Alone

"Imagine being all alone for six months, your only contact with the outside world a two way radio, going stir crazy not just because of the aloneness, but because you are slowly being poisoned by the very air that you are breathing. This Richard E Byrd’s story of survival during his second Antarctic expedition of 1934. Like Alfred Lansing’s story about Shackleton’s ordeal to save his men after his ship was crushed by ice, I first read Alone as an adventure-minded college undergraduate who was starting to become interested in polar science. It has stuck with me ever since. By 1934, Byrd, a graduate of the US Naval academy, was already a national hero for his previous exploits. As part of the second expedition, Byrd planned to spend six months alone in Antarctica collecting weather data. It all went wrong about two months in when he started suffering from physical and mental illness, and became engaged in a monumental struggle simply to survive. The root cause was eventually discovered – carbon monoxide poisoning from his faulty stove. He maintained contact via Morse Code with base camp, called Little America. When transmissions became sporadic and odd, the decision was made to try and rescue him. The first two attempts failed, but the third got through. The rescue party found Byrd frail and week, 60 pounds lighter, but alive. They stayed with him for two months, nursed him back to health, and, when the sun returned in October, brought in one of the expedition’s airplanes out to fly him back to Little America. “Solitude can cleanse the mind, but if you are not careful it can easily overwhelm you” It was not until the spring and summer of 1982, when spending two months on a little ice cap on northern Ellesmere Island, that I started to get a little appreciation of what Byrd went through. I had a field assistant, so I wasn’t alone. I was not poisoned by carbon monoxide, and we had voice contact by radio with the home base. But after that summer, I’d learned a lot about solitude, both how it can cleanse the mind, but also how, if you are not careful, it can easily overwhelm you. The story of how Byrd made it through the long Antarctic night, all alone, slowly being poisoned, with no team to rely on or to provide companionship, is at the same time both inspiring and chilling."