A unique kind of training experience

A summer ‘break’ abroad forges love of work – and adventure

By Jim Leonardo

Dr. Wexler, wearing his Phillips Academy Andover prep school letter sweater, stands at the bow of the Daniel.

Anglers are notorious for spinning tales about their catches, but few will ever top the true big-fish story of ASPS Life Member and ASMS past President Andy Wexler, MD, Pacific Palisades, Calif., who spent the summer of 1972 with five Dartmouth ski teammates on a commercial fishing boat north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland.

For three months, Dr. Wexler removed himself from civilization and disconnected from communication with home in an environment where you ate what you killed or caught; where you could be summoned to the icy waters literally at any hour (the midnight sun at the top of the world allows for such work hours); and where he and his friends were once deposited in the remote Greenland tundra where they had to hunt to keep food in their bellies. The excursion culminated in a grueling encounter with a 40-ton humpback whale in the Davis Strait.

“It was a summer ‘break’ consisting of brutal, physical labor,” Dr Wexler recalls. “Three of us were Outward Bound instructors and all were very accomplished woodsmen, but every day we felt seriously challenged.”

Crewing with a classmate

The adventure was set into motion when Lars, a Dartmouth teammate and Greenland native, asked if Dr. Wexler and four other teammates on the Dartmouth ski team would work as crew that summer on one of two fishing boats owned and operated by Lars’ father. Days later, the young men boarded a flight to Copenhagen, and then to U.S.-controlled Sondstrom Air Base in Sonder Strong Ford, Greenland.

“The villages in Greenland are isolated, and there’s no good way to get to them,” Dr. Wexler says. “Travel on the islands – where many villages sit – in the winter is done through dog sled or snowmobile; when the ice breaks up in the summer, it’s by boat. A third method is by helicopter, which we did, but we had to camp on the tundra for three days before the weather allowed it to fly.”

The chopper flew Lars and his American teammates through the fjords to a village named Sukkertoppen but known to locals as Maniitsoq – “the Hard Place” – on the coast of the Davis Strait, a small parcel of livable island inhabited by about 2,000 people in little cottages built upon rock and snow, along with a few government buildings and a nearby fish factory. Dr. Wexler and his friends were taken to a small cottage, where they would live while working on the Daniel, a wooden, 44-foot fishing boat.

“The non-Greenlandic population included a Danish schoolteacher, doctor and a few merchants, but the locals had never seen Americans before,” he recalls. “They were extremely lovely, friendly and open to us – in spite of the language barrier. The local language is Danish, but on the boat they spoke the native Greenlandic language of Kalaalisut. In order to communicate on the boat, we had to go from English to Danish to Kalaalisut. It would’ve been impossible without Lars translating for us.”

Suffice to say, communication is important on a commercial fishing boat, as the profession ranks among the world’s most dangerous.

“We were on a small boat rolling in the waves, with fish blood all over the deck that made it quite slippery,” Dr. Wexler tells PSN. “There were winches and net haulers pitching back and forth overhead and sharp knives everywhere. If you went overboard in that water, by the time the boat came around to pick you up, it would be too late. You don’t have much survival time in below-freezing salt water infused with ice. That’s what we worked in for hours.

“It’s brutal, dangerous, cold and hard work – all of us were very strong, young guys and serious athletes – and after the first few weeks of this, we thought we were going to die,” he laughs. “We wore long johns and woolens with oil skins over those, and thin, wool gloves with which we pulled-up heavy nets – each one taking a few hours. Then we’d have six to 13 tons of codfish on board, which five guys had to clean by hand.”

Once done, the boat returned to shore and the fish were transferred to a Danish processing plant. The Americans were paid a percentage of each catch, which allowed Dr. Wexler to pay for airfare for the trip with about $600 to spare. As the hours on the job accumulated, so too did the difficulty.

“The hours are: You fish when it’s time to fish,” he says. “Because we were in the Arctic Circle, the sun was up for 24 hours, and with daylight all the time, we’d work 16-20 hours straight. Between nets, we’d crash in the bunk room below the deck in the bow of the boat. We’d catch sleep when we could, eat when we could and work when the captain said it’s time to fish.

“It’s a very hard life; if you want breakfast, you catch it,” Dr. Wexler adds. “You survive on fish and hardtack, a biscuit made from flour, water and salt. We’d be out on the water sometimes 48 hours at a time. When we had a break, we’d take advantage of social events in the village. But when the captain called you back – whatever time of day or night – you report to the boat and work.”

The hard road to acceptance

Quick to learn and adapt to the lifestyle, Dr. Wexler and his friends eventually earned the respect of the locals, he says.

“I got pretty good at cleaning fish,” he notes. “I could clean a 40-pound cod in under 10 seconds and with three knife strokes. Salmon could take a little longer.”

It was one particular incident, however, that cemented the reputation of the college students as hard, capable workers. A Greenlander who was exiled from the community once chewed out the boat’s captain for putting foreigners on his boat.

“He lived alone for years by the side of an isolated fjord in a single room, old-style Greenlandic house made of tundra sod,” Dr. Wexler says of the angry resident, known as Ole, who had actually been found guilty of murder years earlier. The legal code at that time only allowed for a forced relocation to remote Greenland instead of jail.

“He survived by hunting and fishing, and through the good will of the community – people would leave him necessities such as bullets and oil for his lamps, allowing him to maintain his lonely existence,” Dr. Wexler explains. “One day, our boat was fishing in his fjord, so we stopped to deliver supplies. He looked ancient – though I’m sure he was much younger than he looked – and was tough as reindeer sinew. After seeing us, he began to berate the captain in the native language. Lars told us later that Ole reprimanded him for having foreigners crew his boat instead of Greenlanders. But by that time, we’d been there a month and had gotten up-to-speed. The captain told Ole: ‘They eat and drink like us, they sleep like us, they laugh like us and they work hard. They are just like us.’ At that moment, we felt like we had become Greenlandic fishermen.”

That approval spilled into the local scene.

“We were initially accepted solely because we were the guests of a prominent fisherman, but then they saw we were like them in many ways,” Dr. Wexler says. “They invited us to everything; the Greenlandic Innuit culture is very hospitable, due to its roots in survival culture. Everyone’s dependent upon helping one another to survive in such a harsh environment.”

The children in particular found the American travelers fascinating.

“We were such oddities that we became like the ‘Pied Piper’ – hordes of children would follow us all day and crowd around our cottage windows, watching us constantly,” Dr. Wexler remembers. “We were given local names, as well. One American became ‘the bearded one’ or ‘muskox,’ and for some reason I was ‘Ajortaussuak,’ which translates to ‘the big, bad one” – I think because I have a good sense of humor and fooled around a lot.”

A surprising ‘score’

As integrated as Dr. Wexler and his friends became, no one expected that the Americans would help bring home one of the biggest scores of the summer: a whale.

“This was a big deal, bringing in a 45-foot humpback,” Dr. Wexler says. “Whales feed the village for a long time through the skin, meat and blubber they provide – they smoke it and then put into the permafrost to keep.

“That day, we had two boats out: the Daniel, and a second boat that had two harpoons aboard that were shot from a cannon,” he adds. “The Daniel had a crow’s nest about 40 feet above the deck, and one of the crewmen saw the whale from there. The second boat took over with its harpoons and got a hit – I saw the harpoons later, and although they were thick iron, they were twisted like pretzels from the impact.”

Dr. Wexler remembers the process of bringing down a 45-foot whale as “brutal” and says he felt terrible about it.

“It’s not a quick process; they drag the boat and sometimes they dive,” he notes. “These are highly intelligent animals. On the other hand, it was going to feed an entire village for an extended period, so I understand that need. However, I’m not at all a supporter of commercial whaling; they should be protected from that.”

Both sighting and scoring hits on whales are extremely difficult, but the real work begins after towing it to shore.

“A 45-foot whale weighs about 40 tons, so we cut 35 tons of meat and blubber from this animal,” he recalls. “I was inside the whale – and literally treading intestines to keep from drowning in the peritoneal cavity.

“We were processing the whale for three straight days and nights; we used large knives to make the cuts and big hooks to pull off blanket pieces of the external blubber and skin,” Dr. Wexler says. “We cut huge chunks of the red meat, which is below the blubber layer, and on this little island we piled 7-foot stacks of meat with huge slabs of blubber and skin. When we got hungry, we took hunks of the skin and chewed that; the belly skin, which is several inches thick, is a delicacy. We ate it raw with a sliver of white blubber. It has the consistency of inner tube, but it was tasty. The women also boiled a lot of meat in big pots so we could eat while we worked.”

Word of this unprecedented catch spread quickly.

“That summer, three large whales were taken on the west coast of Greenland – one of which was ours,” he says. “When we traveled up the coast afterward people would say: ‘Oh, you caught a whale this summer.’ It’s a small community, so everyone knew what was going on. Smaller whales weren’t that rare; humpback whales are much larger, infrequently seen and more difficult to catch. Add the fact that five American guys were on the crew, and it became a real rarity.”

Growing up quickly

There were plenty of challenges awaiting these five Americans, but none involved “roughing it” more than the 10 days spent in the rain on a thin tundra far from the village and situated between the ocean and the ice cap. Each year, Lars or his father would spend time on the tundra in order to bring back meat that would help the family through the coming winter. That summer, the task fell to the Dartmouth teammates.

“When the boat dropped us off, all we had was a kayak, two rifles, our oil skins, a few fish nets, a leaky tent – and no food,” Dr. Wexler notes. “In the beginning, all we ate was fish. After five days in the freezing rain, we bagged a reindeer. Once we found the herd, we crawled on our belly for two hours to get in range because they’d easily see someone standing. Then one guy flushed them to the rifle side and that was it.

“We carried this reindeer, which weighed several hundred pounds, for five hours back to camp, where we built a smoker and hung that meat and several pounds of fish we’d caught,” he adds. “After 10 days, we packed it all up – and the family had some winter meat supplies.”

The work in Greenland was the most demanding ever required of Dr. Wexler, but it prepared him for plastic surgery – and the rest of life.

“I arrived as a 19-year-old entirely cutoff from his parents by thousands of miles and no communication system except the mail,” he says. “It very much led me to develop my own self-sufficiency – because we were responsible for our own safety, lives and livelihood. The ability to face great challenges and overcome them – even though I was exhausted – just added to my self-confidence. My subsistence was entirely within my own hands as I faced challenges of culture, work and the persistent cold, discomfort and physical exhaustion that I had to conquer daily.”

Though that kind of experience is not required for a career in plastic surgery, Dr. Wexler says the fortitude gained from his time in the Arctic Circle prepared him for plastic surgery residency.

“Doing gross anatomy on a whale and working those types of hours with that hard, physical work set me up to be a surgeon in many ways,” he says. “It taught me a lot of discipline and how to endure a lot, and it gave me additional mental strength. I also gained 10 pounds of muscle, because it was a full-protein diet on top of a ‘weight workout,’ all day, every day.”

It also forged his still-thriving adventurous spirit.

“I’ve been to about 60 countries and worked in roughly 20 of them in plastic surgery,” Dr. Wexler says. “I’ve climbed mountains all over the world, including Kilimanjaro, I’ve hiked the jungles of Borneo after traveling up-river by dugout canoe, I’ve floated the Amazon in a canoe and I’ve completed the Annapurna (Nepal) base camp trek. I’ve been in some of the world’s most remote areas, but Greenland was the beginning of my true love of doing that.

“While working on the boat in a highly dangerous occupation, the decisions I made could literally be the difference between life and death,” he adds. “For the first time in my life, I was totally independent and free.”