The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  “It was when I came in second at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, England,” Leanda said.

  I was stunned and sat back in the restaurant booth.

  “Really? Why that one?”

  “Because my family was there to see it,” Leanda said. “They were rarely able to travel to my international races,” she added with a shrug. “But Manchester was local, and they could afford to come.”

  I stood up and poked the embers, sending up a cloud of sparks into the night, afraid to look at Jenna for fear I might cry. “So then Leanda looks me in the eyes and says, ‘You want to know what real loneliness feels like, Colin? It’s standing on top of a world championship podium with no one out there you care about. That’s the world’s emptiest place.’ ”

  It was growing chilly as the early June night settled in. A breeze had picked up from the desert to the east of us, carrying scents of sage and dust. I started to slide over the log I was sitting on, to be a few inches closer to Jenna, but then I changed my mind. She might think it was calculated.

  I looked back up into her eyes. “At that moment I realized I had to come home—find you again if I could.” I shrugged. “I kept imagining myself standing on the podium… a world championship or Olympic gold medal around my neck, and looking for you.”

  * * *

  GETTING BACK TO THE SLED, with the runaway plastic bag zipped safely into a parka pocket, wasn’t so easy, despite the relatively short distance I’d traveled in my stumbling, fumbling sprint. Without skis on, my legs sank into the snow up to my knees at times, forcing me to flail around with my arms, pulling myself up and out of the deep powder. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, partly from the fear of twisting my ankle or knee. In running after the bag, I’d been focused on catching it; now I just wanted to get back in one piece.

  Finding your way home. The idea kept invading my thoughts as I remembered the journey that Jenna and I had begun on that camping trip up through California and Oregon. The whole rest of my life, it suddenly felt to me—the path leading to this moment on the ice—was a consequence of those days and nights, and I fell even deeper into the memory as I pushed south.

  * * *

  JENNA WAS BEHIND THE WHEEL of my Subaru as we neared Portland a week after that night over the fire in Joshua Tree. She still wasn’t sure about us. She’d kept her guard up, and I couldn’t blame her. She’d been badly hurt and the wounds hadn’t healed.

  I’d told her by then that even though I’d quit the triathlon team I’d been training with, and had no intention of going back to it, the idea of professional racing still appealed—the mental and physical discipline, the competition, the world travel.

  I looked up from the Seven Summits book I’d been reading aloud from. “But you’re more important,” I said. “If there is some new path to find as a professional triathlete that puts us on that road together, then I’ll do it,” I said. “Or, I’ll quit and we’ll think of something else.”

  She’d said nothing in response. But now, as she drove up through the Willamette Valley, past the state capital in Salem and the mile after mile of farms that line the Interstate, she seemed to reach some new conclusion or resolution. She’d been silent for a long time, staring forward through the windshield.

  Suddenly I saw her posture change, her chin going up, back stiffening in the seat. Her hands shifted their grip on the wheel.

  “I don’t think I’ve told you exactly how it went the day…” She faltered for a second, but kept her gaze straight out the windshield. “The day my mom told me about Brett.”

  Now I sat up in my seat. Brett. Jenna’s first love. I resisted my desire to reach out and touch her.

  “I’d thought at first, when I walked into the house that day, that it was another party, even though I was walking in the door fresh off my June birthday and high school graduation celebration,” she said.

  “But my aunt was there, and my best friend and her parents, too—the McCarthys, the people I’d just come back with from Bermuda.” She stopped and took a breath. “Mom’s big graduation gift splurge was that airline ticket,” she continued, glancing over at me with a faint smile, thinking about her mom. “So I should’ve known it was something… else.”

  Jenna had met Brett, I knew, when she was in high school in the little town of Stockbridge in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where she’d grown up. Brett had come up from Florida, where he was from, to visit a friend, and he and Jenna had become instant long-distance high school sweethearts. And after a year of falling in love, she’d chosen where to go to college, in Florida, to be near him.

  “So, anyway, I get back from Bermuda, and finally make it home, and when I walk into my house, everybody looks sort of sober-faced and strange. But still, I don’t think anything… I’m eighteen, center of the world, high school graduate, in love, oblivious to the fact that it all could change in an instant.”

  She paused for a moment.

  “In the living room—everyone was seated, looking up at me—Mom asks me to sit down, and then she takes my hand across the couch… I can hear the words and the exact way she said them. ‘I have to tell you something,’ Mom said. ‘There was an accident… Brett was on his motorcycle.’ ”

  Jenna turned her head and looked at me.

  “My life was changed that day—there was a path, a road ahead for me, then after he died there wasn’t. It was all unknowns,” Jenna said. “I wasn’t given a choice then… Brett was just gone and there was nothing I could do.”

  I clenched my jaw, feeling horrible all over again that I’d hurt her.

  “I know,” I said. “And now I’m asking you to take me back. And I know you’ve got lots of reasons to doubt me still.” I kept talking to her as honestly as I could, telling her how much I respected her. “I’ll keep your heart safe. I’ll never hurt you again,” I concluded, “and, if you’ll just give me another chance, I’m convinced we can build an extraordinary life together.”

  We drove for a while in silence, and I was afraid that my words hadn’t sufficiently accounted for all I’d done. But it was sincere, and she saw it, and it made the difference.

  * * *

  LATER THAT YEAR, we moved together to Spain, then Austin, Texas, to resume the triathlon life, this time together, traveling all around the world even as the slow healing of our relationship continued. I raced, and Jenna dove into every detail of managing the business of a professional athletic life, on and off the race course—from the travel logistics and sponsorships to the profiles and race histories of the competitors I’d face.

  We also made a commitment, as part of our new partnership, that we’d do more than just charge around the planet, as so many professional athletes do—another hotel room, another race, another country and passport stamp—but also have at least one adventure together in each place we visited. And, in fact, one adventure back then would stand out from the rest.

  A couple of years later, Jenna had mapped out a trip after a race in Brazil. The two of us would climb Ecuador’s three highest volcanic peaks—including Cayambe, a nearly nineteen-thousand-foot giant in the Cordillera Central range of the Andes—and I’d decided in advance that I would make this a trip Jenna wouldn’t forget. As we were beginning the climb, I pulled aside our local guide, a short and burly Ecuadoran named Henry, and told him my plan.

  “Tú eres un hombre muy romántico!” he said, grinning and punching me hard on the arm.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a ring. When I told him the story of it, he hit me again, a little less hard. “La familia,” he said, nodding.

  Grandma Sue’s ring. Holding it there in my palm, sun glinting off the diamonds, I thought of the afternoon she’d given it to me, in her bed at home—end-stage cancer, just skin and bones by then, eyes far away.

  “You and Jenna will marry one day?” she’d said, reaching for my hand.

  “Yes, G-Sue,” I said. “I hope so.” She smiled at the shorthand nickname I’d been calling he
r since I was little. “This should be hers then,” she said, reaching over to her nightstand, which was cluttered with bottles of pills and wadded tissues. “I may not be here to see her wear it, but it makes me happy to know that the story goes on,” she whispered. She pressed the ring into my palm and closed my fingers around it with her own.

  The climb up Cayambe’s slopes, just north of the equator, was mostly chilly and gray, alternating with moments of intense equatorial sun, but I could think of little else but G-Sue’s heirloom ring, and what I’d say to Jenna, and where and when I might say it. As we climbed, I kept reaching down to touch the ring in my pocket, fearful somehow that it would slip away or fall out. And I thought of the road Jenna and I had been down together since meeting on that beach in Fiji seven years earlier, all the waypoints: falling in love, breaking up, reuniting, sharing what felt like a lifetime of experience on the professional racing circuit through twenty-five countries, and six continents. After about eight hours, as Jenna and I and Henry reached the summit, the skies cleared and the rugged spine of the Andes scratched out a line for hundreds of miles, marching south into Peru.

  I looked over at Henry, who was watching me—waiting for his cue. With my left hand I threw him my camera. With my right I took Jenna’s hand and went down on one knee in the snow. Henry started snapping pictures.

  Jenna seemed confused at first. Around us, the thin air at just below nineteen thousand feet seemed crystalline and pure. Brilliant sunlight filled every space around us.

  “I liked seeing you there, tied into the rope ahead of me as we climbed up here today,” I said. “I loved that we were connected, working together toward the same goal. It felt right.”

  She saw now where I was going and wiped the corner of her eye. “I want more of that,” I said. “I want that as the anchor of my life, having you by my side, building an incredible life together. Jenna, will you marry me?”

  She reached down to touch my cheek. “I want more of that, too. Yes!”

  She threw open her arms, as though she were trying to capture the whole world with a single gesture—the mountain, us, the moment of me kneeling on the snow.

  “What we do next… I don’t know,” I said. “But it’ll be as big and as great as that horizon out there if you’re there with me.”

  * * *

  THAT DAY ON THE ANTARCTIC ice, after almost losing my plastic bag, I went twelve miles.

  My mind wandered far into memory through those hours in the harness, reliving my proposal to Jenna, and the sometimes crazy arc of our lives in the years before and after. But when I looked down at my GPS, I was jerked abruptly back to reality and to the present. Twelve miles, only one mile per hour, was terribly slow, and three miles less than what Jenna’s mileage plan said I needed to go.

  That night, I slumped into the sleeping bag after the rounds of chores, exhausted and dispirited.

  “Hi baby, how are you doing? How was the day?” Jenna asked when I called in. It was always her way of saying hello, and it always lifted me.

  The connection sputtered with a sudden bark of static and I thought I’d lost her, but she came back, mid-sentence. “…struggled today” was all I heard.

  “What? Can you repeat?”

  “Lou struggled today,” she said. “Barely made two and a half miles.”

  I was jolted by the number. Two and a half miles could only mean severe trouble, and I pictured him, now in his tent, too, just like me, maybe checking in as well with his team on the sat phone.

  “Really struggled,” Jenna finally added after a pause. “He posted to his blog that he made a mistake… almost could have been… really bad.”

  I breathed in sharply, felt the cold air penetrate deep inside my chest. Jenna didn’t say “really bad” unless it really was, and usually that meant worse than really bad. She understated things as a rule.

  “What happened?” I said, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  “He thought the deep snow was just concentrated in one place, a flukey thing that couldn’t possibly go on and on—he’d never seen conditions like that in his other expeditions, and he’d been in this exact part of the continent before just two years ago on a previous expedition. He figured he could sort of shuttle around it,” Jenna said. She paused for a second and I thought we’d lost the connection, then she came back. “So he broke down his camp and his sled load into two lighter piles, leaving one pile on the ice, then going ahead a couple of miles with his lighter load, dumping that and circling back to get the first load.” There was a burst of static then and I only caught the end of her next sentence. “…left his tent and sleeping gear in the snow and went ahead.”

  My stomach was already tightening. Jenna’s story was going somewhere bad, I could tell. Rudd had somehow hit the wall despite his bravery and experience, despite a knowledge about Antarctica that was so far beyond my own.

  My head spun with the numbers, too. I’d been so disappointed with only twelve miles that day, pushing through deep snow, but now everything had changed. Twelve miles to his two-and-a-half put nine more miles between us in one day. That put me farther ahead of Rudd than at any point since I’d passed him on the sixth day. But two and a half miles! It was a number that could only mean crisis.

  I felt immediately, horribly conflicted. It didn’t seem right that I could be happy and excited about expanding my lead, but also gripped by empathy and fear over what might’ve happened to him out there. Rudd and I were competitors, unquestionably, but also brothers of a sort—bonded by this thing we were each attempting.

  “He went back and couldn’t find the place he’d left the gear, the sleeping bag and tent,” Jenna said.

  “Oh my God,” I said, feeling as if every muscle were clenching down inside my bag. Losing his tent and his sleeping bag wasn’t something Rudd or anyone else could survive, and I could imagine it too easily. My separation anxiety from my own sled earlier that day, barely fifty yards away, felt utterly insignificant as I pictured how it would feel to really be disconnected, in a whiteout.

  “Deep blowing snow covered his tracks back to his stash and covered up his stuff at the same time,” Jenna said. “I just read about it on his blog.”

  “Oh my God,” I said again, a wave of empathy pouring through me.

  Static barked across the line. “You there?” Jenna finally asked.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to breathe normally. Rudd’s moment of crisis had come out of nowhere, and worst of all it had come as a result of his deep knowledge. He believed, based on experience, that he knew what to do, and that made what happened all the more terrifying. I later learned that the much deeper than average snow caused several experienced polar veterans to cancel or abandon their high-profile Antarctic expeditions that season.

  And Rudd’s belief that he knew what to expect—that he knew what Antarctica’s averages were, in having walked across that very section of ice before, was the very thing that had tricked and betrayed him. He hadn’t seen the curveball coming, and neither would I.

  CHAPTER TEN The Whiteboard

  DAY 27

  The solar panel above my head, tucked into its little pouch, swung like a chandelier in an earthquake. Roars and squeaks filled the air from stressed tent poles and stretched-out nylon tent fabric. But the tent itself was the attention grabber: it thrashed and rolled around me, looking like it was being wrung out like a rag—the frame torquing, twisting, and shuddering as it leaned to my left or right, before coming back briefly into shape, all the while being slammed from the side with ice and snow flung at high speed by ferocious winds.

  The storm woke me long before my alarm that morning, my twenty-seventh day, 353 miles from the start, and my first impulse was to reach up and somehow stabilize the tent that was so violently thrashing around me. I wanted to grab the tent poles and hold them in place as a way of telling myself things were under control. But then almost instantly I second-guessed that thought and shrank back—tent poles held in place might be stressed eve
n more, and if they broke, the storm would become a crisis.

  I’d been braced for a change in the weather, or at least I thought I was. After I’d crawled into my tent earlier that night, feeling an almost luxuriant soreness after twelve hours of pulling the sled—my muscles ached, but I was satisfied with what I’d done through a brilliantly blue, cold, and sunny day—I pulled out my inReach and saw an alert from A.L.E. that was unusual if only because it used lots of new words: “WARNING!” it said. “A Low Pressure Zone has formed on the edge of the polar plateau.”

  Through all my previous weeks on the ice, A.L.E.’s daily weather advisories had been both dull and short: the forecast temperature and prevailing wind speed and direction. Sometimes the forecast said it would be a little colder or a little windier, but that was basically it. Antarctica’s atmospheric pattern, it had begun to seem, had a brutal consistency that changed only at the margins. Shockingly cold and harsh weather—minus twenty-five degrees, with minus-fifty-degree windchill—was the standard stuff. So as I sat in my tent that night before sleep, hearing behind me the hiss of the stove, wiggling my toes inside the bag, feeling even a little warmth radiating through the tent’s roof from the sun, I read the words again, trying to guess what might lie ahead, and wondering especially what level of severity merited the capitalized word “WARNING!”

  I did know by then that I was approaching a zone where trouble of various sorts, especially strong winds, could be expected. Dixie, the Belgian explorer who’d become my mentor—and who lived, by great coincidence, part of the year in Oregon—had warned me about that, and pushed me in my training to prepare for it.

  “The polar plateau spills wind, like this!” he’d yelled into my ear, standing at my elbow on a blustery day at the Oregon Coast and gesturing out toward the water, where winds were blasting off the Pacific Ocean. We’d hauled my sled there in the back of my Subaru and shoveled hundreds of pounds of sand into it, which Dixie now wanted me to pull down the beach. Back at his house a few hours later, my muscles quivering from the workout, he pulled out a map of Antarctica and spread it across the table. “The great plateau, at nine thousand feet, sits square in the center of the continent,” he said, holding his hands in the shape of a ball, one above the other. Antarctica’s famous katabatic winds, he told me—KAT-a-ba-TEEK in his Flemish-accented pronunciation—are essentially high-density air masses that come down from the continent’s heights, often violently, driven by gravity. “The katabatics flow off downhill. You will hit a headwind in this place.” He reached down and stabbed the map with a finger. “Right… here.”