Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. Photograph by Christopher Michel, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
I remember the taste of Mr. Bubble. I know the flavor of Milk-Bones. While I’ve forgotten so many details of my life and days, even if they’re implicit in my brain, it seems to me I’ve never forgotten a taste. In sixth grade I discovered a pleasurable combination of shrill taste and buzzing sensation (shrill and buzzing both technically characterizing sound, the faculty of whose perception seems to warrant extra adjectives) in the three-way interaction between a particular kind of metal, my braces, and tongue. The crimped metal band holding a pencil’s eraser (the unpainted silver kind, not the gold or Dixon Ticonderoga green) produced the effect, and since I spent a good deal of time at that age sitting at a desk, I savored the phenomenon frequently and without anyone noticing, because it’s socially acceptable—even a teacher-approved sign of concentration—to have a pencil in one’s mouth. The taste in my memory of early adolescence is an indescribable metallic sensation and the attendant flavors of a pencil—cedar, No. 2 graphite, rubber eraser.
The metal band is called a ferrule. In looking it up I found countless websites dedicated to pencils and their appreciation, even names for different effects produced by sharpening them, e.g., “collar creep,” which is that annoying thing where the wood extends to the vertex of the sharpened tip on one side.
Once a thing takes root and spreads on the web, you can pay a reputation-management service to get rid of it. A huckster with a Massachusetts accent will tell you that not only can he eliminate undesirable search results, he can also append the word genius to your name. Or award-winning. Rusty points out that once the desired result is achieved there’s every chance these unscrupulous people will then undo it just so you’ll pay them to fix it again, not to mention that they deepen the original damage in the process of assessing what to quote you for initially fixing it.
What aspirational criteria would I hitch to my name?
“kate colby” “looks & brains”
“kate colby” “pronoiac”
“kate colby” “good enough”
“kate colby” “well-slept”
I closely followed two professional adventurers’ recent competition to be the first to reach the South Pole solo and unassisted. They hauled all their gear in sleds and couldn’t even accept a cup of tea at the research station through which they passed. I followed the younger man’s progress on Instagram. Every night he posted a photo and an account of his day. He listened to music and podcasts along the way and got a satellite call from Paul Simon after plugging the motivational power of Graceland.
He carried bespoke protein bars from a nutrition lab that carefully assessed his caloric and nutritional needs. His synthetic garments were engineered to withstand unimaginable temperatures and wind speeds. How does this endeavor qualify as “unassisted” when these men were at the mercy of technology, biochemical research, digital entertainment, and thermal innovation? If they were naked and barefoot and born free of nutritional needs, maybe then I’d grant them authenticity.
The professional adventurer with the flashy social media presence got to the South Pole first. Now he posts about dreaming impossible dreams while hawking bespoke mattresses.
This essay is adapted from Paradoxx, forthcoming from Essay Press in September.
Kate Colby’s books of poetry and prose include I Mean and Dream of the Trenches. Her writing has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, Lana Turner, Literary Hub, and The Nation. She is an editor at Red Nun Press.