Cold Read Free Page A

now, and our meals consist of seal-meat and blubber only, with 7 ozs. of dried milk per day for the party.”
     This is at a time of inactivity, camped on ice. “The diet suits us, since we cannot get much exercise on the floe and the
     blubber supplies heat,” he wrote. Eventually, the ice gave way, cracking under his camp. “The crack had cut through the site
     of my tent,” he wrote. “I stood on the edge of the new fracture, and, looking across the widening channel of water, could
     see the spot where for many months my head and shoulders had rested when I was in my sleeping bag.”
    Charles Wright survived Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 Antarctic expedition and knew just how important those sleeping bags were.
     He — with Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who had grasped Dante’s reasons for placing the circles of ice beneath those of fire in the
     depths of Hell — was one of the men who supported Scott, hauling Scott’s gear south for the first leg into the heart of Antarctica.
     The support team turned back and waited at their base camp, but Scott and the four men who continued to the pole would not
     survive. Long afterward, at eighty-six years old, Wright talked to an interviewer about man-hauling sleds in Antarctica. The
     interviewer asked about toilet habits on the trail, the point being that getting up in the middle of the night to relieve
     oneself involved more than just stepping outside of the tent in your boxers. “You see,” Wright explained,
    you’ve come from your sleeping bag, you’ve taken into the sleeping bag all the frozen sweat of the previous day, and the previous
     day and the previous day and the previous day. There’s a log of it at the end. And during the night you first melt that frozen
     sweat. And very often it freezes at the bottom of the bag, where your feet are. And if you’re going to have a decent night
     you’ve got to melt all that before you have a chance. And even then it’s not comfortable because whatever is next door is
     wet and cold, and every breath you take brings some of the cold stuff into the small of your back. So a winter’s night when
     you’re sledging is not a comfortable thing at all. But you’ve got to, before you get anywhere, you’ve got to melt the ice.
     And sometimes there’s fifteen pounds of ice or something like that that’s got to be turned into water before you begin to
     sleep.
    From Wright’s account it is clear that Antarctic explorers disciplined their bladders and stayed in those half-frozen bags
     as long as possible.
    Scott himself kept a journal right up until his death. Eight months later, a search party found his camp. In the camp, Scott’s
     frozen body lay between two of his frozen companions. The three men in the tent, it has been said, looked as if they were
     sleeping. The three bodies, along with Scott’s journal, were recovered.
    Scott’s journal records noble behavior and tragedy. By the middle of January 1912, eager to be the first to reach the South
     Pole, Scott and the four men who went with him stumbled on sled tracks and camps left by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen,
     who had beaten them to the pole by four weeks. Scott’s party pressed on to the pole anyway. “Great God!” Scott wrote, “this
     is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.” Disappointed, the men
     struggled back toward their base camp.
    “Things steadily downhill,” Scott wrote in early March. “Oates’ foot worse. He has rare pluck and must know that he can never
     get through. He asked Wilson if he had a chance this morning, and of course Bill had to say he didn’t know. In point of fact
     he has none.” Later, Oates, recognizing that he was slowing the party and endangering their lives, talked to his companions.
     “I am just going outside and may be some time,” he said. Afterward Scott wrote, “He went out into the blizzard and we have
     not seen him since.”
    Scott