Tattoo

I am getting a tattoo for my 50th birthday. Two stylized penguins will forever grace my left shoulder with their presence. 

The buzz of the tattoo needle reminds me of the sound of the electric razor my dad’s barber used on the sides of my head and the back of my neck, only the razor was louder and more painful. I give blood routinely and that involves having a nurse insert a nice thick spike into my brachial artery, so I don’t have to pretend to be a tough guy as Dave, my tattoo artist, works away on my shoulder with with the little machine as it pokes black ink into my dermis. It’s annoying more than painful. My body responds to this invasion by sending white blood cells to the rescue to absorb the foreign matter, but the pigment is too much for the white blood cells to carry, so instead they remain there in stasis. 

This is my first, and probably my only tattoo, and I gave a lot of thought to why I want it. 

The practice of making designs on human skin with ink, or ash, or pigment goes back about 6000 years. In 1991, some tourists hiking in the Italian Alps took a detour off the main trail and found Ötzi the Iceman, the corpse of a man who lived sometime around 3300 BCE. Ötzi bled to death from an arrow wound and was then preserved frozen in a glacier for thousands of years. He was tattooed and his tattoos were created from incisions rubbed with charcoal. Scientists think the purpose of the tattoos was therapy for body pain rather than decoration. The word tattoo may have its roots in the Samoan “tatau” but in one way or another, the practice of marking the body is global and goes back a long time. Tattoos have been used as punishment, to mark criminals or undesirables, as spiritual practice, as war paint to instil fear, or to delineate royalty. At their worst, we can imagine the power of the tattoo on prisoners in Nazi Death Camps, but tattoos have also long been an art form, as in the example of the horimono in Japan. 

Love potion, good luck charm, funereal marking, clan designation, or rite of passage—one of the reasons people have had their skin marked over the centuries is that it looks good and that it means something to the tattooee. 

In my case, the tattoo is about my personal mythology — the stories that most significantly contribute to my understanding of who I am. One of those stories is the myth of Castor and Polydeuces who are the twins of Gemini. Leda, the swan, was their mother, but Polydeuces’ father was Zeus and Castor’s father was Tyndareus although they both hatched from the same egg. Castor was mortal, and Polydeuces, being the offspring of gods, was not. When Castor was slain in battle, Polydeuces begged Zeus to restore him and make him immortal too, and though Zeus was not known for his sympathy, he gave Castor his wish on the condition that the two would have to take turns living in the underworld on alternate days and would not be together again, but would pass each other every day as they changed places, as the stars in the constellation Gemini seem to do on the horizon. 

For me this story is meaningful not just because I was born in June, but because the Gemini myth is about finding ways to live with paradox. How can you live in the underworld and in the heavens? How can you be mortal and immortal? 

I have never been someone who is able to bear dichotomies. If my choice is this or that, my answer is “both.” If I have to have black or white, I’ll have black now, and white later. All my life I have found ways to solve problems. When someone says, you can’t be in two places, I usually find a way. 

The other important story for me is the story of my ancestor, Roald Amundsen, the polar explorer who was first to the South and then the North Poles. He was my grandfather’s cousin and I was brought up hearing stories about him and his travels. It was the pursuit of his story that took me to Antarctica in 2011 — 100 years after his arrival at the South Pole — and it is his spirit of adventure and exploration that is sending me to the high Arctic this summer. As Amundsen looked north again after Antarctica, so will I.

So for me, my gemini penguins have a lot of meaning and represent my will to embrace paradox in life and to push toward personal adventure. The image on my skin is adornment, it’s true, and it’s swashbuckling and sailor resonant, but it is also laced with meaning. 

I was not brought up in a particularly religious way, and in my late teens and early twenties, I struggled to find what I thought was a sense of meaning and purpose in life. I investigated Catholicism, Anglicanism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Taoism and at this stage of my life, having just turned 50, prefer the label that I once saw in a bookstore: “Miscellaneous Spirituality.” I’m open to the wonders of the world, but don’t follow a particular practice to make meaning from them. Having lived a mere half-century, I know I have a great deal more to learn, but it seems to me from here that unlike my younger, searching self, I don’t need to forage for meaning in my life, I need only to see the meaning that is already there. 

Professor shares ancestor's tale

Ruzesky's great-grandfather's cousin was Roald Amundsen, the first explorer to reach the South Pole

Julie Chadwick / Nanaimo Daily News

October 11, 2013

VIU professor Jay Ruzesky will speak about his experiences in Antarctica and his famous ancestor Roald Amundsen in a presentation at the university on Oct. 18

It was out on the bow of the Polar Pioneer headed for Antarctica, that Jay Ruzesky got a peculiar sensation.

The vast, inscrutable landscape was stunning, said Ruzesky, and in its presence he struggled to understand his accompanying emotions.

The closest he could come to describing it was that he felt he was home.

Though it was a completely foreign locale, Ruzesky may have been picking up on an ancestral affinity: His great-grandfather's cousin was Roald Amundsen, famous for being the first explorer to go to the South Pole.

"Lots of families have their claim to fame, whatever that might be," said Ruzesky. "That was kind of our family's fame story, was that we were related to Amundsen the explorer."

On Oct. 18 Ruzesky will share the tale of his ancestor, as part of VIU's Arts and Humanities colloquium series.

In his presentation, Amundsen Then and Now: The End of the Age of Heroic Exploration Ruzesky will look at his own 100th anniversary expedition to Anarctica and analyze how exploration has drastically changed in the last 100 years.

It was on Dec. 14, 1911 that Amundsen arrived at the South Pole in a five-person, 16-dog expedition team.

Plunging a Norwegian flag into the frozen ground, the acheivement was the culmination of years of fundraising and planning.

Some of those funds were raised through North American speaking tours, one of which had stopped in Claresholm Alta., where Ruzesky's ancestors lived.

It was at that time that Ruzesky's grandfather received a watch as a gift from Amundsen, a keepsake that remains in his family today.

Amundsen was initially inspired by the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin.

"One of the things he said in his autobiography was that he read about polar exploration when he was a young man," said Ruzesky. "When he was 14 years old he read Franklin's accounts of one of his expeditions in the North. .. it was a horrible expedition and all of the men spent a couple of weeks barely surviving to get back from where they'd been. They ended up eating the leather from their shoes because they had no food. So it was horrible suffering, but what he says in his autobiography is that he read that and was attracted to it, and thought, 'Wow, I'd like to go suffer for a cause too.'" Amundsen's experiences in turn served to inspire Ruzesky.

"That idea of polar exploration, of going to the ends of the earth to these stark, cold, lonely places which was where he really spent his life - that reaches pretty deeply into the imagination," he said. "I was told those stories from pretty early on."

However, travelling to far-flung places means a very different experience for the modern explorer, he added.

Ruzesky's own expedition to Antarctica in December of 2011 - which he detailed in his memoir In Antarctica: An Amundsen Pilgrimage - highlighted these changes.

"One goes in rather a different way now. I was not as interested in suffering, as he seemed to be," he said.

"It's a very hostile and challenging landscape. .. but it's also a place where modern clothing and transportation can take a lot of the risk out of it and make it a lot more comfortable."

In his talk Ruzesky details how he came to terms with his own romantic notions of exploration - his visions of frostbitten cheeks and dogs howling into the wind - to come away with an appreciation for what remote places like the Antarctic can offer to one's perspective.

Ruzesky's talk is free and will be held in VIU's Malaspina Theatre from 10-11:30 a.m. on Oct. 18.

JChadwick@nanaimodailynews.com

Ariel Gordon's Review in the Winnipeg Free Press makes my holiday weekend:

Bold combo of memoir, travelogue

Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon

IN ANTARCTICA: AN AMUNDSEN PILGRIMAGE BY JAY RUZESKY

NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS, 240 PAGES, $25

On his mother's side, British Columbia poet and professor Jay Ruzesky is a cousin, twice-removed, of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

Ruzesky's compelling new memoir, In Antarctica, tells the story of his trip to the Antarctic a century after his ancestor became the first person to set foot on the South Pole.

Ruzesky, who now teaches in Duncan, spent his childhood dreaming of the polar expeditions. But his adult life had been consumed by writing three collections of poetry and a novel, teaching and having a family.

As the 2011 anniversary of Amundsen's achievement approached, Ruzesky tried to reconcile himself to not following in his ancestor's footsteps.

He failed. Instead, Ruzesky found himself online, booking a berth on a ship that would take him from Patagonia to the Antarctic.

What's more, he convinced his brother Scott to come along, even if his sibling's first question was, "Which one of us is Amundsen?"

Ruzesky knew he was incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt but thought there might be a book in his trip across the ice. (Which, in case you're wondering, makes perfect economic sense to a poet.)

Structurally,In Antarctica parallels Ruzesky's 2011 trip with episodes from Amundsen's 1911 voyage on the Fram and his earlier expedition to the Antarctic on the Belgica in 1887. His title is obviously an homage to the late Bruce Chatwin's classic 1977 travel memoir, In Patagonia.

The sections from Ruzesky's point of view meld travel writing with memoir, which effectively sets the stage for the writer's month-long voyage.

For instance, though Ruzesky has called B.C. home for 20 years, he spent his childhood in the cold-weather climes of Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Saskatoon and Calgary.

One story that would be familiar to anyone who grew up on the Prairies details how the entrance collapsed to the quinzee he and his schoolmates had built in their school playground in Thunder Bay.

This is meaningful, given that Amundsen's crew spent more than a year in a large hut connected to a series of snow caves on the Ross Ice Shelf before making their attempt on the pole.

Also interesting is Ruzesky's anecdote of a failed dog-sledging lesson in Whitehorse in 2002. Knowing that Amundsen's success in reaching the South Pole was largely attributed to his use of dogs instead of ponies, like his English rival Robert Falcon Scott, supercharges this story.

Ruzesky also includes meditations on exploration and cartography and provides context for Amundsen's journey by providing thumbnail sketches of other voyages to both the North and South poles.

The other half of In Antarctica is in Amundsen's voice, an incredibly detailed account that Ruzesky somehow cobbled together from the explorer's journals and photographs.

More importantly, these sections are very finely written. Ruzesky illuminates Amundsen's dreamy childhood and his possible motives for devoting his life to exploration instead of medicine, as his mother would have preferred.

Ruzesky's description of Admundsen's affair with the married Sigrid Castberg that preceded the 1911 voyage, however, read like the best historical fiction.

All of which is to say that In Antarctica is a bold and satisfying composite of creative non-fiction, memoir and travel writing.
______________________________________
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg poet whose paternal great-grandfather died on the shores of Antarctica's South Georgia Island in 1914.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/bold-combo-of-memoir-travelogue-218195082.html

Leaving Antarctica

December 28, 2011

As we have travelled north from the Antarctic Circle, we have seen more evidence of humanity. At Cuverville Island, two sailboats were moored in the bay. They were unlikely and vulnerable there anchored among icebergs. They looked, in fact, out of place. Antarctic glaciers make just about anything seem puny.

On Deception Island yesterday we wandered around a haunted whaling-turned-research station whose human inhabitants were chased away not by ice, but by a violent volcano.

This morning we are bound for King George Island—our last stop. I'm on the bridge early, wanting to be as awake as I can be for my last few hours in Antarctica. The plan was for a quick breakfast after which we would go ashore and walk up to the airstrip operated by the Chilean government, and we would fly out to Punta Arenas. But Antarctica doesn't want to let us go. There is a strong gale blowing across the tip of South America and the pilot has decided it is unsafe to take off. It is a two hour trip from Punta Arenas so they will let us know by radio when the plane is able to leave. In the meantime, we'll have a chance to explore this active research station.

In fact, King George Island is home to several research stations. In order to belong to the Antarctic Treaty Group, a country has to maintain a presence in Antarctica and even though King George Island is in the South Shetlands and has a sub-Antarctic climate, it counts. So there is a Russian station alongside a Chilean station, and everybody else has their toes planted here too: Argentina, Brazil, China, Ecuador, South Korea, Peru, Poland, and Uruguay. Provisioning is easier here than in other places because the airfield is of size and can land relatively large planes on its gravel tarmac.

It's cold and misty. A skua clutches an anchor hold on the bow and looks hopefully toward me. This is a much more domesticated bird than we have seen further south. It must have habituated to life around the research station and it knows that sooner or later, humans mean food. The wind is strong and there is a little snow in the air although I'm uncertain if it is new snow or if it is blowing off the island. Everything we do today happens with a sense of finality. We gear up with coats, boots, and warm gloves; we decontaminate our footwear in the troughs on deck; and we climb down the ladder and into the zodiacs to go ashore.

Robyn is driving our boat and as she cuts the motor to drift us up onto the gravel shore and another sound fills the silence. It is a low humming at first, but quickly builds to a coughing roar and I realize it is only unfamiliar because it is a sound I haven't heard in a while – a Toyota pickup truck. One of the scientists from the base has come to welcome us.

In 2004, an Orthodox Church went up on a hill above Bellingshausen Station. It was built in Russia out of Siberian Pine then taken apart and shipped here to be reassembled. It is one of the star attractions of the island and we haven't been ashore long when the priest bursts out of his trailer to greet us. He is wearing a frock and a long open coat which he tries to gather around himself with one hand, hauntingly like the image of a flasher on the subway. He's using the other limb to gesture his welcome and to shake hands. Hairy legs poke out under his frock. His long beard blows sideways in the wind. I join the line to follow him up the track to the church. From the top of the hill and in the grey light and bad weather, the research base looks desolate. There is a muddy river flowing through the center of it which roughly delineates the Russian and Chilean buildings that share the space. In winter, snow would cover the ground and make it brighter and less-dirt-splashed, but at the moment Collins Harbour could as easily be a lake in the Northern Alberta tar sands. The priest struggles with the heavy wood door and when he opens it, God pours out. There is a blast of light and those at the front of the line begin to glow. The church is so small that we go in ten at a time and when it is my turn, I see where the light comes from. There is a gold screen of panels which holds paintings of Mary and several Saints. There is also an upper section showing Jesus and the fourteen Apostles.

I have a strong sense of spirituality that comes from my experience with the broadly unexplainable wonders that are life on earth as a human being, but that sensibility isn't connected to any particular religion. I understand the power of ritual and yet these shining relics of veneration seem out of place here. I have kayaked through castellated icebergs, I have communed with penguins, I have caressed thousands-year-old ice and allowed the heat of my fingers to melt it. In Antarctica you have to come to terms with immensity. The ice at the Pole is three kilometers thick and it is a desert where snow rarely falls. That fact alone says something about our how Antarctica shows us time. This place is so unlike anywhere else on the planet and is so hostile to human life that coming to Antarctica is as close to travelling to another planet as we can get. So far anyway. Dante Allegheri's Hell is a place of smoking sand and burning rain, and of pools of boiling blood in which the damned must swim. What is the opposite? If you woke up suddenly in Antarctica with no idea how you got here, I suspect you'd think you were in Heaven. No lutes though.

We find out that the plane has left Chile and is on the way. Down at the beach, three penguins line up: an Adelie, a gentoo, and a chinstrap and as they flap and preen, it is as if they have come ashore to wave us off.

It is a 1.5 kilometer hike up the road to the airstrip and as I make the walk, I already feel absence. I will be leaving behind this community of shipmates, and I'll also be leaving something more.

As we're making the walk, the plane, a BAe-146 touches down and taxis toward a flat open space. By the time we arrive, the disembarking passengers have been herded into a group. They're frantically zipping up winter coats and putting on gloves. We are smug veterans now, and we packed away our cold weather gear. In a few hours we'll be in Punta Arenas and people will be wearing summer clothes. We wait to board while the air crew refuel the plane with a barrel of kerosene and a hand pump, and then we climb up and fly away and that's it. We rise into the sky and I catch a last glimpse of King George Island before it disappears under the clouds.

At the hotel in Punta Arenas, there is an orange pickup truck parked out front with a sledge strapped to the roof. The tires are size of hot tubs, and painted on the side it says “expeditiontothesouthpole.com” so I learn that this truck set a world record by driving to the South Pole in a day and a half. Had I made it all the way to my goal, I would have been standing at 90 degrees south when this thing arrived and would have had to try to come to terms with it invading what I have come to think of as a sacred space. It's a sign that the “real world” whatever that is, can not be escaped. And we shouldn't want to escape it. We should strive to live in it, to see more of it, the be the stewards of the world as we know it.

Deception Island

December 28, 2011

People suffer in the polar regions. Anyone who goes to the far north or the far south knows before they get there that there will be challenges. Even with modern equipment there are hazards; frost-bitten noses, fingers, and toes are still common. And yet many adventurers come because of the challenges, and not only are they prepared to suffer, they expect to.

Amundsen became fascinated with polar exploration partly through his reading, as a teenager, about Franklin's Coppermine Expedition in 1819. Franklin's account, says Amundsen, thrilled him as nothing he had ever read before – for three weeks the men struggled to keep going in horrible snow storms with nothing to eat except lichen until they were “reduced to eating their own boot leather to keep themselves alive.” Even as an adult in his fifties, Amundsen admitted that “the thing in Sir. John's narrative that appealed to me most strongly was the sufferings he and his men endured. A strange ambition burned within me to endure those same sufferings.”

So for those souls aboard Polar Pioneer feeling that we have not suffered yet, the sea graciously provides. We do not collapse under the strain of man-hauling sledges, we do not freeze our extremities, and we do not starve, but we do find the rough seas that we escaped in the Drake Passage and several previously unscathed passengers are bruised, battered or green with sea-sickness. Overnight, we sail from the relatively sheltered waters in the lee of Brabant Island into the more open water of the Bransfield Strait on a course for Deception Island in the South Shetlands.

I wake up at two in the morning and hear my brother Scott saying, in his half sleep, the word “ridiculous” over and over. The ship rolls and pitches wildly and his bow-to-stern oriented bunk threatens to roll him off the edge of his mattress. I once again congratulate myself on choosing the port-to-starboard bunk because although I am rocking back and forth, I am not being thrown out of bed. Scott seems less impressed with my choice and I think about offering to trade and then think better of it. I should keep myself from getting seasick so I can help him out later, I reason silently. Later Gary suggests stuffing a pillow under the side of the mattress to keep from getting rolled out of bed, but as it is far too late by then, Scott seems not too impressed with the advice. I doze a little from two until about four-thirty in the morning and then decide that I might feel a little less of the ship's tossing if I am on the bridge and can see what is happening.

It isn't easy to climb down to the galley to make tea and is harder to climb three floors up to the bridge with one hand for the rails and one for the tea mug, but I take it slow and get myself there with only a moderate number of bumps. If I was on land, this ladder would be set on a trampoline on the back of a flatbed truck travelling around a hairpin highway and I wouldn't even think about climbing it, but at sea one doesn't make such comparisons.

It is the only time the ship slams into some weather. The sky is light and the sun is even shining through in places when I get to the bridge, but the wind is strong, gusting from the northwest and the waves are so big that when they burst over the bow, they wash the entire deck and often splash two floors up to the windows on the bridge.

Half of the passengers are missing at breakfast, preferring to ride it out with empty stomachs although I note that some of the people who were seasick in the relative calm that was the Drake are now eating oatmeal despite rough seas. Thus we adapt.

When we get to Deception Island the winds are still strong and it is too rough to attempt a landing so the ship motors slowly along the shore to Bailey Head while we take care of a few departure details. Tomorrow we sail for King George Island and leave the ship, so this down time is our chance to exchange email addresses, photos, and settle accounts.

After lunch, Gary decides that we can risk a landing. Bailey Head is always a challenge and many expeditions don't get the chance to land here. The sea is often rough and it's a tense “wet” landing. The beach is steep and rocky and the waves curl and break just at the shore so landing requires an experienced zodiac driver who can bring the boat close enough to shore that passengers can get out without the craft being swamped by breaking waves from behind. It takes ten trips in the zodiacs and as I watch the operation I see members of the Russian crew up to their armpits in the Antarctic water as they struggle to keep the boats from being washed over, but all goes well and before long the entire entourage is ashore.

Bailey Head is home to one of the largest chinstrap penguin colonies anywhere. There are between 80,000 and 100,000 nesting penguins here and since the have an average of two eggs each and it is the height of the season, there are maybe 300,000 penguins on this edge of the island right now. The melting glaciers create a stream from the heights of the island to the sea and this bed is also the highway from the ocean to the furthest reaches of the colony. I stand by as a freeway of penguins travels to and from the breaking waves in lane after lane of determination. It's like being up against the wall at Grand Central Station at rush hour and the flow of birds is fascinating.

I hike up one of the small peaks and when I get to the summit, I am standing on the podium of a huge Greek amphitheatre of penguins that stretches so far that the tuxedoed audience looks more like snow than individual birds in nests.

I have not yet been troubled by the smell of penguin colonies, but this one is a test. The scent is strong and distinctive. They eat mostly krill but the waft of the penguin colony is less maritime and, to my nose anyway, more of a smell of something vaguely burnt.

Getting back in the zodiacs and aboard the ship is as impressive as the landing in the first place and once we're all accounted for and tagged up, the captain brings the ship about to make an attempt at Neptune's Bellows.

Deception Island is a volcano and the caldera is flooded by the sea so that this island is one of a very few places on earth that one can sail into an active caldera. The narrows are the entrance and not only is the passage narrow, but there is a large rock like a spike or a tooth in the middle of the narrows that is only eight meters below the surface waiting to tear a hole in an unsuspecting ship. Despite the still high winds, the captain decides the passage is worth an attempt and no one speaks as the crew slowly manoeuvres the Polar Pioneer past Deception Islands' portals.

The ship anchors in Whalers' Bay and the zodiacs are lowered again but this time the landing is uneventful. The beach inside the caldera is one of the most sheltered bays in Antarctica and has been a refuge for sealers and whalers since the early nineteenth-century.

Deception Island is a haunted place. There are the remains of a whale rendering factory here – great rusted refinery tanks left behind as whale oil became less valuable, but not before the corpses of thousands of animals were piled here. The volcano erupted violently in 1968 and 1969 and the large research stations that moved into the space the whalers left behind had to be abandoned as well.

The beach is volcanic. Black sand steams in the cool air. I wander around the rotted buildings feeling a kind of sadness and judgement as I think about the whalers as marauders pillaging the sea. But it may be that what I'm really feeling is the human presence here in the form of abandoned buildings, and also the realization that soon I will be going back to the world of news reports and politics, of oil spills and corporate power. It may be that it's not so much what happened in the past that I'm finding vaguely depressing, it's the fact that I'll again have to think about what's happening now in what some people so wrongly refer to as “the real world.”   

Neko Harbour and Two Hummock Island

December 26^th, 2011

I'm thinking about how quickly anything in life can become “normal.” You have or you don't have, you're with someone or you're not, it's raining and three degrees or it's sunny and thirty. You get up to the alarm clock and go to work or you wake up and put on your gear to go kayaking among icebergs.

A week exploring Antarctica and being here feels normal. Last night was Christmas night and because we feasted in the afternoon, dinner was low key – soup and fresh bread.

Before turning in for the night, I found some space alone at the bow of the ship, looking out at ice-covered islands, icebergs, and glaciers along the edge of the peninsula. I was trying to name the feeling I had. Melancholy? I was missing my family and aware that they were having a very different Christmas night without me back in Canada. But no, not melancholy. I wasn't sad or lonesome, wasn't happy or joyful either.

What I felt was belonging. I felt at home and it surprised me that I would feel like that. Who would feel at home in Antarctica where humans have not, historically, lived? What kind of person feels at peace in a place that is almost utterly inhospitable to all forms of life, let alone people?

And yet there I was in my toque (a word unfamiliar to my Auzzie and UK shipmates), winter coat, boots and gloves, dressed the same way as I had been on so many mornings growing up in Winnipeg and Thunder Bay and Saskatoon and Calgary to go to school or go out to play on days when the wind-chill factor was minus thirty and skin would freeze in minutes. Being in the cold is normal for me, but it is more than that. Somehow the landscape seems familiar. Could be thirty years reading about Antarctica. Just maybe.

At Neko Harbour we have a quick breakfast and gather gear for the kayaks. The bay is glass-calm but full of ice so we have to be carful when we launch. A current pulls our boat toward the stern of the ship and we have to work to paddle out of the way of the propeller which is running in case the ship has to maneuver away from an iceberg heading toward it. Most sailors need only worry about reefs and running their ships into rocks. Antarctic mariners have to worry about icebergs running into them.

We spend the morning on a fabulous circuit around Neko Bay, past a parade of gentoo penguins on a iceberg, past a sleeping crabeater seal on another floe, and along the edge of a magically blue glacier that calves into the sea now and then. We take a pause to stop and to try to do nothing but listen for a few minutes. It is an exercise in realizing where we are and later some of the paddlers will say this is their favourite moment of the expedition. It is a silence that would be hard to find back in that other world we come from.

We've seen it all before, of course: ice like blue steel, penguins preening in the snow, whales surfacing to blow, and glaciers heaving off great chunks of themselves, but I think this would never get old for me. I think I could spend years with penguins and every day would be a new day. I think I could paddle the same bay weeks in a row and it would be different every time.

We land on the continent again and walk among the penguins, comic in our own funny suits. A Waddell seal has crawled fifty meters up the shore and sleeps so deeply that I'm sure I could lift its flipper and tickle it without a response.

We paddle back to the ship and load the kayaks. Though Antarctica is often represented in photos as a contrast of white and blue in bright shining sun, it is more often grey, overcast and foggy or stormy. But you can't take pictures in the fog so the impression of Antarctica becomes unrealistic. What we have not yet had on this voyage is a landing while the sun is out. I have made a very conscious decision to see Antarctica through my eyes more often than through a lens, but the photographer in me would like to photograph penguins in the soft afternoon sunlight. However, that doesn't look likely. For a few hours in the afternoon, we sail up the Gerlache Strait through cloud and even a little light snow, heading for Hydrurga Rocks and Two Hummock Island.

On our way across the Drake Passage, I told a few people that my brother and I are Amundsens. Robyn said, “Ah, I had no idea we had Antarctic royalty on board.” Amundsen may have had his problems later in life but Antarctic folks understand the skill of his accomplishments in the Polar regions. When Gary heard about our heritage, he said we'd have to go someplace special and that's where we're headed. We've been sailing in the same waters Amundsen was in as a twenty-five year old mat on the Belgica in 1897. “He landed at Two Hummock Island,” Gary tells me, “and climbed up to test his skis and so became the first person to ski in Antarctica.”

Hydrurga Rocks is a collection of rocks just off Two Hummock Island named after “Hydrurga leptonyx” which is the Latin name for the Leopard seal. It is a tiny island but is home to a chinstrap penguin colony and there is a sheltered bay big enough for a zodiac to land easily. We anchor in the strait and load into the inflatables. The clouds are so low now that I can't see the rocks until we're within a hundred meters of them. We make land and wander over the rocks among the penguins. A few Weddell seals have also humped their way over the rocks to the patches of snow higher up and they snore like middle-aged men. It begins to snow steadily and the clouds pack themselves in just a little tighter. My camera isn't weatherproof enough for this so it looks like I won't get any photos at all. Not only that but I haven't even had a glimpse of the peaks Gary tells me are across a short stretch of water—the peaks that Amundsen skied down over a hundred years ago.

If the only pleasure to be had this afternoon is to watch penguins waddle to and from their nests, then that's ok. I'll treasure the time anyhow.

As I'm looking across to where the mystical mountains are on Two Hummock Island, a little window opens high up in my line of sight. At first I'm not sure whether I can, in fact, see snow on a peak or if it's an illusion of cloud. Yes, it's snow and that's land. I decide it needs to be documented so I get my camera out and snap some quick pictures before the clouds close back in.

But they don't close in. Instead, it stops snowing and the clouds lift so fast it's as though someone just removed a tarp from the sky. The clouds simply disappear and are replaced by deep blue sky and bright sun. I keep the camera out and go photo crazy in case the light changes again just as quickly. I shoot Two Hummock Island from every vantage point I can find, I get penguins from a hundred angles, I pose by the snoozing seals and have other people photograph me. It heats up fast and I have to peel off layers. I'm sweating as I run around the rocks capturing everything I can on film.

And now the sun is beginning to go down and the last zodiac is about to leave. I'm not the only one who has been going paparazzi on Hydrurga Rocks. Andrew, who is probably the most tech-crazy passenger is getting a little more footage with his iPhone and Craig, an “amateur” photographer with impressive skills and a treasure chest of equipment is still snapping away as well. “Penguin silhouette” I say to them as we're making our way back to the last boat, and all three of us turn and fire.

Almost as soon as we're in the zodiac, the clouds come back and by the time we're heading for the Polar Pioneer, I can not longer see Two Hummocks and then I loose Hydrurga Rocks in the fog.

We swing by an iceberg where a young leopard seal is tormenting anxious penguins who look down from the heights of ice to see the predator circling. The seal is curious about the curious humans and lifts himself out of the water way too close to the edge of one of the boats. The zodiac lists to starboard as its passengers shift suddenly to one side.

Back on board, I spend an hour flipping through the three hundred new images on my camera and I'm still a little stunned by the coming--and going--of the light. I don't know what the gods look like, but I know they smiled on us this afternoon.   

Christmas Day 2011

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.

(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.

When I waddle back to my life, I know some parts of myself will have been washed away and others will have been awakened.

Christmas Eve, 2011

Overnight we sailed up the Gerlache Strait. The weather continues to be fair, the water calm. I wake up at 6am with a headache and sore muscles. I am sleeping five or six hours a night and I spend a good deal of that time dreaming. I think the headache comes from the sheer volume of visual stimulation I'm getting. There are so many colours, so much light to take in. When I'm awake, my eyes are always wide open.

Before breakfast I take my place on the bow alone as we sail into the Errera Channel. Many of the place names here come from the Belgica expedition. Errera was a professor at the University of Brussels; we're heading for Danco Island, named for Emile Danco – a scientist who died on Belgica; and the mainland peninsula that is one side of the channel is the Arctowski Peninsula, named for Henryk Arctowski – the Polish oceanographer who made important observations for Adrien de Gerlache.

Most of Antarctica is completely ice-covered so the landscape all around is white. Great domes of ice and snow cover most of the “land” we're travelling through, and in spots blue glaciers cascade in slow time to the edge of the sea where they calve now and then in spectacular collapse. The sea is a nest for icebergs. The cloud ceiling is low but there are often breaks in the clouds and then the peaks of mountains reveal themselves as towers. In front of the ship, penguins porpoise through the water, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups as they feed on the masses of krill that swarm the waters here.

Danco Island is small, just a kilometer and a half long and two hundred meters high. There is a thin, rocky shoreline where we land the zodiac but the rest of the island is a dome of ice. In places along the Island's elevation there are rocky outcroppings that are themselves islands in the snow and these rocks are where gentoo penguins nest. They are hatching their chicks right now so the colony is busy. Males and females take turns sitting the eggs. There is a ritual of greeting. The couple lean their heads back like coyotes and howl, if penguins howl. It's more like a purr and a squawk. The one that has been sitting the egg (or sitting the chick in some cases) transfers the precious cargo to the arriving penguin and then heads out to feed. They travel up to their nests via “penguin highways” in the snow. The highways are flipper-pit deep and go from the rookery down to the sea. The highest nesting site is near the top of the island so to get back from shore each penguin is climbing what I imagine is the human equivalent of the stairs to the top floor of the Empire State Building.

I struggle to the top of Danco with others where there is a 360 degree view down both sides of the channel. The waters are crammed with icebergs and our ship looks puny against the drama of the landscape it moves through.

One of the other prime directives of penguin interaction is to stay off the penguin highways. As I climb through the snow to the top of Danco Island's dome, my feet often punch through up to the hip (by the time I reach the top, I have shed layers and am wearing only a wool turtle neck and I am thinking about the explorers who had to haul their sledges over pressure ridges and sastrugi. Difficult to manage clothing working so hard in -30 degree temperatures). A hole like that in a penguin highway would mean that they would have to forge a new path—an exhausting task for them as well.

But the human track we have made to the top hairpins just a few meters from one of the highways and on the way down I park myself there to watch the penguin traffic. I will never tire of watching penguins. I think we love them like we do because of their imperfections. Because they are bipeds on land, we tend to see them as tipsy little people weaving uncertainly on their webbed feet. At a public panel discussion I hosted on environmental literature we talked about the “serious” quality of most environmental poetry and stories. The Canadian philosopher, Jan Zwicky, said there is little humour in discussions of the environment because the natural world inspires reverence, not humour. Much of my experience in Antarctica holds true to this line of thinking. I am in awe of the world around me and I am reverent. And then there are penguins. They are clowns. Awkward on land, they waddle up from the sea clean as scrubbed potatoes and slip and stumble their way along. They hop athletically from rock to rock but with little grace or poise, either on the edge of falling or falling. I watch them pass one another on the penguin highway. Upcoming penguins pass on the right just like North American cars and there seems to be no conflict when those coming up meet those going down despite the narrow width of the passage. Then one upcoming penguin decides to go left and hoicks himself off the path and into the snow to let the downward penguins by. His webbed foot is no snowshoe so he punches through the snow right to the top of his leg and falls forward, beak-first into the snow. But he pops up, shakes the snow off and stumbles his way back to the highway where he carries on as though the embarrassment of his detour didn't just happen. We see in them something of ourselves in the way we stumble, fall on our faces, make mistakes. On land they are a version of imperfection we relate to.

They are also trusting and vulnerable. Most of the penguins I came close to were, if anything, curious about humans. In our interactions with people, we are used to seeing others protect themselves. We hide our vulnerabilities, take our time revealing ourselves to one another, protect our secrets. So when someone does make themselves vulnerable to us we tend to see the beauty of it. I think we respond to penguins the way we do at least partly because they take so little care to protect themselves from us. They practice the art of being in ways we admire.

There is no one agreed upon collective noun for penguins: a huddle of penguins, a march, a shiver, a waddle, a tobogganing. Gary (who spent a year on the continent studying Emperor Penguins so is a good authority) says “a parade of penguins” and that's the term I prefer. As I sit in the snow watching them hike up to and down from their rocky homes, they are a fantastic parade of activity and it's all I can do to resist the urge to hug one.

After lunch I feel asleep, completely exhausted by the past few days. An hour's sleep is astonishingly regenerative. My headache and my muscle aches are gone. I wonder if the sheer will to be healthy while I'm here is part of my sudden ability to heal myself.

The ships steers its way a little further north to Orne Harbour. The morning was about penguins and the afternoon is about ice. Orne Harbour is a bite into the peninsula and is completely bounded by glaciers. We make a circle of the harbour in a zodiac, staring up at the walls of glaciers. It's a cold afternoon and the wind is blowing twenty knots yet it seems silent here. Light comes through cracks and holes in the glacier illuminating them like the stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral.

In addition to his other talents, Dr. Gary Miller, our expedition leader, is a student of ice and he shares his knowledge freely. Some of the icebergs in the bay appear ribbed which is due to the action of bubbles working their way to the surface along the ice and slowly wearing down the surface with rivers of air. An explosion across the bay announces several thousand tonnes of glacier cracking off into the water. The waves a calving makes can easily be big enough to capsize a zodiac so we are wary as we travel along the blue shoulders of these sleeping beasts.

After dinner Liz, a teacher from California with a lovely voice, leads the group in Christmas carols and I'm reminded how far away from home I am. Being in Antarctica is life on another planet, but this familiar music takes my heart home and I imagine my family warm and sipping eggnog. Santa Clause may visit them late tonight but I have no magic sleigh to take me to the other end of the earth. I step on deck again and feel cold plunge down the collar of my shirt and wrap itself around me. It begins to snow which is not, in fact, a very common occurrence in Antarctica despite the evidence all around. The Australians on board seem particularly interested and before long others are outside and there is a full scale snowball fight going on. The deck is treacherous though and it's not hard for me to picture someone going overboard, especially if they have had an extra glass of the mulled wine that has been going around. The revellers retire inside again and I'm left alone on deck which is what I prefer right now. I can hear the Christmas carols from inside and I find myself wondering what the penguins, themselves gifted with original voices that they can identify in colonies of thousands, would think of this strange human music.

In Antarctica: December 23rd Part 2

Roald Amundsen and his men arrived at the South Pole on December 14^th by “dead reckoning” which means they were going by the distance indicated on their sledge meters. After they arrived, they spent several days taking observations to make sure that they were, in fact, at the Pole. In 1911, it was not so easy to make such observations. In December, the sun stays at what appears to be a constant height above the horizon. The South Pole is one of only two places on the planet where there is no longitude, only latitude, and many of the traditional ways we think about navigation simply disappear. There is no “east” no “west”; there are no time zones. What is a “day” when the sun is always at noon?

By December 23^rd, he was on the plateau, five days into his homeward journey. They were well-provisioned but there was worry about the dogs. Three had succumbed to exhaustion already on the homeward journey and now there were thirteen left of the original fifty-two dogs that had started for the Pole. I try to imagine the happiness of the men when Amundsen decides they have the supplies to increase their pemmican ration from 350 to 400 grams per day. They felt it was luxury.

I'm on the deck of the ship, warm in my merino wool long underwear and Antarctic overgear, full of cauliflower soup and fresh bread. No hardship here. We're heading into the Lemaire channel, one of the most picturesque passages on the Antarctic Penninsula. At the entrance to the channel, the cliffs of Booth Island rise almost a thousand meters straight out of the sea and extend down into the water for another four hundred meters. The water is black and mirror-calm, the sky is grey and I am astonished by the volume of colour around me. There is a Home-Hardware chart worth of different shades of blue. The ship maneuvers around icebergs, through brash ice, and straight through wider floes which make black lightening bolts of space in front of the bow when they crack open. All afternoon we make our way slowly along. All fifty-four passengers are on the deck, taking photos, and there is a reverent silence as we are rendered speechless by beauty of the place. What is there to say?

Amundsen himself was in these waters on February 12^th, 1898. As second mate on the Belgica expedition, the ship's crew were the first people ever to pass through this channel (named by Belgica's captain). Amundsen’s journal entry for that day is only a few sentences long, but he has time to marvel that “No one has ever seen this channel before.”

As we near the narrow end of the Lemaire, there are more and more icebergs. The passage through looks like the hallway in a daycare where twenty children have piled blocks. The bergs have drifted into the passage since we started along and the captain decides that proceeding is too risky. The ship is brought about and we head back where we've come from. This is not a disappointment for me. A few more hours in the Lemaire channel is more of a gift than anything.

By evening, we stop at the entrance to the channel and have dinner in the galley. The veil of cloud is lifting and because it will be light until late, there is an opportunity to take the kayaks out again. At 8:30 I'm in my dry-suit and at the stern of the ship. There is a certain military precision to unloading zodiacs and manning kayaks. Often when we stop the crew needs to keep the propeller going. It can be just as dangerous to be hit by an iceberg as it is to hit one so the ship needs to be able to maneuver whenever there is ice around. But getting twelve people off a ship and into kayaks while keeping us from capsizing, getting squashed by ice, or drifting into the propeller requires that everyone be alert and efficient.

As I float in the rear of a two man kayak, stretching my spray skirt around the cockpit, I do not know that the next three hours will be among the great moments of my life.

We paddle away from the ship toward Booth Island which looms dramatically. Judd, the kayak guru, likes to paddle through ice rather than go around it because, well, because for the most part we can in these small vessels. He goes first and when he gets stuck he wiggles his hips back and forth until his boat shifts enough of the ice away to get him through. In a few minutes we are around a bend and away from the ship again. The sun is still relatively high on the horizon but because it is getting late, it has more warmth to it, more yellow which lights the ice around us like candles. We are in the Antarctic, utterly alone, paddling kayaks around the base of a kilometer-high cliff. We are surrounded by ice floes and icebergs that do fibre-optic things with light. As we round another bend along the shore, the cliff opens and is replaced by a glacier that pours out of a small valley which moments ago I wouldn't have believed could be behind the peak I'm staring up at. Again there is reverent silence as we move through the water. The only sounds are small chunks of ice that ping like Buddhist bells against the kayak rudders. Ahead, Judd holds up his paddle to signal a stop. We drift up to a floe that is about seven meters around. On it, a leopard seal is resting after a meal. All that is left of the penguin are some of the brushtail feathers, conspicuous by the seal's tail. He lifts his head to see who is in his turf and yawns which shows his mouth full of sharp teeth. His head is reptilian and it is easy to imagine how ancient mariners would have seen this creature as a sea monster. In 2003 a marine scientist was dragged under and killed by a leopard seal. We paddle around the floe and as I get to the landward side, I realize that I haven't been paying enough attention to the three meter high iceberg that is drifting in an opposite direction to the floe and moving quickly (icebergs generally follow the currents whereas ice floes are blown by wind). The iceberg is a house bearing down on me and forcing me toward the floe upon which the leopard seal is now raising his head higher. My brother is in the front of our kayak and we're both having a hard time paddling in the brash ice. I'm in trouble and I know it. I don't want to dig too deeply with the paddle for fear of capsizing us but I know that we need to get out of here right now. We hit a chunk of ice the size of a dog house and it pushes our nose toward the leopard seal. I don't want to look at it because I don't want to know if it is coming toward us. I'm completely focused on paddling and moving the boat forward. And then we're through and out the other side and quickly away from the floe and into more open water. But there is another boat behind us. Daniel, who has come out in a solo kayak this evening, is still back there. Only now the chunk of ice is directly in his way and the passage we made it through has disappeared. He's there because he had to wait for us. The iceberg is bearing down on him and I can see that if he doesn't manage to move, its bulk will crush him against the ice floe. Icebergs are dense structures, their mass is about one tonne per square meter so there is an unforgiving weight coming Daniel's way. This is where his composure and Judd's expertise become crucial. Judd paddles his way and begins giving him instructions: “Hold your paddle vertical and put it in behind your right side. Now, paddle backwards three hard strokes. One more. Now the other side.” And in this way, Daniel is released from ice and leopard seal, and we can carry on. I don't know how much of a sense of jeopardy either of them felt just then, but as I'm paddling, I am again aware of just how easy it would be to die here.

On the way back to the ship, we paddle through the fairytale of light that is even more brilliant at 11pm. Ahead there is a beautiful blue-green castellated iceberg as large as our ship. Icebergs are at least as unpredictable as leopard seals. You can not know when they are going to roll over or crack apart or otherwise rattle the sky with an explosion, but Judd must feel fairly confident that this one is stable because he paddles through its column arches and into the iceberg. We follow. I am surrounded by green light and ribs of ice that curl around and over my head. The exit is several meters away and completely arched over with ice. Beneath is a foot of water and then ice. I am in the belly of a whale and I am happy. 

In Antarctica: December 23rd Part 1

I am now in Antarctica – shrouded in it, enveloped by it, covered over completely by the beauty of it. It is easy to love the planet from here. I go back and forth with loving people. Sometimes I have empathy for us as a species. We're so busy and sad. We fight over parking spots. We stand in lines impatiently. We treat one another poorly and feel hard done by. I think of humanity collectively as T.S. Eliot's “infinitely gentle / infinitely suffering thing.” In my less generous moments I'm a misanthrope. I enjoy being away from people at least as much as I enjoy being with them. Perhaps that's part of the happiness I feel here. This entire continent is devoid of people. Not completely, of course. There are just over a thousand researchers who inhabit Antarctica year round, but they're spread pretty thin over Antarctica's 14,000,000 square kilometers (more like 28,000,000 in the winter when sea ice doubles the continent's size). No planes fly overhead on their way to somewhere else. No wires connect one thing to another. It is still quite possible to step ashore in Antarctica and to be the first person ever to have landed on that particular spot.

Early in the morning I spend an hour alone on the bow watching penguins feed on krill and see a humpback also having breakfast as we move through the Bismark Strait and along the Neumayer Channel. We've come north a degree of latitude overnight to find a way in through the ice that clogs the passages to the south. We go ashore in Zodiacs to Port Lockroy on Goudier Island and make land for the first time. There were whalers here in the early 20^th century and a British military base was built during WW 2 which became a research station until the sixties. The station was restored in 1996 and now is part museum and part penguin lab. The three residents of this base are studying the impacts of human tourism on gentoo penguin breeding. The old base hut has been made to look as it did in 1962 when it was abandoned. The caretakers also stamp passports (a passport stamp from Antarctica is a rare commodity), run a post office (cards and letters are transferred from here to the British Postal system so “snail mail” puts it mildly), and they even have a shop which raises funds for the Antarctic Hertiage Trust. You can run from consumerism but you can't hide.

I'm more interested in the penguins. IAATO (International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators) has rules about interacting with Antarctic wildlife – a kind of Star Trekian prime directive which aims, as much as possible, to let the wildlife be wild and undisturbed. The rule is to stay five meters away from penguins (and further away from other species that might hurt you) but it is not possible to keep a distance from them at Port Lockroy. There is a gentoo penguin colony here and they are nesting everywhere, including under the hut and directly beside the walkway between the hut and the rocks the zodiacs landed on. But the penguins are unfazed by our presence anyhow. I stand for ten minutes or so looking at a group of them. This is my first penguin encounter and already I think that it would be very hard to dislike a penguin. More on that later. As I'm watching, one of the penguins that has been lying on a pebble nest stands up and beneath it I see a penguin chick that is no more than a day old (the adult could have been the male or female since they take turns feeding and protecting the chicks). On cue mom (or dad) leans over and vomits a little digested krill into the chick's beak and somehow even that seems endearing.

I spend two hours wandering around the colony. There are some old pieces of equipment from earlier days, including a dog sledge. There is also an entire humpback whale skeleton partly covered by snow. Nesting amongst the gentoos are a number of blue-eyed cormorants. They have similar black and white colouring so I have to look carefully to pick them out among the penguins and I find the way the two species of birds tolerate one another surprising. Is there a lesson here somewhere? I wander around with my camera, patient for another parent to lift up off its chick (or chicks--many have two or even three) or egg. I also put the camera away for long stretches wanting to see things without the filter of a lens. Just me and my penguin against the world.

On the way back to the ship, Robyn steers the zodiac around a few especially impressive icebergs, including one that serves as a king-sized bed for a Weddell seal. I'm onboard again by 11am so that was just the morning. There is so much happening right now that I can't cover a whole day in one blog post. 

More later.  

Antarctica Reached

I imagine Columbus after five weeks crossing the Atlantic. He would have been scanning the horizon to no avail for days, if not for the honour of it, then for the lifetime remittance that Queen Isabella promised as reward to the first European to see the new world. And then the horizon shifted and a mirage of green became defined and someone on the Pinta fired a canon and then everyone saw it.

I open my eyes at 5 am, dress, and step out the door on the deck of Polar Pioneer. I think already I will see the continent. I think I missed the moment of seeing Antarctica appear out of the mist. But as I look out off the bow, I see only sea and sky. The ship trudges stubbornly on through the Southern Ocean.

There is always hot water in the urn in the galley and I make some English breakfast tea and head to the bridge. I'm told we passed an iceberg at 4 am and that we're close to land. There are three members of the crew on the bridge including the captain and I take it as a sign that there may be more to look out for today. I don't know who sees it first, but there is a quick conversation in Russian and then I hear the word in English: iceberg.

It would be unlikely for Antarctica to be the first thing any sailor would see heading south. Before land, there will always be icebergs. They've been known to migrate as far north in the sea as 26^o30' latitude (reported by the iron sailing ship Dochra in 1894) which is between Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro but most of them stay closer to home – white wannabe islands doomed like the grey hair on my head to recede into nothingness one day.

The one ahead is a distant white spot on the horizon. It is a tabular iceberg and it likely calved off the continent and could already have travelled for miles and years. As we draw nearer, it becomes more defined. It's a huge fragment of a broken Greek column lying tilted in the black sea. Off the port side of the ship, another outline comes into focus. It's the edge of the Antarctic peninsula—Lavoisier Island. We have arrived.

We are heading for the top edge of Adelaide Island and the Antarctic Circle and because the inside passages are still clogged with pack ice, we keep to the west edge where the sea is open. Anyone who travels these waters regularly knows that the fastest way through ice is around it. More icebergs appear as we motor south and they awe me with their mass and with the intricacy of the patterns on their surfaces. And here is what I think of as a kind of idiot moment – icebergs are ice. I have always thought of icebergs as, well, kinda snowy. In my my mind and in photos they're often white so I've been thinking of them as big floating igloos. But icebergs are more like supertankers carrying a hold full of cast iron wrapped in cast iron. They're not igloos, they're blue steel battering-rams and even the smallest iceberg would knock a hole in an aircraft carrier and sink it.

Gary explains the idea of “ice blink” and “sea sky”. There is often low cloud in Antarctica and experienced mariners learned that the cloud ceiling appears white above vast stretches of ice because the light reflects off the surface, whereas a dark sky indicates open water where the light is swallowed by the sea.

We are still fifteen nautical miles from the Circle when the pack ice wraps its arms around us and because we are determined to get at least that far south, the ship plunges into it. At first, we move into brash ice which thickens as we press on. And then the ship is pushing aside larger floes until we're deeper in and the surface ahead becomes solid and then lines burst out from our bow like cracks in the plaster from Sylvester's head while Tweety-bird flutters unharmed.

For three hours, a gaggle of passengers stands on the bow, swooning over the way the ship pushes through, and cheering when the Polar Pioneer shoves aside a knucklehead of ice like a bouncer making way through a crowd.

And then the engines stop and we drift just a little further as champagne glasses are passed around. The ship's whistle is reluctant at first, but the crew knocks it back to function and there is a collective cheer to celebrate the arrival at 66^o34' south – we are over the Antarctic Circle.

We've been in Antarctica a few hours and a few weeks worth of life has happened.

Polar Pioneer is the first ship this season to get over the Antarctic Circle and there's a reason for that: the pack ice won't let us much further. That's not quite true. We could wrestle our way through and into Crystal Sound (which had been our hope) but in this ice, we travel at two or three knots so the question becomes whether it is worth it in terms of time and fuel to storm on, or whether it is better to head back North awhile and get inland there.

We turn around and motor back where we've come from. To make up for Crystal Sound, the ship stops when we get back to open water. We're going to get into zodiacs and kayaks and explore the ice floes. In twenty minutes, I'm geared up in my dry suit and life jacket. So my first experience in the kayak in Antarctica will be in the open ocean. The unloading happens quickly and I have little time to be nervous. One minute, I'm on the stern deck and the next I'm paddling away from the ship and through chunks of ice taller than me. I feel like a mosquito in a margarita as I coax the kayak along. My brother is in the cockpit in front of me and he is as speechless as I am. We're following the line of boats ahead and when I look over my shoulder, I can no longer see the ship. It would be so easy to get lost out here and there are so many opportunities to die. There are no waves, but there is a long swell that floats us up and down—the kind of roll you only get far out at sea. And yet it is also deeply peaceful. The zodiacs are somewhere else and all I hear is the mash of paddle dipping into the brash and the crunch of ice off the kayak bow. Around a small iceberg and the group stops. There are several Adélie penguins on an ice flow. They're resting from a feed and seem largely unconcerned about psychedelic kayaks—blue, orange, red. We're so far out of place we can't possibly be threatening. We paddle further and find two more Adélies on a piece of ice that is about four meters square and this time we're treated to a little show as a crabeater seal decides to climb aboard. Crabeaters don't eat penguins, but they don't seem to know that. They squawk and toddle toward the edge of the flow but stop when they see kayaks (wait a minute, were these here before??) then turn around and squawk some more. Judd, our kayak guide, gets a message on his radio. The zodiacs have spotted a humpback whale so we take off after it. It is only when I am back in my cabin hours later that I have a chance to wonder whether it makes sense to chase down a humpback whale in a kayak.

When we arrive at the spot the whale was last seen, it has sounded and we begin to paddle back toward the ship. There is a rush of air as if someone just punctured a bagpipe, and I see mist from the whale's blowhole behind a raft of ice. It sounds again and I paddle the rest of the way to the ship, but half an hour later, after I've shucked all my kayak gear, I venture out on deck and the whale surfaces. It is feeding off the bow and I watch it until it dips below the pack ice and swims away.

Everyone is animated at dinner. We're sailing north now, away from the sunset. And anyway, the sun will not set but will feint toward the horizon before arching up again. I am so visually overstimulated that I think I will never be able to look at a tv screen again. My nose and cheeks are burnt by wind and cold and by reflected light off the ice. I need some sleep and I know my dreams are going to shimmer.