My Antarctica

What's yours?

Before we begin…

When you think or hear of Antarctica, what comes to mind? If given the chance, would you go? What questions do you have about this place so far away and so remote? Or, if you have gone, tell us about it – how, if at all, did it change you? 

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“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It's like going to the moon.” ― Jon Krakauer

On the ice. Photo by Jim Mastro

What is your Antarctica? 

I’ve always wanted to go to Antarctica. No, that’s not true. I have wanted to go to Antarctica since one late summer day in 1979 when my four-year-old son, my roommate, and I went out to picnic on Thacher’s Island off the coast of Rockport, Massachusetts. I was there to do a feature for the local paper I worked which paid little but offered many opportunities to have fun in the name of work. 

We were met at the shore and ferried over to the island by one of the last coast guardsmen to be stationed at the lighthouse there. He and his colleague would be leaving soon and heading to Antarctica where they would cruise on an icebreaker for the austral summer. All I knew about Antarctica then was that it was the furthest I could ever get from everything I knew, that it was murderously cold and breathtakingly beautiful, and that men had died trying to get to the South Pole. When the two coast guardsmen talked about the upcoming cruise, their eyes shone with anticipation. It was infectious. 

Over the next few hours, we ate sandwiches, laughed a lot, took my son up to the top of the lighthouse. We were all in our early twenties and everything – even this sunny afternoon only a few miles from the mainland – took on the aura of freedom, exploration, adventure. When they said, “Can you cook? We need one on the ship. They’re hiring now,” I heard both challenge and possibility. 

I didn’t consider that I got seasick on a wooden dock and could barely make sloppy Joes for two, never mind plan and prepare meals for an entire crew and whatever passengers were along for research or other purposes. I forgot how growing up in northern New Hampshire left me with an abiding hate of cold, snow, and the dark days of winter that never seemed to end. I forgot how long six months might seem to a child who had only lived a grand total of 48 months so far — never mind the question of who would care for him. I wanted this. I wanted to go there, see things that few people I knew would ever see, test my endurance. I knew that doing this or something equally as bold would be the grand experience of my life. If I went, I would never be the same. 

Most of all, the notion of going to Antarctica drove home the full impact of the choices I’d made so far, chief among them the choice to be a mother at eighteen, now a single mother. As we climbed back into the launch for the ride back to shore, home, and my “real life,” I tried to ignore the struggle in my heart, head, and gut as I began to wonder what the choices I’d made so far would mean for the rest of my life or certainly the next few years. 

I laughingly told the coast guardsmen I’d think about it and I did not lie. Some days as I was driving around Rockport, checking the schools, police, or town leaders for news, I was imagining myself on that icebreaker or perhaps at McMurdo Station which I’d read about after the afternoon on Thacher’s Island. Looking back, I can see how little practical consideration went into these imaginings. I understood at some level that if I only ever thought about what was practical, I might never do any of the things I needed and longed to do. I might be a prisoner of the part of myself that scuttled for safety, security, and the known my entire life instead of a person who took risks as we discussed last week when we were talking about what scares us.

I missed something though which surfaced more clearly years later over dinner with my cousin and his wife. I relayed the story of that afternoon and the feelings that followed. He cocked his head at me and said, “your son was your Antarctica.” He pointed to the leap into the unknown I’d taken at eighteen and all that had come with it: physical, emotional, and financial discomfort, work, tests of endurance, discovery of what I was capable of, thrills, joy, growth and the way this choice had changed me. It has been, so far, the grand experience of my life, the one that took me from the shores of everything I knew and showed me how much of life is out of my control. My thoughts about Antarctica represented those moments described in Oldster Magazine recently by Maria Coffey as “counterfactual curosity” about roads not taken.

Still, I think about Antarctica, especially now, as the sea ice is softening, the glaciers calving and dissolving into the sea. I’m not sure I will ever get there – or what I would ever have to offer the place by going there. The cost is high, the cruise ships that go there impact the very environment that suddenly seems so fragile, and weather can disrupt any voyage. Still, I still bookmark information about grants or fellowships for writers and artists to go there, still read whatever I can about people who go there to live and work. Antarctica is a real place to me but it also represents that part of me that longs for extremes and tests and growth and, perhaps, a life I might have lived. All these years later, I am not yet ready to give it up. 

What is your Antarctica? Have you ever found yourself imagining or doing the thing that pulled you far from the familiar and showed you parts of the world or parts of yourself that surprised or awed you? Or, have you found adventure in what appears to be every-day life? 

More to come – and answers to your questions about Antarctica too

This week’s post was inspired by an interview I was lucky enough to do recently with Spark author Jim Mastro and his friend and mentor Gerald Kooyman, who is, as Jim puts it, as closely associated with the emperor penguins as Dian Fosse is with gorillas. Both men have logged years on “the ice” as they refer to the continent at the bottom of the world and later this month, they will launch Journey With the Emperors: Tracking the World’s Most Extreme Penguin. 

Although Kooyman has written extensively about his research, this book is a more personal account of what it took to study the far-traveling, deep-diving, ingeniously evolved birds that lay eggs in the deepest part of the Antarctic winter and grow to be three and half to four and half feet tall.

I am looking forward to sharing our conversation with you in next week’s issue of Spark. What’s more, Jim Mastro has offered to field any questions you may have about living and working year-round in Antarctica. He has spent two entire seasons there. He has dived beneath the Arctic ice and and wrote about all of it with gorgeous photos in his book Antarctica: A Year at the Bottom of the World. So think about everything you’ve ever wanted to know or even the things you never even thought to ask, and share them in the comments this week and next. Jim will address them in the comments section after next week’s issue comes out. 

In the meantime, learn more about Journeys With Emperors and pre-order it here or here. If you’d like to see Emperor penguins in action above and below the ice, check out some wonderful videos here. 

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Traveling to “The Ice”: Fiction and Nonfiction

Nonfiction

• The Quickening by environmental journalist Elizabeth Rush is both memoir and an account of her voyage as one of three journalists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, an icebreaker carrying international teams of scientists to the Thwaite’s Glacier, arriving just as it collapsed. It also chronicles her struggles with the desire to have a child in the face of a future made uncertain and more perilous by climate change. What makes this book special are the details she provides of life aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer (which made it clear that I would never have made it as a cook on such a vessel), an inside look at the research and what drives it, the raw beauty of the Antarctic she encounters, and her thoughts about the need to shift how we think about the continent from a place to be “conquered” to a place to be understood, cherished, and preserved. After reading it, I went to the blogs and sites for several of the research teams just for more such as this one: The THOR Team Blog.

• The Call of Antarctica: Exploring and Protecting Earth’s Coldest Continent by Leilani Raashida Henry whose father was the first Black person to set foot on Antarctica.

  Diamond-Michael Scott
  suggested this book to me during a conversation on Notes. The slim volume centers around the diary of Henry's father, George W. Gibbs, Jr., who was among 40 U.S. Navy crew members aboard the USS Bear, a three-mast, wooden sailing ship working in Antarctica in 1939. Part of the expedition from the beginning, he helped to prepare the former whaling ship for Antarctica. He started out the voyage as a mess attendant, one of those responsible for food, laundry, and keeping the ship clean. Once aboard, he found that neither his rank nor his race prevented him from participating in assignments throughout the expedition as long as he was willing to work hard, an eye-opening experience for a U.S. service member of color at that period. While aboard, he continued to take examinations to get promoted but also took time to jot down his day-to-day observations and experiences such as … “taking a bath in cold water, and keeping clothes clean out of a bucket.” Seventy-five huskies were housed in several parts of the ship, “howling day and night.” 

• And this perceptive short-read from the Washington Post written by subscriber

  Tanya Ward Goodman
  , provides a glimpse of what it feels like to visit the Antarctic on one of those cruise ships and how her visit there helped her to cope with the pandemic. 

Fiction

• My Last Continent by Midge Raymond is both a love story and an ode to the fragility of the Antarctic ecosystem. Researcher Deb Gardener is aboard her working vessel, unsure of why Keller Sullivan, the man with whom she shares a “complicated” history has not shown up. When a tourist cruise ship gets into trouble, her team is called and pressed into service to help rescue the passengers and crew which, to her shock, includes Sullivan. The tension rises not only out of the inevitable conflicts of love and work but the tension between pursuing one’s dreams and work in a place that may suffer for that. I read this book when it came out in 2017, loved it, and then envied the author who I met on a panel that year who had traveled to the Antarctic and understands the miracle not only of the place itself but its status as one of the few places on earth where international agreements ensure that “animals roam without human predators and where everyone works together for the common good.” 

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P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…and now for something completely different…

This is one way to stay safe in a dangerous world…(clearly still working on my video skills)

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”: 

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

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