Getting Out of the Tent - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 224

of Antarctica I had found my answer, I had found my limit. My
limit was being alone.
By mid-afternoon I began to worry that I would need to eke
my rations out over another night when I received word from
Union Glacier that the plane was on its way and would be
with me within the hour. I packed away all my belongings,
leaving just the shell of my tent as a precautionary shelter,
and stepped outside to wait. A constant breeze streamed past
me from the north but the sun glared in heatless intensity
through a loose patchwork of high cloud. Expectation raced
through me as both excitement and panic; excitement that I
was going home but panic at the thought of my expedition
being over. I had longed for the plane to return ever since it
had left me - but I had also dreaded it. Since leaving the Pole
I had feared its appearance because it would mean I had run
out of time. Now, I dreaded it because the plane heralded the
passing of something that I would never experience again. My
big adventure was over and, as demanding as it had been, there
was a sadness in the finality of going home.
I pulled out my camera and started to take pictures. I took
pictures of the horizon, of the tent, of myself. It wasn't as
if I didn't already have a million images of almost precisely
identical scenery but I think I knew even then that I wasn't
taking pictures to capture the view. It was an instinctive act
to try and capture something of the moment - as if the pixels
of my camera could trap not just light but a sense of the
experience too.
I heard it before I could see it. A faint drone barely perceptible
above the fizz of silence. Scanning the horizon to the west I
spotted the plane while it was still no more than a microscopic