Antarctic - Fire and Ice
Part 2 – Ice Written by P.F. Kluge
Photography by Chris Connolly and Courtesy of the Antarctic Dream
After 600 miles of rough seas, Antarctica beings to declare itself,
shapes arising out of cold sea, surfacing into sea and fog. We're
in the South Shetland Islands, headed to a gray island against
a gray sky, and I feel quite far away from the reefs and lagoons,
the greens and blues of the Pacific. Those were semi-precious
gems here are rocks and pebbles. No shirts and shoes here: two
layers of woolen socks, four layers of clothing that is thermal,
insulated, waterproof. Dressed as though we're setting foot on
another planet, divided into groups named after Antarctic explorers,
Scott, Admunsen, Shackleton, and Ross we step down a gangplank
into Zodiac boats and go forth to meet the penguins on Aitcho
Island.
This is the last voyage of the season. It's March, the penguin
rookeries are emptying. Most of the penguins have already gone
to sea and we'll see only a fraction of what was crowded on shore
a few months ago. This doesn't bother me, but I worry about other
people. Our ship is an arsenal of cameras, hand-held digitals,
wielded like pistols, and howitzers on tripods. Photography is
important on a trip like this, maybe too important. "Digital
photography has killed the romance of the voyage," one expedition
staffer tells me. "They're focused on the camera, see everything
through the lens. They miss the scenery, smells, sounds, dynamics.
They miss eighty percent of the trip."
On Aitcho Island, the penguins are waiting, by the dozens, maybe
hundreds, chinstraps and gentoo penguins and a single fur seal.
If it's not a penguin Woodstock, it's the day after Woodstock.
There are penguins at the edge of the sea, testing the water,
up and down a barren ridge, like Indians in an old western movie.
The place is a poultry coop — we're up to our ankles in
pungent penguin droppings — and it's a boneyard, littered
with the ribs and vertebra that whalers left behind. It's a damp
and chilly place, fog and rain and granular snow taking turns
in the wind. Though it tolerates visitors it doesn't invite them
to linger. The only green I see is a few smudges of moss and lichen.
Can coconut palms --- source of wood, fuel, juice, thatch, rope,
clothing — be on the same planet? When we return to the
ship, to three and four course meals and plural pours of Chilean
wine, I'm relieved, like an envoy to a hostile nation, relieved
to be back in the embassy. The great ice shelves, the big U.S.
station at McMurdo, the South Pole itself are far away. We’re
only flirting with Antarctica: all but one of our stops are on
offshore islands, traveling from penguin rookery to penguin rookery.
Before long I sense that my interest in penguins is only slightly
greater than their interest in me. I enjoy walking among them;
they are so comic-book clumsy on land, so deft in the water, so
nonplused by the paparazzi who come ashore. Their temporary homes
are austere places, but there's always a little drama: penguins
awkwardly climbing a hill, then belly whopping down like kids
on a sleigh. Adults stand around, waiting to finish molting, with
the stoic demeanor of someone who's been forced to stand in a
corner for acting up in school. It's not all Disney: I see a penguin
protest when two other birds — skua — start pecking
at a penguin carcass on the shoreline. Outraged, the penguin chases
first one, then the other, but it's two against one and the discouraged
mourner walks off after a while and the feeding resumes. The dead
penguin probably was the victim of a leopard seal, hovering off
shore, preying on fledglings. "I saw a leopard seal eat fourteen
young penguins," a boat driver tells me. "The leopard
seal is sleek, impressive, dangerous, hungry, comes up out of
the water like a torpedo, catches a penguin in its mouth, thrashes
it. Sometimes it lets it go, swim a little, like a cat playing
with a mouse. Then he shakes it, skins it. I don't get upset.
It's part of nature."
More than penguins, whales, seals, albatross, Antarctica itself
is the main attraction, mile after mile of frozen coastline which
is menacing, hostile and — to me — frightening. I
flew twenty hours, sailed two days to arrive in a place where
I do not belong. And that, I'm convinced, is the whole point.
In hot places I sweat. Here I shiver, and not just because it's
cold. It's scary, passing island after island that has no place
for me; pure, pristine, empty places. Non-human? Inhuman? It's
as close as I can come to visiting another planet and looking
back towards earth, longingly. On shore, I test the water, immersing
my hand, while a shipmate times me. I pull out in pain, bone-deep
pain, inside of fifteen seconds. If I landed in these waters in
a life vest, complete with a light and whistle, I'd be dead before
the Antarctic Dream turned and came back for
me. As I sail through narrow channels, the Le Maire and Gerlache,
I see miles and miles of a coastline that shows no mercy. If I
made it to shore, I'd confront a cliff of ice, above it a jumble
of snow and crevasses, further up a windswept, granite peak. And
if I were left behind in one of the rookeries we visit, —
part of the three percent of Antarctica that isn't covered with
ice and snow — how long would I last, shivering among the
penguins, an instamatic camera my only weapon? It would be like
a scene in The Blair Witch Project, a doomed traveler lost in
a place he isn’t supposed to be, taking snapshots of his
final hours. One night, two at the most and I’d be gone.
It frightens me. And I’m not alone.
Captain James Cook, was another man who went to extremes. His
great voyages ended in a warm climate, in warm water, when he
was clubbed, stabbed and speedily dismembered in Hawaii's Kaalakekua
Bay on February 14, 1779. I envy him his exploration of Tahiti,
New Zealand, Australia, Easter Island. But two of his great discoveries
were negative: things that didn't exist, a Northwest Passage from
the Pacific to the Atlantic and a great — and worthwhile
— southern continent, terra australiis incognita.
That's what brought him to where I am. He never set foot on the
continent but he confronted the ice pack that surrounds it and,
though he surmised a continent lay below, it was nothing like
what generations of geographers had hoped for. And here is where
an element of dismay — even despair -- enters his otherwise
understated journals. "I who had ambition not only to go
further than anyone had been before, but as far as it was possible
for man to go was not sorry at meeting with this interruption...the
Frigid, Gloomy and Savage aspect which nature had given this country
exceeds everything that could have been imagined." What Cook
found, I suspect, is what I find: a sense of the way the world
is, or was, or will be.
Antarctica is, among other things, beautiful, drop-dead beautiful
and in a way that no place else is beautiful. There's an edge
and clarity I wish I could take home. On the bleakest day, no
sun from dawn to dusk, you're drawn into a world of ice and snow,
sea and stone, reminded how right a black-and-white movie can
feel, what a mood can be generated in the absence of colors. And
the place explodes into technicolor the morning the sun paints
snow-topped mountains that will never know a piton or a footprint
pure pink. And, in late afternoon, the setting sun turns icebergs
from white to gleaming gold. The icebergs are ships, statues,
animals and islands, blue-tinted; they capture the menace of Antarctica
and --- to my surprise, the beauty. The water molecules in ice
crystals absorb red colors. Not blue. So, even on the grayest
afternoon, there's a neon blue glow around the bottom of icebergs,
that goes from turquoise to cobalt and surprises me whenever I
see it. It shouldn't be there, but it is.
When you voyage to Antarctica, it’s as if you have the
place to yourself. That was true thirty years ago but dozens of
ships make the same trip I am making. Our solitary vessel is part
of a convoy, often just four hours apart, making many of the same
stops. One of the most popular is our sole landing on the continent
itself, Neko Bay. It does not disappoint. I step through clinking
chunks of ice, weave my way among the penguins, step over whalebones,
sit on the edge of a glacier, which makes sudden cracks and rumbles
and launches sheets of ice into a bay where a flotilla of ice
bergs is waiting and a small red ship which will carry us home.
It's just a touch of the Antarctic that's all but enough to generate
lasting awe. A once-in-a-lifetime trip, as advertised. In more
ways than one.
The Beaufort Wind Scale measures turbulence at sea from zero
— smooth as a mirror — to 12, a hurricane. On our
way back through the Drake Passage, we hit 11: "exceptionally
high waves, foam patches cover sea, reduced visibility."
The ship is punch drunk: drawers slam in and out, doors swing
open and shut, curtains slide back and forth across my window,
books fall off shelves, a spare roll of paper drowns in the toilet
and my alarm clock lies on the floor, dismantled, the battery
under my bed. I'm the first one at breakfast, though, watching
waiters stagger from table to table, hearing plates clatter and
shatter in the kitchen, watching a single mean wave upend nine
chairs and send them across the dining room. I see a mountain
range of waves on one side of the ship, a gaping canyon on the
other and I am laughing, but it's scared laughter, like a kid
on the roller coaster. It's a perfect farewell to Antarctica:
difficult to reach, a challenge to endure, hard to leave. Remember
me, it warns. No problem. In the weeks after I return, and to
this day, Antarctica surprises me with the memories I have of
it: the various shapes of icebergs, a shoreline that was all glaciers,
the clinking of icebergs – like wind chimes – at a
penguin rookery, the nonchalant flight of an albatross over a
convulsing sea. I’ll remember. Or – it comes to the
same thing – I can’t forget. Funky over frigid: I’ll
go back to the hot places, for sure. I may not see Antarctica
again. But the place does indeed hit some notes that are off the
scale. Someone, maybe Solhzenitzyn – said that a someone
from a cold place had nothing to say to someone from a warm one.
Maybe so, but a little time around Antarctica teaches you about
the distances in life. And the connections.
Books, Journalism and Teaching
- these are the three things P.F. Kluge
loves. A novelist, a professor. He emphasizes that writing
is for an audience of strangers and that, when you address
strangers, it’s important to perpetrate a story. He
tells his students that delaying writing until you feel inspired
is foolishness. And that especially when you’re starting
out, the reading you do is as important as the writing.
