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We climb down the cargo plane’s steps to the Christchurch tarmac, and the unfamiliar September warmth is delicious. The air here is not nearly so clean, but the grass and flowers and this sun…We inhale as deeply as we can.
We are going home.
But first, we will celebrate Vivian’s eighteenth birthday tonight, conveniently providing me with an adult chaperone, because tomorrow—we are traveling. Four weeks of exploration. We’ve got our tickets, a list of hostels, the money we’ve saved, and only one deadline—the lease on an apartment in San Francisco Kate and I will share starts November 1, as does my three-days-per-week sublease at Madame Simone’s studio for my twelve ballet students, Willa included, already registered. We are the Starlight Ballet Studio. Also, I’ve got a ton of Adelie babysitting to do.
Maybe London next summer. Maybe. Maybe I will apply for San Francisco State’s spring semester. Maybe I will double major in dance and choreography. Maybe minor in business so I’ll understand how to keep my studio alive.
Vivian’s not starting school till January, either—and with her ears pierced, who knows what kind of mischief she’ll get up to. She puts her sunglasses on. She’s visiting San Francisco in February. I’m visiting St. Paul in June. When there’s less snow.
In the airport, I mail a plush Adélie penguin and a letter to Willa. And Kate. And to Owen. A few letters. Letters asking forgiveness. Letters of bravery and love. Outside on the curb, I soak in the sunshine. Close my eyes. The traffic noise, after months of quiet, is delicious.
“What do you think?” Vivian says.
I nod. “You ready?”
“Lead the way.”
And she does.
To one more airport, just one building where Cessnas travel to remote places.
Back to the Ross Sea. South Georgia Island, where I sit in the impossibly green grass on Shackleton’s grave.
“He died on your birthday,” Vivian notes.
I nod, happy we know each other’s birthdays because we are friends. “His wife spent half their marriage waiting for him to come home from the ice. Then he dies shipboard on the water, and she realized he’d been home all that time. So she let him stay.”
I give him the wildflowers I picked in the field outside the cemetery.
We follow the path over the green hills of the island, ice and ocean around us.
True south.
Ocean Beach smells like my childhood. Sounds like my future. I breathe the salt and cold and then, nearer the park, the evergreens and cypress and juniper berry and the lawn, new soil. I’m in a tank top. No coat. The fog moves in my hair. I want to hug it.
“I missed you, Fog!” I whisper.
The heavy glass doors close behind me, and my heart races at the sight of the words on the walls. All of the poem’s words come to me:
Stars that sink to our ocean,
Winds that visit our strand,
The heavens are your pathway,
Where is a gladder land!
At the end of our streets is sunrise;
At the end of our streets are spars;
At the end of our streets is sunset;
At the end of our streets the stars.
“Harper Scott,” Owen says.
Those eyes. Still so dark, so beautiful, and kind, intent on mine. On me.
“Your hair.” He smiles.
I nod.
“Do you love it?” he asks.
“I do.”
“Me too. Can I?” He slowly moves his fingers through my hair, standing so near to me that I close my eyes and inhale the scent of him, the grapefruit soap he still uses.
“You got my postcards?” I ask.
“You’ve been everywhere,” he says. “They’re taped to the refrigerator; it’s a total pain in the ass just trying to get in there for some milk.”
“Did you get my letter?”
“Uh, yeah…the ten pages asking forgiveness for I’m still not sure what? Yeah. I got that.”
“Forgiveness for falling apart. For doing stupid, selfish things in Antarctica, not writing you back right away, all those beautiful letters, every date we went on, I read them over and over—”
“Harper, nothing you’ve done there or anywhere is stupid. I was a dick for trying to guilt you into staying for my own selfishness. Which, in my defense, was fueled by the fact that I was, and am, amazed by and in awe of you. So there’s that.”
“Okay.”
“And I wrote you because I wanted to write you. I missed you. If you’d wanted me to stop, I knew you’d tell me.”
“Okay.”
“And your hair is so freakishly sexy, I’d like to…”
I silence him with a kiss, familiar and thrilling and I have missed him so much.
“You read them?” he says. “The date letters.”
“Yes.”
“More than once?”
“Maybe.”
“Wow.” He smiles at the floor.
“And oh, my shoes,” I say. “You saved me. My life.”
“Kate got them to me.”
“Thank you. I’ll never be able to say that enough. How can I…”
“Harp,” he says, and pulls me to him because, despite how hard I’m trying not to, tears are spilling.
“Every single time!” I yelp. “Can I ever spend three minutes with you and not cry?”
“I’m prepared now. It’s okay!” he says, and he puts a white lace-edged handkerchief in my hand. “That’s your welcome-home present. Now you can be proper and fancy with your depression!”
“I’m not depressed! I’m so…” He kisses me again. People are milling around the chalet, but who cares? We kiss and kiss, and he pulls me even closer until I have to pause to catch my breath.
“So to be clear, you liked the dates?”
“They’re perfect blueprints. Can we go in order? Can we start again?”
“Really?”
“Yes, please.”
“Does that mean we have to work back up to kissing?”
“Obviously. Let’s go.” I sigh happily.
“Where’s your coat?”
“Not cold. Not anymore.”
“You must have been frozen.”
“I was.”
I take his warm hand in mine. My heart is buzzing. Dancing.
“Where to now?” he asks.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. And then home.”
The truth: from the ages of eight to eighteen, I loved ballet more than anything in life, and I knew I was going to be a ballerina. The fact: there was never any way in hell that was going to happen. Not just because I took just three classes a week at our small town’s only ballet studio, in the basement of a former Sacramento Ballet soloist. She loved us and yelled a lot and was glad we came to class, but I think she knew she wasn’t grooming any prima ballerinas. The fact: I was not born with the ballerina essentials—the body, the turnout, the strength, the extension, the stamina. None of it.
Besides being a former ballerina, I am a playwright who writes novels. I think in scenes, not chapters, and when imagining a story I always begin with Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski’s “magic if.” The “magic if” is the truth that occurs on stage, which is different from the truth of real life but is absolutely necessary for an audience to believe in a performance. It is a truth informed by facts, but not made up entirely of them. And it often begins with the question “What would I do if this were happening to me?” A question I come back to time and again when writing fiction.
Which is all to say, Up to This Pointe is a work of fiction informed by a ton of research about ballet and the lives of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, and the Winter Overers at McMurdo Station. Antarctica has always been a brutal ballet to me—a painful, terrible beauty. Both demand a nearly impossible, superhuman capability and instinct to survive. And both hold inexplicable sway over the people who fall in love with them.
Rose Wilder Lane said of writing novels, “Facts are i
nfinite in number. Truth is the meaning underlying them.” In reality, a teenager would never be allowed to Winter Over in Antarctica. But in the reality of Up to This Pointe, in Wilder’s words, “It is not a fact, but it is perfectly true.”
Below I’ve shared some of my favorite research sources with you, because trust me—the “magic if” cannot compare to the real-world magic of ballet and Antarctica. The real world we are so very lucky to live in.
- The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
- Encounters at the End of the World, documentary film by Werner Herzog
- Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange & Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson (companion book to the archived blog of the same name)
- An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science by Edward J. Larson
- Antarctica: A Year on Ice, documentary film by Anthony Powell
- South: The Endurance Expedition by Ernest Shackleton
- Dancing on Water: A Life in Ballet, from the Kirov to the ABT by Elena Tchernichova, with Joel Lobenthal
First and always, to Melissa Sarver White. O Captain, my Captain.
Chelsea Eberly: editor, author, my unbelievable good fortune. Thank you.
Mallory Loehr, Jenna Lettice, Alison Kolani, Christine Ma, Elizabeth Tardiff, Noelle Stevenson, Deanna Meyerhoff, Anna Gjesteby, and everyone else at Random House Children’s Books and Folio Literary Management. Thank you.
My Seattle homes: the Elliott Bay Book Company, Eagle Harbor Book Co., University Books, Mockingbird Books, Queen Anne Books, Third Place Books, Parkplace Books, and my very own Island Books.
My Seattle writing family: Mary Jane Beaufrand, Lish McBride, Michelle Goodman, Sierra Golden, Karen Finneyfrock, Kirby Larson, Kim Baker, Mel Barnes, Jennifer K. Mann, Tori Centanni, Stephanie Kuehnert Lewis, Anna Eklund, Tara Conklin, Dawn Simon, and Suzanne Selfors. SCBWI-WW and the staff and teachers at Hugo House, Seattle. Linda Johns: author, Seattle librarian, hero. You are all the best, most beautiful part of living here.
Caitlin White of Bustle.com, Sanovia of Creatyvebooks.com, Allie Williams (director of the Parnell Memorial Library), the San Francisco Porchlight Storytelling Series, Joseph Murchison, Sheila Hale, Vivian Bernstein, and Marlaine Figueroa Gray for reading, kindness, and inspiration.
Jenni Holm, Sarah McCarry, Beth Lisick, Arline Klatte, Jessie Scholl, Lisa Brown, Amber J. Keyser, Suzy Vitello, Dao Strom. Fearless writers, all.
Thank you, Bernadette Cheyne, Ivan Hess, Margaret Kelso, and Charlie Meyers of Humboldt State University.
My family: Tim and Vickie Longo, Henri, June, and James Taylor Longo, Joe Hart, Patrick Clark, Daniel Slauson, Deanne Calvin. My sister, Christine Inez. Christine and Dominic Falletti and Kelsey Todd. My Lucas Arts family. Bradley Comito, for every perfect, frozen detail. Ellen, Mike, and Katrina Harding, love and thank you to the stars and moon and back. Sarah, Alex, and Malachi Neuse, in these pages and my every day. The Wallach-Neal family and Julia J. K. Rizzle: rock, river, esteemed colleague. It has been an honor. Analise Langford-Clark, my light in the fog. Robert Irvin, my celestial navigation.
Martha Brockenbrough and Jet Harrington. It is not often that people come along who are true friends and sublime writers. You are both. How impossibly lucky to find you.
And to my own little constellation, Tim and Cordelia Longo. My true south.
JENNIFER LONGO was a ballerina from ages eight to eighteen, until she eventually (reluctantly) admitted her talent for writing exceeded her talent for dance. The author of Six Feet Over It, she holds an MFA in Writing for Theater from Humboldt State University, where her obsessive love of Antarctica produced her thesis play about Antarctica’s Age of Exploration. Jennifer lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter and writes about writing at jenlongo.com.
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