The past 4 years had been a whirlwind of unpredictable change, and I found myself in a state of similar disarray I was in 50 years ago, fresh out of college and uncertain of anything except the momentum of the present. I had been divorced, though it felt odd to repeat the word in my mind, as the papers had just been finalized 3 weeks before I left to Antarctica from New York. We had been married nearly 4 decades, but I can say truthfully that I never loved her; rather it was a classic blue blood marriage of convenience, and as dark and self-aggrandizing as it sounds, I thought now that the hum of the city had been removed, perhaps I never loved anyone.
The penguins were of course a principal attraction, and even around the garbage and machinery-strewn edges of McMurdo, the main research station and U.S outpost here, they gathered in curious groups. I marveled at their sleekly engineered bodies and easy familiarity with this alien landscape. Our group leader, a burly and rough-hewn giant of a Norwegian Expat named Lars, had told us earlier on the plane that penguins, once they find a suitable mate, remain loyal until the end. I suppose I envied this too, but not really, it was just an affirmation of my suspicion that even the wild fringes of nature longed for some sort of routine. Despite this though, there were occasionally deranged penguins who would purposefully ignore the rest of the flock and waddle in a distressingly uneven gait towards the interior, driven my some internal idiosyncrasy, or perhaps just the desire not to be number any more. I sympathized with these crazy penguins, since their yearning to be more than another black dot among the millions resonated in eerie clarity with the New Yorker in me. Apparently their were also same-sex penguins couples, which I thought was particularly endearing, that the foul intolerance of American politics and religion need not apply to the natural world, here in this singular landscape of rock and ice.
It was late spring here, almost the southern summer, and on this unusually clear evening of December 15th, I wished my vision was good enough to fully comprehend all the strange, oblique shadows of sun on snow, rock and ocean, the only 3 things that defined this cold desert. The aesthetics of Antarctica were not as 2-dimensional as I had expected; rather, the light constantly morphed around intermittent clouds, throwing it's weightless energy around the edges of the horizon. The weather was fickle and cantankerous , and reminded me of my boyhood summer home on the Coast of Maine, the perennial comfort of warm summer rain and early morning fog sailing in the Atlantic.
I took an immediate dislike to the steel and concrete abominations that were the McMurdo Station, as they seemed so lewd and out of place in this landscape man was never meant to conquer. I stared at the piles of construction supplies and rubbish that lay strewn about the outskirts of the station, and it reminded me quite vividly of the trash I had seen at base camp on Everest nearly 20 years earlier. The audacity of man to excuse such actions in the spirit of "adventure" or remoteness was unacceptable in my opinion, and while our team had not summited that August afternoon in 1983, I was proud of the fact that we had packed out 100% of our trash, and also embarrassed at how easy it was to practice 'leave no trace' ethics on one of the most difficult peaks in the world.
Our group was a motley and thoroughly incohesive assortment of the types of characters you would expect to have fallen off the edge of the world and settled down here; glaciologists, climatologists, machine operators with PhD's in philosophy, kitchen workers who fought for 2 decades on Wall Street. Everyone seemed to share a collective weirdness though, and the details of social etiquette that, in my opinion, mired interaction in the rest of the world, were refreshingly excused here. I loved the refusal to settle for mediocrity which I saw so much of in New York; even amongst the most humble immigrant hot dog vendor or cabbie, their was a shared responsibility to be fresh and influential in the world, to refuse to roll out of bed in sweatpants and drag your feet down the street.
I took an immediate dislike to the steel and concrete abominations that were the McMurdo Station, as they seemed so lewd and out of place in this landscape man was never meant to conquer. I stared at the piles of construction supplies and rubbish that lay strewn about the outskirts of the station, and it reminded me quite vividly of the trash I had seen at base camp on Everest nearly 20 years earlier. The audacity of man to excuse such actions in the spirit of "adventure" or remoteness was unacceptable in my opinion, and while our team had not summited that August afternoon in 1983, I was proud of the fact that we had packed out 100% of our trash, and also embarrassed at how easy it was to practice 'leave no trace' ethics on one of the most difficult peaks in the world.
Our group was a motley and thoroughly incohesive assortment of the types of characters you would expect to have fallen off the edge of the world and settled down here; glaciologists, climatologists, machine operators with PhD's in philosophy, kitchen workers who fought for 2 decades on Wall Street. Everyone seemed to share a collective weirdness though, and the details of social etiquette that, in my opinion, mired interaction in the rest of the world, were refreshingly excused here. I loved the refusal to settle for mediocrity which I saw so much of in New York; even amongst the most humble immigrant hot dog vendor or cabbie, their was a shared responsibility to be fresh and influential in the world, to refuse to roll out of bed in sweatpants and drag your feet down the street.
I was retired; technically, having climbed the vicious power ladder of New York corporate bulshit for more years than I cared to recall, yet I had begun a new lifestyle as of late, a sort of cleansing of past sins, I mused ironically. My days now were filled with 2 unyielding themes; science and humanitarian philanthropy. Having served as a CFO and senior board member of one the world's most influential gold companies had afforded me the luxury to help others, and I looked at the petty material excess of my past with shame and forgetfulness. Antarctica was a place where death and renewal were intertwined dangerously close, and the concentration us humans were capable of seemed insignificant compared to the daily plight of the seals and penguins.
The physical geography of this place was similarly complex and appealing. Maps had always obsessed me; I recall even as a small child being gifted a simple globe by my father one Christmas and spending endless hours in my room studying the un-named corners and wrinkled creases where the greasy wax paper of the map obscured a distant paradise. Everywhere was novel and new and worth exploring; the political bias of the U.S had not yet colored my thoughts, and even now, the nostalgia of this time in my life remained strong. I had reasoned for a long time, all the way until the money started really coming in, that the way to overcome travel limitations in life was to stay ruthlessly fit, mentally and physically. Even now at 72, the young men who frequented our neighborhood gym on the Upper East Side, the square-jawed power brokers; they all knew my name. I relished the feeling that aging, while inevitable, was so much more mental than any of us could understand. The psychological part, well, that was more complex, a balancing act between the calculated reservation and tact I had to exercise in the board room, and singing tribal songs with Nigerian refugees at a benefit dinner in Queens, unafraid of judgement from anyone but myself.
I could say it was this boyish obsession with maps and the financial means to do most anything that catapulted me from a pre-war townhouse on 81st street to the cold, bright wasteland of the South Pole, but really it was a lot more spontaneous than that. I was going to die soon, well, not soon, but inevitably it was coming, and I did not romanticize the harsh facts of old age; the decline of spirit and fortitude. Antarctica was a place that had always haunted my imagination; a place free of the greedy resource terrorism my company had subjected nearly every other continent to, and its purity and singularity remained a global anomaly. The scientists and government people filled the McMurdo dining hall with curious chatter, much of it directed at what a lone 72 year old man had been doing on a New Zealand Armed Forces cargo plane, headed to an island in the Ross Sea. I knew people, and I suppose that was all it took really to secure myself a place on a private research-oriented trip south.
My friend Jacques Seviuex , an influential French climatologist and architect of the global climate change movement, had spearheaded this trip, and invited me along after hearing secondhand of my interest in visiting the last continent. I, or rather my company, had given his research group a fair chunk of change in the 1980's, which I admit was mostly a P.R move [big companies never do anything completely altruistically] it did, however, help a lasting friendship develop. Dr. Seviuex [he was an MD, I loathe referring to some PhD academic as a "doctor"] met with me in Auckland 3 days ago, and as we packed and prepared for the trip, I could tell he was excited not just for his own exploration, but for me as well, and this kept resonating with me on the trip south. Anyways, I managed to placate the herd of scientists and fellow weirdos at dinner regarding my provenance, and they seemed satisfied with my explanation as a "retired environmentalist and adventurer", though this was only partly true.
I had recently crossed that wonderful idealogical divide of not giving a fuck what anybody thought of me, and the newfound freedom of this classic old man characteristic was still fresh. This was not to say, however, that I didn't want to earn the trust and respect of good people. Au contraire: I now focused all the negative energy pent up from being nice to assholes on learning the traits and habits of the best people; people like my companions in Antarctica, fallen off the edge of the world and settled down here. I could sense the collective excitement in the air, as our planeload of travelers disbanded into their various factions and specialities, eager to begin work and not just be a spectator to this vast landscape. I was not so eager to work, as I had done work my whole life and now was just beginning to truly enjoy the fruits of that labor, but I was eager to understand, and I slept impatiently that night in my cot on the floor of the dorm-like research station. The next morning, the sun and sky looked just like last night, and I realized this discontinuity between time and nature was going to take some getting used to.
I fit the Antarctic 'street style', I mused, in my oversize, neon green and red Henri Lloyd foul weather gear, the same sort of gore-tex and neoprene armor the World Cup sailors wore. In the balmy 40-degree southern summer, I felt bit silly clad in layer upon layer of precisely engineering shielding from the environment; yet I knew the harshness of this place did not belie any laziness. Just like the young men I saw on my block in New York braced themselves against the constant current of social judgement and fashion whims, I had to guard my old self against the elements here, the sudden blinding snow squalls and strange shadows of the perpetually setting sun.
After a hasty 7 AM breakfast [it could have been 7 PM for all I knew..], we loaded into 2 A-Star field helicopters for the trip to the mainland, and my mind felt almost numb with anticipation and anxiety to actually step foot on the Antarctic Continent. As the choppers filled the air the the rhythmic din of their ascent, I watched the ugly pastel green and yellow pre-fab structures of McMurdo shrink behind the sun. Suddenly the horizon was huge and immediate, endlessly stretching over the ice cap until some mountain or rock bent the edges into a more forgiving corner. We buzzed low over a rare ice-free inlet to the Ross Sea, and what appeared to be a dirty collection of black boulders coalesced into a colony of thousands of Emperor and King penguins, an abundance of wildlife so foreign to modern man, I thought. The excitement I felt building in my toes and up through my stomach and finally crystallizing into a headache of joy was akin to the nervous anticipation I felt on the summit ridge of Denali, or on our first family heli skiing trip in the Bugaboo's in the late 60's, when nothing seemed impossible. I thought of my family now with an almost detached postscript of consideration, and though I loved them more than air, my journey now had become singular and removed from others, an internal quest to close the loose ends of my life down here amongst the Penguins.
The physical geography of this place was similarly complex and appealing. Maps had always obsessed me; I recall even as a small child being gifted a simple globe by my father one Christmas and spending endless hours in my room studying the un-named corners and wrinkled creases where the greasy wax paper of the map obscured a distant paradise. Everywhere was novel and new and worth exploring; the political bias of the U.S had not yet colored my thoughts, and even now, the nostalgia of this time in my life remained strong. I had reasoned for a long time, all the way until the money started really coming in, that the way to overcome travel limitations in life was to stay ruthlessly fit, mentally and physically. Even now at 72, the young men who frequented our neighborhood gym on the Upper East Side, the square-jawed power brokers; they all knew my name. I relished the feeling that aging, while inevitable, was so much more mental than any of us could understand. The psychological part, well, that was more complex, a balancing act between the calculated reservation and tact I had to exercise in the board room, and singing tribal songs with Nigerian refugees at a benefit dinner in Queens, unafraid of judgement from anyone but myself.
I could say it was this boyish obsession with maps and the financial means to do most anything that catapulted me from a pre-war townhouse on 81st street to the cold, bright wasteland of the South Pole, but really it was a lot more spontaneous than that. I was going to die soon, well, not soon, but inevitably it was coming, and I did not romanticize the harsh facts of old age; the decline of spirit and fortitude. Antarctica was a place that had always haunted my imagination; a place free of the greedy resource terrorism my company had subjected nearly every other continent to, and its purity and singularity remained a global anomaly. The scientists and government people filled the McMurdo dining hall with curious chatter, much of it directed at what a lone 72 year old man had been doing on a New Zealand Armed Forces cargo plane, headed to an island in the Ross Sea. I knew people, and I suppose that was all it took really to secure myself a place on a private research-oriented trip south.
My friend Jacques Seviuex , an influential French climatologist and architect of the global climate change movement, had spearheaded this trip, and invited me along after hearing secondhand of my interest in visiting the last continent. I, or rather my company, had given his research group a fair chunk of change in the 1980's, which I admit was mostly a P.R move [big companies never do anything completely altruistically] it did, however, help a lasting friendship develop. Dr. Seviuex [he was an MD, I loathe referring to some PhD academic as a "doctor"] met with me in Auckland 3 days ago, and as we packed and prepared for the trip, I could tell he was excited not just for his own exploration, but for me as well, and this kept resonating with me on the trip south. Anyways, I managed to placate the herd of scientists and fellow weirdos at dinner regarding my provenance, and they seemed satisfied with my explanation as a "retired environmentalist and adventurer", though this was only partly true.
I had recently crossed that wonderful idealogical divide of not giving a fuck what anybody thought of me, and the newfound freedom of this classic old man characteristic was still fresh. This was not to say, however, that I didn't want to earn the trust and respect of good people. Au contraire: I now focused all the negative energy pent up from being nice to assholes on learning the traits and habits of the best people; people like my companions in Antarctica, fallen off the edge of the world and settled down here. I could sense the collective excitement in the air, as our planeload of travelers disbanded into their various factions and specialities, eager to begin work and not just be a spectator to this vast landscape. I was not so eager to work, as I had done work my whole life and now was just beginning to truly enjoy the fruits of that labor, but I was eager to understand, and I slept impatiently that night in my cot on the floor of the dorm-like research station. The next morning, the sun and sky looked just like last night, and I realized this discontinuity between time and nature was going to take some getting used to.
I fit the Antarctic 'street style', I mused, in my oversize, neon green and red Henri Lloyd foul weather gear, the same sort of gore-tex and neoprene armor the World Cup sailors wore. In the balmy 40-degree southern summer, I felt bit silly clad in layer upon layer of precisely engineering shielding from the environment; yet I knew the harshness of this place did not belie any laziness. Just like the young men I saw on my block in New York braced themselves against the constant current of social judgement and fashion whims, I had to guard my old self against the elements here, the sudden blinding snow squalls and strange shadows of the perpetually setting sun.
After a hasty 7 AM breakfast [it could have been 7 PM for all I knew..], we loaded into 2 A-Star field helicopters for the trip to the mainland, and my mind felt almost numb with anticipation and anxiety to actually step foot on the Antarctic Continent. As the choppers filled the air the the rhythmic din of their ascent, I watched the ugly pastel green and yellow pre-fab structures of McMurdo shrink behind the sun. Suddenly the horizon was huge and immediate, endlessly stretching over the ice cap until some mountain or rock bent the edges into a more forgiving corner. We buzzed low over a rare ice-free inlet to the Ross Sea, and what appeared to be a dirty collection of black boulders coalesced into a colony of thousands of Emperor and King penguins, an abundance of wildlife so foreign to modern man, I thought. The excitement I felt building in my toes and up through my stomach and finally crystallizing into a headache of joy was akin to the nervous anticipation I felt on the summit ridge of Denali, or on our first family heli skiing trip in the Bugaboo's in the late 60's, when nothing seemed impossible. I thought of my family now with an almost detached postscript of consideration, and though I loved them more than air, my journey now had become singular and removed from others, an internal quest to close the loose ends of my life down here amongst the Penguins.
The helicopter circled low over a small cluster of bright red and green Quonset hut like structures, the inland research station, and I marveled at how obscene and obvious the smallest intrusion of man was in this monochromatic world.
We landed with a less than gracious thud on the hard ice, and Lars, Jacques, and myself disembarked from the little glass and titanium bubble of the A-star, tiny specks on the ice 200 km. south of Mcmurdo Base. The jagged teeth of the Transantarctic Range pieced the 2-dimensional veil of the horizon, granite spires with thousand meter walls of blank, frozen granite sticking out of the ice caps. They were a terrestrial cousin of the massive Volcano's of Oceania, the first 9,000 feet of their bulk encased in solid water as opposed to liquid. It was surreal and almost frightening to think of the almost 10,000 feet of permanent ice than separated us from true terra firma, and yet I relished this ethereal separation from the familiar, suspended on nothing more consequential than frozen water.
People were so flighty and unpredictable compared to the stoic resolve of this place, that not even the climactic wounds we had inflicted on the earth had softened the frozen grimace of the interior, though I knew this was not the case.
The earth was changing, and as convenient as it was to believe it was the invention of scientists and politicians, the indisputable truth was that even thousands of miles from the nearest permanent settlement, cosmic rays burned through a Texas-size hole in the ozone layer. It made me seethe with anger, yet also regret after having spend most of my career inflicting such wounds on the earth in search of something as unnecessary as gold, the comically desirable metal that had spurned so much evil in the world. I suppose in this place, so harsh and beautiful, it was impossible to be average or complacent, and the catalyst to understand and explore was omnipresent. That was what scared me the most, the overwhelming mediocrity of the American public, the ability; desire even, to settle without any justification on whatever was easiest.
Perhaps this goes back to the earlier point of having reached the irreversible divide of old age where public opinion no longer swayed me; in any case, I found Antarctica a welcome respite from the gritty streets of New York.
The city was marvelous in so many ways though, and I thought of the young men and women there, immigrants from some rural speck where people dreamt small and were afraid of change. These young people; they were so used to being an anomaly, a curiosity to the plain faced, hard working people of their hometown's, and the anonymity of the city must have been both refreshing and terrifying. I pondered the possibility I might have a heart attack or fall into a crevasse or be eaten by a Sea Lion down here in the frozen southern wastes, and the idea was disturbingly benign to me. My time on earth had passed without the slightest regard for the rest of the universe, the re-incarnation as plankton in the South Atlantic, or perhaps one of the 3rd world workers my company had "provided" for.
The sky was so blue it almost deafened the senses, and in the absence of the vicous katabatic winds that roared down from the mountains, it almost felt like a giant movie studio, insulated from sound or outside stimulus. I stood outside the little red hut where we were to sleep and eat for the next week, and felt so much more inconsquential than on a New York street corner, another office clone en route to some high-rise. When I got home, I was going to call Julia first thing, and tell her I was sorry. Sorry for 40 years of postponed dislike, sorry for the bland connection that held our souls together after Margeret and James had gone off to college and families of their own; sorry I couldn't really share my true self with anyone. She would understand, she already did, in a sad, accpeting way that tore at the ragged edges of my conscience, yet I was numb enough to find companionship amongst the somber green sea and bright snow, as if that would make it all better. As a small child, I read stories of adventure with an insatiable appetite. In those days, political and social implications were easily excused in the name of conquest and understanding, and I marveled at how littlw had changed. I used to think if I bid my time and played my cards right, everything would fall into the right spaces, and doors did open for me in the following years, as I never imagined they would. Life is defined by a lot of things; luck principally, and just like the lines on the globe that converged to this point, everything now was transparent and obvious.
