The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  “Want to see a picture of me at the end?” he suddenly asked.

  “Sure. Of course,” I said, shrugging.

  Rudd fingered through the photos on his phone until he found the one he wanted, and handed it over. I immediately wished I hadn’t seen it. He looked almost skeletal—cheekbones bulging like baseballs from an emaciated face; dark, cold-weather wounds across forehead and nose. Rudd smiled broadly as he took the phone back, and I finally understood what he was really saying: “You don’t know what you’re in for, mate.”

  It was true. I admitted to myself that what I didn’t know about Antarctica and polar survival could probably fill a book. I was far less experienced than Rudd, so much so that I probably looked like an imposter in his eyes.

  He’d fought and been decorated in combat, and through various expeditions over the years had spent more time man-hauling a sled across the Antarctic ice than just about anybody alive. I was from a scruffy counterculture corner of the Pacific Northwest—born at home on a futon on a commune in Olympia, Washington, with Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” playing in the background and clouds of marijuana smoke in the air from the party convened to celebrate the happy occasion. Rudd? Probably hatched from a cannonball.

  Yes, I was fit and strong, and at thirty-three years old, sixteen years younger than Rudd. I’d also been a professional athlete for years, racing triathlons around the world, and I’d climbed some of the world’s biggest mountains, including Mount Everest. I’d even been to Antarctica before. But as I looked at the inimitable Captain Rudd, none of those things seemed very important, or even relevant.

  I felt like we’d been dropped into the plane from two different planets. We had absolutely nothing in common but this moment where our lives had intersected, each of us gripped by the goal of being the first to do something that had never been done: cross Antarctica alone via the South Pole using only human power and without being resupplied. We each knew a little about the other’s plans and preparations—mine in America, his in the UK—but we were going to start from different places on the Ronne Ice Shelf at the edge of the Antarctic landmass. Rudd was leaving south from the Hercules Inlet; I was leaving several hundred miles away at a place called the Messner Start. We might never even see each other again after our little jammed-in-together cargo flight to base camp.

  But all that mattered was that Rudd was getting inside my head from the first minutes, and with every hour that the plane lurched south, and the beginning of what I already knew would be the hardest thing I’d ever thought of attempting, my confidence was sinking. I felt as if he were looking across the seat at me and thinking, Working this guy is child’s play.

  The feeling put me suddenly back in ninth grade on the first day of class at the big high school across town in Portland, Oregon. It was filled with kids I didn’t know who were mostly from the cooler, wealthier parts of the city. I’d walked in looking for my homeroom and my locker and felt almost immediately like an imposter then, too, thrown into a place I didn’t belong and didn’t fully understand. Southeast Portland, where I’d grown up, is a hot corner of the city now, with some of the best restaurants and music venues. But in the late nineties, the kids who filled my new school, coming there from upscale neighborhoods in the West Hills, considered anything east of the Willamette River a wasteland of auto garages, machine shops, and small houses built for the old timber-town and dockworker crews of the city’s industrial past. To them, the neighborhood where I lived was poor, uninteresting, and unworthy, if not downright dangerous.

  My salvation came in finding a friend. David Boyer arrived for class from the wrong side, too, and like me was keenly aware of the difference that made. Together, we formed an alliance, each of us with something of a chip on his shoulder, and something to prove, if only because we were outnumbered. We’d each helped the other face the unknown.

  And that memory brought on another realization: Rudd was facing the unknown, too, just as I was. He possessed reserves of deep experience that I didn’t, unquestionably, but experience would only help so much in a place where the human imprint on the landscape was so shallow, small, and thin. He knew some of Antarctica’s hardest, cruelest truths and had lived through them, but in Antarctica, I knew—from the grizzled veterans I’d consulted and trained with as well as the little time I’d spent there—unpredictability was the defining characteristic.

  Antarctica would set the terms of what was possible, in all the unknowns and variables of wind and storm, ice and bone-chilling cold, and neither Rudd nor I knew what those variables would be, day-to-day or even minute-to-minute, or what strengths would ultimately matter.

  Improvisation and resourcefulness would decide fates and outcomes—just as they had for the early polar pioneers who really couldn’t know, before airplanes and satellites, even what terrain they’d face. Improvisation was crucial to me and Rudd since we didn’t really know if the thing we were both attempting could be done at all and survived.

  Captain Scott’s attempt at motor-powered sleds in 1911 was an improvisation that didn’t work given the technology of the day. The idea was right, just premature. Snowmobiles and modified all-terrain trucks are now the workhorses of the polar regions. Amundsen improvised around food; worried that he and his men would have digestive trouble eating a meat-heavy diet with no fiber, he’d added peas and oatmeal to the rations.

  Shackleton honed improvisation to an art form after his ship, the Endurance, was caught in the sea ice and crushed in early 1915. In keeping himself and his men alive and fed on the Antarctic ice for more than a year, and then sailing an open boat hundreds of miles across some of the stormiest waters in the world to seek rescue, he embodied the idea that survival itself can be an act of heroism.

  And going through all that in my head helped me straighten up in my seat and think of my own strategy in what had already become a bizarre kind of airborne chess game. Rudd, I decided, was genuinely, amazingly impressive with his military-officer bearing and his crisp monologue of astonishing feats. He was canny and probably brilliant. But I felt he was also working me, or playing me, or using some military mind trick in breaking down my resolve and confidence. And I decided to let him do it. That he knew nothing about me, and showed no inclination to ask, could be an advantage in a way I wasn’t sure of yet.

  So from that moment, I mostly nodded and let Rudd talk, keeping my own cards close. I was, in fact, truly intimidated—he could probably have sewn doubt and undermined the confidence of anyone. But having him think me even more diminished than I was also felt like the best hand I had to play. The more he thought me unworthy or unprepared, a probably pampered American millennial with no business trying something like this, the more he might grow too confident himself. I had no idea where any of that might lead or how it might play out. But the lesson, in training for this moment—in seeking out mentors and polar veterans, in reading everything I could get my hands on—had been hammered into me by then like an ice anchor: In Antarctica, overconfidence can be as dangerous as fear.

  * * *

  THE ILYUSHIN SKID-LANDED on the blue-ice runway of Union Glacier just like you’d expect, like a flying tank—as though it had been hurled down from the sky, bouncing and rattling and heaving its cargo until it finally came to a squealing halt and I could take a breath. I was finally on the ice. After the long, intense confinement of the flight and the mind games that had played out across the bench seat, it felt like much more than just an arrival—more like I’d emerged from a long dark tunnel into a new world. In stepping down out of the plane, the tense hours of flying were instantly behind me. Antarctica, from the first seconds, lit up all of my senses. The bitter cold stung my face, yet the unbelievable brightness and the forever white landscape left me in awe. The emotional charge of finally being there made me smile so broadly that my cheeks hurt.

  Union Glacier, which functions as a kind of logistical base camp for almost every nongovernment expedition into Antarctica, is a bustling place as the high
season of the Antarctic’s summer unfolds from November to January. The company that transports just about everybody and everything to the ice, Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions (A.L.E.), sets up a small town of food tents and camp offices. Wealthy adventurers chartering guided trips rub shoulders with ecotourists, scientists heading out to study ice cores, and people who’ve simply fallen in love with a strange, harsh place—like our hard-boiled pilot on the Ilyushin. Mountaineers embark from there to Mount Vinson, the highest peak on the continent. Tiny subcultures of Antarctic obsession blossom in the brief months of twenty-four-hour sunshine before dying back in the months of darkness—people coming to the world’s emptiest and most extreme place just to say they’ve been there, or to run marathons, or to see the famous emperor penguins, imagining themselves to be Captain Scott himself, who made a famously arduous side trip to see the emperors and retrieve some of their eggs for science before beginning his sprint to the Pole in 1911.

  On this day, camp workers were shoveling huge mounds of snow around prefab huts and steel-framed tents. I thought it was probably a normal start-of-season ritual—the summer cleanup of winter’s mess—until I stopped to chat with a guy who’d paused to lean on his shovel for a smoke. He was from England—season on the ice, season off, and good paying work, he told me, if you could tolerate it.

  “This snow is nuts,” he said, blowing out a huge cloud of water vapor and smoke into the cold air. “Way more loose snow than normal and I’ve been coming down here a lot of years.” He paused and took another drag. “The scientists tell us there could be more snow down here in a warming climate because warmer air can hold more moisture, so maybe…” He shrugged, then ground out his butt into a can he’d pulled from his pocket. “Whatever it is, something very different happened over the winter, that’s clear enough,” he said.

  Rudd and I needed almost a full summer season, which in the Southern Hemisphere begins to unfold in November, to have even a hope of completing a crossing before the long winter darkness closed in. We were just as ironbound by the seasons as Scott or Shackleton had been, or Reinhold Messner, the legendary mountaineer and namesake of the spot I was heading for, where the sea ice met the continent. Nothing of modern life or technology had changed that fundamental fact: expeditions went out only when Antarctica allowed it.

  So we each had to start at the earliest window of possible transport. And what that meant is that we were about the only non-A.L.E. people in camp as October rolled toward November. On the morning of the second scheduled smaller-plane flight that would take us to our different starting points on the Ronne Ice Shelf, we filed into the mess tent, the only people in there at that hour. We took our trays and sat down together, just the two of us. It was clearly becoming a pattern.

  Rudd was digging into a huge plate of bacon and eggs.

  “One last big load of fat and calories,” he said.

  Then he stopped, took a sip of coffee, and looked around the tent for a moment. I thought I saw a shadow of hesitation or indecision cross his face, but then some corner turned in his mind, it seemed, as he looked straight into my eyes and blurted his news.

  “I’m starting at the Messner,” he said, digging back into his breakfast.

  I stopped mid-bite, my mouth hanging open. What had been, until that moment, two similar but not exactly parallel projects—different starting points, different attempts at answering the same question, whether this expedition we were trying could be done—had just fundamentally changed: we were now on exactly the same course. With Rudd’s words, this journey each of us was taking had become truly a race. Apples to oranges had become apples to apples—same exact route, same goal. There’d now really be a winner and a loser.

  I looked down at my own plate of eggs, then back up again at Rudd. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I’d gotten to him a little, too. Maybe silence and nodding and saying hardly anything about myself and my plans, even if it mostly had come from a place of insecurity, had sent some message I hadn’t intended. The experienced polar giant had flipped his plan to be like mine, not the other way around.

  He wanted to beat me. That’s what it meant. Rudd had inched his seat closer to mine. We were bound up together, for better or worse, in everything that would happen next.

  CHAPTER TWO Frozen Tears

  DAY 1

  The start of any great effort feels to me like a blank canvas of hope. Since my first swim meets in elementary school, those extended minutes before the buzzer goes off to mark the start have always been magical in their white-knuckled anxiety and completely uncharted sense of possibility. An unwritten story hangs in the air. The future beckons, full of unknowns. Winning or losing is the measure of how things go, but between those two extremes, a whole compacted life, it often seems, will unfold through the minutes to come. Anything is possible. Everything is possible.

  That sense of magic, open-ended potential caught fire in me when I was seven, sitting on the couch with my mom watching the swim finals in the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Seeing Pablo Morales of the United States win a gold medal in the 100-meter butterfly changed my life, firing a dream that blazed in me for more than two decades—that maybe I could one day stand on that medal podium, too. It turned me into an Olympic geek-child who, perhaps sometimes annoyingly, could rattle off the most obscure Olympic trivia, along with the backstories of my heroes.

  The ferocious, uncontainable optimism that boils over inside me at the beginning of almost any new challenge or adventure is a result of that day: Morales in the pool, raising his arms in triumph, me screaming my head off in our living room, jumping up and down on the couch. It’s also partly what had brought me to Antarctica—the idea of the blank canvas, of life unfolding with all its deep uncertainties and possibilities wrapped up together.

  Antarctica felt to me like an untold story. Other than bases for scientific research, it’s a place with no real towns or permanent residents or animals, once you get past the water’s edge and its huge schools of fish, colonies of penguins, and pods of killer whales. It’s the only continent never to have seen a war. Mapmakers routinely don’t show it at all. It’s a blank space in a world that is mostly filled up.

  But as Rudd and I got ready to leave Union Glacier, flying out to our starting place on the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf, he seemed bent on trying to fill the continent himself, if only with his bristly commando confidence.

  “How many calories per day are you bringing?” he’d said as we were readying to load up the plane, a red-and-white Twin Otter turboprop—a workhorse of transport in harsh environments all over the world, from the Alaskan bush to the Sahara.

  I hedged for a second, bracing myself for his reaction. I knew he’d have one. “Seven thousand,” I said as firmly as I could.

  “Seven thousand!” he spluttered. “I’m only bringing fifty-five hundred.” His eyes narrowed into a piercing squint as he looked at me and then at my sled as though for the first time. “Fifty-five hundred is plenty,” he added.

  I thought about saying something about the research I’d done, the medical tests I’d undergone to see how my physiology worked and how my body burned fuel in conditions of stress and cold. I wanted to sound scientific and smart. And we both knew that we’d be burning through a lot more than even seven thousand calories a day—probably closer to ten thousand—so extreme weight loss was certain no matter what. But I was pretty sure he’d see that sort of thing—blood tests, nutrition, and aerobic analysis—as American and fussy rather than rational and scientific, and in any case not remotely British in the can-do toughness of the exploration and expedition world that he worshipped and called home.

  “I think I know what works,” he continued.

  “You know what else works?” he went on. “Ice!”

  I raised my eyebrows, unsure of where he was going.

  Laughing, he said, “I saw you brought toilet paper. I never bother weighing myself down with something so luxurious.”

  Maybe he did know better. I was
no longer sure about anything. More calories, however scientific they were, also translated into more weight, even a sheet of toilet paper added to the burden. Rudd was clearly beginning with a much lighter load.

  Jenna and I had removed five days of supplies in the little apartment in Chile, taking us to sixty-five days, and then I’d subtracted five days more as I fretted and waited at Union Glacier Camp. That took me to sixty days, which was a full week less than Rudd had carried in his project duplicating the 1911 Amundsen route to the Pole. He’d lost sixty pounds in that expedition, and I’d be going much farther. The numbers were scary, but also just plain mysterious, since there was no way to check to see if I was any more correct, or incorrect, than he’d been back then.

  The moment of truth came as we started loading the sleds. Our plane sat on its white-ski landing gear near the storage tent. Our pilot, an upbeat Canadian named Monica who’d told us her story of falling in love with Antarctica at first sight, climbed in and out of the cockpit, making preparations. The flight team had asked if we wanted to weigh our gear.

  Rudd immediately barked a definite yes, and with help from one of the crew members, wrestled his sled up onto the big industrial scale beside the ice runway. I tried to look busy, pretending to be occupied even as I cocked an ear, desperate to hear what the scale might reveal. What I heard chilled my blood. One hundred and thirty kilograms, Rudd had repeated aloud—loud enough for me to hear, intentionally or not—as the scale numbers popped up. One hundred and thirty kilos translated into about 286 pounds, radically lighter than my sled, I knew.

  Rudd looked over at me and nodded, saying with his eyes and gestures, “Your turn, mate.”