April 28, 2019

The feature photo was taken at Jökulsárlón Glacial Lagoon in Iceland back in 2015.

I was there.

I can imagine I’m not the only man in general with the desire to travel to Antarctica, because I’d love to simply walk off the face of the earth for the flat earthers to simply have their say on that matter. And this has nothing to do with them, but rather my uneducated curiosity about all that ice down there. How the f*ck does a regular person like me get down there anyway?

I’ll Google it later.

Maybe a cruise?

I’m only curious because I used to read about the continent in the ‘A’ book of my dad’s old World Book Encyclopedia collection. I read about airplanes, aerospace, aero-everything, and then there was Antarctica.

This was before wi-fi and cell phones. Matter of fact, this was before Windows 95. Maybe even the MS-DOS era. My father’s encyclopedia collection and my pets were all I had for leisure.

I played Batman a lot, too.

I often thought I was Batman.

Antarctica was a space in the encyclopedia where I wandered who cared to research on? As a kid, it was the void of the book, because what does a black boy like me got to do with Antarctica?

You’ve probably read how I used to ride my bike to the airport when I was seven. The adventures started by riding to grandma’s for breakfast every morning in the summer. She lived about three miles from PDX, and with my exploratory habits on my bike I knew one day I’d be riding further alone.

Everyday I’d ride closer to the airport, but stop at the overpass before the military base. I was afraid of heights, but one day I kept going. By eight years old I was biking to the runway off 82nd Way. I watched for hours as planes descended on their final approach and landed onto runway 28L. I also watched my dreams go into a bliss, asking myself, “what if one of these planes is coming from Antarctica?”

I guess this would be an easy start. A dream, and the airport.

-Budd