Amy McCulloch wanted to go to Antarctica, her husband didn't. She went anyway. Photo / Dennis Rochel, Unsplash
Author Amy McCulloch recounts how her first marriage ended in disaster after a trip to Antarctica gave her a new lease on life.
Standing on the deck of the MS Expedition on the way to Antarctica, I felt totally alone. All I could think as I watched Ushuaia, which is Argentina’s most southerly city, disappear was, “I just left my husband on another continent – what have I done?” I was devastated that it had come to this. This was never part of the plan.
My husband and I had been married 18 months earlier, though we’d been a couple for nearly a decade. We got together when I was 21, and he just knew me, he understood the person I was and how I thought and worked. We had everything in common, from what we’d want to do on a weekend to the way we wanted to plan our home.
We’d always talked about doing a big trip, to make memories and build a solid foundation before starting a family and moving forward with our careers. Neither of us had ever visited South America, so that became the obvious choice.
We booked ourselves onto a six-month trip, starting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and then travelling all the way to the bottom of Argentina, and on up to Quito, Ecuador.
Landing in Rio de Janeiro, we were swept up by the incredible atmosphere of carnival. There was lots of partying, dancing all night, and watching the sun come up over the parade. Everything we’d hoped the trip would be seemed to stretch out before us.
However, it soon became clear that what each of us wanted from this adventure was very different. While I was excited about exploring the natural wonders of South America, he wanted to keep partying. I’d be up at 3am to spot jaguars in the Pantanal, just as he was getting back from a night of drinking. I was excited about seeing the Iguazu Falls, Patagonia and Machu Picchu, while he would rather experience the nightlife and make new friends.
After 10 years of living together and loving each other, a gap started to grow between us. I suppose I hadn’t really noticed it before, because we’d had the routine of our normal daily lives, of going to work, of coming back to have dinner together, of seeing the same people. Once we were travelling, it was easier to see all the ways in which we had changed and grown, and how we’d become different people along the way.
We met other travellers and ended up hearing about their adventures. Talking to one couple who’d just visited Antarctica, I was fascinated. I’d ruled it out because of the cost, but this couple told me that the local agents in Argentina often have last-minute cancellations, so it’s sometimes possible to get a cabin on a ship at a discounted rate. I thought that would make our trip truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
When I broached the idea to my husband, he was uninterested. He’d rather spend the 10 days it’d take to visit Antarctica with the other people on our trip, particularly a woman he’d formed a bond with. I could tell that he was falling in love with her and it made me so panicked. However, I justified it by telling myself that we were married and I didn’t have anything to worry about. But he was spending more and more time with her, while I felt like he and I were pulling apart.
The argument rumbled on as we got closer to Argentina, until eventually I managed to get some discounted tickets that would see us leave just as we got to Ushuaia.
Faced with the choice between taking a leap with me on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and staying with the group, my husband decided to stay put while I left.
At first, I told myself that it’d be OK. “Married people don’t have to be joined at the hip, we can do different things and still come back to each other,” I rationalised.
But I was beginning to realise that our priorities were clearly different. By taking ourselves out of the routine of our daily lives, we’d unmasked the fact that what we wanted from our future had diverged. Even as we’d planned our wedding, we had never talked about what a future together would look like.
As I watched Ushuaia slipping off the horizon, I felt a deep sense of doubt, shame and regret. I was entering 10 days of no communication with my new husband. I asked myself why I couldn’t have just waited until he was ready to come on this trip, while another side of me was saying, “No, you have to grab life by the horns and take opportunities as they arise.” Still, I didn’t know if I was capable of being on my own.
After a really stormy night when I couldn’t stop imagining what my husband was doing and thinking, I got up and went out on deck. A shape appeared on the horizon. I stood gazing at it, unable to understand what I was seeing, then suddenly I realised – it was an iceberg.
A shiver of excitement ran through me: here I was on a ship heading to the very bottom of the world. From that moment, I saw something magical every hour – penguins leaping out of the water like dolphins, glaciers bigger than buildings, hundreds of whales surrounding the boat. I even took a dip in the freezing water, and felt any remnants of shame and guilt wash away. It opened my eyes to the wonders that exist in the world, and I realised this was the kind of experience I wanted to seek out.
Returning to Ushuaia was tough. We’d had practically no contact while I was away, since there was no phone or internet on the ship, and it became starkly obvious that things had changed. He was not interested in talking to me about my experiences, or seeing my photographs, or hearing about my trip. I felt, and was made to feel, very isolated. My husband had spent the time creating different memories with other people – memories I wasn’t a part of.
All of a sudden, we had two different travelling adventures that couldn’t connect. I had hoped we would get to share and delight in each other’s experiences, but we couldn’t. There was this crevasse between us that gradually got wider until it was impossible to cross over again into what we had before.
We continued the trip for another three months; back up the continent to Quito because we’d already paid for it, but it was clear that things weren’t right. Though both of us tried to fight for our marriage, I think we both knew that it was over.
We got back in September of 2016; by October, we’d separated and he told me he wanted a divorce. We finalised the paperwork by the end of the year. I needed to be with someone who would say “yes” to experiencing moments of wonder, otherwise I’d be better off alone.
While I was devastated by the end of my marriage, I knew that I wanted more of what I’d found in Antarctica. I started hiking and climbing and exploring. I wanted to push my boundaries. That led me to the “death zone” on Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest mountain; I ran the Marathon des Sables, 155 miles through the Sahara Desert – things I would never have dreamt of doing had I stayed the person that I was in my first marriage. I was more capable than I had ever imagined.
My new book, Midnight, is a thriller set on a ship bound for Antarctica. It opens with a murder, so it certainly isn’t directly based on my experiences, but the trip heavily influenced my writing.
I had to confront a lot of things that I had buried about how hard I had found that time. It ended up being very difficult for me to relive those memories, even in fiction – so much so that I found the book very tricky to write. I always want to root my novels in a sense of emotion, and I had to dig into that, but it took a lot out of me.
I don’t regret my choices. My husband and I had been together so long, he could only see one version of me. Ultimately, what makes a marriage last is the ability to grow together, and we simply couldn’t. I had closed myself off from a lot of possibilities, not believing in myself, and it took reaching rock bottom – and the bottom of the world – to realise it. But after I’d taken that leap, I was on a path to the future that I wanted to live. What I have realised is that once you say yes to those opportunities and are willing to push your boundaries, you never know where life will take you.
- As told to Jack Rear
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