On your own. I’d nodded and shrugged and thanked Simon, but until that moment, standing at the edge of the sastrugi zone—though I couldn’t see even a hint of it yet in the storm—I hadn’t really understood. With my next steps I’d be on my own in a way I’d never been before.
I started falling almost immediately, and with each fall Simon’s words kept coming back to me because I saw how easily and quickly trouble could happen. In the blowing snow, I couldn’t see a sastruga, however big it was, until I was directly on it, and by then my forward momentum made it hard, if not impossible, to react. And the uncountable years of wind that had made the sastrugi had also polished them into fierce and icy hardness. So any fall was a fall onto hard ice, and the deeply uneven surfaces meant that the impact of that fall could hit me anywhere. Elbows, hips, knees, and shoulders were all bruised and hurting within the first hour. I started wishing after one particularly bad fall that I’d brought a helmet. Getting knocked unconscious out here, in the storm, without hope of rescue, would unquestionably be fatal.
I began to bargain with myself. Had I learned anything from that disastrous day when I’d been forced to stop, when I’d curled up at the edge of the sled seeking shelter from the wind and still been unable to repair my ski skin? Maybe I should stop, I said. Maybe I should seek shelter from the storm, after so many days without a day off.
Finally I decided, only a few hours into the day, that if I really wanted to keep going I needed to change from my short skins to my long ones. And that set up a whole new series of bargains and trade-offs. Longer skins, with more surface touching on the ice, would make for slower progress, but give me a better grip on the uneven sastrugi surfaces. I’d have to change my skins. But changing the skins, as I’d learned the hard way, couldn’t be done in a blizzard, which meant I’d need to put the tent back up, only hours after taking it down, and I’d be doing it in a storm. Stopping my big-muscle movements of pulling the sled, even if I could do the switchover quickly, would also give the cold an opportunity to penetrate as I sat inside and worked. Every option I could think of was frustrating or frightening, or both.
But struggling on finally just seemed impossible, and that forced the decision. I’d have to put up the tent. So I unharnessed, looked for a spot that was more or less flat, and uncinched the sled cover, pausing for a moment as I did to stare down at the bungee cord that had held on and done its job through all the miles since the first day when I’d broken the buckle. The cord had been an improvisation that worked, I thought as I stowed it in my bag. The tent fluttered and flapped in the wind as I carried it over, and the work of putting it up—anchoring to the sled, and then on the other side—felt slow and labored. I was frustrated and cold, and the bruises from my falls made every step, however crucial, feel tedious, annoying, and painful. My patience was frayed.
Finally, I got my kitchen box with my stove, which I’d need to heat the skins, into the vestibule and then stood there looking at the sled with my arctic bedding and bags and food all still packed away. No, I decided. I’d leave them outside. It felt like one little piece of the bargaining process I could control. No bedding or food in the tent meant that however much I’d be sheltered once I got inside, I’d be unable to stay there, even if the storm worsened, even if, once I got inside, I had second thoughts. I’d have to go back out to gather my supplies if I decided that I really wanted or needed to hide from the blizzard.
But the bargain didn’t work very well. I got myself and my skis and skins inside, lit the stove, and made the repair. The muscle memory of doing that, like the clenching of my hands on the tent, was almost automatic. But then, with the skis laid out on the tent floor beside me ready to go, the stove turned off and ready to pack, I froze in place.
The tent was fluttering and rolling around me, and I was shivering, and I couldn’t decide what to do.
Uncertainty defined the world. If I unzipped my tent and went back out to continue the day, I risked falling, even worse than I had already, in a place where no help would be coming and in weather that could kill me if things went wrong. If I stayed inside, the great problem of food would circle back to bite me. Going nowhere for another day meant that my food supplies, already stretched, would have to stretch even further. And then there was Rudd, currently thirty-five miles behind me. I’d seen what could happen in a single day, what he could do in a single day in catching up to me if he was out there still and I wasn’t.
So I closed my eyes and tried to calm my mind. I needed to find the place that Vipassana meditation had taken me, starting with that first time when Brian had dropped me off for a ten-day silent retreat near Mount St. Helens, and through the years of practice since.
Staring at the tent floor, I began by focusing on my breathing—but trying to be free of thoughts had the exact opposite effect; my mind was racing. It was like there was a party in my head, and all my angels and demons had been invited. Pieces of me that felt tossed by the storm were competing for attention and dominance—hope wrestling doubt, calm battling anxiety, confidence holding back fear—and couldn’t be denied, any more than I could ignore the tent thrashing around me. I had to take control.
If I can find a way to quiet my mind, get back out into the storm, and continue to make forward progress, I thought to myself, eventually the storm will end; it can’t last forever. No matter how bad the storm was, it was temporary.
A phrase came to me that Jenna and I had seized on and made part of our vocabulary from the meditation practice we’d begun to share—our little reminder that change is the only constant, and that success requires endurance. The words were ordinary, a common phrase, but the deep emotional connections they carried felt like a lifeline.
“This too shall pass,” I repeated, “this too shall pass,” eyes still closed, focusing my full attention on believing it. Then I sucked in a deep breath, unzipped the door, and went back out into the storm.
* * *
AS I STRUGGLED through the sastrugi that day, falling again and again, hunched over in the wind, I found myself thinking more and more about Rudd. He’d never completely left my thoughts, of course, but in the strange mental space I’d entered, the no-rescue zone of Sastrugi National Park, he roared back.
We’d known exactly where Rudd was—though he didn’t know we knew—since the first week, thanks to my mom and her feat of trial-and-error detective work. But since the sixth day, when I passed Rudd, and we had our surreal little encounter—hey there, just two guys trying to cross the continent, bumping into each other—we hadn’t seen each other.
We were unquestionably bound together on the Antarctic ice in a powerful way—each of us separately and in different ways trying to achieve something that no one had ever accomplished, that was, in fact, regarded by many as impossible. But at the same time we were also both profoundly isolated, from morning until night, through every moment of every day and every step we took on the ice. He was out there somewhere in the white, invisible, and yet always there inside me, too, in a way, just as he’d been from those first moments flying on the Ilyushin.
And the public interest in this race had begun to increase, prompting the New York Times to ask Rudd’s team if they could have access to his GPS tracker information to post daily updates of our respective locations. To my surprise, Rudd had obliged and the race was now broadcast live for the world to see. My little tactical advantage of secretly knowing exactly where he was had disappeared.
He made me push harder. At the end of almost every day, almost no matter how long or tough it had been, I’d think of him and convince myself I had an extra half hour in the tank, or maybe even an hour, and could keep going. If he could do eleven extra steps, or eleven extra minutes, I could do twelve. He made me look over my shoulder, even when I could see nothing, thinking somehow he might be there. I thought of him when my alarm went off in the morning, and when I turned off my tent stove at night and the final little hiss of compressed white-gas jets escaped in a sigh.
* * *<
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AS I WALKED into the still raging storm, I started thinking about my weird plane ride with Rudd and those hours across Drake Passage, which now seemed, after all the miles and weeks, like a lifetime ago.
Distracted, I misjudged a step. Hitting the edge of a huge sastruga, I slid sideways, smashing my head. And as I climbed back up, feeling dizzy and rubbing my left temple where I’d come down, I had a strange and startling thought: I needed Rudd.
I stood there for a while, processing that idea and checking myself for other bruises, trying to regain my calm. But it was true: I needed him. As a foil to my always competitive nature, he was convenient to have around, if only for the effect he had on me. And the more I thought about it, the weirder it seemed. Rudd’s existence was almost too convenient. Maybe I’d needed a Rudd, and so—I gasped to myself even as the thought crystallized—I’d created him in my mind.
And I couldn’t shake it, however hard I tried. It was ridiculous. It couldn’t be true. It was absurd beyond measure. I had vivid memories of being with him—how he talked and laughed and even smelled.
But like the Antarctic cold, which also came with me into the tent and couldn’t be banished some nights, for all my layers of clothes, the Rudd question burrowed inside. And though I knew it was halfway to crazy, I decided that I had to ask Jenna that night. I tried to be casual about it. She was going through the medical checklist we did almost nightly, on a scale of zero to four—pain to sleep to bowels. The wind outside was still howling, pale light from the 11 p.m. sun creating a dull glow through the red fabric of the tent. And in a pause, I just sort of dropped the question as though I was asking about nothing in particular, the way you might ask about our beloved NBA team back home, the Trailblazers, and whether she thought Damian Lillard would have a good year and the Blazers might have a shot at the championship.
“Is Lou real?” I said. As I spoke, the wind, which had been blasting and shaking the tent, suddenly dropped, falling almost to calm. The tent was still, just the gentle sway of the clothesline. I held my breath.
And she answered exactly as I’d asked, with a laugh and a completely casual tone, as if my question was the sort you’d ask over a beer in a noisy sports bar.
“Oh yeah, he’s real, no doubt about it,” she said, quickly moving on to another item on the checklist.
I heard in her tone that same thing she’d done with my food supplies—the withheld beat of worry. That she didn’t stop and say “What the hell are you talking about?” was an unspoken signal that said, “Hang on, just hang on. I’ll be strong and you will, too.”
And when she did actually speak again, her words came through just as clearly, that she knew I did need something more, some added little psychological life preserver that told me I was okay, however close to the edge I felt.
“Colin, you’re doing an incredible job out there, I love you,” she said simply.
And “love” was the word I held in my head that night. It felt solid and real. I could cling to it and hang on.
* * *
BUT HANGING ON WAS GETTING harder to do as the storm continued and seemed to worsen through the next day, my forty-eighth on the ice.
And my hands were the signal. I’d gotten used to the regular throbbing ache after twelve hours of gripping the poles, from the cold and muscle strain. But some days brought added elements into the mix and, by the 8 p.m. stopping point, I often felt as if my hands were either being slowly crushed or burned inside the mittens by penetrating cold that had come to seem like fire. They froze by day and thawed by night, day after day. When I had to pull off the mittens for even a few seconds to accomplish a task requiring fine motor skills, the stinging deep freeze in my knuckles could last for hours. I was beginning to fear permanent damage.
That day, for whatever combination of reasons, it was way worse, and by the time I stopped I could hardly bear it. I wanted so badly to get my hands inside the tent. I pictured myself curled up with my hands under my armpits. I pictured holding my hands against the aluminum water pot as it warmed on the stove.
Setting up my tent after that long day, I was distracted by my hands. That was my first mistake.
Consequences rippled out from there.
In my distraction, I rushed it. That was my second mistake.
I didn’t attach one end of the tent to the sled, as I always had before that night, but simply drove an anchor into the ice, and then, before I could put in a second anchor at the other end, a ferocious gust of wind pulled out the first anchor and lofted the tent into the air. Instantly, I dove forward and grabbed the edge of the tent—the aching hands I’d wanted to baby and soothe now suddenly more crucial than ever.
If I lost my grip, everything that kept me alive would be gone in seconds, fluttering up and out into the white. With no backup shelter and no hope of rescue, the end would come relatively soon.
I was an inch from failure.
My compromised hands were now everything. They gripped the tent poles as the whole structure yanked and jerked over my head like a flag, caught in the wind. In a split second, I envisioned my fate if I lost the grip on the tent. I saw my shelter blow away and disappear into the white forever… My life now depended on my grip, and on what would happen, or not, in the next few seconds.
Those seconds felt like hours. The tent became the center of gravity and the center of my universe. In a way, it was the only thing that existed. The tent was home, shelter, life itself.
I stared down at my hands, clenched around the tent’s edge. Immediately, my mittens were coated with fine spindrift that felt as if it was burying me alive and freezing me in place.
I had to get on top of the tent to solve my crisis, but, in doing so, avoid being so much on the top that I bent or broke the tent poles beyond repair, in which case I’d be in almost as much trouble as if I’d lost the tent entirely. The margin of error felt razor-thin, and as I lay there in a panic with the wind blasting into my face, I thought of my left-behind spare poles, buried in the snow at that first waypoint marker. They’d represented a few ounces saved, but also, perhaps, one more bad choice in a cascading chain of errors that would decide everything.
And my hands were shaking. I knew I had very little time before my muscles would start to cramp. Determination wouldn’t matter much after that.
But then there was a lull in the wind. At first it seemed to be nothing, only a tiny pause, but it lingered another second longer, and another. And my breath stopped. I knew at any moment the wind would roar back, and that this lull might be the only chance I’d get. Finally, as the seconds of the lull ticked on, my instinct to survive took hold and I yanked the tent toward my body and wrestled it to the ground. Desperately, I held it in place under my knees, my body shaking from head to toe in the overload of adrenaline. After one of the most intense and fearful moments of my life, I had the tent back under control and had somehow managed not to break a single tent pole. I had my home back. Security had been regained. I knew that, but still, as I tried to catch my breath, feeling the thunder of my heart, I couldn’t unclench my hands. Their grip had saved me and now they wouldn’t let go.
The shaking didn’t stop as the wind kicked back up. Through every task as I began to make camp—bringing in the kitchen box, carrying over my arctic bedding, shoveling the snow barrier—I felt as if I could collapse at any moment from the tension and the post-adrenaline shock. And by the time I finally zipped in, it seemed like everything that had been chasing me through those days of storm and hunger had followed. There was no escape. The tent felt crowded with ghosts and demons and shadows.
I reached for my camera and held the tripod out in front of me, the red record light on like a little eye gazing into mine.
“I’m not doing very good, Cam…” My voice trailed off as I stared into the lens, replaying in my mind the last hour. I came to the brink of saying it—almost lost the tent, almost faced the crisis of my life—but I couldn’t form the words. The world shuddered around me, swaying and s
winging and whipping. I could feel my tailbone against the frozen ground, less cushioned from the weight loss. I could feel the deep strain in my arms as I held the tripod. Mostly I felt nothing, emptied and drained of everything—beyond tears, beyond, for the first time, even hope.
“I’m feeling like I… like I just want to quit,” I said quietly. The camera lens suddenly looked like a hole, a bottomless swirling whirlpool that was part of the storm, part of something that was pulling me in. Cam had come to feel like a friend I could confide in. Now I almost felt he was judging me, and I needed to explain myself.
“It’s just that I… I feel like I’ve failed,” I said. “I mean, I managed twenty miles today… and I know, I know, that’s pretty good, right? Right?” I said. “But the storm just keeps raging and it looks like I’ve got another couple of days at least, and it’s just like it’s all sort of swallowed me and I…”
I reached out and touched the camera’s little red recording light, which looked so fragile and small, like a candle in the wind, then up to my clothesline, where I gave my swaying thermometer a tap.
“I’m trying to hold it together,” I said, turning back to Cam, just as another blast of wind rammed into the tent, making me flinch. I straightened up and pulled the lens closer to my face. “But it’s so…”
I sat silently for a long time after that, my shoulders slumped, biting my lip, staring into the lens without finding any more words to say. Then I slowly reached over and turned off the recording. The little red light blinked out into darkness.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Put Your Boots Back On
DAY 49
Failure and defeat come to all of us at one time or another. I’d known that, and accepted it in going onto the ice. To try something that might in the end be unachievable is to take a risk, and I’d told myself over and over through my weeks in Antarctica that I was up to that risk—that failure, if it came, would be accepted with as much poise and honor as I could muster.
The Impossible First Page 22