The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  The waypoint, I knew, even as I struggled to move past it, was hugely significant—in the struggle to reach it on that first day and in the potentially momentous decisions I’d made there. It marked the beginning of the continent, but also, in a way, the end of what now felt like a prelude. The long arc of events that had landed me in Antarctica—the trek across Greenland, the panicky, nervous insecurity about my preparations, the strange interludes with Rudd on the plane and at Union Glacier, in some ways the entirety of my whole life to that point—had brought me to the waypoint as a first test, a hurdle to be cleared in preparation for the real challenges in the days and weeks ahead.

  And as hard as it still was, with the snow still deep, full of soft, unstable drifts that would collapse down under me and the sled with deep groaning crunches from my weight and the sled’s weight behind me, the words that really started swirling in my head were gratitude and humility.

  Whatever happened from this morning on, I told myself, I was standing on the shoulders of giants. The inspirational path of the polar pioneers before me, and what they’d taught the world about endurance, strength, and perseverance, was the foundation of everything I was attempting.

  Those early explorers had mostly started with questions. Norwegian pioneers like Nansen and Amundsen had reached out in humility, asking native Inuit villagers across Greenland and Canada the simplest and most profound questions: How do you survive? What do you wear and eat and how do you protect yourself from the cold in an environment that can kill you so easily?

  When they headed to Antarctica, where human civilizations had never managed to penetrate at all, those pioneers concluded that the great white continent was essentially a giant math problem. Weight was part of the equation, but the deeper and more challenging part was how much food and calories they’d get for the weight of the food they carried, and what methods and means they’d use to cross that landscape, which in turn would affect the other variables.

  In the modern era, the distinctions got even finer grained, often relating to whether an effort on the ice was supported or unsupported by resupplies of food or fuel cached or provided along the route, and/or assisted or not by any means other than muscle. The Norwegian adventurer Børge Ousland in many ways defined the terrain of astonishing modern Antarctic feats, becoming the first person to cross Antarctica solo when he traveled eighteen hundred miles alone in sixty-three days from late 1996 to early 1997. Not only did he cross the entire landmass of Antarctica, but he also crossed the full Ronne and Ross Ice Shelves from the ocean’s edge. Ousland’s expedition, which had deeply inspired me, was unsupported in that he’d hauled all his food and fuel with no resupplies, but, importantly, assisted in that he’d used a parachute-like kite called a parawing, harnessing the wind to pull him across on the ice. His team proudly announced that on one day with particularly favorable winds—parawing deployed—Ousland had sped 125 miles in only fifteen hours. A single-day distance unfathomable without wind assistance.

  Rudd and I now, Henry Worsley in 2016, and Ben Saunders in 2017 set a different goal. Each of us was trying to become the first person to cross the landmass of Antarctica via the South Pole completely alone with only what we could carry behind us, with no resupplies, as Ousland had. But unlike Ousland, Rudd and I were relying on human power alone. Without the assistance of a kite like a parawing, the math of what I had to carry with me was even more unforgiving.

  The equation was at the very heart of everything, and it was one of the reasons why no one had ever been able to do what Rudd and I were attempting, and why so many people thought it impossible: If I carried too much food, my load would be so heavy I probably wouldn’t make it across without assistance. And if I carried less food, I could go faster but then I might run out.

  And as I pushed into the morning after the unburdening at the waypoint, as I thought of that first morning on the ice, I flashed back to a hotel room in Whistler, British Columbia, a few days after Christmas the year before. Jenna and I had just come in from a long day of skiing. We dumped our gear by the front door of the hotel room, and Jenna walked over to the fireplace to get warm and check her phone. I was pouring water in some glasses when she suddenly gasped.

  “Oh my God,” she exclaimed, looking over at me. I tensed, braced for some family news or a disaster unfolding somewhere in the world. Her mother had only a few weeks earlier been diagnosed with cancer, and Jenna had just come back for New Year’s Eve, after being by her mom’s side through the surgery and post-op over the Christmas holiday. Jenna had a special bond with her mom, who’d raised Jenna, her only child, as a single mother. If there’d been some sudden bad turn in the prognosis—my mind started reeling off the possibilities—we’d need to get back east immediately. I started thinking flight schedules and airport logistics.

  “Ben Saunders is ending his expedition,” Jenna said quietly. “He just posted to his blog.”

  She looked back down and immediately began to read aloud: “ ‘Standing here with less food for the remainder of my journey than I’d planned, with a safety margin that I felt was too slim, I have decided at this time to end my expedition at the Pole.’ ”

  “Oh my God is right,” I said, slumping onto the couch.

  Jenna and I had been rooting wildly for Saunders, and we’d followed every twist and turn of the plot on his blog as he pushed relentlessly toward the South Pole, aiming to fulfill the dream that Henry Worsley had chased to complete the first solo, unsupported, and unassisted crossing.

  He seemed invincible. He’d been invincible back in 2013–14, retracing the steps of the Scott Expedition to the South Pole. But in this latest effort the math of food and supply had tripped him up, as it had so many Antarctic explorers. He’d arrived at the South Pole fearing he didn’t have enough food to make it all the way across.

  There was more, though, as I learned when I found his blog on my own phone and began to read.

  Saunders, writing as he awaited a flight to take him home, said he’d become fearful. He’d fallen so many times in passing through the twisting canyons of sastrugi—as the parallel wind-carved hills of ice are called—that his mind had begun to roll through dire implications and potential consequences. As I read, I knew exactly the place Saunders’s mind had gone: the fear loop. I’d been there, feeling trapped in a maze where every option feels dangerous and escape seems impossible. And sastrugi zones aren’t just places where you can fall—they’re also off the map in a way, places where rescue would be difficult and delayed, if not impossible, because planes can’t land there.

  “I slipped and lost my balance many times in the 450 kilometers or so of sastrugi I encountered,” Saunders wrote. “And I recall the moment I suddenly imagined falling and breaking an arm or a wrist. How would I put my tent up? What if I fell and knocked myself out?”

  Staring out the hotel window, looking at Whistler Village, I felt dizzy, as though I’d just fallen on the ice. Saunders had seemed so close to finding the secret, solving Antarctica’s brutal math problem, bashing through the physical and psychological barriers of a solo crossing.

  I joined Jenna at the window, and we looked for a long time out at the ski slopes, and the light snow that had begun to fall. She could see where I’d gone, knew the wheels that had begun spinning inside my head. Saunders, as much as I’d wanted him to make it, had left a thousand questions lying on the table. If anyone was capable of a truly solo, unsupported, unassisted continental crossing, it was Ben. So did that mean it was really impossible? And where would you even start in trying to figure the answer one way or another?

  As usual, Jenna was ten steps ahead of me, answering questions to herself I hadn’t even said aloud or even thought of.

  “Yup, here we go. This is it,” she said with a faint smile, reaching over to take my hand. “I think I know what we’re going to be working on for the next year.”

  * * *

  THROUGH THAT AFTERNOON after the first waypoint, I felt rattled by the choices I’d made th
at morning in pulling things off the sled, decisions I could no longer go back and fix. I kept picturing the hole I’d dug in the snow. I saw the food down there, now frozen solid, and the ice axe and thermos, covered in darkness and snow. And that mental loop of images made the physical work I was doing in pulling the sled feel even harder. By midday I felt every muscle in my back and shoulders from the harness.

  But I got to my allotted and assigned six miles, as my GPS told me, and then decided I could, and must, keep going and add some more. I ultimately pushed on to cover just over nine miles. By the time I stopped to make camp, I was almost as exhausted as I’d been that first night. I was feeling stupid and slow, stumbling around, thick in my thinking and clumsy in my movements as I set up the tent.

  When I crawled inside, I knew I had only a few minutes before I’d almost certainly pass out, and there were two crucial things to do: I texted Jenna that I was in the tent and safe, and set my alarm. Then I fell facedown onto my sleeping bag wearing all my gear and was gone, falling instantly to sleep as though into an abyss, bottomless and dark.

  I woke with a jolt, in the same facedown position and drooling, when the alarm beeped me back into consciousness. It was 8:50 p.m. I hadn’t overslept, but it was right at my deadline: The Antarctic logistic transport company, A.L.E., required a call every night at exactly that time to give them my location—back at Union Glacier, Rudd and I had been told that under no circumstances should we ever forget. If you missed two consecutive nightly check-ins, A.L.E. would assume you were incapacitated or injured and would scramble to send a rescue, attempting to get to your last-known location, if weather permitted. My GPS location was also being tracked live to the world—anyone with internet could check to see where I was—but in my nightly required call to A.L.E. I felt like a buoy in the middle of the ocean. The mother ship needed to know I was still afloat.

  I dialed in. The person who picked up, an Australian in his early twenties named Tim, wasn’t interested in conversation, or me in particular, just the facts. It was, for him, simply another shift inside the Comms Box, which is what A.L.E. called the tiny, modified cargo container at Union Glacier that served as information central. If A.L.E. had brought you to the continent, and you were out there somewhere, Tim or one of the other two workers who manned the box around the clock was your contact.

  “Ready?” Tim said, getting right down to business after I identified myself. I gave him my latitude and longitude and miles traveled that day, picturing him at one of the tiny desks, fingering a laptop, phone maybe crooked up to his ear by a shoulder, thinking about home maybe, or Bondi Beach on a sunny summer day outside Sydney. He had a life off the ice, and that thought suddenly brightened my mood.

  He was real, and I’d become, it suddenly felt, a bit less real. In my stripped down post-waypoint life, the new strong and capable Colin was also far smaller than he’d been before, as though the stripping down had gone farther than intended. I’d become, to Tim and the world, a digital blue dot on a computer map, blinking my little existence on a website tracker. Tomorrow, my dot would move a bit or it wouldn’t, and that was as basic as it got.

  After I hung up, that idea kept resonating. As I melted my snow and ate my reconstituted Thai noodles, watching the tent flutter around me, it occurred to me that maybe the simplified, stripped down life—the life of a digital dot—had things to teach.

  My life was certainly not uncluttered, I thought, as I looked around my jammed living space, where just about every square inch, from the tent floor to the clothesline running end to end, had a hard pragmatic function. It was a smelly, drippy world of bags and boots and coats.

  But at that moment, it also felt like a palace of wonders since, undeniably, it was shelter in a place of brutality. I was out of the wind. I was out of my harness. I was fed. In my forty below zero–rated sleeping bag and my hat pulled down low, I’d be warm through the night to come. And that seemed, just then, like more than enough.

  CHAPTER FOUR The Suggestion

  DAY 3

  I didn’t want to do it. I really didn’t. I knew, in trying to think rationally, that it was a tiny thing, a little pinprick and a few drops of blood. Big deal. I’d experienced far worse pain than that in just the last hour, like the pain that had built to a fever pitch in my neck and shoulders from the strain of my harness as I trudged across the ice. Every day so far had offered a menu of large and small pains greater than a little needle jabbed into my finger.

  But the finger prick did seem like something I could put off, if I chose to, in a sea of hurts and aches I couldn’t. So I sat there staring, needle in hand, feeling a little ridiculous and weak, but also sort of powerful—in a pathetic way. The weakened, hurting self could take a stand, there in the tent: Look at me. I am strong. See me avoid pain.

  Finally the absurdity of it got to me and I jabbed. Four red blots went onto four swabs. I scrawled the date on a slip of paper, and tucked it into the tiny plastic envelope.

  I flashed back to that day in Dr. John Troup’s office when that part of the journey had begun. It was the understated office of a man who mostly worked from his lab—the domain of a scientist clearly more passionate about what he did than where he sat. He was square-jawed, with short gray hair, and had a warm presence. I liked him immediately. “Remember, the samples have to stay frozen, they can degrade pretty quickly,” he’d said, glancing up from his papers at his desk in the lab.

  Jenna and I, in chairs across from him, glanced at each other and tried to keep a straight face, holding our silence. Finally, after a brief, puzzled look, he’d gotten his own set-up punch line: Keeping something frozen in going across Antarctica would be the least of my problems. “Oh, right,” he said with a smile.

  Dr. Troup, who has a PhD in nutrition science and metabolism, knows a universe of things about food, but when we met him, not a lot about polar exploration and the weird history of Antarctic dining that echoes down to this day. As a vice president of clinical science, education, and innovation at Standard Process, the Wisconsin whole-food supplement company that was sponsoring my project, his goal was to figure out what I should eat, and definitely not eat, once I hit the ice.

  “Some expeditions have subsisted on things like salami and crackers,” I told him. “There’s a whole weird mystique about dried meat, probably because the old polar heroes ate it.”

  “No, no, no,” he said emphatically, waving his hand as though salami represented some evil spirit that had just stomped into the room. “Very inflammatory, especially for how long you’re going to be out there—I think we can do something better.”

  I told him what I knew about pemmican, a kind of meat paste that European polar explorers had adapted from old Native American recipes, and Amundsen’s special formula for pemmican in 1911. He’d added oatmeal and peas to the mix, providing some fiber, which was considered a crucial element in keeping him and his men healthy and regular. Scott and his men carried ordinary pure-meat pemmican, sometimes mixed with hard navy biscuits.

  “Oatmeal and peas,” Dr. Troup said, looking up sharply. “Yes. Antioxidants. B Vitamins.”

  Standard Process had promised to build me a super-food that would be compact, nutrient-rich, and—most intriguing of all—designed entirely around how my body worked and processed food. The blood samples had begun that day in the lab along with the first of a battery of treadmill stress tests and skin-prick examinations meant to tell him and his team what compounds my body reacted negatively to. About seventy different food compounds ultimately popped up on the no-no list, many of which I’d eaten for years seemingly without any bad results or allergic reactions. But in Antarctica, Dr. Troup said, food would be different. Extreme physical effort in an extreme environment could elevate the tiniest of things to huge importance. “Inflammatory” was one of Dr. Troup’s scary words. The way he wielded it reminded me of my parents and their fears of industrial food.

  “Personalized nutrition. That’s what it is. The food we create has to choose
you in a way,” said Dr. Troup, who was in his mid-fifties, a hiker and former collegiate swimmer. He knew the world of exertion, not just chemistry. “The calories it contains have to burn clean,” he said. “Specific to how your body burns calories.”

  Through the months that followed, I made repeated visits to the Standard Process Nutrition Innovation Center, their dedicated whole food science lab in North Carolina, for medical follow-up tests and taste tests. Eventually a little brown thing Dr. Troup and his colleagues dubbed a “Colin Bar” emerged.

  In contrast to most other historic polar expeditions’ food supplies, this solution was entirely plant-based. Coconut oil was the main ingredient, partly because of what was revealed about my gut and how my body worked—and what was, God forbid, inflammatory—but also partly because of the temperature at which coconut oil solidifies and melts. If I kept a bar with me as I worked on the ice, in a pocket close to my skin, my body heat would thaw and soften it and make it edible by the time I reached for it. The combination of seeds and nuts was also fatty, and added some protein without a lot more weight. The texture and flavor was then tweaked again and again. Dr. Troup’s team went for slightly grainy, but not crumbly, slightly chocolatey, but not so much that I’d get sick of it, and above all, by the bucketful, calories. Four thousand calories’ worth of Colin Bars, cut up into bite-sized pieces, could fit into a jacket pocket, amounting to more than half my daily total.

  But Dr. Troup was no salesman.