Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

Chapter Two: “The Evidence of My Ruin”: Richard Byrd’s Antarctic Sojourn

N early a century after Frémont’s 1842 expedition to the Rocky Mountains, aviation pioneer and polar explorer Richard Evelyn Byrd set out to do some serious science on the Ross Ice Barrier in Antarctica. As part of his second expedition to the southernmost continent, he stayed alone at a remote weather station—named Bolling Advance Base and located at 80° 8′ south latitude—during the polar winter of 1934, the season when darkness becomes total and temperatures routinely dip below –70 degrees Fahrenheit. The station was a rudimentary, claustrophobic structure: a prefabricated hut buried in the ice, its presence marked only by a radio antenna and a compact instrument shelter. Over the course of several months, Byrd recorded meteorological data to correlate with those collected at the Little America station—his expedition’s main base—approximately one hundred miles to the north, in an attempt to “throw a highly revealing light on the facts of atmospheric phenomena in high southern latitudes” (Byrd, Alone 13). Byrd planned to conduct a more personal experiment as well: “Solitude,” he felt, “is an excellent laboratory” in which to test the self-sustaining powers of the human mind and body in extreme environmental conditions (139). His efforts, however, proved costly, for during his stay he was slowly poisoned by the fumes of his generator and cook stove that built up in his poorly ventilated enclosure. Byrd was rescued on the verge of death by his companions, after they in-  32   two  “TheEvidenceofMyRuin” Richard Byrd’s Antarctic Sojourn upv.bryson.000-000 4/9/02 1:33 PM Page 32 terpreted his garbled and nearly unintelligible Morse code radio messages as a cry for help. This plot line suggests that Byrd’s published account of his experience , Alone, can be read as a moving tale of human bravery and perseverance in the face of a brutal and unforgiving nature, an interpretation invited by the 1939 appearance of an abridged version of Alone in the widely read repository of inspirational literature, Reader’s Digest. Such a take on Byrd’s story is right in step with his own conclusions about his stay at Advance Base: “Part of me remained forever at Latitude 80° 8′ South: what survived of my youth, my vanity, perhaps, and certainly my skepticism. On the other hand, I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values” (295). Beyond the affirmation of human fortitude and the celebration of life regained, however, Byrd’s musings suggest that a tremendous loss occurred as well as the obligatory gain of spiritual enlightenment. He lists the things he learned, or took away, from Advance Base—the joy of life, the value of living simply and honestly—but just as eloquently cites what was taken away from him. Alone is, of course, much more than an inspirational story and a good yarn, though it is certainly both of these. The Reader’s Digest portrait of Byrd, however appealing, does not adequately address the complex relationships among Byrd, nature, and the science he claims to serve. In fact, Alone provides us with something much more substantial —an ongoing account of an experiment, reported in exceptional detail and with great candor, that tests the relation between one explorerscientist and his environment, the extreme conditions of Antarctica. Though Byrd fashions his adventure partly as a scientific quest and partly as a Thoreau-styled attempt to live in peaceful, soul-replenishing solitude , the Antarctic environment overcomes Byrd’s best efforts at living harmoniously within nature: an inexorable process of disintegration and dissipation results in Byrd’s near destruction. Thus while Byrd’s scientific efforts succeed in terms of the meteorological data set (the weather record his instruments gather, we learn, is complete), he fails to reach his secondary goal of living efficiently and productively in an enclosed, artificial life-support system within the polar environment . In ironic contrast to the Frémontian hero’s mastery of scientific instrumentation, Byrd’s authority is usurped by the technology he byrd’s antarctic sojourn  33  upv.bryson.000-000 4/9/02 1:33 PM Page 33 brings with him. Rather than being symbolic instruments of nature’s conquest by humanity, the barometers, thermometers, wind meters, and radios dictate the terms of Byrd’s day-to-day...