Travel Journals by Hilary Hopkins

Part 4 – The Antarctic Circle And Beyond,  And Then For Home

This morning, at 6 am, it is all grey and white outside. But there are so many shades of grey, and so many kinds of white. The water is a deep elephant grey, paired with a strip of shade behind each mild disturbance, regular little disturbances, a modest choppiness. In each shadow of wavelet the sea is very dark dusty blue. The foam of our slow passing curls away from us in dainty spiderweb-like tracery. A tracery like a spider's web, catching doubtless thousands upon thousands of tiny sea creatures and tossing them up and down briefly, but they are so tiny that this does not disturb them. Here or there, it is of no consequence to them. Penguins, though, arch away from us when we pass by.

The sky is many layers of greys. A greyed blue, pearl grey, dove grey, steel grey, greyish white. There are tendrils of clouds, banks of clouds, piles of clouds. There are clouds that lie across the tips of mountains, and clouds that cross the sky as far as I can see. Here and there are wavering openings in the grey clouds, where it is very light. I know the sun is there, for we are in continuous daylight now, but it cannot be seen in this passage just now. There are many whites, too, but because the sun is not shining through the clouds, all these whites are flat, one-dimensional, like paper cut-outs against the sky.

I think I am going to need to come back here. People are responding to this landscape very powerfully, many of them, I have learned in small conversations. I think we are responding to the fact that there are not a lot of things to look at, there are only a few things to see, and so we are able to really look at these things. There is ice, and water, and clouds, and peaks, and penguins, and some birds and seals, and a bit of lichen and guano. Except for the ship and our fellow passengers, that is all there is to see. The air is very clear and so we can see all these things very clearly. There are no distractions, no visual distractions. No cultural distractions. Only the landscape, and the few things upon it.

It has been a magnificent and powerful day, our travel today. We got up early and after our quiet time in the library here, we went to visit the bridge. The Antarctic Circle is 66 degrees 33 minutes South, and when we first went in to the bridge, we were at 66/19 I think it was. Everyone on the bridge is very quiet, very focused, very business-like, although they permit us red-coats to invade them. Some people apparently do not understand the connection between what the officers are doing in here and their personal safety, for they chatter about things at home, exchange gossip, discuss clothing and pets, and lounge about while the men are trying to do their work. The captain says a few words in a quiet voice and they are repeated by the man at the wheel. Notes are made on the chart. The captain stands in the center looking out keenly at the fantastic scene before him, and sometimes he uses binoculars, intently, then gives a quiet direction.

This morning early the Circle is on the radar, a red line. We stay for a while to get the feel of things, and go to a hasty breakfast. The announcement is made that we shall cross at about 9:00. We eat quickly and go back to the bridge. I station myself directly behind the radar, where the latitude and longitude readings are, so as to be ready to take a picture. More and more passengers crowd in, and the decks are crowded (though I am sure there must be at least a few folks either still in bed or reading a novel in the lounge--).

Just at 66/33, cameras click and I take my picture too, and so does John. There is much merriment and giddiness on deck; someone has had a sign printed up ANTARCTIC CIRCLE and we take turns holding it in front of ourselves and the glorious peaks, and having our pictures taken. John reluctantly goes along with this and so maybe we'll have this picture, too.

The ice gets thicker and thicker. The light, the color, are luscious-- opalescent, nacreous, pearly, pinks and pale pale blues, and greens, and greys. People take many pictures, but we all know that none of them will convey what we ourselves are seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing.

The ice gets thicker and thicker and thicker. The water is filled with pieces of ice, flat ones, jagged ones, lumpy, protruding from the water, lying on the water, floating on the water.

The channel through which we are passing gets narrower and narrower. It is called The Gunnell, and there is another past it called The Gullet. I can't move from the deck, I don't see where the Captain is going to bring the ship through here. The ice is thicker and thicker and closer and closer together.

The ship begins to cut through the ice, and we lean over the railing to watch in fascination and some nervousness. The bow grinds right through large pieces, grinding, crushing, splitting, slicing, shoving. The noises are terrible, the noises of pieces of ice, many many pounds of ice grinding against each other, breaking and splitting and tearing and gouging and pieces folding and sliding under each other. At some places the piece of ice is too big to slice, so the Captain plows the ship into it, stops, and waits for the piece to split and slowly drift away, freeing the way ahead. Oh, gently, like a lover with a virgin!

I cannot see where on earth the channel ahead might be, but still we go on, past gigantic walls of ice on either side, so close, fissured and ragged at the edges. We see seals, Weddell and Crabeater seals, hauled out on floating ice. They raise their heads and examine us, but other then hunching a bit back on their icy platforms, do nothing. The odd penguin bellies away from us and into the water. There are a few birds, petrels and gulls.

There is nothing but ice as far as we can see, all is ice, rock, water, cloud.

The water curling by, as the ship eases cautiously through the cakes of ice, looks oily, curling smoothly like deep blue oil away from the bow of the ship. So cold, at 28 degrees, that it flirts delicately with freezing, approaching freezing coyly, just out of its grasp, but within its reach. The water thinking to be spritely as always, but so within the grasp of freezing that freezing congeals it unaware. Thinking to be free, but captured by the cold, and flowing not like water, but like oil.

We are now well past 67 degrees South, into new territory for this ship, it seems, and it has been decided to try to find us a bit of a landing site, so that we may set foot on land below the Antarctic Circle. The captain is still playing with his big, responsive toy!

After the landing, we will turn. Turn North. This prospect fills me with uneasiness and melancholy. I don't wish to return, in any way.

And we go on, south and south, to 67/37, past where this ship has ever gone before, and we made a landing, a surprise landing, on a place called Blaiklock Island. Our leader Matt went ashore first, speeding along in the zodiac, past some large icebergs, and probed the shore to find a place for us to land. John and I were in the first boat ashore.

What a powerful closing to our farthest South! On this island were wonderful lichens, at least seven kinds on one schist erratic of pink and white and grey. Fantastic enormous foliose black lichen like black roses, orange and yellow green and grey and that fruticose black and green we have seen elsewhere, and a kind of pale brown, and black. And the most marvelous: BOTH of the angiosperms of Antarctica: a grass (Deschampsia Antarctica, from which I saw the dried seed pods) and a lovely little cushion-like rosette with pointed leaves, in the pink family (Colobanthus quitensis). Like a farm, a garden of them, and running water from the snow pack a bit above on the hillside, running water, a stream, a brook, filled with moss and green algae, surrounded by these flowering plants. A paradise.

On the beach, a huge Weddell seal hitches himself along under our watchful silence, nearly all of the passengers lined up in silence watching him.

Instead of cobbles on the beach, of volcanic origin, we have shards of granite and slate and granite flowers, where a small boulder has cracked in place and laid out its petals in a stone rosette. Captain Skog edges ever closer to shore (and sends his man out to take soundings in this new place) while we explore, truly explore, hurriedly. I could have stayed all day.

But it has been a great deal of work to get us here, and we must come out, too. So after an hour or so, we must leave this strange garden, a garden in the Antarctic, below the Circle, a strange encounter, a wonderful gift. The bright green of photosynthesizing plants is deeply welcome, and the sound of running water, especially, and surprisingly, welcome.

There is a cocktail party, and I talk and explore a bit with one of the geologists, an irritable sort. He turns out to be better than I'd thought. I guess I turn out to be better than he'd thought, if he'd thought.

At dinner more people comment on how the immensity, the scale, they usually call it, is what is most surprising to them. I don't feel that way. The scale is not surprising to me, it is what I had expected. I am still unsure what is so compelling. I think part of it is the danger, the knowledge that we are hanging on to life here by our fingernails, in our little metal box with its appurtenances. I remember how when I was a very young child I used to go out in the snow in Denver, all bundled up, and find a place of shelter, under a bush or next to the house, and hunker down and make myself safe in the cold, and imagine that I was an explorer in the snow. That was a long time ago. I see that I still have something of that desire within me.

It seems tomorrow we may visit an American base. The geologist, Wayne, says they have a lot of rules there. That is good, for we need to begin, as one astute person put it last night, to recompresss, for our reentry into the rest of the world.

People will start to become depressed, pretty soon. It'll be good to go to this American place, so as to look homeward. We will be caught up in it, and begin to think of home.

I talked a little bit to the Captain, about the trip through the thick ice this morning (which will be repeated this evening), that it was so delicate, so soft, and he said, yes, you could not be too hard with the ship, you had to be soft with it, not too hard, otherwise the ice will bounce back like a ping-pong ball. He is a charming person and it has been a fine thing to watch him at work.

Now we are going to try to stay up for a while, this endless day, and see the ice-channel again.

A meadow. The green place on that island was a meadow, in the midst of the ice.

---

We came away from our farthest south, and began slowly to make our way north again, toward home.

We stayed up very late--for us--until midnight for me and nearly one o'clock for John--passing back through the frighteningly narrow passage of ice, clogged and choked with ice, crags and blocks and plates of ice, blocking our way, and our ship edging and cutting and slicing and crushing through it, amid a snow squall that frosts the seeing, fills the air, the tiny pieces of snow blowing towards us at a curve as we stand huddled against the railing on the bow of the ship. The dark cliffs on either side are veiled in snow, whitened and softened in their implacable power.

So we stayed up late to watch this, the crew carefully directing this large metal box through this small ice passage.

In the morning we are sluggish, go out on deck, all is calm on the bridge, there is some ice now but very little and the passage is wide. We eat a bit of breakfast and go to take a nap. There are videos in the lounge about British science in the Antarctic. People are restless and a bit out of sorts. The end of this time apart is coming, and they are trying to come to terms with that. People are having to come to terms with the end of this time each in his or her own way. It is a topic of conversation around the eating tables.

After lunch we make a landing, on Petermann Island, that one of the explorers, Charcot, a Frenchman, overwintered on. There are penguins, and rocks, and algae growing in the water. We spend a short time here, but our hearts are not in it. We know it is nearing the end.

A few miles later, we land on another small island, Booth Island, upon which no tour ship has ever landed, it appears. It is another place where the Frenchman Charcot overwintered. It's a beautiful place, with some penguins and some relics of overwintering of some kind, pieces of a hut, linoleum, wine bottle fragments, pieces of boxes, and elegant elephant shaped rocks and a collection of icebergs in the water, one like a deck of cards, and there is one like the Statue of Liberty in the water offshore.

I think this is really the last time I will see the pengies, without a crowd of people around. They are so deeply appealing, they schuss along on their bellies and hinders, shh shh shh along the snow. Their little coarse webbed feet pat-pat-pat along on the rocks and snow. They kind of bray, in their vocalizing. They regard us with no surprise, a mild curiosity, and complete innocence.

Tonight we have received a dinner invitation, to sit with the young handsome purser, who is leaving and it is his farewell dinner. He is charming and the company is good. There is champagne and wine, and then the upstairs crew give him a sing and a cake and a gift, and I am so pleased to be here. There are only seven of us passengers at the table. I try to give him nice conversation. He has been at sea for about eight years, and now he is ready to go home and with some friends, run some guest cottages on the northwest coast. I think he will find it difficult to stay at home.

Tomorrow we go to the American base. It will be complicated and not untrammelled. We are on our way home.

There is a bulletin board downstairs which asks for our adjectives to describe this place. What an invitation for me! Here is my list:

The Blues:
electric blue
acid blue
cerulean blue
neon blue
baby blue
powder blue
steel blue

implacable
unknowable
a death-dealing landscape
a treasure-hunt for the tiniest expressions of life
craggy
the nacre of the earth (my favorite!) [nacre is the name for the inside of a pearly shell]
nacreous
pearlescent

The Greys:
dove grey
pewter
elephant grey
smoky grey
pale grey
silver grey
pearl grey
jade grey
blue-grey
bright grey
glistening grey

opalescent
gleaming
glistening
stark
sky, water, ice, rock in endless permutation
a visual feast of form and pattern

I guess it will now be like other wildernesses: to know it is here will suffice.

The nacre of the Earth.

---

This our final day in the ice. On the bridge this morning, we watched as the Captain tiptoed into the approach to Palmer Station (USA). He showed us, on the sonar, the craggy bottom.

Our visit to the station, one of three the US maintains year-round here, and the tiniest, with about thirty-five people, is complex and regimented, but it is rewarding.

I think of it as a way to begin re-entry.

In small groups we are given a tour of the place, a ratty collection of small buildings perched on a granite outcrop (instead of a penguin rookery). There are places for zodiac repair and engine repair, carpentry and painting and electrical work, a bit of a show of two aquaria in which live some of the beautiful animals we have seen on our underwater videos--sea stars of various kinds, and sponges, and echinoderms, and crinoids, and anemones, and even some small octopi, and krill and some shrimps. And there is a “berthing" building, an office with secretaries (at least this is what our guide, the head painter, calls them), a social center and dining place, where we are served cocoa and brownies, science buildings where we are forbidden entry, a tiny shop where I buy a t-shirt and a hat. Our guide makes affectionate jokes about the winter-overs, they get toasted he says, and squirrely. I have a real life, he assures us, I'm only here four months.

The people we talk to, and see around, most in their shirtsleeves, seem normal enough, but how could you be "normal" and spend each day looking at the ice around you, the water and sky and rock around you, that endless permutation of these four elements and only these four? I ask if anyone brings a few seeds or tiny plant and plants a flower in a pot--but know before he answers that the answer is no, as the Antarctic Treaty forbids any foreign living material. We aren't even allowed beans to grow bean sprouts he says wistfully, but they do have mung beans in the kitchen, so they can give us those. I hate plastic plants, he adds, but they look pretty good after a while, they look pretty real, you know?

After our visit to the buildings, our group goes across the water a little way to the penguin research island, they having been studying a rookery of Adelie and Gentoo pengies here for years. I talk to one of the researchers, who has been studying the birds here for twenty-seven years. I like him; he is kindly and sensible, and thoughtful about his work. All of this science here is funded by the National Science Foundation. In a way, the obscurity of this work--how many people are affected by it, and how many people care?--is a bit like the explorers of old who came here, lonely in their pursuits, to do science. But in the old days those explorers came home and wrote books, and people read them with wonder, that such a place should exist and be visited and be knowable. Now, we are jaded by access to images from our entire world and beyond it, and people no longer wonder as much.

On this island are lush growths of grass and lichens, orange and black ones, with some pale and lime green. I wonder if these lichens at this cold place perform as much chemical erosion as they do in warmer places. I would think in a way the science might be simpler here since there are fewer concealed elements. Like a hot desert instead of a cold one.

After the pengie island--our last visit to pengies--we climb back in the zodiacs for a bit of a run round the islands. We pass slowly by some Elephant seals hauled out on the tiny rock beach. The young ones are a wonderful warm Dijon mustard color, lovely against the lichened rocks.

Out in the water, we discover a Leopard seal, large and pale, a pale silver grey sheen to his back, asleep on a small iceberg. Two zodiacs circle very slowly around and around his ice bed, very close and quite quietly. He, like the penguins, invites touching! he raises his head a few times, and opens his eyes a bit, briefly, but seeing nothing amiss, returns to sleep. Or whatever he is doing.

And we visit the scary upturned hull of a wreck out a bit farther, an Argentine tourist ship run aground by an ignorant captain about ten years ago. The ugly thing, a black forbidding crest, lies just at water's surface, and the waves break over it, and there is a sheen and stink of oil on the waves. A shocking thing, this pollution, since we have all been so very careful and watchful here ourselves.

The leopard seal is my last experience of wildness.

Back on the ship, the Captain and Matt have invited a dozen of the station people on board for drinks and visit and lunch. How complex our floating metal box must look to them! They drink and talk and eat and then they climb back in their zodiacs and return to the station, and we continue North.

I don't know if I want to write any more, now. In a few hours we will start back across the Drake Passage, leaving The Antarctic.

People have added a few things to the long list of words I left on the bulletin blue. "Serene" wrote one. "Majestic." Those are the easy hits. You could aim and aim and never hit it right.

I think I leave it as I found it first: a death-dealing, implacable landscape. A place of treasures of the tiniest life, life that pervades, so wonderfully, even so dangerous a place.