The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t weigh the sled in front of him.

  The look I’d get from Rudd at my astonishing load, which Jenna and I had estimated to be somewhere around 375 pounds, from just adding up the list of what was in there, combined with the weight of the sled itself, would destroy the confidence I had left. I couldn’t risk it. Rudd might say nothing, probably would say nothing. But he wouldn’t need to.

  Our huge awkward difference in weight, open for him and all the camp to see, would reinforce and amplify all the smaller, subtler unstated things that hung in the air—his air of command, his vast knowledge. Even his terrific English accent was daunting. I’d look like the spoiled American who’d never learned how to pack a suitcase, and Rudd would be able to lay me out with an eye-roll. He’d know the vast difference in what we were going to try to pull, and I’d know that he knew.

  I suddenly remembered a boy I’d faced in a swim meet when I was about twelve. I hadn’t thought of him for years and can’t even remember his name now. He was a breaststroke kid like me, and supposedly all but unbeatable. My coach, a tough former collegiate champion in her twenties named Beth, leaned down as the race was about to start.

  “He’s probably the best you’ve ever been up against,” she said, nodding toward my nemesis in the far lane. I could hear the unspoken words she didn’t say, the outcome she was preparing me for: “You might well lose this one, Colin.”

  I’d decided then as I stared across the pool—intoxicated as always by those pre-race emotional highs—that he was probably a West Hills boy who was ready to look down on me as an Eastsider. I wanted to believe he didn’t think much of me, that he was arrogant and superior and so deserved to be beaten. Seeing him that way, whether it was true or not, gave me a jolt of fuel. I liked the prickly, sharp feeling that victory would also be about righting some perceived slight or injustice.

  But then, just before the start, I thought of my dad and the words he’d said to me that morning as we were heading to the meet.

  “Colin, remember the most important thing… have fun!” he’d said, reaching over in the car and rustling my hair.

  He always said that before a competition, the same thing every time, and usually I barely heard it. I don’t think I’d ever really even understood it. But that day I felt something different.

  I still wanted to beat West Hills Boy just as badly. He gave me something to prove. But my dad’s positive spirit gave me a fuel, too, and as we took off down our lanes, the idea really jelled in my head for the first time that competition could be ferocious and joyous at the same time. I surged, moving through the water with a feeling of happiness that made my strokes all the stronger, and ended up beating West Hills Boy, swimming one of my fastest times ever.

  But now, as Rudd’s sled slid off the scale back onto the ice, things were much less clear. The scale beckoned. Rudd and the members of the flight team all turned to look at me.

  “No, I’m cool, no need to weigh mine,” I said. My Mr. Casual act was probably as phony as could be, and I’m sure Rudd saw through it, but I didn’t care. I was limiting my losses, trying to avoid one more image that could get stuck in my head and weigh me down like the haunting photo from the South Pole that Rudd had showed me.

  Then it was time to go. We hauled the sleds aboard and climbed into a plane that was narrow, tight, and cramped—my sled and Rudd’s strapped down side by side, filling the entire space behind the open cockpit, two rows of single-file seats after that running to the back of the plane. Rudd and I were the only passengers.

  The Twin Otter, unlike the Ilyushin, at least had a few windows, and as we took off, the view immediately took my breath away. I couldn’t pull my face from the window. Mountain ranges anchored the far distance in mottled colors of blue and white. Deep black crevasses looked bottomless, as though they might lead to the center of the earth. The ice seemed timeless and permanent, but it was heaving with change. Recently, billions of tons had broken off from some of the continent’s ice shelves into increasingly warm coastal waters, including a monster about the size of Maryland the year before. I squinted, trying to see the ice directly below the plane, then out as far as I could toward the horizon, and the same word captured both perspectives: limitless. I was heading into a place where the regular scales of measurement—in size and harshness of climate and so much else—didn’t really apply, and so all the old ways of measuring myself wouldn’t apply either. Down on the ice, I’d be the tiniest and most insignificant of specks.

  And the plane droned on. Rudd looked out his window as raptly as I did through mine. But then as we were preparing to land at the Messner Start on the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf to disembark and begin, we looked across the cabin at the same time and nodded to each other.

  It doesn’t sound like much, I guess. Strangers nod to each other every day in passing. Office workers scuttling off to meetings nod to each other in hallways.

  But such a deep gulf separated me and Rudd—in who we were and how we’d come to be there at that moment—that our little nods felt almost like signal flares from distant mountain peaks, inarticulate but poignant at the same time.

  With my nod, I sent his way all the wishes I hadn’t been able to put into words—sure, we were both going to battle to try to be first, but overall I respected him and hoped only for the best in what would now come. And I felt that he’d sent the same to me.

  * * *

  AND THAT WAS IT.

  The plane shuddered and shook as it landed, its skis rattling on the sea ice. The crew helped me pull off the sled, offered a few bang-bang handshakes of good luck, and jumped back in with a schedule to keep, taxiing off to deliver Rudd to his drop-off a mile away, the same distance as me from the starting line waypoint at the continent’s edge.

  With a few small steps from the cabin down the plane’s little red ladder and onto the Ronne Ice Shelf, I’d left civilization behind. I’d exhaled the last breath of heated air I would know for two months and stepped down from the ladder’s final metal step, my calf-high thick-soled polar ski boots crunching onto the ice for the first time. I pulled up the fur collar of the red-and-black windproof jacket that matched my overalls, and adjusted the face mask that left no inch of skin exposed, then arched my arms up overhead to stretch my muscles, stiff from the cramped ninety-minute flight.

  They had dumped me off. One minute I was in the world of people, and the next I wasn’t. There was no ceremony; there were no inspirational speeches; there was no starting gun. The motor roared, the skis rattled and bumped—off and away. It was a little like being the last passenger on a bus in a strange, forbidding city you don’t know, and the driver suddenly opens the door and says, “This is your stop, buddy. Out,” and you watch him drive away as you stand there with your suitcase—except that it’s twenty-five below zero and your ungainly, awkward suitcase weighs close to four hundred pounds.

  I was here finally, after a year of planning, and many years before that, starting in childhood when Antarctica first gripped my imagination, but even more than that, I was really fucking alone. That’s the thing that hit me like a slap to the face as I watched the plane head away.

  I’d been to Antarctica once before, climbing Mount Vinson and skiing the last sixty-nine miles to the South Pole from the 89th degree of latitude, a place called, with simple geographic majesty, “the Last Degree.” But that effort—part of a world-record project to climb the highest peaks on each continent, with a roughly one-week expedition to both the North and South Poles—had been done with other people by my side.

  Now, as I looked around me at a horizon of flat empty whiteness in every direction, glaring sun and ice and nothing else as far as I could see, the plane’s buzz fading in the distance, it hit me what a completely different kind of thing this was that I was about to try. I’d understood that it had never been done, crossing to the South Pole and then to the other side of the continent without replenishing supplies or using anything to help propel you but you
r own body and muscle—that’s a lot of what had appealed to me in the testing of my limits, endurance, and grit.

  I knew now for certain how tiny and isolated I’d be on that vast expanse of ice through every day and night—twenty-four hours of daylight under a sun that never set, all stretching out before me to the horizon. And I knew that I’d have to dig deeper into myself than I’d ever gone, looking for reserves of energy I could tap and use.

  My first grade teacher, Shannon Pannel, understood my energy. She saw a boy who couldn’t sit still, and instead of trying to force me into some quiet conformity I probably couldn’t have achieved anyway, she had a simple three-word prescription: Burn it off.

  “Go and run outside around the playground for fifteen minutes,” Ms. Pannel said to me and my best friend, Lucas, after we got into some trouble, egging each other on in some kind of classroom craziness. We went out and sprinted and screamed and jumped as high as we could, and when we came back in I could be, at least for a little while, Colin the student again, not Colin the problem child.

  But the dividing line between worlds—where I’d come from and where I was now—seemed huge beyond measure. My life before Antarctica, through the months of training for the project, the fevered dreams in planning it with Jenna, and really my whole life extending back into Ms. Pannel’s classroom, sat on one side. I was on the other side, alone in the coldest and emptiest place I’d ever been, and a door had just slammed closed.

  I’d need it all if I was going to make it across the ice. I’d have to reach back and find the boy who needed to run, and also the boy who found he could focus and solve problems when the energy was burned off. I’d need to remember my failures and my victories because of what they’d taught me. Rather than needing to burn off excess energy, now I’d need every scrap of emotional and mental fuel I could pull together. I’d have to open the door to my own past to have any hope at all.

  * * *

  THE PLANE WAS GONE. It was time to start moving. That was the crucial thing, if only to stay warm. At twenty-five below, even under the brilliant blinding sun, the body’s core temperature can drop fast. I needed to get the muscles cooking.

  As I walked over to the sled, I glanced at my watch. Though what I was about to start would be measured in days and weeks rather than minutes or even hours, it seemed important somehow to commemorate the moment and give it at least a little more sense of ceremony than the see-you-later goodbyes from the plane crew. There should be an official starting time, I thought. The watch was silver and steely, a Rolex with a circling second hand, and I thought of my friend Marc, who’d pressed it into my hand and insisted that I borrow it to take with me to Antarctica.

  In a visit to his house a month earlier, as Jenna and I were getting ready to go south, he’d looked down at my $10 digital Timex and gasped. “You aren’t going to wear that down there, are you? Dude, this is a historic expedition. I don’t think the Timex is gonna cut it.” With his hands on his head in disbelief, he ran upstairs and brought back the watch that he got the day after his first child was born. The birth had been difficult. The watch had a story, he said. It carried good luck.

  The Rolex felt good and solid, something human-crafted and fine. I gave it a pat on the glass with my mittened thumb. But just noting the time also seemed inadequate somehow, so I reached into the sled and pulled out my little rectangular GoPro camera, which sat perched at the top of a lightweight tripod. I then pulled off a mitten long enough to grab a tiny battery from my inner jacket pocket—I’d already learned that the camera could function no longer than a few seconds unless the battery was kept warm, kept close to my chest—popped in the battery, and hit the record button.

  “Well,” I said, looking into the lens, about two feet from my face at the end of the tripod, which I held out like a selfie stick. Then I stopped. I was incredibly excited, charged with adrenaline, but the moment seemed serious, too, and I wanted to get it right. I thought of the old polar explorers glimpsing the ice for the first time as their ships approached the continent, writing the first words of their expedition journals.

  “So, here and now on November 3, 2018, at 3:22 p.m. I officially begin,” I said, staring into the lens. “Beginnings are simple. You take a step forward. If you’re going a thousand miles or a hundred yards, it’s the same. And maybe endings are simple, too—my finish line, should I succeed in reaching it, is a post pounded into the ice by the United States Geological Survey at the continent’s far side, on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. The post even has a name—LOO-JW. I have its coordinates entered in my GPS, as my beacon.” I gazed out over the ice, trying to summon something more, something Shackleton or Scott might’ve said.

  “And so it starts,” I added, tilting the camera down to my legs as I walked over toward my sled, then tipping it back up to my face. I shrugged. “So, yeah. That’s it.”

  I switched off the camera, re-stowed the battery, repacked the tripod, and bent down to check the cover and the straps on the sled and make sure all was ready. There were four straps, about two feet apart, used to secure my gear. I’d opened and closed them and cinched them over and over in the previous days, packing and repacking and then checking all over again.

  But when I pulled on the very first one, the buckle immediately snapped in my hand, broken into pieces. I leaped back in shock, and instinctively glanced in the direction of the plane, as if I could summon it back. The words I’d just said into the camera about journeys and starts seemed suddenly ridiculous, too, and as I stood there stupidly holding the pieces, the terrible thought whispered in my head: I haven’t even taken a single step and things are already breaking.

  The buckle had been weak and probably already cracked, I immediately told myself, trying to reset from the shock. It was part of a hand-me-down used sled with a lot of miles on it—nothing more than that, and definitely not any kind of a sign that things were going sideways already. I had a bungee cord in the sled and could make do by tying it to the other straps.

  But the other message from the buckle couldn’t be sidestepped so easily: Worse problems than this would surely come, and I’d be on my own to solve them. I needed to adapt and improvise and be ready to do those things at any given moment. The buckle was a symbol of my new reality, in which I’d be self-sufficient or I’d fail.

  So I tried to banish it from my mind. I’ll deal with the next problem when I come to it, I told myself. Turning back around, sled behind me, harness in place, I consulted my compass for due south, straightened my spine, shook my head to clear it, clicked into the bindings of my cross-country skis, and took my first steps.

  Because I was pulling a 375-pound sled, the skis weren’t there to be used in their traditional way, to glide effortlessly through the snow. Rather, they were really just glorified snowshoes—ones that dispersed my weight and minimized the risk of falling into a crevasse. On the skis’ bottom, instead of the slick waxy surface found on a ski racer’s equipment, I’d adhered full-length synthetic fur skins. The traction they provided prevented me from sliding backward. Long before synthetic materials were invented, pioneering polar explorers had used sealskins.

  Yet even with the traction of my skins, with those first steps it was immediately, horrifyingly clear that I could barely budge the sled at all. A stupid little buckle was the least of my problems. My sled felt anchored and unmovable on the ice. I managed to inch it forward a few yards, but then had to stop, go back, and check it out. Maybe there was something wrong with the harness or the runners. But there was no easy answer.

  Whatever we’d done in removing weight, in Chile and again at Union Glacier, and whatever I’d done in training back in Portland, pulling heavy loads up grassy slopes at local parks, enduring endless minutes of planks with my fists in ice buckets, hadn’t been enough. My crossing of the Greenland Ice Sheet as a training exercise—four hundred miles in twenty-seven days—hadn’t been enough either.

  I leaned in and managed a few more steps forward before I had to stop t
o catch my breath. I had more than nine hundred miles to go, and getting even twenty feet from where the plane had dumped me was already painful.

  I became, with every next step, aware of my body—the harness yanking deep into my shoulders, my lower back arching forward to help my legs, which should not, I knew, hurt this much this soon. Something was very wrong and I couldn’t help but cry, mostly because, pitifully, I was feeling sorry for myself. I quickly learned how Antarctica dealt with such pity; the tears immediately froze to my face. More ice in a world of ice, and now I was even making it myself.

  My entire expedition felt as if it was unraveling and I’d only just begun. I didn’t think it could get any worse. And then I saw Rudd.

  On the now empty and silent landscape he appeared to my right, heading at an angle from his starting place and moving along smoothly and steadily, it seemed—a military man in full march. He had me in his grip all over again.

  He’d found a rhythm and was striding across the snow. He looked strong. More to the point, he was actually moving, and just as with the disappearing plane, I couldn’t look away. But then he gradually grew smaller, too, pulling away until he disappeared entirely into the glare.

  I was stuck in place. The feeling of being confined and immobilized triggered a memory that suddenly began rolling through my head.

  I was in a wheelchair. I could feel the pressure of it against my back, so familiar and strangely comforting even though I despised it to the bottom of my soul. I was twenty-two years old, sitting in the kitchen of my childhood home in Portland.

  My mother stood at the edge of the kitchen counter, leaning casually on one elbow. The kitchen lights were on though it was mid-morning—a Pacific Northwest monochrome loop of gloom, drizzle, and gray having settled in outside.

  And Mom had placed a chair there in front of her by the counter—straight-backed and wooden, simple and functional, pulled out from the table. The chair was facing me, seat out, and she had her hand on its back.