But I gradually realized, as more days passed and she began to make arrangements to get me home to Portland, that one version of Mom, that first-day big-idea architect pushing me to envision my future, had transformed into another version, Mom the patient and painstaking bricklayer. She was there at my side, almost always. She slept in the room on a cot. She was there when I went to sleep and there when I woke up.
She didn’t put a sunny face on everything, or gloss over my injuries. She just never left, and the message of love that conveyed was immense. She was a constant in a world that seemed turned upside down, and that became something I could cling to. But she also never stopped asking about the triathlon, and how exactly I intended to execute my plan for doing it—what steps needed to be taken to make it reality, and how soon I thought it might happen. She mixed open-ended love and support on the one hand with inspiration and relentless focus on the other, and she swept me along with her. One day I woke up and found out she’d convinced the doctor to bring me a set of dumbbell weights that I could start using in bed. Given my diagnosis, the doctor looked at me like I was crazy to be training at a time like this. I didn’t care. I immediately started lifting for all it was worth. Mom had been emailing with a doctor back in Oregon by that point as well, and he’d told her to fatten me up. Rebuilding tissue, he’d said, requires thousands of extra calories a day, and the hospital might not be providing enough. So along with the weights came a torrent of snacks and treats and Thai street food. My upper body, at least, got stronger and stronger.
The homecoming trip, back to Portland, when doctors said I could finally fly without fears about what the air-pressure changes might do to my burns, was bittersweet. I’d fantasized, back in my hospital bed, about continuing my trip around the world. And when that clearly wasn’t going to happen, I’d started to picture the good things about getting home. Portland, on some of those days in the bed, shimmered in my mind like a perfect place, magical and beautiful and full of things I knew and loved. I pictured Mount Hood in the distance, and the old steel Hawthorne Bridge I’d biked and walked across so many times, and the steep bark-covered trails of Mount Tabor Park near my parents’ house.
Traveling as an invalid was definitely not part of the fantasy.
The passengers on the flight from Bangkok stared at me as I was being carried aboard, or looked away, just like the ferryboat passengers had on that long day with David. And the Portland airport, which I’d been through so many times on my visits home from school, was utterly different seen from a wheelchair. I’d loved that airport in the past and always felt a lift in my spirits from its homey charm. Now, being wheeled by my mother through customs and then to the arrivals curb, I hated it intensely. I was no longer me and neither was the airport, it seemed. I hadn’t forgotten my triathlon dream, but the long list of humiliations in getting home made it seem more and more like a mirage, another morphine fantasy.
Mom’s mix of love and relentlessness continued after we finally got to her house in Portland. The triathlon dream was real, and would become real, she kept saying. Her optimism and will became the great anchor and constant of everything, and I drew strength from them.
On that first gray Pacific Northwest morning after returning home from Thailand, when she stood there in the kitchen, her hand resting on the back of that wooden chair, eyes drilling into mine, she’d convinced me to take that first step out of my wheelchair. Her strength and belief in me hung in the air, strong as the smell of chai tea from the stove.
Despite my breakthrough the previous day, my mom didn’t take it easy on me. Instead she moved the chair five steps away and the next day ten steps away. Each day I could take a few more steps on my road to recovery. And on it went.
I walked. Eventually I made it all the way around the block. One day I broke into a jog on a wooded trail in Mount Tabor Park. Barely faster than walking, but right then, jogging felt like flying, and I almost immediately stopped and broke down in sobs from the joy and power of it, startling a neighbor and her dog half to death.
The wounds slowly healed. I had to wear compression garments under my clothes and couldn’t expose bare skin to sunlight for over a year, but those things seemed tiny and insignificant. I had less range of motion in my left ankle than before, but I could move. That was all that mattered. The Thai doctor was wrong. Tiny steps and life-changing leaps, love and commitment, pain and perseverance—they all brought me to a new place.
* * *
IN LATE 2009, about a year and a half after the fire, and the endless rounds of physical therapy, I stood on another beach, in Chicago. Needing to escape my parents’ basement after the long recovery, and get my life back on track, I figured it was time to put my Yale economics degree to use. I’d moved to Chicago to take a job as a commodities trader. It was my first real job, if you don’t count painting houses with David in the neighborhoods around Portland, and the money was good. I could afford a nice Chicago apartment. Things were on the upswing. But the dream of completing a triathlon, which I’d promised myself and my mom back in the hospital, was even more potent.
So I’d signed up for the Chicago triathlon, which started with a 1-mile open-water swim in Lake Michigan, followed by a 25-mile bike ride and a 6.2-mile footrace. And I’d trained my brains out, swimming before work, running circuits through the streets when I got off. In the middle of a training ride on my bike, I met a guy and told him the story of the fire, the wounds, the goal hatched in a hospital bed—and he said, “Hey, I’ve done a triathlon, maybe I can help you train.”
And as the date of the race approached, I found more and more that being at work, watching the little disembodied prices of crude oil and corn futures flutter across my computer screen, was simply the interval when I couldn’t be training. I trained in fear that my body was permanently compromised and weakened and that only a ferocity of effort could overcome the wounds and scars. But I mostly trained in joy that I could, more and more, move with the freedom I thought I’d lost forever.
When race day finally came, I stood there in my swim cap on the edge of the lake with more than four thousand other competitors—the city’s staggering skyline rising up behind us—I felt once again the passion of my seven-year-old self, the Pablo Morales worshipper who fell in love with the Olympics. He was still alive, still in there, ready to leap, jump, fly, and dive. But as the countdown came, and the collective adrenaline of the racers around me rose to a fevered scream, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t that boy at all. I had a different fuel burning inside me now: hope. I felt stripped down to a leaner place in body and mind—lighter from having shed a heavy burden.
I was there because I could be there, and that was a huge and powerful force. It propelled me out into the water, and then out of my wetsuit and onto the bike. I raced down Lake Shore Drive, feeling the wind across my face and the wonderful hard pull of the pedals. And the running felt best of all. I ran in joy, fueled by a power that seemed to surge up out of the ground and into my legs. I glanced down at them more than once, almost like I wanted to pinch myself that they were there and whole, and then I ran all the harder. I ran with an optimism that I wanted to shout to the sky, through the concrete canyons of the city that stretched out behind me, across the lake, to the kitchen in southeast Portland and my mom and that wonderful wooden chair—the one toward which I’d taken the single step that had led to this moment.
And I roared. And part of that was knowing that in a way it didn’t matter—when I crossed the finish line it would be a victory no matter what. And I think maybe that made a difference. So purely was I running my own race, so driven by the momentum of what had come before, that I couldn’t be stopped.
When I crossed the finish line, the world itself seemed to open up and cry with me. It had happened, the dream from that Thai hospital bed had become real. But then as I wandered through the crowd, dazed with euphoria, an even stronger thought hit me: The dream hadn’t just happened. Through overcoming my fears, I’d built the dream, ham
mered the scaffolding around it, and made it mine.
Only hours later, walking up to the scorers table, did I learn what had happened. I’d collected my bike by then and grabbed brunch with Grandma Sue, who still lived in the Chicago suburbs where my mother had grown up. “We’ve been calling your name,” a guy behind the scorers table said, squinting up at me.
“What? Did I do something wrong?” I said, fearful that something of what felt like such a glorious moment might be taken away.
“You won,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I still didn’t get it. The race had been run in multiple waves, so there’d never been any way of knowing who was in the lead.
“It means that more than four thousand people started and you came in first—you won the race,” the guy said, speaking as though I was a little slow and needed an explanation of what winning meant.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, BY TOTAL COINCIDENCE, I’d been invited to a summer barbecue at my friend Jenny’s parents’ house, whom I’d met through David.
“Brian Gelber,” the host said at the door. He was a fair-skinned, slightly freckled man in his fifties who shook my hand with a strong grip and a big smile, and he took me around to a beautiful backyard where his large family was gathered. In my finance job, I’d certainly heard of him—his firm was a major force in the Chicago-based commodity trading business—but his warmth and charisma instantly put me at ease.
“So what’d you do today?” he said, handing me a beer. It was a beautiful Sunday evening, full of the sounds of laughter and the wonderful smells from the grill.
“Well…” I felt sort of funny saying it; it hadn’t sunk in yet. “I actually won the Chicago Triathlon.”
Mr. Gelber stopped, his own beer halfway to his lips.
“You won it? Like first place, first place?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Kind of surprised me, too.”
He looked at me closely for a long time, the beer moving no closer to his lips, but then his wife called out, “Dinner is ready,” and after giving me a little touch on the shoulder, he walked over to the table and sat down. Platters of sweet corn and bowls of potato salad made the rounds. The sharp, intelligent conversation around me ranged from the global financial crisis to sports and family life. I was just finishing my plate when he wandered back over and took a seat next to me.
“I’ve been thinking about this triathlon thing,” he said, looking serious. “Not everybody can do what you did today, Colin—hardly anybody in fact—especially considering what you went through with your… accident.” He stopped and clenched his jaw. “My daughter told me about it. Anyway, here’s the thing,” he added with a little smack on the table with his palm. “Have you ever thought about what you might accomplish if you put in a full-time effort training?”
I sat back in my chair, thinking about my commodities trading job, and how much I was starting to hate it.
“I’ve been a competitive swimmer since I was a little kid,” I said. “So… yeah, that dream has always been out there, to one day be a professional athlete, maybe even make the Olympics.” I sighed, reached for my beer, and took a big sip. “But it’s not really an option at this point in my life. I need my job.”
Then Mr. Gelber was quiet for what seemed like a long time, clearly thinking, and finally he reached out and touched my arm. “I think I’d like to help you,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like a sponsor.”
I sat up.
“Financial support so you can do what you should be doing, what your dream says you should be doing,” he said. “Won’t be as lucrative as trading, for sure,” he added, shrugging. “But I’m seeing a guy who should not be sitting in an office.”
I stared up into the pale summer midwestern sky over the Gelber backyard and realized that everything had just changed again. The ripples that had begun that night on the beach in Thailand—the rock thrown into the pond—were still spreading out and leading me to places I couldn’t yet imagine. But I could tell already that those places were calling to me, asking what else I had inside, what other reservoirs might be tapped. I’d been guided by my mother from a place of abject darkness into brilliant light. And now this strange and unlikely moment in a backyard, over beers and brats, had opened another door. I had to walk through.
The next day, I went into the office, knocked on my boss’s door, and quit my job.
CHAPTER SEVEN All In, All Gone
DAY 8
The thick, sweet smell of the white gas had taken me down a rabbit hole of memory, evoking images of the burn and the road after, but the panic from the spill inside the sled, on that tumultuous eighth night of my crossing, had its own effect, too.
I’d hurled all the critical pieces of my life onto the ice around me as I struggled to find the spill and determine the damage. But then as I continued to paw down into the sled, breathing hard, feeling every muscle tighten up with the fear of what I might find—destroyed food, fuel supplies depleted—it suddenly struck me that my anxiety had led to yet another mistake. In throwing things onto the ice, I’d forgotten to secure them down. I turned back and gasped as I realized that my tent and arctic bedding sack with my sleeping bag and pad inside—two of the lightest but most crucial things to keep me alive—were just lying there. A sudden gust of wind could’ve taken them while I’d been bent over the sled, with implications as bad as or worse than spilled gas.
I immediately grabbed my orange and black duffel bags and piled them on top like paper weights along with my Kevlar kitchen box with the stove inside. I pressed the pile down with my mittened hand, just for reassurance.
Then I turned back to the sled. Food was a crucial worry. Historically, food spoiled by gas had ended expeditions. When I found the food bags, I immediately brought them to my face to sniff the outside, then opened them up and sniffed again. But they seemed secure and sealed. I threw them onto the pile of my gear. My gas cans also seemed, in hefting them up, about as heavy as they should be.
Only with it all cleared could I see the thin film of liquid, pooled in the grooves of the sled runners. The one-liter fuel bottle that had spilled, cap improperly screwed back on when I’d been refilling it, lay down there on its side. The loss of one liter of cooking fuel would erode my margin of safety, but not enough to trigger a crisis. I’d dodged a complete disaster. But the horrible rainbow sheen of petrochemicals reflecting back up at me told me how close I’d come. I fell back onto the ice, still gripping the side of the sled, shaking from head to toe.
* * *
I STILL HAD TO MAKE camp after that. But just as crucially, I knew I needed to find my center again, catch a breath, search for a new place of calm. In addressing one problem I’d almost caused another. I needed to refocus.
I laid down the tent, first anchoring it to the sled so it would be absolutely secure on the ice even in the strongest winds, and then on the other side to put down an anchor there, and on around the perimeter, smashing the stakes down with my boot as I went—trying to visualize the process, to reinforce my certainty that I’d done everything right. I carried my kitchen box to the tent vestibule at the back—canopied over by the wind flap—dug it into the snow, and zipped it in with the same intent. And then in the final step, shoveling snow around the tent’s outer edge to keep the wind from blowing up underneath it, I began counting the shovelfuls. It was unnecessary, but somehow it felt both soothing and precise. A one-foot-high snow barrier, piled along two ten-foot lengths of tent, with three feet across each end, twenty-six feet in total. That added up to about twenty-six shovels of snow, more or less, so I figured. I started counting that number down as I shoveled, each shovelful assumed to be about a square foot… 26, 25, 24… until I completed the task.
There was a hypnotic rhythm to that, a feeling that I was relearning lessons, bringing myself back down from an anxious moment, and I heard Dixie Dansercoer’s voice in my head as I worked.
“The best way to deal with
a crisis is not to have it in the first place,” he’d said to me when I’d met him over beers in Longyearbyen, a tough and treeless little dot of a coal-mining town on Spitsbergen Island off the northern coast of Norway. I was preparing to cross to the North Pole in 2016 during the Explorers Grand Slam expedition, and Dixie, a Belgian explorer, was heading to the Pole on his own expedition, guiding a family of Brits.
As one of the most accomplished polar explorers in modern history, Dixie was steeped in survival wisdom about cold and ice, and starting that day, after about the third beer, he became my mentor.
“All things wet are disasters at thirty degrees below zero, Colin,” he’d said that day in the bar, another Dixie-ism that I’d kept and tried to absorb in coming to Antarctica. “So staying dry, or knowing what parts must never get wet—this must be your goal, always.”
Dixie had taught me to put plastic bags on my feet in brutally cold weather, as a middle layer between thin liner socks and thick warm wool socks, and as I shoveled I wiggled my toes inside the boots thinking about him.
This concept had confused me at first. “But the feet will sweat in a plastic bag, and when they get wet, they’ll freeze, right?” I asked Dixie, sipping a Norwegian beer as a cold wind blew into town off the fjord that cuts into the island.
“No, the boot is the true thing to worry about, Colin,” he said. “The plastic bag trick will make your feet and liner sock damp, but the moisture will stay there, right around your foot and not go into the boot. Because a frozen boot over the course of a long expedition? Phfft!” he said with a sweeping motion of his hand. “A frozen boot never thaws in the deep cold. It cannot be thawed. And that’s it. Frostbite. Toes goodbye.”
The Impossible First Page 11
