Antarctica
by A. C. Andersen

​I love a dead man I’ve never met. Although, in my mind, he’s not dead. He’s here just outside, maybe sleeping in his canvas tent, or maybe he’s looking after the dogs. He was here only a hundred years ago but seems so near. I need him to help me understand.
The wind made a snare-drum of the fly. The Antarctic gale whipped so hard against the side of the tent it blasted straight through my ear plugs and roused me from sound sleep. So much for the silence of the Antarctic.
My tent mate, Anne, slept on. She, like Robert Falcon Scott, was from England. I, like Roald Amundsen, from Norway. We were destined to travel together.
​Eighteen of us from the cruise ship M. S. Fram set up a tiny tent city on Hovgard Island. It’s a rock of an island about the size of a football field along the outer coast of the Antarctic Peninsula; that finger of land that points up towards the tip of South America. The narrow sea between them is the dreaded Drake Passage.
Anne and I were to spend the night in a bright yellow North Face dome tent like the ones they use on Everest and in all those post-apocalyptic movies. It sat on the surface of approximately four feet of snow.
We planted the pegs horizontally and stepped them down hard under a layer of snow. Then we tightened the guy lines of both the tent and the covering fly, taught as guitar strings. After that we heaped snow along the base of the tent to bury the edge of the fly. That would, hopefully, keep the Antarctic winds from sweeping up between the fly and the tent and lifting the whole thing up into the air.
I’d read about the wind down here picking up a three hundred pound iron lid and dropping it fifty feet farther on and just missing one of Robert Falcon Scott’s men. Fifty feet is about the distance an average quarterback throws a football. Three hundred pounds is about the weight of three manhole covers. Together Anne and I weighed three hundred pounds. I imagined the wind hauling us up and dropping us into the Drake Passage in the dark of night. I asked Anne if killer whales had night vision. She reminded me that with sonar they didn’t need to see. We laughed a lot that evening.
At bedtime we braved the cold to visit the necessary pit behind a large boulder and dug deep into the snow. Like an igloo toilet surrounded on three sides by waist high walls of snow bricks the little plastic potty sat alone in the snow. We were told how to make sure all our ‘liquid waste’ fell cleanly into the potty and that none of it contaminate the local fauna and flora. All we could see was snow, not a flora in view. We were strictly instructed that we weren’t allowed to poop until we returned to the ship the next morning. That, too, made for an interesting discussion.
Another interesting discussion had to do with disengaging ourselves from our regatta suits. The suit was similar to the snowmobile suit I’d worn one January in Yellowstone. The regatta suit was a waterproof one-piece insulated pants and jacket. The jacket could be taken off and the attached pants would hang from my shoulders by suspenders. So all this would need to be dropped, together with the long woolen underwear, to expose our tender behinds to the risk of frostbite.
I told Anne I felt happy to visit this pole, and not the northern one, for now we only needed to worry about the odd penguin. At the northern pole we’d need to keep watch for polar bears. She told me she didn’t think penguins were birds of prey. I wondered what penguin tasted like. All the explorers wrote about eating them. Anne said they probably tasted like chicken.
Midnight showed us a sky completely different from anything I have ever seen. I’m no astronomer but still look up often enough to recognize the two Dippers and Orion’s Belt. I’ve seen the Milky Way now and then, too, and wherever I’ve been in the Northern Hemisphere the sky looks pretty much like itself.
But looking from here I felt far from home. The stars weren’t in the right place. The North Star was missing replaced by a strange group they call the Southern Cross. It didn’t look so much like a cross, more it seemed a diamond. The song by Crosby, Stills and Nash kept playing in my head and made a little familiar connection between me and that strange sky. But, still, they weren’t my stars.
What was mine was the Milky Way. I’d never seen it like this. But it was familiar. Although, the Milky Way I knew was more a deer trail through the sky compared to this six lane superhighway at rush hour. It lit up the night. Even the Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, were easy to see.
It reminded me of why I had come, why I stood here, of exactly what those explorers from a hundred years ago saw when they looked up. Nothing had changed in the sky since then; except for the International Space Station, of course. But that was just another set of lights on this big road.
Anne had followed Robert Falcon Scott and I had come down here because of Ernest Shackleton. They all looked up at these stars, not just at their beauty, but for their survival. Shackleton could never imagine that someone like me would no longer need to use them for navigation; that someone like me would stand here warm and dry and well fed to look up only for the pleasure of it. He could never imagine someone standing here able to travel back home a week later without frostbite or discomfort. I felt spoiled, embarrassed, awed by attempting to compare our circumstances. If the wind hadn’t started pushing me along I could have stayed there most of the night memorizing what the sky looked like at the bottom of the world.
Snuggling down into my deliciously warm sleeping bag beside my sleeping tent-mate the walls continue a wild beat around me. I think about Ernest Shackleton out in that wind. I consider who he might have been, who the man, Ernest, actually was. What kind of man leads men through such hardship? He lived on open sea ice for two years in simple canvas tents, reindeer skin sleeping bags wet from melting ice, no way to bathe, dried peas, Pemmican and penguins. And all his men survived. They waited on a small strip of beach while Earnest and a few others sailed a small boat over three thousand miles across the wildest ocean on the planet, through storms that obscured navigation landmarks in the sky. Biologically he and I aren’t different. As Carl Sagan said, we’re both made of star-stuff. But, who was the man? I can’t begin to scratch his surface.
Ernest Shackleton, so much more than me, made of stuff I can’t even imagine.