Antarctica - Introduction
In the austral summer of 2005, I made a day trip by helicopter to Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island. This was Scott’s base in 1910 on the journey that ended with his death and the death of four of his crew. The story of this expedition is one of the saddest in Antarctic history and is my favorite. As a young girl, my father filled my head with stories of the South Pole (at one point I imagined Scott was a distant cousin and was angry with him for killing both dogs and ponies), so to visit the hut where they lived was a sort of pilgrimage. The hut was busy with a crew of New Zealand men digging out ice from its south side. I knew how the ice piled up there as I had read about it in Scott’s journals and in Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s marvelous account of Scott’s final expedition, The Worst Journey in the World. The men handed me a pickax and for a while I chipped away with them with the great sense that this small gesture connected me to the past, even to heroism. Soon enough, though, this heroic traveler was tired, so I gave up my digging and wandered into the hut.
Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light I stood, overwhelmed by what had been left there: cans of collard greens and bottles of medical supplies above Dr. Wilson’s bed; reindeer sleeping bags and finneskos (the Norwegian-style boots). When I looked closely I could see that the leather soles were peeling away. The daily lives of these explorers I so admired became clear to me as I looked at Cherry-Garrard’s bunk bed, and noted where Ponting processed his photos. When I saw toothbrushes propped in glasses at the head of some of the men’s beds I wanted to weep. For me, their lives were contained in those toothbrushes.
Daily details allow me to imagine a place, and the bigger the place, the more I need those details. Lucky for me, Scott’s narratives are filled with passages like this from his 1901 expedition: “The first task of the day is to fetch the ice for the daily consumption of water for cooking, drinking and washing. In the latter respect we begin to realize that many circumstances are against habits of excessive cleanliness, but although we use water very sparingly, an astonishing amount of washing is done with it, and at present the fashion is for all to have a bath once a week.”
A bath a week in melted ice water—for almost two years. With this sort of detail the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration is brought down to the basics. What they ate, how they slept, and other facts of daily life make up much of the 1,200 pages of Scott’s narrative of his 1901 expedition. Readers are dragged through days of manhauling; along with Scott and his men we suffer great cold and eat a lot of hoosh and biscuits. It is these details that are the foundation of their great feats.
What is remembered, however, is the tragic manner in which Scott and his men died in 1911, eleven miles from a food supply on their return from the Pole. A cross rests at the top of Observation Hill above McMurdo marking the deaths of Scott, Bowers, Wilson, Evans, and Oates. On it is inscribed Tennyson’s great line: To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. When I arrived at the top of Observation Hill, breathless in the thin clear air, tears emerged spontaneously and unexpectedly. I realized that the cross told the same story as that contained in their toothbrushes. I looked at the Ross Sea, made sure no one else was nearby, and kissed the cross.
The stories of Robert Falcon Scott, Earnest Shackleton, and especially Apsley Cherry-Garrard lured first my imagination and then me to the white continent. I am not alone; most people who venture south have these narratives as their framework, imagining that they, too, will experience blizzards and extreme temperatures, see penguins, and stand in awe of Mount Erebus.
I wanted to know what sort of tent I would sleep in at a remote camp, and if I would feel lonely waking in that tent—or if I would even be able to sleep with that endless sun. I wanted to experience an Antarctic wind on my face and understand what deep cold did to my bones. To understand a place I break it down into the simplest of human needs of sleep, warmth, food. But also: How do you keep communication with loved ones back home? How often does mail arrive? Are there showers? How do people travel around? Where do people pee? And what about love?
Through the narratives of early explorers I could gather some answers, but my two final questions remained unanswered. It wasn’t until I visited Cape Evans that I saw that Scott and his men had outhouses, three for officers and one for enlisted men. (Modern visitors to the Antarctic do not use these outhouses.) But love, that remained the great mystery. Cherry-Garrard, in about six hundred pages, once thinks of “girls, or a girl…” That’s a meager fantasy in two and a half years living in an all-male world on the most desolate continent on earth. I can forgive his omission only because these were, after all, British gentleman.
But the early accounts only gave me a sense of life in Antarctica long before permanent bases, heated and with running water, and long before helicopters and LC130 cargo planes. I wanted to know what it was like for modern travelers on the continent. Some modern narratives gave me an idea of life on the Ice, but I wanted more; I needed to track down the stories I wanted to read, which meant I had to go to Antarctica.
No one ends up in Antarctica by accident. Flying there on your own dime is expensive and the other most commonly used route—getting a grant or a job on the Ice—is difficult. You have to be qualified for specialized jobs such as fixing snowmobiles in below zero temperatures or loading helicopters or pushing snow in a D8 Caterpillar bulldozer. Then there are those people who have learned a skill just to go south. In their real lives they are a park ranger or a dentist who wanted an adventure. In addition all workers and grantees have to be physically and mentally qualified for life on the Ice. So all of these healthy workers have landed in a place they want to be, and despite complaints about work (a six day/sixty hour a week schedule), a buoyant optimism reigns. I fell into that atmosphere with great joy when I arrived in McMurdo just before Christmas in 2004.
It had taken me years to get to the Ice. I applied for a Writers & Artists grant from the National Science Foundation in July of 2002. The proposal I sent them—to edit this collection—followed in the footsteps of other anthologies I had edited, especially one on Alaska, but I worried they would think I could put together the collection just as easily sitting in an office in the U.S. But that summer, a tentative “yes” arrived and over the course of the next year I attended meetings, had a rigorous physical, contacted dozens of scientists who might help me to see and experience the continent, and read as much as I could. The preparation was spectacular—lists of clothing I would need, plus all of my daily necessities for six weeks, which could not exceed forty-five pounds. I would like to say that after a six-hour flight from New Zealand, I stumbled out of the cargo plane and onto the Ross Ice Shelf and bent down and kissed the ice, head turned to honor Mount Erebus. But I did not. I was deaf from the plane ride, slightly nauseated, and a migraine was mounting an attack. I staggered to an orientation meeting in the galley, then to my overheated dorm (my roommate had the window propped wide open) and slept.
Since my goal while in Antarctica was to experience daily life and to find people in different fields of work who could describe that life for me, I was open to just about any experience that came my way. I worked with Solar Joe installing solar panels at a camp at New Harbor at the mouth of Taylor Valley, and there learned how to make Antarctic concrete: take sandy soil, hand carry a bucket of water from the Ross Sea, add to the sand, and within twenty-four hours it will be a frozen block. I helped penguinologist David Ainley count Adélie penguins and then inject pit tags in nesting penguins. I got to cup that football-shaped creature under my arm, as its flipper faintly beat me. I assisted Phil Allen as he hand drilled for ice cores in Garwood Valley and I chopped garlic for Rae Spain at Lake Hoare. When in McMurdo I wrote in my office overlooking the Ross Sea and then would take a shuttle out to Williams (Willy) Field and skate-ski the several miles back to town. These were some of the happiest weeks of my life.
From these experiences I wrote dramatic emails filled with tales of forty-five-mile-an-hour winds and the charm of penguins. Still, what fascinated me most was how people lived their lives, how our very human needs of food, work, play, sleep, and love fit in such a big place.
These essays will offer travelers a sense of those human needs—plus some. And yet I know that all of these writers and travelers are trying to describe the indescribable. You just cannot know what it is like to crave Ritz crackers slathered with butter until you’ve lived in a camp for several months in temperatures hovering near and below zero. Still, these essays reveal with great intimacy and detail moments of life in Antarctica, from the late ’70s to the present. We have the voices of GAs (General Assistants) and scientists, of writers and those who have never written for publication. Through these vivid experiences, we are taken onto the Ice, and are offered the richness of daily life: there are essays here about food and loneliness, about riding snowmobiles and finding love. The essays that follow are set in the three U.S. bases—McMurdo, South Pole, and Palmer—and in camps in the Dry Valleys or on Ross Island and at remote camps on the polar plateau. There is one essay describing the thrill of flying in with the only independent company on the continent. The range of experiences here cannot cover life on the Ice, but they do offer some heroism, and much insight and humor from a big and beautiful place.
I can also promise that the writers here are not proper British gentleman—these essays reveal the ways of love on the Ice. But if you want to know how to pee in Antarctica, you will have to go there.
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