Hoosh

Prologue: A Recipe for Something

A day before I flew by Twin Otter from Ross Island into the Transantarctic Mountains for a three-month deep field assignment, my friend Robert Taylor led me quietly into the McMurdo Station kitchen and surprised me with a dozen loaves of his exquisite bread. A slender, soft-spoken baker with a penchant for mischief, he knew he was helping me escape to the hinterlands with some of the best food in the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). Into my knapsack went bundles of illicitly made olive, sweet potato, and plain sourdough, moist but with a firm crust.
“This is beautiful, Robert,” I said. “How can I repay you?”
“You can’t,” he said, and smiled sweetly. “Just have a good time, and when you come back tell me some stories.”
Ask anyone for stories of Antarctic cuisine, and they’re likely to go as blank as the ice continent itself. Antarctica lies somewhere beyond their imagination, or exists as the strange white mass smeared across the bottom of their cylindrical-projection world map. Often they’ll confuse it with the Arctic, where polar bears and Santa Claus roam the sea ice. With a little prompting, they may at least know Antarctica as the media depict it – the frigid home of penguins, icebergs, and undaunted scientists.
For me, it has been both a second home and a dreamlike otherworld of ice. For eight Antarctic summers, I lived and worked in the starkest landscape on Earth. I slept on a mass of ice larger than India and China combined, woke up flying over glaciers that overflow mile-high mountains, and ate meals in a tent shaken so wildly by katabatic winds that I thought its destruction was imminent.
Antarctic ice is three miles deep in places. The growth of sea ice around the continent each winter is the greatest seasonal event on the planet, while the largest year-round terrestrial animal is a centimeter-long wingless midge, and plant life is confined to a few stony pockets within the 0.4% of Antarctica not covered in permanent snow or ice. 90% of the planet’s ice sits in Antarctic ice caps so hostile to human life that nobody stood on them until the twentieth century. The existence of Antarctica, the only significant realm actually discovered by colonizing Europeans, was not proved until 1820, and the continent’s coastline was not fully sketched until the late 1950s.
Therefore, you may ask, is there really such a thing as a venerable Antarctic cuisine? In a word, no. Since the dawn of time, as far as we know, no human ate so much as a snack in the Antarctic region until Captain James Cook and his frostbitten sailors nibbled on biscuits as they dodged icebergs below the Antarctic Circle in 1773. Seal hunters made the first brief Antarctic landings by the austral summer of 1819/1820, but no one sat down for a regular meal on the continent until 1898. Then, as now, what visitors to the Antarctic – and we are all visitors – sit down to are imported meals. There is no Antarctic terroir. The land does not provide, cannot provide, because there isn’t an acre of arable soil on the entire 5.4 million square mile continent in which to plant a garden. There have been, however, two other sources for the Antarctic diet: the flavors people bring with them, and the flavors of the Southern Ocean, meaning the flesh of seals, penguins, and sea birds raising their young on the Antarctic shoreline. Antarctic culinary history is comprised of a mere century of stories of isolated, insulated people eating either prepackaged expedition food or butchered sea life. In recent decades, of course, with kinder, more complex menus, each nation’s research base enjoys a limited version of its own home cuisine.
If the mother of Antarctic cuisine was necessity, its father was privation. Hunger was the one spice every expedition carried. As Lieut. Kristian Prestrud of the 1911-1912 Fram expedition said, “To a man who is really hungry it is a very subordinate matter what he shall eat; the main thing is to have something to satisfy his hunger.” Rations for sledging expeditions were minimal and monotonous.
Sustenance ruled over sensitivity. Thus, the heroes and stoics of Antarctic history scribbled in their journals about seal steaks and breast of penguin, about pemmican and biscuit crumbs boiled in tea. About dog flesh and caches of pony meat. About “hoosh,” the bleak Antarctic soup of meat and melted snow. About scurvy and dying hungry.
Properly defined, hoosh is a porridge or stew of pemmican and water, often thickened with crushed biscuit. Pemmican is a Native American high-energy food made of dried, shredded meat, mixed with fat and flavored with dried berries. Antarctic pemmican differed in substance, commercial beef and beef fat rather than wild meat, and appearance, compacted uniform, measured blocks.
The word hoosh is a cognate of hooch, itself a corruption of the Tlingit hoochinoo, meaning both a Native American tribe on Admiralty Island, Alaska, and the European-style rotgut liquor that they made. “Hooch” became common slang throughout North America for bootleg liquor, particularly during Prohibition, while for British polar explorers hoosh came to mean the meat stew of the ravenous. Etymologies for hoosh have assumed a strictly Antarctic usage, but I’ve found it used comfortably in British naval documents of the 1875 Nares Arctic Expedition. No doubt it has earlier Arctic usage as well. By the time it reached southern waters, it resonated. “Hoosh – what a joyous sound that word had for us,” said Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance, and indeed the onomatopoeic sound of it – like the whoosh of the Primus stove bringing their stew to a boil – must have been music to their ears.
All of which shows how Antarctica’s sad state of culinary affairs has been framed by a truly rich history on this terra incognita. Here, at the bitter end of terrestrial exploration, where year-round occupation preceded the invention of the microwave oven by only a few years, food has rarely had a more attentive, if helpless, audience. Cold, isolation, and a lack of worldly alternatives have conspired to make Antarctica’s captive inhabitants desperate for generally lousy food.

My Antarctic captivity – quite voluntary – occurred between 1994 and 2004. I worked various jobs in the USAP – waste management specialist, fuels operator, cargo handler, field camp supervisor – as part of the U.S. community from which scientists ventured out to gather data. Occasionally, I worked more closely with these researchers, but like most Antarctic residents I had little to do with science. This surprises most people to whom I tell my Antarctic stories. They hear in the media that Antarctica is lightly populated with teams of bold researchers, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to bring home information for the benefit of humanity. There is some truth in this, certainly, as the entire population of the continent in the busy summer research season (nearly five thousand) is less than a small town back home, and there are many bold and useful science projects being done by brilliant scientists under difficult conditions. What few people know, however, is that only 20% of residents are there for scientific research. The rest of us create and maintain the infrastructure that makes this science possible. In Antarctica, where children are as rare as flowers, it takes a village to raise a scientist.
By far the largest “village” in Antarctica is McMurdo, the USAP hub on Ross Island in the Ross Sea, 2400 miles due south of our deployment point in Christchurch, New Zealand. (The second largest base, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station – with up to 240 summer residents – is also American.) Most Antarctic bases are populated by ten to one hundred multitaskers. McMurdo, however, bustles with up to twelve hundred people in the austral summer months (October through February, when the northern half of the planet is in winter), the vast majority of them dining room attendants, carpenters, plumbers, general assistants, shuttle drivers, etc. They bake the bread, clean the dormitory and office toilets, operate bulldozers, handle radio communications, and shovel snow. For the most part, my experience was their experience. While by the end of my decade I had my share of excitement in the Antarctic wilderness, most of my time was spent in McMurdo, working ten hours a day and six days a week with friends in a workaday triangle between dormitory, job and cafeteria.
And though it seems strange to say, this mundane experience makes my perspective on Antarctica unusual. While most books from the Antarctic have been written by explorers, journalists, historians, and scientists, those notables have made up only a small minority of Antarctica’s inhabitants. Many of the working residents have stayed longer and seen more, but over the last century, only a few support workers (out of tens of thousands) have published books. In the history of the U.S. Antarctic Program, the largest source of humans on the ice, only two have done so. Jim Mastro’s Antarctica: A Year at the Bottom of the World in 2002 and Nicholas Johnson’s Big Dead Place in 2005 were the first to give voice to our neglected majority. These books stand apart from the typical Antarctic travelogue, wherein the usual facts of harsh weather and cute penguins ornament a rare journey (expeditions) or an irrelevant one (a journalist’s three-week tour). Rather, Jim, Nicholas, and I have written from the wealth of experience we gathered during long austral stints, returning year after year to a community rich in oral history and deeply connected to the strange Antarctic landscape.
We share our occupation of the barren landscape with the ghosts of early exploration. Men (and they were all men for the first eighty years) from four different expeditions during the early twentieth century struggled across the volcanic gravel McMurdo has since bulldozed for its roads and buildings. The wind-worn wooden shed on Hut Point – just beyond our massive cargo pier – is a remnant of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901 Discovery expedition, complete with rusting tins of meat on the interior shelves and a ninety year old seal carcass outside. As if in response, across town from Hut Point and looming over McMurdo like the final note in a fugue, a large jarrah-wood cross standing atop Observation Hill commemorates the deaths of Scott and his men on their 1912 Terra Nova expedition. On that final journey, starvation, malnutrition, and severe weather laid the men down just 130 miles south of the hut and eleven miles away from their next depot of food.
In between Discovery and Terra Nova, Sir Ernest Shackleton led his Nimrod expedition across Hut Point en route to the South Pole, which, in the end, lay just ninety seven miles beyond his grasp. He struggled and starved his way back to the hut, just in time to set a shed ablaze in order to signal his northbound ship. Later, in 1915, the men of the Aurora (the second ship of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, which planned to cross the continent to Ross Island via the Pole), passed under the shadow of Ob Hill as scurvy and storm claimed three of their lives.
Some forty years later, the modern age of Antarctic exploration began in earnest and the roots of McMurdo were laid in a massive operation by the U.S. Navy. Thousands of burger-fed sailors from several steel ships moved the makings of a tent city, and eventually a small prefab town, onto the ice-free shores of the southward-pointing Hut Point peninsula of Ross Island. Like the wood-and-canvas explorers that preceded them, the Navy commanders appreciated that McMurdo provided the southernmost port on Earth. Antarctica was at their doorstep. From the late 1950s through the 1990s, the Navy ran the NSF’s science support operation and established large camps in remote sites across the Antarctic, including the South Pole.
During my time on ice, our banter around the dining tables in McMurdo’s galley (as the Navy-built cafeteria has long been called) often includes reference to these outsized stories of Antarctic exploration. The early tales of men like Shackleton, Scott, and Roald Amundsen, and the Navy’s hard-won settlement of the ice, remind us of the harshness of the place in which we now eat soft-serve ice cream.
Antarctic history also provides an ethical framework for all our striving, and for a consideration of why we inhabit the ice and what good might be derived from our actions. Douglas Mawson, an Australian who knew more about Antarctic suffering than most, said that, in the midst of deprivation, “cocoa was almost intoxicating and even plain beef suet, such as we had in fragments in our hoosh mixture, had acquired a sweet and aromatic taste scarcely to be described… as different as chalk is from the richest chocolate cream.” Are we Mawson’s descendants or his antithesis? Either way, we revel in a cozy existence in a place that once sponsored such raptures over the benefits of starvation.
As on other frontiers, the successes, the failures, and the noble and ignoble exploits of our pioneers become essential narratives for those of us who have settled into their footprints. As we find opportunities to leave McMurdo for more remote parts of the ice, and then sense the same human insignificance and fragility they experienced amid the Antarctic austerity, their storied past provides a literary and historic language by which to understand our experience.

My little exploit, the one Rob’s bread was meant to feed, took place in the austral summer of 2001/2002. I had been asked to take the lead in a new two-person camp in the Transantarctic Mountains, where we would build and maintain a runway on a minor seven-mile-wide thread of ice called the Odell Glacier.
I was told to pack everything we’d need for the full one hundred days on the Odell, because no one knew if there would be a resupply plane or helicopter available to send out an extra stick of butter. Still reeling from the task of planning three hundred meals – plus snacks – ahead of time, I was particularly pleased when Rob led me between the oversized cauldrons and gleaming bread racks of McMurdo’s industrial kitchen toward his secret cache of sourdough. Looking surreptitiously behind us, he slipped into the walk-in freezer to grab two large bags.
I just stared at him. “This is real food, Robert. We may have to make an altar out of cardboard or ice or something and worship this while we munch on granola bars.”
Rob rolled his eyes and smiled. “I hope you find a better use for it than that, Jason.”
“I’m sure we will. Let’s see, twelve loaves over a hundred days, that’s… a loaf every eight days. Oh man, we are all set. This is great. Thank you so much.”
“Of course. I’m happy to help. Just be careful out there and let me know how it goes.”
I knew I’d have stories for Rob. Something was bound to happen. Two guys, three months, four tents, one glacier, and fifteen boxes of food. It was a recipe for something.

Hoosh

Chapter 11: A Tale of Two Stations

“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?”
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

“Yes, we eat penguins in Antarctica. Penguin biscuits.”
- Guillaume Dargaud

Grease and Potatoes

Sir Ernest Shackleton, Pole-seeker and poet of starvation, had (with his ghost writer, Edward Saunders) a talent for writing prose that transmuted hardship on the ice into song on the page. In South, he wrote on the pleasures of dispossession: “Man can sustain life with very scanty means. The trappings of civilization are soon cast aside in the face of stern realities, and given the barest opportunity of winning food and shelter, man can live and even find his laughter ringing true.” Shackleton is gone now, as are his men, his ships, and his era. Little remains of that time but weather-beaten huts turned into shrines by those of us who think we know something about those stern realities. Visitors in parkas enter like hooded monks to marvel at the unadorned kitchens of Cape Evans and Cape Royds, perhaps unaware that conservators had tidied up years ago, and in search of a heroic-age ideal, had redecorated shelves with a cute sampling of appealing foodstuffs found on site, like Bird’s Egg Powder and Moir’s Lunch Tongue. The evocative but artificial aesthetic helps us forget as much as remember. It’s the classic problem of a museum trying to represent reality.
Take the case of Shackleton’s whisky. In early 2010, conservators from the Antarctic Heritage Trust (AHT) completed a delicate excavation of five cases of liquor (three of Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky, circa 1897, and two of Hunter Valley brandy from Australia) long hidden in ice beneath floorboards of the Nimrod expedition hut at Cape Royds. One case of the whisky was flown to New Zealand for meticulous thawing and preservation of the bottles, their thin paper wrappers, and even the cushioning straw from the case. One year later, three bottles were sent by private jet under government permit to Whyte & Mackay (today’s owners of the Mackinlay’s brand) in Scotland for sampling. That sample was extracted by syringe under full laboratory conditions (including “gas chromatography (GC) mass spectrometry and GC-olfactometry analysis of fermentation-related congeners”) and then nosed, tasted, and deconstructed by the Scottish distillers for possible re-creation of a century-old lost recipe, no doubt to be marketed in the glow of Shackleton’s reputation. (The character of the whisky, Whyte & Mackay discovered, was “surprisingly light and complex,” less peaty and more modern than expected.) Eventually, the AHT means to return those three bottles to the case and the case to Cape Royds where it will rejoin the others out of sight beneath the floorboards of the hushed altar the hut has become. A British official described the process as part of the “whole romantic tale” of Antarctic exploration.
The AHT, working under the aegis of the Antarctic Treaty, defines conservation as “the means by which the true nature of an object is preserved,” yet in this case the true nature of the whisky seems to be symbolic. Great sums of money are spent to preserve an austerity that Shackleton’s men would scarcely recognize; if food and drink of that time have symbolic value, it is in the grateful, ravenous eating and drinking of it. Rather than a cold museum with whisky hidden primly beneath the floor, the AHT should hire a grumpy actor in the guise of Nimrod cook William Roberts to serve tinned foods and whisky to tourists who have done four hours of chores outside the hut at -20°F.
The old Antarctica is not entirely gone. Faint echoes of the heroic age are heard in every Antarctic program during every Antarctic season. Weather and geography have not changed, after all. But aside from the shivers of otherwise comfortable twenty-first-century campers, there is still one place on the continent that takes old-timey hardship for granted: Vostok Station, the coldest place on Earth.
In 1997, Vostok unofficially bested its record temperature of -128.6°F with an observation of -132°F. In 1963, a Vostok winter was described as so cold that “steel can shatter like glass, petrol can extinguish fire like water and diesel fuel can be cut with a saw.” It is also the most isolated base on the continent, a situation made worse by a dearth of resources in Russia. Vostok is, to put it mildly, poorly funded. Like the U.S. base at the South Pole, it was built in the IGY. Unlike Pole, which at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars has twice been completely remade into a state-of-the-art polar village, Vostok has hardly changed in over fifty years.
Weathered architecture does not translate necessarily to poor food. Charles Swithinbank, passing through Vostok in 1963, thought the food was particularly good, a bonus for the intensely hard duty. For Bob Dale, an Antarctic veteran who served from 1959 to 1975, the Vostok diet seemed pretty good. But he only sampled it during feasts given to American dignitaries, which featured lots of smoked salmon and caviar. “I was pretty sure they didn’t eat like that often,” he said, “but I never saw what they normally ate.” Exchange scientist Robert Flint did see what they normally ate when he wintered at Vostok in 1974. “In Russian fashion, it was quite plain for every day,” he told me, “but truly outstanding for holidays and special occasions.” His hosts fed him plenty of soups and stews made from slabs of Australian beef and canned vegetables, while he entertained them with his rudimentary Russian vocabulary. The Vostochniki (Vostok winter personnel) liked to pass around a clove of garlic from which each man could cut a thin slice for their soup. Flint asked for someone to please pass the garlic, but “this was followed with peals of laughter. Instead of garlic (chesnok), I had said ‘Please pass the puppy dog (schenok)!’” Some Sunday suppers were “very satisfying” oladi, thick pancakes served with marmalade. Flint was particularly fond of the pickled herring served with cold peas, potatoes, and onions. Nearly forty years later, he says, “I still dream of it.”
In 1990, Will Steger’s expedition had their food dreams realized when the men of Vostok feted them with caviar, fruit, and champagne. But the collapse of the Soviet Union cut the funding, making Russian Antarctic life more austere. By the end of the twentieth century, staff at Vostok was cut in half due to reductions in the Russian Antarctic program. The great tractor-train supply traverses from Mirnyy were limited to one per year. All food and fuel necessary for winter survival had to come in on that single nine-hundred-mile journey, but the huge Russian World War II-era tractors, with bunks and kitchen inside, often broke down. When a 1995 summer convoy halted due to severe mechanical failure, the station closed for the winter and the U.S. was asked to fly out Russian personnel. The Americans had already been cooperating with the Russians for several years because of a shared interest in studying the mysterious Lake Vostok. This enormous reservoir – as large as Lake Ontario and perhaps harboring unknown or primordial microorganisms – rests twelve thousand feet below the station.
By the summer of 1999/2000, fuel flights from McMurdo to Vostok were no longer unusual, and I got my chance to go. I felt like I’d won the lottery. Vostok is one of the rarest destinations on Earth. No one travels there with a guidebook in their pocket. No one parades off a plane to Ooh and Ahh at the Russians’ plywood-and-steel space station. It is strictly a functional, if distant and tenuous, node in an aging empire’s scientific network.
On January 26, 2000, I boarded the Herc with a dozen Russian Vostochniki, their bags, and two large Air Force pallets stacked with two tons of frozen home fries. Piled on top was a garnish of fresh potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, and a few days’ worth of fruit. These Vostochniki, fresh from the world, were about to winter under brutal conditions, not least of which was their cuisine of grease and potatoes, night in and night out, for the next year.
Nine years earlier, Deb Baldwin had been working at Pole with a scientist who had spent the summer of 1990 at Vostok. The food, he told her, was simply terrible, all potatoes and vodka. Meals apparently lasted just ten minutes, though the Americans lingered a few minutes longer out of habit. Those hurried meals sound similar to the tasteless tinned dinners on Carsten Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross expedition at Cape Adare in 1899. They choked down their food only for sustenance.
Also on board the Herc were a few other Americans, including an administrator named Jim, a doctor sent to consult on a very ill Russian, and my friend Lena. Lena was bilingual and so had been pulled from her job as a science tech to translate for the doctor.
My job upon arrival at Vostok was to help with the transfer of much-needed fuel from the Herc into the station’s near-empty tanks. Without fuel, the men would have to abandon the base. If I had time after the fuel offload, I might have a few minutes to run over to the base to look around. A fuelie who took an earlier trip had started his run to the station when the flight crew called him back to load up and sit down. All he saw of Vostok was the skiway.
On the ground in McMurdo, I found myself in an ethical quandary. As I boarded, I was told by our loadmaster that this mission was for cargo only, and would offload no fuel. I thought this was strange, as Vostok’s fuel needs were critical. I stood there hemming and hawing over whether I should jump off the plane and get back to work in town.
The loadmaster solved the crisis for me when, over the growing roar of the turboprop engines, he came back and shouted a request: “We won’t deliver any fuel, but there’s a chance we’ll want you to help us take fuel from the Russians!” I looked at him as if he had told me he hoped to squeeze blood from a snowball. This crew was new to the Antarctic, and they were unclear on the situation at Vostok. Though I explained to him in loud pantomime that we had neither the hardware nor the desire to suck up the dregs of Vostok’s tanks and that the Russians couldn’t afford to give it away, he remained unconvinced. He was the confused messenger with a confused message. Sensing my opportunity, I decided my duty lay in preventing the aircrew from damaging their engines with unavailable bad fuel. Nodding to the loadmaster, I quickly sat down, put in my earplugs, and buckled up for my little adventure.
The faces of the Russians reminded me of stark American Civil War portraits staring out from sepia photos: carved and rugged, dark and impassive. Yet these were the men who had not yet spent their year on the ice; I wondered what the men we would bring back, those finishing their year, would look like. Then again, the lines on their faces may have been from jetlag, since they had flown from St. Petersburg to Amsterdam to Singapore to Sydney to Christchurch to McMurdo on an epic one-way ticket.
By the time the Herc rose over the Transantarctic Mountains, most of our guests seemed to be asleep. Vostok’s winter station manager kept his eyes open, however, staring at the pale-green insulation lining the fuselage. His responsibility for the next year was to keep all twelve men safe and sane. Wintering in central Antarctica has always been considered a hardship duty in extremis; even some winters at the comfortable South Pole station have ended with a once-joyful community split into enraged factions. How much worse would it be within the thinner walls and deeper cold of a Vostok winter?
For three hours, we droned across part of an ice sheet the size of China, time zones passing beneath us like crevasses, until suddenly out of the endless snowy expanse a small speck appeared like a blister in East Antarctica’s alabaster skin. We stepped out into -30°F air, sixty degrees colder than McMurdo. It felt like we’d landed in clouds just below the jet stream. Around the extra-long skiway, necessary to build up speed for lift-off in thin air, was perfect whiteness under a perfect blue bell jar of sky. Breaking up the emptiness were an immense tower and the “BOCTOK” sign at its foot. Each seven-foot-high Cyrillic letter (red, of course) stood alone, like the Hollywood sign. The station itself lay hidden behind a rise built of years of plowed-out snow.
Lena and the doctor rushed off to find their patient. The rest of us pushed cargo pallets of home fries and baggage out of the plane by hand because Vostok’s forklift had broken down. Then their thirty-year-old snowmobile began to ferry loads to the base.
One Russian arrival, with nothing before him but the fringe of the half-buried outpost, pulled off his hat, pulled out a pocket mirror, and checked his mussed black hair. I was reminded of the final moments of the Endurance journey, in which the haggard Shackleton, Crean, and Worsley, having arrived at Stromness whaling station after seventeen horrendous months, began to fuss with soot-caked hair and ragged clothes. Their concern was that there might be women: here at Vostok, this was unlikely. There was only Lena, and only for a few minutes. Women have on rare occasion done summer science here, but no woman has ever wintered.

Once I confirmed that the Herc crew would not offload or, God forbid, try to take fuel, I set off over the white rise. Mostly submerged by accumulating snow, the station’s several old small buildings were sun-bleached and rusting. Slumped-over tracked vehicles littered the outskirts. Vostok, the world-class research outpost of an intellectual nation, had the hollow look of poverty. I can’t say that Vostok felt more isolated than other camps – one raft in the ocean feels like any other – but the tenuous barrier this facility maintains against the cold unsettled my American mind.
Pushing through heavy wooden doors into the small, dark common room of the main building, I stepped into another world. Vostok’s arriving and departing residents were gathered around an old billiards table, smoking their raw Russian cigarettes and talking quietly. They sat in a dense smoke that had seeped into cracks in the balls and left a stain the color of dead grass.
The men about to leave with us, finishing their yearlong stint, seemed to laugh more easily than those arriving. In the U.S. program, the opposite is true. We arrive cheerful and energetic and leave pale and tired. Here at Vostok, the beginning of a harsh stint in an anteroom to deep space must bring a level of apprehension that participants in the U.S. program can not fathom. These men still drop off the face of the Earth while we happily flirt with the edge.
When Lena entered after translating the doctor’s consultation, she was well-attended, but not harassed. Her language skills and beauty were the center of attention. Though the Russians were calm, it was interesting to observe their desire to speak with her. Some had not seen a woman for a year or more and the others had that fate before them. Lena said later that they did not talk much of themselves, but wanted to know about her. What I noticed was the occasional glance, or pause in their step, around Lena. What baggage such a glance may carry, the last some of the men had of the warm world before slipping into the long Antarctic night.
Lena told me later that one of the men had boasted of his monthly salary to her, far higher than he could hope to find at home. When he asked Lena if she made good money, too, she demurred. She had the compassion not to tell him that, as a young science tech on a U.S. government-funded aerogeophysical project, she earned his salary in a week.
Murmured Russian syllables followed me into the empty dining room, presumably the same room in which Bob Thomson and his traverse crew had eaten their flash-frozen steaks in 1962. Spare and plain, the room was clearly Vostok’s heart, a repository of culture and simple food so old that it seemed a survivor of ice ages and continental drift. Years of smoke and grease had browned the high pale-yellow ceiling. Much of the paint on the yellow walls had long ago flaked off, and beneath it an older icy blue spread like frost, as if the snow outside the windows had seeped through.
Sepia light slanted through the left wall’s dirty windows. Small framed paintings and photos, mostly rural and tropical scenes, gave a tilted hope to the worn room, while a dark polished grandfather clock stood ticking in the far corner. A pull-down movie screen hung empty. Just then, Jim stepped in for a moment to say with awe that the room looked exactly as it did during his last visit, twenty-two years earlier, except that Stalin’s portrait had come down. Perhaps it had been replaced with the large black-and-white photo of a pair of emperor penguins, which, even after a year in Antarctica, these Russians will never see. Vostok is farther from penguins than most American citizens are from the nearest zoo that puts them on display.
Withered herbs in window boxes stood silhouetted against the snow. In the dusty light, a mound of boiled eggs glistened in a large bowl like dabs of white paint. Six scuffed dark tables each held slabs of black bread, a brick of yellow butter, and a plate of sliced pink salami. On the sideboard, a massive cutting board and heavy cleaver wore the deep scars of the labor, hunger, anger, and celebrations of men living difficult, cloistered lives.
I’d walked into a Russian still life that seemed to breathe in its dark frame. A transient, I was still bundled up in my parka as I shuffled between the modest invitations on the dining tables. The strangeness of entering another culture in central Antarctica was dreamlike, in that I walked in from the palpable center of nowhere and found a stained wooden kitchen extracted from the pages of Solzhenitsyn.
The cook, with a blue and white broad-striped shirt and a broader smile, walked in from the kitchen to offer me tea. His arms were open, with a cup in one hand.
“Tea, for you?” he said (I think), in Russian.
“No, no, I’m just – I’m looking around. I – no, thank you,” I said, lost in my thoughts.
A shrug and another smile said: “As you wish.” To this day, I wish I had accepted.
He was the only Russian at the camp that I spoke with, and it lasted just a few seconds. I paused in my bustling exploration – so much to see, a mental map to make – to consider his kindness, then retreated to spend my last twenty minutes outside, taking bleak photos of old vehicles and the battle between utility and entropy. I wanted to frame Vostok’s strangeness, as if I was the empty Antarctic.
Even as I clicked off my roll of film, I knew I should have sat with the friendly cook to sip some tea, eat an egg, and slab some butter onto the local dark bread. I had tried to see this strange place from the outside rather than taking the time to taste it.
Soon it was time to go. I trudged back to the plane and loaded up with the departing Russians, as they began their descent into the warm latitudes. Onboard was the very pale patient and two silent men playing chess so rapidly it was obvious they had battled daily through their stark year of dark months and white months. The small magnetic board passed back and forth between them like an plate of endless hors d’oeuvres.

East Antarctica

Beyond the penguins and icebergs, far behind the stony coast, larger than the United States and deprived of life, is the East Antarctic plateau. The plateau is the vast bulk of the southern continent, a world of ice inconceivable to anyone who has not traveled over its vastness. Hours are spent flying over a small portion of an undifferentiated white icescape. Ice, up to three miles deep, swells up from a drowned continent and pours in glacial millennia over several thousand miles of coastline.
Nothing interrupts the blank face of the interior except a few research stations and several temporary camps set up each Antarctic summer. As I found in eight seasons of Antarctic work, to meet this place on its own terms is to begin a dialogue with perception. Antarctica challenges our notions of place and self.

* * *

“Can you conceive, can you appreciate or fit into your ideas what can be the meaning of a world without a living thing on it?...And in most places in the universe today there probably is nothing alive.”
- Richard Feynman, “The Uncertainty of Science”

Antarctica is the aesthetic ledge from which we leap into space, the antibiotic portal to all that nothing we cannot conceive. A serengeti of snow-dressed ice rejects life across millions of square miles.
What do we understand about the essential Antarctic, the interior plateau? What ideas survive comparison to this icescape with its funereal cold? And how well do we fit these ideas into the metal probes we send into other parts of space?
Here, as elsewhere, science makes thin reams of data, numbers in streams to be set aside for analysis. We cultivate absences, especially here in the great frozen petri dish of the ice.
Antarctica is the meditative white gate to all the darkness we cannot know. We don’t understand this local quietus, much less the black universe beyond it, but here we go.

* * *

The air is eternal, pre-existence. The scene is pre-human, post-human, a spiritual plane unidentifiable with faith or culture. What we see there is what we cannot know, and what we know is what we cannot see.

“It remained stubborn in itself
Neither on earth nor in heaven
It listens to itself
Among the worlds a world”
- Vasko Popa, from “The White Pebble”

* * *

Look at the map. Don’t look at the coast, don’t look at the text. Just look at the white mass that is the Antarctic. Look at the nothing that fills the map.
Even mapmakers regard the white space as just white space. In atlases, they cover the ice over with paragraphs that describe a few famous journeys and a few famous facts about storm and cold. But under those words is a mute continent of ice, the essential Antarctic, that which estranges this enormous place from all others on Earth.

* * *

Interior Antarctica is a barrier that predates our species. And though we have now crisscrossed and inhabited this harshest of all landscapes, the wall remains essentially intact, exactly because there are no walls. We bring our own (thin) walls and hide behind them. Interior Antarctica is a mental barrier, a wall of indifference.

* * *

Life in the clouds. The same vast white surface, the same rough impermanent ground, and the need to marvel at what mystery lays beneath the sameness.

* * *

Is it possible for one imagination to explain the Antarctic interior? Here are a billion versions of a frozen limbo in the form of a white-on-white desert. Here is silence practicing scales under its breath. A newly-introduced mind, eclipsed, sees all this in an instant.
But will familiarity teach me to classify the undulations of ice and sky? At what point does one person fail to maintain the awesome singularity of it, the wonder of standing on the wide white cusp between life and space?
This is where the “dialectic between idea and ice” (Stephen Pyne) takes place. Do I fail if I speak only to the variations, or do I fail if I romance the monotony?

* * *

No landscape is more inexhaustible, less embraceable, than the Antarctic. Life is the drop of water running through the freezer.

* * *

“When we view the four directions from a boat on the ocean
Where no land is in sight, it looks circular and nothing else.
However, this ocean is neither round nor square,
And its qualities are infinite in variety. It is like a palace;
It is like a jewel…”
- Eihei Dogen, from “Shobogenzo Genjo-Koan”, quoted by Peter Matthiesen in Nine-Headed Dragon River

We navigate the somewhat circular Antarctic, especially its interior, precisely by imagining the continent as square. “Grid direction” was established back in 1957 during the scientific colonization of the Antarctic. Grid direction ignores Antarctica’s relation to the rest of the planet, and instead fabricates a grid much like the roads of a planned city. On aviation maps, this grid is superimposed over the ice. In this orientation, the South Pole is the central point. Grid North runs along the Greenwich meridian, while Grid South follows the International Date Line. The names West and East Antarctica indicate their direction from the Greenwich meridian.
The real geography is neither round nor square, and its qualities are infinite in their monotony. Our artificial constructions are both difficult to see on the ground and absolutely natural to our minds. Everything we say about the ice, once we’ve reached it via the stratagems of navigation, is part of the palace of consciousness that travels with us.

* * *

No one has ever come to Antarctica by accident. No one has ever stood on the plateau intending to be somewhere else on earth. No one has ever arrived without intent.

* * *

“The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.”
- E.O. Wilson, Consilience

Here the lack of complexity, the native reductionism, narrows the possibilities for both art and science. How many surfaces can we represent or strip away from a world made of ice, sky, and time? Most of the information derived out here is from the ice cores pulled from deep within the ice cap. The story the cores tell is about, once again, ice, sky, and time.
The love of this proto-nature without reductionism is the only option for both art and science. Both will only serve to make the ice more complex.

* * *

Neither material nor spiritual world waiting here for us. No gods to clash against each other, or to give us meaning as we struggle with the land. No supernatural for us in this pre-nature. No vertical axis in the human mind connecting underworld to skyworld. No cosmology, no fear, no epiphany, no genuflection. Scarcely four cardinal directions, and no natives to draw religion from the convex paths of the compass.
We newcomers are the parishioners, the altar, the material and spiritual elements. We are world and worldview.

* * *

A continent moving outward from itself, out from the center in imperceptible but unstoppable momentum. Ice miles deep sloughs off at the edges what once joined at the center. A metaphor for transformation? Yes, though an impossible one. A spiritual guide? Perhaps: if we live to shed the excess of thoughts and feelings, shed them like an ascetic’s outer rags, and if we strive, however feebly, to make our selves expressionless and featureless, upon which the accretion of days means only an affirmation of the transience of things, then surely we approach in our person the lunacy of this place.
Icebergs calve off in megatons what was gathered in milligrams…
Here is the Great White Buddha: the self’s migration in the wheeling of a translucent earth, the metamorphosis of a continental material that is both here and gone.

* * *

Now I know: white is blue. Antarctica is not white. Look closely at the snow at your feet, even more closely at the snow out beyond. Where I say white, think pale reflected grays and incremental blues. When you ask which blue, think bruise behind lace. When you think hue, think oblivion.
All we see is surface. What we say is white, a cloud.

* * *

What intimacy is possible with this place? Not as much as I feel. How much loneliness do I find in the plateau landscape? Not as much as I feared. The proximity of my life to this lack of it, and the fact that my observations are altered by what objects I carry with me, contribute to the suspicion that I am scarcely here at all.
But I feel close to that which ignores me. I lay down upon it to sleep, surrounded by technology, but not so enclosed that the ends of my thoughts do not collide with the continental no-thought, which moves much closer to me if I feel insulated and alone.

* * *

I’ve been taking walks out into trackless space, leaving point A without a point B to find.

“Silence. Day of silence. Come back to it. Get back inside it. Impermanence has been left behind.”
– Henri Michaux, “Surging Out From Meditation”

It’s all out there, just steps away. The impermanence is more present than I am. I, we, this sketched home of tents and flags, are desperately more impermanent than the hard silence. I didn’t get anywhere until I came home and looked back over my shoulder.

* * *

Our alienness is so obvious (even giraffes, loping across the snows, would seem more native than our nylon and steel), our presence so tenuous, that our long-established foothold seems never to move beyond the first step of arrival.

* * *

“Art does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation, sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature. Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally.”
- John Berger, “The White Bird”

How do we respond to this nature? There is scarcely enough creation before us to imitate. What have we seen together and what social hope can be derived? We have already chosen to live in an alternative world just to see this place. We can try to amplify its emptiness, as this writing does, but I’m still not sure what there is to confirm.
The phenomenon of the plateau does not offer glimpses of nature. Either you see nature exposed at its root, or you do not find it here at all. There is no middle ground. So it little matters that you observe the emptiness through the small window of a plane or the cramped door of your tent. As long as the intent to respond springs from the observation and not from the window itself, a fragment of nothing will serve as the whole, if we can only find a way to speak to it.

* * *

“Even here God ensures the continuing presence of the enigma of life.”
- Fernando Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet

We are asking the question, and we are the answer. We are the question mark looking for enough words to prop us up.

* * *

East Antarctic skies are the cleanest and clearest on Earth. Pollutants and dust are rare, and water vapor is essentially nonexistent. So why does this blue barren above me appear so pale and washed out? Because of the continental iceblink, because of the high albedo of this stark white place. So much light reflected upward fades the cerulean into the color of water on an old dry map.

* * *

The textures of the plateau under the closest inspection by the naked eye are exactly the same as its textures when seen from the window of a plane. A scuffed whiteness, rich with erosion like a bleached bone.

* * *

"The distended void of the desert teaches the love of detail.”
- Andre Gide, Amyntas

An error on my part: nothing on the plateau is “flat,” just as nothing is “white.” I can’t fail to recognize the infinite variation of the surfaces up here. There are countless textures, visible even in a short walk away from our little human operations. From small ridges the thickness of a fingernail to sastrugi like dolphins, the cold ground beneath us rises to meet the wind.
Sastrugi are the large-scale hard waves of snow that rise amidst a frozen ocean of ripples, lines, edges, ridges, lumps, slopes, pitches, and basins, making true flatness a rare island amid hard turbulence. Layers and textures are born from complexity: direction, speed, and duration of wind play their roles under variations in temperature, amount of available blowing snow, and the old surface features. It’s only our literary and conversational habit on the ice that describes a continental surface furrowed by wind as sheer and featureless.
Paul Siple noticed in his initial survey of the area around the South Pole a pattern of extremely low rolling hills, “which reached crests 50 to 100 feet high every five or ten miles … and were apparently large-scale migrating snow dunes.” That’s only five to 20 feet of slope per mile.
Distractions and attractions are so absent in this icescape that our language responds with negation. We don’t see anything we know, so we say there’s nothing at all. Eventually, however, we must try to appreciate the infinitely complex and its relationship to the infinitesimal. Follow the erratic stitch at your feet, though it’s only several snowflakes high and doomed to be erased by the next gust.
Does the large-scale monotony or the small-scale variety capture the imagination? What scale feeds fear? Which feeds beauty? It takes minutes or years for these textures to form. When I say “flat” in this notebook, I’m thinking of a wilderness of minor textures, wind-driven, sculpted, in flux.

* * *

We may be on the edge of creation and the far reaches of technological living, but we are not yet on the far edge of ourselves… Our thoughts and feelings about work, friends, and flirtations, plus our memories of the outside world, crowd together to become the details of our Antarctic life. What’s inside us provides the only real text for the white horizon to illustrate with blank pages. It takes a discipline of character to live outside the assumptions inherent in a collection of tents circled up against this horizon.
Interior Antarctica a hard place to work, but I think it’s even harder to stay conscious of Antarctica while you’re working.
Everyone wants to live as normally as possible, to outthink the abstraction around them. And it’s easy to do: work and play take up our imagination while the ineffable concept we should be gaping at sits idly by.

* * *

“Self is a subject that most of us are fluent on.”
- Ernest Shackleton, The Heart Of The Antarctic

With this phrase, Shackleton summed up the essence of plateau experience. The truth of it continues to this day, albeit in gentler circumstance.
Nearing the end of his second unconsummated run for the Pole, starved, suffering from altitude sickness, hypothermic and frostbitten, Shackleton was unsure that his abused body could return to things warm and peopled. The physical and mental torment increased each day as he stretched out his expedition’s mortal gamble. As they stumbled deeper into the interior, their self-study became a reflexive preoccupation. Shackleton talks of being “fluent,” as if the self was the continent’s native tongue.
Still today, living and working at the South Pole or a plateau camp, there is nothing outward to draw the mind or the eye, except for the ideas of nothing that we think it resembles. So the mind goes inward, the mind studies the stressed body, the mind sticks to the job or people at hand. The emails new employees send north are at first about landscape and wonder, and then by December fill with complaints about bureaucracy and gossip.
The extremity of this geography is inviolable: emptiest highest quietest driest strangest coldest windiest most isolated most biophobic, but the story of the landscape always surrounds the story of the self immersed in it. Listen to where I went, we say, listen to what happened to me. This is the ancient human need to tell a story that affirms the self and connects us to the tribe. Scientists, federal managers, and workers adventure or perceive adventure here, and the stories always have a nugget of What I Went Through.
The self, made palpable in Antarctic literature by the dying Robert Falcon Scott a few years later, was first announced on the plateau by Shackleton. It’s now cultivated by us, their descendants. Self-involved or not, we are at least fluent in the stories of our experience, small warm notions talking through the whirling drift of perceived annihilation.

* * *

The land’s emptiness is not coated with a single silence. Instead, it is littered with silences, the invisible rags of soundlessness that are blown about by the rough perpetual wind. When the wind stops, absences unfold over the desert snows. When I find myself wrapped up in one, I note that the continent’s blue lid has shut for a while, that things are hesitated, muffled.

* * *

No object here to alienate us, nor any sign that we are unified with this emptiness. If we find absolute otherness in the ice at our feet, how do we cope with its scale? What do we do with a landscape that we call an object but is in fact an earth, an earth which is a monument to a cold unity that may not include us?

* * *

“Deep
in Time’s crevasse
by
the alveolate ice
waits, a crystal of breath,
your irreversible
witness.”
- Paul Celan, from “Etched Away”

If interior Antarctica has taught me anything about time, it’s that timelessness surrounds us in a life composed entirely of unframed moments. On the plateau I feel no story, no beginning or end.
Time is not the straight and shallow river I imported, but rather an invisible relation between things on a scale so large that my life and observations are immeasurably small. My moments don’t exist, and so are simultaneous, as it were, with the infinite. Some days this timelessness seems to crush in on me from all directions, while in others it feels like a medium through which my experience radiates out in all directions, without destination.
Antarctic summer is both the singular moment of high albedo, and an analogue for the endless horizon of time. Timelessness should pervade any theory of Antarctic experience that accounts for the relentless scale of the plateau.
In what other geography does timelessness have only itself for company? My conscious presence here does not overwhelm the perception of deep time, as it does everywhere else. Here I am overwhelmed. This irrational experience of antarctic time is the “native” experience, and the rational notions of mind and space which drive science have little to say about it, cannot recommend or obviate it.

“On the question of time, science is bound to be solipsist. The problem of time is a problem of choice.”
- John Berger, “Painting and Time”

The brief sweep of a zephyr of cold air across the ice is both the infinitesimal fingerprint of an instant and the breath of an ageless universe.

* * *

All things visible or invisible are connected, whether through time, space, or imagination. As we muddle through our days, however, we cultivate, or are cultivated by, the absences that are the shadows of consciousness: we measure the distances between all things, and between those things and us. When we take time to think about things we call “invisible” or “empty,” we make them visible to the mind, but when we say little of something visible, we grow blind to it.
But out of the chaos of our perceptions certain depths emerge. As we experience a lifetime of finding connections, the perspective condenses: for me, space and time have begun to feel like different forms of imagination.
Each moment is a lifetime. Here, in this landscape that is also a blank continuum, every liminal day, there is a lesson in this understanding.
Now, at the end of our season on the ice, as we prepare to go back to what Antarctic residents, in unsure irony, often call the “real world,” where can we go that will not be touched by this empty unity?

* * *

At peace, I feel more antarctic than mindful, cultivating the silence that I remember so well. Within things and my thoughts is the landscape of quietude. I am the bridge between Antarctica, which is the bridge between space and the Earth, and my mind.