New on Sidetracked:

The Journey. To Become One.

Words & Photography: Johnny Wild
Additional Photography: Dariusz Bruhnke

I was nothing but a dead man. I felt the sled harness digging in to my stomach. Pain. I tried to take it off, to release my aching body. I couldn’t. On bent legs, I slowly moved my skis as though I had just learned to walk.

I remember that pain was always with me, but in time I stopped noticing it. I stopped hearing it, or even listening.

One morning, I wake up and can’t feel my feet. I try to move them. I feel as if someone beat them with a stick the day before. I carefully pull them closer and bend them by force, pushing the endurance threshold much further than I can bear.

I remember the pain of that broken thumb, the metallic taste of hypothermia, and the discomfort of stiffened clothes when the icy skin of the river broke beneath me each day and its frigid flow seeped through every chink in my armour, ceding access to my warm body. That was even before winter came. I remember the slimy touch of mould, spreading like a cancer on my clothes, sleeping bag, and backpack after weeks of heavy rain.

I also remember the day of my 33rd birthday, awakened by the sun and painful nausea. Food poisoning. Hunted by doubt, torn between reason and unrest, common sense and an unstoppable need to keep going, to not capitulate. For a few days, when I finally realised the gravity of my situation, I weighed packing my things and moving on against staying put. Despite waning strength and persistent vomiting, I decided to get going. It was 28 below zero.

I was nothing but a dead man. I felt the sled harness digging in to my stomach. Pain. I tried to take it off, to release my aching body. I couldn’t. On bent legs, I slowly moved my skis as though I had just learned to walk. Muscles struck by inertia, fire burning within them even long before noon; legs paralysed as though they had been electrocuted and battered with a club. The agony of each step meant shifting the boundaries of what I thought possible, until all my dignity was lost after more stabs to the stomach and I finally collapsed. My feet stiffened without blood flow, twisting at the ankles like the legs of a doll tossed in the trash, and remained welded to their skis without the slightest possibility of release. I fell again and again, my wrists fastened to the poles, lifted by their length high above my head. I was hanging so, crucified. I couldn’t free myself or even stand up. Bound on all sides, I fell asleep that way, suffused by pain and exhaustion.

I lost feeling in my livid hands. What awakened me was the trembling of my shivering, numbed, hopeless body. Ice-cold sweat forming on my forehead froze even before it reached my brow. I couldn’t believe I fell asleep. When I finally opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was a yellow patch of vomit on the snow.

I kept walking and falling for all of that first day of sickness, uncertain as to the odds of my survival. And that was the first out of six days, poisoned, and still 100km or more away from the settlement I was headed to. Eyes filled with tears, I dreamed of lying down and falling asleep somewhere warm, on someone’s lap, embraced by kind arms, my sweat mopped away and cheeks stroked tenderly. I knew I could not allow myself to deplete all my reserves trying to march onwards and not leave any for pitching my tent.

After all that, I didn’t stay in the tent for even a day. Depression would set in. I was aware that I had to go on; even if I were to swallow just 1km each day, it would be enough not to lose my mind. I told myself that one day, the pain would be a distant memory, a story told or written about.

I remember the wind whipping my face, freezing my eyelashes, and how I humbly accepted it.

Winter came, bringing polar night. The skin on my face aged and the wind siphoned away all the moisture. I remember fearing the end of summer, unsure whether I would be ready for it. Running water became an inaccessible luxury. Arid sterilised snow was all that was left to drink — a curse, a melted illusion of the taste of life. I looked for cracks in ice-bound lakes whose water had recently risen, like an animal desperately seeking grass under the snow cover. Sometimes I crawled to an open edge in the middle of the river current, ready to surrender my existence for a litre of water in my bottle.

Night became day, and day, night. My senses sharpened, except touch and smell. Eyes and ears worked double shifts instead. I became a nocturnal spirit of the forest in the heart of Lapland, guided by moonlight. Wild animals and tricks of my own imagination did not frighten me – it was I who became the engine of their fear.

I was a ghost, unnoticed by the eyes of humans sleeping beneath snow-laden roofs in far-north villages. My presence was sometimes betrayed by the barking of dogs, but animals see more, after all. They even see the invisible.

Winter faded, so I rejoiced in the arrival of spring! I was still on my way. A year had passed since my departure. Only spring forgot the place where I was. I waited for it, but I was too far away – closer to the North Pole than to the warmer lands of the south. I waited for the luscious palettes of colour, for the perfume of its flowery cleavage. It came very late, at the end of June, when I no longer needed it. The dormant silence of winter lingered on inside me.

I was a ghost, unnoticed by the eyes of humans sleeping beneath snow-laden roofs in far-north villages. My presence was sometimes betrayed by the barking of dogs, but animals see more, after all. They even see the invisible.

My life was here and now. All the people I knew and loved became a latent memory frozen in the past, waiting for my return. I did not see them. I saw myself and the birth of a new man. I felt myself become an animal. I stopped counting the days. They were nameless to me. Another summer spent on the trail. I stopped turning back to see my progress and the distance I had already travelled. It disappeared behind the turn of history and time, beyond the curve of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The polar day forgot to turn the light off. For hundreds of kilometres of Finnish forest I travelled at night and slept through the day. Sometimes I did not hear the world around me for a week; only the rush of my breathing and the beat of my heart would echo from the dense growth of moss and spruce. Even my thoughts, spoken aloud, failed to unsettle the silence. I learned to recognise the smell of other animals in the air.

Not a day went by without me falling into icy water, sometimes knee- or waist-deep, and I stayed wet for the following week, sometimes failing to break free from the frozen embrace of the river. Bursting ice sheets over 10m wide kept stealing the ground beneath my feet. My clothing froze in an instant.

I remember the passage through the icy hell of Sarek, when I was left alone for weeks again, after the bustle of the town of Sulitjelma. A five-day-long snowstorm tossed me around like a toy, pushed me straight into rocks. I did not even think about going back. On the second day, 30cm of snow from the frozen lake disappeared overnight. Falling down, time after time, I hit my head against the ice. After eight days I reached the river floodwaters in the valleys between the 2,000ers. Treacherous permafrost waited for me, and I blindly walked straight down to the lion’s mouth.

Not a day went by without me falling into icy water, sometimes knee- or waist-deep, and I stayed wet for the following week, sometimes failing to break free from the frozen embrace of the river. Bursting ice sheets over 10m wide kept stealing the ground beneath my feet. My clothing froze in an instant. No trees in sight, which meant no fire, no heat, no dryness. Only walking onwards could save me from freezing. My skis were on the other side. Never had I felt so forgotten and abandoned. The memory of comfort and a simple life had become as distant as the stars.

Yet in all this suffering I found freedom. Trying to understand the mind of an adventurer is like listening to a story in a different language. You cannot see freedom in someone else’s words when you yourself are imprisoned; you cannot feel its liberating touch while surrounded by the walls of civilisation, locked within the imposed routine of modern life, living in fear, heedless of that voice that begs you to change the life you find so meaningless. My own freedom was within reach, one more step towards a conscious solitude.

With time, I locked myself inside my mind, where I watched its most alluring projections. A crazy world of a thousand thoughts followed by silence. I did not talk to myself. I barely spoke at all. Sometimes I reached ahead, imagining what it would be like to arrive at the finish line. Would anyone be waiting for me there? Then my eyes would drown in a salty pool through which I saw a road so distant that I could only dry them with the trembling sigh of one conscious of time: ‘Maybe one day, but not just yet…’

When they ask me what I felt and what I lacked during that year alone, I think about what I feel now, and what I miss about that life so true; when my heart used to beat to the rhythm of desire and adventure, not to someone else’s vision forced upon me. I needed the immeasurable space to feel and breathe, and with each new day I was more hungry for it.

When I could cram nothing more into the archives of my own mind, I started taking pictures of the simplest, most inconspicuous things and situations. Never before had I lived such an intense and worthy life. These hardest moments are buried under memories so ostensibly insignificant: bathing under waterfalls, or watching the Northern Lights dance in the sky while lying on a frozen lake wrapped in fluff to my nose, or the first rays of sunshine after months of heavy clouds, or the juiciness of berries in August, wallowing in them due to vitamin deficiency, or the taste of smoked reindeer heart, or of fish caught with my bare hands, fried in butter with its roe, or the red meat of a capercaillie, or a trout cooked with an avocado gifted by another wanderer.

Nature was for me and I was its child. I knew that by isolating myself, hiding away from her unquestionable strength, I would always be on her margins, insulted and graced by her. I would be reprimanded and corrected, so I humbly listened until I learned to talk to her. I became her reflection. When Nature froze, I froze with her. When she awoke from winter’s long sleep, to rejoice with the arrival of spring, I also felt life rushing back to me. I could neither stop nor tame Time, since I was in its embrace. Before that first summer came to an end, I felt that Time walked beside me. We existed in harmony. Time, Nature and me.

I was more than an animal living each day of its journey. I was the rain and the frost and a hardened stone. A wave of disturbed lake and a breaking sheet of cracking ice. A gust of wind, madly dancing on its surface. A sharp-edged canyon and a bottomless abyss, the scream of my own consciousness echoing within. A cool shroud of mist flowing down from the peaks and a mighty massif of the old and cracked glacier of Jotunheimen. I was autumn and a rainbow. A clear drop of dew frozen on a leaf and the rushing current of a river, which will stop for nothing until it stops itself. Like Time, I was unstoppable. I was flowing water, which carves its way ahead, I was Nature and each of its many faces. I was the clock and I was Time. I had nothing and needed nothing. I was life.


First published in Sidetracked Volume 11

Johnny Wild first described his 5,000km, human-powered journey as ‘The Great Scandinavian Traverse’, only hiking, packrafting, skiing, canoeing, or running. Starting at Lindesnes lighthouse, Norway, at the country’s southernmost point, Johnny hiked across the Hardangervidda plateau, and the Jotunheimen mountains, taking in Galdhøppigen, Scandinavia’s highest summit, before heading east towards Sweden. Winter came and he donned skis and continued through Gallivare, Karasjok, and Tana, toward his next destination, Cape Nordkinn, the northernmost point on mainland Europe. He then turned south en route to Helsinki, the capital of Finland, and skied to Petsikko and onwards into the Hammastunturi Wilderness Area.

His intention was to continue from here by portable canoe to Kuusamo, but his gear was stolen en route and he couldn’t continue as planned. Instead Johnny decided to run the final 900km to Helsinki without any support or accommodation. Completing a marathon a day, he reached Helsinki on August 29th, 2017, becoming the first man to traverse the Scandinavian Peninsula under human power.

Johnny Wild • @versatilith // Dariusz Bruhnke • @darolila

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