The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  As a little kid swimming laps in the pool, sometimes I’d stumble into that flow state, the timeless space where thirty minutes would go by and it would seem like two minutes or something like that. I never really knew how I got there. It just happened or it didn’t. But I’d come to Antarctica with the deliberate intention of finding that space and exploring it. If ever there was a corner of the earth where the flow state should flourish, I thought, it was here on this endless, empty landscape.

  I’d trained my body for this moment, through the years of competition and climbing and training, and now in a way my body knew what to do without being asked. I became a witness to myself and my thoughts, and I flashed back to my coach Mike McCastle and what he’d put me through in his gym in Portland during the previous year, in preparing for Antarctica.

  “Hold it, Colin. Hold it,” Mike said softly, standing above me as I held a plank position with my hands in buckets of ice. I’d surrendered completely to Mike by that point, in my awe of him and his amazing physical achievements and charitable work. A navy veteran and endurance sports legend, he’d broken the world record for doing the most pull-ups in twenty-four hours—5,804 of them, all while wearing a thirty-pound pack to represent the burden of the wounded warrior, in a benefit event. He’d pulled a Ford F-150 pickup truck for twenty-two miles in nineteen hours across Death Valley to raise awareness for veteran suicide. He pulled it with a harness. If ever there was a guy to help me train to pull something heavy, it was Mike, and I’d do anything he asked. If he said hold the plank as my hands ached in the ice, I’d hold it, no matter what. If he said release the plank and stand in these buckets of ice water while putting together a Lego puzzle—another of his training demands—then I’d do that, too.

  Now I saw that he’d also been toughening my mind, honing it, or breaking it down so that when a moment like this came, I’d know not to resist but surrender.

  I’d been thinking about the ideas of mindset, performance, and endurance for years, and working on them through things like meditation, but as I continued through the afternoon, I felt that Mike’s training tools, and all those hours with him at the gym, were clicking in. Time felt like it was speeding up and slowing down at the same time because I felt so completely present in the moment and the movement. Every breath, every stride, every yanking jerk of the harness against my shoulders became part of that moment.

  It certainly wasn’t like time had stopped or that I wasn’t aware of my muscles and cold hands, and how the harness dug into my shoulders with every forward pull. Exactly the opposite. I felt aware of everything, all at once, as though it was some kind of symphony. I felt I would eat and drink exactly at the moments my body needed food and water, because I felt I could reach down inside and know. I’d know how the tips of my fingers felt inside my mittens, and the tingling that would hit them at the end of a bitterly cold day, and the sled’s little squeak when I had to inch it up and over an obstacle.

  When I finally looked at my watch, I was stunned. Almost two hours had gone by in what seemed like minutes. I ultimately pushed for twelve hours on the ice, the same workday I’d put in the day before, in passing Rudd. I was committing to the break, I realized, by stopping my mind from thinking about it. By not searching so desperately for the way forward, the way had found me.

  * * *

  AND THAT NIGHT THERE WAS news. My mom had cracked the code.

  Rudd, somewhere behind me, was sending messages to his blog, phoned in and recorded daily so that his followers around the world could know how he was doing, where he was, and what he saw and thought about when he gazed out on the Antarctic horizon.

  But tactically he’d chosen not to put the signal of his GPS unit into the website itself so that people could track him in real time, as they could me, on my website. And his daily blog posts never referred to any precise location at all, only to a loosely referenced daily mileage that felt deeply uncertain if not downright suspicious—perhaps another clever deception by a wily veteran competitor.

  I knew he was behind me, but couldn’t with any certainty say where.

  But my mom, for her own reasons, had gotten it into her head that we should know exactly where Rudd was. The inReach unit he was using, like mine, functioned as a GPS locator, but could also send short texts by satellite to his expedition manager back in England.

  I was sharing with the world, not because I was better than Rudd, but because I had a different goal regarding what the project could be. So I’d linked my GPS to my Instagram profile and my website, and then Jenna and I had worked to get schools involved, with kids tracking me in real time and maybe getting excited about Antarctica, or their own goals and dreams. I wanted it all public, all out.

  In any case, Rudd’s inReach had to have a unique web address, a URL, just like mine. Mom and Jenna, in talking about the information gap, knew this—they just didn’t know what URL Rudd had chosen. Finding the hidden URL became my mom’s quest.

  “She reached out to some of her tech friends,” Jenna told me when I called her for our nightly medical check. “And they said that Lou’s signal was probably encrypted—couldn’t be broken. But then she found stuff from his past expeditions, which had the full URL address, so she figured this one was probably not encrypted either and she just started trying different variations.”

  “And she just stumbled on it?” I asked.

  “What?”

  I repeated the question through a thick wall of static, and lay there to wait to see if the line would clear or the call would drop, staring up at the roof of my tent. My battery was up there, and as I thought of Mom and Rudd, I reached up to tap it lightly again with a finger through the tent fabric, wanting one more bit of reassurance. Antarctica tolerated modern technology only to a point.

  “No, I think it was more like just whittling it down,” Jenna finally said when the static subsided. “It was incredible—she realized that because his GPS was running through a European network, rather than an American one, it would have a different label. Then she assumed it would have some personal touch, so she started trying names he’d mentioned in past interviews—wife, children, parents, whatever, but that didn’t work.”

  I couldn’t help but smile, there nestled in my bag on the ice, because I could see everything that Jenna was telling me so clearly. Once unleashed, my mother’s ferocity and determination was an awesome thing.

  “The final piece,” Jenna continued, “was seeing that he’d named all his past expeditions and put the expedition name in the URL for that trip. So when she got that, and typed the magic words of his project, ‘The Spirit of Endurance,’ it all clicked. Boom. She was on her laptop in front of the TV when it happened.”

  Jenna paused for a beat. “Survivor,” she said.

  She knew the effect that would have on me. Survivor, the long-running reality show about a group of people on a tropical island competing to be the last one standing, and so win the $1 million prize, had been a ritual family night in our house from its beginning when I was in high school. I’d gone off to college and life and mostly stopped watching the show, but my mom and Brian kept the tradition going. It was about the only television show they regularly watched—a guilty pleasure, they called it, never missing an episode through thirty-eight seasons. That Mom would crack Rudd’s code in the middle of a tribal council or immunity challenge or some other old Survivor ritual was perfect because the effort itself, sitting there with her laptop, was a Survivor-like strategic move. It had required patience, guile, and determination. Outwit, outlast, outplay. That was one of Survivor’s constantly repeated catchphrases, and Mom had done all three. I could almost hear her scream when it all clicked, startling Brian half to death.

  Learning Rudd’s code, which would give Jenna the ability to calculate and report Rudd’s exact distance from me every night, felt like a secret advantage, a mystery story of ruse and subterfuge. Antarctica’s history was full of tales like that—explorers concealing their plans, veiling their intentions
until the last minute, even keeping the mix of their food rations cloaked in secrecy. I lay in my bag, smiling for a long time until sleep took me, thinking of Mom’s tenacity and cunning.

  CHAPTER SIX More Hospital

  DAY 8

  I pushed another twelve hours the following day, with the whiteout still socked in around me. My body felt the strain of that, for sure, in my aching shoulders and back, but the whiteout had a mental impact, too. With no visual evidence, minute to minute or hour to hour, that I was actually moving anywhere or making progress, I felt as if I were trapped inside the belly of a Ping-Pong ball, white in every direction.

  Early in the afternoon, I took a bad fall, too, making things worse. Because I couldn’t see much farther than my ski tips, ridges and bumps in the ice could appear out of nowhere, and the wind-carved sastruga that took me down was too big to avoid, at least three feet high.

  Sastrugi are the ocean waves on a frozen continent, ice formations that are sometimes beautiful—they can look like meringue on a pie or sand dunes in a desert—but always rock hard, chiseled by wind. They can be modest or monstrous in size, and they’re always irregular in their recesses and ridges.

  My ski tips jammed into this one at the same instant I saw it, and I lurched forward. Momentum did the rest and I fell to the side, smashing my right hip onto the ice and pulling the sled along with me to the sastruga’s edge, where I had a brief moment of panic that it would keep coming and fall on me.

  But the sled stopped, and I got up and moved on, though I was definitely more tentative and cautious after that, fearing another fall and straining even harder to see what might be ahead of me.

  So by the time I stopped, around 8 p.m., my mind was probably even more wiped out than usual. I felt the bruise on my hip when I pressed down on it. My eyes, even with my goggles, burned with fatigue from the hours of looking and seeing nothing. I was weakened by the day and feeling vulnerable, which probably made everything that happened next even worse. Like the sastruga, I didn’t see it coming.

  * * *

  MAKING CAMP ON THE ICE starts with unpacking. There’s a whole chain of events that unfolds after that in a certain set order, from unrolling the tent, to putting down the stakes to secure it, to getting inside and starting the process of melting snow for my water supply.

  But it all revolves around the sled. And I began as usual. I unharnessed. I checked the wind direction and grabbed the sled’s front to pull it around ninety degrees so that it would be less likely to move during the night. I unbuckled the straps on my sled one by one until the cover was loose, then unzipped it and pulled it up toward me.

  That’s when it hit: Gas!

  The smell wafted up from inside the sled and through my mask. I froze, instantly rigid with fear, still gripping the sled cover. From the overpowering smell I instantly knew gas must have spilled somewhere down inside, and the possibilities of what that meant were all horrible. If it had spilled into my food supplies, they were ruined. If I’d lost too much fuel, I would be in just as much of a crisis, unable to melt snow for drinking.

  The smell got stronger as I began pawing through my supplies in panic. Without warning, and with a power that only smell can create, the inhaled scent triggered a memory and I was transported: Kerosene. The thick, sickly sweet smell was suddenly swirling through my head, bringing a flood of dark images and sensations. In a flash of memory I was on a beach. It was dark and steamy hot. Torchlight flickered from a breeze off the ocean. A circle of people in bikinis, shorts, and sandals stood before me, mouths open, looking shocked, their faces starkly illuminated by the firelight. And I began to scream.

  * * *

  IT WAS 2008. I’d been traveling for five months by that night, and life felt open-ended with possibilities everywhere I looked. I’d graduated from college the previous year. The years of joy and grind, swimming competitively at Yale, were over. And I had slowly saved $10,000 from my summer job of painting houses since high school with my best friend, David. Contrary to many of my classmates, I was more interested in depositing adventure into my life-experience account than a paycheck into my bank account while racing up the corporate ladder. So I’d set off to see the world, starting west from Portland out across the Pacific, with the plan of traveling for a year or until the money ran out. Adventure without itinerary.

  I was also going alone, and I was going on the cheap—peanut butter and jelly by the jarful, hostels by night. Chance events and serendipity, which I’d been ready to embrace from the beginning in having no firm plan, had already touched me by then. I’d bought an airplane ticket to Auckland, New Zealand, from Hawaii, where I’d been visiting my father at his organic farm, a patch of grass he’d moved to after I graduated from high school. Standing at the travel agency ticket counter, the agent had said, “Hey, ever been to Fiji? You can get a layover there, no extra charge.”

  “Why not?” I said, unclear at that moment even exactly where Fiji was.

  Fiji, in my meeting Jenna there in that little beach bar, had defined everything about serendipity and chance, and my trip had continued on from there, hitchhiking through New Zealand, and then flying on to Sydney, from where I intended to surf my way along Australia’s east coast. But as I got off the train from the airport in downtown Sydney, there was a phone call to make that I’d been thinking about for weeks.

  I walked to the first pay phone I could find and pulled out from my backpack the book with Jenna’s number written on the back cover, then reached into my pocket for the Australian gold dollar coin I’d acquired while changing money at the airport. I stood for a second, looking at the coin in my hand and the book, and was struck by the same thought I’d had that day at the bar in Fiji: nothing to lose. She might be gone, she might not answer, she might not want to see me. But I had to try. I dropped the coin into the slot.

  And she answered. She was still in Sydney. My luck had held.

  “Hi,” I said, holding the book in my hand. “It’s Colin, from Fiji.”

  “Oh my God!” she said. “Where are you?”

  I looked around. “Somewhere in Sydney… haven’t figured out the city yet. Just landed… and you’re the person I wanted to call.”

  She paused for a second and I realized I was holding my breath.

  “We’re headed out tonight to a bar in Bondi—bunch of friends,” she said. “Join us?”

  The bar turned out to be a pizza place near the beach, which immediately reminded me of Fiji, and inside, Jenna was sitting at a big table, surrounded by friends, again just like that first time. She jumped up and hugged me and shouted introductions over the pounding, loud music.

  “Let’s take a slice outside!” she yelled in my ear.

  I nodded and with two slices on paper plates, I followed her out toward the beach, and then to the Bondi Seawall, where we slid down, facing the ocean under a full moon, our backs to the cool concrete. I wanted to know more about her than I’d been able to learn on what now felt like our first date on the little island six weeks ago.

  Thrilled to be alone with her but not knowing where to start, I grinned and said, “It’s so good to see you!”

  She reached over and touched my cheek. “You too…”

  “So… Australia?” I said, struggling to take it all in: the beach, us together again, the electricity of the moment.

  “I always dreamed of coming to Australia after my mom told me about her first trip here in the mid-seventies. So when my college offered a study abroad program here, the first semester of my junior year I jumped on it.”

  As the waves crashed in front of us and the bar music echoed somewhere behind, I peppered Jenna with questions and she told me about her life—growing up in small-town western Massachusetts, only child of a single mother.

  “Mom grew up working class. She was one of seven kids in a family where nobody had ever flown on an airplane. She broke away, leaving home at eighteen in search of more, eventually becoming a flight attendant in the early 1960s, the Pan Am days o
f flying,” Jenna said.

  I nodded, curious to hear more.

  “She had a thriving career for over twenty years, working her way up into the airline’s management. But then I came along”—she looked over at me with a slight smile—“and she moved back home to rural Massachusetts, giving up her career and her global life to raise me near family. She sacrificed for me, but she always said I was worth it.” I suddenly saw a depth in her that I hadn’t seen before in Fiji, and I reached over to take her hand.

  “So no siblings then, how about your dad?” I asked.

  She took another bite of pizza. “Never met him,” she said, not avoiding my eyes but, rather, looking right at me.

  The serendipity of having no plan unfolded again from there, beginning that night. Instead of surfing up the coast, I explored Sydney with Jenna for most of the next month. We shared cheap dinners and took long walks along the water past the Opera House, talking more about our lives and families and dreams, and by the time I left to continue my trip, intending to head toward Southeast Asia, I’d fallen for her completely. We began talking about the future, vowing to get together again once we were both back home.

  Outside the train station as I headed toward the airport—only a few feet from the pay phone I’d called her on—I kissed her goodbye and reached down into my backpack.

  “I want to give you this—it’s a book that’s meant a lot to me,” I said, holding out a copy of The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho.

  She bit her lower lip. “We seem to have a trend here—another book!” she said, looking like she might cry.

  “You wrote your number last time, and this time I wanted to write,” I said, opening the cover. “To Jenna,” I read. “The time we have spent together has been absolutely amazing, from the endless laughter and smiles to the thousand kisses a day, you have captured my heart. The road of life’s great adventure is full of surprising twists and turns—and luck, too, the kind I had in meeting you in the least likely of places. I hope our roads lead back together.”