Man Against Nature & Man
Man Against Nature–How to Make it Work
No One Has Ever Crossed Antarctica Unsupported. Two Men Are Trying Right Now.Analysis | This man just crossed Antarctica alone - and in record time
The week between Christmas and New Year's Day is what one writer has called the " Sunday afternoon of the year," a time for lazy reading and ambitious cooking projects - or, in Colin O'Brady's case, the final, sleepless 80-mile leg of a two-month race across Antarctica.
In recent years I’ve found myself interested in one story to the exclusion of all others: the grand story of a universe, and a small blue planet, and her transient fabric of life.
My high school literature teacher said that any plot can be reduced to one of three basic conflicts: Man against nature, man against man, or man against self. I liked the idea of searching for the bare skeleton of a story, but noticed pretty quickly that many plots seemed to be some combination of the three. Her trichotomy fell short of reality. All the same, I think that simplification is a great tool for understanding complexity. A skeleton gives form to the soft tissue around it, which is often harder to describe and define. When we can see the sinews and bones laid bare, we can see the rest in a different way, the flesh and fat that magically bring to life a plot or person. That is why Leonardo da Vinci took the risk of excavating cadavers.
I am a compulsive reader, and in the long interlude since high school, my teacher’s three conflicts have jumped to mind as I consumed stories ranging from The Brothers Karamazov to Peter Rabbit. But in recent years I’ve found myself interested in one story to the exclusion of all others: the grand story that we all are living. It is the story of a universe, and a small blue planet, and her transient fabric of life, and a fascinating self-conscious species of primates who love and kill and create — of which I am one. Through the biggest or smallest lens this story is beautiful and terrifying and intricate. At no distance does it become vanishingly irrelevant. At no proximity does it break down into two dimensional pixels. There are subplots that take place in the course of seconds and subplots that emerge over millions of years.
I read this story partly in books — glimpsed and analyzed by other human minds. I absorb it with my eyes and ears when I wake up to the sounds of birds and traffic. I feel it in my dusty sandals. I breathe it in. And beside it all stories by human authors pale. ( Despite claims to the contrary, to a devoted reader it becomes laughably improbable that this great story was authored by a psychic primate, like ourselves only bigger and endowed with superpowers, who cares about whether small primates cover their heads or bow in obsequious praise. )
In our boundless capacity for arrogance, most humans think the great story is about us, though of course it is not. The only subplot of the great story that we humans can influence is the one playing out in the thin mesh of life on the crust of the blue planet, the story of our own destiny and the other species whose destinies are bound to ours. What we seek, according to mythos, history, and sociology, is life and happiness: healthy humans flourishing endlessly in a Garden of Eden. The surface of this planet records the chronicle of our quest.
For millennia we have lived as if we will attain this paradise through competition and conflict: beating nature and beating each other with spear and hoe and axe and gunship. The stories we tell and write reveal our identities — who we are and what matters to us. And like my teacher said, the three conflicts are the stuff that most storytelling is made of. Conflict is the raw material of Barnes & Noble the way that corn syrup is the raw material of Coca Cola. It is also the raw material of Hollywood and new media and even the little narratives we create to explain our day over the dinner table. We love conflict. It grabs our attention. It pumps us full of adrenaline and resolve and a sense of the heroic. And since in our own minds we are, each of us, the protagonist of every story, the heroes are us.
But it struck me recently that when it comes to the story we are actually living, our subplot on the blue planet, my teacher’s analysis may be not merely overly simple; it may be wrong. Sometimes in our attempts to make sense of complexities we reduce them to the wrong skeleton. In conflict stories — man against man, or against nature, or against self — the satisfaction comes when man, our protagonist, wins regardless of what happens to other species or even other humans. Our hero can emerge from the ashes of civilization on a post apocalyptic planet and we go home satisfied.
But what if reality is fundamentally different than our preferred fiction plotlines? What if the conflicts that are so satisfying in books and movies actually leave us less satisfied in real life? What if, in our perennial quest for Eden, beating nature and beating each other somehow means we lose? Or what if the fabric of health and bounty is made instead of something more mundane than winning and losing: Collaboration, for example. Mutuality. Interdependence. Unity. Balance. What if, as a species, we have come this far in spite of (rather than because of) our competition and conflict?
I’m sitting at an outdoor café in Toliara on the southern coast of Madagascar. It is a stark, dry town — French Africa meets Old West — surrounded by badlands and spiny scrub and a mud flat that serves as a tidal outhouse. In the streets, plastic bags swirl in dust devils like eddies of dry leaves, and a fine reddish brown powder covers everything from my computer screen to my eyelashes by the end of day. Cafes serve pain au chocolat for breakfast and foie gras for dinner. But after dark the police, who have been extorting money from passing drivers all day, go home and lock their doors. Armed bandits stake out the highway, using cell phones to coordinate up the road with compadres who roll stone blockades across canyon passes. Valuables like sapphires from a regional mine travel to the port by convoy — by day — accompanied by paid gunmen.
Scattered across the arid plain, poor villagers escape the banditry and extortion only because they own nothing of interest. Carts pulled by tough lean zebu (the local cattle) or by equally tough and lean humans haul their most precious commodity, water, which is in such short supply that people bathe and wash clothes on the roads whenever it rains. In pockets along the shore, where fresh water emerges into the sea, more prosperous villagers live on fish and shellfish, casting their nets from outriggers carved from baobab trees. The peculiar baobabs, which sport crowns of scrawny branches and sparse leaves, store water in vast soft trunks each of which can be carved into a single buoyant dugout.
On the face of it, this is the stuff of Hollywood or Barnes & Noble: Men triumph over the harsh environment, feeding on turtles, chameleons and grasshoppers when necessary to survive; resourcefully planting prickly pear cactus from afar to feed their cattle. Men battle the seas in small spry outriggers, competing with commercial fishing fleets offshore to feed their families and the occasional traveler. Cattlemen with spears fend off rustlers, tribes assert their identity in a post-colonial era, townsfolk defy bandits ( and bandits in uniform ) to keep their town running.
But in reality, the conflicts which necessitate these small acts of heroism may be largely a product of our self-fulfilling tendency to see the world as a set of conflict dynamics. In other words, they may be consequences of our failure to notice a larger narrative, which is that in the broadest sense, man against nature is man against man, and man against man is man against self. We exist only in community with each other and with other species. By triumphing too well too often, we destroy ourselves.
This desert in which I sit wasn’t always a desert; living village elders can recall when things were different. It was a fragile “spiny forest” that survived in delicate balance for hundreds of thousands of years, has been in decline since humans arrived here and began winning battles against nature, and, according to World Wildlife Fund calculations, could be gone completely in just five years. There are no mature baobabs within walking distance of the fishing villages. The baobab takes up to 1000 years to grow and the last remaining giants stand on the far side of the desert plane. Mangrove swamps that served as nurseries for the migratory fish are largely gone. (Recently the media proudly featured a grove of newly planted mangrove seedlings and interviewed the lead volunteer. A week later, the seedlings had been eaten by goats.) The reef that nurtures the local varieties is a crumbling ruin, having fallen prey to rising temperatures. With crops this season threatened by drought, villagers along the shore are digging roots they call wild potatoes in the last fragments of the spiny forest. They don’t replant.
In the pared down simplicity of this herding culture on the edge, I am struck by how much human energy goes into simply protecting possessions from other people. In any village family that can afford a cow or goat, one member spends all day every day playing the role of herdsman. The cattle — the goatherd doesn’t care for the animals in any way — just guards them from other young men who, in turn, win status by stealing cattle. In town, night watchmen sleep in the entries of hotels. Market stalls sell deadbolts. Someone somehow gets taxed enough to support a military. Parasitic police officers maintain a veneer of legitimacy as guardians of the public against the bad guys. Van Damme plays in a back room video parlor that functions as a movie theater.
This dance of man against man in a self-created desert is different only in scale and naked exposure from how we live in the U.S. with our armies and watchmen and willingness to desiccate the lands that feed us. The dust swirls in the streets and sweeps across the plains and through the croplands and still, the stories that compel us are the ones about our win-lose games with each other. As much as Toliara’s desert dwellers, we are like twenty people crowded into a Malagasi taxi brousse, a mini van serving as public transport, holding onto our stuff and vying for space while the bus goes off a cliff.
For millennia we humans could indulge the naïve assumption that we would win paradise by beating out nature and each other. (Our appeals to magical super-humans often were pleas for help in one of these contests. “Dear God, please make my feet swift, my arm strong, my spear sharp, my aim true.”) In the childhood and adolescence of our species, we had no way of grasping the greater story except in small fragments. Nor could we comprehend our own power to destroy the very fabric of life. We were weaker then, and fewer, and nature more forgiving. Destruction happened more slowly, beyond the scope of a human lifetime; beyond the scope of collective memory.
The world-altering capacity of our ancestors is visible only in retrospect. Even in small numbers with primitive technologies, earlier humans eliminated other species — the mammoths of the New World, the Stellar Sea Cow, Mauritius’ dodo, Madagascar’s elephant bird. They converted the cedar forests and farmlands of the Fertile Crescent into the deserts of Iraq, Lebanon, and the Sahara. By altering the balance of nature, they eliminated themselves in small pockets like the early settlements on Greenland and Easter Island. But only a few eccentrics noticed. For most people, slow change is no change.
It took the atomic bomb for large numbers of humans to recognize the magnitude of our destructive power. Big explosions vaporized whole islands — and then whole cities — in seconds, and people took notice. We are only just beginning to grasp the slow cumulative frog-in-a-pot destructive potential of our man-against-nature and man-against-man daily lives.
And yet consciousness is rising. Despite our history and our storytelling, there is a growing sense among people old and young that we cannot exist in conflict with the rest of humanity and other species. Some scientists have been clamoring desperately for generations. But now, finally, our mythologies are changing. In the West, pagan earth religions, though small, are on the rise. New Age woo has mass appeal even among intellectuals ( e.g. The Secret; What the Bleep Do We Know? ). Best-selling authors like Eckhart Tolle ( A New Earth ) promote inclusive, karmic, quasi-Buddhist spirituality and gain devoted followings. And conversations about the sacred feminine are penetrating the Christian patriarchy. ( Conflict is a male-centric plot line; it is no accident of linguistics that the literary conflicts are called man against man and nature and self. )
This spring the most expensive movie of all time, Avatar, captivated tens of millions of viewers with images of a fertile planet where the interweaving of life forms was more tangible and cherished than on our own. Leaders of conflict-centered, human-centric ideologies, railed against the film. In Seattle, megachurch minister Mark Driscoll, who leads one of the most aggressive and patriarchal institutions in the city, spent a Sunday morning expounding about the evils of excessive reverence for nature. The Vatican, which brutally crushed the earth religions of the Americas, had similar complaints. Heaven forbid that their god-in-the-image-of-man, should have to compete ( that’s how they think of it ) with something as primal and fecund and wet as the planet that gave us birth.
My point is not that all of these exploratory perspectives are reasonable ways of understanding our world, but that they all are more centered in unity and interconnectedness than the ideologies that have been dominant in the last two thousand years (and are dominant still). At the leading edge of consciousness, we are reaching for something beyond the three conflicts. We no longer claim a divine right to dominion over nature and “lesser” humans. We seek instead a way of thinking that allows humankind to live in community with each other and with the broader web of life — a way of thinking that allows the generations of the future simply to live.
The undercurrent of collaboration and cooperation, of give and take, has been there all along. Here in Madagascar, apple sellers waiting patiently to sell their pile of ten to twenty apples each, help a “competitor” communicate her prices in French. Five rural villages team together to reserve their last patch of native forest, just twenty acres. They stop shooting the lemurs, instead guiding tourists to see them, and use the entry fees to buy fruit trees, a school, and clothes for the elderly. Cross country drivers who could put each other out of business, instead put heads together about the best lodging, warn each other about hazards, and tow each other’s cars when needed. Many, many people give more than they must and take less than they could.
This, I think is the real story of our species, of our quest for Eden. And when it captures our imaginations even more than do the three conflicts, our future will look quite different.
.....Here's an Example......Man Against Nature is Man Against Man
Happy Day, my peeps. Today we are going to talk some more about the antagonist. The antagonist is THE most critical element of our fiction. Yes, even more important than the protagonist. Blasphemy! No, I’m serious. Our protagonist cannot become a hero ( heroine ) without the antagonist. No opposition and no story.
Yet, every time I blog about the antagonist, I get the same comments:
But what if nature is the antagonist?
But what if a belief system is the antagonist?
But what if my protagonist and antagonist are the same person?
Most of the time, questions like this alert me that you have slept since high school or college English. Do not feel badly about not knowing this stuff. The English we are taught in school is not meant as preparation for a career in commercial fiction. I struggled with this stuff, too, which is why I am using this blog to help part the fog of confusion.
Today we are going to talk about Man Against Nature, since many new writers believe that bad weather, a hungry bear or a Shark-Clown can be the antagonist ( or the BBT if you read last week’s post ). Yes, they can, but uh, not really. If we want our story to have more depth than a Hollywood B movie, we need to really understand this Man Against Nature thing and how to make it work.
But First, Man Against Man
Man Against Man is fairly straight-forward. This is probably the simplest form of story antagonism to see and understand. In simple Man Against Man, we have an antagonist who has a goal that conflicts with the protagonist’s goal.
In the Chronicles of Riddick, Lord Marshall wants Riddick dead because Riddick is the last Furian male, and a Furian male is prophesied to bring Lord Marshall’s end. Riddick, however, wants Lord Marshall dead because Lord Marshall wiped out Riddick’s planet trying to kill all the Furian males so that he could stop the prophesy.
A smidge of irony there.
So here the conflict is pretty clear. Lord Marshall wants Riddick dead and Riddick wants Lord Marshall dead. Only one of them can be dead at the end of the story, lest this become a French film and be hailed as genius at the Cannes Film Festival.
Everybody died, even the houseplants! It was brilliant!
Thus, all of Lord Marshall’s actions are to capture and kill Riddick. All of Riddick’s actions are to avoid capture but press closer to take out Lord Marshall. It is this tug-of-war that creates the story tension.
Ah, But What About Man Against Nature?
Okay, to start. How many NYT best-belling novels have we seen where the protagonist is fighting bad weather for 400 pages? And how can a protagonist ever really win against the weather? It isn’t something we can control, so is the weather really the BBT ( Big Boss Trouble-Maker )?
Yes, and no.
Often Man Against Nature will also generate a Man Against Man and a Man Against Himself story.
Huh?
I know. It’s okay. Breathe in a paper bag and trust me. First, understand that even if a storm or a shark-clown is the BBT, we need a corporeal antagonist to generate much of the conflict.
Humans don’t do so great with existentialism.
Thus, your story likely will lend itself more to a character battle. What is it about your protagonist that will change when pitted against nature or the worst parts of himself? There will often be a flesh and blood representation of that ugly nature.
The Perfect Storm
The Wolfgang Peterson film The Perfect Storm is a great example. Was the storm really the BBT? Or was it merely a catalyst that brought forth the real BBT…pride and greed ( Man Against Himself ).
George Clooney plays Captain Billy Tyne who is desperate for money. Tyne convinces the crew of the Andrea Gail to go fishing during a dangerous time of year to preserve his business and his pride (and frankly, the men agree because they are desperate, broke and trying to preserve their manhood).
The crew presses out beyond their normal fishing grounds, leaving a nasty developing thunderstorm behind. Their luck seems to improve when they hit the Flemish Gap. The men bring in the haul of a lifetime…but then ice machine breaks.
Of course it does!
There are but two choices—go through the storm of the century to get home before the fish rot OR go around the storm but lose the haul and their dignity. A fight breaks out among the crew (Man Against Man). Some want to take on the storm. Others know it’s a fool’s errand and no money is worth dying for.
Ultimately, it is the captain who makes the final decision to risk his men for the fish. He is the physical proxy of greed and pride. He ( mistakenly ) believes believes that their skill will be able to triumph over the perfect storm, and he is wrong and everyone dies…which is probably why I really didn’t care for the book or the movie, but that is just me.
But, notice how the storm doesn’t directly generate the story problem. The captain is broke. He is staring down the barrel of bankruptcy. The men are broke. They are fighting with loved ones over bills.
It is pride and greed that propel the men out into the ocean during the most dangerous time of year. Pride and greed drive them beyond their normal fishing area. And, in the end, pride and greed lands them at the bottom of the ocean.
It is the captain who leads the way, and that is why HE is the proxy of the BBT. It is his decision to go fishing during a dangerous time of year that changes everything. If Tyne had declared bankruptcy and taken on selling hand-painted garden gnomes, there would be no story and the men would have lived.
Yes, this can be a mind-bender, but practice this enough and it gets easy.
Man Against Hungry Critters
Another great example of Man Against Nature is the 1997 survival story The Edge. Anthony Hopkins plays braniac billionaire Charles Morse who becomes stranded in the wilds of North America when the small prop plane he’s traveling in crashes. Charles is not alone. Though the pilot is killed, two photographers–Bob and Stephen–survive with Charles.
If this were a simple Man Against Nature story it would still be good, but what makes it great is the story doesn’t stop there.
Man Against, Munchies Mon
Charles is aware that photographer Bob is having an affair with Charles’s wife ( a supermodel ). He also suspects that Bob deliberately invited him out into the wilds to kill him. This agenda is, of course, put on the back burner due to the fact that Bob is a total city boy and he needs Charles’s photographic memory if he hopes to survive.
***Charles loves reading survival books and Bob is in a pickle without that information running around Charles’s noggin.
Man Against Himself
Charles is a billionaire, a man with the Midas touch. His mind is what has helped him amass a fortune, but he’s never really had to get his hands dirty. When he crash-lands in the wilderness with a man he knows wants him dead, can he do what it takes to come out alive? Nature is what will test this.
See, Nature becomes the catalyst–the brutal weather and sparse food of the Pacific Northwest. Oh, and add in a hungry man-eating bear and now we have the perfect test for Charles, to see what he is really made of.
This movie isn’t scene after scene of fighting off a bear and keeping warm–though there is a lot of that. The fighting the weather and evading the bear really drive the Man Against Man story. Charles vs. Bob. Only one man can walk out alive.
Thus, I hope you can see that Man Against Nature is doable. Mother Nature is a viable choice for a BBT, but she does need help for our story to have any depth. In The Edge, screenwriter David Mamet could have written a script where characters outran a bear for 90 minutes…but he didn’t, and THAT is why the movie rocks.
Man Against Nature --and Man
No one has ever crossed Antarctica alone, but now two adventurers are trying
A weather window opened on Halloween morning, the typical stiff winds and polar fog relenting, and the flight to Antarctica was cleared for takeoff. For nearly a week, Colin O’Brady, a 33-year-old American adventure athlete, and Captain Louis Rudd of the British Army, 49, had been waiting in Punta Arenas, Chile, on the Strait of Magellan, near the shattered end of the South American continent. In separate buildings blocks away from each other, O’Brady and Rudd had been immersed in similar tasks: weighing and re-bagging their freeze-dried provisions and sorting through polar-grade gear. Their stashes included sleeping bags good for conditions down to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, portable solar panels, cross-country skis, hand-held satellite phones and modems, and a GPS tracker programmed with way points to lead them step by frozen step across the highest, driest and by far the coldest continent on earth. Each of the two men, who came to this quest from very different backgrounds but forged a competitive bond during their time in Chile, was determined to become the first person to cross Antarctica alone without support — a 921-mile odyssey on ice through blasting winds that could take as many as 65 days. It’s a trek that killed a man two years ago. For much of this year, Rudd had been expecting a one-man battle against nature. Now his struggle has become a race. Rudd announced in April that he would make the attempt. Then, in mid-October, with just weeks to spare, O’Brady, who had also been preparing for months, revealed on Instagram that he planned to do the same. Both men hope to conquer a continent that has become the new Everest for extreme athletes, though they represent two vastly different approaches. Rudd is more of an old-school adventurer. He enlisted in the Royal Marines at age 16 and remains in the British armed forces. He fought in Kosovo, Iraq (three tours) and Afghanistan (four tours). “The way I’ll console myself on this expedition is to remind myself that nobody’s shooting at me,” Rudd deadpanned. “Obviously, Antarctica is dangerous in its own way, but I look at it as I’m extremely fortunate. I’ve had friends lose their limbs, eyes, real life changing stuff.” Rudd was introduced to polar exploration by another English soldier, Lt. Col. Henry Worsley, a distant relative of Frank Worsley, the captain of Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated journey to Antarctica in the early 20th century. In 2012, Rudd and Worsley traced Roald Amundsen’s 920-mile journey to the South Pole. Unlike the wounds of war, suffering in Antarctica, Rudd said, “is temporary.” O’Brady is more of the age, a seasoned adventure athlete and budding social media star forged from injury and perseverance. He grew up in Portland, Ore., and swam at Yale. While on a trip to Thailand in 2008, two years after graduating from college, he was in a freak accident that changed the course of his life. His legs were burned so severely that doctors told O’Brady he would never walk normally again. Eighteen months later, while living in Chicago and working in finance, he decided to push his limits and signed up for an Olympic distance triathlon. He won the amateur division. O’Brady quit his day job, raced triathlons professionally for six years, and was on track for the Olympic trials. But he left the sport in 2014 to pursue the Explorers Grand Slam. He climbed each of the “Seven Summits” (the highest peak on each continent) and skied the last degree to both poles in just 139 days in 2016, claiming a world record that he still holds. This summer, O’Brady climbed the high points in all 50 American states in just 21 days, obliterating another record — to the delight of his social media followers. To prepare for the Antarctic trek, Rudd trained himself, putting in hours of power lifting. Each night, after working a full day at his British Army base, he would drag a giant truck tire along a riverbank for hours. A professional trainer, Mike McCastle, put O’Brady through a similar power lifting regimen at his gym in Portland. O’Brady gained 15 pounds of muscle for his attempt. To withstand the frigid elements, he held long planks with his hands and feet, plunged in buckets of ice water. He then untied knots while his fingers were still stiff and numb. He calls his expedition “The Impossible First’’ and plans to show much of it on social media (Rudd’s presence there is minimal). “If I can’t, it’s not as fun for me,” O’Brady said. “I stand for breaking through barriers. I’m a big believer that we should uplift one another.” A TEDx Talk he delivered in Portland last year has been viewed 1.2 million times on YouTube.
UNBROKEN SNOW AND ICE
Although there was some initial tension between the adventurers, they agreed on a course beginning on the Ronne Ice Shelf, setting off on Nov. 3. From there, they planned to ski onto Messner Glacier in western Antarctica and climb into a crosswind from sea level toward the Thiel Mountains, which rise like dorsal fins above an otherwise unbroken sea of snow and ice. A dogleg to the southeast is to bring them to a line they are to follow to the South Pole, climbing to an elevation of 9,301 feet. That journey alone is 651 miles. From there, they plan to descend Leverett Glacier and finish on the Ross Ice Shelf, some two months after setting out. All the while, they will be dragging Nordic sleds, called pulks, to haul all of their food, cooking fuel and camping gear. On Day 1, before using any supplies, their pulks weighed roughly 375 pounds. The men’s skis are covered in synthetic skins for better traction; working like glorified snowshoes, the skis help distribute weight in a way that avoids punching through deadly crevasses. For their crossing to qualify as unsupported, the competitors cannot accept any help from the few humans they might encounter — not so much as a cup of tea from researchers at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station as they pass by. Though a handful of adventurers have used kites to ride the winds across the continent or arranged for caches of food and fuel to be dropped along the way, the accomplished English polar explorer Ben Saunders was the last to attempt a solo, unsupported crossing. He chose a different route and tapped out after covering 805 miles in 2017. The year before, Rudd’s friend Worsley had made the same valiant attempt. He covered more than 900 miles but died from an infection two days after being rescued from the ice, just 126 miles from the finish line. After Worsley died, Rudd fielded a six-man team of British soldiers to trace his journey, completing it for him in 2017. They held a memorial service at Worsley’s final campsite.
“WE’RE BOTH GOING TO MAKE IT”
Antarctic firsts don’t come cheap. The cost is steep in cash and toil. Rudd and O’Brady each raised upward of $200,000 from corporate sponsors and private donors to make their attempts. Originally, their itinerary called for a Nov. 1 departure from Punta Arenas, but fair weather must be seized, so at 8:47 a.m. on Oct. 31, the competitors boarded an Ilyushin cargo jet operated by Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions, a charter company that regularly carries explorers to Antarctica. The destination was ALE’s base camp on Union Glacier. On their way to the airport that morning, Rudd was relaxed and chatty yet had some worries. He had left his home in Hereford, England, on Oct. 26, the day after his wife, Lucy, had unexpected surgery. His 21 year-old son was away with the army; his two daughters, ages 24 and 21, had tears in their eyes when he hugged them goodbye. When the men first arrived in Punta Arenas, there was a lot of tension and distrust. For months, Rudd had thought he would be competing against the elements and himself, not an athlete. Then O’Brady made his surprise announcement. The two met for the first time in the cellar bar of Ernest Shackleton’s preferred hotel in southern Chile and bonded over a shared desire to suffer in the service of a grand adventure. The thaw between them continued, and the day after they landed in Union Glacier, they agreed on a proper head-to-head battle. At around noon on Nov. 3, Rudd and O’Brady boarded a Twin Otter ski plane that took off over Mount Rossman and banked east. After a 90-minute flight, they landed on the Ronne Ice Shelf. O’Brady got out first and collected his gear. “Good luck,” Rudd told him, “I think we’re both going to make it.” They hugged goodbye, in what was most likely their last human contact for at least two months. Then, while O’Brady strapped into his sled, the plane drove about a mile away to Rudd’s parallel starting point. (That means O’Brady technically had about a 10minute head start, but it will most likely prove negligible over such a long distance.) The Ronne Ice Shelf is 600 feet thick, floating in the ocean yet fused to shore. They began three miles away from their first way point and the beginning of the Antarctic continent. That’s where O’Brady set up camp, on the lip of the continent, after a threehour haul. The sky was still blue — there are 24 hours of daylight in the Antarctic summer — and it was a relatively balmy minus 25 Fahrenheit (minus 32 Celsius), without a trace of wind. Despite the good weather, O’Brady was content to pace himself and build up to the longer days ahead. “Once you get in that rhythm or routine, that flow state starts to hit,” O’Brady said from his satellite phone. But the weather will not always be so favorable. Temperatures can drop below minus 50 Fahrenheit (minus 45 Celsius), even in summer, and should a storm delay their progress and force them to remain in their tents for days, the competitors could run out of food. Both men brought five days’ reserve, just in case. Other dangers include hypothermia, frostbite and a chafing condition known as polar thigh. Infected wounds fester because the body heals more slowly in the cold. Winds have been measured at nearly 60 miles per hour on the polar plateau, and if a strong gust carries away a tent, the journey will end right then. Even milder winds can create whiteout conditions, when snow swirls and a polar fog can blot out the sky and whip the snow’s surface into sastrugi: wavelike speed bumps that can extend for miles and make hauling a heavy sled slow going. Both men have fallen in crevasses on other expeditions. Then again, perhaps their greatest threat will be each other. With two competitors attempting the crossing at the same time, will they track each other’s progress too closely? Push themselves past the point of exhaustion into mortal danger? On their first day, Rudd went a little harder than O’Brady and skied 4.6 miles to grab an early lead. He maintained that edge for the next few days, but in nearly whiteout conditions the following Thursday, when both men had to stare at compasses bracketed to their chests to stay on track, O’Brady marched 20 miles in 12 hours to catch Rudd. The next day, again in whiteout conditions, he pushed past Rudd and grabbed his first lead. Whoever wins, if successful, these two men will be forever linked in polar lore. “People have been trying to do this for 100 years, and nobody has successfully done it yet,” O’Brady said. “And here are two guys both pushing each other to hopefully conquer an impossible feat.”
Next week, perhaps we will explore some more unconventional antagonists. Did this help? Are your brains now the consistency of scrambled eggs? Any questions? What are some questions or troubles you have with the antagonist?
I LOVE hearing from you!
And to prove it and show my love, for the month of October/November, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. If you leave a comment, and link back to my blog, and mention my book 'We Are Not Alone' in your blog, facebook like my page(s) …you get your name in the hat THREE and FOUR... times. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours, truly.
I will pick a winner every week for a critique of your first five pages. At the end of October/November I will pick a winner for the grand prize. A free critique from me on the first 15 pages of your novel. Good luck!
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