The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  “Actually, I’m not camped,” I said, staring out at the mountains. “I’m planning on going on a few more hours.”

  “Wow,” Tim said. It was one of the few expressions of personal interest I’d heard through our many exchanges.

  “Weather has been beautiful,” I said. “Decided to take advantage of it.”

  “Okay, got it, just send me your coordinates when you make camp,” he said, immediately back to business. Tim was Tim and I hung up the phone smiling.

  I’d noticed, even as I stood there with the phone, that the winds were starting to pick up around me. On the upper part of the glacier, the protective embrace of the mountains had shielded me, I realized, and as I’d moved back into the open that shield was gone.

  As I continued on, things intensified, and I was very quickly in the middle of a serious squall, which evolved into a full ground blizzard. A ground blizzard isn’t a regular storm, and this was the worst I’d ever experienced. Regular Antarctic storms pummel you with the load of snow and cold they bring with them. They carry their freight with a force that feels as though they want to pick you up and haul you off with them to some netherworld of cold. A ground blizzard is worse in some ways because it swirls from every place, a chaotic maelstrom blown up from the ground and whipped into walls of snow that close in from every side. I decided that it must feel something like this to be inside a blender or a vacuum cleaner.

  You could lose your way very quickly in a storm like that, and there were many moments of my journey across Antarctica when a storm of such severity would probably have seemed like the great demon itself, a storm beyond the limits of terror. But now, as I peered out into the thick, swirling wall of white, I felt a calm that said this storm would not touch me, not in the places that mattered. I’d staked it out and claimed it. I’d transcended the physical discomforts of the external world in all its raging chaos, and found a deep inner peace.

  I was certainly aware of the storm’s deep cold, and I knew that my body could be knocked over by a ferocious gust of wind, but with every step, as I moved further into it, I felt the fortress of calm protecting me. My mind couldn’t be knocked down.

  * * *

  AT MIDNIGHT, after eighteen hours of pulling the sled nonstop, the storm still raging, I realized that I was running out of water. Water was a different variable than food. It could only be made over the stove, and the stove—especially in blizzard conditions—would only function in the tent. So I’d need to stop. As I pulled the tent off the sled, my near disaster only a few days before flashed through my mind. My hands hurt just as much as they had that night. The cold was penetrating me just as much or more. The winds were certainly more severe. Risks and unknowns were all around me, swirling like the snow itself.

  But this time was different. Even with all those things being thrown at me, I knew with a certainty and absolute confidence that I could accomplish the task and put up the tent. As I laid it down on the ice, the fabric flapped and whipped, and I knew that the possibility was real that through error or accident, should I lose my grip, the tent could be gone into the storm, with fatal consequences. Fear and distraction had been my enemies on that night when it almost happened—they’d been in control. But now I was in charge, and I knew what to do to keep the fear and distraction at bay.

  I anchored the tent to the sled and followed through with all the steps to secure it, feeling my hands gripping the fabric, but also knowing exactly how hard I needed to grip, and no harder, and seeing every step with a smooth efficiency I doubt I’d ever mastered before. I carried over the stove and zipped it in.

  And then I stood outside the tent door, the storm swirling and howling around me.

  “Colin, you are strong and you are capable,” I said aloud, to the storm and to myself. And even as I said it, I realized that the phrase, repeated every morning on the ice, was no longer a mantra to bolster my confidence. Nor was it a statement of fuck you in defiance of the storm, which I’d also done a few times. I wasn’t afraid anymore. It simply, at last, felt true. I no longer had anything to prove.

  * * *

  IT WAS ABOUT 7 P.M. IN OREGON—midnight my time—when I called Jenna from inside the tent, right in the middle of Christmas dinner at my sister Caitlin’s house in Hood River. I could almost smell the ham and salmon on the table, the gluten-free sage stuffing, and the pies in the kitchen, laid out by the stove to cool.

  “What a day you had!” Jenna said when the call went through. “Forty-eight miles! It’s amazing—we kept watching you on the tracker, and watching, and you just kept going. Your mom called you her ‘unstoppable little blue dot.’ ” She stopped and I heard her breathe. “We’re missing you here for Christmas, baby, but I’m so happy to hear your voice, Colin. When you didn’t call at your usual hour, we all started to wonder, but I knew…”

  “I’m good, Jenna. I tapped into a deep flow state. There’s so much I want to tell you…”

  “I could feel it. And now I hear it in your voice… So you’re in the tent then, stove on and fed?”

  “I’m in the tent,” I said, watching it heave and flap around me.

  She was silent for a moment, absorbing that. I could almost see her expression, see her listening. “The tent’s rattling around. You’re in a storm? I know what that sounds like after fifty-three days.” She paused to listen again. “We thought, when you didn’t stop, that you were probably having great weather.”

  “It’s actually one of the worst storms I’ve seen, full ground blizzard. It’s like a shaken snow globe out here.” I paused for a second. “But I’m not stopping. I’m just melting snow for water, and then I’m going to keep pushing to the end,” I said. “I’ve hit a place that says I need to keep on, go back out. I need to see what’s in there. In me.”

  She was silent for only a beat. “I hear it, Colin,” she said softly. “I hear the strength in your voice…. I know you’ve got what it takes to keep pushing…. Wait, hold on, here’s your mom.”

  Mom’s voice suddenly filled my head. “You’re really doing it, Colin,” she said. “I just want to say how proud of you I am, and Merry Christmas.”

  “And I want to say thank you,” I said. “For… everything.”

  “It’s wonderful, this thing I’m hearing in you, in all of us,” she said. “It’s like a choir or something, like a hallelujah chorus.” She stopped and laughed. “Too much Christmas music around here maybe….”

  Then Caitlin picked up the phone, my big sister’s supportive words always meaning the world to me, and Brian, and other members of my family, all of them shouting to say they wished I was there with them. And finally Jenna came back.

  “I know you’ve got to the place you dreamed of all this time. The frontier of the possible. And that I shouldn’t be worried about you. I’m so happy for you, for us.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I feel your strength in here with me right now in the tent, Jenna. You’re walking with me through this storm… inside me more than I know how to describe. Strength… yours, mine, the amazing energy I feel from people out there following my journey—it’s a village, not just me at all.”

  * * *

  I’VE NEVER SET OUT to be a conquering hero. In the books my mom and dad read to me as a child, the characters I always loved best were the scouts, the seekers of truth going out to survey and report back from the frontier, sharing lessons learned and the maps they’d drawn. The point of The Impossible First was to push the edge of the possible and to bring back what I learned to perhaps inspire others to take their own scouting expeditions to their own Impossible Firsts.

  As I packed up my tent and prepared to continue on into the storm, all the pieces of my life’s journey began rolling through me. I was there because of all the people who’d supported me, who’d made sacrifices for me, and who’d never stopped believing in me.

  I saw David, sitting near the back of the classroom, where I was, on that first day of high school, and there again next to me in Thailand, holding
me up and trying his lamest of jokes. “More hospital,” he said as he’d carried me in.

  My mom was there in the storm, too, and I could see her face and eyes in a thousand ways and at a thousand times—at the foot of my hospital bed and there across the kitchen, hand on the wooden chair, her eyes demanding that I rise up and walk, and dancing through our house to Paul Simon like a wild woman. And my dad was with me, hiking at my side through some damp and fern-wrapped trail in the Cascades, teaching me about stewardship and responsibility and the annual rate of retreat of his beloved Mount Hood glaciers in a warming climate, and most of all showing me through his life’s example that loving the earth was about caring for it.

  And Brian, grinning across the front seat of his pickup truck on the way to my first Vipassana retreat, and Caitlin, holding my hand on my first day of school, and always beside me in the car on Switch Day.

  Mr. Gelber was there, rubbing his chin and looking at me with his brilliantly perceptive gaze across the table at his backyard barbecue. I could even smell the brats on the grill. Mr. Boyle was with me there in the storm, and I saw him staring up at the ceiling from his conference table at Columbia Sportswear, deciding the fate of the project Jenna and I had brought to him.

  And Jenna. I felt I could almost reach out into the storm and touch her. I saw exactly how she’d looked in the bar that day in Fiji, and the little dark brown line that runs across the iris of her left eye, which I’d fallen in love with the first time I saw her.

  I felt her body against me, the day we’d made love with her hands still covered with the dirt from our first garden. I saw how the rain had poured down off her hood in the park in Portland when we decided to risk it all. And the inspired look she’d given me that morning on the Burning Man playa, gazing up at me in all her glory.

  I felt stuffed with all those things, like a symphony was playing through me and inside me and every step through the storm was the space between the notes. Strength came from that boy I once was, jumping up and down on the couch watching Pablo Morales win Olympic gold. And from that nervous teenager showing up for school on the wrong side of the river, and the high school grad arriving at Yale full of Pacific Northwest attitude. And from that wounded twenty-two-year-old, crying in his bed in a Thai hospital. And from that fool who drove away into the steamy July heat of Portland and had to experience the pain of intense loss before becoming the man who would “pop the question” on a mountaintop in Ecuador.

  * * *

  THE STORM LIFTED AROUND MIDDAY as I approached what I knew was the end of the continent. A wooden post, put in place by the United States Geological Survey, marks the place where the continent ends and the Ross Ice Shelf begins.

  My GPS told me I was near. And it seemed I could almost feel it, too, in the fatigue of my body, and in the heaviness of my eyes inside my mask, as though a whole life had been lived in that compressed window of time. My dad’s text, my decision to push on, my call to Jenna from inside the tent, my transformative moment kneeling on the ice with outstretched arms in the middle of the Leverett Glacier—they all seemed like pieces of a story I couldn’t yet quite tell or get my head around.

  When I finally saw in the distance the actual wooden post where the landmass ended and the sea ice began, the finish line goal I’d poured so much into, it still felt like a shock and I had to blink back a feeling of disbelief that it could be real. I’d gone seventy-seven miles in the past thirty-two hours, faster than my math had predicted. I’d visualized reaching this place countless times. I’d pictured how the weather would be, and what the sky and the ice would look like. I’d imagined how my body might feel, and even how it might look. I’d played a made-up movie in my head of the finish-line moment over and over. And now here I was, on the afternoon of December 26, 2018, with the end in sight.

  The post even had a name, which I’d entered into my GPS as the end point of the journey. It was called LOO-JW in the mystery speak of USGS government geographers. More than a few times at night in my tent, in moments when my mind had wandered into a place of despair or doubt, I’d pulled out my GPS and studied that little five-digit code name, running my finger across the screen, trying to believe I’d reach it.

  But now, when I finally saw it on the horizon, the post looked so tiny and insignificant, an isolated little stick in the middle of nowhere, that it seemed almost absurd. There’d be no one there to welcome me, or congratulate me. No cheering crowds or medals. Just a solitary hunk of wood.

  A thousand huge forces, a single mistake, or a moment of bad luck could’ve stopped me from reaching this place.

  A part of me wanted to charge on to the post, finishing what I’d started. I was a quarter of a mile away at most—a lap around a high school track. I could be there in minutes. But a bigger part of me wanted this moment to last forever. The post wasn’t going away. I’d reach it soon enough and touch it and perhaps cry at the touch of it. Rudd was far behind. I’d achieved what I set out to do, to complete the world’s first solo, unsupported, unassisted crossing of the Antarctic landmass. I knew I’d never be in this place again.

  So I stopped, wanting to stretch out this moment, with more than 931 miles behind me, and just a few hundred yards to go. I unclipped from my sled. I put on my extra parka layer and sat down. I looked out toward the post, then back south toward the Pole and the direction I’d come, and finally down at the sled.

  The sled.

  I reached over to touch it, running a hand across the yellow cover, almost near tears. All these weeks, the sled, despite having been essential to my survival, had been my hated and burdensome shadow. Suddenly, I felt all over again the ache of that first day when I’d barely been able to budge it. I smelled again the white gas spilled down inside, and the memories that had roared out at me about the fire and the burns. I saw again the shape of it looming over me, teetering and ready to fall on me as I lay there twisted and sprawled by the huge sastruga. I felt it knocking me over going down the Leverett Glacier earlier that day.

  We’re all occasionally weighed down by our burdens, I thought, giving the sled a little pat. But we also need a place to hold the great gifts life offers along the way. My burden, it seemed, was also my salvation. As I trudged through the miles and weeks of my journey across the frozen continent, consuming food and burning fuel, empty space began to appear in my sled. At first, it was just a small sliver of a space, but that space grew larger and larger as the days passed.

  Through the nine hundred odd miles I’d covered, I’d filled the empty spaces of the sled every day, little by little, with every memory, every lesson learned, every bit of love and wisdom that I’d gathered along the way. Now, stacked high with the treasures of my life, the sled was more full than ever.

  As I’d set out on this journey, people asked me, “Why would you choose to suffer like that by yourself in Antarctica?” Now my answer was in the sled, next to all the other lessons learned. Through my crossing, I’d come to measure the highs and lows experienced in life on a continuum between one and ten.

  I’d experienced the full spectrum in Antarctica; many “one” days alone full of fear, crying in my tent and wanting to completely give up. But in stepping out beyond my comfort zone, daring to dream beyond what most people thought was possible, I’d arrived at this moment. This flow state. This “ten.” I was there in that moment not in spite of the “ones,” but because of them.

  Antarctica taught me that life isn’t about maximizing our time at “five,” in the zone of comfortable complacency, hedging against fear, loss, and pain. But rather, life is about having the courage to embrace the full spectrum—the tapestry of all the “ones” and “tens” and mundane moments in between. It’s the key to unlocking potential and living fully.

  The post sat there a quarter mile away, a solitary beacon at the continent’s edge. And everything after that, I knew, would be different, after I’d finished the crossing. I was a man between worlds.

  Finally, I’d sat there long enough to star
t getting cold.

  I needed to get moving again, if only for that. I needed to go forward because my mind and body said it was time, and I’d learned how to listen. And so I stood up, walked for the last time to the front of my sled, strapped on my harness, and headed toward home.

  Epilogue

  It was early morning and a thick layer of gray slush covered the sidewalk outside our midtown Manhattan hotel as the black four-door town car pulled up out front. I’d been off the Antarctic ice for less than a week, making my way to New York City from Chile, and as I stood there holding Jenna’s hand, my feet were getting wet. In leaving our room, I’d worn the wrong shoes.

  “You are Mr. O’Brady?” the driver asked as he climbed out. He was a thickset man in his forties with bristly gray hair and a heavy Slavic accent. I waved and nodded, but when he got around the car to the sidewalk, he immediately looked down, then back up at us. “This will not fit,” he said, glancing at the car and back down again.

  “I am sorry for this,” he said. “They gave me wrong car. I did not know about…” He glanced back at his car for a few seconds and scratched his head, as though further rumination might conjure up a giant rear storage area he’d forgotten about. “I will call and they send another car,” he said.

  “How far is it?” I said, turning to Jenna. She glanced down at her phone and tapped in the address. “About three-quarters of a mile—point seven six, which would be about… ten blocks.”

  I looked down. My sled, dinged up and battered, lay there mired in the slushy muck, stuffed into an oversized surfboard bag with a handle and wheels. The concierge at the hotel had helped me carry it out to the street from the storage room where they’d held it for me overnight. “I think we’ll be fine,” I said to the driver. “Thank you.”