Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Trust and Obey (don't write about the song) (05/21/15)
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TITLE: 50 feet of rope | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jack Taylor
05/26/15 -
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“Just do it!” shouted Shackleton as the wind threatened to hurl his companion off the cliff face of the South Georgian island. “The whaling station at Stromness is just ahead.”
“You crazy Irishman,” yelled the man suspended precariously from a ten foot length of rope. “We’ve been scaling and repelling cliffs almost 30 hours. Do you really think you can conquer the whole world with a 50 foot piece of rope and a carpenter’s adze? This rock face is sheer ice.”
Frank Worsley, navigator and ship’s captain, shouted from behind, “Tom Crean, those 70 Huskies of yours, still down in Antarctica, know how to obey better than you. What kind of a dog-handler are you if you can’t push the limits a little?”
Crean looked over the five hundred foot drop they’d already scaled. “Nice jab, Captain Frank Worsley, navigator extraordinaire. Tell me again, who captained the Endurance into the ice so that it got crushed? Even my dogs couldn’t go 32 miles over this terrain.”
Ernest Shackleton dug his bare fingers into the slippery traverse and reached out for the carpenter’s adze. “Give me that thing. If nature doesn’t build a path for you then you build it for yourself. Trust me and do what I say.”
Crean swung himself onto a small ledge he’d fashioned and released the adze into the frostbitten hands of the expedition leader. “I reckon you brought us those 15 days through the storms. I’m the one who begged you to go on this suicide mission.”
Worsley pulled the slack of the rope free to swing it over to Shackleton. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t become a doctor like your father? Who wants to be stuck inside with sickly specimens of humanity instead of living freely outdoors? I have to admit, I am almost sick of salted fish and seal blubber.”
“Don’t be putting down my father just because he was a doctor,” said Shackleton. “He was first a potato farmer. When the potatoes in Ireland failed he went to medical college in Dublin. He was already thirty-three. When my mom got sick he raised the lot of us with my grandmother. He taught me never to quit and always to obey.”
Crean held the rope taut as Shackleton traversed across a small gape in the rock face. “Whatever made you want to be a sailor? I know you were on the sea since you were sixteen. Didn’t you ever want to stay home with your wife?”
Shackleton watched Crean swing across and join him for the last challenge before the crest. “I’ve tried politics, business, studies. The first time I felt the sea breeze in my face as we rounded the southern cape I was hooked.” He turned and looked back over the endless stretch of sea surrounding the island. “When you walk where no man has walked before you know there’s a God. And if I know there’s a God who is there then I have no fear to follow him and to take my men with me.”
“And so here we are,” said Crean as he pointed to a seemingly impassable ice sheet.
Shackleton hacked a foothold in the icy cliff face and then another. He attached the rope to a spike and pushed himself up on that toe hold. Half an hour later he rolled over onto a ledge and threw the rope down. “It isn’t like walking all the way across Antarctica but it’ll be something to tell your grandchildren.”
“Sir Ernest,” shouted Worsley, “I know King Edward knighted you for taking us closer to the south pole than anyone before and I know he was impressed that you took us up the largest active volcano but what do you think he’d give you for this?”
“We’ve gone over 700 kilometers in a lifeboat in the most dangerous of seas,” replied Shackleton. “We’ve been away from land almost 500 days. I’m only 42 and I have a lot of the world left to see. We didn’t finish that 3000 km from sea to sea across the pole yet."
Crean reached the crest of the last hill and looked down on the whaling station below. “We’ve got 22 men still waiting for rescue. We’ve got work to do. You’re not a hero until you bring every man home.”
“The men have been on their own for almost two years so we better get on with it. If they just do what I told them they’ll survive.”
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