-Tangents from the Underground-
What is sight, but a few pictures we snap for posterity from
the infinite possibility we stand before, the inconsequential funnel of reality,
the gaping maw of thought and ethics that divides everything. Stone and flesh,
fire and ocean, we thrive on the cold tranquility of virtue and precise formulas
of indifference.
Murder can be civilized and politeness can be vile, but the voluntary lapse in
consciousness we take when something is seen as truth without question,
I guess we are all just muses to someone, nature smiles eternal and all we can
do is squint and try to block the sun. Wired into the grid we are just around the corner from the beaten path, the wild tangents of the underground are hot and humid, thick with ideas
and lush with possibility, but the desert on constrained comfort is so comfortable.
we turn on the air conditioning of mass media and blast the fearsome and revolutionary into
submission; Phoenix in July it sizzles on gritty sidewalks.
The edge of the soul should be ragged and unkempt, open to ideas and not tied to daily doldrums, routine is beautiful and necessary, but need not be mindless.
-Desert Wanderer-
Sun spills over the wrinkled edges of the world and I,
a desert wanderer, trod on past silent valleys and the obvious want of water
and nothing.
Island in the sky I forge a hollow in the desert dust of humanity.
-Snowflakes-
Great silent mounds of fluffy crystals, you dampen unrest,
my mind soothed, enter the whiteroom, everything silent and immediate,
outside perceptions cannot enter, I am entombed, a voluntary subject of the
earth and sky. Pillows, blankets, the covers of powdery nothingness that I pull tight
over concerns and worries, all the bare brown rusty spots of the world are covered so
nicely, as if the next turn downhill was like taking another breath.
-South Georgia Island-
The boat slowed and shuddered as the rear engines shut down and the men scrambled on the deck to ready the anchors and salt-bitten, yellowed bowlines as we slid in towards the dock. The sun peaked over the high crest of glaciated peaks in the distance and I exhaled with the relief of the end of 500 years winter.
We had arrived. The 6 day passage from Tierra Del Fuego had been terrifying and beautiful, wrought with cavernous green rollers and looming icebergs, the gulls and albatross's curiously following our wake. It was here in 1914 that Sir Ernest Shackleton set off with his crew to try and cross the Antarctic continent. They would not set foot on land again for 497 days.
Not every place in the world was intended for human habitation, and I shivered in the cold fog as I thought of the closest people to our vessel, over 800 miles away.
On the open ocean at dawn, the sun burns with such an immediate and disarming intensity that it is all one can do do not stare at it and go blind. As the bustle of docking our 110 foot ship filled the harbor with the surreal thwacks and shouts of anthropogenic struggle, I struggled myself to fathom this consequence of this place we were in.
We were hear as scientists but also as adventurers, visitors to a seldom visited speck in the South Atlantic, 80 miles long and 20 miles wide, gray peaks robed in ancient blue ice soaring 10,000 feet above the fierce breakers.
I kept thinking of home in Boulder; the climbing gym, the coffee shop where I'd watch the yuppies and hipsters at work, Whole Foods, REI. Somehow in this place of such raw, primal beauty it all seemed hollow and plastic. I'd been waiting for this trip for so long, I suppose it's why in hindsight I took the underpaying, often tedious office job at NOAA, there had always been talk of this trip. It was never promised, just stirred around like cream in coffee, there but dissolved among daily trivialities like excel spreadsheets and powerpoints. When my boss called me into his office 2 months ago and dropped the bomb, in a hushed but excited tone, that I'd be part of a month-long expedition to study climate change on South Georgia Island, all the long hours wasted fantasizing in google earth of this forgotten strip of earth seemed worthwhile.
In this place there was only ever-shifting sky and boiling clouds, thousands of waddling, coalescing penguins and elephant seals, and the omniscient bulk of the mountains thrust over everything, scary and mysterious. I couldn't help but think back with humble reverence to the giant white rocks on a hillside as we left Fort Stanley, capitol of the Falkland Islands, which spelled out on crude letters "PROTECTOR." To whom this was addressed was a mystery; the salt-crusted and weatherbeaten fisherman coming in from the South Atlantic, the explorers and adventurers out to claim a slice of something, god even perhaps, protector of foolish human struggle. At the time, it seemed so surreal, the heaving, windswept Atlantic beckoning out of the tiny harbor towards South Georgia, sort of like the motto the British, in another inanely myopic imperialist war, had given the South Sandwich Islands when they 'won' them: "Let the Lion Protect his Own Land." Indeed, the lion had protected his own land, but this lion was not guns or whaling stations or pale, egotistical northern europeans, but the elements of nature that had always ruled this place.
The basic aesthetics of our first port and current location, the abandoned Norwegian whaling station of Grytviken, was surreal and sad. It is difficult to comprehend how hard man is on the land until you see one of the most pristine, remote places in the world laid fallow by rusting steel cables and tin roof warehouses, the rotting hulks of massive 4-masted schooners half sunk in the harbor. It was as if the whistle blew at 5 o'clock on a Friday and then never returned, content to rape and steal from this magnificent landscape and turn their backs against the remains. The remains of Grytviken was but a tiny fraction of the island though, I thought with slight consolation, though the idea of some self-righteous Nordic barbarian slaughtering one of those noble beasts on this very dock made me seethe.
Grytviken was an apparition of man's foolish ambition though, and I vowed to keep at such in my mind, and not let the rusting hulks of 1950's whaling ships and the arrogant white steeple of the town's meticulously restored 18th century church unfairly influence the beauty of this place. Though I'd scarcely been on land 10 minutes, I already felt the tremendous gravity of the island, the hundreds of penguins down the beach, the raucous seals and terns, the distant brooding peaks. We began to unload the equipment and supplies, the gaudy neon inflatable Zodiac boats so out of place in this cold gray landscape. The crew, 2 young Frenchman and the captain, also from the Cannes area, were also excited, as they had not made the voyager here before and were contracted out rather last minute to be our transportation to and from the island. They were to stay, but mostly would loiter around Grytviken and the vicinity of the fjord we were in, as we prepared to move inland and over the mountains for the duration of our stay, traveling into crevasse and avalanche ridden terrain where the footsteps of man had not been felt before.
This idea had always fascinated me, as silly and arrogant as it sounded, the idea of treading lightly and the earth and simultaneously claiming 'first tracks' in the name of conquest and adventure. A smile creased my cheeks as I though back to my last real wilderness trip, by real I meant greater than that week-long vacation backpacking trip in Utah or long weekend skiing the backcountry huts where neurotic yuppies tried to hide their iphone and crackberry communication with the rest of the world, the "sidecountry" I loved and hated. That last trip, 6 weeks spent whitewater paddling on the George River, the ragged edge of the Labrador peninsula trailing north into the aurora borealis. That had been so intense, relaxed but also unforgivingly harsh, and I marveled at how I'd made the journey over the past 10 years from an idealistic young man of 18 to today.
My fellow group members on this trip were lovely and detestable, caricatures of Boulder over education and outdoor stimulation. Really, this was great though, and a fine model for how the rest of the slovenly American population should conduct themselves. I suppose I was ridiculing myself in an attempt to come to terms with how blessed and empty my life was: filled with the intensity and immediacy of constant outdoor adventures, the culture and pretension of Boulder life, the alluring uncertainty of the future. The last bit though, the chaotic future I always prided myself on, was waning in appeal, and I found myself longing for the unquestioning love saw in the young families that overpopulated Boulder, the subject of my frequent derision and amusement. I was so damn tired of feeling like an anomaly, even out here among the seals and penguins, comically removed from the negative influences I saw as my reason for indifference.
Hans, a tall handsome Norwegian, smiled as he hefted a large waterproof case containing our CO2 measurement equipment, newly designed by some engineering lab rat back home. He always seemed happy and productive, his close-cropped dark blonde hair and bulging pectoral muscles hidden under a sweater a size too big. His wife and young son were pleasant and predictable, reasons I found to doubt myself in ever establishing a successful relationship. I was pleasant, certainly, but my bipolar-esque alternating between manic pride/happiness and depressed self-loathing/sadness made science and skiing sound far more engaging than human commitment. Sarah, on the other hand, was strange and unpredictable like myself, highly functional but also on some sort of alternate reality plane I found comforting and accessible. While for better or worse there was no romantic prospect between is I saw, we shared conversation and the occasional beer after work, and I enjoyed our collective idea of being fugitives in an increasingly homogenous Boulder. The Isle of South Georgia obsessed us both to an equal degree I think, and I was sincerely appreciative that our boss had included Sarah on the team at the last minute, as our senior paleoclimatologist had come down with a bad case of the flu.
We were to spend the first few nights in Grytviken, calibrating our instruments and our minds to the harsh, alien landscape of the South Atlantic. The giant, bright yellow North Face tents supplied to us by NOAA were almost comically out of place here, and we had began calling these portable living spaces "the space station on Mount Everest" on previous trips, a slightly cynical allusion to their techy functionality. Regardless, they were pretty much the best damn tents money could buy, and I always relished the long, windswept nights holed up in the yellow gore-tex cocoons, reading by headlamp or typing data into our little field laptops. It was late afternoon and I imagined this is what earthset and sunrise must be like on the moon, as the last crimson shards of light filtered over the horizon and the temperature plummeted at an almost perceptible rate. In the distance the cry of bull elephant seals filled the air with discordant grumbling, and the mountains stood watching, so close and large they threatened to topple over into the sea.
I returned to the ship after setting up our tent, Sarah skipping along behind me and laughing about the small group of curious penguins that had followed us onto the dock, our presence too alien and unfamiliar to cause any fear in them. It was so refreshing and disarming to be in place that must be a lot like Darwin's Galapagos, where animals have no distrust of people, and flock in curious awe of our arrival here. The penguins, they were the best, sleek and engineered for a cold, unforgiving climate, yet also silly and approachable, the type of creature you couldn't help but like, and envy in a way, as they seemed to always have ample company and food.
I thought of the King penguin, the dominant species here, and how I'd never forgotten my 7th-grade science teacher's instruction to us that they could hold their breath for 18 minutes and dive to over 1,500 feet. 18 minutes! I don't think I could do anything for 18 minutes, much less willingly deprive my body of the most fundamental ingredient of life. They waddled and flapped their wings, craned their rotund, brightly feathered necks in curious response to our activity, and pretty soon our entire crew was thoroughly distracted with the growing penguin congregation. Dinner/journal entry time was forgotten as we were overcome with the human animal instinct to observe and understand, something so stifled in the civilization we've created, I thought. Tomorrow we were to begin climbing, slowly and surely, up the stoic flanks of Mount Nelson, the 9,500 foot peak looming past the harbor, first summited almost 100 years earlier by Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew, not in the spirit of adventure or conquest, but simply to get a good viewpoint from which they might plan the ill fated future of their expedition.
These mountains were not particularly huge nor inaccessible, compared to the high Karokoram in India or the Cerro Blanco in Peru, yet they were disproportionally fierce and intimidating, perhaps due to the committal, involved nature of this place, a speck in the cold wastes of the South Atlantic. The aspect the sun shone on was always oblique; slanting and inaccessible, and even in midday in January, the sun cast strange oblong shadows across the snow. The first rays of morning bothered by sleep and lit the inside of the tent with bright yellow reflection, and I crawled out of my sleeping bag and started to pack my gear for the days climb. On this first leg of the trip it would be just Hans, Sarah and myself, with the rest of the 10-person crew embarking on a different itinerary to the South, taking sea-level ice CO2 and O2 isotope readings to fulfill another part of our mission.
I relished the thought on standing almost 10,000 feet over the Scotia Sea in a few days time, the ragged edges of the world falling away at my feet, rock and ice obscuring the horizon line. I knew this was a shallow fantasy though, and everything from weather to crevasses avalanches stood in our path to the summit. I had always been a daydreamer, a romantic idealist in the mountains, who only faced reality when is was harsh and in front of my face, yet I felt I was pragmatic enough when the situation called for it to get done what needed doing. I clicked into my skinny little touring skis, and felt almost comical in comparison to the massive twin-tip powder skis I usually relied on for transportation in the mountains. I had to remind myself this was not the forgiving highway-serviced backcountry of Colorado, but place so removed and foreign to the rest of the world I could not equate its meaning to anything experienced before.
We moved swiflty and without complication, and I relished the company of two people in equal physical shape and motivation to myself; fellow climbers and skiers. As we progressed up the snaking blue tongue of the Admundson Glacier, the little harbor and our base camp faded and the views to the south and east were nothing short of spectacular. The teeming masses of penguins and seals seemed to coalesce into a mass of slowly moving gray and white dots, spread out on the tussuc-fringed shore of the island, amongst the stark white sand and pounding surf.
This didn't strike me as the type of place one came to take abn "eco-cruise" or an "adventure holiday" but rather represented the ragged, unkmept edge of the world onev somehow ends up at after having been jaded by everything else. That fit our team in a sense, ambassadors of an elite first-world scienctific organization bent on understanding how we were progressively fucking up the world, people who had answers to everything and nothing.
We settled on a distant rock island in the middle of the glacier as our lunch destination, and the calm, easy monotony of upward progress in good weather soothed my racing mind. 'Click slide clack' as each ski moved upwards a step, bringing us a bit closer to the cloud-enshrouded summit of Mount Nelson. The rock island moved closer and soon we sat on the gray flanks of gabbro and diorite, a 100 meter wide battlement stuck in a downward tide of ancient ice. The sun had come out and warmed the valley to a pleasant 45 degrees, and I wiped salty sweat off my brow as our group shed a half dozen collective layers, fatigued but not exhausted from our 4.5 miles and 3,500 feet uphill.
Some silly pop song resonated in my head, a common thing on long, singular treks like this, to have something so removed and alien to this landscape bouncing around in my thoughts. High on a distant sea cliff I could barely make out the festive yellow crests of Macaroni penguins, nesting for the summer in great throngs of hundreds of birds, inhabitants of the most extreme niche in this already dangerous island. I wiped cracker crumbs off my chin and enjoyed the last bit of sardines and cheese in silence, as we chose to sit for 10 or 15 minutes and simply enjoy the brilliant, deafening silence of this valley, the clatter of distant rockfall or wind the only sound. Suddenly, everything crystallized in my mind like a plume of magma shooting up throguh the crust, definite minerals appearing out of the hazy, boiling mix, somehow constant in space and time. I knew about the Boulderites, the rednecks, the genuises and the idiots, I knew what I would do tomorrow, and then next day, and every sunrise and sunset until there were no more. I wasn't going home.
