“This is an excellent article, Pumpkin. Please read it!” Mikael calls out from the bedroom as I step into the house, knocking the snow off the most enormous boots I’ve ever worn. I just took a dark 3pm stroll around his snowy, forest village in Darlana, Sweden. I’ve been here less than 24 hours.
“Of course, I’ll read it!” I call out. I have consumed everything Mikael has recommended in this last year: from books about documentary filmmaking, polar expedition training, hours-long podcasts on the science of happiness, and more recently monk stories of the spiritual quest variety. It’s all tangential to my passion, too; which is, simply, living fully.
“You will relate to this story after we’ve gone to the mountains,” he calls out as I hang up my coat.
I walk into the room, a time capsule of the 70s here in rural Sweden, a house he hopes to inherit from his recently deceased Aunt Dagmar. He’s propped up on his daughter’s mouse stuffie, “It’s perfect for my head. I’ll bring it into the mountains, too.”
He’s removed the frilly lampshade to read this old National Geographic article, also from the 70s, that he recently received as a gift from another polar explorer. It’s about Naomi UemuraI’s solo voyage to the North Pole, a target Mikael himself is set on, in time. Soon he’ll cross the Greenland Icecap, his second attempt.
“This era of Nat Geo photography inspired me big time when I was younger,” I said as I worked the lighting and snapped this photo of him.
“You and the rest of us.” He says.
Mikael and I are 19 years apart. When I was a fetus, he was beginning his earth-crossing cycling trips. And when I was starting my cycling trips in my 20s, he was starting his Arctic exploration in Siberia in his 40s. Now, I’m in my 40s and here I am.
Photo by Michael Julius
Let’s go try on your Arctic gear, love.” And we trundle down to his basement full of expedition gear.
He smiles warmly, “You will love it,” standing in his long johns and silver house slippers amidst the disarray of fuel canisters, ropes, bindings, sleds, poles, clips, and tech.
After a bit of sock trials, they fit!
“These boots have crossed Greenland,” he says. Here we go, another year together!
Gofeetgo 
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