From Vancouver, I flew down to LA, where I was to spend a week before catching the USAP flight to Christchurch. That flight had been the source of some anxiety. I couldn’t be issued a ticket until I medically qualified, which I did in September; the ticket was not forthcoming, however, and as the clock ticked down to my departure from the UK I was assured that it was in process and that I should expect it three weeks before the planned flight date. When this didn’t happen I inquired, and my coordinator said it was running at 10-14 days prior now. Now in Vancouver. those dates passed still with no ticket, but I was contacted to re-confirm my travel details, so at least I knew I hadn’t been forgotten. At last, the morning of my afternoon flight to LA, it arrived. I was booked a day earlier than planned, due to a shortage of tickets on the original date, but an extra day in Christchurch would be to my advantage so that was all right.
I lived in Los Angeles for 5½ years, working at Disney Animation. It was a very educational time if not a terribly happy one; by the time I left I needed a good deal of healing, which thankfully my next job, and then my first year in the UK, provided. It’s strange coming back, because the sights and smells ought to be so familiar, but my time here has been tidily packed away in its own little box, and I’ve become so happily bedded in my new home that I feel detached from that whole period, as though it happened farther away and longer ago than the second-hand Antarctic history that’s so fresh in my head.
This visit was particularly interesting in that I jumped back into the animation world with both feet. My sister threw a going-away party and invited a load of friends from Disney days, most of whom I hadn’t seen in six years, some of them not for ten. It was really good to reconnect and catch up on what we’d all been up to in the meantime – many of them had been to the Frozen II wrap party the night before – and was the cause for much reflection on ‘what if’s. My sister has stuck with the animation industry and made a successful career of it, and all these friends were doing well on their respective tracks. I had never thought I would be tempted away from animation: I wasn’t happy in LA, but I am happy at a desk drawing other people’s ideas, which is generally a recipe for contentment in the industry, wherever I fetched up. And yet there I was, on my way to Antarctica, and they on their way to an early night before their regular salaried jobs the next day. My next day, I accompanied my sister to her high-level job at a prestigious studio, and had a fine free lunch with yet more old friends living their successes, before she drove me to buy stamps to reward my precious crowdfunders who keep me in my rented room and fill my cupboard with potatoes.
When you work someplace like this, you’ve probably Made It.
I often say my twenty-five dead guys ‘rescued’ me. Certainly my pursuit of this story gave focus and direction to my exit from LA, but I was on my way out anyway. One could make a convincing case that I was ‘rescued’ from professional advancement and financial security, which hardly seems like a rescue at all. And yet, if the tables were turned, and I, a content and well-respected animator in 2019, were attending the going-away party of a friend on a mad adventure to the ends of the earth, I know I would be questioning my life choices. To paraphrase Mary Oliver: what would I be doing with my one wild and precious life?
Everyone has to answer this question for themselves. For some, undeniably, achievement and comfort are the paramount goals, and there is nothing wrong with that. I, however, seem to have inherited the restless gene that sprayed one side of my family across North America and the Pacific Rim. The small taste of accomplishment and comfort I did have worked for some time to anaesthetise me to the need for something else, but not for long. In a way that must be hard for many to understand, I knew I couldn’t rest happy until I’d at least tried to bring this project into the world, whatever sacrifices it entailed. Though it may not look like an improved condition from the outside, I was rescued inasmuch as I was removed to a path to my own eccentric brand of happiness, for which I am ever grateful.
My time in LA happened to coincide with Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican festival of the dead, in which departed loved ones are commemorated and one is confronted with the inevitable finitude of life. Buddhists believe that one must acknowledge and accept death in order to live more fully in the present. My time in the company of people who are all dead, now, but especially those who didn’t expect to die when they did, has been an invaluable education in the importance of doing the most with the time that is given you. These ideas are present in historical Christianity, but modern Western culture has made death such a taboo that the urgency of living while you can is more or less lost: if you don’t think about death, it won’t ever happen, right? Perhaps we would do better to remember that all of us will exit this life, perhaps much sooner than we think. Whether you acknowledge death or refuse to think about it, it will, inevitably, find you. What will you regret not having done with your wild and precious life?
In a subtle and slow-motion way, the two weeks leading up to my departure for the South have been my life flashing before my eyes. I have been lucky enough to have lived several lives in my thirty-some-odd years, and I’ve revisited a few of them on this trip so far. Where it takes me from here is anyone’s guess, but I find myself in the highly unusual position of not regretting anything important in what’s come before. If my plane goes down in the South Pacific, I will be very annoyed that I didn’t get to finish drawing Vol.1, nevermind the rest of the story, and would wonder what the point of it was, but I had fun doing those first 81 pages and there isn’t anything I would rather have done with that time. It’s taken a lot of hard internal work to get to that point, but it’s a good place to be.
Time and substance are irrelevant here. It will drive you mad or liberate you, or perhaps both.
By the time you read this, I will, most likely, have been in Antarctica, and am probably on my way back. People say Antarctica changes you; how will it have changed me? Will I be looking at my familiar places in new ways? Will it have changed my perspective on the people in my life? I am writing this in LA on the brink of departure and am very aware of standing on the cusp of something. The trip hitherto has afforded me the opportunity to reflect on what got me here. It has been a long and strange road but a good one, and from this perspective at least, I feel it has prepared me well. We shall see.
And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, "What is the use?" For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
