by Barry Lopez
Wilson was a calm man, comfortable in his own skin. Were he able to sit around Pole and listen to people’s conversations at the start of the twenty-first century, and to listen in the evening to BBC broadcasts of world news, as we did, I think he would not have felt so much scientifically uninformed—he could catch up on that—as morally quaint.
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A SECOND REASON the four of us elected to stay on at Pole instead of returning to McMurdo that day was that it was easier to think here. Inside the heated buildings, which were situated inside a sheltering dome at that time, life was protected from the weather. A chef made meals, someone else melted snow for water. When you opened your eyes in the morning, you had no agenda to address. You could sit undisturbed at a table with a map or a book in front of you for hours, or go upstairs and sink into a club chair in the Skylab.
Well fed and freed of my responsibility to assist, I felt served by fortune during those few days at Pole.
Once or twice a day I would leave the shelter of the dome to take a walk. I’d long since adjusted to cold temperatures, and wind chill was infrequently a factor because the air at Pole is usually calm. This is not to make light of low temperatures in the interior of Antarctica, only to say that you become accustomed to them, to the numbness in your hands and the patches of frost nip on your face.
The first night I spent on Newall Glacier with Paul, Cameron, and the others, I headed to my one-man tent to sleep. On my knees, I began to take off my outer clothing, stripping down to expedition-weight long underwear and my socks. As I maneuvered in that tight space, twisting out of my clothes, I began to doubt that I had either the tolerance or the stamina for twenty-seven days of this. It was −20° F, I was all gooseflesh, involuntarily hunching over in a ball to conserve heat as I crawled shivering into my sleeping bag.
The warning story for me about living with cold temperatures—and all this was taking place in the Antarctic summer—came in the week following those moments of frigid introduction. Cameron and I and the others were studying the uneven flow of Newall Glacier. (This was part of a two-year effort to determine where the less-stressed sections of ice were in the glacier, so we could locate a promising spot at which to drill, one that would produce the fewest stress fractures in the ice core.)
Cameron and I were perched on the flank of a sheet of exposed bedrock high above the glacier and employing a laser theodolite to pinpoint the exact location of a two-mile-long series of bamboo poles that had been set out the year before in a straight line at 90 degrees to the flow of the glacier. Our colleagues below were traveling from pole to pole by snow machine and holding up a reflector at each spot for the laser to find. Between sightings, the two of us retreated to the interior of a small tent we’d set up to shield us from thirty-knot winds. We “spooned” there, hugging each other for warmth. The temperature was about −25° F and the high winds were creating wind chills of close to −60° F. At one point while we were outside surveying, Cameron lost, for a split second, his grip on one of his mittens. A few moments later, lying together in the tent, he said, “In Antarctica, you make the big mistake only once.”
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ON THE DAYS I left Pole station, I’d walk out a ways across the plateau, enjoying the simplicity of the view, whichever way I looked. Some arresting arrangement of solar light would often be apparent in the sky, refractions of various sorts, which gave rise, for example, to bright spots of pale pink and lime on either side of the sun—sun dogs—or to a ghostly pillar of vaporous light between the sun and the horizon, a column the color of the moon’s gray soil.
The forever setting sun, the squeak of my boots on the snow as I walked, the sound of my breathing over the extensive silence of the plateau, suggested somehow that the buildings around me were only insubstantial projections of mine. They might wink out at any second.
Some days I watched as pearly opalescence bathed an entire cloud. The interior of an abalone shell, mounted in the sky.
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IN AN EFFORT to understand what might have driven Robert Falcon Scott, a person few knew well, to be the first to reach the pole, I visited the National Archives in Washington, D.C., one spring morning to examine the only existing facsimile copy of the diary he was keeping when he died. Passages from the diary are often quoted in Antarctic histories but, even when words from a handwritten document are quoted accurately, they do not convey the information that the point of a pencil or pen can leave behind.
I wanted to look especially at two sentences in the diary, the place where he expresses his anguish after learning that Amundsen had beaten him to the pole by thirty-four days; and the last sentence he wrote, composed in the tent where he was later found dead with Wilson and Bowers (Evans and Oates, the other two members of the polar party, having perished on the trail behind them). The three of them were only eleven miles from food at the One Ton Depot and 147 miles from Cape Evans, but Scott knew this was the end. He wrote: “For Gods sake look after our people.”
At the pole, Scott had written, memorably, “Great God! this is an awful place […].” It was clear from the way his pencil moved across and down the page leading up to that sentence that he was simply dutifully recording what had occurred, writing as if detached. As he begins the first G in the words Great God, the pencil bears down hard. Taking in the appearance of the entire page, looking at what precedes and what follows this sentence, I felt that this abrupt burst of intense feeling (from someone who usually kept his emotions tightly in check) represented the sudden full realization that he had irrevocably “lost the prize.”
As I read biographies of Scott, I came to believe that he’d long envisioned the achievement of the pole as the looming apex of his life. To arrive there first, before anyone else, would secure him a knighthood, retirement from the Royal Navy, international renown, and some significant amount of money. To lose it, he thought, to come in second, would burden him with a reputation for mediocrity for the rest of his life. Scott pictured his conquest of the pole, I believe, as an assault on a great mountain, a vertical quest, with the summit of the mount his prize. When Birdie Bowers spots Amundsen’s first black flag, tied to a standard jammed in the snow about ten miles from the pole, Scott knows he’s been beaten. In that moment, the quest is over. (The flag marked one corner of a survey box Amundsen employed to ensure there would be no doubt about his having stood at 90° S, not a mile or so away.) But it’s not until the following day, when Scott encounters the tent Amundsen left behind (with a note in it for him) that it sinks in. It’s then that he writes: “Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.” The long, perilous ascent of his figurative Everest having been accomplished, Scott now sees the place for what it actually is, an undistinguished, unbounded, flat, and anonymous expanse of snow. He is standing somewhere—it could be anywhere—on the polar plateau. The mountain has collapsed. It’s −22° F and he is more than eight hundred miles from the shelter of his winter quarters at Cape Evans, which he will not live to see.
The second entry I wanted to examine might have been made on March 29, 1912—this is the last date Scott wrote out, but his final entry might have been made as much as two days later. There is no period after the sentence “For Gods sake look after our people”; exactly whom Scott meant by “our people” has long been debated. The least generous interpretation is that he was referring only to members of the expedition. Another interpretation—a line at the front of his diary requests that the notebook be given to his wife, Kathleen—is that he was asking Kathleen to look after their class of people, including his infant son, and not incidentally, Scott’s reputation. What I understand his words to mean is less narrow than this, and perhaps overly generous. Anyone who seriously engages with the landscape of Antarctica learns that the geography here is indifferent toward humanity. It is not
“antagonistic,” seeking to thwart human effort. It made no distinction between Scott and Amundsen, the latter an obsessed, ruthlessly efficient, emotionally cold individual with as many character faults as Scott. Antarctica personified didn’t care who arrived where or what happened. It was people who built these constructs to sort “winners” from “losers,” and it was people who might have just as easily not built them. What Scott meant, I think, was for Kathleen to attend to those whose lives had not ended in Antarctica, and to support those whose questing might one day carry them to Antarctica’s shores.
The bitterness of his defeat, I came to think, had burned out in Scott by the time he lay dying. We assume sometimes that whatever the dying say at the end, or last write down, represents a conscious final thought, but I don’t believe this is very often true. What is really going on at the end mostly goes unspoken and unwritten, and what actually happens at the end remains unknown to the living. Final written thoughts are not likely to be profound summaries of everything that has come before. What was on Scott’s mind at the last, I believe, was what many men of my generation came to understand in Vietnam, in circumstances as harrowing in their way as Scott’s. The strategies for victory—and the handing out of medals—are as nothing compared to what people learn about looking out for one another under duress. No calling was higher in Vietnam than covering for another soldier. And the adolescent daydream, that the world is there for the taking—Scott wrote repeatedly on the trek back to Cape Evans about how his dreams had been dashed—or that the world acquiesces before strong men, is delusional.
The world outside the self is indifferent to the fate of the self.
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IN THE BOREAL SPRING of 1992 I boarded a 308-foot ice-breaking research vessel, the Nathaniel B. Palmer (named for an American captain who codiscovered the South Orkney Islands in 1821, and was among the first to sight Antarctica, in 1820), and accompanied it on its first voyage to the Southern Ocean. We sailed from the coast of Louisiana in March, passed through the Panama Canal and a little more than a week later put in at Punta Arenas, Chile, on the Strait of Magellan. After refueling and taking on freight and a small party of scientists, we crossed the Drake Passage and entered the Weddell Sea, the first ship to do so in the austral fall since Shackleton’s Endurance was crushed there in 1915. Our objective was a joint U.S./USSR (at that time) scientific camp operating on an ice floe deep inside the Weddell.
A Soviet icebreaker had put the camp in in the austral summer of 1991–92. Ours was the first resupply mission. The Palmer had been built in the Louisiana bayous the year before and outfitted for nearly every type of scientific research liable to be conducted in the Southern Ocean, from drilling for sediment cores on the bottom to observing the lives of sea mammals. Its extensive lab space supported studies in water chemistry, sea-floor mapping, ocean ecology, geodesy, and phytoplankton and krill distribution. This initial voyage was a shakedown cruise; there were only a few scientists and support staff aboard, in addition to the normal complement of officers and crew, and a few supernumeraries like me. The scientists were all bound for Ice Station Weddell (ISW). The ones they were replacing there would return with us to Punta Arenas.
On the way to ISW, sailing in loose pack at the ice front between the Southern Ocean and the Weddell Sea proper, we encountered dozens of whales, mostly minkes, orcas, and a few southern rights. Hundreds upon hundreds of crabeater seals—the most numerous large mammal in the world—were hauled out together on ice floes around us, along with smaller clusters of two other Antarctic seals, the gregarious Rosses and the Weddells. Leopard seals, hunters of penguins, we nearly always saw by themselves.
One evening I stepped out on the Palmer’s aft deck to take in the night before retiring. The deck is open and spacious, and built close to the water’s surface to make the lowering and retrieving of instrument platforms easier and safer. Work lights illuminated both the surface of the deck and the Palmer’s prop wash, the standing wave aft of the ship created by the ship’s propellers turning just enough during the dark night to keep the ship snug in a temporary slip it had made in the edge of a large ice floe. After a few moments I noticed four emperor penguins standing on the edge of the ice floe, staring at the ship’s standing wave. Suddenly one dove into the water. The other three followed immediately. I assumed that they were swimming off, mistrustful of the ship, until I saw a head emerge from the standing wave. Then three others. They were surfing the prop wash of what was probably the first ship they had ever seen.
As winter came on and we continued to force our way through the pack ice farther and farther south, we had fewer and fewer hours of daylight with which to work. Without light from the sky to help us spot open leads and read fault lines in the ice that the breaker could wedge open, we were compelled to lay up at night along the edges of large ice floes in order to conserve fuel. On some of those long nights I took advantage of the permission the captain gave me to step overboard and go for a walk. He only asked that I take a couple of companions with me, that I carry a radio, and that we all wear life jackets.
The air was often cold—20 or 25 below zero Fahrenheit—and we were far from any well-known place on Earth, nine hundred or so miles southeast of Cape Horn, in a sea roughly the size of the Mediterranean, one in which no ship but ours was to be found. Commercial shipping lanes, which run east and west in the Southern Ocean, were far to the north of where we were. No air traffic passed overhead (nor, at that time, did any satellites). Walking away from the ship across the frozen sea provided me with an unfamiliar perspective. On nights that were clear, light from the stars, radiating through the immaculate air, offered us all the illumination we needed to make our way safely across the ice. Within the hemisphere of remote space we occupied on those nights, there was only the sky, the ship, and the ice.
For our safety (and for our reassurance, no doubt), the captain ordered every outside light on the ship turned on when we stepped overboard—deck lights, navigation lights, work lights, searchlights. Seen like this, silhouetted against the blue-black vault of a sky pulsing with stars, with the murmur in our ears of the ship’s diesel engines idling, the Palmer could have been an intergalactic vessel of some sort, settled here for the moment on an inhospitable moon. It bristled with antenna wands and satellite communication globes. Its deck cranes gave the ship the appearance of a deep-space freighter. Steam rising from its ventilation grills and the plume of pale smoke wafting from its smokestack gave it a look of behemoth vitality. Behind its walls, past thermal-pane windows glowing in its superstructure, there was, I knew, daunting electrical, mechanical, and electronic wizardry.
On these walks I often raised my binoculars to draw closer to galaxies just beyond the Milky Way. Imagining my way out to them mentally, from the pindot of a planet I stood on between two spiral arms of my own galaxy, named Sagittarius and Orion, out past the halo of dark matter and dark energy surrounding our galaxy, out to the galaxies in our Local Group, brought the entire scene—the ice, the ship, the dark water underneath—into a continuum of time and into an unbroken expanse of space that overrode any information I might have gotten from my wristwatch or handheld GPS at that moment.
The only thing my watch could offer me was the time I told the officer on deck we would be back. For the moment, however, I was not in Antarctica. I was afoot on some planet’s moon.
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IN THE END, the captain decided to halt the Palmer about twenty-two miles shy of our destination. The supplies we were bringing to ISW were all small enough to fit inside a helicopter, and the fuel required for a few helicopter runs would be very much less than the fuel required to get the 308-foot ship through pack ice to the edge of the ice floe the camp was built on. We were far enough south, and it was late enough in the solar year, that our “days” were now dominated by darkness. This hampered our search for navigable water, something else the captain now
had to take into consideration.
The resupply of the ice station that April night had, again, the feel of an interstellar docking. The Bell 206 Jet Ranger appeared from and then disappeared into the utter dark, ferrying cargo and personnel and taking with it, each time, the turbines’ terrific roar. The helicopter’s turnaround times were so brief, the pilot never shut the engines down. The whirring rotor blades and the whining of the turbines added an element of urgency to the scene, and the pilot intensified the urgency by hand-signaling his constant impatience. Beneath a high canopy of silent stars, with the ship’s halogen work lights holding the night at bay, crewmen, hunched over and anonymous in their heavy parkas, scuttled back and forth under the prop wash. Men shouted. Cold steel banged in the numbing air. The five ice-station-bound scientists, wearing too much clothing and waiting anxiously in the ship’s interior, were perhaps wondering what they had gotten themselves into.
The helicopter pilot, clearly irritated by something not apparent to us, began shouting at his passengers as soon as they boarded about safety, as though needing to emphasize his authority over them in this chaotic situation, or as if he believed, because these men were academics, that they needed confrontational instruction in routine matters, or that, for him, these were people whose ideas about harsh weather and lunar-like isolation had come from watching television. His strange outburst spoke eloquently to tensions that frequently characterize such situations, ones in which working-class and middle-class people are forced to share the same confined spaces when they hold slightly different ideas about the nature of the mission. I’d felt this tension aboard the Palmer for some weeks, disgruntled crewmen resenting the condescending treatment they had to endure from a few of the scientists, people who strolled the ship with the air of owners. This theme, the tension between two social classes, is the infrequently reported story, in my experience, of numerous fractious scientific and adventuring expeditions.