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  They get such a kick out of it that they decided, one day, to see if they couldn’t find a similar reference point in the U.S. I think the idea arose just after we’d talked to the nice man from Menomonie, Wisconsin, about the sudden disappearance of his moose. Moose stories always remind me of that scene in the TV show Murphy Brown where Murphy, played by Candice Bergen, is dismissing a rumour that she might be replaced by a reporter from Canada. “Canada!” she snorts. “What do Canadians know about news? MOOSE LOST,

  MOOSE FOUND. MORE SNOW.”

  Anyway … the lost moose. It was made of fibreglass, about seven feet tall and six feet long, Terry Tilleson told us, and had been fastened to the front door of the local Moose Lodge right under the security light—only it wasn’t there any longer. Not only that, it was the second time the moose had gone AWOL, so someone in Menomonie had a thing for that particular ungulate. We were sorry about his missing moose, of course, but at the same time, we were quite taken with the name Menomonie, and since it was a moose and all that had taken us there, we wondered if Menomonie might not be the right place to anoint as our American Reading.

  Senior producer Marie Clark decided to put the question to our audience. They could nominate alternatives to Menomonie if they wished, and then we’d have one of those totally spurious web elections to determine the winner. In the end, it came down to four places: Peoria, Illinois; Normal, Illinois; Peculiar, Missouri; and Menomonie. Producer Max Paris did the counting, and on June 25, 2002, Barbara Budd proclaimed Menomonie the new official centre of the wacky universe in the U.S., with 41 percent of the vote. Luckily for her, it’s easier to pronounce than it is to spell.

  But you know, Menomonie never caught on quite the way Reading did, much to the Reading Man’s sorrow, no doubt. We might have fought harder for Menomonie if we’d known then what I’ve since learned. While trying to nail down the correct spelling of the place, I found that the beautiful city of Menomonie (population fifteen thousand) is located partially within the town of Menomonie in Dunn County, northwest Wisconsin—NOT to be confused (though it’s bound to be, isn’t it?) with Menomonee Falls, which is incorporated as a village and contains thirty-two thousand people, in northeast Wisconsin, although it’s northwest of Milwaukee. Wherever and whatever it is, Menomonie sounds like our kind of place.

  Don’t ask me if they ever found their moose; I don’t know. One thing I should add, though, is that in September 2000, I had my own Big Cabbage moment: Barbara Everingham in Wasilla, Alaska, told me about winning a local Big Cabbage contest with a specimen that weighed 105.6 pounds (47.9 kilos for the metric crowd). I was surprised that they could grow such big vegetables in the short growing season they had, but she reminded me that they also had sun 24 hours a day during the summer.

  FYI, the Big Cabbage world record holder is Bernard Lavery, formerly of Llanharry, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Wales, who grew a plant that weighed 124 pounds in 1989. In the account he posted on the Internet, Dr. Lavery says it would have weighed more but the movers kept losing pieces of it as they were hauling it to Alton Towers, 210 miles away, where the Worldwide Giant Vegetable Championships were being held that year.

  So all in all, it was a disastrous harvest. Although I broke the world record, I should have chalked up one of at least 150 lb. The huge cabbage ended up in a sorry state, with thousands of visitors poking at it over the four days that it was on exhibition. At the end of the show, I gave bits and pieces of it away as souvenirs to whoever wanted it.

  This cabbage abuse seems to have soured Dr. Lavery on growing big vegetables. According to his posting, he subsequently went to work for Sheik Zayed in Abu Dhabi and then settled in Sutton St. Edmund in Lincolnshire, England, where he grows “a few pumpkins and sunflowers for the children.”

  As of this writing, Barb Everingham’s cabbage still holds the state record in Alaska—and she didn’t feed it anything special.

  FOUR

  Tim and Colin and Julie and Yulya

  Radio that takes hot air to new heights

  It’s May 2004, and Canadian adventurer Colin Angus is telling us about a little trip he’s planning to make from Vancouver to Moscow with his friend Tim Harvey.

  CA: We’re going to be leaving from Vancouver up to Fairbanks; that’s 3,600 kilometres on the bikes. It’s going to be an interesting trip but fairly straightforward; it’s your typical sort of highway biking. And then from Fairbanks, we’ll continue down the Yukon River in a rowboat for about 1,800 kilometres to the Bering Sea and then we’ll cross the Bering Sea in a rowboat, which is about a 400-kilometre crossing, and then follow the Siberian coastline in our boat until a town called Anadyr. Then we hop onto our skis and we ski for about 800K and then back onto our bikes again.

  ML: It all sounds challenging to me—what is going to be the most challenging part, do you think?

  CA: I think the toughest part is going to be our travel in Siberia. Often people think the Bering Sea crossing is going to be the toughest, and it sounds intimidating, but we’ve really prepared for that. It’s actually fairly calm in August when we do the crossing. But Siberia itself—it’s very remote and it’s cold. We’re going through there in the middle of winter, and the average temperature is minus 50 in January. That’s the average; Winnipeg, by comparison, is minus 20, so …

  ML: That’s not good.

  CA: No, no. We’ve spent a lot of time preparing for this section, too. It’s all about having the routines in place and making sure that your equipment isn’t going to break down on you, because you can’t really take your gloves off and repair it.

  ML: How much food are you taking? How long is it going to take you, first of all—the whole trip?

  CA: The duration of the trip is going to be approximately 11 months. We’ve dropped off caches of food all the way up to Fairbanks for the cycling leg, and then we’re going to be carrying almost 4 months of provisions in our rowboat. The boat is packed: it’s got all our gear for Siberia and enough food to take us right into the heart of Siberia, and that’s pretty much when our own rations end. We’re using freeze-dried food; it’s approximately 1.2 kilograms per day per person, which is about five thousand calories, which is a lot of energy, but it’s necessary when you’re trudging through the cold conditions.

  Once we get to Irkutsk, which is where our food’s going to run out, we’ll have to start using local supplies, but it’s a lot more difficult using local provisions, because it’s things like potatoes and meat, which, when it’s minus 50 out, it’s pretty hard to chop the potatoes up, so we’ll have to do as much prep as we can before we embark from the cities or towns we purchase the food from.

  ML: You’ve made some extraordinary journeys in the past. Did you canoe down rivers in Russia before?

  CA: Yeah. Our most recent river journey was a descent of the Yenisey River, which flows through Mongolia and Siberia. The thing I like about rivers is that they offer you a unique view of the land. It’s almost like an inanimate guide taking you along, showing you all sorts of aspects of the land you’re going through, and this, in some ways, has some similarities—we are descending a river, but it’s almost like a whole bunch of expeditions thrown together.

  ML: And Tim? Has he had some experience with this kind of adventure?

  CA: Tim’s spent a lot of time in boats and kayaking. I mean, he hasn’t done any extended adventures exactly like this; the most recent trip he was on was working as a photojournalist in Central America. The most important thing, though, is to have the right kind of attitude and spirit, which Tim definitely has: it’s a combination of being tough, being able to endure the hardships that are definitely going to be encountered, but also having a passion for the outdoors, a love for the environment around you.…

  Why did they want to do this? Colin said it was to save the planet—to encourage people to mount their bikes and leave their cars at home in order to reduce greenhouse gases and slow down global warming. But I think they may be addicted to adventure. I mean, other people sell raffle
tickets or write pamphlets to save the planet; they’re not skiing across Siberia. Since Colin and Tim’s trip was sponsored in part by a satellite phone company, it was not going to be hard to contact them along the way, and we thought it would be interesting to stay in touch, but we had no idea how interesting the trip would get.

  Before they even got out of British Columbia, forest fires forced them off the road, so they bought a canoe to carry them northward. Getting across the Bering Sea in an 18-foot rowboat also proved to be more challenging than Colin had anticipated, as wind and stormy weather kept blowing them in the wrong direction and threatening to cast them into water that was cold enough, Tim said, to bring on “an ice-cream headache in your hand” if you trolled it overboard for a moment.

  This is definitely my kind of story. I’m the original armchair traveller; I love adventures, provided they’re someone else’s. I love talking to people like Tim and Colin and reading books like Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void, which is an account of a harrowing adventure Simpson and his friend Simon Yates underwent in 1985.

  Simon and Joe have just completed a first ascent of the west side of Suila Grande in the Peruvian Andes, they’re heading back down and Joe falls and breaks his leg in several places. At first, they proceed downward, with Simon and Joe roped together, Simon lowering Joe ahead of him a few hundred feet at a time. This is agonizing enough, but then Joe goes over a cliff and is caught hanging in mid-air. Simon realizes that either they will plunge to their deaths together or he can cut the rope, let Joe go and hope to save himself. He cuts the rope. He hears a yell, then nothing. Simon continues his descent and returns to base camp, feeling devastated because he has had to leave his friend for dead.

  Joe, meanwhile, lies at the bottom of a crevasse, not dead but without much hope of getting out. Miraculously, he does get out and then gets himself, broken leg and all, back down the mountain alone. It takes him three days. At the end of it, he is dehydrated and starving and half-frozen, but he is alive.

  Touching the Void is a thrilling tale of adventure and extreme peril, of human ingenuity, grit and determination. The title describes the feeling you get whenever you take a leap into the unknown, which is what we all do every time we embark on something we haven’t done before and aren’t sure we can do—starting a new job, getting married. But some people aren’t satisfied with the ordinary challenges life offers; they crave extreme challenges, and I crave the vicarious pleasure of hearing about them.

  They must be a bit crazy, though, don’t you think? These climbers and sailors and the people who get themselves perched atop a million tons of rocket fuel and blasted into space? How else to explain why a young woman would wager her future against a race into the Southern Ocean, alone aboard a 60-foot yacht in high seas and biting, gale-force winds, knowing that if you have the good fortune to come out the other end alive and in one piece, you’re still not likely to have won the race?

  That’s the race called the Vendée Globe, about which Canadian sailor Derek Lundy wrote a mesmerizing account in his book Godforsaken Sea. He was motivated to write it, he said, by the death in 1997 of fellow yachtsman Gerry Roufs, a former Olympic sailor from Hudson, Quebec, who was ploughing through a fierce South Atlantic storm in the Vendée Globe race when he lost radio contact. Roufs was never heard from again. Pieces of his boat were being collected by the Chilean navy at the very time that Derek Lundy came into the As It Happens studio to tell us about the book and the race.

  The Vendée Globe is always exciting, but the ’96/’97 race was particularly intense. There were three sailors apart from Gerry Roufs who might have been lost had it not been for some remarkable rescue operations. The most daring involved British racer Peter Goss’s rescue of Raphaël Dinelli, a French sailor whose boat capsized 1,200 nautical miles south of Australia in the same storm that killed Gerry Roufs—a “survival storm” Derek Lundy called it.

  DL: A survival storm is essentially a storm in which wind and wave have reached the point where the sailor can’t make any choices. He or she is really just hanging on, adopting storm tactics—that is, probably running off before the wind and waves. You’re really at the mercy of whatever happens. I mean, if you get through a survival storm, there’s a little bit of skill involved—well, a lot of skill involved—but there’s a heck of a lot more luck involved.

  ML: So you’re bobbing along on the ocean, just praying to God that you’ll survive it.

  DL: You’re surfing and screaming along on the ocean, praying that you’ll survive, yeah.

  ML: So they’re in this condition and Pete Goss has to turn his boat around and beat up into these gale-force winds?

  DL: He had to beat into winds that were blowing in excess of hurricane force, probably around 70 knots or so. The seas were described as anywhere from 50 to 65 feet. The Vendée Globe boats are strong, but they’re not designed to do that; they’re designed to run ahead of weather like that, not go back into it. So he really put himself into a position where he wasn’t sure whether his boat would hold together.

  Peter Goss was about 160 miles past Dinelli when he heard his distress call, and he did turn around into the howling wind. It took him two days, but he got there in time. Goss finished the race in fifth place, but he was rewarded with a hero’s welcome in France and the knowledge that he had acted nobly. Raphaël Dinelli, for his part, showing the steely determination that characterizes so many of these adventurers, entered the next two Vendée Globe competitions and, on his third try, finally made it all the way to the end. He finished the race in 12th place, 37 days after the 11th-place finisher, Anne Liardet.

  In 1997 someone also tried to save Gerry Roufs. Like Peter Goss, Isabelle Autissier reversed course and beat back toward Roufs’ last known position, but without any radio signal from Roufs’ boat, she couldn’t find him in the raging storm, nor could any of their fellow sailors in the area.

  I asked Derek Lundy why people signed on for the Vendée Globe.

  ML: Given how awful it is out there, you ask yourself, Why do they do it? Why would anybody put himself through such pain and terror and take such a beating?

  DL: That really is a good question. I think they do it for a number of reasons. First of all, they are professional sailors, and this is sort of the apogee of the profession. You know, you sail the Vendée Globe, you’ve reached the top. But there are also people who just like adrenalin; they like the thrill of coming close to death or appearing to. It must seem to them quite often that they are.

  ML: But are they crazy?

  DL: No, they’re not. I thought they might be, or I thought they were before I started talking to them and reading more about this sort of racing, but in fact, I found myself talking to people who were extraordinarily sane, calm, centred, modest people. There was nothing pretentious about them. One of them said to me once, “When you’ve been out there on the edge of the world, you know you’re insignificant; you know you’re just the ordinary human being you are; it’s impossible to think otherwise of yourself or of humans in general.”

  And I think there’s another element, too. You know, the Southern Ocean itself can be a terrible place, but it is a beautiful place in a way as well, in the sense that it probably is the last true, great more-or-less untouched wilderness on earth. So people who are out there are in a place on earth where hardly any human being living today has been. It must be a unique sensation.

  All right, but still. Forget the Vendée Globe. I have always wondered, who but a madman would willingly—willingly—expose himself to the brutal cold of Mount Everest, where if you don’t die of exposure or a fall, the altitude alone could kill you? In May 1996, several people paid a small fortune for the privilege of dying an agonizing death on the roof of the world. That season on Everest was notorious for the loss of life—8 in one day, 15 by the end of the climbing season—and people were wondering how much commercial exploitation should be permitted on the world’s highest peak.

  The traffic doesn’t seem to have diminished
. In 2005 Canadian climber Pierre Bourdeau was one of three hundred would-be Everest summiters. We spoke to him just after he’d narrowly escaped being wiped out by an avalanche that had come down on his camp on the Kumbu Glacier.

  It was 5:30 in the morning when Bourdeau was awakened by something that sounded like thunder. Two or three seconds later, his tent was being pelted by rocks and debris. He knew what was happening, and he was sure he was going to die; if the rocks didn’t kill him, he’d be buried alive in the snow. The next thing he remembers is being about a hundred metres away from where the tents had been, and alive. The tents were all destroyed, but by some miracle, he and his fellow climbers had escaped with only a few bruises.

  “We don’t know why we’re alive,” Pierre Bourdeau told us.

  “So are you done with climbing for a while?”

  “For a short time, yes.”

  Another very cold place to visit is the North Pole, which is where British adventurer David Hempleman-Adams got himself in April 1998, making him the first person to climb the highest peaks on seven continents and reach the magnetic and geographic North and South poles. He spoke to us from Resolute Bay after being air-lifted off the ice, together with his Norwegian travelling companion, Rune Gjeldnes.

  ML: How did you know you were there [at the North Pole]?

  DH: We had two systems: we had a Global Positioning System and an Argos system. So we were within three metres, actually, of the Pole. And what happens, it’s drifting all the time, and by the time the airplane the next day came in, we’d drifted off seven miles, so we had to walk through the night to get back to the North Pole again, so we went there a couple of times.

  ML: Let’s make it clear to everybody exactly what kind of an ordeal this is. Some four hundred miles on skis? … How heavy was the sled?

  DH: Mine was about 150 pounds; Rune’s was probably nearer 200.