Since getting seriously into polar history, I kept hearing the same two things from polar veterans. One was that I could not possibly understand the story properly, or be able to depict it truthfully, unless I visited Antarctica myself. The other was that Antarctica changes people. This was unanimous amongst scientists, historians, and even tourists: one cannot help but be profoundly affected by contact with Antarctica; that is just a fact of the place.
I have certainly been changed by Antarctica indirectly. The inner kernel of “me” is the same in my earliest memories as now, but the Terra Nova men and their experiences have fundamentally shifted how that kernel views and relates to the world and the people around me. I am a vastly better person for their influence, and that is a large part of why I have been so dogged in getting their story to a new audience: the hope that, through my work, even one other person might be changed in the same way.
When I finally got the chance to visit Antarctica in person, I had half an eye out for signs something had happened. Two weeks into my visit, I had learned a lot and had some meaningful experiences, but I couldn't say I had changed at all. Maybe that initial action-at-a-distance was the change I had been promised after all.
Then I went to Cape Crozier.
As we have spread around the planet, humans have noted certain places as being special in some way, places of some sort of power, or where the spirit world is a little more tangible. The Celts called these 'thin places', where the fabric of reality is threadbare, and Something Else comes a little closer. One can have a 'thin' experience anywhere, but certain places seem to encourage them. They may remain completely unmarked, or may become loci for centuries of pilgrimage, or anything in between, but they exist in some form in every culture except, perhaps, the post-Enlightenment intellectual West.
Antarctica, generally, feels like where the edge of a painting dissolves into brushstrokes. There is a certain unreality baked-in: the sun wheels around the sky without setting, one can count on one hand the species of life regularly seen, and everything – the landscape, the weather, the distances – is so vastly out of proportion to puny humanity. One could argue that this 'unfinished' feeling is because so much of it is white, but I have travelled through many snow-covered landscapes, and they feel like landscapes covered in snow, not fundamentally blank places with a few suggestive details dropped in by an artist whose main attention was elsewhere.
Cape Crozier was something else entirely, though. It is, of course, hanging off the edge of Ross Island, but it felt more like it was hanging off the edge of reality itself. It is a thin place par excellence. And I had an experience there which I have been trying to process since landing back at McMurdo. When I tried to discuss it with friends, my ability to speak quite simply stopped. Then the pandemic, and the new house, and pushing through Vol.1, all rose up and drove it to the back of my mind. In February I wasn't ready to talk about it; here in October, I worry it's too late. But I feel compelled to share what happened there, and if I don't do it now, I don't know if I ever will.
If this were a novel, at Cape Crozier I would have felt the thinness of time, and a closer connection to the dead men I had followed there – perhaps almost to believe they weren't dead at all! In such a place, that didn't seem impossible. But that is not what happened. Nor did I have some sort of enlightenment beamed into my head from the heavens. Even the word 'happened' is too suggestive of some sort of discrete external event. If you had asked me, there, at the time, I'd have said I was just sitting there thinking. But I sit thinking a lot in life, and this was not the sort of thinking I am used to. It was more like a revelation. Not in the trumpets and angels sense, but in a literal one: layers of clutter and gloss were pulled back to reveal a simple underlying truth. It was, in essence, a dose of perspective, a view from high and far enough away to see the big picture, and not the surface detail. As I sat at the base of a boulder, gazing at the stone igloo and gawking at how completely insane were the men who dragged their sledges to this desolate nowhere to build it, I suddenly saw my life as it appeared in the Author's notes.
Ever since first getting the inkling that this story would make a good graphic novel, it has felt like a calling. I said 'no' to the calling for years – some sort of cosmic wrong number – but when I finally said 'yes' everything started falling into place. That is supposed to be a good sign, for a calling. And I was happy following it, though it wasn't easy or comfortable. As far as I could deduce, under my own power, it seemed like what I ought to be doing. That is not to say there weren't doubts, especially in the grey light of a winter morning when I would lie in my rented bed, looking at my desk and wondering what on earth I was doing with my life. And I was not untroubled by other concerns: Shouldn't I be more helpful to my family? Why have I been persistently unable to find a tribe, or a relationship? Will I be allowed to stay in the UK? Can I do this work and keep myself fed and housed?
Here, on a wind-scoured ridge on the edge of nowhere, reflecting on its history of unbelievable and, it could be argued, pointless hardship, one might expect to realise the folly of one's ways, and to swear off quixotic enterprises in favour of the hitherto unappreciated quotidian stuff that really matters. But that is not what happened. Instead, I got this dose of clarity:
I am here to tell this story. Not here, at Cape Crozier, in this instant (although that too), but here, on this planet, as a human being. This is what I am for.
Whatever I need to make it happen will be provided. No less, and no more.
Everything else? Tangential. Not worth worrying about. What needs to happen, will happen, and if it doesn't happen, it didn't need to. And that's OK.
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
When I was young, we had a puzzle of the United States of America. It was made of Masonite, and the pieces were cut out in the shapes of the states, which would be assembled to fill the recessed outline of the country. Because they were geographical shapes and not interlocking jigsaw pieces, they would slide and rattle around until the last one got wedged in and locked everything else in place.
Most of my life, I have felt like that rattly puzzle. I didn't realise it because I had never known there was another way to be. But there under the boulder it felt like that last piece had been dropped in, that secured all the loose ones. It was not that Cape Crozier was my missing piece and now that I had it I was complete – that is far too literal. The missing piece was a something that wasn't even a thing; rather, in that moment of clarity, I felt all the jangling bits come to rest, and a wholly unfamiliar solidity. At last the clay wobbling around the potter's wheel had been centred, and I felt a metaphysical ground beneath my metaphysical feet that I had not known it was possible to feel.
Ironically, the rest of the day I felt like I wasn't touching the actual ground at all, perhaps because what I was anchored to was on another plane entirely. The stumbling shamble through the wind back to the helicopter might as well have been happening to someone else. We took off into the gale, and though the pilot acted as though it was perfectly ordinary, when we were rounding the ridge he said 'wow, that's the rotor all the way to the left' which I didn't understand but didn't sound great. Nevertheless the sense of peace persisted, and I understood how, in his last letter to his wife, which he knew would be his last, Wilson could have kept insisting 'all is well.' (I knew why he wrote that: he had read Julian of Norwich. But now I understood why.)
The journey back was a transcendence all of its own, the beauty of which seemed to be a perfectly natural outward manifestation of that altered state. We touched down in time for me to make it to the Galley just as it opened for dinner, so we couldn't have been gone two whole hours, and that seemed absurd to me – surely I had sat under that boulder for two hours at least? Or had we only been at the igloo ten minutes? It was impossible to tell.
What I wanted more than anything was to go up a mountain and ponder the whole thing, alone, until it sorted itself out and I was ready to come back down again. I could have gone up Observation Hill, but the weather looked liable to turn into a proper blizzard at any moment. So, lacking a better option, I went to go eat, and, after having a chuckle at the Cherry Turnovers, slunk to the back where I could usually count on having a small wallflower table to myself, especially this early. But one of the larger tables was full of young dudes talking about bar fights they'd been involved in, and I just … couldn't. So I wandered into the main area and discovered the One Strange Rock crew having an early dinner as well, begged a spot at their table, and ate swaddled in friendly natter instead of at one with the universe in a blizzard. It amounted to much the same thing.
Eventually one of them said, 'You went to Cape Crozier today, didn't you? How was that?'
I made an exploding gesture around my head and said 'Pkhhhh.'
Cherry wrote that the Winter Journey 'had beggared our language'. I am sure that my inarticulate gesture is not what he meant. But at the same time, in fact at that very dinner, I realised something about his writing. The Winter Journey chapter is unanimously regarded as the finest part of The Worst Journey in the World. Some people question that this otherwise unremarkable country gent, who never produced another book, could have written with such profound and expressive talent, and they posit that his friend and neighbour George Bernard Shaw, who definitely did consult on the book, must have ghostwritten it. I have read enough of Cherry's writing – in his own hand – to know this is bosh; the voice and the style are distinctly his. What's more, I was surprised to discover, when going through his journals, that a large portion of the Winter Journey chapter was not written last, despite it being the last to join the manuscript of Worst Journey, but was in fact written in his bunk at Cape Evans while he was recuperating from the experience. In the published book, he singles out some passages as being from 'my own diary' but great tracts of unattributed narration are more or less verbatim quotations as well. The experience related therein feels so immediate because it was.
Underlined sections outside the quote-text are also pulled from Cherry's diary.
The rest of Worst Journey, while perfectly readable, is largely a narrative rewrite of Cherry's and others' diaries. Sometimes he lets others carry the story for pages at a time. His writing is undeniably good, but is often simply mortar, filling gaps and binding sources together to tell a history that no human invention could better. The Winter Journey chapter, on the other hand, reads like a torrent of pure inspiration pouring through him onto the page. That such vivid, timeless prose should have come from an exhausted 25-year-old in his bunk in a wooden hut is no less remarkable than from a jaded 35-year-old in the library of his country house.
Artists of all stripes will often say that their best work is not their own creation, but feels like it already existed and came through them from somewhere else. It's as if there's a great Beyond where things that need to come into the world – stories, images, performances – queue up for passage through artists' minds and bodies. Sometimes one taps into it by luck; usually it's a combination of training and discipline that makes the link traversable, from time to time. Perhaps artists' minds are their own thin places, in a way. Sitting there at dinner with my friends, I felt as though I'd brushed against the fabric between this reality and that Beyond, and, like touching the wall of a tent in a rainstorm, broken the surface tension and allowed something through. I felt like, if I just put pencil to paper, something could flow through me, if only I could narrow down a subject. With the intensity of his experience, Cherry did not so much brush against the wet tent fabric as punch a hole through it; feeling just a small inkling of that myself, it was no wonder that the creative energy poured into his diary with such intuitive eloquence.
Had I sat down to write this that night, perhaps I could have tapped into that flow, but I didn't feel I was ready. I can guarantee you that right now I am not tapped into anything but a vague and dwindling recollection. As vast as the experience was, by putting a box of words around it, I cannot help but reduce it to the confines of the box. But that is the best I can do under my own power.
Compared to the seismic transformation of character brought about by my first vicarious encounter with Antarctica, the insight at Cape Crozier was very small and personal, but once in place, the ramifications have been substantial. When I arrived back home, just before Christmas, the world was still as it ever was, but I was different, and I noticed how differently I related to everything. Things I loved about Cambridge, which previously made me desperate to stay, I appreciated no less, but valued instead as something I had the honour to enjoy for a while, and didn't need to hold on to. A young-adults group which I'd hung around, formerly a precious simulacrum of a social life, now felt hollow, and I abandoned it in favour of time spent one-on-one with the handful of people who I really appreciated. They all said I seemed different; one person said I seemed 'sad', but I think I had just taken the mask off the seriousness which tends to frighten people. I have never been afraid to be myself, but in recent years have tried to mitigate that self in relation to others; there seemed no point to that, now. It was as if my inner gyroscope had finally started spinning, and I had a sense of balance and orientation that I hadn't before.
Holding on to the clarity of that moment, and the centredness it brought me, has not been easy. It didn't keep me from panicking when my housemate excoriated me back in March. It didn't focus my mind on my work as soon as I'd moved into the new place, or save me from getting angry and frustrated when battling my tax returns. Sometimes it's very hard to remember at all. But I know what happened, and I can remember remembering, even if I can't recapture the feeling itself. Sometimes, when it's very windy, I seek out a high open place in the hope of feeling it again, but it hasn't worked. Maybe it doesn't need to. Having it once was all I really needed, and even if I succeeded in flicking those switches again, what good would it do that hasn't already been done?
I could not foresee, on that windswept ridge on the edge of reality, where the world would be in 2020. In wry moments I think I was only a few months ahead of a large portion of humanity, who have been forced to sort things out when the pandemic stripped away their preoccupations and illusions. Maybe you are one of them, and you recognise some of what I've described. Maybe you feel like you've been running away from it. Maybe you have been running towards it but have been unable to find it. All I can tell you is: it's worth the seeking.
I wish everyone in the world could visit Antarctica, even just once, and see how it changes them. The world would be such a better place. I am so profoundly grateful that I had the chance, and am determined to pay it forward by bringing some shred of that experience to as many people as possible. If my communication fails to bridge that gap for you, then take it upon yourself to find your own thin place. They are all around. It only requires that you be receptive, and undertake to look.