The Door

I crossed the Greenland ice cap. I have no idea what I brought back.

There’s a mirror in the bathroom of this small hotel in Kulusuk and I stood in front of it for a long time today.

First shower in thirty days. Not because I was dirty. The ice doesn’t do that. No dust, no grime, just cold and white and frozen water in every direction. But when the heat hit my skin I stood there longer than I needed to, because thirty days of reduction does something to you. Warmth becomes a thing you feel again. Actually feel. You forget that’s even possible until it isn’t.

I turned around and caught myself by surprise. That sounds strange. It’s your own face. But thirty days is long enough to forget what you look like, and the person looking back at me had clearly been somewhere I hadn’t fully come back from yet.

The beard. The nose, still raw and flaking where the cold and frost-nip got into it. A body 9.6 kilograms lighter than the one that walked onto the ice. We found out on the luggage scale at the airport, weighed like freight. That number sat with me more than the reflection did.

I stood there and looked at the outside of a month on the ice. And I could explain all of it. Every kilogram. Every raw patch of skin. I know exactly what that cost because the body is honest like that, it shows you the work, it doesn’t hide anything.

It was the inside I couldn’t account for.

That’s when it started.

The outside I can explain. I know it in my feet, which are swollen and broken in ways that make every step a negotiation. The left one is beyond what I’d call okay. Two toes on the right have opinions about everything. For the last two weeks out there I was in the most sustained physical pain I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been in a few things. The body kept the receipt. It always does.

But the inside.

I don’t know what happened in there. That’s the honest answer and it unsettles me in a way I find interesting. Not frightening. Interesting. There’s a difference, although sometimes in the dark they feel the same.

Here’s something about spending eight to twelve hours a day moving across a landscape that doesn’t change. The white goes in every direction and after a while your brain stops trying to find the edge of it. The past stops being behind you. The future stops being somewhere ahead. They collapse into each other and sit right there on the ice with you, all at once. Time gets strange. Identity gets stranger. You start to wonder which version of yourself actually showed up out here, and then you wonder if that’s even the right question, and then the wind picks up and you just ski.

In the quieter moments, when the weather held and the rhythm found itself, I’d put something in my ears. Music mostly. The mind would grab whatever it found and run. Ten hours of movement, of white, of nothing but breathing and the sound of skis on snow. Whatever you gave that mind it would pull apart and turn into something you weren’t expecting.

There were two or three pieces of music that did something I wasn’t prepared for.

I won’t tell you I saw it coming. One moment I was just moving, just existing in that strange collapsed time the ice creates, and then something in the music cracked something open and the tears came. Not dramatic. Not a breakdown. Just tears, quiet, without asking.

And the first thing I did was judge myself for it.

What the fuck. This is a hardcore Arctic expedition. You don’t cry on a hardcore Arctic expedition. Get it together.

But that instinct, that grab for toughness as armour, I think that’s exactly what the ice was trying to strip out of me. Because what happened in those moments was real. The music and the cold and the exhaustion and that enormous silence all arrived at the same point and what came out was true. Not weakness. Not anything breaking. Just a person, alone, doing something that had no business being done, moved by something beautiful.

Those two things don’t cancel each other out. They make each other more.

I had days out there that felt like grace. Moving through something so old and so indifferent to my existence that I felt completely at peace with being small. Like the scale of the place burned off something I’d been carrying without knowing it was there.

And then I had the other days.

Wind straight into my face, horizon unmoved for six hours, something dark settling in beside me and refusing to leave. The doubt that doesn’t visit, it moves in. The shadows that weren’t metaphorical. I went into rooms out there I wasn’t expecting to find. I don’t know what was in all of them. I’m not sure I want to know yet.

And then I look into my own eyes in this mirror and I see it. Something moved behind them. I can’t name it yet. There’s a room in me now with a door I’m standing in front of, feeling what’s on the other side the way you feel heat before you see fire. Warm. Real. Waiting.

I’m a little nervous to open it. Not afraid. Nervous the way you are before something that actually matters.

I don’t know what I’m going to find. I don’t know what the ice gave me or what it took. I don’t know which of the things I believed about myself on May 1st are still true. Some of them probably aren’t. I suspect I won’t miss those ones. I suspect there are things in that room I’ve been circling for years without knowing how to get there.

I went out there to prove something to myself. I think. And maybe to find some peace of mind, which is not the same thing as happiness and I think I’ve always known that. Whether I found it I genuinely can’t tell you yet. I’m not sure the ice is where you find it. I’m starting to think it might just be where you get honest enough to know you were looking.

Somewhere in the last few days on the ice, through the pain and the white and whatever the hell the rest of that was, part of my brain started thinking about the next one. Already. And then in the same breath wanted nothing to do with any of this ever again. Both things absolutely true at the same time. I don’t know what that says about me. Maybe that’s the whole answer right there.

Tonight is the first night I’ve had my own space in thirty days. After a tent. After walls shared with people doing the same voluntary, stupid, beautiful, hard thing I was doing. It wasn’t misery. It was chosen hardship, which is a completely different animal. You put yourself somewhere the exit closes and the only direction left is forward. There’s something in that I’m going to be sitting with for a long time.

My phone has messages I haven’t opened. I’m not ready. When I get home I’m going to take a few days before the world comes in. Not because I’m hiding. Because this needs room to land before I let everything else near it. Because I know myself well enough to know that if I start scrolling through a hundred kind messages before I’ve understood what just happened out there, I’ll lose the thread of it. And I think the thread matters.

Here’s what I know. This isn’t over. I don’t mean another crossing, although maybe that too. Maybe a solo one. I mean whatever started on that ice is nowhere near finished. The real work, the internal work, the opening of whatever is behind that door, that’s what’s coming. And I think it might be the most interesting part of all of it.

The data will come later. The Garmin has every kilometre, every broken night of sleep, every beat of a heart doing its job in conditions it wasn’t built for. The Whoop has thirty days of what this actually cost stored in it. I want to understand all of that. I think there’s something real in it.

But that’s not this.

This is just a man standing in a mirror at the edge of the world. Not shocked exactly, but a little shocked. 9.6 kilograms gone, a face that has clearly been somewhere, a body that has an opinion about everything right now. The outside I can see. It’s the inside I’m still trying to read. Looking into his own eyes, knowing something shifted, not knowing yet what to call it, and being okay with that.

It’s just getting started.

And I am absolutely exhausted. Mentally and physically as much as I have ever been in my life. Both of those things are true at the same time.

The door is still there.

G.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​