Tasmanian Pademelons

We're just back from Tasmania -- where we attended and presented at the Antarctic Visions Conference at the University of Tasmania, Hobart.

How did the talk go? I believe it is always ill-advised to begin a new slide deck at 3:30 am the day of -- because one suddenly has a "great new idea."

And yet this was the predicament I sucked myself into, suddenly obsessed with capturing larger ideas of how we understand and talk about place. And the name I gave it was Lyrical Geomorphology. (Expect to see more of these notions here, as I tease them out for my book.)

The rest of the panel "killed" (modish high-praise lingo vectored into my brain via my 13-year-old daughter) that day. Bill Fox, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent, gave a rousing discussion of his own path to Antarctica -- how understanding The Ice as Place began with conversations -- with Barry Lopez and Stephen Pyne. Gretchen Legler, author of On Ice , detailed her ever-expanding list of women's writing on The Ice.

I quoted my good friend David Campbell's brilliant Antarctic book The Crystal Desert , showed slides from my exploding collection of Antarctic images, and chatted about how "personal" stories offer us writers a sort of wild creativity and freedom.

When the conference ended we drove south towards Recherche Bay, to a solar-powered shack in the forests.

Unexpected, dominant piece of each day: In the land of nocturnal animals, road kill takes on stunning proportions.

Part of our morning ritual entailed pausing to shovel small, unfamiliar animals off the road. It felt like the right thing to do.

While doing so one day, Ed said to me, "What the hell is this one?" The grey-brown back and reddish belly, the muscular forearms, stocky, short legs.

Only yesterday as I culled photos from the trip did I sit down to add name to image. I came again to this guy and found it to be a male pademelon -- and Aboriginal name, sometimes called the rufous wallaby.

Looking at its living rellies online, I considered how islands like Tas tell a specific wild story of adaptation, how this adaptation is often portrayed as "exotic" and how site-specific plants and animals hold us in their thrall.

Thanks for that inspiration, pademelons. More about native plants and animals and how their life The Presidio in our next post.

Dream of a Butterfly Dreaming

Don't tell anyone: Ed and I stole away from work to a matinee of Inception. We were the only souls in the theater. The story is built like a Chinese box and it represents all that is great about stories, the imagination, and matinees. For the two or so hours it cranked along, Inception gave me something to think about -- other than how ghastly the weather is currently in The Presidio, which seems to be Thought No. 1 these days.

Do you know what happens here in The Presidio in July and August? Well, it's not summer. Unless it's some sort of Christopher Nolan-devised anxiety-inducing dream-state. (Actually, if you wonder what the sky looks like here in summer, take note of how the sky looks in the crumbling world DiCaprio and his partner imagined in the film. Same-same.)

The sky is a silver dome. As someone who spends as much time as she can outside each day, this sky is both depressing and infuriating. On the really bad days, I am convinced someone has rigged this sky, Inception-style, to drive us all mad. Not that a few odd days of the big, glowing silver bowl -- (do we live in some hotel buffet steam-table serving vessel? Will a great spoon come and pull me out and slap me on a plate?) -- wouldn't offer some coolish variation on shades of blue and luminous clouds. But what happens in The Presidio is bright grey arrives, slaps down on us, and we live this way until September.

During these months, I walk around my writing studio, patrol the beaches and fields, and try not to scream.

I've been told there are more microclimates in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else on Earth. Can this be true? I know if I walk about a mile over the hills here, I will hit true summer -- hot sun, tanned legs, tall, sweating glasses of iced tea.

However. Do I flee my home because the weather doesn't meet my needs? Or do I stick it out, go all white and pasty, and shove my weary brain into books and matinees? This feels like the more noble path: The weather and I are meeting, eye to eye, and I am learning what it is to feel honestly blue because I cannot, will not see the blue sky.

What is the weather learning from my resilience? Am I schooling the sky?

Part of my reading-to-ignore-the-silver-sky takes this form: The skeptical philosophy of Chuang Tzu. Does Christopher Nolan read Chuang Tzu? His work suggests so. At any rate, for obvious reasons given this oppressive and relentless sky, this work resonates for me. Perhaps this is the question: Is the weather trying to tell me something via the writing of Chuang Tzu? Or am I Chuang Tzu dreaming of the weather and how I will write about it in my book? Or am I Leslie Carol Roberts dreaming of a sky that is still weeks away holding tight with the trees and the great band of nesting migratory birds that keep me company each day?

"Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things."
(The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, New York, 1968)

Paperback Writer

I recently found out that if you have a great hardback edition of your book -- ie, a book people call "beautifully designed" as I do, paperback days may have to wait. Well, it's not truly the fault of the book design. The fact is,

THE ENTIRE
EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica October 2008: 323 pp.; 5.2 inches x
8.5 inches; 11 photographs.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1617-4



(800-755-1105)

while doing "great" in sales (particularly for a book with no marketing except for a few ads and a personally funded book tour) cannot go paper until we sell more hardback copies.

It's not like I'm not already trying. While the book came out over a year ago, I continue to give readings across the U.S. and abroad (try buying the book in Australia or New Zealand where I did much of my research -- ha-ha on that idea) and make cold calls to bookstores to see if they carry my book.

The main resistance to purchasing it by bookstores? Price. The book costs over $20. "We'll carry the paperback," they tell me. "Cheaper to stock. And for a traveller's book like yours. More portable."

I come home, vaguely defeated by this news. It's all so much to manage these days for us writers. Remember when making books was about assembling a bunch of pages, stapling them together, then calling it a day? Ha-ha on that idea, too.

My husband Ed, who closes large deals on fiber optic cables for a living, finds this paper-back edition log-jam appalling.

"Get me a copy of your contract! Who makes this decision?" he squawked from our orange couch, where he balanced a bowl of pistachios and a Stella Artois beer while reading the latest on hybrid Lexus sedans.

"Nebraska has the paperback rights," I sniff. "They say we have to sell more of what we have first. But they've been really good to me. It's just the book business right now. Tough."

And it's true. Nebraska is an excellent press and I love working with them. And these are weird, paradigm-shift times for all of us in publishing

So.

This leaves me with no other route than to try and sell as many copies of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica as I can. I mean, this is what we polar explorers do, isn't it? Take charge and keep going with good cheer, even in the face of adversity?

This is my first foray into direct marketing, and I can say as a writer who prefers to sit for long hours in wide-open, wild places, like Antarctica and New Zealand (read about it in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY) -- it sort of freaks me out in a way canoeing a rough river or sliding down an icy hillock do not.

But what are the options? Sit here in silence, writing away on my new project and give up trying to get more eyeballs on THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY? Wait til I see it in five years, dust-covered on the outdoor remainder table at Green Apple Books on Clement Street in San Francisco, next to faded copies of How Not to Act Old?



Someone suggested I do a YouTube author video where we get creative and show both what the book's about and what I went through to get this book written -- how I travelled to Antarctica in 1988 for three months, then reported the news in other places around the world, then found I thought about Antarctica every day.

So I began my slow path back to The Ice, reading and researching the people who went before me, the treaty and legal conventions, and the state of the ice and wildlife. A deeply personal quest, first as a reporter then as a single mother with a Fulbright working out of Gateway Antarctica International Research Centre in Christchurch.

Fifteen years after first setting foot on Ross Island, near Robert Falcon Scott's famous hut, I wrote my book about my life in Antarctica and subsequent explorations into the "little known" stories of that continent's exploration.

Why do I think Antarctica matters so much, to stake my life on this project for more than a decade? Well, I think Antarctica offers us much to consider -- and I felt and feel we can only fully embrace all we have here on Earth via close inspection. I love how Antarctica contains more than 60 percent of the Earth's fresh water, how the ice is more than 20 million years old, how the ice covers 98 percent of the continent. I love how penguins have evolved as birds who swim rather than fly.

And I loved the chance to take a nice long chunk of time and turn all this over in my mind and into the thing call book, to slow down my thinking from the rapid-fire worlds of mothering and journalism, to allow the feel and reach of The Ice to inhabit the feel and reach of my creative work.

More on the path to making the book in the next post. In the meantime, any thoughts on ways to get the book to more people's eyeballs?

Let me know.

Field Notes: Here Is Where We Walk -- One

Presidio National Park
San Francisco


An Unofficial Look at Place Known Since 1776 by Handle “Presidio” Gathered by Our Research Department

1. San Francisco Bay is relatively young: only about 8,000 years of ocean water flooding into what was once a large valley. Melting ice from the last glaciation raised ocean levels and thus the bay began to form.

2. Interesting rocky base in these parts: The Franciscan Complex. (Sometimes called the “World Famous” Franciscan Complex.)

3. Rocks Beneath Our Feet: Graywacke sandstone and argillite also lessor amounts of greenstone (altered submarine basalt), radiolarian ribbon chert, limestone, serpitinite (altered mantle material), and high-grade metamorphic rocks such as blueschist (high-pressure), amphibolite, and eclogite – these words typically fractured and mixed together to form a “melange.”

4. Range in age from 200 to 80 million years old

5. Franciscan Complex composed of semi-coherent blocks, called tectostratigraphic terranes, which were episodically scraped from the subducting oceanic plate, thrust eastward and shingled against the western margin of North America.

6. The Earth is a coolish design concept -- a dynamic place of moving pieces. Some of the best geologic detective work centers on the understanding of tectonic plates -- and how the lithosphere is broken up into seven or eight major plates and many, many minor plates.

7. A piece of the Presidio is an interesting rock called Chert. Chert epitomizes how movement and change define life on Earth.

(We spend so much time with rocks here because of recent the rocks call the shots – they determine what grows where, what the terrain is like, how much any species, even humans, can survive given their chemical composition.)

Note: This is not to suggest the rocks care, mind you. From our careful observations, we can say they are entirely absorbed with their own (losing) battle with wind and water, as well as with tectonic shifts. Thus their understandable (and forgiveable) wild indifference.

Big News on the Big Salmon

Wondering what's happening in Rakaia, New Zealand, home to the world's largest public salmon sculpture? (There's a larger one in a private collection in Japan.) In addition to the Salmon Tales Restaurant, they have added a "4-D" salmon educational and entertainment center. But don't take our word for it: http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/4d-cinema-comes-rakaia/5/53329

Field Notes: Here Is Where We Walk

This begins the next iteration of The Entire Earth and Sky blog.
Goals for 2G Entire Earth and Sky blog:
1. Over the next 246 days, I will complete my book, Here Is Where We Walk, posting bit and pieces as I go.
2. Figure out if it is ethically OK to print a book about trees on any sort of paper.
3. Make and document a series of interactive "maps" -- of my two current favorite topics -- trees and how they grow and behave in general and Antarctic geology and ice.
4. Learn to use the laser cutter at work with such proficiency that I can create many iterations of my maps for a "show" that will tour the world.
Well, our team here in the Presidio clearly has a lot of work to do.
This blog will be refreshed weekly for the summer, more when school begins in September.

Field Notes: The Traverse to the Pole

In 2003, one of the biggest stories for Antarcticans was the construction of a 1400-km "ice traverse" from the American McMurdo Station to the South Pole. I wound up writing very little about this track in the final version of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica, and that was a difficult choice. On one hand, the discussion of this track dominated talk at Gateway Antarctica during November and December of that year. On the other hand, the project crept along, plagued by the problems posed by Antarctica to "track builders" -- ie shifting ice, deep crevasses, extreme cold, and very little was really known about the implications of the track for the larger environment.

There was also the feeling that the ascendancy of Antarctica as the key lab for monitoring global climate change meant figuring out ways to gain better access to more its formidable interior. More scientists on the ice would mean more information and maybe a better fix on how the Earth's atmosphere is changing, or has changed in the past.

I try to keep a balanced view of so-called progress in the name of science. However. It was stunning to me that whole features of the ice -- crevasses for instance -- had been modified using explosives. This "filling in" was heartbreaking to imagine. Yet when the Americans came and talked about their scheme, they argued that the track allowed them important options for better science -- and negated the reliance on planes as the sole way to the South Pole.

It was reported that airplanes pumped out more carbon dioxide and other pollutants than the track vehicles would. In 2003, the US made 293 polar flights, to the station that sits on the ice on top of the pole. They also needed the traverse to backload old gear -- and not leave it laying about in a junk heap.

As I considered this icy thruway, it struck that a little less than 100 years earlier, Roald Amundsen led the first successful expedition to the pole. In the ensuing years, the Antarctic interior remained as pristine as he found it. There are fewer than 4,000 people in the summer months, and they cling to the coast lines for the most part. Imagine this on a continent nearly twice the size of Australia or the size of the US and Mexico combined.

The term "sparse" doesn't begin to cover. It's just wide open green and blue ice ripped across by katabatic winds.

In winter, the population dwindles to about 1,000 and the ice doubles in size, making the whole place -- land with ice covering -- twice its summer size. Ninety-eight percent of the continent is covered with a permanent ice coating. Seventy percent of the Earth's fresh water is contained in this ice.

And yet, this ice track felt like some sort of essential defeat to the wilderness. Here we go, I heard one scientist say. First they blast their way across the ice to make their track, then they continue to use their bloody planes anyway. And the whole place is ripped with the sound of engines.

Rather a dire view, but something to consider.

In 2005, the first vehicles arrived at the pole on the traverse. It is described as establishing a "proof of concept" that indeed, one can make and maintain an ice road in Antarctica. The focus in 2007 seemed to be repairing and maintaining the traverse -- remember the ice flows down from the South Pole to the coast. It is in constant, slow motion, gently shifting with the cycles of the moon, they have learned.

So here we are five years after the big, loud debate about the road -- simply Google US traverse to south pole and you will find the press coverage from around the world.

Things happen slowly in general around Antarctic projects -- so much staging, so much time needed simply to stay alive down there.

As Bryan Storey, the noted Antarctic geologist and head of Gateway Antarctica once noted, Antarctica decides what you get to do once you get there.

Interesting place to stop for a moment and ponder the ice and all its mysteries.