Final voyage of 2024: ANTARCTICA

Musings on darkness from an Alaskan who survives by escaping winter, plans to sail aboard a tall ship to the southern continent, and a cute dog pic

Low light in winter from a public use cabin outside Anchorage.

Staring down the barrel of darkness that comes with Alaska winter has been particularly humbling this year. I am sun HUNGRY, my friends.

Maybe it is because I skipped this season last year almost entirely and am now shocked by the casual shift toward dimness.

Maybe it’s because I’d forgotten to load up on Vitamin D early on and the exhaustion of low light is taking a physical toll.

Or maybe because I’ve met failure in many new forms this year: I’ve been an unlucky sailor, a bad fisherman, an inattentive social worker. And so when winter rolled around, I was both prepared and not quite done yet with what I’d wanted to accomplish in 2024.

But, you see, winter has a nasty habit of showing up whether you want it or not.

It is also a most beautiful season. A necessary season.

It is a time to re-set. To rest and to hygge. To retreat inward after a frenetic summer. I painted every surface of my bedroom—ceiling, closet, door, walls, trim—a rich, dark brown and now I fall asleep each night inside a chocolate bar. I am wrapped in mud.

The people who thrive in winter know how important it is to maintain a routine, to get outside, to visit with friends and family. Most folks I know have some kind of escape plan so they can soak some sunshine into their sun-starved bodies. I am no different. After all, the cold temperatures that accompany winter don’t bother me quite so much as the lack of light.

I like inclement weather; I’m drawn to it like a bad accident. I can’t look away. I live for a good terrible weather forecast. Give me a torrential rainstorm and I’ll tell you what it feels like to get a hug from an angry rainforest. Soak me in seawater and blow me over with hurricane winds and I’ll tell you a story about what it feels like to come back to life.

Right now my front yard is blanketed with the most delicious foot of freshly fallen snow. My truck is blocked in by a berm I have already shoveled away twice in the past 24 hours.

Early this morning, I drove for two hours on nearly empty streets after midnight to fetch a friend from the airport and I must admit that by the end of the ride, I was feeling confident and boozy from fun of 4-wheeling it through streets burdened with powder. Here is the winter we love. Caked in snow, fresh and ready for a good romp.

And yet, there was a time in my life when I lived even closer toward the North Pole.

“Did I really live all those years in Fairbanks? How did I manage it?”

These are the questions I ask myself as I remember my struggle with the dark months at 64 degrees North. I’d watch the thermometer plunge to temperatures below zero and feel amazed that I’d still want to go for a run or a ski.

I’ll never forget gliding through the disorganized black spruce forests of Goldstream Valley under the moonlight of late afternoon with a wild animal dog wearing fleece booties velcro’d to her paws. She really did believe we’d been dropped into heaven. There were days I agreed.

After all, imagine a place where all dogs are encouraged to roam free, are invited to all the best parties, and your fellow citizens embrace bad weather like it is their long lost love?

Sure, people lose their minds up there a fair amount of the time too.

I sure did.

In those years, the physical toll levied by darkness translated into an even more challenging mental health struggle. And boy, those times were pretty tough to shake off. But in the process of climbing out of that hole, I came to know myself in a new, more playful way.

I learned to take myself less seriously. To love harder. To be okay with taking a path that might differ from what others expect.

I learned to keep on LIVIN, man.

“Let me tell you this, the older you do get, the more rules they are going to try to get you to follow. You just got to keep living, man. L-I-V-I-N.” -Matthew McConaughey

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AND SO:

I earned myself a get out of jail free card from winter blues and am not afraid to play it. I owe my current strength to those years of struggle. And I owe that past self the current pursuit of unrealized dreams.

I’ve hatched a fairly decent light therapy plan. Thank you southern hemisphere and frequent flyer miles. On top of my banana split-me-out-of-here plans, I’ve got work projects that promise to bring fresh light to my darkened world.

It involves boats, a return to a place I travelled as a teenager and came home with this song on repeat, a reunion with a college bestie at her home away from home, and a jaunt into a jungle with my adventurous mama.

A combination of old and new. I know you want to know all the deets, but you’ll just have to be patient, my friend. For now, I’ll just let you in on the first destination:

Tierra del Fuego.

I touch down Dec. 13 in Ushuaia, which has been describes as: “the end of the world, the beginning of everything.”

I’m looking forward to seeing what everything feels like.

From here, I will embark with fellow intrepids and sailors on a crossing of the Drake Passage aboard the tall ship Bark Europa. Europa is a 56 meter square-rigged sailboat built in 1910 as a German light ship (a vessel that served as a floating lighthouse).

While she has updated interior, electronics, and access to new marine safety technology, the way Europa is sailed hasn’t changed for decades. (I admit I did peak into the engine specs (it runs on two 365 Cat engines.)

A few interesting facts about Bark Europa:

• The max hull speed is just over 13 knots

• It takes about 45 minutes to hoist all sails

• It takes about 5 minutes to take all sails down

• Including all sheets, halyards, clew and buntlines, brasses, and mooring lines there is 5.5 kilometers of rope/line on board

• Europa can sail on a 65 degrees close hauled course

For the 22 days of our journey from Ushuaia to Antarctica’s Shetland Islands to Ushuaia, we will be immersed in a world I’ve dreamed of visiting since I was a 5th grader in Ms. Ramey’s after school explorers’ book club with my dad. It was there that we read Endurance by Alfred Lansing.

I’ve been scrambling to find a way to get myself to Antarctica ever since, but it was this year that the plans lined up in a way that made sense.

View of Bark Europa from somewhere above in the rigging. Photo by Tobias Fischer on Unsplash

I’ll have plenty to share I’m sure. This promises to be a wild ride. You can follow the ship here if you are interested. Please do let me know what kind of questions you have! I’ll do my best to try and answer them.

Stay tuned for dispatches.

Keep on L-I-V-I-N my friends!

-Brittany

Sweet Sadie loved winter and winter loved her.