On the first page of my diary, I wrote "I WAS BORN TO BE A WANDERER" in big block letters. Most of what she wrote went over my head, though I did come away with a vague aspiration to turn my loneliness into adventure. Marian's chapter said she'd been raised by her uncle, and when I read that, I got goose bumps because I was being raised (kind of) by my uncle.Ī nice librarian dug up Marian's book for me-The Sea, the Sky, etc.-and I pored over it like an astrologist consulting a star chart, hopeful that Marian's life would somehow explain my own, tell me what to do and how to be. I think I might have been looking for someone to tell me a plane crash wasn't such a bad way to go-though if anyone actually ever had, I would have thought they were full of shit. My parents had gone up in a plane and never come back, and it turned out a decent percentage of the brave ladies had met the same fate. I only knew about Marian Graves because one of my uncle's girlfriends liked to dump me at the library when I was a kid, and one time I picked up a random book called something like Brave Ladies of the Sky. I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought. I thought I would believe I'd completed something, but now I doubt anything can be completed. I thought I would believe I'd seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life. It isn't how I thought it would be, now that the circle is almost closed, the beginning and end held apart by one last fearsome piece of water. What I have done is foolish I had no choice but to do it. I knew the horizon could never be caught but still chased it. I want a respite of stars.Ĭircles are wondrous because they are endless. I can think only about the plane, the wind, and the shore, so far away, where land begins again. I don't regret anything, but I will if I let myself. I wish the line were a smooth meridian, a perfect, taut hoop, but our course was distorted by necessity: the indifferent distribution of islands and airfields, the plane's need for fuel. I will try to pull the circle up from below, bringing the end to meet the beginning. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won't be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge-a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave.
Little America III, Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica
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