Goin' South

The proper response when someone tells you they’re going to spend a year at the South Pole is to encourage them to follow their dreams.  However, that encouragement would have been lost on me.  A turn around the sun at the bottom of the world was never my dream.  Then original late adolescent plan was to become a doctor.  I was the going to be an astronaut, because clearly doctors make great astronauts.  And when I was famous for being an astronaut, I was then going to be a US Senator.  But after six decades of moderate effort I haven’t even met the Marvin Lee Aday criteria for success:  “Now don’t be sad, ’cuz two out of three ain’t bad.”  At least I got to be doctor, and batting .333 gets a multimillion dollar contract in baseball.  (I love baseball for many reasons, not the least of which is that if you’re successful merely three times out of ten, you’re a superstar.  Doesn’t work that way in medicine, but wouldn’t it be great if you only had to get it right a third of the time, and it was fully expected that you would screw up the other seven patients?)

If you’re gong to be a doctor, emergency medicine is probably the best adventure you can have.  Nobody else can clear a room like a few ER docs talking shop.  Nobody else seems to understand the unique relationships between objects and orifices quite like us.  Nobody else spends at least two-thirds of their clinical practice saying “That was stupid.  Don’t do that again.” 

But even with all the fun and frivolity that accompanies ER work…and there is plenty of that, to be sure…I still wanted to do something more.  The time to be an astronaut had long passed me by; two divorces and a custody battle made sure I couldn’t buy a seat on a Soyuz of Jeff Bezo’s masculine tribute to rocketry.  (I understand some men compensate for certain anatomical issues through the purchase of expensive cars, fast boats, and…but I digress.)  And I just don’t have the work ethic it takes to run for office.  I would do fine if appointed Philosopher-King, but I don’t want to go knocking on doors and begging for money.  I didn’t like selling tickets to the Troop 61 Boy Scout Pancake Supper in 1974 and I don’t see myself liking it any more now.  I personally think the best job in politics for me would be to serve as Lieutenant Governor of a midwestern state, where you get chosen for the job by the gubernatorial candidate who does all the hard work, and if you win you spend most of your time going to county fairs saying hello, showing the flag, and eating fried things on sticks.  (Note to Kansas:  I’m willing to come home.)

So it’s the summer of my sixtieth year.  I’m bored in my job, and I’m sure it shows.   My son is finally on his own, working for a local television station halfway across the country. My son is my pride, and the Best Girl Friend Ever is my joy; but they’re all independent.  Nobody needs me anymore.  And I feel the fog of my mortality approaching on Sandburg’s “little cat feet,” not in the next room, but down the block if you listen close enough.  There’s time for one last burst of derring-do before the long decline.  So Antarctica?  And not Antarctica with the hoi polloi getting of the cruise ship in their loaner goose down parkas to gaze at seal and penguins and maybe spy the breach of a minke whale before discussing the grand sights at the cocktail lounge that evening.  Nope.  I’m going to the South Pole and I’m going to live there for almost a year.  Why?  I blame Mr. Popper’s Penguins.  It’s as good an excuse as any.

**********

When you consider vanishing off the face of the planet for a year, it helps to get the opinions of those you love.  Accordingly, the first person I asked was the Dental Empress, the aforementioned Best Girl Friend Ever (known to friends and family as the BGFE).  She’s an exceptionally beautiful five foot ten small-town Florida blonde ex-cheerleader/valedictorian who is a dentist, a dental practice consultant, and the person with the most street-smarts I’ve ever known.  We’ve known each other for over thirty years and been together for the last ten.  She knows me better than anyone except my parents, and she knows things about me they never will.  Her default mode is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and then she comes out with the most brilliant academic dissertations that makes you wonder who she’s channeling. Every day she does something to make me laugh out loud.  I adore her like nobody’s business.

We’re sitting in bed one night talking in between episodes of Seinfeld and The First 48.  (We love it when the perp says he wants a lawyer.)  She knows I’m dissatisfied with work, and that I usually have a about a five year shelf life before looking for something else.  I had to broach the topic somehow, and knew I would get a nuanced, understanding reply within the context of our long-term, committed, mutually supportive relationship.

“So you know I’m looking for something different to do.”

“Um-hmm.”  She’s changing the channel to Netflix.

“I kind of feel like I’ve never really had an adventure.”

Still working the remote.  “Did you forget about your ex-wives?”

I doubled down.  “No, a real adventure.  I never did the military, was never part of a heroic crowd like police of firefighters, never really part of team like athletes.  I just don’t feel like I’ve ever put myself out there and really lived.”

“Mmmmm.”

“What would you think if I went to Antarctica for a year.”

Having started an episode of The Show About Nothing, she put down the controller and looked at me with a sympathetic sapphire-eyed gaze.

“Well, that’s stupid.”

And of course it is.  It’s irrational, financially dicey, and egomaniacal.  Leave the BGFE, leave my son, leave my parents, friends, and family, leave the dogs.  But I argue my case, alternately describing all the wonders of the opportunity and pleading for understanding until, in her laconic way, like a Spartan woman with a southern accent, she finally comes to a decision.

“I don’t like it, but if you don’t do this I’m going to hear about it for the next thirty years.  Get it out of your system.  But you’re not doing this again.”   Oh, and she also extracted two promises.  One is that if I couldn’t write a book during a year in the snow I had to quit whining “I could do that” every time I went to Chamblin’s Bookmine.  And she obtained the assurance of a new car if she was able to clean out the garage while I’m gone.  Like I said, street smarts.

**********

Talking to The Kid was my next project.  My son is a recent college graduate whose first real job is as a scrivener of digital media for a television station in North Dakota (State Motto:  Cold keeps out the riff-raff).  This, as you can imagine, is quite an adventure in itself for a child of the Sunshine State.  Here’s an actual conversation we had when I visited him several weeks after his first springtime blizzard and saw that he was now the proud owner of three snow shovels.

“I noticed you have three snow shovels.”

“Yes.”

“Why do you have three shovels?”

“So I can shovel snow faster.”

“Do you have two friends to help you?” 

“No.”

“How many arms do you use when you use a shovel?”

He gives me that “My father is an idiot” look.  “Two.”

“Do you see a problem here?”

He actually didn’t, nor did he actually use any of the three shovels to dig his car out of the snow following his first fall blizzard in what seemed like ten days later.  Instead, he waited two weeks for me to show him how to do it on my next paternal visit.  However, now that he’s made at least two additional friends in the Frozen Tundra, it may be that he was just really into preparedness.

I’m fortunate that he and I are pretty close, but that also means I’m the default resource for every bit of knowledge he can’t find within a Japanese anime called “Girlz und Panzer,” including things such as how to jump start a car, clean a toilet, and that you can make hot chocolate without a teakettle by putting a cup of water in the microwave for two minutes.  (And he couldn’t figure that out even as he witnessed me, tired of his surly withdrawal into the electronic world during the first few months of Covid, put his computer in the microwave.  Turns out less than thirty seconds are required to fry a motherboard.  Cost $700 to replace it, but it felt sooooo good.)

He had some initial trepidation with the plan, and I felt for him.  He would be more on his own than ever before, and while my family and the Empress would do anything for him, they wouldn’t quite have the same depth of connection or understand his concerns in quite the same way.  Eventually, he thought it was probably the right thing to do for me, and we discussed that we could either start to cut the cord now or wait until he’s 45 and I’m dead.  Now seemed to be a better time.

Moving down on the list, it was time to talk to my Dad.  I thought that being a guy, he might get it.  It was also a strategic move, for I knew that when my mother found out her first response would be “Your father’s getting older, and what if something happens to him and you’re not there?”   So talking with him was also a pre-emptive strike.  He concurred with the essentially frivolous nature of the enterprise, but told me I should go ahead and do it because I probably wouldn’t have the chance again.

The biggest hurdle was going to be telling Mom.  There were a few “how-to” ideas in circulation.  One was to not say anything, but to build suspense at our family holiday gathering by producing gifts of socks and long underwear and hats and gloves until she finally asked what was going on.  My favorite of all the suggestions was that I simply post on Facebook that I was spending a year in Antarctica with a “PS:  Don’t tell my Mom” at the end of the post, and then sit back with a stopwatch and time how long it would take the phone to ring.  There was a lot of hemming and hawing and stewing and stalling and starting and stopping, because I knew she wasn’t going to be pleased.  But in the end, the BGFE thought I should just call her, and recognizing good advice when it appears on my doorstep I resolved to do so on a lovely weekend afternoon.

My mother knows many things, and she knows many things because she asks many questions, often the same query two or three times to makes sure all the answers match.  She also expresses her opinions through questions, and all the better if she can wrap some guilt into it.  (This is her super power)  This is one of her attributes that I’ve inherited in what the geneticists might term a full expression of the phenotype.  It drives people nuts.  So I knew her response would not be as a series of statements of love and concern but as a series of inquires as to whether I fully understood what exactly I was planning to do.

Of course, experience had taught me that the first line of attack was going to involve my “Your father is getting older,” her voice crackled through the airwaves and out through my phone. “What if something happens to him and we need you?” 

This was the one I saw coming, wrapping family, guilt, and mortality into one neat question.  You’ve got to admire her skill.  Fortunately, I had successfully conducted my pre-emptive strike.  “I already talked with him about it, and he thinks it’s okay.”

(To be fair, the Dental Empress had also tried guilt as a means to change my mind, but she had used the dogs instead.  Leveraging my affection for our oldest canine friend, she would say, “You know, Goldie’s 11.  That’s pretty old for a dog.  What if something happens and you’re not here for her?  What if her last thought before she has to go to her forever sleep is to look around for you and you’re not there?  Is that fair to her?”  For all her elegance, at heart she’s a street fighter.) 

The chance of success of a military operation depends on a comprehensive approach, and when focusing on a target my Mom asks questions like carpet bombing.  Without time for me to savor my initial victory, she moved on to a second wave.

“What about the BGFE?  Doesn’t she need you?  I don’t want you to threaten this relationship.  She’s the best one you’ve ever had, and we really like her.  You don’t want to mess that up?”

“Mom, she’s not happy about it, but she gets it.”

“What about your son?  Will he be okay?”  And on and on and on, questions about how my current employer feels about it, how any future employer might feel about it, how much money am I getting and how much money am I giving up. I would reassure her, put down the phone, and twenty minutes later she would be full of new thought in an effort to mount yet another attack against my carefully fortified redoubt.  Finally, as she recognized that I was engage in this foolishness no matter what (a stubbornness which is often blamed on my father), she said, “I think it’s crazy, but it’s you.”  Mothers always know. 

Once it became clear that I was dead-set on this course, she immediately went into Maternal Organization Mode.  She checked off her mental list, reminding me make sure my taxes would be done, my bills would be paid, that I had a list of all the family that would be expecting postcards, and that she had emergency contact information.  But mostly she reminded me time and time that I needed to make sure the relationship with the BGFE wasn’t going to be damaged, because “You better not screw this one up.”

(My father’s view on my relationship with the Empress was made clear several years ago, when he demanded I stay with her forever because he was tired of cutting the heads of my ex-wives out of family pictures.)

I had already taken care of that. There were birthday and Valentine’s Day gifts strategically wrapped and stashed in the spare bedroom.  There was also a special box to be opened the day after I left.  Festooned with blue unicorn paper, it contained over 300 envelopes, one for each day I would be gone, each containing a school Valentine telling her she’s a nice person.

(Inset "awwww" here).

I should also note that a month before departure, the BGFE and I got engaged.  It was something I had been planning for months, long before Antarctica was even a cold little thought in my chilly small brain.  It was only later that I realized the timing of the proposal could be construed as a bribe to not dump me while I was gone.  Either way, she said yes.

**********

I only know one actual polar joke, and it has to do with the Northern Seas.

A Jewish guy and a Chinese guy are sitting next to each other at a bar.  Suddenly the Jewish guy rears up and punches the Chinese guy in the face. 

The Chinese guy asks, “What did you that for?”

The Jewish man replies, “That was for Pearl Harbor.”

“But I’m Chinese!” says his victim.  “Pearl Harbor was the Japanese!”

The Jewish guy smirks.  “Japanese, Chinese, Vietmanese…it’s all the same to me.”

The Chinese guy thinks for a moment, than hauls off and whacks the Jewish man.

“Hey, why did you do that?” the latter asked, getting up off the floor.

“That was for the Titanic.”

“The Titanic?  That was sunk by an iceberg!”

“Iceberg, Goldberg, Greenberg…it’s all the same to me.”

(This would now be a good time to call Human Resources.)

**********

Our dogs, of course, had no idea what’s going on.  We have three.  Daddy’s Good Girl Goldie Goldstein is a white, thigh-high goldendoodle with more doodle in her than golden.  Polly (named for Sweet Polly Purebred of Underdog fame) is a smaller goldendoodle, more golden than doodle.  Finally there’s Zach, a black-and-white, sweater-wearing tribble “Teddy Bear” dog which is allegedly a mix of a Shih Tzu and a Bichon Frise with probably some guinea pig or lemming thrown in.  The poor thing has got some serious brain damage, like the Habsburgs of dogs.  It spends most of it’s time staring straight ahead, either in deep contemplation of the mysteries of the cosmos or, well, because it stares straight ahead. 

But at least Goldie, the largest, eldest, and brightest of them all, knows something is up when the luggage gets begins to be laid out on the bedroom floor.  For the record, we have proven that Goldie is the smartest by throwing blankets over their heads and seeing how long it takes them to try to get out.  Goldie shakes it off immediately.  The other two are non-committal towards the entire exercise, and sometimes we leave them there for an hour or more just to see if they move.  Which they do not.

Goldie is my clearly my favorite of the three, and I think it’s mostly because we’re both old. When you’re young, human or canine, you want to go and run and play and frolic and bark at things.  When you’re old, most days you just like to be around someone you love.  We’re both at that stage of life.  Plus, she’s the Jewish girl my Mom always wanted me to find.  I know she’s Jewish because when she first entered our lives, The Offspring of the BGFE named her Goldie Goldstein, which promoted this conversation:

Me:  So, the dog is Jewish!

Offspring:  No, she’s not.  She’s Episcopalian, like Mom and I.

Me:  Do you know any other Episcopalians named Goldstein?

I stopped that nonsense dead in it’s tracks.  And for constant reinforcement, we have special song we sing at petting time:

“Goldie Goldstein, my furry fellow Jew.

Goldie Goldstein, I truly do love you.”

I have also modified a Shabbat prayer to not only thank God for the bread of the earth, but for Goldie Goldstein the Dog.  (Adapting prayers is not new to the family.  My son adapted the same blessing to thank the Lord for the bread from the earth and the Coke from the store.)

So while I’m certain the dogs won’t really understand why I’m not there, I suspect they might miss our routine.   I‘ve written down the highlights for the Dental Empress to avoid any disruption while I’m gone.

0630  First Morning Run.  Dogs exit via the front door with a reminder that it’s too early for barking.  They occasionally comply.  On coming back into the house, Goldie gets a hug and a kiss.  All three dogs run to the kitchen for Morning Cookie.  The Morning Cookie Song enhances the experience.

“Morning cookie!

Who loves morning cookie?

We love morning cookie!

We all love morning cookie!

It’s the morrrrnnning…coooooookie…..sonnnnng!  The morning cookie song!”

1200 Noontime Run and Snack.  Please consider chanting “Snack! Snack! Snack!” emphasizing the “n” and the “k,” because they like it better when you raise your upper lip to your nose with the “n” sound and snap out the “k” with your palate and tongue.  Their favorite mid-day offering are chicken meatballs.  Two for Goldie, one for each of the smaller pups.  Do not relent when they look at you beseechingly for more.  Okay, do.  They’re so damn cute.

1500 Chewie Time.  A duo of small rolled chewies each for the younger two, and a giant rawhide temptation for the Lead Canine.  Polly will eat her chewies immediately.  Goldie will sit on her couch (not the couch, but her couch) and savor the treat for over an hour, and woe to you if you approach her during this special personal time.  Zach will carry his chewies around the house for a fortnight and then at some point put them down in parallel on the floor, staring at them as if trying to see in Euclid was right.

1800 Dog Dinner.  Three-quarters of a cup of the most delicious kibble for Zach, a full cup for Polly, and two and a half for Daddy’s Best Girl.  Dress with crumbled chicken meatballs and Swanson beef broth.  Entertainment includes the Dog Dinner Song.

“Dog dinner! 

It’s time for dog dinner!

It’s time for dinner with the dogs!”

2100  Last Run.  And all to bed. 

 **********

The reaction of my friends seemed to split along gender.  Most of the guys seemed envious of the Great Adventure; most of the women fell into the “Momma, he’s crazy” camp, and they weren’t crazy over me.  The most unique reaction, however, came from my older and (mostly) wiser friend Doug.  Doug is a free spirit of the 60’s, a few years older than I, with a mustache, beard, and long grey hair flowing down to his shoulders, looking for all the world as Jesus might had he lived to obtain Social Security.  Always concerned about my mental health and the risks of loneliness away from my beloved BGFE, he turned immediately to role of the penguin as a source of solace.  More specifically, how does one get it on with a penguin?  A nice seafood dinner, of course, and maybe a showing of “Happy Feet” for mood?  It must be hard to hold onto those oily flippers, and there’s no doubt the little kicking feet must get in the way.  And there’s really no good way to deal with the beak.

(For the record, the Dental Empress had addressed the celibacy issue as well, reminding me that while my pre-existing committed relationship meant that other women were most certainly off limits, there was no objection to a continuing relationship with Right-Hand Rosey and her Five Dexterous Friends.)

**********

My first live-fire exercise with the Antarctic team was a team-building exercise at the YMCA of the Rockies.  I had been there once before, in 1982 for the small-college circuit Cross Examination Debate Association National Tournament.  The trip was memorable not only for a third-place finish, but for the fact that I got to fly First Class on the old Frontier Airlines and got not only a steak served to order on a linen tablecloth with real cutlery, but also several glasses of wine without the indignity of showing a badly made fake ID.

At the start of the team building exercise, we were each asked to tell a fun fact about ourselves.  It was interesting mix of nuggets of truth, ranging from the achingly lonely (“I just hope to make a lot of friends”) to the useful (“I know how to fold a fitted sheet”…this got applause) to the unintentionally uncomfortable (“I want to get closer to all of you on those cold winter nights”) that made you swivel your head to see if anyone from Human Resources was stopping by.  My contribution was that I had been at a debate tournament at the same place last millennia.

(This is about to be a useful piece of information.)

After spending much of the first day on introductions and a review of a pre-test we had taken on emotional intelligence (Actual quote from my results: “Howard tends to be overly optimistic and needs to be more tethered to reality,” which came as a total surprise to me because I tend to be overly optimistic and not tethered to reality), the second day of the workshop featured a negotiation exercise.  Not to give too much away for future contestants, but essentially two people are contending the fate of ten oranges that each need for their own purposes.  The idea is to establish a win-win condition where both parties are, if not thrilled, at least reasonably satisfied with the outcome.

I was paired up with a young man who was, as I would soon find out, street-smart beyond his years.  We commenced to hagglin’, and he’s asking lots of questions.  I’m giving him all the information I’m allowed, and he’s giving me nothing.  This doesn’t bother me in the slightest, as I figure he’s doing what I often do…ask a lot of questions…and then like me he’ll start thinking out loud, and I’ll follow his lead, and we’ll reach a good place, shake hands, and part friends.

My adversary looks around, like he wants to do a deal, but make sure that nobody else overhears our solution.  He asks me to go behind a corner of a nearby building to talk.  Like a puppy with promises of peanut butter nuggets romping through my brain, I follow, and once we’re out of sight of the others he points his index finger towards me, raises his thumb to the sky, and quietly but definitively says “Bang.  You’re dead.  I shot you, so I get all the oranges.”

I’m stunned.  We were pals, right?  Having a good talk, and maybe sharing some citrus as good fellows all?  “Why did you do that?”

“I figured if you were third in the country in some debate tournament, I sure as hell wasn’t going to win an argument. So I’d have to pop a cap in you.” 

And that, my friends, is true situational awareness.  The kind I don’t have because as you know, I tend to be overly optimistic and untethered from reality.

**********

Of course, most stories of mine would be incomplete without noting something I’ve done to stir up trouble.  This one is no exception.

The second half of my orientation week was focused on a Wilderness First Responder course.  Half our group got to go to Fire School; unfortunately, that silly MD after my name consigned me to doing, well, medical stuff. 

(I was especially sad because I learned that Fire School grads get a special hat.  I like special hats.)

Being a doctor and all, it was determined early in the course that since I probably knew most of the content, I might best serve as a model patient for the hands-on teaching.  So when we were doing a module on chest trauma, I was moulaged up to simulate a sucking chest wound. 

(Moulage is the use of makeup and prosthetics to simulate injuries in a training setting.  A sucking chest wound is one caused by an impalement that allows air into the chest cavity but does not allow it to escape.  It also sucks.)

What got me in trouble was not when I felt the rescuers had missed the obvious injury, and therefore my simulated clinical status should go downhill.  There was no blowback when I suddenly proclaimed, “The light!  The light!  Grandma!  I smell fried chicken!”  Indeed, one of my rescuers told me to retreat from the tunnel, that there was a hot Latina named Conchita waiting for me on earth with tacos and churros.  I like tacos.  I came back.

Nor did I get into trouble when, simulating a patient with a gastrointestinal illness, I would lie on the floor in a fetal position, grabbing at my stomach and making loud raspberry noises while singing “Baby Shart” over and over and over.

No, gentle reader, the first of what caused me to run afoul of the tender sensitivities of modern times was that when one of my rescuers was patting my chest down to determine the extent of my simulated injuries (a most clinically appropriate thing to do), I said, “Gee, not even my ex-wife touched me like that.”  (Which is true...she never palpated my rib cage to detect a significant chest injury.)  The other was when the instructor was talking about the need to ask about Viagra use prior to giving a patient nitroglycerin for chest pain, I said aloud to myself, “Well, that’s never been a problem here.”

As best I can surmise, I must have offended someone’s ex-wife who did, in fact, examine her former spouse for thoracic injuries in a meaningful and loving way, as well as someone who found certain medications to be a useful adjunct to his life and didn’t want to be reminded of it.  Of course, as befits these days when one can’t simply raise the issue at the time in order to educate and obtain an apology, I only learned about this three weeks later after my offenses were reported up several different food chains.  Appropriate admonishments were administered, apologies acquired, and oaths were sworn in a resolve to do better.  My speech is now pure as the driven snow.  At least when anyone’s listening.

One last tidbit from team-building.  A few of us were talking about professions with dark sense of humor, and of course emergency medicine popped up as a likely candidate.  But two of the scientists in our group pointed out that astrophysicists probably have the gloomiest view of reality, as all they do is spend their days gazing into the void of nothingness.  Which brings me back to my ex-wife, but we can’t talk about that.  At least not out loud.

**********

I would like to say it all got real a few days before departure, and that the enormity of the venture finally hit me like a bang stick between my non-equine eyes.  But it didn’t…it just felt like the packing was more of a pain than usual.  I did occasionally stray into the realm of “this is the last time I’ll do this” routine, until I realized that short of falling into an ice crevice, in which case my demise means I won’t remember what I’m missing anyway, I would be back, and that those things dear to me like the BGFE, my son, my family, the dogs, Hostess cakes, and Waffle House would still be there.  The constancy of Waffle House always brings peace.

At the airport the morning I left, the Empress and I both tried to be casual about my trip, as if I was going to someplace noxious like Cleveland and would be back in a few days.  She tried to pout, but didn’t pull it off.  She never can, because when she pouts you can see the hint of smile behind it and you know she’s play-acting. Between us, I’m the one with the heart on the sleeve because I’m so stupid in love with her.  In many ways she’s my very own Elsa, my Ice Princess, and sometimes the only way I get a glimpse of how she feels is when she wakes up and says she had a bad dream that we weren’t together anymore.  Our Public Displays of Affection most often involve late night runs to Taco Bell clad only in bathrobes.  So for us there was no teary emotional farewell in full view of security.  But I did learn later that after she left the airport she had two Pork Chop Biscuits from Hardee’s.  Given that these breakfast delights are charter members of the Sad Food Group, along with Wavy Lay’s and French onion dip, maybe she cares after all.

So now I'm in seat 10D on a commuter flight headed to Houston, connecting to San Francisco, hemisphere hopping to Auckland, and then to Christchurch. I plan to read, to sleep, to eat my four brisket sandwiches (on white bread, with yellow mustard) made from last night's leftovers, and to use the aircraft lavatory at least twice to see which way the water swirls down the drain on either side of the equator. After that, I have no idea what awaits. Stay tuned.