A sad realization struck me after visiting Royal B.C. Museum’s Race to the End of the Earth exhibit.
I will never, ever date Jennifer Aniston.
Ha ha. Just kidding. No, the realization was, I will never, ever be a hero.
Well, there’s a tiny outside chance. If a dog fell into a slow-moving river, I might jump in and save it. But only if it was a warm summer day — and it was a super-cute dog, like a Boston terrier or something.
Race to the End of the Earth is all about heroism. We’re talking real-deal, industrial-strength heroism. The show chronicles the adventures of Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen, who led manful expeditions to the South Pole a century ago. We also caught the Imax film Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, which is about Ernest Shackleton’s über-heroic exploits.
It’s impossible to exaggerate how mind-roastingly difficult these journeys were. Which made me wonder, “Hey, why’d you guys undertake them in the first place?”
Scott’s men ended up dragging 600-pound sledges across the Antarctic ice. At times, they burned 7,000 calories a day (and consumed only 4,600). They wore unfashionable outfits made from bits of reindeer fur. On a good day, they puttered about in miserable wooden huts, one of which is carefully re-created by the museum.
What’s worse, Scott and two pals got stuck in a blizzard and perished in a horrific manner. They were found months later frozen solid in their sleeping bags. Heroes to the end, they’d written farewell notes to their loved ones, chock full of noble thoughts.
This kind of gentlemanly action is all about British pluck and honour, the sort epitomized by Biggles, the English comic-book character, and Tom Brown of Tom Brown’s School Days fame. (My favourite character in Tom Brown’s School Days was not the Biggles-like Tom but caddish Flashman, who had loads of fun boozing and cavorting with loose women.)
Think of our modern-day “hardships:” There’s something wrong with my iPhone. It’s too hard to figure out my PVR. The Air-Miles people have scheduled inconveniently long layovers for our vacation flight to Paris. Eating too many cashews has made me bloated.
Compare this to poor old Scott in his primitive 1912 sleeping bag, writing a goodbye letter to his family while he turns into a human ice cube.
If you want an even more vivid sense of what dubious joys the South Pole holds in store, check out Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure. Seeing the Antarctic on an Imax screen six storeys high will convince you this region is the frozen armpit of the world.
Shackleton and crew sail off from Old Blighty in jolly spirits. But then their ship gets caught in ice and is crushed to smithereens.
After this, there’s lots of marching about on ice floes, yanking lifeboats across ice and rowing in frigid oceans. They finally reach some God-forsaken, penguin-infested island. And then Shackleton decides he and a few hardy souls must sail 1,300 kilometres to seek help from a whaling station.
After surviving hurricane-whipped seas, they reach another island. And then — get this — Shackleton and two chums must hike continuously for 36 hours over ice-covered mountains to reach the whaling station in homemade hiking boots. I think they used ship’s nails for cleats.
For Shackleton, it was just one bad news story after another. The Imax flick reminded me of the Monty Python skit in which elderly Yorkshiremen complain about their childhoods, trying to outdo each other in the hardship department. (“We used to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill everyday for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a bottle. If we were lucky.”)
At the museum, you can take a “personality test” to see how suited you are for Antarctic trips. One of the questions is: “Winds of up to 300 km/h have been clocked in Antarctica, and the sound is intense. Would this bother you?”
Oh yes. For I’m no hero. Unless it’s a cute dog or something. On a warm summer day.
Race to the End of the Earth is at the Royal B.C. Museum until Oct. 14.
