The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume LXXVIII

All around the world people are gathering. They are stuffing airplanes and stockings hung with care to capacity. Soon, reindeer will be prancing on rooftops near you, and Christmas morning will be filled with colorful presents wrapped in shiny paper and bows, bringing smiles. And the Christmas trees, which were carefully decorated and beautifully adorned with ornaments old and new, will be the majestic centerpiece of it all.

I did get a real tree a few weeks ago. I found the one for me, a Frasier fir from North Carolina, not too tall, not so pricey, just right. It is beautiful.

I have my dear sweet wife Ellen, and our cats to keep us company. We visited with friends and called relatives far away, making the best of this holiday, so we did not feel alone.

Many people, whether they celebrate Christmas or not, are alone. If they are not incarcerated in solitary confinement, then it is by choice. Some are happy and content about their choice, others maybe, not so much. They would choose people over loneliness.

My friend Jim Hearns, who I knew in Gardiner, Montana, was one of those who tried solitary life for a while. He was a few years older than me at the time, right around 30 years old, when I knew him. He was a fun guy and loved being around people. He was a cook at a local restaurant, just like me, and he lived right next door at our apartment complex overlooking the Yellowstone River.

Jim fancied himself a mountain man. He sewed his own buckskin clothing and jewelry, complete with beads and elk ivories. He made his own hat from a fox. I wish I had a picture of him wearing that. Native American fashion was his thing, even though he was not native. He even made me a beaded necklace with porcupine quills and badger claws on it, which I still have as a keepsake, but no longer wear. He and his roommate, Dennis Gaskin, and I, would snowshoe across the Gardiner foothills in front of Sepulcher Mountain and Electric Peak to see bison and pronghorn. We never got too close, so my pictures were not the best, as I only had a little box camera with no telephoto lens. But that did not matter. It was fun.

Jim loved snowshoeing and being in raw winter elements. He told me about how, a few years before we met, he gave real mountain man living a try. He would hike anytime, anywhere, day or night. He hunted elk up in the Absarokee range, adjacent to Yellowstone Park, so he would go deep into the woods, following streams, and without a map, test his limits, camping out days at a time. He claimed he saw a real mountain man once. It was a brief encounter. The man was dressed in furs and was about a hundred feet away across a river. He stood perfectly still.

Jim called to him, and moved through the trees, toward the river bank. The man did not answer. He just walked a few steps into the bush and was gone. Jim often wondered if it was an apparition, or if that man resided in the forest. He could not say, but firmly believed that the man was real. He saw what he saw. This was not on one of Jim’s long overnight hikes. In fact, it was not even far from the road. So, no telling what the real story behind the man dressed in fur was.

On one of his longer hikes, Jim found a cabin. It was abandoned, uninhabited, and on public land. He guessed it was fifty to a hundred years old, and he could not tell the last time it had been used. There was nothing in it but a table, a chair, a flat bed frame, and a small cast iron stove. Jim got the idea that he could live there.

When he got back into town, he told everybody his plan; to pack up his gear and live in that cabin for the winter. Others confirmed his story to me, so I am confident it was not a fantastic fabrication. Gardiner in the 1980’s was a small town where everybody knew everything about everyone. I imagine it may still have those same attributes. Our mutual friend Gloria Olson, a waitress at the cafe I worked at, told me that a few years back, Jim said to everyone that he was going up in the mountains for the winter, and he did. He just disappeared and came back in the spring with long hair and a bushy beard, and he smelled bad, so his story was true.

Jim told me about living up there in great detail. About the serenity, the storms, the snow. He saw a few bears. He killed one deer and ate it all winter, and shot a few pheasants or quails. He got a taste of that Thoreau Walden Pond experience without the pond and without the visitors. For six months he did not see another person. No mysterious mountain man showed up. He saw no hikers or hunters. He said he would not do it again.

I asked him about the solitude. “Did you talk to yourself?”

He said, “You really want to know this don’t you? Yes, I did. I had long conversations all day long. Arguments. Disagreements. Talked about staying up there forever. Talked about how nobody would ever believe anything about this.”

Other than living deliberately, nothing exceptionally spectacular happened to Jim. He had brought with him everything that he needed. An ax, matches and fuel, dry foods, a cooking pot, and utensils. Clothes, bedding, and books. He filled his days with the chore of survival and never got so uncomfortable he could not handle it.

He was relatively warm in a cabin with a stove, even if the outside temperature dipped well below zero, he was going to be fine. It wasn’t like he was walking across Antarctica.

Seriously, Mike, who would do that?

Harpreet Chandi, that is who.

In case you have not yet heard about the indomitable Captain Chandi, allow me to bend your ear a bit further. Last year she walked 700 miles from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole. I first read her story in National Geographic and have been a big fan ever since. Only a handful of other people have done this. Starting at Hercules Inlet and pulling a 200-pound pulk with all of her survival gear, she made it to the bottom of the globe in 40 days. And she was all alone.

Now, she is doing it again, but going a bit farther than she did last year. Her plan is to cross the continent, about 1,100 miles in 70 - 75 days. As of this writing, Christmas Eve, she has already gone 500 miles in 41 days, so she is almost halfway across. She is basically on the same route as last time, starting at Hercules Inlet, and at the south pole she will likely step inside the station to visit with scientists and get a hot meal, before trudging back out on her journey to the other coast.

Where she will end her journey, I am not sure, but if she goes straight across the continent, it is likely that her destination will be the Davis Research Station. I do not see that information posted anywhere, but that is my guess. Her pace is behind that of last year's trek, probably because she is pulling more provisions on the sledge, about fifty pounds more. You can track her progress and listen to her satellite phone dispatches at her website.

At Polar Preet – Breaking Boundaries you can read her diary and read all about what inspires her to explore. Listening to her dispatches is truly inspirational. She speaks out to those who feel alone, who may be contemplating suicide, or who may think they are not good enough for whatever reason and urges them to carry on, find their next goal, and never quit. She tells about the days of whiteouts and cold winds and brilliant sunshine. She shouts out to schoolchildren who have sent her their own words of encouragement and authors of audiobooks who she is listening to. She saw a bird the other day, which I thought was spectacular.

Hearing that pushed me to learn that there are 46 species of birds in Antarctica! Something I never thought to look up before because I thought they only had penguins. There are no predators, like bears or wolves in Antarctica. The most dangerous things there are, well basically, everything else. Ice and snow, high winds, temperatures lower than anywhere else on earth, and no convenience stores. The list of things that can kill you is short and serious, and the list of things they don't have there is really long. Bring your own everything and pack out your garbage. And your poop.

Or you could train to be as tough as Preet and not have to worry about it. Someplace on her blog I read that she was taking in 5,000 calories a day and processing all of it, which meant to me that she never has to go. If I interpreted that correctly - WOW!

You don't get much more impressive than this young lady, that is for sure. She is doing something truly amazing, for a second time. She has forged a name for herself in our history books and as a British military officer, was named Woman of the Year at the Women in Defence Awards. It took a lot of training for her to get where she is today, alone in the midnight sun at the bottom of the world, completely self-reliant. I could not do what she is doing. Maybe I might have years ago, but it never occurred to me to do such a thing, and I think I like shorter hikes in warmer weather just a bit better.

Remember too, that she is not just skiing across hardpacked ridged snow pulling everything behind her. Her trip is a lot of uphill climbing. The south pole is 9,301 feet above sea level, and the ice is estimated to be ice 8,900 feet thick. Before she gets to the other coast, she will have to climb even higher, before finding her way down. There can be crevasses thousands of feet deep. It is not safe.

It is great that we have explorers like Preet to share their adventures with us, to send out those dispatches and do scientific study, and it is sad to hear that Antarctica's greatest threats come from the rest of the world who will never see it in person. So, this year, my holiday wish is for you to please send a message to Polar Preet and give her some words of encouragement. Because she is the one person I know of, who is definitely alone this year. Use the contact form on her website and just let her know you heard about her adventure and say something nice. I am sure she will get the message from her sister-in-law, who is monitoring the site and uploading the dispatches.

If you know anybody else who is alone, you should call them, too.

Thanks for reading, and to all, a good night!