The Winter Journey

Outside the nylon walls a faint morning grey nibbles the edges of a sooty night sky. I'm tucked cozily into my sleeping bag, but I really have to pee.

Finally relenting, I click on the headlamp – my breath billows in the white beam. It's cold. Single-digit cold. I reluctantly unzip the bag, slip on frozen boots, hurry out of the tent to relieve the problem, then hustle back to the warmth of my downy bed with a shiver.

It's 5:37 AM, Sunday, January 26 and we are pitched along one of my favorite rivers in northern Michigan for our annual winter float-and-camp. I'm with my two boys and a couple buddies. Five guys, three tents, two drift boats, an abundance of snow and a scarcity of people.

Just how I like it.

During his research for the fantastic book The Comfort Crisis, author Micheal Easter found that, on average, Americans today spend 93% of our time indoors. It's a staggering sum.

He went on to say “We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, under-challenged, safety-netted lives.” And that "a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best – physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder – after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day."

Easter's words read a bit like the works of the Stoics. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Roman philosopher and author of Letters from a Stoic, said this: “We treat the body rigorously so that it will not be disobedient to the mind.” Seneca believed that doing difficult things made people stronger and gave them more control over their bodies. And that this control could be applied in the future when people are tempted to take the easier way out. 

This annual outing is our chance, at least for a couple days, to test ourselves against the elements – cut and split wood, build a fire, roast wild game over the flames, dig out snow to pitch our tents, and spend as much time as we can out of doors.

It's our opportunity to exit the daily spin cycle of monotonous routine and intentionally embrace a modicum of discomfort and rigorous activity. To get away and reconnect – with the ways of our early ancestors and the riparian rhythms that have slowly slumbered off into near hibernation for the season.

A brief interruption of easy and normal, however humble.

The sad truth is that we have collectively, as a species, gotten soft, and it's not good. Our 21st-Century version of weekend discomfort pales in comparison to the everyday life of people just a mere century ago. Not to mention the undertakings of true adventurers.

I recently finished the book The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott on the three-year Terra Nova Expedition (1910-1913) to Antarctica with the objective of reaching the geographical South Pole. As you can likely tell by the title, it was a lot more trying than our brief sojourn.

While the main objective of the outing was the pole, the itinerary also included the continuation of scientific work that Scott had pioneered on his Discovery Expedition (1901-1904), including research by the zoologist Edward Wilson.

Part of the research Wilson undertook in Antartica focused on emperor penguins, particularly their breeding cycle and biology, aiming to understand their embryonic development and potentially shed light on the evolution of birds from reptiles by studying their eggs. The only location to find these eggs was at the rookery at Cape Crozier, which lay about 60 miles from Hut Point, but the optimal time to acquire them at the desired embryonic stage coincided with the fearsome Antarctic Winter.

On June 27th 1911 Wilson, along with the expedition's assistant zoologist Cherry-Garrard and Royal Marine Lieutenant Henry “Birdie”Bowers, left their base and marched out into the winter darkness, hauling a sledge loaded with nearly 800 pounds of supplies, for Cape Crozier in search of the Emperor penguin eggs. This was known as The Winter Journey.

From the offset the men struggled in a constant battle with the elements. The fierce winds whipped unrelentingly at speeds that seldom dipped below 60 mph, and coupled with temperatures that ranged between -49º F and -78º F, it rendered conditions almost unbearable.

It took them 19 days to reach Cape Crozier, sometimes covering no more than a mile a day, in the tortuous conditions. The cold was so intense that Gerrard’s teeth shattered from the constant violent chattering. He would require extensive dental treatment for much of his life as a result.

Excerpts from the book tell the story:

"The temperature that night was -75.8 degrees and I will not pretend that it did not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire."

"...already we have been out twice as long in winter as the longest previous journeys in spring. The men who made those journeys had daylight while we had darkness, they had never had such low temperatures, generally nothing approaching them, and they had seldom worked in such difficult country. The nearest approach to healthy sleep we had had for nearly a month was when during blizzards the temperature allowed the warmth of our bodies to thaw some of the ice in our clothing and sleeping bags into water."

Photo from the Antarctic Heritage Trust

At one point after reaching Cape Crozier their tent was carried off in a blizzard. Again, the excerpts tell the story better than I ever could.:

"...it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of hysterics. The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar of it can not be imagined."

"'Bill, Bill, the tent has gone' was the next I remember from Bowers shouting at us again and again through the door."

"...our tent had either been sucked upwards...or had been blown away."

While at the cape they had also constructed an igloo from blocks of ice and rock and had used a piece of timber they had brought with them as a roof. This structure too was almost destroyed in another storm.

"There was more snow coming through the walls, though all our loose mitts, socks, and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst places: our pajama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks over the door."

The "canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments in fewer seconds than it takes to read this. The uproar of it all was indescribable. Even above the savage thunder of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips. The highest rocks which we had built into our walls fell upon us, and a sheet of drift came in."

The men eventually made it back to the hut at Cape Evans, after a 36-day ordeal, on August 1st 1911, with three eggs that had survived the return journey.

"...this journey had beggared our language, no words could express the horror."

I likely wouldn't have lasted a day.

Scott at the South Pole. He and four companions attained the pole on January 17, 1912, where they found that a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had preceded them by 34 days. Scott's party of five died on the return journey from the pole; some of their bodies, journals, and photographs were found by a search party eight months later - photo from The Worst Journey in the World.

The quote "comfort is the enemy of progress" is attributed to P.T. Barnum, meaning that staying too comfortable can hinder personal growth and advancement; to progress, one must sometimes step outside their comfort zone.

And while our weekend trip wasn't some bold push into the frozen unknown like Amundsen or Scott, a wild test of human endurance like Shackleton, a daring first ascent like Sir Edmund Hillary, or a brave expedition into unmapped territory like Lewis and Clark, It did allow us to briefly experience life outside of our temperature-controlled cocoons. To treat our bodies with a bit more rigor than watching football by the fireplace. To teach us a bit of perseverance – to keep pushing through things that make us uncomfortable. To take a few risks, and maybe come out a little more resilient on the other side.

As Apsley Cherry-Garrard so poignantly put it despite the trials of their outing: "Generally the risks were taken, for, on the whole, it is better to be a little over-bold than a little over-cautious. It is so easy to be afraid of being afraid."

I couldn't agree more.

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" - Tennyson "Ulysses"