The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  Five days’ worth of food laid aside seemed like a huge amount. But then came the troubling thought of how many miles I had to go on those now more limited rations. Jenna had said yesterday that she and Mom were doing new numbers on a mileage plan, so I shouldn’t think about that, but I couldn’t help it. From where I sat, more than five hundred miles were left just to the South Pole, and the Pole was just another waypoint, not even close to the finish line at the continent’s other edge. Divided by fifty-five… even if I managed six-mile days… I started to do the math and stopped myself. No, the day-by-day plan was what I needed to focus on now, the one Jenna had worked through last night. Six miles I could imagine, so I said it to myself again, aloud. “Six miles!” I shouted in the tent.

  “We worked out ten-day sections,” Jenna said in her text. “The sled will get lighter as you go, as you eat and burn fuel. The 375 pounds we figure you have now is temporary, Colin. You’ll be able to go more miles per day in each section, pulling less weight behind you. It’ll be more like Greenland, eventually.”

  Eventually. I liked that. It was something to look forward to. I’d successfully pulled a much lighter sled for four weeks across the Greenland Ice Sheet earlier that year in training for Antarctica, and the idea that my dead-weight behemoth here on the ice with me now could slim down at some point to a Greenland weight was tantalizing.

  But the margins were clearly tight. The new plan, if it worked, would get me across the continent with exactly the amount of food I needed and no more. It had me arriving at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, 930 miles away, in fifty-five days with little cushion for down days, blizzards, error, or injury.

  But her text then went further.

  “Is there anything else in your other supplies that you want to rethink?” she wrote. “This is the last, last chance to leave anything, Colin. You should think about all of the gear in the sled and decide for yourself what you can really do without.”

  I stopped and looked around the tent—at the crucial little circle of things from stove to extra clothes that all felt, just then, really important—then back to the text to read it again. I knew what she was saying. There were clearly other things she’d thought of that I might cache down in the snow at the waypoint. And she’d known, too, that crews from A.L.E. would return to the Messner Start, to drop off or pick up people on future expeditions, and could pick up the cache. But in the leave-no-trace ethic of the Antarctic expedition world, and the ethic I’d been raised with, by parents who’d taught me that public lands were sacred, she was right—this was the last, last chance. After this, there’d be no other place to leave anything behind.

  But Jenna—and my mother, I suspect, in consultation—had been afraid to put specific suggestions on the list. They were already reducing my margin of safety in telling me to cache food. To then go beyond food, and urge me to get rid of gear that could be crucial in other ways—that was clearly a bridge too far, which I immediately understood. It was another step I’d have to take by myself.

  I ate my protein powder–fortified oatmeal without really tasting it, thinking through which of my belongings would be critical. There were no clear scientific answers. There were traditions and handed-down nuggets of wisdom about equipment and supply on the ice, but anything never before done—whether it’s a previously unclimbed mountain or a new way of attempting to get through and across an ocean or a continent—brings with it the possibility of old answers not working for new questions.

  As I packed my stove, grabbed my thermos, and braced myself for the day, I started to picture everything that was out there packed and folded on the sled. It had all seemed important once. That’s why it was there. Now I needed to reset, start over, throw out the decisions that had seemed easy back in our garage in Portland when we’d laid out everything.

  And I wanted to have as many decisions made as possible before I unzipped the tent and headed out, knowing that the brutal cold could make me rush. I was afraid I’d tilt too far in my haste and anxiety and make mistakes, pulling things off the sled I shouldn’t, or leaving things on the sled that would drag me down.

  As soon as I was out in the elements, I knew my fears about rushed decisions had been well founded. The cold hit me with a body blow—almost thirty below zero according to the little thermometer clipped to the bottom of my jacket—and it felt as though it was trying to get at me, claw through the layers of parka, mittens, mask, and then to the base layers beneath. I stiffened with the force of it, feeling my muscles clench, as though trying to hold in the heat. I took a deep breath and felt the cold grip my lungs.

  The tent was my first priority, and so I methodically set to work on that, pulling the stakes up from the ice, folding the poles, rolling it all up in preparation to pack on the sled. I wanted all the things I absolutely had to do done before tackling the hard things, the decisions that from this moment would certainly ripple out in importance.

  I chose the ice axe immediately. I could cache that. In bringing the axe, and insisting from the very beginning that I’d need it, I’d been thinking of mountain climbing and crevasses, and forty-five-degree slopes—places where one bad step will take you to your death. Only toward the end of my journey across Antarctica, on the Leverett Glacier, should I make it that far, would I hit terrain where blue-ice crevasses were common, running down deep into the ice.

  But as I held the axe there in my hand, I had second thoughts. It felt so reassuringly solid, sitting there in the palm of my mitten, its silver blades gleaming in the sun. An axe had saved me before, when I’d slipped on Mt. Hood in Oregon when I was sixteen. Back then, I’d been able to dig the tool into ice and arrest my fall, saving my life, and now I was getting ready to leave behind the only one I had, with more than nine hundred miles of unknown terrain ahead.

  I could hear Jenna’s voice in my head as I laid it down in the pile by the five bags of food. “You sure?” She’d remember my insistence back in Portland that the ice axe was a must-have, and she knew from experience herself, in her own climbing, that an axe could be the most unnecessary and burdensome of things until suddenly it was the most important.

  The Leverett has been mapped pretty well, I said to myself. I think I’m fine. At that moment the Leverett felt sort of theoretical, too, so far out into the distance it felt almost like an alternative future that might or might not happen. I’d face the Leverett—and whatever risks came with it—if and when I got there, eight hundred miles from now.

  I’m going to leave my spare thermos, too, I thought, grabbing it from inside the sled. That one was scarier and harder, partly because I knew Rudd had specifically mentioned having a backup. If a thermos breaks, or its seal gets compromised in some way, you’re finished, he’d said, because the water inside will freeze solid, and once it has you’ll never get it out. Then you have no way to store any melted water, he’d said, which would mean having nothing to drink during the day when you were outside and couldn’t stop to melt snow. Antarctica’s cold, dry air would suck the moisture out of you. Dehydration would be imminent.

  By then, I was rushing, just as I’d feared I might. I’d put on my extra parka layer, but even then—masked and goggled up in my layers and mittens—I was getting colder by the minute. It was crucial to get my decisions right, and just as crucial that I finish the task as quickly as possible to preserve my body heat. Kneeling on the ice, pawing through the sled was precise and detailed work, better suited to a warm living room or a kitchen table, and didn’t use the big muscles in my legs, arms, and torso that kept me warm in pulling the sled. Worse still, the wind had kicked up, sending a stab of cold that felt like ice water had been poured through a tiny gap in my neck warmer and down my back.

  But bit by bit, I added tiny things to the pile. Most, I knew, made almost no difference in weight. An extra stick of lip balm. A small tube of sunscreen. Half the needles from my repair kit. But taking them out felt like simplification, as if I was stripping down more than weight. I was unburdening myself of en
tanglement, of things and possessions, civilization itself. Things were in my way, and the fewer I had of them, the better, at least for my mindset, if not the actual physical effort itself.

  I stopped for a second when I got to the bag with cleaning and first-aid supplies. There’d be, of course, no way to bathe or shower in Antarctica—any liquid water, made with snowmelt on my stove, was too precious to use for anything but drinking and cooking. So back in Portland, we’d put in seventy days’ worth of little prepackaged wet wipes—one per day in cleaning up whatever part of me needed it. At Union Glacier, I’d pulled out half of that, to thirty-five. Now I grabbed most of what was left and threw them into the pile, too. Ten wet wipes and a roll of toilet paper would do for the next two months.

  Jenna had led me to this path, stripping down and stripping out, without ever saying anything directly. And there was a sweet and delicate history to that back-and-forth. We’d both known that any decisions compounding my risk at this moment had to come from me. But I also knew from experience that she was the great anchoring backstop of logic and reason in our relationship. If she thought I was going too far too fast along the edge of a cliff, she’d pull me back—not so much in fear but in clarity because she could see where the drop-off was and I often could not. And yet she found that place at the edge of things attractive, too, in her own way, and it was in that complex swirl of chemistry that we’d met, twelve years earlier, on an absurdly tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  I’d landed on the main Fijian island of Viti Levu—twenty-two, fresh out of college, and off to see the world with savings from my summer job painting houses—but had decided on an impulse to take a boat out to one of the smallest nearby islands, a beautiful little patch of sand and palm trees about the size of a city block. It had some shacks with bunks, great waves offshore, a bar, and nothing else. So the waves called out to me, and then the bar did.

  And in the bar was a girl. She was drinking beer with a group of female friends, none of whom I noticed for even a second—just her. Sipping my own budget Fiji Bitter from down the bar, I watched how she brushed the hair back from her face before taking a sip, and how she seemed to pay such close attention to her friends when one spoke.

  Okay, I thought, taking another sip. I’m here in the most unlikely of places, and so is she. What have I got to lose? So I just walked up and said hi, and after a few minutes of small talk about incredibly tiny Polynesian islands, asked her name.

  “Jenna,” she said as she stood, looking me straight in the eyes and drawing me in with her infectious smile. She was tall and slender, had sun-kissed brown hair, and was wearing a white bikini. “And you’re the surfer dude—I noticed you down on the beach.”

  “It’s a small beach,” I said with a nervous smile, unable to take my eyes off hers—her left iris had a little diagonal line running across it and it looked almost like a tiger stripe. But what I was really thinking was that she’d noticed me. On a speck of sand in the middle of a vast ocean—a place I’d stumbled onto by mere chance—something had happened, and a spark had jumped between us. Over the next couple of days hanging out in paradise, I learned she was from Massachusetts and that she was studying in Sydney, Australia, for a semester abroad from college, and when I left the island, I stowed in the bottom of my bag the paperback book I’d been reading on the island. I was traveling without a cell phone so I’d asked Jenna to write down her phone number on the back cover. I wanted to make sure the book didn’t somehow get lost. It was a number I knew I’d call.

  * * *

  BUT NOW I WAS HERE, kneeling on the ice trying to figure out what I needed, and Jenna was far away. The pile grew.

  When I got to the extra tent poles in the bottom of the sled—a full replacement set for the ones threaded into their sleeves that sprung the tent into shape, now on the ice, rolled and ready to load—I paused for a few seconds, weighing them in my hand. I gave them a bounce, up and down, making another little calculation of cost, benefit, and risk. The spare tent poles can go, I said to myself. I don’t think I’m going to need them.

  Choices are complicated. I stared down at the pile I’d made. It felt as if I’d drawn an invisible line on the ice, separating things that were utterly crucial to my life from things that would soon be gone forever and out of my reach, and I’d been forced to dig around somewhere deep inside myself to see the difference.

  It felt strangely familiar, like “Switch Day.”

  The every-Wednesday ritual of Switch Day, which shaped my life from the sixth grade through high school, was a product of my parents’ divorce when I was ten and my sister Caitlin was twelve. The shared custody arrangement—going from Mom’s house to Dad’s and then back the other way—was amicable and easy, with Mom’s new house just eight blocks away from the family house where Dad still lived. But shared custody also meant we were always either coming or going, with Switch Day approaching or just over.

  Things, possessions, objects—what to take, what to leave in one house or the other, and how to travel as lightly as possible—had defined the rhythm, as my sister and I were driven back and forth by Mom or Dad, then later by Caitlin herself, in her beloved hand-me-down Mazda 626. Two laundry baskets always rattled in the backseat. Mine had a week’s worth of clothes and shoes jammed and stuffed into it in no particular order, with my book-stuffed school backpack plunked down on top like a lid. Caitlin, two years older and already more precise than I—in the process of becoming, in a small way, the exacting scientist she’d become in college—actually packed her Switch Day things. Her clothes were folded and laid down in layers, which always impressed me because I couldn’t imagine doing that.

  The Switch Day drive became an anchor of how I came to understand and experience the idea and reality of divorce. Switch Days taught me to travel lightly, to live lightly. Take the things you need, what will fit into a basket, and no more. I loved the weekly hand-off partly for that reason, being forced to choose the things I’d need and realizing as I did how short the list really was. That extra pair of jeans? Unnecessary. One would do. A second hoodie or sweater? Extra weight that would just sit there unused.

  But even before their divorce, my parents—in living the values they’d built their lives around as organic farmers, then health-food store workers—had instilled in my sister and me the idea that choices would shape our lives. That started with food. Whole grains and organics, they taught us, were the yellow brick road of righteousness, and lots of corporations were out there making and selling the exact opposite—unhealthy things that my parents said exploited human weaknesses for sugar, fat, salt, and artificial ingredients of every sinister kind. Around our kitchen table “the industrial food complex” was a kind of whispered curse phrase.

  Choosing became a parlor game in our house, often centering on the bags of mysterious free product samples my dad, the natural food store’s purchasing manager, would bring home. They’d been sent from manufacturers hoping to get their products on the store’s shelves, and my sister and I were enlisted, over and over, as food-testing guinea pigs. “Five new kinds of alternative nondairy milk, kids!” my dad would say cheerily. “Tell me which ones you like, or hate!” Snack time came from the sample bag, in the form of high-fiber crackers, odd nut spreads, and fake cheese. “Alternative non-wheat cereals for breakfast, kids! Dig in and give me a report!”

  I only realized gradually as I got older that the choices game, and the bag after bag of product samples that rolled into our kitchen and onto the table, were also part of a hard calculus of choice by my parents. They were living their values in the work they did at the store, which paid very little, and also living those values in feeding us bulk rice and beans multiple times a week. Making free samples fun disguised a truth that they were often, in fact, dinner itself, a necessary component to make ends meet. My parents were doing their best to feed us, and making some of the toughest choices themselves along the way.

  * * *

  AFTER ABOUT TEN MINUTES of
deciding what to leave behind, the cold was seeping its way into me. I needed to get moving. I could feel it creeping around the edges of my mittens and boots, looking for gaps. So I gathered my little pile of choices on the ice, and was instantly full of second thoughts. A part of me feared I’d need it all and it should go back on the sled, while the other part of me thought what I’d extracted was minimal and that I’d gone through the struggle and cold for nothing.

  But I was also quickly learning that Antarctica doesn’t allow for indecision. You do or you don’t. You act and you move and you hope for the best. Pondering takes time, and time spent in indecision can freeze you. So I dug a little hole, picked up the little cache of items in my arms—about twenty pounds’ worth, I’d estimated, mostly from the food—and, without ceremony, buried it under the snow at the waypoint coordinates. There was little else to do by then but stuff my extra parka into the front of the sled, strap down the cover, and harness up.

  I’d tried to lower my expectations as I prepared to actually start for the day and begin pulling, but I still hoped and imagined that twenty pounds—all those things I might potentially need, now gone—would be worth the nagging worry they’d caused.

  When the harness straps dug into my shoulders and waist with the first lunge forward, though, it felt precisely the same as yesterday, like the straps had hands—strong, cruel grasping hands that wanted to drag me back, and fingers that dug into the flesh around my stomach and shoulders.

  After a few puffed breaths, I stopped and looked back. The sled, six feet behind me at the end of the rope connected to my harness, looked sadly the same, too, its yellow cover bulging with what were now clearly absolute necessities. What could be stripped out was gone, and before long I found myself, as I had the day before, crying into my goggles again, if only from the frustration. Another day, with more ice where you didn’t want it. Despite all of the training and preparation to pull this heavy sled and survive in these brutal conditions, my body felt weak. In that moment I understood that the outcome of this journey would ultimately be decided by the strength of the muscle six inches between by ears, my mind.