The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica

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One I can take society well enough, so long as I keep my rubber gloves on. Although lately, I have to say I keep feeling the irrepressible urge to cut off my ear and catch the next train to Antarctica. —J. D. Salinger Lyttelton, New Zealand, to Cape Evans, Antarctica I sailed to Antarctica with a group of people who wanted to save the world. The world, in this case, meant Antarctica’s ice-shrouded 5.4-million-square miles, a crystalline fortress separated from the known or temperate world by a ring of howling, fierce ocean. There is nothing more alone in this world than Antarctica. Once the center of a great southern supercontinent, it became a fragment, drifting south to the pole, where the seas and winds conspired to seal it in a horrible cold. Ice took over, offering a jumble of milk-stained cliffs and green glassware. When the sun shines the whole place lights up better than the Emerald City, and it is the most beautiful place on Earth. I was young then and did not realize there remained places not only called the unknown, but actual unknown regions of Earth—unseen, untouched, unmapped, places no one had yet named or even set eyes on. In Antarctica, a requirement of entry is leaving your eyes behind after you have a new pair 34 * the entire earth and sky installed. Then you get the chance to see the world again as though for the first time, and even your own home and mother make you stop and revel in wonder. My God, you find yourself saying, I love the smell of rain on hot concrete. Transformation is a great idea as long as you don’t think about it too much. Our ship was a donated oceangoing tug, designed to pull large freighters to and from port; Dutch-built with enormous Smit-Man engines, most of her career had been spent working coastal Maryland for the pilots’ association. (Coincidentally about forty miles from where I grew up outside of Washington dc.) We had ample engine power but lacked a hull wholly reinforced for ice. What this gained in narrative color, it lost in mind-numbing terror. (Later, when it was too late and we were already at sea deep in the Antarctic, one old salt noted she was a very dangerous ship for ice, neither designed nor modified to deal with hits from rock-hard ice. Later still, when Antarcticans learned I traveled on this old ship, my choice to do so came to be considered—falsely I might add—“brave.”) Fitted with brass and polished, dark wood, about thirty years old, Greenpeace sailed her south to scrutinize polar research stations and create outrage about Antarctic mining schemes being hashed out at closed-door international meetings. I recall cruising through the long tunnel separating Lyttelton —a colonial port town established in the mid-nineteenth century, later home and workplace for dozens of polar explorers and their crews—from the larger metropolitan area of Christchurch, New Zealand, on a hot, bright January morning , and seeing our ship tied up at the quayside, flanked by Nedlloyd freighters and coastal supply ships, and in contrast to them our ship appeared pitifully small, like a blackand -ocher bath toy festooned with a rainbow, a hopeful little tub. The cab driver wanted to know why I was going to one * 35 the quayside. I told him we were heading to Antarctica to save the world, something I had come to enjoy telling people , to which he looked aghast in the rearview mirror, then asked me if I believed in God. Do you know, he began, that a ship sank down there only two years ago? I knew the ship he was talking about, and it scared me in a profound way; yet a growing urgency to be in Antarctica overshadowed fear. As I paid the driver, he looked at me and said, “Really, God bless you.” Many Antarctic stories begin with a bright moment of realization or even a dream—illustrating the narrator’s ineluctable destiny as a polar explorer. My story begins with this scene: a Greenpeace press kit sliding off my desk one morning in Melbourne, Australia. Antarctica smiled at me from the cascade of photos; an ice-shrouded steaming volcano, gleaming blue ice, tiny...