Ice and rock. Consciousness of white, capacity of black.
Perpetual winter. The planet Winter. One day, one night. The yin and yang of dark and light. Camera, please save these images and voice-over for later transmission.
A white ocean. In the far distance a dragon’s back, buried in ice. We walk in a straight line, yet it is a movement that simultaneously turns on itself and opens to the infinite. Spiral development. We have come into a strange situation, as you will learn when this transmission reaches you. In many ways it is a clarification of our purpose. We have to reach a refuge and food, or we will die. All other tasks are set aside, as this one of survival takes precedence.
It is a situation strangely like that reached by Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, begun in 1914 after Amundsen and Scott had finished their fateful race to the Pole. The Pole having been reached, subsequent expeditions had to find different rationales for going, and at that time this was not so easy. Shackleton called his voyage the British Imperial Transantarctic Expedition, but this grand title only partly concealed the fact that the trip had no real point. Crossing the continent was merely a goal invented to replace reaching the Pole; no one had thought of it before. It was the excuse of someone who wanted to be down there just for the sake of being there. Exploration, science, neither really mattered to Shackleton; what mattered was living in Antarctica. There he had first experienced that being-in-the-world which is our fundamental reality, our one true home; and rather than try to find that experience also in the wilderness that is England, he kept returning south.
So he and his men embarked on a new kind of enterprise, similar in many ways to the wilderness adventure trips we see today. Like the trip we are sharing at this, moment.
Each expedition has a different character, you see, fulfilling different karmic fates. In fact many expeditions encompass entire karmic lifetimes all in themselves. For karmic lives are shorter than human lives, and each of us passes through many different karmic existences during the course of a single biological span. This is a fact that is not well known in the West, I have found, even though the demonstration of it is there for all to see in the history of their own lives.
In any case, Shackleton and his men sailed the Endurance into the Weddell Sea, on the side of Antarctica opposite the Ross Sea. The Weddell Sea is covered with pack ice far more than the Ross Sea, and Shackleton’s ship was caught in this ice, and they were forced to live on the ship for ten months while the ship was carried in the ice’s slow dance around the great bay; and then the ice crushed their ship and sank it, and they lived in camps on the ice for five more months, still drifting north and west.
The trip Shackleton had planned to make was gone for good. They could only camp on the ice as it drifted out to sea, waiting for the ice to break up, when they could try to sail in three very small lifeboats to some solid land. At that point they would be cast into one of the greatest voyages in history. But the waiting, for month after month; this was a very difficult thing. Other expeditions were driven to madness by such enforced inactivity.
Yet all Shackleton’s men attest to the fact that he was calm in waiting, even jovial, and that his unfailing good spirits, and the close regard he had for his men, helped them to endure the wait. He created a community of trust. In spiritual terms it may be that these months of waiting were the greatest achievement of that group—an extraordinary experience of being-in-the-world, which changed them fundamentally and forever: living on ice, using the collective unconscious of their paleolithic minds. “We realized that our present existence was only a phase,” as Worsley put it. And as this is always true, everywhere, they had realized a very valuable thing. And it was Shackleton who made it possible. He never faltered.
But we need not wonder at Shackleton’s ability to keep his spirits high during this time. Marooned though they were, he was just where he wanted to be. He was living in Antarctica, having a difficult adventure—it was just what he wanted! So he was able to keep his men cheered up because the joy of life was in him. He was in his place. This is a big part of the greatness of Shackleton: he found his place, he went there, he enjoyed it. He shared that joy in a way others could feel.
This is particularly important for us to remember now. We started in the footsteps of Amundsen, but we must end in the mind of Shackleton. So far our leader Valerie has exhibited that Shackletonian optimism which will be so important to the success of our endeavor, and I trust completely that she will stay that way and see us through. How I admire her calm happy spirit, her strength in leading us. And we are lucky; walking across the ice is not as hard as living on it and waiting. We have a goal to travel toward, just beyond the horizon.
We live an hour and it is always the same. No distractions to the spirit. A white plain to infinity. Not sensory deprivation exactly, but rather a kind of sensory overload, within just a very few massive elements: sun, sky, ice, light, cold; all intense to the point of overwhelming the mind. But then time passes and here we are still. On we walk. The microforms of snow under my feet are a true infinity of worlds. The sky is several different tints of blue. The sun is a star.
Everything is so clear in this moment. No past, no future. Messner’s mantra: We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.
Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were in an exotic new place that is not my home. They will all be the same as this place. Here the experience of existing comes clear. This world is our body.
Now we must walk over it a certain distance. We, like Shackleton’s men, have had our supplies crushed in the ice. And though our hour’s wait was nothing like their fifteen months, in the long run we end up in the same boat. We have to cross this white immensity now. We have to make our way to food and refuge. We make our brush stroke on the empty paper. We are like they were once the ice under them broke up, and the truly dangerous part of their adventure began.
blue sky
white ice
At first they walked over firn, which took their weight like a sidewalk. There were sastrugi of course, but they could easily step over them, and the different angles of hardpack that their boots landed on actually gave their feet and ankles and legs some variety in their work, so that no one set of muscles and ligaments got tired, as when pounding the pavement in cities or in the endless corridors of a museum. So in these sections it was good walking.
They spread out in little clumps: Jack and Jim up with Val, Jack going very strong, even pushing the pace a bit; Jorge and Elspeth behind them; Ta Shu back farther still, rubbernecking just as he had before their accident. Val set the pace and did not allow Jack to rush them. “Save it,” she said to him once a little sharply, when she felt him right in her tracks. “Pace yourself for the long haul.”
“I am.”
But he dropped back a little, and on they walked. They were doing fine. As she always did on long hikes, Val stopped the group to rest for about fifteen minutes after every ninety of walking, in a system somewhat similar to Shackleton’s. In ninety minutes their arm flasks had melted the snow and ice chips stuffed into them, and so everybody had two big cups of water to drink. They could also eat a few inches of their belts, as Elspeth put it; their suits’ emergency food supplies were sewed into an inner pocket wrapped all the way around the waist. The food was something like a triathlete’s power bar, flattened and stretched into something very like a wide belt, in fact. It was good food for their situation. At some stops they chewed ravenously; during others their appetites seemed to Val suppressed, by altitude or exertion no doubt. She made sure they didn’t force it. In truth it was water that was crucial to this walk; they were breathing away gallons of it in the frigid hyperarid air, and they were sweating off a little bit as well. Two flasks every ninety minutes was by no means enough, but it certainly staved off the worst of the dehydration effects, which could devastate a person faster even than the cold, and made one more susceptible to the cold as well.