“Expeditions are less complicated than people think.”
Here I am again standing in the Swedish sun, after being driven and courted to a new idyllic countryside to haul two tires for 3-4 hours with my man, Arctic athlete, Mikael Strandberg.
Before getting started we ate a plate of pastries in the picture perfect garden of a hundreds-of-years old Skåne cottage. Flowers exploding and waving in the breeze.
“These pastries are straight from my childhood,” he says. Eating a plate of four pastries before training is not our usual, but he makes every day with me a celebration, a holiday.
The way he loves me, the doting details, the gratitude, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and nor is being in a relationship with a professional explorer for that matter.
To be clear, Mikael is doing the tire hauling over logs, mud, and roots. I’m hiking at a clip or running for 20 min at a time. 9 miles today all told. I’m trying to push myself as much as he is but it’s impossible.
Standing in the Swedish fields waiting for him to catch up with his two tires, I’m taking it all in, my double life, and I’m empty of thought, feeling at peace.
As outdoors people we need to tire ourselves in big open places, it’s how we deal with life. For me, my life is in big flux and I’m just about through the hardest part…
Of hard parts, Mikael is off to Greenland soon to cross its width, following in the ski tracks of the father of the polar voyage and his hero, Frithof Nansen. “It’s a true sea to sea crossing,” Mikael says, of over 600km, hauling a sled wearing skis or crampons with 30 days of food and supplies; sleeping each night in a tent in the middle of the second largest sheet of ice in the world, the Greenland Ice Cap.
“What do you look forward to most?” I ask at a cafe, on our final morning together as he indulges me with another round of rare, but celebratory coffee and cake.
“The time away from all the modern complications. Nothing but the hard work.”
He looks at me longingly before I leave yet again. With so much to figure out across two continents in order to bring our lives together, with his two film projects, and his daughter’s eye disease, with our divorces and co-parenting relations, with my new career on its natal breaths, life is its own day to day expedition.
He stares off into the city rain as people rush by in varying moods of urban self-containment. “These polar expeditions are far less complicated than people think.”
Perhaps! And a good enough reason to savor and celebrate all the in between complications we can manage.
