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The hows and the whys are the meat and potatoes of any story and I have a lot of German in my blood, so I understand how important meat and potatoes are. How did I end up with a job that sails me to Antarctica?

So a guy walks into a bar…

Well, not precisely, but sort of. Actually, it all started with a phone call on a hot afternoon in August 2007, during a time when I was crashing on my friend Miles’ couch in Scarborough. The caller was a regular at my pub. He was happy to have gotten in touch with me because it just so happened that a friend of his was looking for a replacement bartender on an expedition vessel cruising in Canada’s Eastern Arctic waters. The conversation went like this:

John: “So the deal is, they’re desperate for a bartender. They’d pick you up at your door, drive you to the airport, and fly you up to Kuujjuaq at no cost to you. You’d board a Russian expedition cruise ship called the Lyubov Orlova, and you’d bartend seven days per week, while cruising all over northern Labrador, the coast of Baffin Island and the Northwest Passage. You’d leave next Tuesday and you come back sometime in late September. This is so you, Randi.”

Me: “YES PLEASE.”

But in actuality, a friend had just bought a plane ticket to visit me in Toronto so I Just. Couldn’t. Do. It.

Man, it hurt. But unequivocally I told John that although I couldn’t say yes to this particular opportunity, I intended to get the job next year. And that’s what I did. I spent the summer of 2008 getting paid to cruise around the most remote places in Canada. Places where it’s not uncommon to stumble upon human bones that have been lying undisturbed for anywhere from two hundred to a thousand years. I drove a zodiac. I ate raw whale. I saw some of the most beautiful mountains I’ve ever seen in my life. I lived under a sun that never set. I roamed around abandoned Inuit towns. I visited Greenland. I let a Russian woman wash my hair with raw onion. I said goodbye to any semblance of privacy. I got used to bitter, bitter coffee. I worked every day. Every single day. Twice. I ate a lot of cous cous. So much cous cous…I saw so many fjords that I became jaded to them. In fact, by the end of the season I had become so jaded to the entire experience that I was convinced that I would never work on a ship again.

Little did I know that I would find myself in the Yukon one year later, starting to think more and more about the possibility of applying to do it all over again, this time in the Antarctic, for Quark Expeditions, the company that takes the Lyubov Orlova in winter. I figured it was worth a try. I had no plans for winter. Also, I figured my chances of receiving a response to an unsolicited cover letter and resume emailed to God Knows Where were so low that I didn’t even have to think about the pros and cons of going back to ship life again. Imagine my surprise when I received a response in less than 48 hours. Further, imagine my surprise when eventually I got an offer of employment!

Oh, shit.

I couldn’t say no. It was Antarctica. It may as well have been the moon.

So here I am. And for those of you wondering, yes, I have just seen A Serious Man.