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.
6/28/2008
Field Notes: They Came Home to Lyttelton
In my journal for The Entire Earth and Sky, I wrote,
I drove home to Lyttelton in my green truck, made a cup of tea, and curled up in bed. From my bed, I could look out a large window to the port. Later that night, a red coastal freighter would arrive, as it did each week, and begin unloading a cargo that often seemed to be entirely clanging metal bars. At that moment, the port was still, illuminated by melon halogen lights, lights that urged gulls to forget the night. They flew in a wide arc, silent, circling. Norris had given me a copy of his Antarctic book, which was sold at the Canterbury Museum. It collected a series of newspaper columns he contributed to a local paper, detailing the specific stories of Lyttelton and Canterbury men who sailed during the Heroic Age.
As I read, I could hear his voice. Some of the ships took expeditions to the Antarctic, then turned around and came home to Lyttelton where the crew waited out the frigid, ship-crushing winter season. Thus, Scott’s second and final ship, the Terra Nova was moored at Lyttelton for long periods during 1910-1913. The ship had dropped off Scott and the exploration team at Cape Evans. They would return in the spring thaw to fetch Scott and his victorious party, home from their dash to the South Pole.
You can imagine how people in Lyttelton would have felt, looking down into the port and seeing the Terra Nova in their midst. Norris was almost equally devoted to the ships themselves, the old sailor in him coming through, I reckoned, and he recorde the Terra Nova’s fate: She had vanished during World War II off the coast of Greenland, where she was in the service of the U.S. Navy.
I put the book down and recalled a photo in the Lyttelton Museum, an image that had captured a moment of pageant and freak show, P.T. Barnum does a wilderness act: Eleven men in Burberry anoraks, hoods extended and obscuring their faces. They wore harnesses and towed sledges just as five men would do en route to the South Pole. The first holds a crumpled Union Jack hastily hoisted on a pole. Two young boys galloped in from the right, skinny legs, knee breeches and caps, white collars glistening. The street mired in mud, the hillside homes cloaked in a faint coal-smoke haze. Behind the marchers, a regimental band, wearing topcoats with brass buttons. These Antarctic sailors march deliberately, suggesting they know where they are going – and in fact, they do – back to the quayside, a left turn and then two blocks down the steep hill, back to their ship’s chores, then off to sea. Later, the photos will show these men at sea, faces masked by cold and ice, skin darkened and shining from coal and blubber smoke.
I returned to his book, in an eloquent essay, They Came Back to Lyttelton, he listed more than a dozen and their fates. There was Lance Corporal A.H. Blissett who served aboard the Discovery. By the time Norris knew him, he was Harry Blissett, a rather gruff watersider, or dockworker. He had frightened Norris as a child. Blissett was the first to find an Emperor penguin’s egg, a moment Scott had recorded on January 28, 1903, “all the news seems good. Blissett has discovered an Emperor penguin egg and his messmates expect him to be knighted.”
Hugh McGowan had served as an engineer with Shackleton’s 1904-1906 Nimrod expedition and continued that work back in Lyttelton.
W.W. Knowles had been an able-bodied seaman on the Terra Nova. He worked as a watersider for many years in Lyttelton.
The Morning, a relief ship sent out in 1903 – I considered the odd moment of language meeting purpose, mourning, the feeling of showing deep sadness following the death of somebody – sailed to find and bring home Scott and his Discovery crew when they were late returning in 1903. She had two Lyttelton men aboard: Arthur Beaumont, able-bodied seaman, who later worked in Lyttelton as a watersider and crane operator, and Jack Partridge, who sailed with the Morning and then headed south again in 1907 on Shackleton’s Nimrod. He became fireman on the Lyttelton Harbour Board’s dredge Te Whaka.
Not all the Lyttelton men were seamen. Local boy Eric Norman Webb, Norris noted, was just twenty-two when selected by the legendary Australian polar scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson to head south.
Webb served as chief magnetician with the 1911 Australasian Expedition, and was key in locating the South Magnetic Pole. The magnetic pole describes, for the Earth’s magnetic field, the equivalent of the geographic South Pole. The South Magnetic Pole is not fixed, and drifts like a cloud across water, land, ice. In 2003 it hovered off the Antarctic coast, over the Southern Ocean. Webb went on to become a world authority on hydroelectric power.
The next morning, I wandered along the town’s quiet streets. Someone had broken the windows of two shops the night before. Drunken sailors? Young hooligans? I climbed cement stairs by the museum and sat down in Baden Norris Gardens, dedicated to his work as historian and naturalist, turned and gazed out across the deep turquoise water to Diamond Harbour on the other shore. A bay cruise boat, black and white, pulled slowly away from the quay, a dolphin-watching trip. Earlier in the year a pod of Orcas had made the unusual move of swimming into the harbour and gobbling up a lot the tiny, rare Hector’s dolphins that also called Lyttelton home. Those that remained were keeping a low profile. No one had seen any in months.
I drove home to Lyttelton in my green truck, made a cup of tea, and curled up in bed. From my bed, I could look out a large window to the port. Later that night, a red coastal freighter would arrive, as it did each week, and begin unloading a cargo that often seemed to be entirely clanging metal bars. At that moment, the port was still, illuminated by melon halogen lights, lights that urged gulls to forget the night. They flew in a wide arc, silent, circling. Norris had given me a copy of his Antarctic book, which was sold at the Canterbury Museum. It collected a series of newspaper columns he contributed to a local paper, detailing the specific stories of Lyttelton and Canterbury men who sailed during the Heroic Age.
As I read, I could hear his voice. Some of the ships took expeditions to the Antarctic, then turned around and came home to Lyttelton where the crew waited out the frigid, ship-crushing winter season. Thus, Scott’s second and final ship, the Terra Nova was moored at Lyttelton for long periods during 1910-1913. The ship had dropped off Scott and the exploration team at Cape Evans. They would return in the spring thaw to fetch Scott and his victorious party, home from their dash to the South Pole.
You can imagine how people in Lyttelton would have felt, looking down into the port and seeing the Terra Nova in their midst. Norris was almost equally devoted to the ships themselves, the old sailor in him coming through, I reckoned, and he recorde the Terra Nova’s fate: She had vanished during World War II off the coast of Greenland, where she was in the service of the U.S. Navy.
I put the book down and recalled a photo in the Lyttelton Museum, an image that had captured a moment of pageant and freak show, P.T. Barnum does a wilderness act: Eleven men in Burberry anoraks, hoods extended and obscuring their faces. They wore harnesses and towed sledges just as five men would do en route to the South Pole. The first holds a crumpled Union Jack hastily hoisted on a pole. Two young boys galloped in from the right, skinny legs, knee breeches and caps, white collars glistening. The street mired in mud, the hillside homes cloaked in a faint coal-smoke haze. Behind the marchers, a regimental band, wearing topcoats with brass buttons. These Antarctic sailors march deliberately, suggesting they know where they are going – and in fact, they do – back to the quayside, a left turn and then two blocks down the steep hill, back to their ship’s chores, then off to sea. Later, the photos will show these men at sea, faces masked by cold and ice, skin darkened and shining from coal and blubber smoke.
I returned to his book, in an eloquent essay, They Came Back to Lyttelton, he listed more than a dozen and their fates. There was Lance Corporal A.H. Blissett who served aboard the Discovery. By the time Norris knew him, he was Harry Blissett, a rather gruff watersider, or dockworker. He had frightened Norris as a child. Blissett was the first to find an Emperor penguin’s egg, a moment Scott had recorded on January 28, 1903, “all the news seems good. Blissett has discovered an Emperor penguin egg and his messmates expect him to be knighted.”
Hugh McGowan had served as an engineer with Shackleton’s 1904-1906 Nimrod expedition and continued that work back in Lyttelton.
W.W. Knowles had been an able-bodied seaman on the Terra Nova. He worked as a watersider for many years in Lyttelton.
The Morning, a relief ship sent out in 1903 – I considered the odd moment of language meeting purpose, mourning, the feeling of showing deep sadness following the death of somebody – sailed to find and bring home Scott and his Discovery crew when they were late returning in 1903. She had two Lyttelton men aboard: Arthur Beaumont, able-bodied seaman, who later worked in Lyttelton as a watersider and crane operator, and Jack Partridge, who sailed with the Morning and then headed south again in 1907 on Shackleton’s Nimrod. He became fireman on the Lyttelton Harbour Board’s dredge Te Whaka.
Not all the Lyttelton men were seamen. Local boy Eric Norman Webb, Norris noted, was just twenty-two when selected by the legendary Australian polar scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson to head south.
Webb served as chief magnetician with the 1911 Australasian Expedition, and was key in locating the South Magnetic Pole. The magnetic pole describes, for the Earth’s magnetic field, the equivalent of the geographic South Pole. The South Magnetic Pole is not fixed, and drifts like a cloud across water, land, ice. In 2003 it hovered off the Antarctic coast, over the Southern Ocean. Webb went on to become a world authority on hydroelectric power.
The next morning, I wandered along the town’s quiet streets. Someone had broken the windows of two shops the night before. Drunken sailors? Young hooligans? I climbed cement stairs by the museum and sat down in Baden Norris Gardens, dedicated to his work as historian and naturalist, turned and gazed out across the deep turquoise water to Diamond Harbour on the other shore. A bay cruise boat, black and white, pulled slowly away from the quay, a dolphin-watching trip. Earlier in the year a pod of Orcas had made the unusual move of swimming into the harbour and gobbling up a lot the tiny, rare Hector’s dolphins that also called Lyttelton home. Those that remained were keeping a low profile. No one had seen any in months.
6/16/2008
Penguins Go to the Zoo...
Each day as part of my iGoogle page I get a feed of jokes. Most are not my taste: I guess I prefer to laugh privately or perhaps it's that the whole joke set-up construct makes me nervous.
Who knows.
At any rate, today I got this joke from Comedy Central: Penguins go the zoo...
A man drives to a gas station and has his tank filled up. The gas pumper spots two penguins sitting in the back seat of the car.
He asks the driver, "What's up with the penguins in the back seat?"
The man in the car says "I found them. I asked myself what to do with them, but I haven't had a clue."
The clerk ponders a bit then says, "You should take them to the zoo."
"Hey, that's a good idea," says the man in the car and drives away.
The next day the man with the car is back at the same gas station. The clerk sees the penguins are still in the back seat of the car.
"Hey, they're still here! I thought you were going to take them to the zoo."
"Oh, I did," says the driver, "And we had a swell time. Today I am taking them to the beach."
The first thing that came to mind were the Magellanic penguins at the SF Zoo, a rather sad-looking bunch in their cement pond. Not so long ago, maybe five years or so, some new penguins born and bred in Ohio came aboard the island. This arrival triggered a massive "migration" of the original gang, who proceeded to swim as though making the long commute from northerly to southerly latitudes in wide open seas.
If I am in the right mood, these sorts of penguin stories can make me bawl.
This, of course, made me think of all the penguin stories I had heard from my friend, the Antarctic curator Baden Norris (he runs the Lyttelton Museum on New Zealand's South Island) -- who had also for many years run a bird hospital and nursed many penguins back to health. Penguins are endemic to New Zealand's South Island and actually considered something of a smelly mess.
One of my favorite stories was that of Percy the Penguin and I included in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY as a field note.
Field Notes
I imagine if penguins were to study us the way we study them, they might be intrigued by how we adapt to and construct our habitats. Maybe they would investigate our habitat construction in places like New York. How we stack boxes of stone one on top of the other and then argue amongst ourselves about what colour the inside of these dens should be. How we change the den’s colour randomly. Or do we do so for other reasons? Perhaps, as scientists do in the Antarctic, they would be curious about whether or not helicopter noise disrupted our breeding habits. I don’t know about you, but I would feel disrupted by a helicopter full of penguins descending on my den, determined to shove a thermometer up my rear end and check my body temperature. Penguins may be the most carefully studied of all Antarctic wildlife and there was a lot of grumbling among Antarctic scientists about duplication and relevance. Yet penguins hold our attention in ways seals do not. Why is this so? And why do we insist on making them into comical little men in dinner suits, carrying silver trays of champagne? Baden had run a bird “hospital” for many years. As part of this, he had worked with the indigenous species called the blue or little penguin, Eudyptula minor, (the Maori name is korora, and it is the world’s smallest penguin. This penguin weighs about one kilo, or 2.2 pounds, and stands no more than 25 cm high. These penguins have suffered from gruesome predation, and introduced species like ferrets, stoats, weasels, house cats, and the family dog, make fast work of them. Among those in his care was a penguin that had arrived with a damaged bill and blind in one eye. Baden named him Percy and said he never could have survived again in the wild. While he lived with Baden, Percy got to know Baden’s cats, who came to treat the little bird with respect, and treat him as part of the household. Baden explained how other penguins were in hospital because they had become oil contaminated. To cure them, Baden gave them detergent baths, then carefully checked that all residue was removed. After about five weeks, most were ready to be reintroduced to the wild. They usually did not want to go, he added. He recalled one particular day when he had four to release, how he took them down to the beach and shooed them all toward the sea, then sat on the beach and watched them swim away. One by one, they came back to the beach and sat down next to him. Then the five watched the surf roll onto the beach at Sumner. Two penguins tired of this, and wandered back toward the waves, but the other two were quite determined to come home with Baden. So Baden brought them to the beach again the next day, and this time one turned from the waves. A few days later he, too, agreed to swim out to sea. Returning to the sea was no longer an option for Percy. He came to have a taste for cat food and enjoyed daily swims with Baden in the surf. Percy rode to the beach in the boot, or trunk, of Baden’s white car. When they finished their swim, Percy waddled back to the car park. He always knew which car was ours, he was a smart penguin, Baden recalled. I pictured the two of them rolling in the turquoise South Pacific waters. So Percy lived his half-penguin, half-human life making a comfortable nest in the cold furnace in the basement. During one of the South Island’s torrential rainstorms, he was moulting, and water surged into his moulting area and by the time Baden found him, he was ice-cold and water logged. Wrapped in shawls and held tight, Percy died. Down the coast from Baden’s home, many years later, the town of Oamaru became home to a set of wooden burrows and bleachers, a habitat restoration project with spectators, where tourists paid to watch penguins emerge from the sea as night descended. They hopped up the rocky beach. When we visited, one turned towards where I sat with my children and came to within a few feet of us, looking steadily at our family. Then the penguin turned towards the hills and began to climb towards the burrows. In the gift shop, we bought small plastic replicas of the little blue penguins. They were made in China and stood as tall as my thumb.
Who knows.
At any rate, today I got this joke from Comedy Central: Penguins go the zoo...
A man drives to a gas station and has his tank filled up. The gas pumper spots two penguins sitting in the back seat of the car.
He asks the driver, "What's up with the penguins in the back seat?"
The man in the car says "I found them. I asked myself what to do with them, but I haven't had a clue."
The clerk ponders a bit then says, "You should take them to the zoo."
"Hey, that's a good idea," says the man in the car and drives away.
The next day the man with the car is back at the same gas station. The clerk sees the penguins are still in the back seat of the car.
"Hey, they're still here! I thought you were going to take them to the zoo."
"Oh, I did," says the driver, "And we had a swell time. Today I am taking them to the beach."
The first thing that came to mind were the Magellanic penguins at the SF Zoo, a rather sad-looking bunch in their cement pond. Not so long ago, maybe five years or so, some new penguins born and bred in Ohio came aboard the island. This arrival triggered a massive "migration" of the original gang, who proceeded to swim as though making the long commute from northerly to southerly latitudes in wide open seas.
If I am in the right mood, these sorts of penguin stories can make me bawl.
This, of course, made me think of all the penguin stories I had heard from my friend, the Antarctic curator Baden Norris (he runs the Lyttelton Museum on New Zealand's South Island) -- who had also for many years run a bird hospital and nursed many penguins back to health. Penguins are endemic to New Zealand's South Island and actually considered something of a smelly mess.
One of my favorite stories was that of Percy the Penguin and I included in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY as a field note.
Field Notes
I imagine if penguins were to study us the way we study them, they might be intrigued by how we adapt to and construct our habitats. Maybe they would investigate our habitat construction in places like New York. How we stack boxes of stone one on top of the other and then argue amongst ourselves about what colour the inside of these dens should be. How we change the den’s colour randomly. Or do we do so for other reasons? Perhaps, as scientists do in the Antarctic, they would be curious about whether or not helicopter noise disrupted our breeding habits. I don’t know about you, but I would feel disrupted by a helicopter full of penguins descending on my den, determined to shove a thermometer up my rear end and check my body temperature. Penguins may be the most carefully studied of all Antarctic wildlife and there was a lot of grumbling among Antarctic scientists about duplication and relevance. Yet penguins hold our attention in ways seals do not. Why is this so? And why do we insist on making them into comical little men in dinner suits, carrying silver trays of champagne? Baden had run a bird “hospital” for many years. As part of this, he had worked with the indigenous species called the blue or little penguin, Eudyptula minor, (the Maori name is korora, and it is the world’s smallest penguin. This penguin weighs about one kilo, or 2.2 pounds, and stands no more than 25 cm high. These penguins have suffered from gruesome predation, and introduced species like ferrets, stoats, weasels, house cats, and the family dog, make fast work of them. Among those in his care was a penguin that had arrived with a damaged bill and blind in one eye. Baden named him Percy and said he never could have survived again in the wild. While he lived with Baden, Percy got to know Baden’s cats, who came to treat the little bird with respect, and treat him as part of the household. Baden explained how other penguins were in hospital because they had become oil contaminated. To cure them, Baden gave them detergent baths, then carefully checked that all residue was removed. After about five weeks, most were ready to be reintroduced to the wild. They usually did not want to go, he added. He recalled one particular day when he had four to release, how he took them down to the beach and shooed them all toward the sea, then sat on the beach and watched them swim away. One by one, they came back to the beach and sat down next to him. Then the five watched the surf roll onto the beach at Sumner. Two penguins tired of this, and wandered back toward the waves, but the other two were quite determined to come home with Baden. So Baden brought them to the beach again the next day, and this time one turned from the waves. A few days later he, too, agreed to swim out to sea. Returning to the sea was no longer an option for Percy. He came to have a taste for cat food and enjoyed daily swims with Baden in the surf. Percy rode to the beach in the boot, or trunk, of Baden’s white car. When they finished their swim, Percy waddled back to the car park. He always knew which car was ours, he was a smart penguin, Baden recalled. I pictured the two of them rolling in the turquoise South Pacific waters. So Percy lived his half-penguin, half-human life making a comfortable nest in the cold furnace in the basement. During one of the South Island’s torrential rainstorms, he was moulting, and water surged into his moulting area and by the time Baden found him, he was ice-cold and water logged. Wrapped in shawls and held tight, Percy died. Down the coast from Baden’s home, many years later, the town of Oamaru became home to a set of wooden burrows and bleachers, a habitat restoration project with spectators, where tourists paid to watch penguins emerge from the sea as night descended. They hopped up the rocky beach. When we visited, one turned towards where I sat with my children and came to within a few feet of us, looking steadily at our family. Then the penguin turned towards the hills and began to climb towards the burrows. In the gift shop, we bought small plastic replicas of the little blue penguins. They were made in China and stood as tall as my thumb.
6/11/2008
10 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT ANTARCTICA
What a great day for Antarctic news: The last supply ship in dumped off about 16,000 condoms to make it through the winter. Good on ya, mates, as my Kiwi colleagues say. The first part of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY is a "gazetteer" of Antarctic facts. And then there are facts strewn around the book. How about this one: 46,800 cans of beer are ordered each year for Scott Base, the New Zealand base in the Ross Sea. (Wine, you ask? 2,268 bottles.) At any rate, I plan to include fact lists each week over the austral winter, in honor of our colleagues toughing it out in the 24-hour darkness of the deep south. While some might call such lists random, there is also an argument that all of these ideas were carefully selected from the tens of millions floating around out there -- do you see the link?
1) Antarctica is the only continent where people compete on an annual basis for the chance to reside and work there.
2) Antarctica was once the center of the Gondwana supercontinent, which included Africa, India, South America, and Australia.
3) 98 percent of the continent is covered by ice; with a volume of 30 million cubic kilometres.
4) The weight of the ice has depressed continental bedrock by 600 meters.
5) Antarctica contains 70 percent of the Earth's fresh water in the form of ice.
6) When winter darkness descends, the community shrinks to 1,000.
7) Ice crept across Antarctica about 40 million years ago and has remained largely intact since then.
8) On Nov. 29, 1929, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd of the U.S. Navy became first to fly over the South Pole.
9) At the South Pole, the ice is 2.8 kilometers thick.
10) People who live and work at the South Pole are called "polies."
1) Antarctica is the only continent where people compete on an annual basis for the chance to reside and work there.
2) Antarctica was once the center of the Gondwana supercontinent, which included Africa, India, South America, and Australia.
3) 98 percent of the continent is covered by ice; with a volume of 30 million cubic kilometres.
4) The weight of the ice has depressed continental bedrock by 600 meters.
5) Antarctica contains 70 percent of the Earth's fresh water in the form of ice.
6) When winter darkness descends, the community shrinks to 1,000.
7) Ice crept across Antarctica about 40 million years ago and has remained largely intact since then.
8) On Nov. 29, 1929, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd of the U.S. Navy became first to fly over the South Pole.
9) At the South Pole, the ice is 2.8 kilometers thick.
10) People who live and work at the South Pole are called "polies."
5/01/2008
Otherwise, you have a worthless imitation
My book, The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica, is not due out until October 1 but it recently appeared on Amazon.com. Lately, when people other than my writing colleagues ask about the book -- I have taken to talking like a swaggering travelling salesman, as in, "You can pre-order a copy on Amazon.com."
This newish habit of mine makes me feel like an ass, and yet it is hard to stop. Orwell wrote so beautifully about the vanity and selfishness of the writer. He also, I believe, threw in lazy as part of his equation on what writers, in fact, are. Vain, selfish, lazy. Perhaps this is why I enjoy doing historical research, years of combing archives, in search of letters and diaries of men working in Antarctica. I am fascinated by their calm determination, their sense of purpose, and their unending appetite for the unknown. Among my favorite sailors who came to me via letters, was a Scotsman named James Paton. I included a piece of his story in The Entire Earth and Sky.
***
I recall sitting in the Canterbury Museum Archives reading Paton's diary. I was rather distracted by the diary as a physical object -- they used to sell the opening pages to advertisers and the adverts themselves seemed meaningful and illuminating, although I did not ultimately use them in my book. (Too many small portals, or portholes, open as I wandered through the pages and photos. The challenge wasn't to find, but to know what I sought while also being wholly open the new.)Here are my rough notes:
The Diary of James Paton, 1904
The book is dark brown and gold embossed on the cover, an oval “Lett’s No. 101 Diary” in ornate hand; the oval fashioned as a belt, secured with a buckle at the base.
Inside the front cover, several pages of ads, including “Eno’s ‘Fruit Salt’”
“Every household and travelling trunk ought to contain a bottle of Eno’s Fruit Salt for preventing and curing by natural means all functional derangements of the liver, temporary congestion arising from alcoholic beverages, errors in diet, biliousness, sick headache, constipation, thirst, feverish cold, influenza, throat affections, and fevers of all kinds.
“The effects of Eno’s Fruit Salt on a Disordered and Feverish condition is Simply Marvellous. It is, in fact, Nature’s Own Remedy, and an Unsurpassed One.
CAUTION: Examine the Capsule and see that it is marked ENO’S FRUIT SALT!’ Otherwise, you have a WORTHLESS IMITATION.
Lett’s Australasian Rough Diary and Almanac for 1904
Being the fourth year of the reign of his majesty king Edward VII.
Date of Birth of and Age in 1904 of The Royal Family...
Including list of New Zealand rates of postage -/1 for each 1/2 oz.
Paton writes, Saturday 5th December 1903
Cast off moorings from the Alexandria Peir (sic) exactly at noon, there were many friends down to bid us Good-bye and wish us God speed, although our send of (sic) was not quite so enthusiastic as the one from Lyttelton it was no less sincere, the short period we had been in Hobart was not lost…
A letter on the ship Terra Nova stationery: logo is Emperor penguin standing on a globe, with the Antarctic continent underfoot. In the ring band around it, the words, British Antarctic Expedition, Terra Nova RYS
The penguin is in profile, gazing steadfastly to the right.
Christmas 1910
“Knowing only too well how little time we shall have on hand when we get to our destination I think I had better begin my letters now. We left Port Chalmers at 2.30 P.M. on November 29th, and all went well until December 2nd when we ran into a heavy southerly gale our decks were heavily laden with cargo. ...we had to turn to and throw a good part of the deck cargo overboard, this was not our only danger, as it soon leeked out that the water had risen as high as the bottom of our furnaces ...all hands were employed all the time up to the waist in water, with the seas breaking over them while the aftergaurd (sic) (the officers and scientists) were kept passing it from the Engine room in buckets,
All this time we had very little to eat (nothing hot) and no rest, and for our own sakes as well as for the poor dumb animals we had on board, it was a relief the weather moderated.
During this gale we had one dog washed overboard, and two of our horses got down and died but several days passed before we could get them out of the stalls to throw them overboard."
And then Paton recounts how life was at sea -- once they arrived in Antarctica. He travelled there a remarkable 10 times and was among the most highly sought polar sailors in the world. However, you won't find him in any museums, save Lyttelton, New Zealand. Paton, like most of the simple seamen, has been all but erased from history.
This newish habit of mine makes me feel like an ass, and yet it is hard to stop. Orwell wrote so beautifully about the vanity and selfishness of the writer. He also, I believe, threw in lazy as part of his equation on what writers, in fact, are. Vain, selfish, lazy. Perhaps this is why I enjoy doing historical research, years of combing archives, in search of letters and diaries of men working in Antarctica. I am fascinated by their calm determination, their sense of purpose, and their unending appetite for the unknown. Among my favorite sailors who came to me via letters, was a Scotsman named James Paton. I included a piece of his story in The Entire Earth and Sky.
***
I recall sitting in the Canterbury Museum Archives reading Paton's diary. I was rather distracted by the diary as a physical object -- they used to sell the opening pages to advertisers and the adverts themselves seemed meaningful and illuminating, although I did not ultimately use them in my book. (Too many small portals, or portholes, open as I wandered through the pages and photos. The challenge wasn't to find, but to know what I sought while also being wholly open the new.)Here are my rough notes:
The Diary of James Paton, 1904
The book is dark brown and gold embossed on the cover, an oval “Lett’s No. 101 Diary” in ornate hand; the oval fashioned as a belt, secured with a buckle at the base.
Inside the front cover, several pages of ads, including “Eno’s ‘Fruit Salt’”
“Every household and travelling trunk ought to contain a bottle of Eno’s Fruit Salt for preventing and curing by natural means all functional derangements of the liver, temporary congestion arising from alcoholic beverages, errors in diet, biliousness, sick headache, constipation, thirst, feverish cold, influenza, throat affections, and fevers of all kinds.
“The effects of Eno’s Fruit Salt on a Disordered and Feverish condition is Simply Marvellous. It is, in fact, Nature’s Own Remedy, and an Unsurpassed One.
CAUTION: Examine the Capsule and see that it is marked ENO’S FRUIT SALT!’ Otherwise, you have a WORTHLESS IMITATION.
Lett’s Australasian Rough Diary and Almanac for 1904
Being the fourth year of the reign of his majesty king Edward VII.
Date of Birth of and Age in 1904 of The Royal Family...
Including list of New Zealand rates of postage -/1 for each 1/2 oz.
Paton writes, Saturday 5th December 1903
Cast off moorings from the Alexandria Peir (sic) exactly at noon, there were many friends down to bid us Good-bye and wish us God speed, although our send of (sic) was not quite so enthusiastic as the one from Lyttelton it was no less sincere, the short period we had been in Hobart was not lost…
A letter on the ship Terra Nova stationery: logo is Emperor penguin standing on a globe, with the Antarctic continent underfoot. In the ring band around it, the words, British Antarctic Expedition, Terra Nova RYS
The penguin is in profile, gazing steadfastly to the right.
Christmas 1910
“Knowing only too well how little time we shall have on hand when we get to our destination I think I had better begin my letters now. We left Port Chalmers at 2.30 P.M. on November 29th, and all went well until December 2nd when we ran into a heavy southerly gale our decks were heavily laden with cargo. ...we had to turn to and throw a good part of the deck cargo overboard, this was not our only danger, as it soon leeked out that the water had risen as high as the bottom of our furnaces ...all hands were employed all the time up to the waist in water, with the seas breaking over them while the aftergaurd (sic) (the officers and scientists) were kept passing it from the Engine room in buckets,
All this time we had very little to eat (nothing hot) and no rest, and for our own sakes as well as for the poor dumb animals we had on board, it was a relief the weather moderated.
During this gale we had one dog washed overboard, and two of our horses got down and died but several days passed before we could get them out of the stalls to throw them overboard."
And then Paton recounts how life was at sea -- once they arrived in Antarctica. He travelled there a remarkable 10 times and was among the most highly sought polar sailors in the world. However, you won't find him in any museums, save Lyttelton, New Zealand. Paton, like most of the simple seamen, has been all but erased from history.
11/14/2007
The Ontology of an Oil Spill
The oil spilled into San Francisco one week ago and even today, even with all our news vectors and sources and RSS feeds, we still don't seem to be able to wrap our minds around it. Baker Beach, where I walk each morning, remains closed. The sign announcing its closure has a peculiar old-timey look to it. White wood stencilled with words about the oil spill. This being a former Army base, it should come as no surprise that there are Army-letter-looking stencils lying around, waiting for the day an impromptu sign needs to be made.
So. The daily walk now leads east-north-east, towards the cemetery, a national cemetery, a place meant to ensure that these people would not have died in vain. The walk moves me away from the Pacific and closer to the site of the spill. Spill: to flow or allow something to flow from a container. Yes: Event of one week ago matches dictionary. Yes: Container ship gashed along a bumper on the Bay Bridge and then oil flowed.
And now, yes, and now the birds die. I try not to think about this and feel this, the idea that while I sit here with fingers lightly tapping keys, less than a half mile away, in the cold dark, some shag or gull feels the deep cold of oil coated feathers. Feels cold, then slowly gives into this wave of fatigue, all the while wondering, what can all this be?
What to do while we wait to hear that the beach is open or that they need more help -- there remains endless cheer herein with the news there are too many volunteers at present -- what to do? Well, the decision was reached this is no time for long, blond hair. If the birds found themselves reduced to the deep brown of bunker oil, I would join them. I wandered down to my friend Patrick Richards salon, where he ageeably chopped my hair short and then coated the blond with brown dye. I no longer look precisely like me. I am no longer me, and I am no longer me because the place where I need and desire to walk has been taken away. What I mean to say is just this: I think we each of us are defined and created by the landscape in which we live. When we stop responding to the demands of our current reality in a specific place, we cease to be fully human and alive.
As example, I think of my friend Ed, who lives in a town called Orinda. In Orinda, people place lights under their front-yard trees and illuminate their yards at night, next to their illuminated homes, gestures wherein one begins to feel the lure of the Taj Mahal after sunset. But what do these lighted trees mean for the birds who try to make sense of 24-hour light pollution? Does this cross their minds? When the sun rises, and the tree-lights fade in comparison, the homes sit and stare at the few walkers on the street. Walking in Orinda is an exercise in jumping the hell out of the way of ginormous black SUVs roaring towards the clogged freeway. Walking in Orinda is something people choose not to do, not in the sunlight, and certainly not at night. So who are the tree lights for? What do they mean in the context of placing ourselves in a landscape? How is this at all connected to the oil spill?
Spill: To come from a building or other confined space in large numbers. I invite the people of Illuminated Tree World to spill into the streets, to cut their hair, to lay down in the dusty road and see who can make the first angel.
Meanwhile, my hair remains chocolate brown and short. Meanwhile, the beach is closed. Meanwhile, as a poet once wrote, the real world goes like this: Each day we awaken to the same white light creeping into our eucaluptus stand, the banana slugs remain eager to gnaw the skin on my palm given half a chance, and our local crow family dives and alights in the silver trees. Meanwhile it is yet a beautiful day.
When you drag a comb through your hair today, think of the birds of the near-shore Pacific. Hope they fly clear when word gets out something evil this way comes.
So. The daily walk now leads east-north-east, towards the cemetery, a national cemetery, a place meant to ensure that these people would not have died in vain. The walk moves me away from the Pacific and closer to the site of the spill. Spill: to flow or allow something to flow from a container. Yes: Event of one week ago matches dictionary. Yes: Container ship gashed along a bumper on the Bay Bridge and then oil flowed.
And now, yes, and now the birds die. I try not to think about this and feel this, the idea that while I sit here with fingers lightly tapping keys, less than a half mile away, in the cold dark, some shag or gull feels the deep cold of oil coated feathers. Feels cold, then slowly gives into this wave of fatigue, all the while wondering, what can all this be?
What to do while we wait to hear that the beach is open or that they need more help -- there remains endless cheer herein with the news there are too many volunteers at present -- what to do? Well, the decision was reached this is no time for long, blond hair. If the birds found themselves reduced to the deep brown of bunker oil, I would join them. I wandered down to my friend Patrick Richards salon, where he ageeably chopped my hair short and then coated the blond with brown dye. I no longer look precisely like me. I am no longer me, and I am no longer me because the place where I need and desire to walk has been taken away. What I mean to say is just this: I think we each of us are defined and created by the landscape in which we live. When we stop responding to the demands of our current reality in a specific place, we cease to be fully human and alive.
As example, I think of my friend Ed, who lives in a town called Orinda. In Orinda, people place lights under their front-yard trees and illuminate their yards at night, next to their illuminated homes, gestures wherein one begins to feel the lure of the Taj Mahal after sunset. But what do these lighted trees mean for the birds who try to make sense of 24-hour light pollution? Does this cross their minds? When the sun rises, and the tree-lights fade in comparison, the homes sit and stare at the few walkers on the street. Walking in Orinda is an exercise in jumping the hell out of the way of ginormous black SUVs roaring towards the clogged freeway. Walking in Orinda is something people choose not to do, not in the sunlight, and certainly not at night. So who are the tree lights for? What do they mean in the context of placing ourselves in a landscape? How is this at all connected to the oil spill?
Spill: To come from a building or other confined space in large numbers. I invite the people of Illuminated Tree World to spill into the streets, to cut their hair, to lay down in the dusty road and see who can make the first angel.
Meanwhile, my hair remains chocolate brown and short. Meanwhile, the beach is closed. Meanwhile, as a poet once wrote, the real world goes like this: Each day we awaken to the same white light creeping into our eucaluptus stand, the banana slugs remain eager to gnaw the skin on my palm given half a chance, and our local crow family dives and alights in the silver trees. Meanwhile it is yet a beautiful day.
When you drag a comb through your hair today, think of the birds of the near-shore Pacific. Hope they fly clear when word gets out something evil this way comes.
10/25/2007
Permaculture
We gathered around an open-pit fire at Hidden Villa, in Northern California's Los Altos hills, a landscape where they teach "sustainable" practices on farms and for humans in general on Earth. Hard to believe this parcel of 1600 acres, woods, mountain, and farm, were a mere 38 or so miles from San Francisco. So far that day, we had hiked the trails and talked about how this part of the lithosphere was once deep under the sea, how banana slugs on the palm will gnaw skin, and we had worked the farm, milking, feeding, and learning how all the wiggling piglets, covered in shiny umber down and born three days earlier, were bound for the fry pan.
All this filled my brain as a shooting star zipped across the cool violet night while one of the interpreters, Will, talked about a sustainable world culture. The term he used was "permaculture, " and he explained the ideals: rather than thinking about the individual elements themselves, think about how they all weave and unify.
Most of this audience had logged a mere decade on the Earth's surface and I wondered if Will's urgings seemed too fantastic. Yet children do indeed consider all ideas -- from flying wizards to talking pigs to the possibilities of deep ecology. A hopeful moment.
Soon we broke into smaller groups and headed away from the camp fire out into the woods for a night hike. In my group , there were two other mother/chaperones along with our two wilderness guides. Both of these mothers wore lipstick, which they must have applied sometime between dinner and the walk into the dark woods. One of our exercises entailed staring at an index card displaying an outline of a Disney mouse head and then writing down its color. The guides described how in the dark, we lose our ability to see color; because three things are required to sort out color: a light source, an eye, and something at which to gaze. I thought about the lipstick. A gesture that made sense in a night world of lights and restaurants but here you had to adapt.
What came to mind as we stood listening to a Great Horned Owl,
bubo virgianus, was how out of luck we would be if we had to actually survive at night without light. Most of the children in our group lost themselves in some version of mini-terror when we were challenged to make a short "solo" hike on the trail.
Perhaps most of our current debate on how to maintain human habitats on Earth as the climate changes, a miasma of light bulbs and hybrid engines and plastic shopping bags, questions about permaculture and embracing ideas of deep ecology, then, are simply questions of fear.
After we returned to our city school later the next day, the children watched "An Inconvenient Truth." My little daughter said the film made her feel both sad and afraid, which seemed like a reasonable and thoughtful response.
For some reason, this reminded me of something an editor at The Washington Post had once told me, as way of a scolding: Fear is a great motivator.
Tonight I plan to lay in my bed and listen to the ocean's roar and consider the weave, the sea and its ecosystem, the stars overhead, those piglets down the pike. Is our sort of soft indifference to their fate, amazingly, the dominant sentiment about our fate as well?
All this filled my brain as a shooting star zipped across the cool violet night while one of the interpreters, Will, talked about a sustainable world culture. The term he used was "permaculture, " and he explained the ideals: rather than thinking about the individual elements themselves, think about how they all weave and unify.
Most of this audience had logged a mere decade on the Earth's surface and I wondered if Will's urgings seemed too fantastic. Yet children do indeed consider all ideas -- from flying wizards to talking pigs to the possibilities of deep ecology. A hopeful moment.
Soon we broke into smaller groups and headed away from the camp fire out into the woods for a night hike. In my group , there were two other mother/chaperones along with our two wilderness guides. Both of these mothers wore lipstick, which they must have applied sometime between dinner and the walk into the dark woods. One of our exercises entailed staring at an index card displaying an outline of a Disney mouse head and then writing down its color. The guides described how in the dark, we lose our ability to see color; because three things are required to sort out color: a light source, an eye, and something at which to gaze. I thought about the lipstick. A gesture that made sense in a night world of lights and restaurants but here you had to adapt.
What came to mind as we stood listening to a Great Horned Owl,
bubo virgianus, was how out of luck we would be if we had to actually survive at night without light. Most of the children in our group lost themselves in some version of mini-terror when we were challenged to make a short "solo" hike on the trail.
Perhaps most of our current debate on how to maintain human habitats on Earth as the climate changes, a miasma of light bulbs and hybrid engines and plastic shopping bags, questions about permaculture and embracing ideas of deep ecology, then, are simply questions of fear.
After we returned to our city school later the next day, the children watched "An Inconvenient Truth." My little daughter said the film made her feel both sad and afraid, which seemed like a reasonable and thoughtful response.
For some reason, this reminded me of something an editor at The Washington Post had once told me, as way of a scolding: Fear is a great motivator.
Tonight I plan to lay in my bed and listen to the ocean's roar and consider the weave, the sea and its ecosystem, the stars overhead, those piglets down the pike. Is our sort of soft indifference to their fate, amazingly, the dominant sentiment about our fate as well?
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