My Journey: March 2018

Alone in Antarctica

By Felicity Aston

When the day of departure arrived, I deliberately tried to avoid as many goodbyes as possible. I think I was scared that if I let myself feel nervous or upset, I might not be able to regain control.

As the countdown to my departure had diminished from weeks to days to hours, I had increasingly felt like a swimmer clinging to the side of a boat over a deep ocean. I knew that as soon as I launched myself away from safety, I would need to be relentlessly focused on simply keeping afloat -- never able to stop, never able to relax. It was an intimidating thought, but now I found that I'd clamped down so hard on any emotion that I could barely feel anything at all. I can sense myself gradually shutting down, inwardly tensing until I was completely focused on the challenges ahead. It was like a deliberate shedding of everything that was me and replacing it with an altogether more calculated mental state. I was aware of myself being smothered by several layers of self-control and realized glumly that this would be the extent of my inner landscape for the next 3 months.

Previously it had always been the presence of a team that had stopped me caving in to the mental vices. A mix of pride and stubbornness would make me determined not to be the weak link in the group. When leading a team, I had always been aware of my responsibility to those I was leading to be the best I could be. It was knowing the impact of my actions and behavior would have on others that stopped me from falling apart. I wanted to identify what it was that would motivate me to keep going when there was no one to witness my weakness.

By midnight, I found myself on the first stop of my journey to Antarctica. Sitting alone in the airport surrounded by strangers, I don't think I had ever felt more isolated. This was only the first stage in a very long journey and yet I already seemed to be an incredibly long way from home.

Others waiting at the basecamp vented their restive nerves by climbing nearby peaks, kite-skiing along the runway or exploring local ranges. I deliberately shied away from doing the same. I didn't want to risk hurting myself in the days immediately before departure. I felt as if I had focused myself on the journey ahead to the point that it obscured all else; as if I didn't have the mental capacity to think about anything but what lay ahead.

The plane flew on and on over mile after mile of the same pleated expanse. There was no end to its span and no variation in its character. It seemed impossible that I could expect to ski across such vastness. I was struck by the sheer enormity of the distance I was taking on. 1700 kilometers sounded like a lot on paper, but now that I was seeing it for real, every inch, I was left with no doubt. It was a very long way by plane; it was an inconceivable distance by foot. I became aware of a growing reverberation deep in my belly. There were nerves, but there was also a welling excitement. I could feel the freedom of striking out across those drifts, imagine the searing could that would make me feel ecstatically alive and sense the satisfaction of marching towards an empty horizon.

Stepping back from the plane, I stood watching as the idle engine kicked into life. I readied my camera to film the plane leaving. But as it lifted into the air and banked back towards me to fly past, I forgot about taking pictures...

Then I stood, motionless, fixing my gaze on the vanishing black smudge in the sky. I could sense the mountains to my left, but I barely dared to look at them, as if glancing at my surroundings would make it real and I wasn't ready to face the reality of the moment -- not yet. Instead, I stood staring at the sky with a sense of dread as the silence rushed in. It was a tangible, roaring silence that seemed to thicken the air around my head, exerting a pressure on my temples and filling my ears, rushing into my mouth as I tried to breath.

I ran my gaze repeatedly over the slogan that I had spontaneously scrawled above the tent door in black marker: "Let routine take command of feeling." It was a phrase I had read in Erling Kagg's book about becoming the first person to ski solo to the South Pole. Strict routines often provide a momentum that can overcome any emotional reluctance. I willed myself to focus only on my routine, to deaden my emotional response in order to rationally evaluate my ability.

I have always loved the idea that no two people see the same rainbow. The optical effect I see from the position of my eyes is dictated by the law of physics to be unique, different from the view of anyone else. My rainbow is unique to me, a fact that transforms it into a magical personal secret.

I can't remember the first time I heard about Scott of the Antarctica. It seems like he has always been there, lodged in my childhood consciousness. The story of Scott's long trek to the South Pole to find that the Norwegians had beaten him to it, followed by the tragic death of his party just miles from safety on the desperate return journey, contains so many memorable scenes of fortitude and stoicism that has almost taken on the cadence of a parable. But I have come to realize that it is a history that has been streamlined with the telling through the generations. The individual episodes of adventure that make up the story are like pebbles on a beach that start life as boulders of irregular and complex form, but over time are smoothed and simplified until they become oval stones that fit perfectly in the hand. Their new shape is pleasing and easy to handle, yet they have lost something in the process.

I'm the sort of person that, when reading about exploits of others, is distracted by curiosity to know if I would be able to do the same. How would I have reacted in that situation? It is this curiosity that motivates me to explore where my personal capabilities and limitations lie. I want to know who I am.

It strikes me that we all tend to be fascinated by our own nature, that we are always looking for a way to learn more about who we are. We are drawn to the promise of discovering something new about ourselves. It was this desire of self-understanding that had led me to adventures in Antarctica as a graduate, but it was the suspicious of what such self-understanding might reveal that had lured me back to Antarctica alone.

Expeditions temporarily empty my life of all but the basic concerns of eating, sleeping, travel and staying safe. Like clearing undergrowth from a garden to discover the outline of borders and flowerbeds underneath, reducing life to just the essentials reveals the fundamental structure that underpins the whole. I found that, with life at its most basic and my spirit stretched, what was most dear to me was memories of time spent with those I love. I take this as a clear indication that, above all else, this is what is important in my life. It was a lesson I had been taught before, but a lesson I needed to learn again.

Months after returning home, a priest in Italy sent me his thoughts on Antarctica. He wrote of his belief that "everything must be stripped away in order to truly hear again." The phrase filled me with emotion because it expressed precisely something I had felt deeply in Antarctica. It is a place that strips away all but the essential and what's left is what's most important. It enables clarity of thought only possible when we are at our rawest and most genuine -- when we are scared, lonely, exposed. What's more, the lack of any physical distraction and the purity of the landscape allow us the space, freedom and clarity to ponder our purpose and our place in the scheme of things.

It's impossible to witness such a landscape and not be struck by just how vast and how empty the southern continent truly is. In England, every stone, every clump of soil, has been touched by repeated human hands through endless ages. The land itself is inlaid with the human story and you can sense those histories as you pass through it, the scenery dense with echoes of past times. Successive generations have physically shaped the land; leveling hilltops, digging dykes, cutting pathways through mountains, so that the past of a region, as well as the life of those who live in its present, is recorded in its topography. When I first traveled to Canada, particularly the far northeast coast of Labrador, I felt unnerved by the wilderness there. It took me a while to realize that it was the absence of that dense human history soaked into the soil and rock that unsettled me. It felt as if humans were only lightly grafted onto the surface of those wild places and that we could be shrugged away at any time.

Antarctica takes this impression to its extreme. Humans have been crossing the Antarctica plateau intermittently for a century, but our tracks and footprints have been blown clean, silted over as soon as our backs are turned. Mankind, for the moment, has not managed to take root here and the only indelible mark is a diluted chemical signature in the ice -- the result of radiation and pollution carried south on the wind.

I think it is perhaps Antarctica's lack of human history that forms the essence of its magnetism, the reason why so many are irresistibly drawn to it. In the South, we are presented forcefully with the reality of our frailty and the certainty of our irrelevance to the natural forces working around us. Antarctica shrugs us off without effort. The continent makes me feel vulnerable, both as an individual and as a species. Like views of Earth from space, a view of the Antarctica plateau brings man dramatically into contact with his own limitations.

I remembered how I gazed down at them and had tried to imagine how I would feel when I saw those peaks again. Back then the expanse of Antarctica had been an unknown in my future. Now it was a memory in my past. In the time between I had gained exact knowledge of what crossing that expanse would entail. I now knew there would be endless days of whiteouts, skies that could absorb the mind for weeks and moments of utter isolation. More importantly, I knew now I would react to those challenges as a person. My ability to cope had perhaps been the biggest unknown of all and the greatest source of my pre-expedition nerves. I now knew that despite tears and madness and anxiety, I would -- and could -- endure. Looking back, I understood that fear is not a weakness. It is how we deal with that fear that determines our strength. The knowledge that I was capable of persevering brought with its gentle self-assurance.

I used to have a camera that was metallic, heavy and completely mechanical with two solid lenses that fastened onto its clunking body. These lenses shared a circular polarizing filter. The filter split the light so that it rotates the quality of the colors seen through the camera lens. When the filter was perfectly aligned the colors snapped into an intense brilliance that made what had been before seem dampened and clouded. Although the scene through the viewfinder hadn't changed, the filter made it appear clearer, richer and more tangible.

Returning from my journey across Antarctica, I felt that my experience had a similar effect, lending the simple details of life an extra bloom and defining understandings that had been hazy before. My perspective had shifted in barely perceptible but significant ways. It allowed me to recognize fundamental changes in myself.

I was filled with new certainty and detected a placid but resolute composure in myself that was unfamiliar. It was a confidence that came from having persevered, mixed with the relief of being released from a long-standing unknown - that of my own capability. I returned with better perception of what was important to me as a person.

I still feel the pull of adventure but I have a clearer idea of the challenges that will be meaningful to me in the future. None of this insight would have been possible had I not been on my own. I was glad for the experience of isolation and I know I will continue to benefit from the memories of the solitude in Antarctica.

By being truly alone I had seen how deeply reliant I am on human ties and in ways that were unexpected. It was not simply a matter of having company to pass the time, or backup in case of an emergency. During the expedition, I found that the absence of others had shaped my behavior, my thoughts, my actions, my reasoning. I had seen for myself that it is human relationships that bind us to place, time and purpose, human relationships that make us who we are as individuals and that our contentment, and our happiness, depend on those precious human connections.

It was clear to me that the success of my expedition had not depended on physical strength or dramatic acts of bravery, but on the fact that at least some progress -- however small -- had been made every single day. It had not been about glorious heroism, but the humblest of qualities, a quality that perhaps we all too often fail to appreciate -- that of perseverance.

My Journey

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

The Last Glow

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Alone in Antarctica

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Alone in Antarctica

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Antarctica

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