As much as I enjoy writing my blog, there are times when the neurons in my brain are on vacation and not much help in deciding what to write about. I have decided to share with you a chain of events that have been and are very important in my life. Perhaps you will have something similar in your life.

The year was 1897, and the Southern Ocean, circling the Antarctic, was doing what it is famous for. The waves were huge and the ship being tossed around was the Belgica. It was on the way to the Antarctic to try to be the first to locate the south magnetic pole. The ship became caught in the ice and held over winter. They didn’t reach the pole.

In 1898, the ship and the men that survived, escaped the ice and returned back to Europe. One of those men was a young sailor named Amundsen. He would later become one of my heroes.

You’re wondering why all that is important to me? In 1898, while those explorers were escaping with their lives from the Antarctic, my grandmother was giving birth to a son on a farm in Southern California. He was her tenth child and they named him John Reseck, later to become my father.

In 1911, Amundsen and Scott, another Antarctic explorer, had a race to the geophysical south pole. Amundsen got there three weeks before Scott. About an 800 miles round trip. The Scott party of four men were returning to their starting point which was a sturdy hut, were stopped by a storm which froze all of them to death, just 11 miles from the hut and safety. That was in 1912. The hut was left just as the men had left it in 1911, when they started their trip.

In 1958, I was near the hut with Dr. Miller, studying the nearby penguin colony as a member of a five-man team of biologists. We were the first sent by the USA to study the life in the Antarctic and its coastal oceans, when we got caught a storm. The storm collapsed our two-man tent and we had to take shelter in Scott’s hut or meet the same fate he and his men had just 46 years earlier. We slept on the wooden floor in our sleeping bags being extremely careful not to disturb anything. The hut is now protected from anyone. Only historians are allowed near it.

A few years ago, I was looking through a big book on the history of the Antarctic. I turned a page and there was a photo of me with my name under it. I was shocked! Then I became delighted. I then realized that this was a history book, and I was in it. Oh my God! Am I really so old that I am talked about in a history book? All of these emotions passed through me in about a ten second time period. I looked in the mirror and confirmed that I was old enough. They said that I was the first person to dive through the sea ice of the Antarctic’s Ross Sea. I thought about it. What a horror to be listed with those other men as being the first to do anything. I was delighted again.