* * *
I WOKE UP DURING THE night feeling overwhelmed and ganged-up on, my defenses down. Things I could wrestle with rationally by day—the wind and cold, and the effects that Antarctica was having on my body in cracks and frostbite—seemed suddenly bigger in that 3 a.m. space of anxious uncertainty. I pulled off my sleep mask. Sunlight beamed through the roof. The wind still blasted outside. And I needed to pee, so I grabbed my pee bottle to bring it inside the bag, where I could relieve myself without having to leave the tent in the middle of the night. But just as I did I was seized by a wave of hunger that made me ravenous and a bit out of control. Still half-asleep, I grabbed the duffel bag with my food supplies and ripped it open, then grabbed chunks of Colin Bars and stuffed them into my mouth.
In my delirium, they were candy bars, the most delicious things I’d ever eaten. Every bite swirled into my senses. I’d never tasted anything like it. And then just as abruptly, I was horrified, realizing what I’d done.
I’d broken the rules. I’d lost control. I’d eaten tomorrow’s food. I slumped into my sleeping bag, raging at myself and feeling the bars churning in my stomach. Antarctica was almost every day demanding hard choices, and in a moment of half-awake dreamscape reasoning, I’d made a choice and responded to a need deep inside me that was probably more than just hunger. That seemed clear enough to me as I lay there, unable for a long time to even close my eyes.
Consequences of that moment of blind need would unfold. But it also struck me, as I stared at the red tent roof for a long time, watching my clothes line bounce and dance with the motions of the wind, that our defeats can’t be separated from our victories. Scars and triumphs both make us who we are. I reached down inside the sleeping bag and touched my thighs and calves, running my fingers along the places burned and healed.
The good and the bad couldn’t be separated. What I was and how I’d come to be there, tucked into my little world on the ice, was a consequence of every event in my life. My food-raid mistake would have repercussions, and those repercussions would have consequences of their own, and the best I could do was hold on and hope that pulling one thread wouldn’t unravel everything.
CHAPTER EIGHT Ghost Town
DAY 16
I woke up feeling sick and disgusted with myself, and as I leaned over to light my stove, I knew I’d be hungry for the day, and I accepted that as my fate. I’d made a mistake in the night—worse than that, I’d shown that I was weak—grabbing extra food in my half-awake, half-asleep dream state.
I bounced the remaining day’s worth of Colin Bars up and down in my hand as my water heated on the stove, weighing them in my mind, trying to assess exactly how many calories I’d gobbled and so how many fewer I’d have in my pockets as fuel during the day. About half were gone, meaning I’d eaten somewhere around two thousand calories in my raid, and that would take me down to about five thousand calories total for the day when I’d still be burning ten thousand. Rudd rations, I thought as I pushed the bars into my pockets. Even less.
My stomach was gurgling as I broke camp, and I had to stop several times as I packed, straightening up with a hand pressed to my belly. I heard Dr. Troup’s warning again in my head, that the high-fat, high-calorie bars he and his team had created for me were, in a way, a food on the frontier—designed for high performance in an extreme environment, but also extreme in their own way. The bars had worked beautifully and burned cleanly in my body on a day-to-day rationed basis, but gorging myself last night—eating the most ever in a day and far more than anyone had ever expected in a twenty-four-hour period—had pushed me to the border of my body’s tolerance.
The gurgling churn in my stomach continued as I harnessed up and began pulling south into a brilliant clear day, and I felt I could see forever across the ice even as I found myself focusing more and more on my digestion. I’d certainly been aware of my body before, in my previous fifteen days on the ice. Muscle fatigue and cold were constant companions. But things felt pulled to a new place now. When a new wave of rumbling gurgles rolled through, my gut grabbed my mind entirely, and I tried to fight back by focusing on things outside myself—on the sun and sky and ice around me—trying to absorb Antarctica as a kind of escape from my internal struggle.
But after about four hours, the wave surged to a new place. I needed to relieve myself and couldn’t avoid it much longer, and at that point logistics took over. I’d been fortunately regular, going to the bathroom every morning without fail in the snow-floored vestibule sheltered by the outer layer of my tent. Now I looked down at my gear. To get out of my clothes, I’d first have to unharness and remove the compass from my chest, then take off my jacket, then my windproof overalls underneath. Only then, having arrived at the base layers, could I pull down my underwear.
The clock would be running. A glance at my thermometer said it was almost twenty-five below. I’d have a lot of skin exposed. Frostbite was possible and was definitely on my mind—even as my gut roiled, I thought about my frostbitten nose. But then the wave passed and I told myself I could make it through the day. I shrank back from the challenge and difficulty of relieving myself outside, and clung to the idea that I could wait and do it safely and securely in my sheltered little bathroom vestibule.
But I couldn’t make it. At about six hours, a wave came that wouldn’t stop. Instinctively, I thought that I’d get relief if I was able to pass some gas, so I tried. Unfortunately, more than gas came out. I was relieved and disgusted at the same time, and it didn’t help that I knew I had another six hours left of pulling forward before I could properly clean up, and that every step would now be accompanied by sticky chafing.
To minimize the weight I would be hauling, I’d brought no change of underwear. And, of course, at the first waypoint, I’d gotten rid of all but ten wet wipes. I’d use at least one of those ten tonight when I got inside the tent, and until then I’d have to get by with a quick and partial cleanup on the ice. It was all very humiliating, the sort of thing that armchair adventurers never imagine but that likely crops up, with wide variation, on any journey where the stakes are so high and the resources are stretched thin. As my stomach settled down, I was soon starving again on my reduced post–food raid rations, and that didn’t help.
* * *
THE CLEAR WEATHER CONTINUED through that night and into the next morning, my seventeenth day on the ice, and I woke up excited by the prospect of an important waypoint: My GPS told me I’d make it to Thiels Corner. Thiels felt important, as a symbol and as a geographic marker. From there, I’d be at eighty-five degrees south, three hundred miles from the South Pole and more than two hundred miles from where I’d started. It also marked a turning point on my compass. I’d navigated toward Thiels, an airplane refueling depot, from those first days on the ice at the Messner Start, skirting around known crevasse fields in the process, and now I’d adjust the heading for a straight shot south toward the Pole. A first important leg of the journey would be over, and though I’d been steadily climbing from my starting point at sea level toward the nine-thousand-foot-high polar plateau, Thiels marked the place where the climb would intensify, making my already burdensome sled feel even heavier. And Jenna had told me the previous night that I was more than nineteen miles ahead of Rudd, which felt like a solid lead. I’d planned a little celebration for myself in making it there, especially after the undignified fiasco of the previous day. Thiels would be an achievement, especially when judged against those horrid first hours and days when everything felt lost.
The visibility remained stunning as I pushed on. I could see an actual horizon—the white of the ice marking a sharp and clean horizontal break with the blue sky, which felt bracing and limitless after being locked in by the whiteout. And after only about another half an hour of pushing south, I began to see the outline of a structure emerging in the distance.
Seeing anything other than ice, snow, and sky was stark and jarring, even though I couldn’t tell quite yet what I was squinting at. A dark rectang
ular shape, the sun glinting off a metallic surface of some kind, was all I could see, but even that was enough to make it an instant obsession. It was something different. That alone meant I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and that I didn’t need to use my compass. I could navigate toward it.
And it seemed so close. After first seeing it, I thought to myself—bang! Thirty minutes and I’ll be there. But I pulled toward it for an hour and it looked exactly the same, and then another hour and still it seemed just as far away. I couldn’t tell whether it was some trick of the light or just the vast emptiness of the landscape, but the effect was profound—as though I was on a treadmill with a photo of some desirable destination dangled in front of me, and no amount of strain or struggle would ever get me there. If I’d needed another reminder of my absurdly tiny stick-figure smallness alone on the ice in Antarctica, and the distances I still had to go, here it was.
But gradually I could see more details emerging: fuel barrels, the outline of a runway. Thiels, about halfway between Union Glacier and the South Pole, had been created for planes that couldn’t make the whole seven-hundred-mile distance. And as I finally got there, I saw that the depot and its landing strip, this early in the summer expedition season, had been unused since the onset of winter and darkness the year before. Evidence of abandonment, of time standing still, waiting for something to happen, hung over everything.
Ironically, a covered porta-potty toilet sat at the runway’s edge, frosted and tilted partly over, and I stopped and stood there, thinking of my grim experience the day before. Even if right in the middle of my gut-churning episode, I’d stumbled on the only working outhouse for hundreds of miles in Antarctica, I would’ve been afraid to use it for fear of violating the rule of taking support of any kind. I’d been doomed no matter what.
I’d also imagined in a general way that arriving at Thiels and seeing things from off the ice, things manufactured in a factory and brought here by people doing their jobs, would be welcome and comforting. But as I walked up the ice runway, unplowed and untouched by anybody for months, and then stopped to touch one of the fifty-five-gallon green barrels of jet fuel, still deep in its cocoon of winter snow, my sense of comfort and celebration started to evaporate. Thiels felt empty in its abandonment, hollowed out and ghostly.
A tractor with a plow on the front sat at the runway’s edge, and I felt compelled toward it. I ran a hand down the frost-covered hood, then climbed up and looked through the window into the cab. It felt like an abandoned museum: Supplies, emergency kits, and tools were jumbled on the seat and the floor where the driver’s feet would go, next to a big cardboard box labeled, “Meals, ready to eat, individual.” I couldn’t have taken or eaten any of the supplies, of course, even if the cab had been open, with a sign that said “Help yourself,” because of the unsupported nature of my crossing attempt.
But still, it was hard to look away, and I pressed my face to the window and reached up a hand to the frosted glass, wanting somehow to touch the things inside and smell them and run my hand down the box to feel the smooth sides and sharp corners and imagine the person who’d carried it all there in closing down Thiels for the season. Just the phrase “ready to eat” was enough to make my mouth water, however frozen, locked away, and unattainable the food really was, because the food inside there was something different, something beyond my iron routine.
After so many days of isolation in my little universe of tent and sled and all the pieces of that life, it felt as if I’d wandered into a ghost town, a place of lost and lonely things. The barrels and the tractor and its frozen contents had sat there in the dark through the long Antarctic winter, and I was the first person on the planet to see them since.
I’ve stepped out of the world of human things, I said to myself, standing there on the tractor’s steel step. I don’t belong here. The jolt of that thought made me stand up straight and look around me again.
But the even weirder thing was that it was all so familiar. I’d been here before. Exactly here. When I’d been flying back to Union Glacier in 2016 from the South Pole after my Last Degree expedition, the A.L.E. plane had stopped for refueling. As I stood on the tractor’s step, I saw everything about that landing, and how our pilot, just a few minutes before our arrival, had looked back over his shoulder. “We’re picking somebody up at Thiels,” he said. “So it might take a few minutes longer with all that.”
Doug.
He was waiting for us at the depot, and had been there for two days. He’d been trying to make a solo, unassisted crossing to the South Pole, starting from the Hercules Inlet, and had called at Thiels to be picked up, abandoning his project. That’s all the pilot knew as we came in to land.
Doug was bent over, packing things into his sled, as I walked over from the plane, and when I said hello, he stood up suddenly with a startled look. He was in his mid-forties, with a gray beard and a face that had been beaten and weathered by the wind and cold.
“Sorry,” he said softly. “I’ve sort of forgotten what it’s like being around people… you know, talking.” He gave me a half smile and turned back to his sled.
“How long have you been on the ice?” I asked him.
He straightened slowly this time and looked out across the landscape for a second.
“Forty days,” he said. “Thought I’d make it… a nagging foot injury.” He spoke in partial, clipped sentence fragments. “It slowed me down, the foot.” He fell silent again. “And weather.”
That he was incredibly tough was obvious just by the look of him. But he volunteered almost nothing more about himself or his journey on the ice as I helped him wrestle the sled onto the plane. I only learned later, in reading his expedition blog, about his accomplished life—West Point graduate, former US Army infantry officer, lawyer, mountaineer. He’d rowed a boat across the Indian Ocean and been obsessed with Ernest Shackleton and Antarctica since fourth grade.
I’d never met, until that moment, anyone who’d just come through such a long time alone in Antarctica, and at the time I think I was more puzzled than anything else by Doug and his strange demeanor. But as I stood there a second time at Thiels, a new understanding swept through me. Antarctica had gotten inside him and changed him.
He seemed removed from the world, turned inward, focused on someplace that his journey had taken him, a landscape beyond words—hellish or transcendent or both, but clearly nothing that was of the regular world. I had no idea where Doug had gone, in his mind, through his forty days on the ice in 2016; my second time at the depot, I still wasn’t sure.
But the deeper realization that struck me, and sent a chill through me worse than any Antarctic cold, was that I was now heading toward that same portal of challenge and change that he’d emerged from. What he’d seen, where he’d been, what haunted those eyes—that was my own future, too. I was going into the unknown, just as Doug had, the uncharted place where there really was no map or guide to say where I’d be inside at the end. And would I even make it to the end? Antarctica had broken Doug, forcing him to end a dream he’d nurtured for decades. Would the same thing happen to me?
Rudd knew that Antarctica changed you. That’s what polar wisdom and experience had taught him, I suddenly understood, and what he’d been talking about on our flight together from South America. I’d looked at the devastating photo he showed me and only seen the physical transformation, the superficial one.
I suddenly needed to flee, and I hustled out past the unplowed airport to continue south. Doug had wrestled with Antarctica’s demons in this place, and had been defeated and broken by them. And my glimpse of him that day told me his fight had been heroic and epic against demons that were formidable and terrifying. They were still here and I needed to get away.
* * *
PULLING THE SLED GOT HARDER and harder through that afternoon, and very soon I found I was almost unable to move forward at all without huge, sustained effort. The snow felt much deeper after Thiels, forcing me to push through thick powder, bu
t I’d also fled the depot, hurrying out to escape the strange place it had taken my thoughts to, and it occurred to me that I was still being affected by that. After a while being in the harness felt as hard as the first day, when I’d groaned and heaved toward a waypoint on the continental edge.
The sled was definitely lighter by then—by Jenna’s estimate, at least fifty pounds lighter, from the things I’d removed and buried back at the first waypoint and the sixteen days of food and fuel I’d used since then. I knew that. It couldn’t possibly have become heavier. And yet it felt that way, which threw its own burden of doubt on all those difficult decisions we’d made, to remove food and potentially crucial tools and supplies. Had all of that been a mistake? Was my body breaking down? Even the question of whether the snow was in fact deeper, or just seemed that way, hammered into me as I pulled ferociously in the harness.
The line between reality and perception, what I could trust or not about myself and my conclusions and sensations, seemed tenuous, as though I were walking a tightrope between two worlds and could fall to one side or the other—toward some great new place of clarity, or into utter darkness. Doug, I think, had walked that tightrope.
And in the muffled shuffling of my feet, powdery snow brushing up over my boots to mid-calf, another thought hit me: There was no way to know which world was the true one, the real one, no way to gut-check my own perceptions. There was no one there with me to ask a second opinion of, no one who could look out and say with objectivity, “Yes, Colin, this snow is deeper today, and much harder to push through,” or “No, Colin, it’s all in your head. You’re tired and you’re blaming the snow when the answer or the flaw is inside you.”
The Impossible First Page 13