Travel Section
Exploring the white space—on and off the page
Where are we – and what are we doing here?
Travel Section | Issue 3 | Sunday 05 July 2020
Revisiting Antarctica
More than a year has gone by since I experienced some moments of silence and solitude in Antarctica and the South Shetland Islands. I found myself briefly and blessedly lost in the landscape, in the clean cold air under an enormous sky, and in unmeasured time spent watching and getting close to wildlife. I went and came back—almost. All my traveling has changed me in some way, at some level, but life has gone on. Antarctica made a different sort of change and has taken up a different sort of space in the travel section of my life. Since my return to New England I’ve felt adrift and in collision with the familiar landmarks—like an ice floe, perhaps. I continue to look to nature’s architecture and to animals and wildlife to earth me—if indeed earthed is what I need to be.
I’ve caught the scent of a wilder geography. Some new, unnamed space is calling me, and it may be only a matter of time before I need to answer.
From my notebooks:
Tuesday 19th February, 2019
Two days out of Ushuaia, Argentina.
Beyond the Beagle Channel, somewhere between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Not far from Cape Horn.
I wake at six-thirty to the static of the PA system and to the voice of Maria, our fearless and sporty expedition leader, announcing that conditions are in our favor and we’ll be making a landing on Cape Horn this morning. Thank you Maria, I'll be happy to stand by for further announcements. There's a buzz of excitement on the RCGS Resolute throughout the morning and we shuffle noisily in stiff foul weather gear, ready to go to gangway the moment the call comes. At ten o'clock, after a couple more announcements to stand by, the Zodiacs begin their trips to shore.
The conditions might be in our favour but the water is wild and choppy. We have an exhilarating ride to shore and make a splashy landing on Cape Horn. Maria and some of the crew meet us at the water's edge to hold the boat steady and explain the strategy for getting out of the Zodiac and onto the rocks. It’s an effective though very wet strategy—and then there are the rocks to navigate before a stiff climb up multiple stages of slick wooden steps to the clifftop.
On a hill that looks out over the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean stands a lighthouse that is manned by an officer of the Chilean Navy. The officer lives in a modest attached house with his wife and three young daughters. Every four months he is relieved by a fellow officer so that he and his family can visit the mainland.
A short walk from the lighthouse stands the tiny Chapel of Stella Maris. The door is wide open and outside the wind is blowing, but the tiny chapel is quiet and peaceful and homely. There are wildflowers on the altar, and a bible open at psalm 89, and I read to myself in halting Spanish in a tiny chapel on wild Cape Horn:
You rule over the surging sea; when the waves rise up You still them.
The heavens are Yours, the earth also is Yours.
The north and the south, You have created them.
On the hill above the lighthouse and the chapel stands a monument made from layered sheets of steel five or six feet square, painted white and grey and black, and cut into the silhouette of an albatross. The sky beams through its open center and the whole marvelous thing is visible from a great distance. The monument was the work of José Balcells Eyquem, a Chilean artist from Santiago, and was installed in 1992. In the same year Sara Vial, a Chilean writer from Valparaiso, wrote a starkly beautiful ode to all the sailors ever lost at Cape Horn. Her poem is etched on a plaque at the foot of the path to the monument. The English translation reads:
I am the albatross that awaits you at the end of the earth.
I am the forgotten soul of the sailors from all the seas of the world who have crossed Cape Horn.
But they did not die in those furious waves.
They fly on my wings towards eternity in the deepest breath of the Antarctic winds.
To many, Antarctica conjures the ultimate wilderness—a vastness of white, mile upon mile of ice and snow surrounded by an ocean of harsh and freezing water under a pale, empty sky. And little else. Except for a lone wandering albatross, perhaps.
There have been many attempts to not tame its wilderness but to explore the continent and begin to understand its depth and length and its elusive dimensions. English explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundson mounted expeditions in the early 1900s. Their stories and writings are legend. More recently, in 1993, Norwegian adventurer and writer Erling Kagge walked alone on skis to the South Pole, without radio contact with the world. In 2017 Kagge published a book called Silence in the Age of Noise. He kept a journal during his long solitary walk.
On the twenty-seventh day, I wrote: Antarctica is still distant and unknown for most people. As I walk along, I hope it will remain so. Not because I begrudge many people experiencing it, but because Antarctica has a mission as an unknown land. I believe that we need places that have not been fully explored and normalized. There is still a continent that is mysterious, and practically untouched, that can be a state within one's fantasy. This may be the greatest value of Antarctica.
The minuscule portion of Antarctica that I saw struck me as a prevailing wilderness that will resist all efforts at taming. Many have begun to explore it: seventy-six research stations and air facilities have been established across the continent and islands; forty of them are occupied year round and the rest seasonally or ad hoc. The ice continent tolerates the remains of several abandoned research stations. There are human comings and goings and the growing traffic of the tourism industry. But it’s not by accident that Antarctica remains mostly wild. It’s not due to magical thinking or to Mother Nature's passive resistance to human invasion. It's thanks to the twelve countries who signed the Antarctic Treaty in 1961 and the fifty-two countries that agree to protect Antarctica as a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science.
In his book The Moon and Sixpence Somerset Maugham wrote:
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. They have always a nostalgia for a home they do not know. The streets in which they have played are just a place of passage. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.
And sometimes we find ourselves in a place that, against all the odds, makes us feel at home and calls us back.
On the passage north from Antarctica our expedition ship passed through the South Shetland Islands. Some of us camped out overnight in the snow on a tiny island called Useful Island. We slept under the sky in heavy sleeping bags inside bivy sacks. No tents, no ceilings—we were confined only by the night sky. I woke in the very early hours of the morning with a cold, wet neck and a hood full of fresh snow. I looked up to see a thousand stars in unfamiliar patterns and I felt an inexplicable, uncanny sense of home.
I had to tear myself away from camp the next morning when the Zodiacs came ashore to return us to the ship. I stood on the top deck of the ship with a lump in my throat as we headed out of the region and back toward Drake Passage. There was nothing to keep me there and nothing to stay for, but all the reasons for leaving felt irrelevant.
Birds, mammals, and other species migrate for shelter, sustenance, and to further their species. What do humans go in search of? How or where might they find it unless they have an inkling of what it looks or sounds like?
Antarctica struck me as a place to begin the ultimate expedition—to strike out and go deep, to places that might exist not only in the wild geography of the natural elements but within the even wilder geography of the human psyche—and to embrace the eternal need to seek, and the eternal hope of discovery.
I’ve enjoyed writing this third newsletter for Travel Section. I love exploring places and memories and ideas, and reminding myself of the marvelous journey I’m on. Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your comments.
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