The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  My breakfast said it all.

  Surrounded by all that was so profoundly familiar—the hissing stove behind me in the kitchen, the dank smells of my lived-in clothes, the flutter of my tent in the wind—I’d stirred the oatmeal into my mug and added my protein powder, and then I just couldn’t take my eyes off it because the portion looked so small. I even looked around me, on the sleeping bag and to the sides of it, to see if perhaps I’d spilled some, though I knew with absolute certainty that I hadn’t. I wanted to gobble the oatmeal in two bites. I wanted to savor it. I wanted to save it for later. I wanted to do all three things at the same time.

  The question of food had clawed its way back and would have to be faced. I’d eaten forty days’ worth of rations in reaching the South Pole, and now only had fifteen days of rations left from the fifty-five I’d started with at the first waypoint, after Jenna and I had pared down my load. I almost certainly had more than fifteen days left to my finish line at the continent’s other edge, on the Ross Ice Shelf. But beyond that essential fact, I had no clue what the balance point really was of food supply and miles left, or even how to estimate it.

  Though expeditions before me had gone by foot up the Leverett Glacier—Felicity Aston in particular, in her amazing 2012 trek—descending the Leverett all the way to the Ross Ice Shelf solo, unsupported, and unassisted, had never been done. There was no historical data I could check; I was truly stepping into the unknown.

  Ben Saunders had intended to complete the same route last year, descending the Leverett after reaching the Pole. He’d arrived at the South Pole with fifteen days of food supplies left, the exact amount I had on my sled as well, when I’d walked up and touched the great silver orb the day before and unpacked my Explorers Club flag. But then Saunders, with vast experience on the Antarctic ice under his belt, had decided that the math problem of food and miles in going the Leverett route was too uncertain, and he’d ended his project, rather than risk running out of food.

  “Standing here with less food for the remainder of my journey than I’d planned, with a safety margin that I feel is too slim, I have decided to end my expedition at the Pole,” he wrote in a blogpost announcing his decision to stop. “In some ways it was an easy, logical decision to make, and in others it was extraordinarily hard, particularly as I’m not currently in trouble.” I had a tiny fraction of Saunders’s experience, but I’d made the choice to continue on, and now as I stared down at my breakfast, the implications of that decision felt deep and uncertain.

  Crossing the Pole had distracted me in some ways from the food math. I’d thrown up my armor and my defenses in going past the Amundsen-Scott Station. And then I’d been swept up in that wave of euphoric invincibility after the Pole. And all of it, I now saw—the anxiety, the wonder, the glorious post-Pole moment in the shadow of the sundog—had diverted my attention from the nagging, serious issues that had to be resolved. But now reality was back. Food was reality. Oatmeal was reality. The 350 miles ahead of me to the finish was reality.

  I had to reduce my food intake or risk running out completely if I continued to eat regular rations. That was the reality that stared back at me from my mug of oatmeal. The amount left on the sled wouldn’t last, if I continued to eat my allotted seven thousand daily calories. My only choice now was to stretch out the food I had left, pushing on every day with less in my already constantly hungry belly. Less now each day, as bad as that sounded, would also be way better than none at all at some grim future date if I got injured or sick on the Leverett and couldn’t be quickly rescued.

  The math looked bad: It had taken me forty days to cross the 566 miles to the Pole, averaging fourteen miles per day. That left me with roughly 350 miles to go on the morning of my forty-first day. If I went the same pace for the miles left—fourteen miles per day—it would take twenty-five days to reach the Ross Ice Shelf. The only answer was to reorganize again, find a new plan, divide up the food that was left.

  And that night, I knew, I’d have to have a conversation with Jenna, which I’d been resisting and she’d been gently suggesting had to happen, about how exactly to do that, specifically how much less food I could have in the days I had left. I’d dreaded the conversation and its implications, but as I pushed through that forty-first day, making eighteen miles by the end, I could think of little else. I even planned out, as I shoveled the snow and drove in my tent anchors, what I’d say to Jenna. “Let’s work the problem. We can solve this.” But when I heard her voice, the dam broke.

  “I’m looking down at my body and I don’t recognize it,” I said, halfway to tears with my first words. I pressed the sat phone so hard to the side of my face that it hurt, and stared up, watching my mittens, mask, and thermometer bobbing on the clothesline. “I’m experiencing rapid weight loss, baby, my wristwatch is sliding around on my arm.” I held it up over my head and saw the watch slide down toward my elbow as though it were on a greased pole. “I’m starting to get scared.”

  “Oh babe, it’s going to be okay,” Jenna said. Her voice cracked with emotion through the harsh static of our phone connection, pouring into my head, and I tried to pull it deeper into me, seeing her at our long, dark wooden kitchen table and smelling sautéed mushrooms and onions on the stove. The puppy she’d brought home while I was on the ice, a soft-coated wheaten terrier named Jack, whined in the background, and I tried to see him, too, and pull him into the phone, into my tent. “Colin, just remember. We’ve got a team of doctors, and they’re going to put you all back together when you get home. Just remember that,” Jenna said. Something about how she said the word “remember” told me she was trying to convince herself, too.

  “I don’t mean to sound alarmist—really,” I said, trying to recapture the rational, let’s-work-the-problem mindset I’d aimed for. “I just need to keep telling myself I’m fine, that’s all,” I said. “It’s not like I’m falling apart… but it’s scary when you look down,” I faltered for another second, “and your legs are so small.”

  “It will all come back, Colin, just remember that,” she said, speaking slowly, as though to a child.

  “Yeah, okay,” I mumbled, wanting her to think that I wasn’t in as bad a place as I really was.

  Our specific task that night was fairly straightforward: Fifteen days’ worth of Colin Bars and daily rations had to stretch to twenty days at least, and even that was a guess. Since I didn’t know how long it would take to get to the end, I couldn’t be sure that any amount of stretching out the supplies would be good enough.

  And every calorie calculation came with repercussions. At full rations, I’d been eating seven thousand calories a day, which in the real world was a huge amount, a surefire formula for piling on the pounds. Out here, pulling the sled twelve hours a day in brutal cold, it had the opposite effect. Because I was burning through at least ten thousand calories a day, seven thousand was a starvation diet, forcing my body to seek out and use up any fat reserves it could find inside me. And when the fat was used up, the muscles were next.

  Now I’d go to less than six thousand, which I knew would leave me hungry almost every minute through the day and accelerate my weight loss. And just bringing all the food into the tent to sort through made me uneasy. I’d been so strict and careful since my nighttime food raid to never bring any extra supplies into the tent, and now here it all was in front of me—all my food in the world—and it didn’t look like much. Ten daily ration bags, each in their own Ziploc, fit into one larger dry bag. The thirty-five-thousand-calorie stash of Colin Bars, which I’d pulled aside on that morning at the first waypoint when I cached food and supplies, sat in their own separate bag, frozen solid as bricks.

  So my first step, as I held the sat phone with one hand, was to pull out the individual daily ration bags and lay them out on the sleeping bag. Then I’d count up the component parts and start rebagging—oatmeal stretching out into smaller portions, ramen rations going to every other day, and on down through a process of a scoop here and a scoop ther
e that was making me anxious and hungry even before I started.

  I got the daily bags in a row. I got the spare bags all set in a pile. And then I went down the row of rations, counting it all up.

  “Hmm,” I said when I finished, shaking my head. There should be ten food bags and somehow I’d counted eleven.

  Just then the phone line popped and buzzed for a second.

  “What did you say?” Jenna said when she came back.

  “Nothing, nothing,” I muttered. I was counting again by then, going down the row, tapping each bag with a finger. Somehow I got to eleven again. I flopped back and stared up at the tent roof for a second.

  “You okay?” Jenna said. “You ready to start rebagging?”

  “Um… almost,” I said. “Just having a little trouble.”

  Mental trouble is what I thought but didn’t say. There had to be ten bags. I knew there were ten. It struck me, and frightened me, that maybe I wanted so badly to have eleven bags that I simply saw the number I wanted.

  So I counted again, tapping the bags with a crusty finger and mouthing the numbers silently to myself as I went down the line… six, seven, eight… thinking that this time I’d get the number that made sense. Then another time. I stopped, feeling a wave of growing panic. This is how it starts, I thought. If a simple thing like counting small numbers was now beyond me, the big things could unravel very quickly.

  Finally, I heard a little sigh followed by a wave of static at the other end of the phone.

  “What?” I said. “Hello? Are you still there? Hello?”

  I felt suddenly desperate and alone. If the line was dead and it was just me in my tent with confusion and my uncountable food bags, I feared I might just really go crazy.

  But Jenna was back on the line.

  “There’s an extra day, right?” she said softly.

  I froze and blinked, staring at my food.

  She knew.

  And I finally got it out of her. Based on her own count, she knew I probably had eleven full days of food left, plus the extra Colin Bars. But she’d been afraid to say it. She’d been protecting me, just in case she was wrong. She knew that if she’d told me I had eleven and it really somehow turned out to be ten, the disappointment could’ve been devastating. Of course she’d known the correct number; she’d organized every detail of this expedition and meticulously tracked every choice along the way. She also knew what a brittle, fragile place I’d come to.

  I lay back in the bag when the re-sorting was done, feeling relieved, but in some ways even more freaked out than before. The extra seven-thousand-calorie food bag meant that I’d been given a brief reprieve—I could eat a full day’s rations tomorrow before starting on the new reduced food regimen. But the fact that I’d been so confused in figuring it all out, and that Jenna had been so concerned about my mental state, meant that I was also really hitting some new place of jeopardy. Food supply fears were coming at me from one side, mental confusion and weight loss from the other, and it was all related. I felt surrounded, ganged up on and overwhelmed, and I wasn’t sure how, or if, I could fight back.

  And though I couldn’t see it, the worst was only beginning.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES DURING THOSE NEXT FEW days it almost felt like time had screeched to a stop or ceased to have meaning.

  The blank emptiness and numbing monotony of a landscape without features, and the ferocity of effort required to move across that landscape while never seeing much evidence that I was actually getting anywhere, had come to feel like a vast and perverse treadmill.

  People I loved were out there somewhere—my family, my wife, my friends—along with strangers from around the world who were following my progress. I knew that, and I tried to draw strength from it. I thought of the French scientist, reading the New York Times on his computer in the South Pole station. I thought of Tim in the Comms Box dreaming of Christmas Day on Bondi Beach. But it all felt shallow and incomplete, like a cartoon, a reflection of reality and not the real world itself.

  I tried telling myself my reduced rations didn’t matter and weren’t having an effect. And for the next five strange days, I pushed ahead on them, pulling the sled for twelve hours each day, trying to pretend that everything was the same, that I was strong and that fifteen hundred fewer calories per day didn’t matter.

  But it did matter. Just as it was that night when I’d been unable to count food bags laid out in front of me, I found that many little things were becoming different and harder—harder to physically accomplish or sometimes even to understand. Sometimes in pulling the sled, and staring down intently at my compass, I’d start to lose the sense that it was separate from me, and I’d feel like I might fall down into it, spiraling into its depths as though it were a black hole. One night, in building the snow-wall embankment around my tent, I stopped in the middle of the task, frozen in place, shovel in hand, not quite sure what I was doing or why, as though my mind had just sort of walked off the field.

  And the cold seemed to be tightening its grip like the slow turning of a screw. The human body burns calories to stay warm, to heal, to stay alive. Heat is life. But through those days after the food redistribution, the temperature also seemed to go into slow free fall, down to thirty below or often worse. And my thermometer was only easily readable down to about that temperature—after that the little red mercury line got harder and harder to see—so I found myself tapping it with the thumb of my glove sometimes when I’d check it during the day, wondering whether it had, like so many other things around me, gone slightly off-kilter. And I began to think I was actually chilling down deeper inside than I had before. A defensive perimeter had been penetrated. The cold had found a chink in my armor.

  I was sitting on the sled, eating my reduced portion of ramen, when I thought of Henry Worsley’s descent into peril. I certainly didn’t know what his final days had been like, or the exact symptoms of his decline, but he’d clearly hit some dark corner of his mind and body, a place where something of Antarctica had confronted him or changed him. And that night, when I froze again in place, suddenly confused about lighting my stove, it struck me that perhaps Worsley, a giant of Antarctic wisdom and experience, had not known what to do when he hit that inflection point. Maybe he’d become locked in place, unable to choose or see the correct path ahead, and that’s what had turned a problem into a crisis.

  And that was perhaps the single most terrifying thought I’d had in forty-six days on the ice—maybe in my entire life—that Antarctica’s cruelest, hardest force wasn’t its weather or its brutal cold, but the quiet erosion of judgment and reason and sanity, and that it was also the one thing you couldn’t possibly defend yourself against.

  * * *

  I’D SEEN THE GREAT STORM gradually coming toward me through my forty-sixth day on the ice. It didn’t roar in suddenly, or surge. It crept in with slow, almost imperceptible changes of light and wind, and then with the first light drifts of blowing snow. No sign or signal was ever in itself abrupt or alarming. It all just built and built, until the pace became part of the experience, deepening my dread about what was to come. The growing cold, along with the chill I increasingly felt inside, in my bones, through the day, was another signal that a low-pressure front was grinding toward me across the flat, featureless expanse of ice, with nothing to block it or divert it or change its path.

  I’d learned by then to trust my skis, too, in gauging the weather outlook, and they told me to brace myself. How much snow was blowing across them at any one moment—whether they were fully or only slightly covered as I went forward—told me how much snow was actually in the air, something that was otherwise very hard to tell with no contrast of white on white. And the skis, through the day, were increasingly buried.

  Then, through that night as I tried to sleep, the storm fully unfolded in its fury, until by the time I climbed out of my tent the next morning, I was in the thick of it.

  And it was the worst possible time. My compass and GPS told m
e that I was approaching a place in my journey that I’d dreaded even in good weather—a one-hundred-mile stretch of ice where the sastrugi, which I’d managed to deal with through the miles and weeks when they were one or two feet high, became monsters. They’d now be three to five feet high, each with potentially huge holes on any side—a hellish stretch that previous explorers had nicknamed with wonderfully deadpan irony Sastrugi National Park.

  The name said a lot about Antarctic explorers themselves, that their idea of levity was to dub one of the hardest places on the continent to get across a “park.” And yet there definitely was a kind of grandeur to the awfulness of it.

  I stopped, straining to see ahead of me in what was gradually becoming an all-out blizzard. The wind smashed into me, gusting to what I estimated to be fifty or even sixty miles per hour, which would produce windchills in the range of eighty below or worse. But the real terror of Sastrugi National Park was also the most ironic. This park was in a real way “off the map”—unreachable and inaccessible. On a continent with thousands of square miles where a rescue plane equipped with skis could come in for a skid landing, weather permitting, the great sastrugi zone made landing impossible.

  I thought of Simon, A.L.E.’s travel safety manager. His office in Punta Arenas was lined with maps, and the day we conferred we had my route map displayed on a wall-mounted TV.

  “Okay, right here’s where you definitely don’t want to get into trouble, Colin,” he said, drawing what seemed like a huge circle with a laser pointer and looking up at me. “If you call for help in here, you won’t get it,” he said. “You’ll be on your own.”