The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  The deep snow and the emotional challenge of the day gradually wore on me through the afternoon, to the point where I started to search for ways to get past it. I focused on my breathing. I counted my steps, trying to fall into a rhythm. But the snow felt like quicksand that I would sink into without some more dramatic solution. Finally, I decided that I should break my silence and reach for the thing that, until then, I’d resisted: music. So I looked through the tiny list on my phone and selected Paul Simon’s Graceland. I’m no musician, and most of the time I can’t really even quite say what moves me exactly in any song or album. I either like it or I don’t.

  But when the first chords of the title song blasted into my head, I was a little boy again, joyously dancing with my parents and my sister around our kitchen. The album was released in 1986, when I was still in diapers, and was the soundtrack of our house from my earliest memories, always played at high volume, often before school to get some of my energy out before my teachers would ask if I could please, please just sit still in class. I associated Graceland with gray, gloomy mornings in Portland that would be lifted from their gloom by those glorious rhythms and the sight of my family dancing crazily around me, twirling and jumping and laughing.

  I danced on the ice alone. I jumped. I remembered how it had thrilled me, but in the deep space I’d found—everything around me moving in rhythm—I heard it differently, too, as though for the first time. And the lyrics that had gone over my head as a child seemed deep and powerful, like they’d been written for that moment, for Antarctica, for me: Everybody sees you’re blown apart. Everybody sees the wind blow. I’m going to Graceland.

  * * *

  THE PAUL SIMON ALBUM, which I put on repeat all afternoon, got me through the day and the deep snow, but it also brought me back again and again to thinking about my parents. As I remembered them dancing to Simon’s songs, I also recalled their choices in raising me and Caitlin, and the respect for each other that had endured even through their divorce, and the integrity they’d demonstrated over and over, not through any kind of deliberate lessons, but by simply and quietly living their lives.

  I was still thinking of my mom and dad after I finally got through my twelve hours, set up the tent, and climbed inside. I hadn’t yet written the Instagram post that I’d been composing in my head all afternoon, gushing that Paul Simon was a transcendent genius. I hadn’t begun any of the evening’s chores beyond lighting my stove to begin snowmelt for my water, always the first priority.

  I slumped down for a second, trying to gear myself up for the tasks ahead, exhausted by the day, and opened my inReach. A text had arrived from my dad, as if he’d known, as if he’d read my thoughts and knew I was thinking about him—knew that maybe I needed something more from him that night.

  He’d sent me a quote to encourage me, as he did many days. But this one smashed into me with a power I didn’t expect. It was from Des Linden, the first American woman to win the Boston Marathon in thirty-three years, in 2018. “Some days it just flows and I feel like I’m born to do this,” she said. “Other days it feels like I’m trudging through hell. Every day I make the choice to show up and see what I’ve got, and to try and be better.”

  I read it again. And then again, and kept coming back to the four words in the middle, “every day… show up.” That suddenly felt like an important key. If the arc of my journey was really taking me to someplace beyond the known world—that spot on the map Doug had touched and come back haunted by—then every day and every step was important. And it also meant that every day was its own fight. If there’s deep snow or frostbite or emotional demons, you show up and see what you’ve got, and that’s maybe how you get to the end. It was a sentiment my dad himself would say and live by, that the good fight itself was the victory and that the smallest moments of life say the most about who we are inside.

  CHAPTER NINE Getting Home

  DAY 20

  After nineteen days and nights of repetition and routine, time was starting to blur. The myriad tiny details and steps of my life from the first moments of the alarm until the last chore inside the tent were starting to feel like a continuum, as though I’d always been here, wandering across the ice alone. The rhythms of work—seventeen-hour days consisting of two hours of chores in the morning, twelve hours pulling the sled, and three hours of chores at night—and cold and wind had begun to swallow me, 270 miles from the start.

  But this day instantly felt different, from the first moments after my 6 a.m. alarm because out there somewhere it was Thanksgiving Day. And as I broke camp to begin my day, the tent fluttering around me, exhalations of breath whitening to frost on the outside of my mask, I could picture everything about the traditions that would be unfolding back home.

  Thanksgiving dinner, since I was in college, meant my mom and Brian’s beach house in Manzanita on the Oregon Coast. It meant walks along the empty beach, and toasts around the outdoor firepit. It meant salad! That thought alone was enough to make my knees weak even without the family part. The idea of anything fresh and green, through the iron grind of my frozen or reconstituted rations on the ice, had become by then an obsession.

  But as I broke camp and pictured the scene and glorious smells and laughter, it struck me that Thanksgiving was really only one element of the deeper force that held my family together: ohana. The word means “family” in Hawaiian but with a broader sense than the English-language equivalent—it means the family we choose to love and bring into our lives, not just our relatives by blood. My parents, after their divorce, had vowed that the family would continue on in a new way, and ohana had been their answer—introduced to us by my stepmom, Catherine, who’d raised her two daughters in Hawaii, where my dad now lives.

  For one weekend a year in the summer, they made it work, bringing together a sprawling, blended family of spouses and former spouses, siblings, children, and in-laws, along now with Jenna and her family added into the mix. We were a smattering of last names, in fact. Mine was different from anyone else’s in my family. At birth, my parents opted to combine my mom’s last name Brady with my dad’s last name O’Connor to give me my name O’Brady. It was an utterly unlikely and wondrous group, connected only through my mom and dad and the complicated journey of their lives, all the way back to my half brother, Richard, whom my dad fathered in high school.

  Seeing my mom hugging Catherine and getting to hang out with my five older sisters—Caitlin, my full-blood sister; my stepsisters Eva and Lili from Catherine’s previous marriage; and my stepsisters Sadie and Casey from Brian’s previous marriage—felt like magic.

  At an annual ohana weekend gathering a few years earlier, we’d played charades.

  When Mom’s turn came she drew a tough one. “Three words,” she signaled. “Movie.” Then she let us know she planned to act out the first and second words at the same time. “Okay,” we nodded. She paused for a second. A sort of blissful openmouthed expression came across her face as she gazed up toward the sky. She turned to look at us all, palms up as if we should immediately get it. We stared for a few blank seconds, then broke out laughing.

  “Happy!” someone shouted. “Crazy!” Mom just kept shaking her head, reverting to her openmouthed posture, which made us all laugh even harder the second time.

  I glanced around the couch at the wondrously unlikely scene: Caitlin sat with her four stepsisters bundled in around her; spouses comfortably in the company of former spouses.

  But Mom was struggling and we all couldn’t stop laughing. She tried the third word of the title and got nowhere, then tried the blissed-out look again. Finally, in hysterics, we gave up.

  “La La Land!” she shouted.

  * * *

  AT AROUND NOON THAT DAY, still wrapped up in my thoughts about family and imagining Jenna and I starting a family of our own to add to the mix, I paused to take a midday rest break. I unharnessed, took off the skis, and sat down gently on the sled, feeling it first with my mitten to avoid sitting on my tent poles and ben
ding them. I pulled on the puffy extra parka that I always kept strapped in at the front of the sled, grabbed the ramen noodles from my day bag and mixed them with hot water from my thermos into my blue insulated mug, immediately slurping the warm noodles before they could grow cold.

  Each sensation and motion was so deeply ingrained by then, through repetition, that I could’ve seen it and felt it all with my eyes closed. And there was a kind of comfort in that. From here, I felt I’d be sharing something of the Thanksgiving meal and the celebration thousands of miles from home. I hoisted up my mug in a toast to faraway family, then reached with my other hand into a pocket for my ChapStick—and at that moment a plastic bag left in there by accident got stuck to my mitten and fell out. It had been a food bag, then a sock-liner bag, pulled off my foot the night before and retired from duty with a hole in it.

  Then, in the briefest of instants, it became a kite, blown from my hand out and across the ice, fluttering and rolling. And without thinking, or really even deciding, I jammed my food mug down and ran after it.

  The bag looked like it had a mind of its own, skittering across the snow, then stopping for a few seconds before catching a draft and lifting up, puffed with air, and back to the snow to roll and tumble again. And even as I scrambled, slipping and falling and getting up, never taking my eyes off the bag for fear of losing it, I questioned what the hell I was doing. I was wasting precious energy. In running across the ice without skis, something I’d been careful to avoid, I was risking a really disastrous fall as my boots postholed down into the snow. The bag was tiny and, in the grand scheme of things, probably insignificant—its disappearance out onto a universe of ice would be no loss to me.

  But I couldn’t stop. I’d committed myself to catching it and putting it back into my sack of trash. I’d leaped from my sled and run for reasons that were already there inside me, baked in. I leaped partly because of my dad, Eagle Scout, worshipper of the public lands and forests of the West, and I thought of him as I scrambled and fell and chased. I saw his face looking down at me when I was little and we were hiking somewhere in the Cascade Mountains east of Portland.

  “Stewardship,” he’d said as he bent down to pick up a little piece of tissue that a previous hiker had dropped on the trail. He’d said the word like a conclusion, as though it summed up a philosophy or a life, which in my dad’s case, it probably did. He traced his love of the land and the outdoors to my grandfather’s decision in the late 1960s, when my dad was ten, to move the family from Los Angeles to the deep emerald embrace of southern Oregon. On the day Dad and I were hiking in the Cascade Mountains, I saw him jam the tissue into a backpack pocket that was already stuffed with other things people had dropped and he’d retrieved: gum wrappers, plastic bags, wet wipes. His garbage pocket, I called it. “Leave no trace, Colin,” he said as we resumed our hike. “Then go further. Leave the trail in better shape than when you started.”

  Finally, my skittering across the Antarctic ice came to an end as I caught the bag, leaping onto it like it was a fumbled football. Feeling stupidly proud of myself and ridiculous at the same time, I rose up onto my knees, clutching it in my mitten.

  And when I looked back in the direction I’d come, I felt a mix of anxiety and love that probably could only make sense after nearly three weeks alone on the Antarctic ice.

  My sled.

  I’d dashed off away from it on the rawest of impulses, and there it was in the distance, looking so tiny and fragile and alone. My sled had become an extension of me, and it was now out there by itself, and it felt like in a weird way that it needed me. We completed each other, bonded in a pact of survival. I would die without my sled, and my sled, like the iced-in tractor at Thiels, would disappear, it felt right then, into this vast landscape without me—another lost and ghostly piece of the continent.

  Until that moment, through nearly three weeks on the ice, I’d never been this far from the sled—I’d never been more than six feet from it, day or night around the clock—and that’s certainly part of what led to my anxious ideas and thoughts. The sled was dinged up and used, still hugely heavy and smelling of gas, but it also contained everything that would keep me alive, and being this far away from it made me suddenly and deeply anxious. It was totally irrational, I knew: I could see my sled as I stood there with the bag. It was, at most, fifty yards away. There was no way I’d lose it or not be able to get back to it.

  But as I began to walk back—faster than I needed to in the odd and fretful mindset that running after the bag had put me in—a second thought struck me, too: that getting home is sometimes harder than it looks. The things we do, the decisions we make out of impulse or calculation, the dreams and prizes we envision beyond home that push us to abandon what we already have, can lead us deep into the wilderness, where trails leading back home are very hard to find.

  * * *

  SIX AND A HALF YEARS earlier, on a June night in 2012, over a campfire at California’s Joshua Tree National Park, ten months after that disastrous summer day when I’d driven out of Portland, speeding off and away in pursuit of my triathlon dreams, I was in a desperate search to find my way home.

  I’d ruined a lot of things that day of my departure, putting into motion a chain of events that had gone very wrong. And for what?

  I’d gone to the dream team training camp and severely overtrained my body—testosterone levels slammed to those of an eighty-year-old by the endless days of swimming, biking, and running I’d logged while trying to keep up with some of the best athletes in the world. I’d been mostly absent through an important moment in my mom’s life, her run for mayor, and worst of all I’d lost Jenna.

  For a while after I disappeared—to begin training part of the year in Southern California, part in Australia—Jenna and I talked on the phone. But then days would go by, followed by weeks, until the breach I’d created in leaving, and the self-important way in which I’d done it, took on a life of its own. Slowly, the breach became a vast gulf of silence and distance, and we’d both started seeing other people.

  Now I desperately wanted her back. I wanted another try at all the things that had collapsed for us, mostly due to my actions. Jenna was regrouping, too, jobless now after a year spent working on my mom’s campaign, which had ended with a third-place finish in the primary election that spring—just short of the cut that sent the top two vote-getters to the general election.

  I’d sent letter after letter to Jenna from Australia that she’d mostly ignored, then tried weekly bunches of flowers. When I’d come home earlier that year, after having quit the triathlon team, and took her out to a tear-filled dinner in Portland, I told her I still loved her. And from her own place of hurt, she’d spoken a brutal truth: “You care more about racing than you do about me.”

  I had no convincing reply because everything I’d done, in ripping myself apart from her and my family, said it was true.

  But finally she agreed to accompany me on the drive back north from Southern California to Portland, camping along the way. The same triathlon gear I’d had with me as I roared away from our Burnside Street apartment the year before—bike on the roof, bags of gear stuffed into the trunk—was all in there with us, heading back home as well.

  “No promises,” Jenna said in agreeing to come along. She was meeting her mother in California anyway, she said.

  “Okay… no promises,” I replied, though it was the last thing I wanted to hear.

  And on the way to Joshua Tree, we stopped at an REI and I bought her a new sky-blue down sleeping bag for her twenty-fifth birthday, and she picked up, on a whim, a glossy how-to book called Climbing the Seven Summits. It was about the highest peaks on each continent, from Everest in Nepal to Denali in Alaska—with lots of beautiful photos, route maps, equipment and training tips, and the history of first ascents. We read it aloud to each other that evening in the car on the drive east from Los Angeles, and Jenna lingered especially on the pages about Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the wonders of the Serenget
i Plain, which she’d dreamed of visiting since she was a little girl. The book was planting an important seed in both of us, one that would germinate and grow in the months and years ahead—though I didn’t see that at the time.

  “I haven’t told you the whole story about Leanda,” I said as the campfire at Joshua Tree crackled.

  Jenna stirred slightly on the log she was sitting on but didn’t say anything.

  “I was with her in a restaurant in Noosa Heads, north of Brisbane,” I said finally, staring into the fire. Jenna wrapped the blanket around her a little tighter. “We’d put in a brutal session of biking and running that day in the national park there.”

  I saw Jenna nod. She knew about Leanda Cave, a triathlete I’d been dating in Australia, at the team training camp there. And she knew the general outline of things—how, as I fell into my triathlon obsession, I’d fallen as well for the Leanda legend. Cave was the only woman in history to have won the Kona Ironman World Championship—2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and a marathon—and a world championship at every other triathlon distance, including Half Ironman and draft legal Olympic distance. If there was ever a Mount Rushmore for triathletes, she’d be on it.

  I stopped for a few seconds, staring at the fire, wanting to tell the story right. “Something Leanda said over that dinner changed everything for me,” I continued.

  I’d asked Leanda about her proudest moment or fondest memory in a life of amazing races, and I expected to hear the usual things athletes talk about—challenges overcome, world championship victories, last-minute come-from-behind sprints. But her story came out of nowhere.