All Alone in North Korea

A Strange Sort of Freedom

Dear Republic,

Nate Worthen reflects here on a week in the weirdest country on earth. It's an unlikely stop on our world tour, and I can't stop thinking about the skiing.

-ROL

ALL ALONE IN NORTH KOREA

Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. In 2016, I was living in a world of business processes and transaction coordination, a life measured in the increments of an escrow clock. I was two years into a commercial real estate career in Utah, a profession I had stumbled into, yet one that was beginning to yield financial rewards that felt unearned, or at least unexpected. In the world of market analysis and portfolio optimization, everything has a trajectory. For me, the sudden influx of income didn’t represent security though. It represented a pressurized need for an exit velocity.

Everyone has a different way of coping with a quarter-life crisis. Some spend their way out of it. Most people I know buy the car; I bought a ticket to the most closed-off “flight path” on the planet. I found myself staring at a website for tours into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. They offered a seven-day itinerary that included snowboarding at a remote mountain resort. As a guy who lived for the “Best Snow on Earth” of the Wasatch Front, the idea of carving turns in a hermit kingdom felt like the ultimate act of defiance against the domesticity closing in on me.

That’s because of Courtnie. We had met on Tinder, another digital frontier I used to satisfy my hunger for novelty. Our relationship had been an off-and-on circuit of high peaks and low valleys. Recently, the signal had been more “on” than “off” and I found myself in love, or at least terrified that if I continued to live a life of flying standby, she was going to move on with a more committed frequent flyer member. She was rational, loyal, and ready for a shared horizon. I was as ready as a wandering nomad could be. I even had the ring on order, but I felt a primal need for one last “last hurrah.” I needed to prove that my individual flight plan hadn’t been entirely filed away by the FAA of adulthood. I booked the trip and bought the flights, assuming a professional tour was the safest way to navigate what seemed like the riskiest country on Earth to visit. Little did I know, my plan was about as fully baked as brittle, raw pasta dropped into cold water.

The transition from the familiar to the surreal began at Beijing Capital International Airport. To enter North Korea, you first have to exit familiarity. I navigated the gargantuan terminal, past the luxury boutiques and the smell of foreign floor wax and a heavy, musky odor I couldn’t quite place, to an obscure, beige counter behind glass at the far end of the hall. I was supposed to meet my “tour group” there.

When I arrived, I looked around. I was the only person who looked like me. I was starting to understand what I had rarely experienced, that being “different” comes with a certain amount of physiological unease. I looked at the agent and asked about my group. She took my ID and slid a paper ticket through the opening at the bottom of the glass. It was a beautiful, tactile ode to the 1950s travel experience I was about to have.

“Where is the group meeting?” I asked. The agent looked at me with a confusion that I wasn’t sure was linguistic or existential. “No group. Tour for you. Party of one. Guide in Korea.”

In aviation, they talk about “landing gear failure.” As I stood there, the weight of my isolation hit me with a physical thud. I wasn’t naive. Just months earlier, an American student had been detained and returned in a vegetative state for allegedly moving a poster. Now, I was venturing into the same country without the slightest idea of what to expect or other western travelers to rely on for camaraderie.

I don’t want to overstate the importance of this moment, particularly because thirteen years earlier, I had left my familiar world as a volunteer Mormon missionary. For two years, I lived in Japan with strangers, without a command of the language, speaking to my family back home only four times in twenty-four months. That was my coming-of-age experience. Yet, standing in that Beijing terminal, this felt equally pivotal. This was a test of my internal fortitude versus my ability to safely assess risk. If I didn’t board that plane, I was backing out on myself. I would be tethered to something less than the wild I was desperate to embrace.

I sat on a blue suede chair and pulled out my phone. The “Point of No Return” was staring me in the face. I called Courtnie. The international ringtone had a haunting, rhythmic lag, like a heartbeat struggling to find its pace. When she picked up through the crackle of the Beijing connection, I told her the truth, which, frankly, hadn’t always been my practice. I was alone.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said. I could hear her parents in the background. In stark contrast to me she was at home with her family. Although he never said anything to or about me while I was on the call, I felt the silent presence of her father, a police officer and a man of immense reason and risk aversion. Her voice carried the steady frequency of a control tower trying to wave a pilot off a dangerous approach. “Nate, come home now.”

It was the most logical advice I could have received. It was also exactly what I couldn’t do. To turn back then felt like a castration of my own value system. I wanted to be the man willing to go where others wouldn’t. If I didn’t do it now, when would I? I told her I’d think about it, but even then, I think we both knew the decision was made. I walked onto that Air Koryo Tu-204 with a sense of independence that was as intoxicating as it was terrifying.

The next seven days were an exercise in “forced reverence.” I was met by two female guides who never left my side other than when I was in my hotel room. We visited the Grand People’s Study House, a cathedral of knowledge where “state-of-the-art” computers sat in rows, humming with electricity, yet remained disconnected from the global nervous system of the internet. They were monuments to what could be, frozen in what was.

The most nostalgic moment came unexpectedly at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun. As I walked through the massive sterile halls toward the glass-encased body of Kim Il Sung, I was dressed in the same dark suit and tie I had worn every Sunday for most of my life, a strange, ghostly familiarity washed over me. Having grown up in the LDS church, I had spent hundreds of hours in holy temples where a specific, hushed respect is demanded without a word being spoken. The way the light hit the stone, the synchronized movements of the crowds, the sterile, muffled noises, and the immaculately landscaped grounds, it was all eerily familiar. But here, there was no one to share the irony with. I realized then that I understood the architecture of North Korean devotion because I had been raised in a different version of it. I knew how to perform the silence.

The next day, we drove for hours toward the Masikryong Ski Resort. The weather was grey and bleak, the kind of winter day that feels universal, whether you’re in North Korea or North Dakota. This time the overcast sky felt more sobering. Along the “highway,” I saw the reality the propaganda couldn’t mask. Men, women, and children were lined up in the freezing mud, digging a trench with handheld tools, well-worn shovels and rusted pickaxes, for what the guides claimed was a new water line. It was a medieval scene framed by a socialist-realist dream.

At the resort, the paradox deepened. Masikryong has seven runs. The locals there, likely on the only visit of their lifetime, stayed on the first two beginner runs. This left the other five entirely to me. I have skied the best snow in Utah, but I have never experienced anything like the silence of those runs. It was untouched powder, a trail of authentic white silk in a country where almost everything else feels curated or inauthentic. I was a ghost on a mountain, carving turns through a landscape that felt like it shouldn’t exist. It was the closest reality I’ve ever experienced to the traditional Christian heaven…boundless, quiet, and perfectly white.

The strangest “ping” of reality came at the DMZ. I stood on a balcony looking south, and suddenly, my phone, which had been nothing more than an overpriced camera for days, erupted. The South Korean cell towers were close enough to bridge the gap. My pocket chirped and rang with days of missed texts and voicemails. The outside world was screaming at me through the “iron curtain.” I managed to fire off a single text to Courtnie to let her know I was safe before the armed guards led me away.

The “security breach” of a text message from the 21st century was too much for the 1950s-era stillness they were maintaining. I was ushered out, the chirping ghost of my real life silenced once more.

On my final full day, we visited the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum. I listened to a history of the Korean War that bore no resemblance to the one I had learned in Utah. I thought of my grandfather, who had participated in that same war as a member of a military band. I kept that fact to myself. Standing in that museum, I realized that my own “American Flight Plan” was also a scripted tour. I had been fed my own version of the “truth” my entire life, and it took a trip to the end of the world to see the seams in my own flag.

The final test of my internal fortitude was leaving the DPRK. I had purchased a book about the country’s founder, and my luggage was searched with a cold, methodical intensity. The intimidating men in uniform eventually waved me through, and I boarded the flight back to Beijing. I had survived, but I carried memories I would only be able to share through limited photos and the fragments of my own storytelling.

I looked at my hands as we crossed into Chinese airspace. I thought about the ring waiting for me in Utah and the next adventure that awaited—one that was in some ways equally dangerous and foreign, but completely different. I had gone to the most controlled place on Earth to find “freedom” one last time, only to realize that freedom isn’t the absence of a flight plan; it’s the choice of who you fly with.

My “last hurrah” was more of an emergency landing than an escape. I felt more grounded, accomplished, and truly myself than I had before the engines started. Now, a shared life of commitment felt more achievable and less daunting. It looked like a runway, cleared for takeoff.

Nate Worthen is a man of two worlds. He is a commercial real estate broker, a father of three, and a failed city council candidate. He is also an unfettered adventurist, spending weekends on an unending quest for rare, surreal moments that challenge his perspective on freedom and fortitude. Nate can be found in Providence, Utah, enjoying a life that is both suburban and exotic.

Picture: Worthen's Tourist Card