7/27/2019 The Latest Dreams of Barbara Hillary, the First African-American Woman to Travel to the North Pole | The

to the North Pole | The New Yorker

Culture Desk

The Latest Dreams of Barbara Hillary,

the First African-American Woman to
Travel to the North Pole
By Lauren Collins July 26, 2019

Photograph by Zachary Murray / Big Mongolia Travel

he last time I heard from Barbara Hillary, she had just got back to Arverne,
T Queens, from Longyearbyen, Norway. This was in 2007; she was seventy- ve, and
I was twenty-seven. I don’t remember how we initially got in touch, and neither does
Hillary. My very strong suspicion is that she called me up and launched into some long,
entertaining explanation of how she was about to become the rst African-American
woman to travel to the North Pole. A month before she was due to leave, I went to see
Hillary at her gym in Rockaway Park. There she was, pumping iron, slogging away on
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the treadmill, and fretting about how she was going to raise the remaining nine
thousand dollars that she needed to make the trip, which would require eight to ten
hours a day of cross-country skiing. This was before Kickstarter and GoFundMe.
Hillary was sending letters around cold, without much success. “Mayor [Michael]
Bloomberg referred me to the Department for the Aging, which sent a form letter of
things I could do in the senior center,” she told me. “Mister, don’t you get it? If I’m
going to the North Pole, why the hell do I need a senior center?”

Hillary was a Talk of the Town

. That much was clear. In March, 2007, I wrote a Talk of the Town
story about her, and
story readers responded enthusiastically, making
contributions to the project (someone even sent a lucky two-dollar bill) and tracking its
status. Hillary reached the top of the world a little more than a month later, on April
23rd. “I have never experienced such sheer joy and excitement,” she said in a second
story I wrote, that May. “I was screaming, jumping up and down, for the rst few
story
minutes.”

After a twelve-year absence, Hillary popped up in my in-box earlier this year. Christina
Hodson—a screenwriter and producer in Los Angeles, who got to know Hillary
through a friend—was writing on her behalf, to let me know that Hillary was planning
a trip to Outer Mongolia. Hodson is hoping to make a documentary about Hillary’s
life. (I would watch that!) She ran through the itinerary: Hillary would meet a group of
nomads whose way of life is being threatened by the deserti cation of their steppes,
spend a day with Kazakh rug makers, give a talk at a village school. “She will also visit a
few of the region’s eagle-huntresses to learn rsthand how women have begun to break
into the traditionally all-male custom,” Hodson wrote in her e-mail. Then she was
heading north to see a reindeer.

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Photograph by Zachary Murray / Big Mongolia Travel

Hillary and I got on the phone a few weeks after her return. She has a great voice:
Harlem accent, perfect diction. Talking to her took me back to what seemed like a very
different time: when New York was my North Pole, a place of bracing discovery; when
Hillary was still living in her old house on Beach Sixty-eighth Street, which was gutted
by Hurricane Sandy; when you did something amazing, took a picture, and just put it
in a box. Hillary had been awarded two honorary degrees since we’d last spoken. She’d
gone to the South Pole, too. “Montana—I went there with two friends of mine,” she
told me. “We call ourselves ‘By Invitation Only’—we don’t want to hear about your
miserable marriage, your boyfriend. You wanna talk about polar bears and the state of
the world? You’re in,” she said. I asked what she thought of the state of the world. “It
sucks,” she replied. “I think we’re hellbent on blowing ourselves up into hydrogen
particles.”

Gallagher, a global-insurance company, sponsored the Mongolia trip. Hillary said that
it had been interesting but draining. “About four weeks ago, I was so sick the doctors

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thought I was going to die,” she said. “My heart was accumulating uid in the heart
valve. I was sick while I was in Mongolia, but I kept going because there was a lot of
money that had been spent, and I had an obligation, so as long as I could stand.” She’d
own from New York to Moscow, Moscow to Mongolia. “In Moscow, the gentleman
who was handling my luggage was very nasty—he was throwing my luggage around, so
I had to tell him off,” she recalled. “The whole airport came to a screeching halt.
Apparently, they’re not accustomed to that. You could hear a ea urinate on cotton,
that’s how quiet it got.” Upon landing at the Bayan-Ölgii airport, in western Mongolia,
Hillary had been amused to nd that there were no elevators or escalators. She asked
how they got bags downstairs and someone said, “We carry them. Do you want us to
carry you?” “Hell no!” Hillary answered.

She was annoyed by the arrogance of some of her fellow-Americans, and impressed by
the politeness of Mongolian kids. “They were like the children I knew when I was
growing up,” she said. She recalled, “I had the honor of some ritual in which the oldest
person in the family cuts sheep intestines off the ankle of a child when they reach their
rst birthday. So I was saying, ‘Oh, shit, I hope this damn thing doesn’t bite!’ ” Hillary
has never married or had children. One woman she met had received a medal from the
government for giving birth nine times. “That still staggers my imagination,” Hillary
said.

She turned eighty-eight on June 12th. She did what she usually does, which is to give
gifts to the people who have been nice to her all year: her mechanic, who changes the
oil the way she wants him to; her butcher, who gives her the best cut of meat. In the
past few months, her health has not been good. She has been in and out of the hospital,
and says that she’s “skin and bones.” But she is already dreaming about her next trip.
“I’ve discovered a place, but it’s in Russia, and I have to gure out how to get
permission from the Russian government to go there,” she said. She continued, “You
see, dreams, even if they don’t come true, are important. Isn’t it great to maintain a
dream or a memory? I can close my eyes and still see the wonderful mountains in
Antarctica—contrary to public opinion, it is mountainous in places, and they’re blue-
gray, and there’s the joy of silence.” I asked if she thought the Russia trip would happen.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I nd that it’s like looking at a great dessert in the
window of a store and saying, ‘I’m going to have that.’ And if I don’t? Look at all the
people who have unbelievably boring lives, look at all the women who have been

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programmed like glori ed maids.” She waited a few seconds and added, “Am I a
hopeless dreamer, or was I born at the wrong time?”

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