Up until that moment, I hadn’t taken a single step in over a month, and my tightly bandaged legs hung in front of me against the wheelchair.
“It’s time, Colin,” she said, softly but firmly. “Your entire goal for the day is to get out of that wheelchair and take one step to sit down in this chair instead. Show me that you can do it.”
“I’m almost ready,” I said with bright phoniness, gazing out the window to the Portland gloom, which felt easier than looking into Mom’s eyes. “I’m going to do it.”
I wasn’t ready, though. I spent three hours staring at that chair just a few feet in front of me. I thought that being in a wheelchair was, in fact, kind of a milestone and I’d come pretty far already after so long in a hospital bed. I thought that I’d be stronger and more healed tomorrow, really ready then to get up and try to walk.
Fear is a strange beast, because so often it hinges not on the things we know, but the things we don’t. And the what-if fears are the worst, the ones that wake you up at night, half in dream, fearing some wildly irrational possibility that has bubbled up while you slept. What if I can’t do it? What if the ankles, tendons, or knees seize up? Worst of all, what if that Thai doctor with the bad skin and broken English was right: “You will probably never walk normally again,” he’d said.
Mom wasn’t having any more of my delay tactics.
I’d glimpsed her intensity before, and heard plenty of tales about it growing up. I’d pictured her strong, defiant posture at age eighteen standing before a federal judge and being sentenced to a month in jail for an act of civil disobedience and protest that she wasn’t about to apologize for. I knew the depth of her commitment to the political and environmental causes she still believed in. That formidable mom was now staring me down across the kitchen.
“One step, Colin, that’s all. Just one step,” she repeated, this time without as much of a smile as the last time. That told me she was losing patience with me after all these weeks.
I knew she was not going to let me off that easily. One step was, after all, really only one step. The chair would be farther away next time, farther still after that. And I’d declared a month earlier from my hospital bed, legs bandaged to the hip, that I’d do a lot more than walk. I’d vowed to one day complete something I’d never done before or even talked about—a triathlon of swimming, biking, and running. Mom hadn’t questioned, just nodded and promised to help, however unrealistic the goal seemed, or in truth really was.
And now she was living up to her half of the bargain, and I could hardly complain. The can-do part of me stirred, pushing me to grip the chair’s arm, rustle my legs, and put a tiny bit of weight onto my feet. The what-if part then stilled everything back into place with fear. Surging with new resolve, and wanting so vehemently, so ferociously hard to please my mother, I slowly rose. The what-if Colin was still in there and talking, resisting until the last second putting any weight onto my legs and feet. But I’d finally managed to silence him. I took my first step.
* * *
I STRUGGLED ON, with Rudd now long gone in the distance and my skis and sled runners still sinking into the powder. But after three hours, one grunting step forward after another, I’d made it only two miles, and finally I just ground to a stop, feeling like a failure and a fool. The strength to take another step had left me. The frozen tears were making matters worse. Not only did they make me feel pathetic, but they also raised my risk of frostbite. Even worse, despite the cold I was sweating from the hard exertion, which on this Antarctic twenty-five-below-degree day could bring disaster all by itself. “If you sweat, you die” has been a maxim of polar exploration since before the days of Amundsen and Scott, based on the hard reality that damp clothes can freeze against your body in minutes in subzero temperatures, causing hypothermia.
I needed my wife. That’s really all I could think. Jenna would be able to see something in this that I couldn’t, some way to change course. She’d thought through the project more than I had, more than anyone had. I saw the big picture, but she saw both the picture and the brushstrokes that might make a work of art. She planned better than I, organized better, and saw three steps ahead of me most of the way.
She was flying home from South America to Portland that day, I knew. I pictured her on the plane, reading her book. I saw in my mind how her hair was probably pulled back into a ponytail; I could see her graceful stride walking across Portland International Airport’s wonderful and weird teal-colored carpet. I imagined the upstairs office in our house with its view overlooking the Willamette River, the wall maps of Antarctica, and the desk from which she’d be running the expedition. Every image I could grab onto felt far away, untouchably remote from where I stood.
The satellite phone, which I kept in a jacket pocket on my chest—accessible even should I fall into a crevasse or get separated from my sled—managed to catch a signal, bouncing from the bottom of the world, and she answered. I could immediately hear her surprise, even through the crackling static of the connection. The pitch of her voice went up a notch as she heard my voice, clearly bracing herself for something.
But she immediately also announced she was in the car with my mom, which sent its own sharp signal back to me: Colin, don’t freak out your mother. If there’s disaster to relate, save it, please.
“She just picked me up at the airport,” Jenna said brightly. “We’re almost to her house.”
More code was embedded in that sentence: Save it. Hold on.
So for the next few minutes, as Mom negotiated traffic from the highway into my childhood neighborhood, we talked in generalities. The weather was good, I said. Rudd had passed me, not so good. At the house Jenna jumped out of the car, and I could hear slamming doors and the voice of my stepfather, Brian, in the background, welcoming Jenna home.
Jenna paused, then was back on the line, serious now.
“How’s it going?” she said evenly.
“It’s really hard,” I said quietly, still crying. “The sled is so heavy… it’s cold and I’m sweating…” I rambled on in partial sentences, which were further garbled at Jenna’s end by the poor connection.
“What did you say?” she said, though at my own crackly end it sounded something like “Wha… ay?” So I repeated the main point, that I was in trouble, and it sounded even worse a second time, because I knew it pointed even more emphatically to a worst-case scenario I wanted to avoid: that I was done, that it was over. I could already imagine the grim message we’d have to put out to friends, followers, and sponsors. Colin O’Brady, who set out to achieve a never-before-completed feat and dubbed it “The Impossible First”—to trek more than nine hundred miles across Antarctica unassisted and unsupported—announced today that Antarctica had done him in after about two miles.
“I think we named the project the right thing, babe,” I said. “It looks like it might really be impossible—three hours into a thousand-mile journey pulling the sled and telling everyone I’m going to do this and I’m already having doubts. I think we need a new plan.”
“Where are you?” Jenna said.
“What?” I shouted back.
“Where exactly are you?”
I told her I was still on the sea ice, not even yet on the landmass of the continent, where the first waypoint, a GPS point of latitude and longitude, marked the actual start. I’d planned on blowing past the place where sea ice met land ice and making another seven miles or more inland before stopping for the night, but now even getting to the waypoint—which I was sure Rudd had blown by—seemed hard to get my head around.
Jenna said she was outside the front door of my parents’ house. I imagined her pacing, then sitting on the front step. I’d sat on that step a thousand times. I knew how weak it sounded that I wasn’t even to the formal starting place and was already blubbering.
“Okay, Colin, how far are you from the first waypoint?” she said.
My reply sounded labored, even to me. “Point five-four miles,” I said, looking at m
y GPS, though it sounded and felt like a million right then. “We’d figured that ten-hour days would get me across—”
“So we’ll reboot,” she said briskly. “You’re half a mile from the waypoint—let’s just get you there for now.” She paused for a moment, either thinking what to do next or letting me process what she’d just said. I couldn’t tell.
“We’re going to come up with a new plan, Colin,” she continued. “Tonight you just need to make it to the first waypoint, just that little half a mile. That’s all, just the waypoint. If you can do that, you’ll feel like you’ve made some progress.”
She stopped again for a second, letting me digest that last bit. Progress. Yes, I nodded to myself. That would help, however miniscule it was.
“And you should eat your full ration of calories, a whole dinner,” she continued. “Then call me after you’re in your tent and you’ve checked in with A.L.E. Are you remembering to put on your parka when you stop?”
I could hear in her voice that she was testing me, checking the stability of my mental compass.
That Jenna was concerned enough about me to throw in that gentle nudge—“Hey, you haven’t lost your mind entirely yet, right? You’re remembering to stay warm?”—made me wince that I’d worried her, and smile that she loved me. And her giving me a little goal to make, however pathetically small it was, meant she was also seeing inside me. She knew what made me tick. Goals were how I functioned, and she’d thrown me an easy one. She knew that I’d grab it and use it to push myself, and at that moment the size of the goal didn’t matter.
“The weather is clear and sunny,” I said quietly, staring out at the horizon, the sky brilliant and blue, hoping to see Rudd, somewhere out there, slowing down himself. She thought my weather comment was a positive note, I think, because I could hear her brighten up.
“That’s great!” she said. I’d meant the exact opposite, and started to say so. If it was this hard pulling the sled on a day that was just bitterly cold—no storm, no whiteout, no ferocious wind—the prospect of truly bad weather was utterly terrifying. I’d thought of telling her that I might’ve cried myself into a bit of frostbite, but I pulled back from that as well. She had too much on her shoulders already. “Yeah!” I replied back, trying to harness her upbeat energy, sitting there on the front step of the house, a place I knew as well as any in the world and much better than the place I was in now.
It was about 8 p.m. Chilean time in the time zone my watch was set at to coordinate with A.L.E.—so 3 p.m. in Portland—by the time I got to the waypoint, set up camp, got into the tent, and called her.
Across thousands of miles, bouncing up to a satellite and back down to me in my tent, the details poured into my head as she talked—how she’d walked into my mom’s house after our earlier conversation and sat down with her around the kitchen table to scribble out thoughts about weight and mileage, food and fuel. Jenna had been hesitant to involve my mom, not wanting to worry or burden her, but couldn’t hold it in when my mom saw the signs of trouble in Jenna’s face. Mom wouldn’t let up, and it all came out.
That I hadn’t weighed my sled now really felt like a failure. If I didn’t really know for sure how much I was pulling, then a new plan was clearly far harder to calculate. But I didn’t know what to say, feeling as if I’d let her down in my weakness back at Union Glacier.
“Okay, Colin, clean slate,” Jenna said. “Expectations, disappointments with the day, whatever—put them aside. When you wake up in the morning, you’ll see a text outlining everything—how much weight and supplies I think you can cache on the ice at the waypoint,” she said. “But right now you need to think about getting a good night’s sleep and making six miles tomorrow, if you can. That’s your first target.”
Sitting in my tent for the first time, I imagined Mom and Jenna, bent over their spreadsheets, side by side, heads almost touching as they consulted. They were sitting in those wonderful plain wooden kitchen chairs—maybe even the one that I’d just been remembering in thinking of the day I’d taken the first step from my wheelchair. Jenna said she’d needed my mom that night, needed to have someone else looking at the numbers, a second pair of eyes. She’d wanted help in bearing the responsibility of the decisions she was making on my behalf.
“Six miles,” I repeated. “That’s what I need to think about tomorrow.”
“Yep, just six miles. You’ve got this. I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
* * *
I PRESSED THE BUTTON to end transmission and lay back in my bag, listening to the soft rustling of the tent and staring for a long time at the bright red, diffuse spot on the roof, marked by the midnight sun. My tent was big enough to sit up in, barely, but also small enough that when I stretched out, my head and feet were only inches from the tent’s opposite ends. It felt claustrophobic but comforting at the same time, lying there anchored down—first night on the ice, first night alone. Around me, the continent stretched out in one direction, sea ice in the other. I was in Antarctica’s embrace, separated from the ice by an inch of pad and an inch of sleeping bag.
But everything had just been shifted, subtly but profoundly, by the events half a world away in Oregon.
The two most important women in my life were thinking about how to help me get through this thing, and that made me feel deeply grateful, as I lay hoping for sleep but not finding it. Tomorrow they’d advise me how much of my precious supplies I should leave behind so that I might be able to pull the load I had. They were expressing their love in helping me achieve my dream, while at the same time reducing my margin of safety by reducing the amount of food I’d be taking and narrowing the window through which I might pass to the other side of the continent.
I’d put Jenna and Mom in a terrible position of responsibility. But, in itself, knowing that their decisions were ferociously difficult and painful gave me a new reason to push hard starting tomorrow, if only to honor them in return. And they’d know that I’d push harder precisely for that reason, because they knew me so well. One day at a time was probably all I was ever going to be able to picture of my journey in the days and weeks to come anyway, and the new plan took that fact into account. Six miles. One day. That much I could get my head around.
As I pulled down my sleep mask to block out the sunlight, I felt a wave of confidence based on almost nothing except trust, but that was enough. I was sure the new plan would be precise, strategic, and carefully thought out on my behalf, even though I had only the slightest clue what it would contain.
CHAPTER THREE You Are Strong, You Are Capable
DAY 2
I don’t know where it came from, but I woke with a phrase. My alarm beeped, I pulled off the eye mask that helped me block the sun, and there it was, and it had to be said aloud. “Colin,” I shouted into my tent to the empty, cold continent around me. “You are strong! You are capable!”
No matter how loud I shouted it, the sentiment was still mostly blind optimism. But I have always believed that we are the stories we tell ourselves. This mantra was a story I would have to tell myself over and over again to believe it. It seemed like everything in my little universe of tent and ice should know the phrase, too. “Colin,” I said to my stove as I lit it. “You are strong! You are capable.” My shoulder muscles still aching from the first day’s effort, and my row of mittens, masks, and neck warmers, suspended the length of the tent on a clothesline, needed to get the message too, loud and clear.
The new Colin was roaring into the day, leaving the disaster of yesterday behind, and embracing a new plan and new hope. Even my bowels seemed to get the strong and capable signal, I thought as I clambered out into the little vestibule at the end of the tent. The vestibule-bathroom, which was sort of like the tent’s front porch—ice for a floor, only a single layer of nylon overhead—was much colder than inside the tent, where solar radiation could sometimes heat the air to just above freezing, which was balmy compared to the well-below-zero temperature outside
. But on that morning of new commitment, the cold front porch air felt almost welcome and invigorating as I dug a hole to squat over.
Then it came down to choices, which weren’t as easy.
The text from Jenna had arrived, as promised, and I sat there in my sleeping bag, reading it over and over on my inReach, feeling my heart pounding in my chest. The inReach, a handheld electronic device, which also functioned as my GPS indicator, was the only way to reliably send and receive rudimentary text messages via satellite transmission on the ice—cell phones being useless and satellite phones not much better in their often static-filled connections. In a few terse sentences, she said she thought I could remove five more days’ worth of food off the sled, which would take me down to only fifty-five days of supply.
Fifty-five! The number shouted in my head. After the horrible first afternoon, struggling to make barely two and a half miles, then in the tent gobbling down a whole day’s rations as though I’d earned them—fifty-five gave me the shivers beyond the deep cold that had penetrated into me through my first night on the ice. I read the text again, then looked down at my supplies. I had six dry bags, each with ten days of rations, each day in its own one-gallon Ziploc bag, which made it easy to feed myself—one Ziploc’s worth per day, every one exactly the same, day after day. About half a day’s calories came from things like oatmeal, ramen, soup, and freeze-dried dinners that I ate inside my tent, and half from the protein-dense Colin Bars I ate in small bites through the day while pulling my sled.
“Take out ten Ziploc bags of daily rations, keep the Colin Bars from each bag, and cache the rest of the food from those bags at the waypoint,” the text said. “The net result leaves you with five days of food weight off the sled, and on your final days of the expedition you’ll have to depend more on the bars, which are the most calorie-dense and efficient food you’ve got anyway. But, don’t worry about that now—we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
The Impossible First Page 4