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| Felicity Aston, Arcticnaut |
I am in fact horribly sensitive to the cold and don’t think
I’d last five minutes on the planet’s bleakest and most inhospitable continent.
Oh, they reply, clearly disappointed
and puzzled. Perhaps they wanted someone more willing to risk life and limb in pursuit
of their topic, because we like to live vicariously through the gung-ho type.
That way, we can ponder how an ordinary human being could possibly survive
conditions, journeys and self-imposed hardships that beggar the imagination.
They would have a completely different and far more fulfilling
conversation with Felicity Aston, an English lass who pluckily decided to become
the first woman in the world to ski, by herself, across Antarctica — and lived to tell the tale.
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| Epic selfie |
That tale is told with compelling aplomb in her memoir Alone in Antarctica — a to-the-point
title if ever there was one. Not more than a few pages in you realize that she
not only accomplished a feat of astounding stoicism and endurance, but that
she’s a darned good writer too. As she takes us along on her perilous
expedition, she shares details about the unique geographies and weather
conditions she encounters along the way with fluid, sensory language. Of the
mountains, for example, she says “Those at the back were chiseled into spires that stretched
for the sky while at their feet smaller hills and nunatuks crowded together
creating an overlapping pastiche of rock and ice. The rise and fall of the
saddled ridges and lower summits resembled the regular ridge and scoop of a
scalloped shell.”
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| All frozen up |
This memoir is also noteworthy for the intimacy with which
the author invites us into her head, which we soon discover is the really
dangerous terrain. It was the “isolation,” she says, she found “far more
terrifying than the temperature.” The mental landscape and the hazards it poses
when one undergoes such a journey alone is a remarkable account of
self-examination and discovery. The end of the earth is a long way to go to
find the end of your rope, but hanging at the end of it is wisdom that cannot
be gained otherwise.
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| Get it here: Amazon |
It was possible to follow Aston’s journey in real time with the internet, as she updated her progress via satellite phone to Twitter. I
kept up-to-date through Facebook, and distinctly remember the frustration she
expressed as she waited out bad weather before she could begin, and again at
the end, when a remarkably moving bit of video footage was posted to let us all
know she’d made it to her destination, Hercules Inlet on the Ronne Ice Shelf.
With the camera up close so all we can see is a tight shot of her face, Aston
struggles to come to terms with her historic achievement, shedding tears of
what feels like sheer relief while she waits for the plane to come and pick her up
from the ice.
Aston’s obsession with Antarctica, a place whose allure has
drawn her to dwell in its remoteness many times over the years, is one in which
her interaction with the land is repeatedly erased. The blank canvas upon which
she treads retains no footprint, no physical memory of her passing. This has
always been the case. Those explorers who fought to imprint themselves upon the
land — Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, Mawson, Fiennes et al. — also had to do so
from a distance, in ink on paper. Their accounts have inspired me as a thinker
and writer, and this book does too.
I will always be grateful that someone else has braved the cold to report back on what it’s like to be truly alone, so I don’t have to be. Aston has taken a page from the old boy’s books and made Antarctica her own.
Felicity Aston's WEBSITE.
I will always be grateful that someone else has braved the cold to report back on what it’s like to be truly alone, so I don’t have to be. Aston has taken a page from the old boy’s books and made Antarctica her own.
Felicity Aston's WEBSITE.
Some of my other writing on Antarctica from The Paris Review.
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