Antarctic Anecdotes

Whether you’re an adorable small child, a gawky young adult with no money, or simply a procrastinator who found the stores closed and an extra box of Oreos in the cupboard, homemade gifts fill the holidays.   There’s a certain sentimentality to these kinds of gifts on the part of the recipient; meanwhile, the giver gets to revel in the smugness of moral superiority, having resisted the temptation to sell out to commercial interests but instead devoting time to a personalized memento of love and friendship rather than recognizing that sloth lay at the root of the homemade gifting.   But all scorn aside, what mother doesn’t love that card form her pre-K offspring made of folded-over construction paper with a scrawled drawing that looks like a withered Airedale but is really the Madonna and Child?   Especially when it’s presented on Mother’s Day with LUV ME printed on the cover, complete with a backwards L, and accompanied by breakfast in bed of Froot Loops and Pepsi because...

I’ve mentioned that the phrase “It’s a harsh continent” is a good way to excuse anything that seems to go wrong south of the Antarctic Circle.   But in the case of human physiology, that’s not an excuse but a reality. The fact is that our lineage started out as a gang of happy little Australopithecines, presuming that small hairy bipeds eating shoots and grubs and continually running away from lions and cheetahs and what-not, can be considered a truly happy hominid.   Our forebearers evolved on the African savanna, in a temperate environment.   Across the mighty sub-Saharan plains the land was flat, the air was warm, the sun marked the day, and the moon signaled the night.   (And a good chance to be eaten in the dark by a lion of cheetah or what-not.) None of these characterize the Antarctic continent. Antarctica is the highest, driest, and coldest continent in the world.   While seals and penguins live quite nicely on the coast because they’ve been doing that...

  Twilight was officially over on May 13, and even though it had been dark outside for some weeks, there was still this slight glimmer, more of thought than reality, that the endless night hadn’t quite set in.   But now the darkness is fully upon us, in more ways than we knew. We’ve all experienced night, but night here is different, almost primal in its’ extremes.   Outdoors is either hauntingly peaceful or actively hostile.   There’s really nothing in between.   It’s as if the continent wants to lull you into complacency before killing you in the most ruthless and unmerciful way.   If the sky is clear and the wind is calm, even the smallest sliver of moonlight reflects off the snow and penetrates the shadows such that one can gaze out across the polar plateau with wonder at its’ endless expanse and utter barrenness; as Buzz Aldrin said about the moon, it’s a landscape of “magnificent desolation.”   It’s a meditative space, almost spiritual.   ...