People embrace extremity for all kinds of reasons. Aimee Levitt ended up in the Antarctic because, as she tells us, she was angry. Angry at her job situation, angry at what her life had become, angry at herself for letting things get this way. So: extremity. Buffeted by cold and wind, yet buffered from a world that was lurching toward a pandemic. No easy resolutions here, though—just a plainspoken excavation of the interior journey that goes along with a physical one.
I went home and Googled. It turns out there are a lot of ways you can go dogsledding. You can go for an afternoon, or for a couple of days. You can stay in a nice, warm cabin or at a lodge where they give you elaborate meals and hot chocolate spiked with whiskey when you come back from your afternoon with the dogs (you could probably get that in a flask for the sled, too). You can get a full spa treatment, with massages. For some reason, I rejected all of these. I’m not sure why. I think I was still thinking of the two women sleeping in a tent they had hauled from Istanbul to Tibet on the back of a bicycle. Real adventure is hard.
And that was how I landed on Outward Bound. I read the website very carefully. I wasn’t quite sure it would make me into a true adventurer or even a better, more confident person, but there were dogs. They also said no one had ever died on one of their expeditions. I was sold.
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