Forty-Six - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 99

My reflection seemed strangely alien. With goggles, face mask
and hood in place there was not a scrap of skin visible and I
appeared more spaceman than human. The equipment became
my outer skin, distancing me slightly from the environment. It
was both protection and prison. While I skied, the wind flowed
in a constant stream against the left side of my face, freezing
the dampness from my breath so that the mask became a solid
shell. It made eating a little difficult. I had to be selective about
the snacks I chose from the bag in my pocket, picking out the
morsels that were just the right size and shape to be posted
through the breathing hole in my mask. Drinking was even
worse. I'd deliberately chosen a water bottle with a protruding
and narrow neck which made it easier to jam through the
frozen fabric but to prevent spills I had to grip the bottle
opening with my teeth to hold it in place while I gulped.
The experience of being locked inside the layers of frozen
material all day reminded me of The Man in the Iron Mask ,
an old black-and-white film I had watched as a child on my
grandparents' TV. The hero had been locked inside a helmet
of iron in the evil hope that his own beard would eventually
strangle him. The idea must have terrified me as a child because
it still made me shudder as an adult and was perhaps the reason
that ripping off my layers of frozen face-covering at the end of
each day felt like a moment of liberation. Putting the mask back
on again the next morning became a ritual of almost ceremonial
importance. As I fixed each Velcro fastening and settled each
seam I sank deeper into a state of readiness for the day ahead.
The mask was my polar war paint.
As I crossed into the eighty-eighth degree of latitude I met the
line of longitude at 132 degrees west, the invisible line that I