The Moth Presents Occasional Magic

by The Moth Presents Occasional Magic (retail) (epub)

  It was debilitating and so slow. And in the beginning we all got frostbite.

  I can remember skiing at the front. I had frostbite on my middle toe and my little toe, and a little bit on my big toe, and I could feel it getting worse. But I couldn’t call a halt to the team to warm it, because we were so far behind schedule. We had endured three storms, breaking ice, backwards drift, and the worst ice conditions I’d ever encountered. We would never get there if we stopped.

  I can remember thinking, Oh, God, okay, I can’t feel my middle toe. Well, oh hell, who needs a middle toe? I can live without a middle toe.

  And a little toe…well, yeah, I can live without a little toe.

  I can’t live without a big toe. If it starts to go for that, that’s it.

  We were literally bargaining with bits of our bodies in order to make this happen.

  I found on the ice that when I could think about things, I missed the children terribly. I could go about fourteen days, fifteen days—that seemed to be the limit before it affected my morale.

  Pom and Caroline were really good. They would give me time with the satellite phone and the precious batteries. I’d call, and the kids were so excited to tell me about everything they were doing and how great it all was. They chattered, and I listened, and when I put the phone down, I was filled with them again, and I could keep going.

  If I had trouble with frostbite, Pom was the worst. All her toes were frostbitten, and after forty-seven days we had a resupply plane that came in to give us new food and fuel, and Pom had to leave.

  I never thought about getting on that plane, even though the chances of us getting to the pole were so slim. On day thirty-seven of the expedition, before Pom left, we’d gone just sixty-nine miles of the five hundred. We’d gone a few more in the next ten days, but we still had over three hundred miles to go. It was impossible. But we weren’t going to give in.

  It was now just me and Caroline. And although we missed Pom, when she left, we began to use her as our motivation.

  “We’ll do this for Pom. We’ll do another hour for her.”

  We became one driving force. We swam through open water, we skied across thin ice. We added hours to our days. Because we were walking across the Arctic Ocean, the ice moved constantly—always against us. So some nights we would get into our frozen sleeping bags that we would have to break, and as we slept, we would drift backwards.

  Those were the tough nights. But eventually, after eighty grueling days, we knew we had two hours left. We were literally feet from the pole, and we thought, This is it, this is it.

  We pinpointed the North Pole with a GPS. The ice moves on the ocean so fast that while the North Pole is a fixed place, it feels like it’s moving as the ice moves you this way and that.

  You have no concept that you’re moving, so it feels like the North Pole is running away from you.

  We got the GPS out and zigzagged this way and that, and we couldn’t pinpoint it. As quickly as we were getting there, the ice was moving.

  “We can’t be the first women to go thirteen feet from the Pole!”

  We stood there on a piece of ice, not sure what to do. We could almost hear the planes. And we looked at the GPS and the numbers, and as we looked, it started to count upwards.

  We watched it moving and moving, and that piece of ice, as we stood still, moved up to the magical ninety degrees north.

  We got it.

  I planted the Union Jack, we sang the national anthem, and I asked Caroline if she would take a picture of me holding a photo of my children, because I felt they were there with me. I could never have made the sacrifices without them inside my very soul.

  * * *

  Polar explorer ANN DANIELS is a world-record holder and one of Britain’s leading female explorers. Starting as a mother of young triplets and lacking any outdoor experience whatsoever, she claims that it was pure hard work and belief that led her to being selected to take part in her first North Pole expedition. From these humble beginnings, she went on to conquer the South Pole and in 2002 became the first woman in history to ski to the North and South Poles as part of all-woman teams. Experiencing temperatures as low as minus fifty degrees Celsius and braving encounters with polar bears, she has sledge-hauled over three thousand miles in the most inhospitable environments in the world, completing over ten Arctic expeditions and surviving more than four hundred days on the ice. Ann’s most recent expeditions have included working with NASA, ESA, NOAA, and the University of Washington to help scientists understand what is happening in the fragile polar icescape and how this affects the whole of the planet. anndaniels.com

  This story was told on April 11, 2016, at the Union Chapel in London. The theme of the evening was Coming Home. Director: Meg Bowles.

  I used to play a lot of poker at the house of my oldest friend, Wanda Bullard, on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia.

  I loved those nights. I would pull up in Wanda’s driveway and look through her dining-room window, and I could see her in there setting up for poker. She’d be cleaning the cat food off the dining-room table and then cleaning the cats off the dining-room table, and then setting out her lucky Chinese coins, and lucky sharks teeth, and lucky bottle caps, and her lucky ashtray from South of the Border.

  When she became intent, she would always put her tongue like this, so even though she was sixty years old, she looked a little like Charlie Brown from the comics.

  My friend Larry would be there in his black cowboy hat and his hooded cobra eyes, shuffling and reshuffling the deck.

  And I loved these people.

  I’d go into that house of junk, and Wanda would just light up and say, “Well, hello there!”

  And she’d give me a hug, which was always a little awkward, because she came up to about here on me [gestures to his chest].

  She’d been a teacher for forty years. Her students loved her. Everybody loved Wanda, because she was so kind and generous.

  I recognized those qualities, but what really drew me to Wanda was her mean streak. You’d give that girl a glass of bourbon and the insults would start to fly. In fact, these poker nights were just orgies of insults. All of us—me, my ninety-year-old mother who would sometimes come by, and Larry and Wanda—would just sit there all night and play poker and insult each other.

  Wanda would say, “You’re a weasel! Your hand is pitiful! And you’re especially ugly tonight.”

  I would say, “Larry, you look like a cobra.”

  Larry would say, “George, you look like a New York pimp in that getup.”

  And Wanda would say, “I can’t show ya this hand right now. But when I do show it to you, I promise you you’ll remember it for the rest of your life—your sorry life!”

  And guarding this little circle of insults was a ring of just pure blissful chaos. Wanda’s cats—she had six cats, and all night long they’d be jumping up and down from the table and scattering the poker pot. She had these two big ugly hound dogs that would be howling all night, anytime anybody ever came by. And there were always strange people coming in and out of that house.

  There was one particular character named Frankie Stump. Frankie was a drunk, and a good ol’ boy, and he loved to hunt.

  Actually, he loved to drunk-hunt. One day he shot a deer out at the Sea Palms Golf Club on Sunday afternoon, from the window of his pickup truck while he was stopped at Frederica Road at a red light. He pulled over, and he got out, and he field-dressed that deer right there on the fairway in front of all these astonished golfers.

  And one day he had a big freezer delivered to Wanda’s house. He just gives her the freezer, chock-full of venison, which we thought was kind of generous. But there was one friend of ours, Miss Lucy Mayo, who did not care for Frankie Stump. She was a tiny woman, and she was one of those people who are always aware of the invisible world all around her. She was aware of the doings of ghosts and demons and angels. A
nd she hated Frankie Stump, and she said there was nothing generous about Frankie giving us that freezer. She said, “He can’t eat all them critters he’s killin’, and he wants to say that the meat doesn’t go to waste, so he gives you that freezer so he can keep up the slaughter. But it’s just an excuse. That freezer is full of the spirits of all of those deer he’s murdered and it will bring a curse on this house, and it’s an abomination.”

  And she was rolling on about this while we were trying to play poker, until Wanda couldn’t take it anymore, and she said, “I don’t care! Shut up and play!”

  And then it was Christmas.

  This was just a couple of Christmases ago. Larry got Wanda one of those singing Santa Clauses that you get in Kmart, and I got Wanda one of those singing trophy fish. She really loved all that crap. Lucy Mayo got her one of those Roombas, you know? One of those robotic vacuum cleaners? And that was bouncing around all Christmas Day in the kitchen, and the cats were all hissing at it, and the dogs were barking at the cats, and the fish was up on the wall singing away, and Wanda was saying, “I OWN this hand, put your money in the pot, put YOUR MONEY IN, you little cowards!”

  And it was just about the best Christmas ever.

  I remember one time I went outside to make a call, and as I was coming back in, I looked in through the window, and I saw Larry and my mom and Wanda sitting there, and I began to think maybe I was just too attached to these people. So I told myself that nothing lasts forever. I reminded myself that I might well come here one day and Larry would be gone, and my mom would be gone, and Wanda would be gone, and the house would be empty. I told myself these things as a way to inoculate myself against future grief, and I did succeed in making myself really sad for about ten minutes, until we started playing poker again.

  And then the poker was just so amazing that after everybody else was gone, Larry and Wanda and I stayed there and kept playing poker and laughing—we played all night.

  We couldn’t stop: we played till 5:00 p.m. the next day.

  And after twenty-four hours of poker, I staggered out of that house, and my eyeballs were rattling around inside my skull, and Wanda shouted after me, “You’re a quitter!”

  Then a few months passed, and Larry went into the pantry to get something. He happened to look down, and he noticed that when Lucy Mayo had plugged in the Roomba home base, she had unplugged the freezer.

  She had done that on Christmas Day, and now it was the end of February.

  Larry called me and Wanda in, and he pointed at the freezer and said solemnly, “Don’t ever open this. Ever.”

  The next day Wanda hired a couple of neighbor kids to come over and haul the freezer out.

  Three kids showed up—I guess it shoulda been four—because Wanda and me and my mother and Larry were sitting in the dining room playing poker, and the kids were back in the pantry getting the freezer. In between was the kitchen, where the pets hung out and molested each other, and we were playing.

  Then we heard this terrible crash.

  And then a moment’s silence.

  Then one of the neighbor boys came streaking through the kitchen and ran right past us. His face was white as a sheet, and he was screaming and running for the front door. His two friends were right behind him, and they were throwing chairs out of the way and clawing at each other just to get past each other, to get out, to get out of that house.

  And then the dogs showed up—the dogs came running past, and you could see the whites of their eyes. They were horrified, and they were running for the door.

  Then the cats emerged, and they were just little dark streaks.

  One of them jumped on the table and slid all the way across, and everything—the bourbon, the coins, the lucky sharks teeth, everything—went flying, and the cat shot out of there.

  And we were just sitting around staring at each other blinking, wondering what was going on.

  And then it hit.

  The smell.

  Because those neighbor kids had dropped the freezer, and everything had come out, and God knows what kind of meats were in there, but they were all rotten.

  And I can’t describe to you the smell. All I can say is that wherever that smell was, you had to be elsewhere.

  And so we got out of there, and I may have lost a little dignity, because I think I might have elbowed past my ninety-year-old mother in my haste to get out.

  But then we were out, and we were alive. We rounded up the animals, and we brought them over to the neighbor’s house. And then we decided that we were gonna go back. We were going to put scarves on our faces like masks, and go rushing in there, and grab the freezer, and get it out of there.

  So we wrapped these scarves around our faces, and we walked back, and as we came around the corner of the house, we could see Lucy Mayo standing at the front door knocking, but a little puzzled because the front door was open, which it never was because the pets would get out. But the pets weren’t around, and nobody else was around, and she was sniffing the air and getting that smell of death. And you could just see that she was putting together this narrative, this terrible narrative, about a burglary gone bad and the murders, and all her friends in there dead.

  And then she heard our footsteps, and she wheeled around and saw arrayed before her seven masked banditos. Or maybe they were the spirits of Frankie’s murdered deer.

  She was just so terrified, but then Wanda started to laugh. And she leaned up against the house, and she sank down into a crouch, and she just became a ball of laughter.

  And then all of us were laughing. Even the neighbor kids were on their asses laughing. Even Lucy Mayo, who had no idea what was going on, couldn’t help but laugh, because this was one of those moments—those astonishing moments at Wanda’s house—that happened all the time, thousands of times.

  Until last summer when Larry suddenly died. And then my mom died, and then Wanda died, within a few months of each other—one-two-three. So it’s all as foretold, everybody’s gone, and that house is empty.

  I was just there a few months ago, and the sermon that I told myself about how I had to be prepared for this darkness? That sermon was useless, because I wasn’t prepared at all.

  Because when the invisible world strikes, we’re hopeless.

  And I shouldn’t have even wasted my time with this sermon. I should have just gone back in that house and spent every minute I could playing poker with my friends and taking their money and listening to the insults of my beloved Wanda.

  * * *

  GEORGE DAWES GREEN is the founder of The Moth and an internationally celebrated author. His first novel, The Caveman’s Valentine, won the Edgar Award and became a motion picture starring Samuel L. Jackson. The Juror was an international bestseller in more than twenty languages and was the basis for the movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. His most recent novel, Ravens, was also an international bestseller and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail of London, and many other publications. Mr. Green divides his time between New York City and Savannah, Georgia.

  This story was told on November 14, 2002, at The Great Hall of The Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Around the Bend: Stories of Coming Home. Director: Catherine Burns.

  My mother always says, “If you don’t know where you’re going, know from where you come.”

  I was at a point in my life where I didn’t feel connected to my roots, and I certainly didn’t know where I was going. So after several years of living abroad, I decided to return to my home country of Sierra Leone and move back in with my mother.

  I was particularly excited to see my grandmother. She had raised me up until age three. She was the matriarch of our family.

  She was this amazing human being. She was bold and vivacious. She was the glue that held our family together. And so when I finally made it to Sierra Leone, the first pe
rson I went to see was her.

  I remember driving up to her house, where I had grown up, and it didn’t look as big as I remembered it.

  And there was my grandmother, standing by the doorway, and she didn’t look as big as I remembered her. She was looking a little frail.

  But it didn’t matter. I ran to her embrace and just hugged her and held her and inhaled her scent.

  I was finally home.

  I spent that weekend with my grandmother and cousins and aunts. We were catching up; we were cooking and eating and laughing.

  They reminded me that my name isn’t pronounced fa-toooo. It’s Fah-TOO.

  You know, learn to say your name!

  I also learned that my last name had roots, had ancestry, had place.

  It was really good to be with my family. My cousins and I were getting to know each other again. They told me that my grandmother hadn’t been her usual self lately, that she wasn’t as lively or as outgoing as she had been; she was a little more withdrawn.

  So one afternoon I went to my grandmother’s room, and I lay beside her, and I said, “Grandma, what’s wrong? Everyone says you’re not as jovial. You’re a little quiet. What’s going on?”

  She simply turned to me and said, “Fatou, when the heart is full, it cannot speak.”

  In that moment I remembered that my grandmother had endured eleven years of civil war; she had lost her husband, my grandfather, to the war; she had lost her only two sons, my two uncles, to the war; and most recently she had lost her eldest daughter, my aunt.

  I could feel the sadness in her, and I knew she was tired.

  I edged closer to her, once again inhaling her scent and just being with her.