The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  And so, in thinking about it later, I probably should’ve seen it coming.

  As I climbed a huge sastruga, there was a hole I couldn’t see in the whirling sea of white. I came over the top and plummeted, falling four or five feet, skis twisted around me in a tangle. My body slammed on the hard ice of the sastruga on the way down and my leg was twisted sideways.

  But then as I lay there at the bottom looking up, I saw that the sled, pulled forward and still connected to me by my harness, was now at the top as well, teetering and leaning. One move too quickly on the harness and it would crash down onto my splayed-out legs, breaking bones, or skis, or both.

  Moving carefully, so as not to disrupt the sled from its precarious perch above me, I assessed the damage, reaching first, out of instinct, to the parts that hurt worst. My right elbow had smashed on the way down, on the ice or on a ski, and my hip and ribs had clearly banged on something as well. But when I reached down to touch my leg and over to my ankles, I found I could move them, which was the crucial thing. They weren’t broken. I wiggled my toes again just to make sure.

  All the outcomes screamed with potential disaster. If I broke a leg and couldn’t put up my tent I’d die in the storm. If I was injured but able to get into the tent and reach A.L.E. for rescue, they surely couldn’t come anytime soon or land an aircraft anywhere near me.

  And the fall had ripped off the skin I’d just put on, which meant that the very thing I’d spent the day trying to avoid—losing a day in the tent—was now the best possible scenario. I had no choice but to regroup and see how bad things were, so I eased up out of the hole, made it back up to the sastruga’s top, and spotted a place nearby that looked flat enough to pitch the tent. The storm had won.

  For a moment after I’d climbed out, skis now off and jammed vertically down into the snow, I just blinked inside my goggles. It was mid-morning. I was terrified, brutalized, and bruised. I couldn’t go on with unusable skis and I had never put up the tent in such conditions. Every step forward or back was a place I’d never been. And then I checked my GPS and saw that I’d gone barely three miles. Three miles. Three miles of damage, wounds, and failure.

  What is this place? And why am I out here? It all seemed unreal. The only certainty was that I needed to get my shelter up quickly. But at that moment, even the rituals of the tent seemed new and frightening. I knew I had to clutch the tent with every ounce of my grip and my strength, but I also knew that my strength had probably been compromised already by the cold and the struggles of the morning. I was afraid, I decided, for very good reasons. If there was a day when the tent could escape me and blow off into the white, it would be a day exactly like this.

  So my defensive posture, curling up against the wind and the cold, extended into tent assembly as I clutched and clenched, holding everything so tightly it hurt, anchoring the tent’s edge down to the front end of the sled and then creeping slowly around to the back to anchor it there and pull the poles into posture.

  But everything still felt completely inadequate in the face of that wind and cold. An anchor into the ice? What was that? It seemed like nothing. What was holding down anything really, from just flying off into the storm? My little circle of possessions there on the ice was nothing, and I could so easily picture all of it—the sled, the tent, and me with it—just lifting up and away, disappearing into the void. Everything now was uncertain except the need to get inside as quickly as I could.

  I shoveled my snow barrier around the edge, a hunched-over man of gritted teeth. I pushed anchors into the snow with clenched leg muscles. I shivered and I counted shovelfuls, and I brought over my kitchen and cinched the sled cover, and I knew I’d forgotten nothing. But I still had to stop and check it all again in my anxious uncertainty. But finally I convinced myself that all was done, and I unzipped the tent flap to climb in.

  And then the pieces of the storm, or the consequences of my actions in dealing with it, chased me right inside—including my skis. I shoved them in alongside my sleeping bag and then clamored over and reached to pull off my mask, realizing as I did that my usual routine there was shattered, too. My clothesline, dangling there before me, would be useless in trying to dry or thaw or defog anything as long as the storm raged. The sun was barely penetrating through the cloud cover and onto the tent’s roof, casting everything inside into a red-hued gloom.

  Body heat would have to do the job. So I pulled off my boots, took the damp, steaming socks out of the plastic bag liners, and stuffed them down into my pants against my thighs. I took my frozen mask and pulled it up against my body under my parka. Without the clothesline, my gloves would have to go up against my body to dry, too.

  Then came the even worse part: the skis. The only way to make the adhesive stick was to get both the skin and the ski relatively warm and dry. I could use the stove to melt snow off the skin to make it sticky again, but keeping it, and the ski, warm after that was another question. With hardly any radiant heat from the sun penetrating through the storm, the tent was freezing. That left me dependent on my body, the closest thing to a heater for hundreds of miles. So I brushed the ice off the ski as best I could, shoved it into my sleeping bag, and climbed in.

  Behind my head in the kitchen vestibule my stove made its familiar white-noise hiss in a faint counterpoint to the roar and flap of the tent. The water finally boiled, and I poured it into my Nalgene bottle, which I immediately pulled inside my bag with me, too, to help warm my body and dry the clothes. And the flood of warmth up through my body made me feel just a little less alone.

  * * *

  THROUGH MY DAYS ON THE ice, in the daily and nightly rhythms of pulling the sled and the clockwork chores in making and breaking camp, I’d fallen into a rhythm of work that became almost like the ticking of a clock. The constant motion, never really stopping but for the five or six hours of sleep I tried to get each night, was crucial and necessary—every day was filled from start to end with things I had to do to move forward and stay alive. But routine also chased away, or at least kept at bay, the reality of isolation.

  Being inside the tent when I should be outside working stripped away all those protections. I no longer had a routine to cling to and hide behind, which made everything way more terrifying. On a typical night when I might wake up and check my watch, hours before my alarm, I was still embedded in the rhythm of what had happened during the previous day and what might happen on the next—still bobbing along in the river of tasks and schedules. It was night, though still daylight. Sleep time. I could chase away crazy thoughts by calling them nightmares. Close your eyes, Colin, and go back to sleep.

  But today at 1 p.m., when I finally settled myself inside the tent, my insecurity felt almost overwhelming because everything, at that hour, felt new. The rhythm was broken and the doubts and the fears could surge in to fill the empty spaces. Normal for me had been my daily grind of chores and hours in the harness.

  Normal was now gone, and I felt suddenly even more aware of my profound isolation. If I went out there now, I thought, I’d die and no one would know, and even if Rudd, who was the closest human being to me on the planet, was by some unlikely turn of events exactly on my path, he could walk directly by me in the storm—in zero visibility, tent and sled all but buried—and never even know I was there. Rudd was the closest thing I had to a first responder, and even he could never respond.

  I tried for a while to tell myself that a rest day had been imposed on me and that I should use it, grab onto it and try to actually recover—not just from the horrific morning, but from the days of hard work before that. My crash and fall was perhaps a gift after all, I said. The blizzard outside, however much it was still rattling and twisting the tent, would not get me today, would not kill me or break my leg. I’d made it safely inside; I should close my eyes and sleep. But it didn’t really work.

  Had I earned my food rations? I lay there for a while thinking I hadn’t, and that reduced calories for reduced work was the hard math of how the world work
ed. But then I second-guessed that. I should eat regular rations. A recovery day, I decided, meant healing, and healing needed calories. Still, as I shivered in my bag, I was glad I’d brought no extra food inside the tent with me. I might feel weak again later, vulnerable and in need of comfort, and my next day’s supplies were freezing solid outside, safe from a desperate raid.

  And then I rationalized and bargained again. Being finally driven inside to shelter by mid-morning after only three miles was in fact the best thing that could’ve happened, I told myself. Rudd had taken rest days and storm days in his past expeditions. Given the brutality of the day, it just might be possible that the polar giant in his wisdom had taken a look outside and stayed zipped in.

  But when the text from Jenna arrived late in the day on my inReach, my defenses collapsed entirely. Rudd hadn’t stopped, or sheltered in.

  “Rudd did fifteen miles,” Jenna wrote.

  “Fifteen miles,” I said, letting out a sad exhalation. In one day, he’d gained back more than twelve miles. I’d been about twenty-six miles ahead the day before, and in a single day, my lead had almost been cut in half.

  Things were a mess. I was a mess.

  I was physically uncomfortable, with all my wet, cold, and hard possessions there with me inside my pants and against my body in my parka, with the ski dominating everything—sticking down to the bag’s bottom and up over my head right to the tent’s edge. The tent spot that had seemed flat enough was not, with big round bulges of ice that poked up into my back through the bag and the bottom of the tent. And the psychological blow from the Rudd report made the discomfort even worse.

  After I said good night to Jenna, eyes wide open and sleepless, I reached for my camera, popped out the little tripod legs, and hit record. The red light of its eye just then seemed so comforting and warm, almost alive, and I felt as soon as I saw it that I wasn’t quite as alone as I’d been.

  “Hi,” I said. “We’re here in the storm, as you can probably hear. Things got screwy with the skins, and then Rudd—”

  I stopped myself. There was, unquestionably, no “we” there in the tent—just me and my stuff, and I realized with a little start that I wasn’t just talking into my camera, I was talking directly to it. Through night after night of journaling my experience, the camera had become almost like a confidant and a friend—part of the story, not just the device for helping me remember. So what? I thought with a shrug. I needed a friend, that night especially.

  I reached over and swiveled the tripod to show my sleeping bag and the ski jutting out the top, then leaned over to be back in the picture. “As you can see, it’s pretty cozy in here,” I said. “No people, but a nice sharp ski to cuddle up with.”

  I tapped off the record button, pulled out the camera battery, and stowed it in my inner jacket pocket, against my chest, then carefully folded up the tripod and laid it down next to me. “See you tomorrow, Cam,” I said without even thinking.

  * * *

  RUDD, SOMEWHERE OUT THERE in the storm right now in his own tent, had probably gained new strength and resolve from the day he’d had, even as my own confidence had crumbled. Because my GPS signal, unlike his, was globally public, posted continually for anyone to see exactly where I was, he knew exactly how far I’d gone and how much he’d advanced on me. My open information decision had given him an advantage in knowing my progress, and that night he would benefit from it. He’d soldiered on and I hadn’t.

  Rudd had clearly believed from the beginning that in my inexperience there lurked the potential for a mistake—a moment of overconfidence, underplanning, or ignorance. And now, I felt, it had happened.

  It was unquestionably a race again. One bad day and everything had changed. That was the great truth of it. I’d been gaining almost a mile a day or more on Rudd for two weeks running, and was almost to the point of thinking that the gradually growing numbers would soon reach a tipping point, a place beyond which he couldn’t catch up no matter what. My confidence had been growing—more than it should have, I now saw. And as I’d seen that morning in stepping over the edge of the sastruga and going down, Antarctica preys on exactly those moments. It’s when you think you’ve got it all nailed down that Antarctica roars out to get you.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Ripple Effect

  DAY 28

  I became a machine after that, a stoked steam engine, propelled by needs that were deep inside me. Rudd had closed much of the gap between us in a single day—that was a big part of what changed. It was a race again. But the even bigger impetus was that I felt I had to rebuild my rhythm, strength, and confidence—not because of Rudd, but for my own sake.

  Through the next eight days, my twelve hours in the harness stretched sometimes to thirteen, and my rest breaks grew shorter. Even stopping during the day for a drink of water and a two-hundred-calorie chunk of Colin Bar, which had felt in the past like a little reward for all my hard work, came to carry a deadline. “Eat it and go,” the clock said.

  But by my thirty-fifth night on the ice, 495 miles from the start, eight days since the broken ski skin had stopped me in the storm, the days of harder effort had taken a toll, and I lay exhausted in my sleeping bag, another night when I’d been barely able to get my evening chores done. I cooked, chewed the food I’d cooked, and melted snow for the next day’s water, and every motion felt one step too far. Even talking to Jenna that night, in her regular checkup on my physical, mental, and emotional state, was almost too much.

  “Look, I know you’re tired,” she said, when I’d slurred some response to a question, or just lapsed into silence in the middle of a sentence. “But there’s one more thing you need to do tonight—I need you to call this number.”

  “What? No, no…” Our connection faded out for a few seconds. “I can’t talk… I’m just too—”

  “Trust me, call this number,” she said. Then she repeated the number again for about the fourth time, through static, until I got it down.

  “Okay, fine,” I said, sighing. We hung up and I fumbled with the phone, aggravated all over again by my glue-crusted fingers. In my exhaustion, even the ringing when the call finally went through sounded annoying and I started hoping for voicemail. But then a man’s voice came on the line.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Um, hi,” I said. “This is Colin from… um… Antarctica.”

  “Hey! I’ve been expecting your call. This is Paul.”

  “Paul?”

  “Paul Simon.”

  I immediately decided that I’d lost my mind. There was no possible way that I could be in the middle of Antarctica on the phone with my musical hero Paul Simon. That it was a strange and vivid hallucination made much more sense.

  Okay, I thought, and went silent, waiting for the next weird thing to happen.

  “I heard you were listening to Graceland,” the voice said.

  Graceland. It all flooded back. Listening over and over as I’d pushed through the deep snow. The memories of dancing in the kitchen with my family. The Instagram post I’d written on the seventeenth day and forgotten about.

  “Yeah! Wow!” I stammered, coming back into the moment, but still reeling, wondering how Jenna had gotten Paul Simon’s number.

  “It was so great to think about you down there listening to those songs,” Simon said. “I liked imagining them playing out there on the ice, having a new kind of life in that incredible place…. It’s ice everywhere, right? And how cold is it, anyway?”

  Now my imagination played out, picturing Paul Simon thinking about me listening to his music in the middle of Antarctica. That was almost as surreal as hearing his voice. But I was also struck by the thought that I hadn’t really talked to anyone other than Jenna and strictly business Tim from the A.L.E. Comms Box for weeks. Paul Simon would expect real sentences, and I wasn’t sure I still knew how to do that.

  “Yeah. The ice is more than a mile thick under me right now where I am in my tent,” I said. “Average is about twenty-five below.”

/>   “Wow and wow,” he said. “Wait, I’ve got to ask you something else, just because…” The line went white with static for a few seconds. “You know how musicians are.”

  “Sorry, say again?” I said.

  “What else have you been listening to down there?” he said.

  “Hmm. Well, actually a lot of nothing… silence mostly, trying to find a place in my head where… um… it’s hard to describe, but—”

  “I totally get it,” he said. “Sounds of Silence,” he added, and we both laughed.

  “No, yeah, really,” I stumbled, feeling like my tongue was thick in my mouth. “I actually deleted almost all my music files except for six albums before I got down here.”

  “Then I’m really honored,” he said.

  “So, what I kept was Graceland, the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, Bob Marley’s Legend, Counting Crows’ August and Everything After, Sublime’s self-titled album, and Blind Pilot’s Three Rounds and a Sound.”

  “Very cool,” he said. “But I want to hear more about the silence. You know, it’s an old songwriter’s cliché, but it’s true—the spaces between the notes are the most important parts of any song. So what’s that like? Are you finding it, that place in your head?”

  I paused, thinking of the times when I’d felt so completely present in the moment that I melted into it. Simon’s phrase rattled into my head, and I knew I’d keep it and use it: the spaces between the notes, the place of power. “Sometimes,” I said. “I find it sometimes for a while. The silence can open a door… and then there’s a whole world beyond that, especially down here where the empty ice goes on forever.” It sounded cryptic and impenetrable in talking about it, but he seemed to have immediately understood.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s a place definitely worth going to. All art is about seeking something you’re not sure you’ll ever find, but trying to get there anyway.”