I'm drawn to stories about people who make demands of themselves that go beyond the ordinary and into the extraordinary. While the engineer side of me is interested in the how, the psychologist in me wants to know why. There is rarely a how without a why.
Some of my curiosity about why people go beyond the normal is because as an airline pilot, nothing I do is normal, yet it's the safest normal man has yet found. Nothing is less normal than buckling into a metal tube going 500 MPH at 7 miles above the Earth's surface, relying on machines to cram air into the little metal sausage so we can have something to breathe. Nonetheless, I do it 5 times a day, go to the hotel, get some sleep, and do it several more times the next day. Just as if nothing could be more normal.
We've made it look so normal that it's news when it doesn't work. Much of that has to do with technology that we take for granted, like incredibly reliable jet engines and GPS navigation which relies on dozens of little satellites whizzing around in space.
Some of it has to do with advances in understanding human limitations and finding workarounds for them like standard operating procedures and pre-made decisions.
We know that humans are often very poor decision makers under stress. The only reason humans are better decision makers than computers is because as stupid as we are, computers can't even make stupid decisions yet. That's why my aircraft has a two-inch-thick manual of emergency and abnormal checklists that is required to be in it at all times: when it's important that decisions be correct, it's important to make them ahead of time, away from stress.
That's why it's so impressive that Ernest Shackleton in his Nimrod Expedition of 1907-09 made the decision to turn around only 97 miles away from the South Pole. After all the miles trudging painfully through the blinding snow, after two months of misfortune and misery, they were less than a hundred miles away... and he said stop.
That takes courage to do. It would have been easy to press on, only a few days away from setting foot where no human had done so before; only a few days from becoming an immortalized Figure of History. It would have been easy to be dead, like R. F. Scott, who lacked the courage to stop.
About mid-way through the story, the main subject, Henry Worsley, and his two companions reach the place where Shackleton turned around:
During the next two days, the storm abated, and they covered more than twenty-five nautical miles. On January 9th, they barrelled ahead for six hours. Then Worsley took out his G.P.S. and gripped it, as he put it, "like an old man carefully carrying a cup of tea." As Gow and Adams anxiously looked on, Worsley shuffled around until the G.P.S. connected with satellites and coördinates flashed on the screen: 88° 23' S, 162° E.
"That’s it!" he yelled, slamming his poles into the ground. "We’ve made it!" The men looked around, examining the place that had long consumed their imaginations, and which had lured them nearly to their demise. All they could see was barren ice—their grail was no more than a geographical data point. As Adams later put it, "What is Antarctica other than a blank canvas on which you seek to impose yourself?"
... Worsley kept thinking about the predicament that Shackleton had faced a hundred years earlier. Shortly before reaching the ninety-seven-mile mark, Shackleton had written in his diary, "I cannot think of failure yet. I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me. I feel that if we go on too far it will be impossible to get back over this surface, and then all the results will be lost to the world." He added, "Man can only do his best, and we have arrayed against us the strongest forces of nature." When he finally made the decision to retreat, on January 9th, he wrote, "We have shot our bolt."
A little further on, the team encounters a particularly strong storm that blocks their way forward for a while:
"Proper Antarctic storm!" he wrote in his diary, noting that there was no chance of moving forward that day. The next morning, the gusts felt strong enough to hurl a small dog; one of the tent poles broke, and he had to repair it. "A salutary reminder just who is in control around here," he said of the conditions. "Trespassers will be punished."In the cockpit, each day I have the privilege to partake of a peaceful yet powerful view, with sunrises and sunsets that no painter can match, rare days where the air is so clear I can see from one side of an entire state to the other, and clouds dancing below me in peculiar formations that have never happened before and never will again. Nonetheless, I and my craft are still trespassers in this air, tolerated only through a mixture of technological ingenuity and a healthy respect for who is really in control. I call it a privilege because I have no right no be here.
A final thing I found fascinating was Shackleton's "fourth man": a sense of a divine presence accompanying him. As I pointed out in my review of Charles Lindbergh's The Spirit of St. Louis, the same thing happened to Lindbergh:
While I'm staring at the instruments, during an unearthly age of time, both conscious and asleep, the fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences--vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane. I feel no surprise at their coming...Compare this to Worsley's experience on his solo journey to the Antarctic, taken after his previous effort with two companions had been successful:
These phantoms speak with human voices--friendly, vapor-like shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there...
[These were] familiar voices, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.
And so Worsley pressed on, muttering to himself a line from Tennyson’s poem "Ulysses": "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Once, he looked up in the sky and saw, through his frozen goggles, a dazzling sun halo. On the edge of the circle, there were intense bursts of light, as if the sun were being splintered into three fiery balls. He knew that the phenomenon was caused by sunlight being refracted through a scrim of ice particles. Yet, as he stumbled onward through the void, he wondered if the light was actually some guiding spirit, like the "fourth man" that Shackleton had spoken of. Perhaps Worsley, too, had pierced the "veneer of outside things"—or perhaps his mind was simply unravelling. His diary entries had become sparer and darker: "So breathless . . . I am fading . . . hands/fingers are forever shutting down . . . wonder how long they will last."I shall not ruin the ending of this powerful story for you. Read it for yourself and you will not regret the time it takes to do so.
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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.
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