Freeze
JAN 5, 2023 – A Bay Near King George Island
As the fog rolls in, swallowing the distant glacier-topped mountains in a grey veil, I paddle for my life. Not fast strokes, which you might expect, but slow, powerful strides on the left side of my kayak, the kind that burns your triceps, my attempts at turning my partner and me back towards the group. There are fourteen of us in the misty waters. Snow falls in delicate flurries, dusting the hood of my jacket and melting into the surface of the water around me. When we’re still, the quiet is so deep I can hear the snow landing—small taps against the thick shell of my coat. I can’t feel my toes, wrapped in two layers of wool socks and fur-lined boots. Just ahead, islands of ice drift, their edges jagged, some arching out of the water into white arbors.
The cold has wrapped itself around me like a second skin, and I’m thinking about a boy. Not by any conscious choice—in fact, I’m trying not to think about him—but he seeps in like the stray snowflakes burying under my collar. I think of New Year’s Eve with him in his Maryland dorm, drunkenly counting down from ten with his friends, savoring that last second of 2022 to remember the way he invited me over: “It would make me really happy to start the new year with you.” I think of how, after the kiss, he lofted me over his shoulder and started making Kraft mac-and-cheese at the stove as I laughed. I think of the next morning, grabbing hungover Chipotle before leaving for Dulles International, seeing his phone light up with a text from someone I knew he had hooked up with. We aren’t exclusive—he wasn’t cheating. But now it hollows me in a way I hoped to forget at the bottom of the world.
My dad yells from somewhere behind me, also in a kayak, “Put your back into it, muscles!” I roll my eyes but concede that we’ve drifted more than I thought. His strategy for keeping present is to push the physical. Despite standing at a stocky 5’8, my dad carries the confidence of a much taller man. Portly, blue-eyed, and buzz-cut, he often takes the stance of a bodyguard, hands clasped behind his back in anticipatory defense. Two decades in the U.S. Air Force have kept him instinctually vigilant, but under the tough exterior, I know him gentle. His favorite musical is Les Misérables—in which he prefers Javert but performs every voice of “One Day More” without fail—and he still keeps photos of his and my mom’s wedding years after their divorce. Even so, when I told him what I saw on New Year’s Eve, he said, “Look around, Em, look where you are! You can’t be sad in a place like this.”
To his credit, he’s been looking forward to sharing this with me for over a year. He first visited Antarctica in 2018 for work at McMurdo Station, though I haven’t a clue what he did there. He’s wanted to come back ever since and promised he’d bring me; he said it was unlike anything he’d ever seen. He embodies a love for travel that his mother instilled in him. Although they moved frequently, she used every opportunity to show him that the world was a kind of inheritance—vast and explorable, with enough desire to do so.
Why, then, while surrounded by the wonders of a continent I may never see again, am I plagued by this silly blond boy? I’d been hesitant when my dad first suggested the trip but relieved when it came time to leave. I figured something as drastic as Antarctica would be perfect to distract from whatever bothered me about the situation, but does it not cheapen the experience to view it as a distraction? What is really doing the distracting here? The harder I shove my paddle into the water, the more the stark, trite realization threatens to surface that “it isn’t him, it’s me.” I let myself get into a situation where my worth feels dependent on someone else, and I’m a lost cause if I can’t stop thinking about him a thousand miles away.
I consider my dad and how his eyes light up when he talks about the pureness of the continent. It conjures some bitterness to be surrounded by white, untouched land, and feel nothing but impure against it. There’s the quiet smack of water against ice, the sky an endless spread of flurries above us. You can’t be sad in a place like this!
JAN 6, 2023 – Deception Island
We’re hiking up the side of a volcano, boots crunching on black sand like we’re walking through ash. The caldera yawns ahead of us, its rim stark against the sky, while the sun and sweat find us shedding our layers of warmth. Not too many of them—I keep on a fleece zip-up. Standing on volcanic rock, surrounded by ice and sand, I’m reminded that the tundra isn’t too different from the desert.
“Only touch the outside of the hot springs,” the guide calls, gesturing to patches of dead krill marking where the temperature spikes. “You can cook in those pools. They reach 158 degrees!”
I glance over to find my dad eyeing the hot springs with a grin, daring me to touch one. I stab at him with one of my hiking poles. Cheeky.
In the distance, a lone penguin wanders the ashy sand, its tiny body ruffling and waddling and—God, here he is again!—our first date, sitting on the pool table in his basement, the boy’s grin as we’d just compared handwriting.
“Give me something to draw,” I’d said, pen poised, and he pondered very seriously.
“A penguin,” he said. “They’re my favorite. Give me a page, I’ll do one, too.”
At best, our drawings were identifiable as penguins. At worst, they resembled tuxedoed ducks on snowshoes. I added glasses to his drawing, and he added a surfboard to mine. “Not bad,” we said.
I find myself starting to cry. How absurd, standing on frozen volcanic rock, looking out over the remains of a still active volcano. How ridiculous. My dad spots me now, and he pats me on the shoulder.
“It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” he says. I nod.
JAN 9, 2023 – Somewhere in the Southern Ocean
It is a balmy zero degrees Celsius when I step onto the gangway. There are ice caps in the water. I am wearing a blue bikini.
A light fog descends upon the white giants in the distance, mountains made of ice and sedimentary rock, decorated with snow like powdered sugar. Waves lap at the ship in steady motion, and, really, it’s beautiful: an ocean so clear you can see where the bottom of a glacier a hundred feet away extends into the abyss, the colossal scale of it terrifying in its splendor, and dozens more of these majesties on full display beyond my frosted eyelashes.
The bikini was the only swimsuit I brought with me and like hell I was going to pay $90 for a one-time dry suit. The metal grates leave imprints in my heels that I won’t be able to see until much later, teeth chattering while I wait for the shower to heat up. Heat is foreign to me now. My fingers straighten to test their feeling—stiff, slow, numb—and I grip the staircase railing as I descend to the platform, which undulates with the tide. A sunburnt crew member disappears behind me to belt a life vest and cables around my waist: easy retrieval should I knock myself out on an icecap. I move to the dinghy strapped parallel to the gangway, from which I will dive into the Antarctic waters headfirst. My father records from the ship’s upper deck, hair still wet from the water, grinning as he yells, “PIL SEUNG!”—a battle cry of the Republic of Korean Marine Corps. Notably, my father is neither Korean nor a marine, but he claims this is their term for “certain victory.”
This is only partially true. “Pil Seung” is part of a larger phrase, “Jung Shin, Il Do, Ha Sang, Pil Seung,” which loosely translates to, “With a concentrated mind, you will have certain victory.” I’d always thought it was meant to reinforce the “win, no matter what” mentality, but It focuses less on violence, dominance, or arrogance, but rather on the necessity of confidence in one’s decisions, the courage to fail—but learn—as a win in itself.
I watch as the person before me flails their limbs in an attempt at a backflip. People willingly shell out hundreds of dollars to participate in progressive cold-water therapy; in a way, this plunge, this trip, acts as the same thing (except ten times more expensive and, somehow, for the less mentally well). Maybe this will heal something. Maybe the shock will cleanse my mind, reset my mindset, christen some spiritual beginning. My English books would suggest a nosedive into the Southern Ocean is a veiled metaphor for baptism, tabula rasa, or whatever. Admittedly, I want to believe that for myself. If I do this, will I be changed? How long have I been looking for an excuse to change?
I stand on the edge of the dinghy, fighting the urge to hug myself as I gaze into the water’s dips and swells. A crew member gives me a nod: “You’re good to go.” My heart rate riots at the words.
I concentrate on concentrating my mind and not thinking about how insane it is to jump into nearly-literally freezing because it’s cool, or just to say that I did it, or about the boy. But I’ve spent so much time trying not to think about the boy, and I always end up thinking about the boy, and it is so angering, so rip-my-hair-out frustrating, that I just let it happen.
I think of the brown mole near his chin and how he always ends phone calls with my name. I think of how his hand instinctively covers his mouth when he’s thinking, like he’s holding something back, and the funny pleasant noises he makes when he’s eaten something he enjoys, and how he winds up like Popeye when he playfights with his brothers. I think of the cucumber slices he has to put in his water or else it tastes “stale,” and the time he promised to kiss every inch of my back, and he did. He kissed my calf once because it was nearby, and it occurs to me that nothing may touch me there as tenderly again.
Eyes closed. Deep breath. I extend my hands above my head and launch myself in an arc across the rippling surface, my toes leaving the dinghy’s rubbery hide, and I don’t feel cold at all.