December, New Story...

‘Falling off the Edge of the World’

What happens when you fall off the edge of the world? Somewhere, all the neat geometric lines of longitude that divide the globe into inhabitable realms converge to a point, and when you stop falling south you are in Antarctica. Antarctica is different from the northern Latitudes both in physical character and myth. With no history of habitation or significant exploration, it is truly the last wild place left on earth. ‘It is true that we have fouled the extremities of the continent with our egotistical desire to claim and understand’, Frank thought as the wheels of the massive army cargo jet met the ice and sent up clouds of fine white snow, but the vast frozen interior remains empty and pristine.

He felt the familiar green expanse of New Zealand they had left this morning was a world away. He’d chosen to burn a good chunk of his once-impressive retirement on what everyone seemed to think was a frivolous trip to the last reaches of the world. ‘Having just passed 7 decades of existence, I might enjoy a leisurely retirement in my New York townhouse’ he thought as a man announced to the passengers and crew in measured tones that they had just touched down on the last continent. A black and white speckled dot stood a hundred meters or so away as they sped across the ice towards Mcmurdo. It might have been a penguin. ‘How fitting’, Frank thought, and smiled to himself.

The past 4 years of his life had been a whirlwind of unpredictability, and he found myself in similar disarray he’d been in 50 years ago, fresh out of college and uncertain of anything except the momentum of the present. He was divorced now, though it felt odd to repeat the word in his mind, as the papers had just been finalized 3 weeks before he left for Antarctica. They’d been married nearly 4 decades, also known as a long fucking time, Frank thought. He could say truthfully now that I never really loved her, never loved her relentlessly; his feelings for her were like a pot of water set to boil and then kept just a degree too cold to bubble up and announce itself. As dark and self-aggrandizing as it sounded, he thought now that the hum of the city had been removed, replaced by the ice- that perhaps he’d never loved anyone that way.

The penguins were of course a principal attraction. Even around the garbage and machinery-strewn edges of McMurdo, the main research station and U.S outpost here, they gathered in curious groups. Disembarking from the plane in surprisingly balmy 30-degree sun, he marveled at their sleekly engineered bodies and thoughtless familiarity with this alien land. His group leader, a towering, roughly-hewn Norwegian Expat named Thorbjorn, had told him earlier on the plane that penguins, once they find a suitable mate, remain loyal until the end. He supposed he envied this too, but not really, it was just an affirmation of his suspicion that even the wild fringes of nature longed for some sort of dull routine. Thorbjorn also informed them gravely that occasionally deranged penguins who would purposefully ignore the rest of the flock and waddle in a distressingly uneven gait towards the interior, driven by some internal idiosyncrasy, or perhaps just the desire not to be number any more. Frank 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 him. Apparently there were also same-sex penguin’s couples, which he found particularly endearing. The archaic mingling of American politics and religion need not apply to the natural world, he thought with satisfaction. His son was gay, and Frank had always stood up for him, though as he had to admit, growing up gay in New York City was not so bad in many ways.

It was late spring at Mcmurdo, almost the southern summer, and on that unusually clear evening of December 15th Frank wished his vision was good enough to fully comprehend all the strange, oblique shadows of sun on snow, rock and ocean- the enduring elements defining this cold desert. The aesthetics of Antarctica were not as 2-dimensional as he’d expected. Rather, the light constantly morphed around intermittent clouds, throwing its weightless energy around the edges of the mountainous horizon. The weather was fickle and cantankerous; it reminded him of his boyhood summer home on the Coast of Maine, the perennial comforts of warm summer rain and early morning fog sailing in the Atlantic.

Frank took an immediate dislike to the steel and concrete boxes of the McMurdo Station, as they seemed so lewd and out of place in this landscape man was never meant to conquer. He stared at the piles of construction supplies and rubbish that lay strewn about the outskirts of the station. It chilled him to think of how much it looked like the trash he’d 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 to him. While his team had not summitted that August afternoon in 1983, he was proud of the fact that they had packed out 100% of their trash. He remembered being almost embarrassed at how easy it had been to practice 'leave no trace' ethics on one of the most difficult peaks in the world.

His group at Mcmurdo was a Kafkaesque assortment of the types of characters one might expect to have fallen off the edge of the world and settled in Antarctica- 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, and the details of social etiquette that in Frank’s opinion mired interaction in the rest of the world were refreshingly excused here. He loved their refusal to settle for mediocrity; a spirit he saw so much of in New York. In even the most humble immigrant hot dog vendor or cabbie, Frank thought, there was a shared responsibility to be fresh, to refuse to roll out of bed in sweatpants and drag your feet down the street.

Frank was retired, having climbed the vicious power ladder of New York corporate life for more years than he cared to remember. He’d begun a new lifestyle since leaving Lion Capital, a sort of cleansing of past sins, he mused with vague irony. His days now were filled with 2 unyielding themes- science and humanitarian philanthropy. Things he’d wanted from the start, really. Having served as CFO of one of those companies now being protested in Zucotti Park had afforded him the luxury to help others. He looked at the petty material excess of his past with wanton forgetfulness. Antarctica was a place where death and renewal intertwined dangerously close, and the bad things humans were capable of seemed insignificant compared to the daily plight of the seals and penguins.

Maps had always obsessed Frank. He recalled even as a small child being given a simple globe by his father one Christmas and spending endless hours in his room studying the unspoken corners and wrinkled creases where the greasy wax paper obscured some distant paradise. Everywhere was new and unpolluted and worth exploring then, the political bias of the U.S having not yet colored his thoughts. Even now, the nostalgia of this time in his life remained strong. He’d 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. That meant mentally and physically. Even now at 72, the young men who frequented his neighborhood gym on the Upper East Side, the square-jawed power brokers and hipsters trying to look a little less skinny in their skinny jeans- they all knew Frank. He 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. It was a balancing act between the calculated reservation he’d had to exercise in the board room and singing tribal songs with Nigerian refugees at a benefit dinner in Queens, unafraid of judgment from anyone but himself. Lion Capital did not define him, and as simple as this statement sounded, perhaps it took going to Antarctica to fully realize it.

Frank could say it was his boyish obsession with maps and the financial means to do most anything that catapulted him from a pre-war townhouse on 81st street to the South Pole, but really it was a lot more spontaneous than that. He was going to die soon. Well- not soon, but inevitably it was coming, and he did not romanticize the harsh facts of old age, the inevitable decline of spirit and fortitude. Antarctica was a place that had always haunted his imagination; a place free of the predatory ‘lending’ his company had subjected nearly every other continent to. Its singularity remained a growing global anomaly.

It was time for dinner now, and 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 for an island in the Ross Sea. Frank knew people, and he knew that was all it really took to secure himself a place on a private research-oriented trip south.

His friend Jacques Seviuex, an influential French climatologist and architect of the global climate change movement, had spearheaded the trip and invited him along after hearing secondhand of his interest in visiting the last continent. Frank, or rather Lion Capital, had given his research group a fair chunk of change in the 1980's, which he admitted was mostly a P.R move [big companies never do anything completely altruistically]. It did, however, help a lasting friendship develop. Sevieux had met with Frank in Auckland 3 days ago. As they’d packed and prepared for the trip, he could tell Sevieux was excited not just for his own exploration but for Frank as well. It was good to know ambitious people, Frank thought satisfyingly. With this story, he managed to placate the herd of scientists and fellow weirdo’s at dinner regarding his provenance. They weren’t the types who cared much about credentials or dollar signs anyways, he thought with relief. Frank had recently crossed that wonderful ideological divide of not giving a fuck what anybody thought of him, and he relished the newfound freedom of this classic ‘old man’ characteristic. This was not to say, however, that he didn't want to earn the trust and respect of good people. Au contraire: he could now focus all the negative energy pent up from being nice to assholes his whole career on learning the traits and habits of the best people. People like his companions in Antarctica, he thought, the people who’d fallen off the edge of the world.

He could sense the collective excitement in the air there, as their planeload of travelers disbanded after dinner into their various factions and specialties, eager to begin work and not just spectator of this vast landscape. Frank was not so eager to work, as I he’d worked his whole life and now was just beginning to truly enjoy the fruits of that labor. He was, however, eager to understand, and he slept impatiently that night in his cot in the dorm-like research station. The next morning, the sun and sky looked just like the previous night, and he realized this discontinuity between time and light was going to take some getting used to.

He fit the Antarctic 'street style', he mused, eating breakfast with his teammates in his oversize, neon green Henri Lloyd foul weather gear, the same sort of gore-tex and neoprene armor the World Cup sailors wore. In the balmy 30-degree southern summer though, he felt bit silly clad in layer upon layer of precisely engineered shielding from the environment. He knew though the harshness of this place did not belie any laziness. Just like the young men he saw on my block in New York braced themselves against the constant current of social judgment and fashion whims, Frank had to guard his old self against the elements here- the sudden blinding snow squalls and disorienting shadows of the perpetually setting sun.

After a hasty 7 AM breakfast [it could have been 7 PM for all he knew..], they loaded into 2 A-Star helicopters for the trip to the mainland, and his mind felt almost numb with anticipation and anxiety to actually step foot on the Antarctic Continent. As the choppers filled the air the rhythmic din of their ascent, he watched the ugly pastel prefab 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. They 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, Frank thought. The excitement he felt now was no different that the nervous anticipation on the summit ridge of Denali, or his first family heli skiing trip in the Bugaboo's in the early 70's, when nothing seemed impossible. He thought of my family now with a sort of framed love, like something placed in one of those little brass curio boxes he’d admired as a child. He cared about them deeply, but his journey now had become singular and removed from others, an internal quest to close the loose ends of his life at the end of the world.

The helicopter circled low over a small cluster of bright red Quonset-hut-like structures, the inland research station, and Frank marveled at how obscene even the smallest intrusion of man was in this monochromatic world.

We landed with a less than gracious thud on the hard ice, and Thorbjorn, Jacques, and myself disembarked from the little glass and titanium bubble of the first A-star; tiny specks on the ice 200 km. south of McMurdo. The jagged teeth of the Transantarctic Range pierced the horizon; blank granite spires with thousand meter walls. They were the terrestrial cousin’s of the massive Volcano's of Oceania, it seemed, their first 9,000 feet 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 them from true terra firma, and yet Frank relished this ethereal separation from the familiar, remembering than nothing was really permanent. People were so flighty and unpredictable compared to the resolve of this place, that not even the climactic wounds humans had inflicted on the earth had softened the frozen grimace of the interior, Frank though. He knew this was not true though- the ice melted here, Lion Capital soldiered on without him, and Julia leaving him was not flighty or unpredictable at all.

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, a Texas-size hole in the ozone layer lay over Frank’s balding head. It made him angry, yet also filled him with regret of all the oil companies, the coal companies, the transnational resource stealing companies he’d help lend money to. In this place, so caustic and beautiful, it was impossible to be complacent. He couldn’t ignore a sunburn on the top of his head, or a puddle that didn’t used to be there. Perhaps this all went back to his earlier realization of reached the irreversible divide of old age where public opinion no longer swayed him- in any case, he felt changed.

As they hiked across the ice towards a distant rock outcropping Sevieux wanted to same, Frank felt his thoughts drift towards home for a minute. The city was marvelous in so many ways, he thought wistfully. He thought of the young men and women there, the 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. Frank pondered the possibility he might have a heart attack or fall into a crevasse or be eaten by a Sea Lion on this trip, but all in all the risks seemed no different than another day in New York. It seemed his time on earth had passed without the slightest regard for the rest of the universe, his possible re-incarnation as plankton in the South Atlantic, or perhaps one of the 3rd world workers his company had "provided" for.

The sky was so blue around them almost deafened the senses, the way certain feelings of cold are indistinguishable from heat. In the absence of the vicious katabatic winds that usually roared down from the mountains, it almost felt like a giant movie studio, insulated from sound or outside stimuli. After their hike, Frank stood outside the little red hut where they were to sleep and eat for the next week, smoking a guilty cigarette, the last of the pack he’d smuggled down to McMurdo. Standing there, he felt so much more inconsequential than on a New York street corner, another office clone en route to some high-rise.

When he got home, he was going to call Julia first thing, and tell her he was sorry. Sorry for the the mindless sense of ‘family’ that had prevented him from being honest even after Margaret and James had gone off to college and started families of their own; sorry that maybe he couldn't really share his true self with anyone. She would understand; she already did. Tapping the cigarette end the same impatient way he used to do after big board meetings, with the wind announcing its arrival in the building snow squalls coming from the mountains, he felt numb enough to find companionship amongst the ice and sun, as if that would make it all better.

As a child, he’d 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 he marveled at how little had changed. He used to think if he bid his time and played his cards right, everything would fall into the right spaces, and doors did open for him in the following years, as he never imagined they would. He decided that when he called Julia, he’d ask if she might want to meet him for lunch. No expectations, just to talk. The ‘sorry’ bit was something that might have been ok before Antarctica. Now he knew he just had to make things right. Life is defined by a lot of things, Frank thought. Luck principally, and just like the lines on the globe that converged to this point; everything now fit into place.