Adventure Is Just Bad Planning (Roald Amundsen)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You said it yourself:
adventure is just bad planning —
which means the Pole
was not an adventure
the Pole was a schedule
maintained by dog sleds
and depots
laid every degree of latitude
and the depots
smelled like pemmican and frozen rope
and the specific stillness
of a cache
that has been waiting at minus forty
for the one man organized enough
to arrive
on the day he said he would

[Verse 2]
The other expedition brought ponies —
ponies to the Antarctic,
animals that sink in snow
and cannot eat the rations
and die in the cold
that the dogs were bred for
and the choosing of the ponies
over the dogs
was romance over preparation
and romance killed five men
on the return
from a Pole they reached
thirty-four days
after you had already left it
and the leaving was the part
that mattered:
anyone can arrive
the question is whether the planning
includes the getting back

[Chorus]
You learned from the people
who live in the cold —
the clothes, the dogs,
the technique of moving
through a landscape
that wants you dead
and does not negotiate —
and the learning was not humility
it was the recognition
that survival in a place
that has no margin for error
requires borrowing
from the ones
who have already solved the problem
rather than insisting
on solving it again
from the elegant beginning
your national pride would prefer

[Outro]
You disappeared in the Arctic
searching for someone else —
flew north to find a lost crew
and the plane went down
and the body was never recovered
and the not-recovering
is the only unplanned thing
in the biography:
a man who had calculated
every variable
between himself
and the end of the Earth
finally met the one variable
the planning could not reach
and the variable was the sky
and the sky
does not file a schedule