To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  Scott’s confidence was admirable, but entirely misplaced. There is little one can be sure of when trying to survive on the vast Antarctic ice sheet. It was a trip that would take months, covering more than one thousand miles across the harshest and most desolate terrain in the world. There would be no possibility for rescue should something go wrong, no exit strategy. Scott’s confidence couldn’t warm the hands in a subzero chill; it couldn’t calm the winds or put food in an empty tin. It was logistics, not ego, that his team needed most.

  Scott planned to reach the Pole by establishing camps along the way to support slow but steady progress. This was the same technique later used in the first summits of Everest and El Capitan.

  The expedition would be spread over two seasons: the first to establish supply caches, the second to use those caches to push on to the Pole and back.

  Effective caching required the placement of tons of supplies and would be an expedition in itself, involving a team of dozens of men, dog sleds, and horses. The location of the caches was critical and carefully planned. Pushing the tons of supplies forward one mile at a time was an enormous effort, so the caches would be placed not one inch further along than necessary.

  The key camp, the camp their lives would depend on, they nicknamed One Ton Depot. This massive cache of supplies had to be placed at just the right spot so that it could support the expedition the next season both on its way toward the Pole and on return when they would be dangerously depleted. The position of eighty degrees south latitude was calculated to be the ideal location. In hindsight, it is remarkable how prescient the determination of that very spot turned out to be.

  As the team pushed on toward eighty degrees south latitude to establish the cache, storms lashed at them and delayed progress, horses fell ill, the Antarctic winter approached, and Scott began considering whether to establish One Ton Depot thirty-five miles north of the planned location. That would mean that the next season, as they were returning from the South Pole hungry and worn, the camp would be thirty-five miles further away than originally planned.

  Scott was strongly advised to keep pushing on and not establish One Ton short of the strategically calculated location. Otherwise, his assistant Lawrence Oates warned, “I’m afraid you’ll come to regret not taking my advice.”

  There are always a few preplanned decisions that can be revisited when circumstances get difficult. You may decide to leave the coffee grinder behind, or determine that the pillow really isn’t critical. In contrast, there are decisions that should never be revisited because they were so carefully considered in the first place. The location of his most critical food cache at eighty degrees south latitude in Antarctica was one of those decisions that Scott should never have reconsidered. But he did.

  Scott decided to establish One Ton Depot at seventy-nine degrees, twenty-nine minutes south latitude, thirty-five miles short of the original plan. That decision would be his team’s undoing.

  On the 13th of September, 1911, after living through months of total darkness, and with the worst of the Antarctic winter behind them, Scott and his team began their march toward the Pole.

  As they pushed forward, Scott made another fateful decision. While they had originally planned for four members to be on the final push, he raised the number to five. There would now be one more mouth to feed. But with weather cooperating and food evidently plentiful, Scott estimated they would have no problems bringing the extra man along. Optimistic, they pressed on.

  On January 17, 1912, Scott’s team finally approached the South Pole.

  The expedition had left Wales eighteen months earlier, camping through the harsh Antarctic winter. Scott had personally suffered through previous failed expeditions; he had witnessed scurvy and storms, confronted fears and desperation, had seen team members die. Perhaps he rationalized it would all be worth it now. The misery that he had endured, all the families that were left alone and fatherless by his expeditions, could now be balanced by, perhaps even justified by, this moment, when his boot finally touched the South Pole.

  What he saw next must have crushed him.

  As his team neared the Pole, there, in front of him, was Roald Amundsen’s flag, planted thirty-two days earlier.

  If the team had been first, maybe it would have buoyed their spirits, provided a bit more will to persevere through what was to come. Being second, spirits sank. Scott wrote these words in his diary:

  Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.

  And with that, he turned his men toward home.

  The diary reveals that on the return trip, despite the rapidly deteriorating condition of his team, Scott had them load thirty pounds of rock samples onto their sleds. Perhaps to counter the overwhelming sense of defeat, he could motivate his team by some appeal to scientific purpose. As a physicist I’m enthused and motivated by science, but I’ll admit that under those circumstances, having suffered such defeat, a rock would have provided me no consolation at all.

  By mid-February, they had not yet arrived at One Ton Depot, that critical supply camp they had established a season earlier. A blizzard was now setting in and it was clear that they did not have enough food for all of them to last out a long storm.

  Heroism can take various forms. It can be brazen, or shrill, or thoughtful. In the case of one of the team members, Lawrence Oates, the very man who had warned about the placement of One Ton Depot, his heroism came in the form of modest resignation. According to Scott’s diary, on March 17, Oates made an announcement to the team:

  ”I am just going outside and I may be some time.”

  Oates then walked out into the blizzard and, by his own choice, froze to death. With that decision, he left one fewer mouth to feed and perhaps, he hoped, that would provide a better chance for the others to survive.

  Oates’s act of heroism merely prolonged the inevitable. On March 29, with the storm still raging, Scott began the final entry in his diary, discovered eight months later along with his body and those of his teammates.

  Last entry. For Gods sake look after our people.

  That final entry was accompanied by a private letter to his wife and another letter to the British public, which closed with these words:

  Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.

  Scholars have been studying Scott’s expedition for nearly a century, debating whether his decisions deserve praise or vilification, whether he demonstrated leadership or ineptitude. I have no strong opinion on those matters.

  Instead, what I find compelling is how he spent those final hours with the pen, coming to grips with his death, the deprivation of Antarctica now fully realized. All three of his final writings—his diary, his letter to his wife, and his letter to the public—end with a common focus: a reflection on his family. Yet they were more than ten thousand miles away, too distant to hear his final desperate whispers.

  He and his remaining expedition mates died an Antarctic death: isolated, disconnected, and desolate, their bodies frozen into place, their spirits shattered into pieces.

  Scott died, they all died, cold and broken.

  For what it’s worth, they were just eleven miles away from One Ton Depot, the cache that had all the food and supplies they needed to survive. The opportunity to live was there, so close, yet they couldn’t reach it.

  With the Hercules grounded, we braced for the incoming storm.

  We surrounded our tents with ice walls that could withstand winds of more than one hundred miles per hour. We had plenty of food and I had a few books to read. The storm, no matter its fury, would be manageable. We could wait it out.

  The blizzard hit a few hours later, battering us as we retreated
to tents.

  During a break in the blizzard we strapped on cross-country skis and glided over the ice sheet with our Global Positioning System firmly in hand. Without a GPS, it would be nearly impossible, merely a matter of luck, to find our way back to camp. Within a few hundred yards of skiing out, our camp vanished in the swirling snowdrift. Once the bright yellow of our tents faded from view, the landscape looked the same in all directions, completely flat, the horizon line blending in with the clouds.

  There was nothing to see, no contour to the surface, it was like being on a treadmill in a fogbank. Still, the skiing, as dull as it was, passed some time before the blizzard picked up again and we returned to our tents. I zipped shut the flap and returned to a book and the thick down of my sleeping bag.

  That is how time passed for me, hour after hour, day after day. Eventually, I ran out of books. I lay there, zipped up in a bag, confined, staring at the tent walls just inches away.

  Detached. Isolated. Waiting out the storm; the days wore on. The solitude bore down on me.

  I was thirty-eight years old and experiencing pure detachment from the world—a detachment that I had thought, until now, I had desired.

  I was alone with my thoughts. I began to reflect on why people might conclude that I was cold and broken. I thought about whether I wanted to stay that way.

  My father, an English professor, was probably the first adult to see my emotions chill and crack. After my mother died he was left to raise three teenage boys on his own in the suburbs of Virginia.

  Not unexpectedly, as we got older, we all went our different ways.

  My middle brother, Joe, who is two years older than me, is now a surgeon in the navy, having been deployed to hospitals all across the globe over the years as medical help was needed. His last decade of deployments reads like a list of political hot spots: he served in Iraq, standing in the blood of fallen soldiers, went to Guantánamo Bay to treat detainees, provided emergency surgeries after Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti.

  My oldest brother, Roger, who is five years older than me, lives in the Midwest. He started out as a mechanic and eventually became a manager for an airline company, moving several times over the last ten years to accommodate the changes to an industry that was shaken after 9/11 and continues to expand and contract.

  There aren’t many occasions when we are all at the same place at the same time. The only time when we were around the table together with any regularity was more than three decades ago. One of those times none of us has ever forgotten.

  Despite the challenges of raising us, my father was determined to keep our minds clear and our backs strong. To do that, he relied on what had shaped him.

  My father was raised during the Great Depression, which means that he sweeps his spatula around the glass of the mustard jar and holds it up to the light to look for any last smears of yellow. By the time he’s done, the jar glistens as if it were buffed clear by a machinist.

  His Depression experience also means that we didn’t click on the air conditioner in the summer unless the temperature was over ninety-five degrees. We wore thick sweaters in the winter. We hand-washed the dishes. We had a manual push lawnmower.

  It was so rare that we watched TV or went out to the movies that I grew up without any awareness of pop culture. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school, when a girlfriend bought me a television, that the world started to penetrate. She had delivered it to me with the following order: “Watch this. You’re clueless.” I first saw Star Wars when a buddy rented the video and showed it at his house. That was in 1994, nearly twenty years after the movie came out. When I did finally see an episode of Seinfeld, it was the finale and I didn’t get any of the jokes.

  What really marked our days growing up, more than anything else, was the food that my dad would put on the table. We didn’t eat lettuce; we ate kale. He didn’t use wheat flour; he used bulgur. We didn’t have chocolate; we had carob. We drank powdered milk. I assumed as I was growing up that these substitutions were a result of his suffering through the Great Depression, when, I imagined, he ate cardboard with a side dish of shoe leather.

  He kept the desserts ordinary at least. Except once.

  I can’t remember who asked first, that night around the dinner table when I was thirteen years old, but it was on all our minds.

  “What is this?”

  We had dutifully plowed through our dinner, forking into our mouths whatever bizarre vegetable my father had purchased that week. Now dessert was in front of us, but it was unidentifiable.

  The bowl was filled with a thick pale yellow sludge. Trapped in the paste were small pods, like maggots with glistening translucent shells. At least nothing appeared to be moving in the bowl, which was encouraging.

  “It’s rice pudding,” my dad calmly explained. He had been answering this question for years, just never over dessert.

  I tapped at it with my spoon, examining the texture. I pried out one of the maggots.

  “This is rice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why make dessert out of it?”

  To this day, I still think that is a sensible question. After all, no one eats string bean cake or cauliflower cookies.

  “Because it tastes good,” my father responded.

  Perhaps in some cultures, on some tables, in someone else’s kitchen, that might be true. But that day, licking a smear of it off my spoon, I can tell you with certainty that it wasn’t good.

  “No thanks,” I said. The Slakey brothers all looked at one another and we leaned back from our bowls, spoons idle on the table.

  My father decided at that moment that he had to seize control. “This isn’t an option; you’re eating that rice pudding.”

  We had squared off over dinners before, eventually complying with an order to eat some mossy green or other. But this time, I thought, justice was on our side. No one is required to eat dessert. In fact, dessert is supposed to be the reward for slogging through the main course. This was like telling the winner of the Boston Marathon that his reward is that he now gets to walk home. In the rain. Barefoot. Over glass.

  It didn’t come to blows, it never did in our house. My father had earned our respect; we all recognized the challenge he faced raising us all alone, so a smack was never necessary.

  And so, knowing we would never get physically harmed, we decided to wait him out, in silence, ignoring the pudding and thinking that at some point he would concede because no one can, truly, force you to eat dessert.

  He had an appointment that night so he walked out of the kitchen a few minutes later, leaving the three of us brothers still sitting at the table with our full untouched dessert bowls. When he pulled the door shut behind him, we took our bowls over to the sink and dumped the contents down the drain. We left the kitchen feeling victorious.

  It’s very rare now, but occasionally we find ourselves all together around a table, and one of us will make a joke about that ridiculous pudding situation and we’ll all laugh. And on one of those occasions I asked my dad what he was thinking that night when he tried to force us to eat that pudding. He shrugged off the question.

  So, many years later, I’m left to imagine the answer on my own. When he returned home that night and looked in the sink, he would have seen the discarded pile of rice; we didn’t make any attempt to hide it. He would have taken that spatula and scraped the final remains down the sink, the effort to make a treat for us ending in nothing but failure. He always projected steel, but at that moment, alone, watching the grains spiral down the drain, I imagine he thought about our mom and how different all this would be if she were standing there beside him.

  She was no longer standing beside me, or my brothers either. As a result, all of us retreated, each in our own way. None of us had many close friends. There were many evenings as an adult when I would be at home, alone, doing little more than sitting under the lamplight.

  And now I was alone again, in my tent, waiting out a blizzard in Anta
rctica. Over the next eight days, I recognized that my life was like Scott’s death—isolated, cold, broken. I realized that this was no way for me to live. Or, to be more honest, I knew that it was not the way I wanted to die. If I kept going the way I was, my final moments would be every bit as miserable as Scott’s.

  We could hear the Herc before we could see it. The sound filled the clearing sky and then the flying walrus appeared on the horizon. After eight days, the blizzard had finally broken.

  I was relieved to leave the continent.

  The sensory deprivation tank of Antarctica had presented me with isolation in its purest form. The hour upon hour, zipped up, alone, in the tent had given me a chance to consider, to feel, the consequences of pure detachment. I had thought about what isolation had made of me and what it had done to Robert Falcon Scott.

  Until this expedition, I had thought I was entirely comfortable with distance and detachment. But I had never before experienced them with such intensity, the total separation, that Antarctica presented.

  I had thought it was my remove and self-absorption that gave me the focus to push past challenges and achieve my goals. But there was Robert Scott to consider. Those qualities had delivered him a death in silence and despair.

  So I had an epiphany of sorts. I decided that I had enough. It was time I left my cave.

  It was a quiet epiphany. I heard no voice. Clouds didn’t part. Instead, I came to my realization after days of being confined in a tent, thinking about my mother and the past, feeling the desolation of Antarctica in the present, and reliving so much that had happened in between.

  I remember worrying about one thing: I still had a half dozen more items on my surfing and climbing To Do List. As I thawed, would I risk going soft and losing what I thought was the necessary steel in the spine to get it all done?