To the Last Breath
Page 9
There are plenty of neighborhoods in D.C., so the fact that she happened to live three Metro stops away from me were about 1 in 20.
Putting that all together, the odds of it happening were:
Remarkable. Less than a one-in-a-million chance. The coincidence was extraordinary; the odds of meeting on Everest and then connecting in Washington, D.C., were vanishingly small.
We walked out of the restaurant and I asked about seeing each other again.
“I’m leaving on a trip,” Gina said, staring back at me, her interest impossible to read.
That was a familiar line, I said it dozens of times myself. I would say it again now.
“I’m leaving for Antarctica. Let’s talk when we both get back to town.”
Chapter 5
COLD AND BROKEN
If a walrus had wings, it would fly like a Hercules C-130 cargo plane.
The plane lumbers through the air, propellers dragging its heavy load forward. You can feel the struggle in the cargo bay where the payload sways, the fuselage rattles as if the rivets will explode, the vibrations of the floor work through your toes up into your spine, and the four engines scream so loud that you need earplugs as thick as bullets just to muffle the sound to a low roar.
For the last three hours I’ve been confined in a seat that flips down from the wall of the plane. The plane’s vibrations are shaking my bones; I’m past aching and we still have two more hours to go. We’re riding along with cargo that’s being delivered to a camp about a hundred miles deep into the manta ray–shaped continent of Antarctica. Among other things, the camp serves as a depot to stockpile supplies, some of which will then be taken further along to the South Pole itself. We won’t be going all the way to the Pole; we’re here to climb Vinson Massif, the highest mountain on the continent.
The remoteness of Antarctica can be measured in the price of a barrel of oil. A barrel that costs $40 in Santiago, Chile, costs $400 at the depot, and costs $4,000 at the South Pole. The increase scales with the cost of transport, and transport is pricey; the cost of spinning the propellers on a Hercules is roughly $10,000 per hour. We could never afford to book this flight on our own, and that’s why we’re traveling with a load of goods headed for the depot.
Sitting across from me is Jim Williams. Serene, head rolled back against the fuselage, he is inconceivably restful, looking like he could keep calm through any storm. In fact, he can. He did just that on our last climb, Mount Everest. That was just six months ago, and this mountain will be item #5 on my eleven-item climbing and surfing list.
There is no runway in Antarctica, but over the years of flying here, pilots have identified a long thick strip of ice that can handle the bulk of a Hercules.
The plane rolls to a stop and with a grinding of gears the back panel of the plane begins to slowly drop down onto the ice, forming a ramp off the cargo bay. As we watch the door swing down, inch by inch, light starts to fill the bay. Before we can see the continent, we can feel it. A subzero wind blows into the hold, and we take in our first lungful of chill Antarctic air. I exhale in a thick, visible cloud.
Antarctica’s history is replete with tales of disaster, desperation, and triumph.
The first documented spotting of Antarctica was from the bow of a boat, in 1820. This was the one and only time in recorded history that a continent was truly discovered. There were no indigenous tribes here, no nomads who had passed through first. There is good reason for that, of course. The continent is utterly uninhabitable; there is nothing here that could sustain life: no fuel, no food, and despite having the largest amount of freshwater in the world, there isn’t a drop readily available—it is all frozen up in mile-thick ice.
That glimpse of Antarctica in 1820 turned out to be the safest way to explore the continent: at a distance. Over the next century the continent brought misery to most anyone who traveled here. Just two years later, the first group of travelers spent a winter here. Not by choice, but due to shipwreck.
It wasn’t until 1902 that a group would travel here with the intent of planting a flag at the South Pole. The Pole had been part of the public imagination for decades, but, like all expeditions, no team could hope to be successful until they solved the grueling logistics of pushing hundreds of pounds of gear and food across a thousand miles of ice.
The first attempt failed. The team, led by Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, pressed on through the subzero temperatures until they were overcome by snow blindness, frostbite, and scurvy. They turned back, still hundreds of miles short of the Pole.
Like customers in a ticket line, more expeditions followed, one after the other, often meeting with calamity. These expeditions weren’t motivated by the possibility of wealth; this wasn’t like Columbus being dispatched from Spain in the hopes that he would bring riches back to the kingdom.
Antarctica had no gold or coffee, no spices or beads. It offered only one thing: a story. No matter the characters or narrator, Antarctica always provided a tale of adventure about dog sleds, frostbite, and thinning rations, guaranteed to end in either tragedy or glory. Every nation that supported an expedition wanted that story to climax with their countryman’s boot touching the South Pole first. They wanted to boast that it was the grit and will born out of the soil of their great nation that allowed the explorer to triumph over the calamities that the Pole was sure to deliver.
Robert Scott desperately wanted that story to be his to tell; he had to reach the Pole first. Buoyed by completely unfounded determination, he returned to Antarctica less than ten years after his previous failed expedition.
Like me, he too would step onto the continent and exhale in a thick, visible cloud and look out over the vast sheet of ice with confidence, a goal clearly fixed in his mind.
Scott’s story would end in utter disaster. And his ultimate fate, his final desperate minutes, would lead to a turning point in my life.
The back bay of the Hercules rattles down onto the ice and I take my first step onto the continent. The first thing I see is completely unexpected, bizarre, like staring in a mirror and seeing someone else’s reflection. Here, at the most lifeless, desolate, frigid place on the planet, where there is no possibility of warfare, there standing in front of me, is a Chilean soldier.
Who could he possibly be planning to shoot? Who is his enemy here? As it turns out, nowhere on the planet, no matter how desolate, is beyond politics.
“Chile thinks there might be something worth owning here,” scoffs one of the Hercules pilots.
The Antarctic Treaty commits that no country will claim territory on the continent of Antarctica. Instead, the continent is recognized by most countries as a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science. There are detractors. Despite being an original signatory of the treaty, Chile now claims territory in Antarctica, and apparently they go to extremes to let the world know.
“I hear Chile flies pregnant women down here to give birth and claim citizenship,” the pilot explains to me.
That could be a myth, but it’s not hard to believe when you see their soldiers wandering around this desolate ice sheet. This has to be the most thankless assignment in Chile. These soldiers probably joined up hoping for a posting in sunny Santiago, but after one unshined boot or a sloppy salute they ended up in this frigid wasteland. Then again, I’m here by choice, and that probably is just as surprising to them.
Our stop here is brief. We swing on our packs, and start hauling out our duffel bags jammed full of supplies. Our next step is to go still deeper into the continent to a location with a patch of ice that is too short and narrow for the Hercules to reach. We’ll get there by a Twin Otter, the four-seat prop plane that serves like a taxi to glacier climbers the world over.
Two hours later, the Twin Otter’s skis glide to a stop in the snow and we climb out of the cabin onto the glacier at the foot of Vinson Massif.
“I’ll be back in five days, if the weather’s good,” the pilot shouts over the hammering of the engine.
This remote continent has become even more desolate now. There are no soldiers, no planes or pilots, no other tracks in the snow but ours. With no possibility of a rescue in the event of a calamity, we now have minimal margin for error.
I look down at my watch and realize that time no longer has any meaning. The sun never sets during the Antarctic summer, daytime is endless, and hours can pass without consequence.
In fact, Antarctica is a massive sensory deprivation tank. There is almost nothing for the senses to work with here. I scroll through my senses, searching for something, anything, for them to grasp on to:
Smell
There is no scent here. There is no smell of fresh-cut grass, no aromatic flower or waft from a neighbor’s barbeque. The ground that could support vegetation or a grill is buried under a mile of dense, odorless ice.
Sound
The glacier is quiet, lifeless. Barks, chirps, a car horn, the cool tone of a muted trumpet, the whisper of a friend in a darkened movie theater, all of that is the sound of another, distant continent. Here there is silence—penetrating, evident, and heavy.
Sight
It is white, everywhere. The ice, snow, and sky all blend together in a blank colorless canvas. There isn’t even a nighttime to offer some variety. The sun sits just above the horizon line and rotates around us, casting a long shadow off the contours of the mountain that rises ahead of us.
Touch
There is nothing here to touch. That’s for the best. With temperatures of forty below zero, any exposed skin would freeze in seconds. And so I am encased in a high-tech armor, further disconnecting me from an environment that offers nothing more than wind, cold, and the challenge of scaling an ice-encrusted mountain.
All climbers assemble their own suit of armor, and I’m benefiting from the most advanced threads that science has to offer.
My protection against the forty-below temperature starts with a base layer of polypropylene. The fibers of the material are thin yet more absorbent than a kitchen sponge. If you put a drop of water on it, you’ll see the water spread out as wide as a pancake. By spreading out, the material allows your body heat to evaporate the water quickly. Even if you sweat like a horse, polypro can keep you dry to the touch.
Cotton, by contrast, is the devil’s fabric. It takes longer to dry, draws more heat out of the body, and leaves you cold and wet. When I’m on an expedition, my cotton T-shirts stay clean and folded, in a drawer back at home where they belong.
The next layer, over the polypro, provides insulation against the subzero temperatures and takes a couple different forms: fleece or down. Fleece traps anywhere from 30 percent to about 80 percent of your body heat. So you wear it when you’re active to vent some of your heat to ensure that you don’t get too hot. Overheating would sap your strength, like sitting in a sauna.
If you’re inactive, loafing in a tent, then you need to retain more of your body heat to stay warm. In that case, a puffy down jacket is the ideal choice with the down feathers trapping air and retaining up to 95 percent of your body heat. But there is a risk to down. If it gets wet, it loses all ability to keep you warm. The feathers clump, soaking up the water, and the insulating air layer vanishes, dissipating the heat and leaving you fully exposed to the cold and wind.
The insulating layer for my feet gets special attention. My toes have been highly susceptible to frostbite ever since I spent twenty-four hours in the death zone on Everest. My boots have a thick layer of closed-cell foam, similar in concept to the material used on the tiles of the Space Shuttle to insulate its fuselage against the temperature swings of reentry.
My final layer is a shell that armors me against the eighty-mile-an-hour wind gusts and waterproofs me from the swirling snow. A lightweight, completely waterproof, and breathable shell requires some high-tech trickery. The critical, enabling scientific fact is that a drop of water is vastly larger than a molecule of water vapor—a basketball compared to a BB. So a material, say Gore-Tex, has pores small enough that they allow vapor, excess body heat, to escape while keeping large water droplets from getting in. In fact, the pores in a waterproof shell are typically twenty thousand times smaller than a raindrop of water but one thousand times bigger than a water vapor molecule.
All that gear is jammed into my sled, a runnerless toboggan, sealed shut with ropes and bungee cord. The toboggan has a harness attached, the sort of thing that an Antarctic explorer in the 1900s would have slung onto a workhorse or sled dog. We have neither of those. We’re the pack animals.
Jim and I each clip a harness around our waist and begin pulling our loads up the mountain.
I confess, I’m a lousy sled dog; I don’t get a thrill out of hauling gear.
I would never qualify to be a lead husky, that snarling dog with harness taut, eager for the day’s haul. I would take my place in the second row, or third, reluctant to be hooked on to the line, looking longingly at the sledge, wondering why I couldn’t ride on it instead. And that night, after gnawing our meals down to the bone, while the other dogs dreamed of the next day’s haul, their legs jerking in running motions, I would dream of a paw massage.
At least a real sled dog would end the day’s haul with a slab of meat. Mine ends with Cup-a-Soup and a bag of dehydrated stroganoff.
For the next five days, we have astounding luck: we get day after day of clear weather. It is windy and relentlessly cold, reaching only twenty below at the warmest, but no snow falls that would pin us in place. We climb uninterrupted, making camps to rest along the way to the summit.
Our first camp sits on an exposed open expanse of ice. As we unclip from our harnesses, the wind is beating on us, swirling and whipping around, lashing at our backs and gear. A tent can’t withstand these stinging gusts. So we pull saws and shovels off our sleds and start carving blocks out of the ice beneath our feet.
We slice out ice block after ice block, each about the size of a breadbox, and stack them to make a four-foot-high protective horseshoe of ice that rims our tent. The wind can now blow as hard as it wants—it can bend its head and bull-rush our camp—and our tent, cushioned by the wall, will stand strong.
The masonry work leaves us drained, and we crawl into the tent and start unloading food. One thing we don’t have to haul with us is water. We’re surrounded by it; 70 percent of all of the earth’s freshwater is locked up in the ice of Antarctica. With a snap of a lighter and the burst of flame from a camp stove we can melt all the water we need.
Camp stoves are temperamental things. Despite careful cleaning, they still sputter, choke, and wheeze. They have these bouts of asthma at the worst possible times. If you have a comfortable rest day in the tent, the stove lights promptly, pushing out a stout blue flame. But every so often, when you are cold and depleted, energy draining away, your body desperate for water and food, the stove seizes up, gasps, and lies quiet.
On this occasion, the stove lights promptly, reserving its seizure for a more desperate hour.
We’ve picked this time to bed down because the sun, perpetually rotating around us just above the horizon line, is about to disappear behind the mountain, taking the temperature down with it. Since time is meaningless here, we decided that when the mountain blots out the sun, we’ll call it 10 P.M. I drop my head down on a sack stuffed with clothes and gear and wake hours later to a light-filled tent. Two days later I’ll stand on the summit.
I wish I could say that the view from the summit was captivating in the clear Antarctic skies. But to me, it wasn’t compelling. Unlike other mountaintops I’ve stood on, there were no sharp ridgelines or granite faces to hold the eye, no green valley in the distance or glacier contoured like the raked sand of a golf trap. We stared out over an endless sheet of crumpled white paper. It was another summit; another place to t
urn around. Box checked.
Other people could find beauty in that view, I’m sure. I lived in rural Illinois for nearly seven years and I know that there are farmers who can look out over the miles of uninterrupted stalks and be filled with a sense of wonder, overcome by nature’s splendor. I just see corn.
The good weather continued on our descent and the Otter picked us up, as planned, five days after dropping us off. Despite being in the most remote and unforgiving place on the planet, it seemed that our good luck was holding and that we would get out of Antarctica and back home quicker than any other climb I had done before.
But our luck was about to change.
There are storms, and then there are wrathful, unforgiving tempests, with the fury to bend steel and the determination to unearth your deepest fears. If there is a measure to the severity of these tempests, it can be revealed by the Hercules cargo plane. The Herc is designed to land in any conditions the world can hurl at it, having the tenacity and slow steady power to punch through the teeth of a storm, land, and haul away a load.
When the Otter landed us back at the depot, we got the news. The Herc crew canceled their supply flight due to an incoming storm. That could mean only one thing: the approaching blizzard would be impenetrable.
Every generation has its memorable competitors: Magic vs. Bird, Ali vs. Frazier, Sea Biscuit vs. War Admiral. In 1911, it was Robert Scott vs. Roald Amundsen to see who would be the first to reach the South Pole. Both were trying to bring the prestige home for their respective countries, Scott for England and Amundsen for Norway.
There was talk of scientific work along the way—mapping, cataloguing, and measurements—but for Scott the expedition had only one true purpose: to secure the Pole for the British Empire. He had failed in his previous expeditions, but he was determined to reach the Pole this time.