Peter Freuchen spent the winter of 1907 alone in the dark. A junior member of a Danish scientific expedition to northern Greenland, he was, in his own words, “just past 20, full of a lust for novel adventures,” and so, “like a fool,” he volunteered to spend the season manning a remote weather station. As wolves slaughtered his dogs and the icy condensation of his breath caused his cabin’s frozen walls to creep inward, his thoughts turned “sterile and unattractive” and he began having extended conversations with his cutlery. But the ordeal did not break him, for Freuchen had fallen in love with the Arctic.
Freuchen is the subject of Reid Mitenbuler’s “Wanderlust,” an attempt to reconcile the contradictions of, as Mitenbuler writes, “a highly sociable person who, somewhat inexplicably, was drawn to some of the most isolated places on Earth.” Mitenbuler paints Freuchen as the rare explorer who saw the world’s remote corners not as territory to be conquered but as a place to call home. Although narratively clumsy, it is a charming portrait of a man who traveled the world with an open mind, whose natural warmth never faltered in the cold.
