by Barry Lopez
One year, a few of the military pilots, for whom joining the club was a rite of passage at this duty station, began surreptitiously filming women while they were undressing for the Vanda plunge. Admonished by the New Zealanders to behave better, the pilots responded with jeers. Thus was born the impulse to create the Royal Drambuie Society. When some of the videotapes, including images of female staff members of the National Science Foundation, began circulating at McMurdo Station, the commanding officer of the flight squadron ordered an end to the practice. The military pilots, once they were officially reprimanded, became the most vigilant enforcers of the new “no photography” protocol at the Royal Vanda Swim Club’s outdoor facilities.
The morning I reluctantly left Vanda—I felt like I’d had three glorious days at an exclusive spa, despite the necessarily spartan accommodations and plain meals—a female geologist, whose patience I had apparently tried, took me aside to inform me that I was inexcusably confused about the difference between a stone and a rock. The terms are not interchangeable, she said. A stone was a rock that had been put to some utilitarian or cultural use by a human being. Thus a headstone, a paving stone, a cornerstone, and Stonehenge. A rock was something that had not been handled by a human being. Thus a rock-ribbed coast and highway warning signs about falling rock. I didn’t inquire about rock gardens but said I was grateful for the clarification. In the years following, I myself was able to annoy a number of people by requesting that the distinction be observed.
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DURING THE WEEK following my visit to Vanda station I spent a few days in a camp in the Taylor Valley, just to the south of the Wright. One reason I’d asked to visit this camp was that the scientific party here was headed by a female principal investigator, one of the few at that time who’d been successful in getting funding from the NSF for remote fieldwork in Antarctica. Diane McKnight’s team was composed mostly of geochemists and biogeochemists studying stream flow and stream chemistry at Lake Fryxell, Lake Hoare, and Lake Bonney, all frozen lakes in the Taylor Valley. Melt streams in the Taylor are little more than rills, but the chemistry being done here, crucial to understanding the larger overall impact of climate change, doesn’t depend on analyzing large volumes of water.
In my usual role as a low-level field technician, I helped with the work going on in Diane’s camp but often used my free time in the evening to explore the valley. One day, hiking alone across a slope above Lake Fryxell, I found a mummified seal, a young crabeater that had died there. Its carcass had been dried out and preserved by the wind, about seven miles inland from McMurdo Sound. At that time more than forty mummified seals had been located in the dry valleys, some much farther inland than this one. No one knows why some seals meet this fate. Of the several hypotheses offered, the one that makes the most sense to me is the one that would occur to an Inuit hunter—the presence occasionally of a “water sky” over the valley.
If a dozing seal, especially an inexperienced one, awoke on the sea ice to find that the crack or hole it had hauled out from had closed or frozen over, it might attempt to reach open water by searching for a “water sky.” In an ice-covered landscape, a dark patch appearing in an overcast sky reveals a place below where light is reflecting poorly off open water, compared to the reflection of daylight off a surface of snow or ice. Absent any other opening in the ice cover it might find nearby, the seal would continue to move toward that dark patch. The sky above McMurdo Sound, however, contains a second set of naturally occurring dark patches, those above the snow-free dry valleys. If a seal headed off in the direction of one of the dry valleys’ water skies, and never turned back, it would find itself stranded far from the open sea, where it would eventually die of exposure, hunger, and dehydration.
The taut skin of these freeze-dried animals feels smooth and hard to the touch, like the surface of a river cobble. No scavenger but the rare south polar skua, a seabird, ever tears into these mummified seals. Some bodies, unevenly dried out by the wind, arch upward from the ground in the shape of a semicircle, the rear flippers and the head both pointed toward the sky. Others lie prone, facing the wind, eye sockets bored out, mouths agape. With the retreat of its lips, a crabeater’s molars and premolars, an ornate frieze of tiny, closely fitting cusps, stand out boldly in highly evolved but now useless efficiency.
Whenever I encountered these animals, I found it difficult to leave them. And when I finally left, often as not I stopped and looked back. They were inconsolable in their error. Most all of them had died alone. Some lay there with the clouded eyes of the blind.
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EARLY ON A SUNDAY MORNING, the quietest time of the week in McMurdo, I met up with five companions at the snow machine shed. We lashed our survival gear, packed in bivouac sacks, to six Ski-Doos and proceeded in tandem slowly down a muddy, half-frozen road to the sea ice, turning south there at the shoreline. We rounded Cape Armitage at the tip of Hut Point Peninsula and climbed the low wall of the McMurdo Ice Shelf. From there we headed east-northeast to Cape MacKay, the halfway point of a fifty-mile journey that would take us to Cape Crozier at the east end of Ross Island, the site of one of the largest emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica.
By coastal Antarctic standards, this was a perfect summer morning, with temperatures in the mid-twenties and clear skies. The forecast was for continuing good weather.
The urge to make this journey came from reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922), a classic of Antarctic literature, written toward the end of the so-called Heroic Age of (mostly British) Antarctic exploration. On June 27, 1911, Edward Wilson, the father figure of Scott’s 1910–13 expedition, Cherry-Garrard, a wealthy patron (and full-fledged member) of the expedition, and a feisty, diminutive British lieutenant named Henry “Birdie” Bowers left Cape Evans, bound for Cape Crozier and the penguin colony. (Bowers and Wilson would both perish nine months later on Scott’s attempt to reach the South Pole.) The cape was only seventy-five miles away, over flat terrain; but it was midwinter and their clothing and equipment were barely adequate. Pulling two man-hauled sledges, initially laden with 757 pounds of food and equipment, they endured gale-force winds and brutal low temperatures on the monthlong trip. On July 15 they reached their goal, a prominence known as The Knoll, high above the penguin colony on the sea ice below.
To better shelter themselves at the cape, the men built a stone enclosure roofed over with sail canvas. Wilson’s obsession—the rationale for the journey—was to collect penguin eggs. On July 20, with a break in the consistently stormy weather, they were able to descend a precipitous cliff face and collect six eggs, three of which broke on the climb back up the cliff. For the next five days the men remained in their hut while a storm tore the canvas roof apart and scattered their belongings, some of which, in the darkness, they never recovered. On July 25th they began their return journey. They met with fewer stormy days than they had on the trip out and arrived back at Cape Evans on August 1.
This story is widely known and most often retold in Antarctica with a mixture of awe, disbelief, and mild contempt. By modern standards the trip was a mindless bit of Edwardian bravado and scientifically pointless. (The eggs ended up at Edinburgh University, where they sat unexamined for decades.) However ill advised the trip was, though, Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard had made an arduous effort to achieve something they believed in. The expedition was further driven by Wilson’s genuine conviction that they were conducting important scientific research about embryonic development and what it revealed about phylogeny and evolutionary biology. Whatever judgment one might finally make of the advisability of the journey, it was epic. And Wilson’s straining after new information is the archetype today for the process that produces Antarctica’s massive and only export—knowledge.
Whatever my feelings about what had happened that winter at Cape Crozier, I had a strong urge simply to see the huge p
enguin rookery there, spread out on the sea ice below the gargantuan seaward wall of the Ross Ice Shelf, the crèche that, in winter darkness, these three men had never been able fully to take in. I had a similar desire as well to pay my respects to the three explorers at what remained of the stone-walled redoubt where they’d struggled to stay alive. One day at McMurdo it occurred to me that a small, experienced group of people, using snow machines, could retrace the route of “the worst journey in the world” in high summer, and do it in less than twenty-four hours, not thirty-five days.
To bolster my chances of getting approval from the lead NSF representative at McMurdo for such a trip, knowing some were sure to declare it too risky, I selected a group of highly qualified friends and acquaintances with backgrounds in search and rescue, and then added in McMurdo’s head snow-machine mechanic. I presented my case to the NSF supervisor in his office on a Saturday afternoon, a few minutes before his office closed (and, I knew, just before he and his staff would be gathering at one of McMurdo’s bars to socialize). I handed him a list of names with each person’s credentials, along with all the required paperwork describing several tasks we intended to perform and signed forms from each person’s supervisor, releasing them for the trip. Everyone in the group, I told the NSF representative, had read the guidelines governing entry to Specially Protected Area Number 6 (Cape Crozier) and had signed a form I’d prepared saying that they had. As for the route there and back, it had been flagged by a New Zealand group some weeks earlier and the flags were still in place. I’d checked.
The supervisor nodded thoughtfully at all the paperwork and finally said okay. Early the next morning, long before any supervisor might reconsider and ask for further discussion, we were gone.
After we doubled Cape Armitage on the sea ice, climbed the front of the McMurdo Ice Shelf, and doubled Pram Point on Hut Point Peninsula, we were flying. The twenty-nine miles between Pram Point and Cape MacKay took us across the Ross Ice Shelf’s Windless Bight, an embayment on the south side of Ross Island where, mysteriously, Antarctic winds rarely stir. We were driving six abreast, ten yards apart, raising rooster tails of powder snow behind us. Past Cape MacKay the shelf ice begins to buckle, creating swales and some crevasse fields. We proceeded carefully here, coaxing the machines through the worst of the fractured ice. Eighteen miles past Cape MacKay we swung up to our left, climbed a snow-covered slope, and parked the snow machines at a previously agreed-upon spot outside the boundary of the Specially Protected Area. We doffed some of our heavy-weather gear, shouldered survival packs, and began hiking north, toward an overlook that lay beyond The Knoll.
What we saw when we got there had the same two effects, it seemed, on each of us. No one in the group was talking as we approached, but in that moment we all came to a standstill and remained in utter silence, motionless, for many minutes. Each person finally sat down on the snow apart from the others. In a kind of vast amphitheater on the sea ice below us was the sort of wildlife spectacle one fantasizes about seeing one day, and then gazes at in disbelief, as though confronted by an illusion, a scene that would resolve itself into ordinary reality when the spell broke.
The spell never broke.
Our view is east across the frozen headwall of the Ross Ice Shelf, about eighty feet high here. Icebergs that have recently calved from the ice shelf stand frozen in the nearby sea ice, like stranded buildings. To our left we can see the shoulder of Post Office Hill; to the right, the north face of The Knoll. Below us all is ice, radiant under a uniform fall of direct sunlight. The frozen sea is all gray and white—the grays of fog, of smoke; the whites of gypsum. The “alleluia plain” of sunlit sea ice here carries heterogeneous patches and narrow lines of dark charcoal, with dabs of light brown within the dark patches. With my binoculars, the dollops of brown resolve into fuzzy emperor penguin young, the charcoal patches and lines into adults. The orange blotches at the back of the adults’ heads and the yellowish glow of their upper chests sharpen in the glass of the binoculars.
Useless, really, trying to count them. Hundreds stand on the sea ice amid the icebergs. The silence that had overcome us was only our bated breath; the air here virtually hums with the clatter and blare of the penguins’ voices, their nasal cries. Perhaps these are cries of alarm set off by our arrival. For more than an hour we do not move. Eventually the penguins quieten.
The hour we spend with them is intimacy without narration, an experience without increments of measured time. The unvoiced emotions we felt, which we mention to one another later, include inexplicable tenderness, moments of soaring elation. In Antarctica, where death seems to lurk more than it does in other places, each of us is drawn strongly to anything as clearly alive as these birds. Feelings of affinity with these free animals, a sense of shared fate with them, seemed to go deeper and to come on more quickly here than elsewhere.
From my vantage point I can see tints of green and turquoise in the barrier face of the ice shelf, phantom colors, some of them. The changing angle of the sun lifts these pastels out of the ice and then releases them.
I’ve gotten cold, sitting here the hour. Finally I stand up. I work my binoculars slowly across the penguin colony, isolating individual birds and following their socializing among the others for a while. When you watch wild animals, it’s impossible to know what they’re really doing, or when they started doing whatever it is you see them doing, or when they’ve started doing something else. The minutes or hours a human might intently watch them don’t create a valid framework for the animals’ lives.
No one has said anything since we arrived, but some kind of end point arrives for the few still sitting and for the ones standing, and we begin to leave. Leaving here feels like walking out on a piece of music before it’s finished, music that is so beautiful it fills you with something unbearable.
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BACK AT THE SNOW MACHINES we dig out thermoses of hot soup and coffee and have our first meal since breakfast, then set out to find the stone shelter. We search for two hours, south and west of The Knoll, but can’t come up with it. We repeatedly check the detailed map of Cape Crozier we’d brought along but are defeated. Either the map is wrong or we’re inept. We give up.
It’ll be colder on the way back. We work the machines down off the snow-covered slope and through the maze of ridges and fissures in the pressure ice. This part, we now know, will take longer to negotiate than we’d originally planned, but in a few hours we’re back at Cape MacKay at the edge of the Windless Bight. By eight that night, fourteen hours after we left, we’re back at McMurdo.
Years later, waiting in McMurdo for the weather to clear at Klein Glacier, I was offered a ride aboard a helicopter bound for an ornithologists’ camp at Cape Crozier. After dropping supplies there, the pilot set me down about a hundred feet from Wilson’s stone shelter. It seemed we had come within about thirty yards of it ten years before. I still can’t imagine how we missed it.
The pilot told me to take whatever time I needed, that he had no further duties that night. In the eighty-seven years since Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard had built it, all but the lower few courses of stone had fallen, these last still crudely mortared with scraps of vegetation. Bits of clothing—a sock, a piece of knitted wool—lay about. Shreds of sail canvas. The paper drawer from a small box of matches. I circled the structure slowly twice. It was like circling the body of someone left on a battlefield.
In his much-praised study, The Last Place on Earth, comparing Roald Amundsen’s and Robert Falcon Scott’s separate quests for the South Pole during the same few months in 1911–12, Roland Huntford mercilessly eviscerates Scott for his mistakes and heaps praise on Amundsen, casting the one as a criminally negligent amateur and the other as a peerless professional. A British historian told me once that to really understand Huntford’s book I would have to understand more fully what class envy and class hatred had to do with Huntford’s vitriolic at
tack on Scott; that aside, I find myself agreeing with some of Huntford’s analysis of why one man succeeded and the other died, along with four other men in his party, in an effort to reach the pole. Essentially, Amundsen crossed the Ross Ice Shelf, the Transantarctic Mountains, and the polar plateau as a party of Inuit would, using dog teams and outfitted in fur clothing and traditional Inuit foot gear. He had no real interest in science, only in fame. On the return leg from the pole, he fed his dogs to the other dogs. Scott undertook the trip with an attitude of cultural superiority, eschewing sled dogs for Manchurian ponies, all of whom would die miserably along the way, and championing man-hauling, which fatally exhausted him and his companions. Like many of his countrymen then, he considered the Inuit an inferior race, people with nothing much to teach an Englishman. He, too, was interested in fame, but he took the time en route to do pioneering science. And his expedition, compared to Amundsen’s, was tragically thwarted by unusually harsh weather.
A large wooden latinate cross, a memorial to Scott and his polar party, stands atop an elevated prominence at McMurdo Station called Observation Hill. The view from there, out beyond White Island, is over the enormous Ross Ice Shelf. The last members of the ill-fated polar party—Bowers, Wilson, and Scott—died 119 miles south of here. The final line of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is carved in the horizontal beam of the cross: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
By the time I finally arrived at the stone hut at Cape Crozier, I’d experienced a little of what Scott and his men had had to face on their polar journey, including man-hauling sledges at 9,000 feet on the polar plateau, in −30° F weather. In truth, I’d barely brushed up against the full prolonged experience of what they’d not been able to endure; but I had grounds enough to be absolutely stunned, given the planning errors in their attempt to reach the pole and the inadequacy of their equipment, that they had nearly made it back.