those of lesser-known figures like Valerian Albanov and David Lewis.

As the book’s title implies, danger is an omnipresent reality for explorers of the poles. Its portrayal of the Arctic is every bit as treacherous as the introduction suggests—the explorers must confront everything from snow blindness and frostbite to ice crevasses and raging winds. “From reading these accounts, one thing is absolutely clear: the globe’s apexes are best observed from the relative comfort of the pages related here,” Kuhne wrote.

There is indeed a certain pleasure in reading about danger at a distance. As Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, wrote of a chasm-like fissure his expedition encountered on an Antarctic glacier in 1910, it is difficult to “deny ourselves the pleasure of glancing down into the hole.”

Peering through the lens of Kuhne’s book, the tenacity of these explorers as they cross hundreds of miles on foot in sub-zero temperatures, killing sea lions, polar bears, and their own sled dogs for sustenance, looks like a facet of the latest epic action hero movie. When Lewis, the first man to circumnavigate Antarctica single-handedly, recalled that he “had just enough dignity left not to cry out for help when the going got a bit rough” after his boat capsized in a frigid storm, he sounded more like Indiana Jones than a New Zealand doctor.

Considering the author’s background, it is perhaps not surprising that Near Death abounds with such dramatic moments. Kuhne traveled the world as a young man in search of white water rapids and has written ten books on river rafting and kayaking. Though Kuhne said in an interview that “it is really difficult for someone like myself to claim to identify” with the polar explorers his book profiles, it is easy to imagine a kinship between the thrills of the rapids and the challenges of arctic exploration.

Near Death is all the more interesting because the environment it describes is rapidly changing. Thanks to global warming, polar sea ice is melting, and ice flows are breaking apart, making it more and more difficult to traverse the polar landscape on foot as most of these explorers did. “The Arctic book does seem to have created not only more interest than I anticipated but a different kind of interest. Because of the climactic changes ... people are especially interested in this area,” Kuhne said.

Kuhne added that one of the reasons he wrote Near Death in the Arctic and its companion anthologies Near Death in the Mountains, Near Death in the Desert (which will be published this July), and Near Death on the High Seas was to give people a greater appreciation for the natural world. “So many of us live in these urban areas and have been disconnected from nature,” he said.

The book’s only drawback is the occasional tedium and dryness of its prose. Though Kuhne said that he tried “to find not only exciting adventures but also well-accomplished writers” for his book, but Ernst Shackleton is no Homer. This is, in truth, only another mark of the adventures’ authenticity, but the bareness of some of the explorers’ accounts may not be pleasurable to all.
Yet for the Columbia student emerging from his winter layers, this may be the ideal springtime read—an opportunity to revisit the cold at a distance and be inspired by the awesome power of the poles.