“Anyway,” concluded Mr. Perry, “since Admiral Byrd wasn’t all that happy seeing me around—I guess I reminded him of his near-criminal negligence for gassing himself up at his much-ballyhooed ‘Advanced Base’ and making other men risk their lives to save his behind—for my next and last winter there, instead of my wintering on the main base with the other men, Admiral Byrd ordered me to ‘observe the penguins’ while staying alone in Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds. March to October nineteen thirty-five.”
“Observe the penguins that had already left,” I said.
“Yes.” Mr. Perry folded his arms as he chuckled, and again I could see how powerful his forearms still were. They also showed several livid scars. Old scars. “But in the autumn, before it got too ungodly cold, I could smell the overpowering guano stench of their rookeries every day. But one gets used to bad smells.”
“It must have felt like real punishment,” I said to him again, still feeling the horror of such isolation and moved to real anger at Admiral Byrd’s pettiness. “Not the guano, I mean. The sense of solitary confinement.”
Perry only smiled at me. “I loved it,” he said. “Those winter months at Shackleton’s hut were some of the most wonderful days I’ve ever spent. Dark and cold, yes…very cold at times, since the Cape Royds hut wasn’t really designed to heat for just one person, and the wind found its way in through a thousand cracks and crevices every dark day there…but wonderful. I used canvas and Shackleton’s old crates to create a little cubby near the door where I could stay a little warm, although some mornings the wolverine fur around the opening of my sleeping bag was almost covered with frost. But the experience itself…wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.”
“Did you climb any mountains that winter?” I asked. I realized it was a stupid question as soon as I asked it. Who can climb mountains in the dark when it’s sixty or seventy degrees below zero?
Amazingly, he nodded again. “Shackleton’s men climbed Mount Erebus—at least to the rim of the volcano—in nineteen oh-eight,” he said. “But I climbed it solo three times, by different routes. Once at night. Oh, and although they credit the first winter climb of Erebus to a British climber, Roger Mear, just six years ago in nineteen eighty-five, I climbed Erebus twice in the winter of ’thirty-five. I don’t think that’s in any record book. I guess I just never bothered to mention it to anyone who might have written it down.”
He fell silent and I also stayed silent, wondering again if this nice old man was bullshitting me. Then he stood, lifted his old wooden-staff ice axe, and said, “Just a few months ago…this past January…an ironworker at McMurdo Station, a guy named Charles Blackmer, did a solo ascent of Mount Erebus in seventeen hours. It was in various alpine journals because it set an official record. Beating the older recorded times by hours and hours.”
“Did you pay attention to your time climbing the mountain fifty-six years earlier?” I asked.
Mr. Perry grinned. “Thirteen hours, ten minutes. But then, I’d done it before.” He laughed and shook his head. “But this doesn’t help you with your research, Dan. What do you want to hear about South Polar exploration?”
I sighed, realizing how unprepared I was as an interviewer. (And, in some ways, as a man.) “What can you tell me?” I said. “I mean something that I might not get from books.”
Perry rubbed his chin. Some white bristles there scraped audibly. “Well,” he said softly, “when you look at the stars near the horizon…especially when it’s really cold…they tend to jitter around. Jumping left, then right…all while they jiggle up and down at the same time. I think it has something to do with masses of super-cold air lying over the land or frozen sea acting like a lens that’s being moved…”
I was scribbling madly.
Mr. Perry chuckled. “Can this trivia possibly be of help in writing a novel?”
“You never know,” I said, still writing.
As it turned out, the jiggling stars near the horizon appeared in a sentence that spanned the bottom of the first page and top of the second page of my novel The Terror, which came out sixteen years later and which was about Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage debacle, not about Antarctica at all.
But Mr. Perry had died of his cancer long before The Terror was published.
I found out later that Mr. Perry had been on several famous climbing expeditions, and various Alaskan and South American expeditions, and to K2 as well as the three-year South Polar expedition with Admiral Byrd we discussed that summer day in 1991. Our “interview”—mostly wonderful conversation about travel, courage, friendship, life, death, and fate—lasted about four hours. And I never asked one right question the whole time: a question that could have told me about his amazing Himalayan experience in 1925.
I could tell that Mr. Perry was tiring by the end of our long talk. He was also speaking with more of a wheeze in his voice.
Noticing me noticing, he said, “They removed a chunk of one of my lungs last winter. Cancer. The other’s probably packing up, too, but the cancer’s metastasizing elsewhere so probably the lung won’t be what gets me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the absolute inadequacy of the words.
Mr. Perry shrugged. “Hey, if I reach ninety, I’ll have beaten a lot of odds, Dan. More than you know.” He chuckled. “The pisser is that I have lung cancer but I never smoked. Never. Not once.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“The added irony is that I moved to Delta so that I would be just minutes away from the mountains,” added Mr. Perry. “But now I end up wheezing and gasping if I climb a low hill. Just climbing a few hundred feet of pasture at the edge of town now reminds me of trying to climb and breathe above twenty-eight thousand feet.”
I still didn’t know what to say—the loss of a lung to cancer must be a terrible thing—and I was too dull-witted to ask him where and when he might have climbed above 28,000 feet. The region above 8,000 meters, around 25,000 feet, is called the Death Zone for good reason: every minute a climber is at such altitude, his body is becoming weaker, he is coughing, gasping, always short of breath, and the climber is unable to recharge energy even by sleeping (which is all but impossible at such altitude anyway). I later wondered if Mr. Perry was just using that altitude—28,000 feet—as an example of how hard it was for him to breathe now or if he’d actually ever ventured that high. I knew that Mount Vinson, the tallest mountain in Antarctica, was just a little over 16,000 feet high.
Before I got around to asking an intelligent question, Mr. Perry clapped my shoulder. “I’m not complaining. I just love irony. If there is a God of this poor, sad mess of a universe it’s got to be Bitch Irony. Say…you’re a published writer.”
“Yes,” I said. My voice may have sounded wary. The most common thing that published writers are approached for by new acquaintances is to be invited to help that would-be writer either (a) find an agent, (b) get published, or (c) both of the above.
“You have a literary agent and all that?” said Perry.
“Yes?” I was even more tentative now. After just four hours I admired the man greatly, but amateur writing is amateur writing. Almost impossible to get published.
“I’ve been thinking of writing something…”
There it was. In a way, I regretted hearing those familiar words. They were the punch line of too many conversations with new acquaintances. But I also felt a sense of relief. If he hadn’t already written his book or whatever, what were the chances that he could do so now, almost ninety years old and dying of cancer?
Mr. Perry saw my face, read my thoughts, and laughed loudly. “Don’t worry, Dan. I’m not going to ask you to get something of mine published. I’m not sure I’d want it published.”