ON THE MARK

MARK BYERS

I’m on edge. The normal excitement for upcoming adventure is colored with a tincture of fear born of an unknown response to a worldwide pandemic with which we are all too familiar. This adventure has been in the planning stages for two years, but as Mr. Robert Burns said, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.” With just three and a half days to go before this rocket launches, I am only cautiously optimistic that all systems are “go.” It started when my friend Dave of Union Beach, NJ took a trip to Antarctica. A diver and pilot, he’d been assigned to McMurdo Station in his youth and as a more “seasoned” fellow, he wanted to return to the seventh continent as a tourist. He went as passenger of a small cruise line out of Ushuaia, Argentina and the photos of Tierra del Fuego, the Drake Passage, the Antarctic Peninsula, and his ice dives were so stunning that we were seriously jealous. When we go somewhere neat, we say, “We’d come back here.” Dave is no different, except he doesn’t muck about. His air combat motto is “You don’t turn to engage, you turn to kill” and in this case, he not only vowed to go back, but to do so immediately. When he announced his intentions to return to Antarctica in ’21 and invited friends to accompany him, it took us about a second to say, “Count us in!” That, plus a healthier-thannormal deposit got us a twin stateroom reservation on a 90-meter ship. But those were the naive days of ’19, before COVID reared its ugly head and threw the world into chaos. Still, thinking we’d pass the “two weeks to atten the curve” and then two more and two more, we gured we had enough time for this whole thing to blow over before we had to board a plane to Buenos Aires. And it almost worked: more and more people were being vaccinated, treatments were re ned, borders were opening, and ights were… ying. Just a little over one month before our scheduled departure, Argentina opened its borders to everyone with a vaccine and a negative test.

But the light at the end of the tunnel was almost a train and still might be, in the form of a man named “Omicron.” As if travel to Argentina wasn’t laden with enough restrictions: special health insurance, including repatriation and COVID isolation, plus rapid PCR test results 72 hours prior to departure. Scads of documentation on vaccinations and health status were required, as if Argentina wasn’t quite sure for what to ask, so they defaulted to asking for everything. As a rm believer in preparedness, and as a two-time loser in the battle with seasickness, I scheduled an appointment to arrange for heavy-duty anti-nausea pills, pills for traveler’s diarrhea, and so on. The minute a vaccine booster was available, Betsy and I rushed to get it. To counter the infamously capricious weather of the continent, we packed the latest in layering technology. What’s that? There’s a 30 lb. weight limit for checked bags on Aerolineas (50 lb. on United)? And 18 lb. for a carryon? Repack, weigh, take stuff out, reweigh. Lithium batteries can’t go in checked bags? Repack and reweigh. Liquids less than 3.2 ounces and in ziplock bags, yadda yadda yadda. I feel like a terrier in a circus, being urged through ever-smaller aming hoops. Now, here we are, just days before departure, prepacked and prepared with just one more aming hoop to negotiate: a negative result on a PCR test less than 72 hours before entry to Argentina. After two years of planning and deposits and questionnaires and begging insurance for speci c language on a letter, we’re now down to not getting ill before someone can stick a giant Q-tip up our noses and run an expensive ($250 a pop, not paid by insurance) test on it to make sure we aren’t playing host to Lord Omicron. Add to that the recent capricious and angry response of airlines to just about any perturbation, plus the normal vagaries of weather and airplanes breaking and the ill mood of both their staffs and the passengers and I wonder if it won’t take a minor miracle to get this mission off the ground. I am literally losing sleep, but instead of being giddy with anticipation, I’m fraught with fear. Such is the way of Adventure in the Time of COVID. ,