An Unreasonable Coldness

“Out in the void and staring hard At the dim stone where we were reared, Great mother, now the gods have gone We place our faith in you alone, Inverting the procedures which Knelt us to things beyond our reach.” ― Derek Mahon, from “The Globe in Carolina”

I am certainly lessened at this altitude and latitude. It seams unreasonable to me that my humanity would betray me in the face of this coldness, at these heights. My head has felt nothing but hurt over the past few days. There is no air. Or little air. Or less air. I sleep four to six hours per night in one hour increments. Asleep an hour, awake for thirty minutes, then one hour of half-sleep, awake for thirty more, and then one or two final and futile attempts at sleep before the morning. This has been the passage of my first week atop Sermersuaq (the Kalaallisut word), this flat sheet of ice we disfigure with our machine and pedestrian tracks.

I've been moved from bunking in a converted milvan to one of the tents, only steps away from board and safety. The tents are actually quite warm after a few minutes. Tonight will be my first night outside and it will be twelve weeks in that tent. While I've been to the Antarctic and this climate is not dissimilar, I've never slept in a tent in such conditions. I was a townie at McMurdo, I noted already, having never gotten much farther than Erebus or a fuel cache some miles into the continent. It is actually something I regret with regard to my experience on the Ice. Yeah, I wish I'd got out of town just a little bit more.

A colleague here asked me what would convince me to deploy again to the southern continent. We met years ago in Antarctica and he was curious the other day. I admitted that the idea is appealing. Remote site logistics and its challenges are always attractive. My answer was perhaps not as genuine as it should have been. I told him I'd only go if it included the possibility of a traverse to the Pole. As I stated, I've only ever traversed as far as the foot of Erebus, and then only on a snow machine. But I was less than truthful. There is a creeping desire always. An itch. It's a strange inkling that occurs every few years for me.

I'm not alone in this ebbing desire to depart the greater chaos of life back in the world, as they say. My little brother, a captain in the Marine Corps, has admitted all but the same to me. This weakness is merely a very urgent desire to deploy.

What is it and where does it come from? For me, it seems to be something of a desire to have my actions and contributions matter. Not that they don't matter back in the word. It's just harder to see. We are inundated with noise, light, ads, casual corruption, mindlessness, ones and zeroes, even this digital glue that now holds all our systems in place. I feel overwhelmed and I am afraid. Here, the results of a person's actions feel more immediate. Action–Result. Purposeful. Meaningful. Simple. And a person's behavior is more critically defining when she struggles against nature, and more urgent still when that struggle roams along some remote thoroughfare.

I keep thinking about that young documentarian on the flight from Copenhagen. He was interested in the reasons these strange folks choose to work these strange jobs. There are so many sturdy people here, entirely suited to this life. For as much as I pretend I am, I suspect that I am not. Some split their time between the Arctic and the Antarctic, ostensibly homeless in the interim. Their belongings are stowed for years inside storage units dotting the landscape like colored pins from Atlantic to Pacific. It is as if personal belongings might matter less to them than the experience itself. Which is something a few might boast about. They streamline their gear, pack just the right amount to travel light, fast and free, before, during, and after. They are anchorless. Untethered. Free, in a sense. And that willingness to lead a life adrift is something I admire in them.

As much as it might appear I am giving us all the benefit of the doubt, here there is most certainly mania. It is abnormal to do these things. Here is dysfunction. I've written it before: appropriate means the same as mediocre, and mediocre means average. These maniacs are not average in the slightest. Yet, I can't help but suspect a modicum of selfishness involved in our reasons to live and work under such austere conditions. For my part, I must admit a bit of ego in my mania. Like the youthful indiscretion of enlisting in the Marine Corps or my daily self-destruction in the punk scene, these struggles seem merely childish drives to endure something, to endure anything, to hurt so as to feel. Regardless of whether these obstacles are imposed (so often) by the self or by some external force, frequently it come down to this fairly unsophisticated need to prove to oneself or others one's capacity to endure. We put these liquids in our bodies, or drugs up our noses, cause our lungs to suffer with this smoke, we hump these 20 miles, or climb that mountain, swim a strait, bike a coastline, tramp that trail from arbitrary geographical locale to its longitudinal end, all for nothing. Because that is, of course, where this or any trajectory will take us all: to nothingness.

It's like searching for the path of most resistance on our way to nihility. When we come out at the other end of each toil, I guess we know something more about ourselves. Unfortunately, that which we learn is often not quite that which we expected. Sometimes we don't like the definition or the identity forged. If there is time before our inevitable oblivion, we can perhaps move on. We can always find a new identity before the end, a new bin to store our gear, or our selves. I don't know if any of that is true. Or maybe I don't know if that is true for anyone else but me.

I do it to satisfy that itch, to investigate the persistent suspicion that my life has no purpose. Again, my simplicity. And for that, my apologies.

The Polak is supportive and I suppose my current and any future endeavors would be dictated by the nature of that support. If she asked me to stop, I would. But I think she understands that I need these things. That maybe I need these hardships. That I am strangely never satisfied with myself.

Yet, I do miss her. My love. Every hour. Every time I look out at the emptiness. I miss her smell. Her touch. And all those things that are just things but that we collect and protect until they or we are gone. Our home. We've always nested well, wherever we are together in the world. We are a good partnership. I know this now. I didn't for a long time. Only hoped. She suffers my little annoying habits and I suffer hers. I love them, require them even. It's also not too sophisticated to note that these things that I value, these moments of comfort far away, this home of ours seems more valuable right now because of the distance. This cold all around, these barren latitudes throw my memories of home and of her in a starkness that reveals the honest essence of each, unvarnished by all that chaos of ones and zeroes, those fucking systems kluged to systems, all the tomfoolery of modern life, the hubbub of society, and the needless complexity of all this digital muck.

Shit, I miss my wife. “There are no religions, no revelations; there are women.”

― Andrei Voznesensky, from Antiworlds