DOWN and OUT

In case you haven’t noticed, this site is—in part—an exploration of place. And since I’m currently in Antarctica, this place has a lot to do with snow and ice. February marks the beginning of my twentieth month on Ross Island since 2003, but I’m finding myself endlessly fascinated with its surrounding landscape, which is really more of an icescape since Antarctica is 98% snow and ice.

By now, snow and ice could be so passé, but on a recent walk through the pressure ridges in front of Scott Base, I again remembered how seductive this place is. A pressure ridge is an ice feature that forms when tidal waves ripple a frozen ice layer that sits on top of the sea. Pressure ridges usually occur where the sea ice bumps up against an ice shelf. Sometimes the ridges become so pronounced that their crests break and create geometric displays of ice fanning out in all directions.

During the summer season in Antarctica, the pressure ridges are a dynamic landscape feature. Unlike Observation Hill, which just sits there—static—on the edge of town, the pressure ridges change shape from week to week, and revisiting them is like going to an art museum that frequently rearranges its galleries. Because warming temperatures cause the layer of ice on top of the sea to thin, the ridges become more pronounced as the season wears on.

Yesterday, as I ran on the Ob Hill Loop past an area that rippled with pressure ridges a few weeks ago, I noticed that the ridges had broken, and cluster of seals had come through the cracks to warm themselves in the sun.When I turned my back on them to head up the hill, I heard a woooosh of air and looked back to see a whale spouting breath through a pool of open water. It was one of those moments when the disparate aspects of this place all came together—the pressure ridges like ice sculptures shining in the sun, the seals—overgrown slugs—spread on top of the ice, my calves burning as I forced myself to scurry up a scree-covered hill.

“It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” –Sir Edmund Hillary, New Zealand polar explorer and mountaineer  

Besides McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s Ross Island is the location of one other lonely outpost: the New Zealand Antarctic Program’s Scott Base, population: “LOTS,” as the sign at its border reads. At this time of the year, “LOTS” means that around fifty-five happy Kiwis live snugly within a central building that looks like a space station…and otherwise puts McMurdo to shame. Less than three miles away from McMurdo, Scott Base has benefited from forethought in both strategy and design. The entire settlement could fit within an area less than a half a football field in length; by comparison, McMurdo’s hasty beginnings and its heedlessness to aesthetic principles make it an unsightly case of suburban sprawl.

The Scott Base structures are uniformly painted lime green, a color that looks out of place on a continent that has no native vegetation, but its matching palette makes the station look neat—almost sleek—in a way that McMurdo never will be. Attention to detail and design-consciousness are Scott Base’s signatures—from its glossy turquoise fire extinguishers to its Euro-designed dining chairs, which are the colors of autumn leaves.

Named after polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, the New Zealand station is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this week. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Helen Clark is currently on Ross Island for the celebration, along with the 87-year-old Sir Edmund Hillary, a Kiwi mountaineer and explorer who has attained celebrity-type status. I wonder if we’ll see them over the hill at McMurdo, but if they knew what was good for them, they would stay at Scott Base.

Life’s better there.

(The food, the parties, and the bar are also better.  Scientists in drag in the Scott Base Skirt Party, above). 

“I had a boat…a cargo of books, and the kind of dream of self-enrichment that spurs everyone who sails north from Seattle. Forget the herring and the salmon: I meant to go fishing for reflections, and come back with a glittering haul.” –Jonathan Raban, in Passage to Juneau (1999)

The recent “Down and Out” discussion of the Polar Sea has had me thinking more about the sea…and its meanings, which brings to mind Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. Raban’s book tells the story of the author’s journey in a 35-foot sailboat from Seattle to Juneau via the 1,000-mile Inside Passage. But it also shows how that journey becomes a canvas within which nature, history, literature, person, and place are all at play.

Besides recounting the physical aspects of the passage—its tides and winds, its whirlpools and the telephone booths stationed at its docks along the way—Raban manages to narrate a history of place that is as natural as it is personal. The balance is remarkable—one moment Raban describes what it is like to find the morning sky “paint-white veined with streaky pink, like the inside of a mussel shell,” and in the next moment, he tells us what it’s like to be “an experienced deserter,” a “rat” who leaves behind his family for travel.

Framing the entire narrative is Raban’s retelling of Captain Vancouver’s explorations of the area in the early 1790s, and readers are assured a good summary of “Captain Van’s” Voyage of Discovery by the time Raban reaches his destination. In Passage to Juneau, British Romantic poetry also makes a good showing, as do Indian legends, along with advice from fellow travelers and books like Wrinkles in Practical Navigation (1881).

“To put oneself afloat on a sea-route as old and heavily traveled as the Inside Passage was to join the epic cavalcade of all those, present and past, who’d found some meaning in these waters,” says Raban. After reading his account of the journey, I’m convinced that Raban more than stayed afloat with the “epic cavalcade” and that he, too, found some meaning in those waters—maybe even “a glittering haul.”

“During the afternoon we were nearly becalmed, and witnessed some magnificent eruptions of Mount Erebus, the flame and smoke being projected to a greater height; but we could not, as on a former occasion, discover any lava issuing from the crater; although the exhibitions of to-day were upon a much grander scale…” –polar explorer Sir James Clark Ross, in A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions During the Years 1839-43

The world’s southernmost active volcano, Mount Erebus is perhaps the most alive of McMurdo’s landscape features.  From a distance, it sometimes looks like an old white-haired man reclining with his head tilted back and cigar smoke puffing from his mouth.  This is how I imagine it, at least, but Erebus does smoke, and he still sputters lava bombs (yes—he.  Landscape features often seem to have a gender, and Erebus is most certainly male).   

With gill-like crevasses opening on its sides, Erebus doesn’t simply look dangerous; the volcano has also proven to be a killer.   When a 1979 New Zealand sightseeing flight carrying 257 people lost its bearings and slammed into its side, Erebus became the site of Antarctica’s most tragic plane crash. 

With a summit elevation of around 12,450 feet, Erebus is the highest point on Ross Island and a topic of interest to several scientists here who keep close tabs on its rumblings.  The National Science Foundation’s Antarctic publication, the Antarctic Sun, reported last week that Erebus erupted as much as six times a day in the second half of 2005.  We’re not in danger of becoming the next Pompeii, however, as most of the eruptions are closer to a burp than a full-on spew. 

Estimated to have been active for around 1.3 million years, Erebus doesn’t seem like the kind of volcano to cool off anytime soon.  Named after one of the sons of the Greek god Chaos, Erebus will more likely keep living up to its name.

“The whole place and conditions seem so strange and unlike anything in the world in our experience…that one cannot describe them in fitting words. At one moment, one thinks of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’: ‘Alone, alone; all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea…’ and then when the mazy clouds spring silently from either hand and drift quickly across our zenith, not followed by any wind, it seems uncanny.” –Sir Ernest Shackleton, in Heart of the Antarctic (1919)

Between some scree-covered hills, McMurdo Station sits tucked into the armpit of Ross Island and surrounded by the frozen sea. During the summer season, airplanes and helicopters can land on ice only about as thick as I am tall, allowing for regular cargo and equipment supplies to be delivered from Christchurch, New Zealand. But the summer season is short, and airlifting supplies to Antarctica is expensive, so most of the cargo keeping this place going for a year at a time arrives annually on a single ship—quite a bit of pressure for the folks who do the ordering. And getting a ship into a place surrounded by a frozen sea isn’t easy, either.

In order to aid the resupply vessel that is on its way from Port Heuneme, California, two burly icebreakers crunched their way to McMurdo this week—a Swedish icebreaker called the Oden and the U.S. Coast Guard’s Polar Sea, which is currently docked just outside the window. Both ships have reinforced hulls and can smash a channel through the ice so that supplies can be hoisted right onto the shore when the cargo vessel arrives. One hundred curious Adélie penguins showed up at Hut Point Peninsula after the Oden arrived, and we’re hoping for a storm to blow out the channel’s floating ice so that killer whales will follow.

The Polar Sea has brought a lot of excitement into town—including a rowdy crew of Coasties, who are glad to be at port after their long journey from Seattle. McMurdo is no Sydney (the crew’s last major stop)—we only have three dingy bars and a station store, but they don’t seem to mind.

In some ways, the ships’ arrival signals the beginning of the end. Shortly after the cargo vessel arrives, many workcenters will begin to close for the winter season, and scientists will fly back to their universities around the world. The ships will sail north, and airplanes will remain grounded in New Zealand. Within the next six weeks, a thousand people (including me) will say goodbye to this place, and just over one hundred will stay.

“…my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars until I die.”  –Ulysses speaking to his son, in Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1833) 
 
The ultimate adventurer’s poem?  If I had to pick it, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” might be the one I’d choose–I can’t think of any other verse that gives a better voice to those restless grumblings in my bones.  

Tennyson’s seventy-line poem is narrated by the aged Ulysses—the heroic figure who in his youth narrowly escapes the Trojan War and then encounters numerous trials on his return journey to Ithaca (the subject of epic poems the Iliad and The Odyssey).  But Tennyson’s version of the hero is an “idle king” struggling with his insatiable desire to set back out wherever the seas will take him. 

In Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses hands over his scepter to his son and then looks in the direction of the port, where he sees that “the vessel puffs her sail.” Ulysses thinks of his mariners, who are now old like him, but his purpose still holds.  “That which we are, we are,” Ulysses says, “…made weak by time and fate but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  

I recently reconsidered this poem after finding that its last line, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” is inscribed on the memorial cross perched atop Observation Hill.  Visible from the center of McMurdo, the marker memorializes Robert Falcon Scott and his party who died sledging home from the South Pole in 1912. 

Outside of its literary context, the reference could seem to suggest stubbornness, inflexibility, or foolhardy lack of compromise.  Knowing Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” we can sympathize more with Scott as a kindred adventurer, one with a “hungry heart” who believes, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” 

 “‘Yes, the life which we call blessed is to be sought for on a high eminence, and straight is the way that leads to it.  Many, also, are the hills that lie between…’” 
–Petrarch, from “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux”

I have admitted my love of the mountains, in general, and mentioned my fascination with Antarctica’s Royal Societies, in particular, so it should not be surprising that I’m at least a little interested in Observation Hill, the 800-foot tall mound of volcanic rock that sits right on the edge of town.  From one angle, it’s shaped like an almost perfect pyramid, and at McMurdo, we literally live in its shadow (depending on the time of day and year). 

  Walking from the center of town, a hiker can reach the summit of Observation Hill in less than thirty minutes by way of a steep scree slope that meanders upwards into a nice ridge.  During some portions, the walk feels like you’re doing high-intensity intervals on a stair-stepper at the gym, but then you look up and realize that you’re in Antarctica—it’s gorgeous outside—and you’ve only got this far to go:

 And when you get to the summit, your reward isn’t a blinking panel of red lights on the stair-stepper’s console; instead, it’s a miniature McMurdo, finally so far below you that the town’s humming generators and clattering snow-tracked vehicles can’t be heard. 

  Two weeks ago, a new trail around Ob Hill officially opened up, allowing a good running route with lookouts over the ice shelf.  The black volcanic dirt set against its whiteness creates a striking contrast. 

Melted pools of ice are scattered along the way, their cracks spidering out in wavy lines.

Since 1912, a memorial cross has been perched on top of Ob Hill in honor of polar explorers Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates, and Evans, who died that year on their return journey from the South Pole.  The inscription reads:  “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  The last lines from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” those words will be important to remember for the upcoming post…on—yes—Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”  See you then.