JULY READS RECAP
I bit off more than I could chew this month with a wopping six books in various degrees of 'being read' and none of which were finished.
ENDURANCE has been my priority read of the month.
JUNE FEATURE: THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD
10 XX, 2024 - 06 23, 2026
Reading this book was a journey in itself. In the time it took me to read it, I went through many phases of my life. I began it in California when I was working as a wildlife monitoring technician in the high desert. Cherry's long prose and painstakingly detailed logisitics didn't enthrall me as it would come to just then, but I picked away at it here and then, reading as The Terra Nova amassed her crew, then began it's long voyage south.
Then it followed me into a period of unemployment within the wildlife field in my first winter post-undergrad. I really struggled through horrible boredom and a deep longing to return to fieldwork at that time, and I did not find any solace in Cherry's (at the point in the book) bright, promising future as he was preparing to embark on his own journey, regaling the reader as the expedition set sail for the Pack. He then came with me up to Denali National Park the next summer, and I slowly began to revisit the book, quelled from my dismay and with an open mind once more. I felt closer to Cherry then, working with sled dogs and being in my field once more.
It wasn't until the winter did I really dive back in. Conducting backcountry patrols in the Alaskan wilderness in the heart of winter; it was the closest I could get to living Cherry's experience--mushing through the dark with my closest companions, at the mercy of the long, long night, sloging through -65F at our coldest (still not as frigid as Cherry would face, but respectably within the wheelhouse). I would curl up in my bag at the end of a long, long, cold day, my feet painful with cold, fingers lacking sensation from frostbite, and read of the harrowing journey Cherry would face on his Winter Journey. I was frostbitten and hypothermic at the worst times, got as near as I can to a true appreciation for the true pain these men when through and endurance, courage, and companionsip these men displayed--though I never shattered my teeth like he did, and I loved my dogs a lot more than Cherry ever seemed to!
When I applied to the study that will take me down to McMurdo this fall, 24 years old, eager and bright-eyed and maybe not entirely competent, I really began to see myself before Cherry (before the horrible tragedy of losing his closest two friends befalls him). I felt his albeit brief heartache and longing when being turned away from the expedition initially, and I can only assume we have shared a similar elation at the knowledge of being taken on an adventure of a lifetime to some of the farthest reaches South. Cherry was 24 when he was taken on the expedition--I am 24 now, was when I was given the job offer, 24 when the NSF cleared me to deply, though I will be 25 by the time I am down on the ice.
Cherry's grief is so plain, even if he doesn't spare the time, or rather the words, to explore it deeply. It is a heartbreaking read once the Winter Journey is done, and the parties have turned back from the poles. I finished the winter journey in my position as a musher, and moved alongside Cherry as I departed my closest friends I'd made over that long, hard, but maybe the best year, and settled into my miserable summer job as a park ranger as he was turned away from the final stretch of that desperate race.
The loss of Bowers and Wilson must've been world-stopping and shaken Cherry deeply. It's a loss I have yet to know, but was brought to tears by all the same. I could (obviously) talk about this book for paragraphs, it was with me for two (much too long, so sorry Cherry) years of my life, in which I found humor, inspiration, perserverance, curiousities, and grief. God, poor, poor Cherry. Great book. One of my best reads.
If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward,
so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.
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Me on my own Winter Journey. I was recovering from frostbitten fingers, mushing a team of 8 dogs, with 4 hours of sunlight and travelling through 9 hours of darkness, battling temps of -65F. I could speak so much more about this day, but it honestly will be a post at another time. Cherry's refrain of 'You've got it in the neck-stick it stick it stick it' was a constant thought rattling around in my head.
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