Christmas and we are likely as far away
from our land-locked loved ones as we will ever be. No matter what
your religion is (or isn't) Christmas is about the same thing for
everybody: it is a holiday that reminds us to be better people, to be
generous, to care about others, to be responsible for our actions. A
Sufi proverb says, “Love is what you do,” and that is the general
message for Christmas whether you're Sufi, Buddhist, Catholic,
Protestant, or agnostic.
First thing in the morning, our ship
anchors in Paradise Bay and we go ashore at Brown Station, an
abandoned Argentine research station on the Antarctic continent
proper. In 1984 a doctor went mad over the winter and burned down
his cabin thinking that if he did so, someone would have to come and
pick him up. Instead, the rest of the researchers had to stuff
themselves into a remaining hut and constrain the doctor until the
resupply ship arrived on schedule. He must have felt very alone
indeed to do such a thing. Here on the Polar Pioneer, we passengers
were strangers a few days ago and are now very much a community
brought together by collective awe.
The wind is blowing at ten knots and
there is a chop on the water but the kayaks are deployed for an
expedition around Skontorp Cove. My brother, Scott, is in the front
of our twin kayak and I can feel his anxiety as we struggle to make
way through the open water. Waves crash over the bow and although I
am trying to steer us at an angle into them, the water washes over
the cockpit skirts. We two are heavy cargo together – four hundred
plus pounds of personhood – and the kayak feels more like a
submarine when waves cover us. I do not want to capsize in the
Antarctic sea.
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| (photo: Peter Evans) |
When we round the point Brown station
sits on, the water calms and we are able to paddle closer to shore
and to relax. We can't get too close though because Skontorp Cove is
glaciated. We are paddling along teeth of ice that tower over us
like steel buildings downtown in a big American city. Across the
bay, faint rays of sun are breaking out through the low, dark clouds,
but the wind is still gusting and I can see whitecaps where our ship
drifts several kilometers away. Our guide, Judd, is a frustrated
border collie trying to keep his herd a safe distance from the
glacier fronts. There is a clap of thunder, and a wall of ice comes
down into the sea as if its structure had been dynamited from within.
We feel the wave the calving sends out but he has kept us far enough
away to be out of danger. We find a low stretch of iceless beach.
There is about thirty meters of land here that is not covered by
glaciers and we climb out to stretch our muscles and toast the
Antarctic continent with pieces of chocolate. I think about
Shackleton's men, living for months on an Elephant Island beach not
much larger while waiting for an unlikely rescue. Looking at the
whitecaps on the bay, I think about how much happier I would be to be
rescued than to get back in the kayak and sprint into the wind to get
back to Polar Pioneer. But the ship has come closer and it is only a
fifteen minute paddle back.
If that is my idea of Antarctic
suffering, I know I have it soft. Less than half an hour after we
wrestle the kayaks back on deck, I'm wearing warm clothes and my mug
is full of hot, sweet tea. Other than the tree in the lounge of
Polar Pioneer, it doesn't feel like Christmas to me. Happily, Santa
Claus finds us in the afternoon and small gifts are doled out. The
chefs in the galley have managed to cook a specially festive meal
including Christmas turkey, Christmas pudding and wine.
A little later, we go ashore again at
Cuverville Island where 5000 Gentoo penguins have a breeding colony.
They amble. They dawdle. They saunter with their flippers out at
their sides looking like outlaws in old westerns about to draw their
six guns. But they have no six guns and as I watch them come and go
in the bay, I notice a more sinister form stirring the water. A
leopard seal haunts their launching point, hoping to snatch an unwary
penguin as it enters of exits the sea. In an outright race, an adult
penguin can outswim a leopard seal. Waddle as they do on land,
penguins are grace incarnate in the water. But leopard seals are
clever. Gary tells me they will bide the water at the end of a murky
run-off channel to surprise an unwary penguin that swims through.
While I'm looking offshore, a greyhound
bus sized iceberg in the water not far off the penguin colony snaps
in half, erupts with sound and then rolls over like a lazy Weddell
seal on the snow. The sound and the waves that spill outward from
the crash reinforce the drama around us all the time. Like the poet
Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo, the ice is filled “with light from
within” and that brightness makes us, in turn, glow inside.
Much in the way Christmas reminds us to
want to be our best selves, the Antarctic reminds us to want to
change our lives. Here is the world before we messed it up. No
cigarette butts on the beaches, no graffiti carved into the glaciers.
Pristine is a word I keep hearing. Antarctica is pristine. When we
spend some time among the marvels of Antarctica, we know that we are
lucky and we want to be worthy of it.
At the end of Christmas day, the ship
found some calm deep water and dropped anchor. A voluntary rite of
passage in Antarctica is a plunge in the polar sea. I wasn't sure
that my heart could take it. I have surfed in the Pacific off the
west coast of Canada and suffered exposure. That water was twelve
degrees. The sea in Antarctica is the coldest and most pure water in
the world – there are very few suspended particles so it absorbs
all light and appears black. The temperature is zero degrees
Celsius. When the crew lowered the gangway, a sofa sized chunk of
ice floated by. I climbed down the stairs in my bare feet and
lowered myself into the water. The teeth of it bit into my skin. I
leaned forward and tucked my chin and dove in and under, thoroughly
baptized by Antarctica.
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