Frau äh Dingens!

Two men were stranded in the Arctic for almost two years without seeing another human being. At one point, they stopped speaking because of an imaginary love affair. This is one of the strangest and most moving survival stories I have encountered. In 1909, Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen sailed to northeast Greenland aboard a ship called the Alabama. His mission was to recover documents left behind by an earlier expedition whose leader, Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, and two companions had died in the Arctic in 1907. Their lost records contained valuable geographical observations. Among them was evidence that the supposed Peary Channel, believed by some to divide northern Greenland from the rest of the island, did not exist. In spring 1910, Mikkelsen set out with the ship's engineer, Iver Iversen, to find the missing documents. They travelled hundreds of kilometres across an almost unimaginably hostile landscape. They suffered from starvation, exhaustion and scurvy. Their sled dogs died. But eventually, they found the records. What they did not know was that while they were struggling to return, disaster had overtaken their ship. The Alabama had been damaged and sunk by the ice. The remaining crew had salvaged supplies, constructed a small hut from the wreckage and eventually escaped aboard another vessel. When Mikkelsen and Iversen finally returned to Shannon Island in November 1910, they found the ship gone and their companions gone. Nobody was waiting for them. Nobody knew when they might return. For the next nineteen months, the two men lived in extreme isolation. They survived on provisions, hunted animals and whatever they could salvage. Their tiny shelter became almost their entire world. They endured the Arctic winter, with its long stretches of darkness. Outside were ice, polar bears, dangerous weather and vast distances separating them from everyone they knew. Inside were two exhausted men. They had to depend on each other for almost everything. And then something extraordinary happened. Among their few possessions was a postcard showing a group of young women from a Danish school. To entertain themselves, the men began inventing personalities for the women. They gave them names. They imagined relationships. Mikkelsen developed a particular fondness for one of the imaginary women, whom they called Miss Støt. One day, Iversen composed a song about her. Mikkelsen was furious. He felt that his companion had behaved disloyally toward the woman he had imagined as his own. The two men stopped speaking. For two days, silence filled their tiny shelter. Eventually, Iversen handed Mikkelsen a mock letter, apologizing and offering to surrender not only Miss Støt but all the other imaginary women. They reconciled. They promised not to let silence come between them again. In September 1911, Iversen wrote in his diary about the unbearable slowness of time and his fading hopes that a ship might arrive. The months continued passing. Back in Denmark, many believed the men were dead. But in the summer of 1912, a Norwegian sealing vessel finally reached them. After nearly three years away from home, Mikkelsen and Iversen returned to Denmark alive. The records they had rescued helped establish that the supposed Peary Channel did not exist. The expedition had achieved its geographical purpose. For nineteen months, two men occupied an almost unimaginably small human universe. They were each other's entertainment, irritant, companion, witness and best hope of survival. Even an imaginary romantic betrayal could become a genuine source of pain. The photograph of the two men after their ordeal shows what the Arctic did to their bodies. Their story tells us something about what prolonged isolation can do to a mind. And what friendship, however strained or imperfect, can do to keep it alive.