9.30

[Airbnb is sponsoring five volunteers (practically randos, they assure us) to go on a trip to the Antarctic plateau to look for evidence of microplastics. I saw the advertisement and nearly fell down. I have already submitted my application. It reads thusly:]

I am under no illusions that the proposed research trip is easy. I anticipate that it would be the most difficult thing I have ever done. I have read a half dozen books about polar explorers and research expeditions, watched documentaries, and perhaps overwhelmed with questions an Antarctic research pilot I happened to meet. Apsley Cherry-Garrard is a hero of mine. Some of my best anecdotes are about Shackleton. I know that our southern continent is inhospitable and terrifying, and yet not thirty seconds passed after I learned of this opportunity before I started writing this application.
There’s a reason why I felt I had to fill this out. I work with kids. I’m a teacher during the school year and a summer camp worker during the summer (I can’t get away from it; I’ve been at camp for ten years now). And every time I tell a student or camper that they’re capable of more than they could dream, I have to believe it. But to say a thing is very different from living it. I want to be able to tell my students that, when the opportunity showed itself, I ran full-bore at the most unachievable dream I had. If I can do that, I can implore them to do the same, to believe in themselves, to believe that other people will see their worth, that with a dash of luck even the stars are within reach (metaphorically).
Three years ago, I did something I believed to be similarly inconceivable. I piled everything I had onto a bicycle and set off from Massachusetts to get to California in three months. I was alone, with no direction and less cycling knowledge. Every day was a battle with fate, a desperate flailing for control of my life in an unfeeling world. It’s cliché, I know, but the sudden end to my marriage and a barely-constrained self-loathing had manifested in a four thousand mile journey to, I suppose, “find myself.” I didn’t. There’s nothing mystical in doing something grand and difficult. There is no secret to such a thing, only luck, privilege, and sacrifice. My battle with fate, giving in to luck and giving up comforts and company and money more and more every day in the pursuit of a wild dream—these things do not get easier. Certainly, they are difficult, but they merely are.
In short, the science is fascinating, the ideas are aspirational, the results likely to be troubling. The trip is worthwhile in itself. But as much as I would explain my scientific bona fides, as much as I would explain my outdoor acumen, it would simply eclipse the larger truth. It has long been my unspoken dream to travel on the Antarctic plateau. I scarcely dared breathe of such a thing for fear that even the possibility of it was too fragile, that my saying such a thing out loud may destroy the reality of it. I breathe it now.

[Hey, you should apply too. Why not? What could you possibly lose but time, and you stand to gain a dream. That's a trade I would take every day.]