When the tent was secured, I stared down at it for a minute, rechecking my mental list of things to worry about or put aside as completed. The sum of my possessions, my life, and my existence on the ice was all in there, compacted in one place—the space inside barely bigger than your average coffin, but representing at the same time everything about safety and home.
But it also represented, beyond the eventual sleep I’d try to get, the second part of my workday. I still needed to get myself fed, get snow melted for water for the next day, check in with A.L.E. and Jenna, and on down a list that would take me another two or three hours to complete, and as I crawled inside, a wave of comforting familiarity rolled through me. The first thing I saw was my clothesline dangling out before me, running the length of the tent. My face mask, banged to clear the icicles, went immediately onto the line, followed by my mittens. Then the boots came off, along with my three pairs of socks—the heavy wool outer layer, the plastic bag, and finally the thin inner liner against my skin. One of Dixie’s added nuggets of wisdom was that a foot bag should also have been, in a previous life, a food bag. The container for a morning’s oatmeal ration could be recycled as footwear, and that night as I held the bags up to my face to look, I saw that one of my oatmeal-turned-foot-bags had developed a hole and was done. I wadded it up and stuffed it into my jacket pocket.
All the pieces of my life were in motion. Mittens and steaming socks bounced on the line. The tent fabric fluttered as though it were alive. My overalls scraped on the tent’s floor, fabric on fabric, as I crawled forward before turning back to zip up and close myself in.
* * *
STARTING THE STOVE, to begin snowmelt and make hot water to rehydrate my dinner, was always the first step once inside, and by then it was time for my nightly 8:50 p.m. check-in call to A.L.E.
But after that came a part of the day I always looked forward to, a moment that was soothing and comforting even when I wasn’t trying to recover from some freak-out or trauma, when I’d feel, for a few minutes, like I was standing in front of a classroom of kids—something I’d come to love in the nonprofit work Jenna and I had begun with the Explorers Grand Slam.
I grabbed for the inReach device from my bag, and there it was: The nightly text from Jenna had arrived, with a question from one of the thirty thousand schoolkids who were following my Antarctica project in their classrooms at 104 schools around the world. In a day of constant motion, answering kids’ questions about Antarctica or my life on the ice—often extremely thoughtful, always interesting—felt like a release, a few minutes when I was freed from the sometimes claustrophobic confines of my day and my routine.
Jenna was the facilitator in making it work: Every night, I’d send her a photo and recap of my day—transmitted through a glacially slow Iridium GO! satellite modem, thirty minutes or more to send one low-res image—which she’d post to Instagram, while I responded to the nightly question she’d forwarded on the inReach.
That night, an eleven-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta, Georgia, who had been following The Impossible First journey through the curriculum in his classroom, wanted to know about wildlife.
“How do you protect yourself from polar bears?” he asked. “Do you see them very often?”
I read it again and smiled as I did, picturing the boy and his school, hoping the curiosity that had prompted his question would always burn, pushing him to keep learning.
“Here’s a riddle: why don’t polar bears eat penguins?” I wrote back. “Because they live in different parts of the world! There are no polar bears in Antarctica at all, which is lucky for me, and the penguins. The bears all live on the opposite side of the globe in the far north near the North Pole.”
* * *
I FOUND A RHYTHM the next day, and the next, and on through a string of twelve-hour days in the harness. That I could go days without an incident or accident or crisis of some other kind restored some of my confidence, and by the time I woke up on my fifteenth day on the ice, I felt in some ways like a well-oiled machine.
A bad headwind had developed during the night. I’d heard it growing in force, whipping the tent, and as I began my two-hour morning routine of chores—putting on the water to boil, pooping in the vestibule of snow at the foot-edge of the tent, pouring water into oatmeal, then filling my two-liter thermos for the day’s drinking water—it seemed to only grow stronger. I pulled on my three sock layers, my red-and-black overalls and jacket, listening to the growing howl, and by the time I climbed out, it was really whipping, by far the strongest wind I’d experienced on the ice, coming straight north toward me from the high polar plateau.
I stiffened instinctively and involuntarily as the first real gust blasted into my body, feeling the deep cold of it even through my bundled layers, my mask, and the fur collar of my parka hood—and as I harnessed in and began, I realized I’d never pulled the sled into anything like it. The wind hit my body like a wall, forcing me, without ever consciously deciding to change anything about my posture, to lean into it, curling over slightly toward my ski tips. I was creating a line against the wind like my tent’s, I realized—streamlined with the wind’s direction to minimize the impact. When I stopped to take a quick pee, I saw quickly that I’d never peed in wind like that, either. Even with my back carefully positioned to the wind after I unzipped the fly of my overalls, the pee stream sprayed wildly away from me.
As I zipped up and turned back into the wind, it struck me that I hadn’t shot enough video of dramatic weather like this either. I’d been journaling with my camera in recent days, recording my thoughts in the tent before sleep and filming scenes outside of deep snow or beautiful weather. In addition to my journaling, I was capturing photos for my nightly Instagram post and videos to share later when I returned from Antarctica.
That day in the wind the idea of what to film was pretty basic: me trudging across the frame, pulling the sled into horizontal blowing snow. But complications quickly ensued.
I grabbed my GoPro, which was mounted onto a little tripod, set it up facing out across the ice, and reached down with my huge ungainly mittens to fumble with the record button. Video rolling, I left the camera in position and walked back to my sled. But just as I got halfway across my big scene, I looked over and saw that the tripod had toppled in the wind. That meant starting the entire process all over. So I retreated to my starting spot, unhitched, walked over to put the camera back upright, then tried the whole thing again. And again it fell. I felt like an actor in a low-budget movie where the sets are cardboard and the swap meet–quality props are guaranteed to fail.
The cold was starting to get to me by then, and I knew the battery would also be stressed from the frigid air, and that I needed to be making progress pushing south. When I got back to the camera after the second knockdown, I was getting frustrated with my cinematic partner.
“Okay, man,” I said aloud. “I know it’s windy out here, but three legs should be good enough. I’m getting around on two. You can do this.”
The camera stayed upright this time, but it was a clearly ridiculous exercise all the same. The camera recorded me pulling the sled into the wind, going out of the frame, but then a few minutes later walking right back and reaching down with my big black mittens to pack it all up. I gently folded the little tripod legs, then peered into the lens one more time. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “The things we do, huh?”
I was trying to bring some levity to the situation to take my mind off the bitter cold and in some small way normalize what was abnormal. After all, with this trek, I was engaged in something that demanded all my strength and will. My survival instincts naturally rebelled against taking time out to “shoot selfies.” But if that picture you’re creating can’t be viewed, how can it inspire? How would my life have been different if I hadn’t been able to see Pablo Morales win that butterfly gold medal in 1992?
* * *
THE WIND CONTINUED AND WORSENED through that morning, taking the windchill down to what had to
have been well below minus fifty, and by noon I was really looking forward to my quick midday break and my ramen noodles. I unclipped and sat down on the sled, pulled on my extra parka, and grabbed my thermos. I poured water from the thermos into the mug with the noodles and pulled up the mask to take a slurp. But then just as I was pulling the mug to my face, I caught a glimpse of myself in the little mirror that jutted up from the front of the compass. With a flinch of panic I set down the mug and I yanked the compass toward me for a better view.
The tip of my nose was frostbitten. A white spot about the size of a pinky fingernail had formed right on the tip. I looked down into the mask, a Darth Vader–like plastic mask-and-goggles combo that covered my face completely from the top of my forehead to below my chin.
A caked layer of ice had formed inside, right where the mask touched my nose. Because of the headwind, my breath had condensed and frozen inside, instead of being blown out the side as I breathed, which happened with any kind of crosswind. And the pressure of the mask had then pressed my nose up against the wall of ice. That had been enough to do it. With the mask off, I quickly grabbed a ski pole and jammed it down into the mask, and after four or five jabs, the ice finally broke into shards and I shook the mask upside down to clear it before putting it back on, my heart pounding.
People lost parts of themselves in places like this—I couldn’t help but think of Everest expedition survivor Beck Weathers. And I thought of the promise Jenna and I had made to each other, that I’d always come home in one piece even if it meant failure.
I’m being changed, I thought as I touched a mitten to my mask, now back on my face. I’m becoming someone I don’t know. Frostbite felt like a symbol, the beginning of something bigger. Antarctica was taking my body and my mind somewhere far away from what I’d been before. There’d be positive pieces of that journey—I firmly believed that, even if they were mixed in with the negative elements. But might I lose sight, in obsession or error, of the promise I’d made to Jenna about my safety? What was the price I’d have to pay for my dreams?
* * *
I’D PAID PRICES BEFORE.
After falling in love in Sydney, Jenna and I continued building our relationship over the next three years. Jenna finished college in Florida, I took my job in Chicago, but over this time we never lived in the same city. We dreamed of sharing a home and, in 2010, Jenna moved to Portland so we could be together. But on a steamy day in July 2011, when I was twenty-six years old, I stood at the curb outside an apartment building on West Burnside Street in Portland, throwing the last few bags of clothes and gear and books into my fifteen-year-old turd-brown Subaru. My triathlon bike was already secured to the rack on top, but other than that, I was traveling light—running shoes, swimming caps and suits, and enough other clothes to get me by when I wouldn’t be training.
I certainly wouldn’t have said at that moment that I was an asshole, or a fool, or even confused. But I stood there, sweating and impatient, full of the absolute blind certainty of every confused, foolish asshole I’ve ever known. I looked at my watch, thinking about summer traffic that can snarl Interstate 5 south of Portland. I thought about California and Australia, where I was going to live and train, and all the grand triumphs I’d surely have ahead. I was about to hitch a rocket ride, and if there were implications in that for my relationship with Jenna, I couldn’t see them, or perhaps on some level I’d chosen to ignore them. Jenna was twenty-four that summer, dressed for work in her sharp and smart business clothes, heading off to a campaign staff meeting with my mother. Her “politics clothes,” I called them. She’d just come out of our apartment and stood on the curb looking at me, arms crossed on her chest. Her eyes were red. She’d been crying. I’d done that.
I could see the balcony of our apartment over Jenna’s shoulder—our first apartment, near enough to the Portland Timbers soccer stadium that we could hear the roar of the crowd on game day. I saw the tomato starts she’d put into our little terrace looking out over the city street. “Our first garden!” she’d said, her hands covered with black potting soil, as she came back inside. We’d made love in celebration. There’d be lots more gardens, we told each other.
But I also didn’t see those things. I was leaving, and there was nothing much more to discuss.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance and I’m taking it,” I said to Jenna. I didn’t say anything about us, or ask anything about her. I declared it.
She looked me in the eyes across the sidewalk, but didn’t say anything for a while.
“I moved across the country from the East Coast nine months ago to build a life with you,” she finally said. Her words were a declaration, too, a statement of fact. She wasn’t pleading or crying. “Left the community I knew, left everything…”
“I know,” I said, shrugging. “I know that.”
We stood there silently after that for a while. I saw her eyes well up, and she bit her lip.
“But you have to do this, I know—it’s an incredible opportunity,” she said. “And you should… it’ll be…” She shrugged.
“Long-distance,” I said.
She nodded. “And I’ve committed to working with your mom,” she said. “I can’t just walk away from that.” She straightened up. “I’m just a little sad right now, that’s all. It’ll be lonely here without you.”
In other circumstances, Jenna’s comment, and her implied suggestion about my priorities and loyalties—that I was walking away from my own family and she was not—would’ve stung. My mom, after years of passionate grassroots political involvement, had decided earlier that year to make her first-ever run for public office, trying to become Portland’s next mayor. And Jenna, my mom’s first campaign hire, was using her political science degree—helping shape campaign events and organizing Mom’s every minute, from her first early-morning wake-up call to the last meeting of the day twelve hours later. Mom and Jenna were dashing around the city together day after day sprinting through five-minute lunches, speeches, and neighborhood meet-and-greets, and I’d seen that Jenna was dedicated to it and was good at it.
But couldn’t they both see what had fallen into my lap? I’d been invited to join a super-elite triathlon team. World championships, the Olympics, medals, glory, half the year in Southern California, the other half in Australia—all of that beckoned like a glittering jewel. Even getting the call from the coach who’d invited me, a former world champion herself, had been exhilarating and flattering. But she said the offer came with a condition. “You have to be all in, Colin,” she said. “If you’re not all in, 100 percent, then don’t bother coming.”
And so, pumped up with an inflated view of my own destiny, I drove off into the muggy Portland afternoon, blind to what I was leaving behind.
All in, all gone.
* * *
I’D BEEN AFRAID TO CHECK my nose again through the rest of the day until I got into the tent, but I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it, reaching up periodically to feel my mask, wanting to pull it off to check, knowing that made no sense and could worsen the problem.
But then, once I was inside the tent that night, I couldn’t stop looking. I stared for a long time at myself in my little hand mirror, which was definitely not a good idea. The longer I looked, the stranger and less familiar I appeared somehow, so unlike the person who’d always gazed back at me in mirrors before that. The still-white spot of frostbite on my nose created a bull’s-eye target in the middle of my face and I couldn’t stop staring at it, and probing with my finger.
My dot of frostbite was superficial. I knew that. White indicates the lowest level, just past the pink of frostnip, baby steps into the spectrum of horror that can lead to the blue-black of tissue damage and amputation.
I knew my nose needed extra protection now, just in case something like the ice-mask problem happened again, so I grabbed for my first-aid kit. I had blister and salve cream in there, and bandages to wrap puncture wounds, cuts, and burns. None of those things were a fit for
this particular problem.
Then I found a roll of kinesio sports tape—the stuff you see on athlete’s shoulders and arms, meant to help stabilize muscles and tendons. It wouldn’t heal my frostbite, but it would at least cover it up, function like a little jacket that would hold in my skin’s warmth, a tiny suit of armor. I cut two more strips to put across my cheeks; even though I’d seen no frostbite, it felt like insurance.
By the end I looked like a defensive lineman from the brawly, leather-helmeted days of the NFL—damaged and bandaged, but by God, going back out onto the field, ready to get clobbered all over again.
Then I looked at my fingers. The fine-dexterity work with the tape had made them hurt like hell, and I saw that if anything, they were in even worse shape than the nose—not frostbitten, but cracked wide open in the cold. Fissures ran deep into my fingertips, and as I held them up in front of my face in the pinkish light of the tent they seemed alien—Frankenstein fingers, crevasses down into the ice, not part of me, not the Colin I knew or had ever known. I’d have to do something about them, too.
I shuddered and pawed through my medical bag again, looking for my superglue, which I’d thrown in as a fix-all. I needed to close the cracks to keep them from growing, so I laid one hand down on the top of the sleeping bag, took the glue with the other hand, and ran a bead down each crack.
Gluing my cracks closed was in some ways even more disgusting than the cracks themselves—in almost any other time or place in the world I’d left behind, it would have been absolutely revolting, if not unsanitary, unsafe, and insane. But all things had changed. What was disgusting had become strangely comforting. What was only very cold, and not brutally cold, felt almost warm. What was monotonous, in food and the daily grinding rhythm of life in pulling the sled south, became an element of autopilot calm, one less thing to think about. I held up my hands before me in the diffuse red light of the tent, clenched my fingers to make a fist, felt the glistening glue beads drying stiff and tight in the cold air, then looked into my eyes one more time in the mirror, wondering what other cracks I might be gluing closed before I was done.
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