Life Raft - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 109

hero. It is in fact the exact opposite. I am driven by the fear
that I will find myself lacking, and this fear pushes me to search
for reassurance.
It strikes me that we all tend to be fascinated by our own
nature, that we are always looking for a way to learn more
about who we are. Methods are as diverse as ancient rites
of passage and horoscopes, art and alternative therapies
but the appeal is the same; we are drawn to the promise
of discovering something new about ourselves. It was this
desire for self-understanding that had led me to adventures
in Antarctica as a graduate, but it was the suspicion of what
such self-understanding might reveal that had lured me back to
Antarctica alone. Through the prism of that alone-ness I hoped
to establish once and for all if my fears were founded, the fear
that - at my core - I was not up to it.
I must have pondered all this every single day as I skied. I had
hours to explore every avenue of thought on the matter but I
was now so close to the Pole that it seemed as if I caught the
occasional faint rumble of machinery drifting towards me on
the wind. This unlikely echo of civilisation seemed plausible
because the South Pole is currently the site of one of the largest
scientific research stations on the continent. The Amundsen-
Scott station at the South Pole was established in 1957 by the
American Navy and has been slowly expanding ever since.
There are now around 250 people that live and work there
in a giant, three-storey, E-shaped building on stilts during the
summer season, a population that shrinks to 100 for the long,
dark winter. In summer the station is busy with minibuses and
transport snowmobiles (weird-looking contraptions that haul
groups of people standing in a double row while clinging to
a specially built sledge) moving people from the main station