The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  And here I was, I thought as I looked at the weather warning again. Katabatic winds and a low pressure system as well. Okay, I thought with a shrug as I pulled up the sleep mask. I’m prepared. The confidence that had been building in me through those previous days was still bubbling along. Tomorrow would be a tougher day, probably the first of a string of tougher days until I finally completed the climb up to the plateau itself, but I’d known it was coming. “I’m strong and I’m capable,” I said. I’m prepared.

  I wasn’t.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME the 6 a.m. alarm went off—the tent still heaving around me—I was already starting to bargain with myself as to what I should do. Jenna and I, in planning the project, had talked about the idea of rest days. I’d need them now and then, we’d decided, for my body to recover. And there’d certainly be days of severe weather, we knew, where a decision to stay in and rest up could be driven by safety concerns.

  But all that planning and discussion had happened in what I now thought of as the era of Before Rudd. We’d planned my crossing of Antarctica around the goal of trying to complete a thing that had never been done. How long it took was more about how much food and gear I could carry with me and whether we could solve the math problem of supply and time and weight—whether I’d have enough food, how much I could pull, and how long it might take, given all the unknowns of weather.

  When it became a head-to-head race back at Union Glacier, everything changed. With Rudd there behind me—relentless and experienced, strong and clearly capable—my competitive instincts had surged, and I knew Rudd’s had as well. I’d gone to twelve-hour days of pulling the sled, from the nine or ten hours I’d imagined, because of Rudd. I’d cached and left behind food, narrowing my margins of safety, partly because of Rudd and the pace Jenna had calculated I needed to maintain and how much I could pull to sustain that pace. Rudd was pushing longer days than he had on his previous expeditions, too, because of me, and every night adding his famous eleven steps.

  But there were limits, in theory. There were days, again in theory, that were simply too severe or dangerous, when staying in the tent marked a line of wisdom. Was this one of those days? Without much thought, I decided that it wasn’t, because it seemed clear to me that Rudd would say it wasn’t one of those days either. Rudd was Rudd. He would definitely go out, I told myself, and so I had to as well, and do the best I could to go twelve hours into the storm.

  But I had to admit I wasn’t entirely confident. I’d never seen weather like this. I didn’t have Rudd’s experience. I didn’t know for certain what he’d do, how he’d reckon his chances, sitting in his own little tent-universe, hearing the storm rage outside. And every minute it felt like the storm was probing my defenses, seeking weakness: When I zipped open my kitchen space to light the stove, I jerked back in shock at the blast of frigid air and the face full of spindrift snow that hit me, blown in through the vestibule vents during the night.

  But the voice inside me was also speaking loudly by then, and it said that I’d committed to this thing—I’d committed to Jenna’s and my shaping of what the project could be. As much as I wanted to beat Rudd across the continent, I wanted even more to fulfill the promises I’d made to her and to myself after our engagement.

  As I shoveled the protein-powdered oatmeal into my mouth, that word—“promise”—kept repeating in my head, and it conjured up an image.

  The whiteboard.

  Jenna and I bought a two-by-three-foot whiteboard after coming back from Ecuador when I’d proposed on Cayambe. We figured we’d chart out our future. As I sat in my tent eating, I could smell in my memory the sweet chemical aroma of the colored markers, and see the board on its easel in the living room of our Portland apartment. It sat empty and blank at first, challenging us with its blankness. Then one day Jenna walked over, picked up the bag taped to the back, and reached into it.

  “There’s an eraser,” she said, holding it up. I nodded, getting her point immediately. No idea was so crazy we shouldn’t write it, or dream it.

  So we dreamt and wrote and erased, and we did it together—that was the crucial thing. Inspired by our now tattered book from REI, we decided we’d attempt to break the world speed record for the Explorers Grand Slam—climbing the tallest peak on every continent, the “Seven Summits,” plus trekking to the North and South Poles across the last degree of latitude. We wrote “The Explorers Grand Slam” on the top of the whiteboard.

  Jenna would run the project and I’d climb the mountains. We kept scribbling and erasing ideas beneath, but one word remained through all of our brainstorming: “Impact.” We’d build the project around a nonprofit aimed at inspiring kids to develop healthy habits and chase their dreams, which we named Beyond 7/2, a nod to the larger mission beyond the seven peaks and two poles.

  We’d possessed boundless enthusiasm but no money, and barely a clue what we were doing. And yet the whiteboard connected it all, as I only understood gradually over time. More than just a place to jot ideas, it became a spaceship, our transport to destinations that we dreamt about.

  Empty white space defined my world that morning in Antarctica, and as I pulled my things from the clothesline, zipped my bags closed, and climbed out into the gale, I reached out and back to those days of planning in our little apartment, and the idea that blank spaces are sometimes just spots on the board, waiting to be filled.

  But the memories only went so far in helping me through the start of a brutal day. When I stood up outside the tent entrance, I felt smothered by the cold and wind. The sun overhead was tiny and vague, a pale dot peering through a white blur. The tent and the sled were all but buried. The whiteout closed in like a blanket.

  And my head wasn’t in the game. That was the first bad sign. The weather warning had spooked me, made me nervous. However much I’d tried to shrug it off, I’d started to bargain with myself again within the first hour of pulling south—wondering if perhaps there was a reason to cut the day short, get out of this weather, back into the tent. I began to look for reasons that would justify a half day, or a three-quarter day, and in my distracted state I stopped for a moment and leaned over to unzip the sled to get my even larger mittens out due to the extreme cold—and in one quick moment of stupidity, things began to go wrong.

  I’d trained myself by then, in a routine of muscle memory, that whenever I needed to bend over, I had to pull the mask off my face because the heat from my breath would rise up to fog my goggles. But for the briefest of seconds that morning, I forgot, and as I leaned into the sled, pawing through my bag for the mittens, I let out a big, nervous breath, and it happened: the air filled my goggles, the goggles fogged, and in the minus-fifty- or minus-sixty-degree windchill of the storm, the fog almost instantly froze into a layer of ice on the lenses. The goggles were ruined for the day, with no way, until I could get into the tent that night, to thaw them out and fix what five seconds of cold and distraction had done.

  I stood up with the goggles still on, ferociously angry at myself, and realized I had to pee. But since I couldn’t see anything but a frosty blur, and had almost no manual dexterity through the extra heavy mittens, feel and muscle memory were all I had to go on. I turned away from the wind, pulled up the snow skirt, unzipped my pants, and began to pee—staring blankly out into space as people do while they pee, or at least as men do. A sudden sharp sting of pain that felt almost like an electric shock reeled me back into the moment. Fuuuck! Shouting and jumping, I ripped off the mask and looked down.

  My thermometer, frozen as cold as the temperature it was measuring, just past twenty-five below, and attached to the bottom of my jacket, had swung down and its icy metal tip had touched the side of my penis just long enough for frostnip. A white spot the size of a pencil eraser had already appeared, not bad enough to scar or worry about long-term—I peered down and let out a puff of air with relief—but enough to enrage me all over again. An absurd chain of events—unfortunate and only by luck not completely disastrous�
�had unfolded from the simple act of leaning over, one of the most normal things you can do. People bend over to tie their shoes, pick up a piece of trash on a hiking trail, or pet a dog. As I found the spare goggles, swapping them out as quickly as I could to minimize the number of seconds that my skin would be exposed to the open air, it struck me how far from normal I’d traveled—that bending over for a few seconds in the storm would have such outsized effects. Maybe, I thought, this was the sign I’d been secretly hoping for, that things were too crazy to continue and that I should cut my losses with a partial day.

  But of course I didn’t, and I couldn’t.

  * * *

  AS I SLIPPED BACK INTO THE HARNESS, everything felt alien. The sastrugi would’ve been hard to deal with even without the storm. The katabatic winds would likely have been formidable even without the storm, I thought, recalling Dixie yelling over the wind on the beach. But this storm was a stew of everything—tough terrain, intense headwinds, and cold, all folded together and compounded into something way worse than its individual components.

  And as I started slowly to move forward, I felt a change in my posture, too. I leaned in, leaned down, strained forward to see, as my muscles clenched to hold in my body heat. I was curved over like an ancient wanderer, ski poles for canes, a hook-shaped man clawing forward on the ice. I focused entirely on my compass, which became the center of my universe. All things beyond the compass were impossible to see anyway, and even the compass, a foot and a half from my face, was sometimes hard to see as snow and ice blew down onto it, coating its face.

  The combination made every step a test of unknowns. Would three feet ahead of me be a slope up, or down, or sideways? And how strong would the next blasting headwind be? I jammed ski tips into sastrugi I couldn’t see in front of me. I slipped sideways and fell on sastrugi I didn’t realize I was on top of, and felt my anxiety growing almost by the minute—a fear loop that fed on itself.

  And then on another sastruga I couldn’t see, I slipped and slammed down, and as I started to get up, I saw that one of the skins on the bottoms of my skis had peeled off. It hung down, flaccid and useless, and I knew I couldn’t go forward another step without fixing it.

  Skins are the traction tires of cross-country skis. With the weight I was pulling, their absence would mean standing in one place and just sliding back and forth going nowhere, or worse, sliding backward. So I’d brought two kinds of skins with me—one pair of each, a short and a long. Short skins were good for moving across flat or moderate terrain, in allowing me a tiny bit more glide in each stride, while long ones were for days like this, when gripping the snow was the key thing.

  So the detached skin, a long one, had to be fixed, and it struck me that I’d never remotely trained for a job like this, at least under these conditions. Even my hands-and-feet-in-the-ice-bucket training with Mike back at the gym in Portland couldn’t fully prepare me for this. I certainly knew how to change a skin—clean off the ski, unfold the skin to expose the sticky side, and press down the changed skin—but I’d always done it in what now felt like perfect conditions—in a tent, or outside in weather that was just cold or just snowy. The storm had now changed all the variables of that equation.

  As I stood there holding the ski, I watched in dismay as the bottom surface, where the skin had just been pulled off, became almost instantly coated with frozen snow. A replacement skin wouldn’t stick if it were too cold, or if the ski wasn’t clean enough. And the brutal cold meant that the job had to be rushed. Even with my big puffy parka on, I could feel my body temperature falling.

  So I quickly peeled off the long skin that had partly detached, and stuffed it inside my pants near my body, hoping that the warmth would thaw it enough for use later in the day. Then I unharnessed myself and got my replacement short skins from the sled and stuffed them into my jacket, too, hoping to warm them up, if only a little, in preparation for the repair.

  I knew that the window would be short for trying to make the fix—the new skin would stick or not and I’d know immediately. And I knew I had to get out of the wind, or at least find some way of blocking it long enough to have any hope. So I tried hunching over, curling myself around the ski, making my body a windbreak. Then as quickly as I could, I brushed the snow from the ski and reached for the replacement skin inside my coat.

  But the snow was too much. Even as I tried to press the skin into place, I saw that it was useless—the adhesive surface was completely caked with white.

  That left me only one usable skin remaining—the second short one—and so only one hope left to make the repair. And I had to get a better windbreak. So I lay down, nestled against the sled’s edge, hoping that being on the downwind side would be enough protection, and as I curled in with the ski beside me, I remembered the little sheet of instructions that came with every skin set. “In severe cold, you may have trouble mounting the skins,” the sheet had said. “Make sure the skis and skins are clean and free from ice and snow.”

  Hah. I grimaced inside my mask at the absurd impossibility of that. I looked down at my hands, bound up inside my thickest, clumsiest mittens. If I could just take my hands out, I thought, I could get the task done correctly. I could press my fingers down on the ski skin, forcing out the bubbles and gaps, and push the sticky surface into place. It would be so easy, and the images of doing it—the step-by-step simplicity of a simple task—rolled through my head as I nestled against the edge of the sled with the storm raging around me. But using my bare hands wasn’t a choice. If I took out my hands, the exposed skin would be at severe risk for frostbite. Clumsy and awkward were all I had, but I had to try.

  So I knelt over the ski and sheltered it the best I could from the gale. I scraped the ski with my mitten, trying to clean it. Then at the last second, I pulled the short skin from inside my coat, hoping it had caught a little warmth from my body, and as fast as I could I pressed it into place.

  It wasn’t a great job, not even a particularly good one. There was no way to get all the ice completely off the ski, so there was no hard adhesive bond. In the real world, in a comfortable place like a ski lodge, it would be an obvious do-over. But the cold and the wind and snow made for a hard running clock. Good enough would have to do.

  As I struggled back to my feet, feeling like the wind might knock me over, I thought of the morning back at Union Glacier, before our flight to the Messner Start, when Rudd had offered a lesson about skins. He’d been whipping around on the edge of the ice runway on his skis, no sled behind him, looking so completely natural and powerful that I just stood there and watched. It was a thing of beauty.

  He saw me and swung across the ice, coming to a stop and stepping out of his skis in a quick and efficient motion.

  “Beautiful morning,” he declared.

  “Absolutely,” I agreed.

  He turned the bottom of one ski toward me and ran a mitten up and down it. Snow fluttered off in a rainbow cloud of crystals, glistening in the sun as they floated and slowly fell to the ice.

  “What’s your plan for short skins and long?” he said as he ran a hand down the other ski.

  “I’ve got a set of each and can switch out for different conditions,” I said.

  “But just one set of skis?” He leaned in toward me, sounding surprised.

  “Skis are heavy,” I said. I looked back at him and straightened up my spine. Rudd had left me feeling insecure over and over since we’d met. It was a grim and repetitive cycle, but now I felt a sudden wave of confidence. This was an issue I’d thought a lot about. I knew what I was doing. “One set of skis cuts my weight a lot and I can then carry more food and gas.”

  “True. All too true,” Rudd said, nodding.

  He stretched and looked out over the ice for a second.

  “But changing a skin can be a bastard of a task. I’m a glue man now,” he said. “Two sets of skis, one with a short skin, one with a long, both superglued down permanently. And the spare set of skis can be used as tent stakes.”


  Okay, I guess we’ll see who’s right, I said to myself, supremely confident that it would be me.

  * * *

  AS I CLIMBED BACK INTO THE HARNESS, having completed my repair, I tried to summon back the self-assurance I’d felt that morning with Rudd. I’d fallen. I’d fogged my goggles. I’d frostnipped my penis. And I’d definitely have some further repair work in the tent that night on the skis, to get a correct set of skins on. One short skin and one long felt strange—I had more traction with my left ski than my right.

  But things wouldn’t get worse, I figured. My progress forward was hard and brutal and cold, but I was finding my rhythm, and starting to feel even proud of myself for pushing on through such conditions. I am one with the storm, I told myself. I’m embedded. I’m surrounded. I’m a blue dot in a sea of endless invisibility. Because of the weather and terrain, I’m in a place without possible rescue, where no plane can land. But I’m going on, and I’m strong.

  In any horror story or suspense thriller, the hero’s moment of greatest coolheaded calm, or arrogance, is always where the killer jumps up with a knife out of nowhere, or a door suddenly springs open to reveal the rotting corpse of the murder victim.