Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  The ship followed an iceward course at 178 degrees. At bedtime the third night following, the ship was rising up and sinking down on the ice, but we woke in a motionless vessel and obediently trooped down to the lecture room yet again. Rodney had been staying up until 3:00 a.m. every night to try to seduce or bully Dmitri into sticking the course; Dmitri wanted to go to bed by 3:00 a.m., and the passengers were out of the way by then, and so that was the ritual hour of the journey’s failures. To the casual observer, the ice we had been going through seemed much of a muchness, and the boat seemed to go through it now faster, now slower, but steadily. But once more at 3:00 a.m., the captain had declared the ice impassable. Rodney acknowledged that it was atypically dense for the season, but emphasized that the ship could do it. The captain, who had a distinctively Russian ability to be uncommunicative and melodramatic at the same time, said that the ice was “still too much” and shrugged. He said, “I try hardly,” which we feared might be more accurate than “I try hard,” which is what he had intended to say. It seemed we would not get through.

  Rodney’s eyes filled with tears as he explained how hard it was for him to fail, as though his situation warranted the primary sympathy. At first everyone was terribly British and stiff upper lips were kept and socks were pulled up, but many passengers later admitted to crying in their cabins that day, as if the warm saline of their tears could melt the frozen brine in our way. A few ascended into sanctimonious homilies about how inspiring it was to be reminded that one couldn’t always get what one wanted from nature. Then someone asked the obvious question: If we were not going to Antarctica, what exactly were we going to do for the next fifteen days? Rodney said he hadn’t really thought about it. “What do you want to do?” he asked. It was folly to offer a vote to a group of travelers who were neither united nor informed. Before long, desperate and obscure proposals were flying around the room.

  The Professor Khromov filled up with contagious sadness. It was not a grand or opulent trip, but it was an exceedingly expensive one to which people had made very profound commitments. Conrad’s family had saved for eight years to give him this trip as a fiftieth birthday present. Lynne, who had done a previous trip with Heritage, had persuaded her husband and five of their friends to join this great adventure. Nick’s mother had asked him on her deathbed to take the little inheritance she could leave and spend it on his childhood dream of visiting Antarctica. Greg had used up all his vacation and some unpaid leave, and would not have time off again until 2009. Lauren had given up her retirement and worked an entire year to pay for her trip with Stephen. And the cool kids—Dean, José, Glenn, John, and Carol—were professional crew on high-level yachts and had signed up for this expedition three years earlier, exhausting their savings. There was something Shakespearean about the disappointment, and nothing could be done about it. The British tendency to make the best of a bad situation butted up against the American habit of pursuing impossible dreams. The British and New Zealanders tended to think we had been given lemons and had best make lemonade. The Aussies, Americans, and Africans thought we had been given lemons and might as well throw them at the authors of our frustration.

  The first night after the surrender, only a few of us stood sentinel to look at the endless expanses of sea ice. Yet in a way, it was hard to believe how disappointed we all felt to be in this strange world. Out on the deck, I was lost in the wonderment of where we were as much as in the sorrow of where we weren’t, because the so-called midnight sun had made a spectacular debut at about ten o’clock and gilded a mackerel sky over the hummocky meringue of the furrowed ice. There were mammals and seabirds to see, and we vied to document them with our many digital cameras—the rare Ross seal and the common Adélie penguins alike. The Adélies were scattered, one here and four there, and sat complacently on their islets of sea ice until our boat was almost upon them, then belly-flopped into the water. The snow petrels circled us, resembling, when the sun caught their white feathers, images of the Holy Spirit in Northern Renaissance paintings. If you stood on the metal steps so that you could lean over the prow, you could catch your own prismatic reflection in the shiniest bits of broken ice before the ship sundered them. The air itself was a purifying tonic.

  Yet some churlishness in us couldn’t be satisfied with the permanent light of the white nonworld in which we were hopelessly adrift, short of our last continent and outside of time. It is true in general, but especially true of travel, that people are thrilled with anything extra and distraught about anything expected and missed. You may never have heard of the pudding-toed tree chameleon or the Cloister Court of St. Yvette, but when your guide tells you that you’ve been privileged with a rare sighting of the lizard, or that you are catching the nunnery open at the whim of the sisters, you are elated. When the opposite happens, you feel not just disappointed but betrayed. You curse yourself for having spent so much money on an experience you’re not having. You resent in advance the refrain that will begin “Well, actually, we didn’t get there.”

  Our hopes radically reduced, we lined up a day later for a Zodiac cruise around Scott Island, a seldom-visited outcropping of rock north of the thickest pack ice. Thrillingly, we saw a predatory leopard seal—they have been known to attack humans—sunning himself, looking like a cross between a sea slug and a dinosaur. At that afternoon’s briefing, Rodney said he thought ice might be clearing to the south and proposed that we wait near Scott Island a day or two, on the chance that we could still make it through. Even the atheists went to bed that night thick with prayers. We found a fragile camaraderie in staving off despair, as though going through this experience were forging soldiers’ bonds among us, though also with a creeping Huis Clos feeling that we could not escape one another.

  At a time when the environment is under siege and ice shelves are famously dwindling, something about the dwarfing scale of the landscape was reassuring. All of us had come fearful of the greening of Antarctica, and what we found was relentless frozen serenity. Hoping that we would stay the course and break through to the continent, we were still awestruck and humbled by the majesty around us, and while we prayed the thick ice would vanish out of our ship’s course, we hoped it would not vanish from the earth.

  The following day, we stayed close to Scott Island and waited some more. The terrible briefings were getting to be like consciousness-raising sessions of the mid-1970s at which each participant got to say his or her piece while the others gritted their teeth. Rodney now focused on how long it would take us to get out of the Ross Sea if we got in, but trouble returning seemed less alarming than not getting in at all. I began to understand those historic explorers who wanted to reach the poles so much that they trekked into uncharted territory not knowing if they would ever return, losing limbs to frostbite, disappearing into crevasses or whiteout storms. Dmitri now announced that getting through the ice would take several days, that we’d have to come back through the same ice, and that we no longer had sufficient time for the round-trip. Rodney said, unconvincingly, that the captain was right.

  People were both shattered and outraged. Now the problem was time, after all these days had been expended on so much back-and-forth. Rodney had thought that we could get through. Dmitri had refused to go. We had been pawns in a contest of personalities. What nature does, one accepts with some degree of grace. What human cupidity has caused makes one furious. If the message had been conveyed to us that the problem was truly the ice, we would have accepted it, but the manner of bungling incompetence and personal conflict made it hard to swallow. That night, up on the bridge, Ian observed that we were going only nine knots, “as this boat was built more for comfort than for speed.” Mary said, “I’m not sure it was built for either, really.” That was about the size of it. A number of people on board were reading The Worst Journey in the World, the brilliant account of Robert Falcon Scott’s fatal expedition of 1910–13, and we began referring to the Nimrod Centennial as “the second-worst journey in the world.”

 
We still had two weeks left. We would go west to hunt icebergs, then head back to New Zealand via the subantarctic. So far, we had been on solid ground four times, and the intrepid adventurers on board were going stir-crazy. I have always hated being cold, but for those imprisoned days, shivering on deck was oddly thrilling, and I relished that touch of frozen numbness in my fingers and at the tip of my nose. The cold was antarctic even if we didn’t have the continent under our feet; it physicalized our brief kinship with the penguins and seals and whales. To reassure ourselves that we had gone somewhere, we tossed off new vocabulary: grease ice and pancake ice, frazil ice and hummocky ice, tabular bergs and bergy bits, first-year ice and multiyear ice, and brash ice and sastrugi. It’s not the Inuit who have a hundred words for snow; we do.

  We eventually reached icebergs. Many looked almost avant-garde; we saw the Frank Gehry iceberg and the Santiago Calatrava iceberg and the endearingly old-fashioned Frank Lloyd Wright iceberg, not to mention various Walmart and IKEA icebergs along the way. They put to rest the common wisdom that snow is white: snow is blue, with white reflections glinting off it in certain light, except that it is sometimes green or yellow, and very occasionally striated with pink. Caught in its glacial heart is the dense snow that absorbs all but the bluest light, that glows as if neon fragments of the tropical sky had been trapped in a southbound gale and transported here. The last tabular iceberg we approached marked our final farewell to the fantasy of Antarctica that had brought us together. It was the most beautiful we had visited, and the largest, and while we were close to it in our Zodiac, it calved a slab the size of a walk-up apartment, which plunged into the gelid sea with a roar worthy of the Fourth of July.

  Among the islands of our funereally slow return, Campbell Island was a joy. The royal albatross nests there, and a group of us were privileged to see a rare changing of the guard, when the male comes to relieve the female from sitting on their egg, so she can fly out to sea and get food. After half an hour of affectionate mutual grooming, the female cautiously stepped off the nest and the male settled in for his long shift. Even the tour’s ornithologist had never seen this ritual before.

  Otherwise, our strategy consisted largely of approaching an island to take in the view of its hills, then climbing the hills to look at the view of the boat, then returning to the boat for a last look at the hills. Rodney would charge ahead, leaving his older clients to struggle over steep and muddy ravines unassisted. People were crossing off the days: not that the islands were uninteresting, but Heritage offers tours of the subantarctic that last as little as a week and cost about $5,000 per person. This trip, by the time we had paid the various extras, had cost the magazine that sent us more than $40,000 for a double cabin, not including airfare to New Zealand or unreimbursed time away from work.

  We waited for Rodney to propose at least a partial refund, or even to give us an open bar for one night, but it never came. When I confronted him, he said, “This trip has cost me as much as if we’d made it through.” That last evening, the weather was inconceivably lovely, and we stood in that bright warmth, so opposite to our purpose, and were depressed as hell by the clear blue sky, the shimmering water, the gentle beauty of the summery New Zealand shore.

  We were like foreign visitors who had dreamed all their lives of seeing New York City and set off with that goal only to end up stuck in downtown Newark with no way home for a month. Disappointment had surged in waves. There was the initial shock. Then there was a lulled feeling that one couldn’t stay upset indefinitely, and the very real pleasure of seeing more than a hundred species of birds, some two dozen mammals, and a sea’s worth of ice. Finally, there was the sensation of getting off that boat without having done what we’d set out to do—a feeling of rage, failure, gullibility, self-blame, and doubt. We had boarded the vessel with the hopefulness of youth rekindled in us, and we came back with the disaffection of age.

  Initially, we had viewed the informality of Heritage Expeditions as unpretentiousness and relished the aura of discovery that Rodney conjured. The Nimrod Centennial had turned into a disaster because a real problem in nature had coincided with equally real amateurism. We later learned that another boat, the Marina Svetaeva, faced with the same ice at the same time, had changed course and made an Antarctic landing in Commonwealth Bay. There was something lovely and fresh about Heritage’s bluster, something almost heartbreaking in the feeling that we were all in this together. We never quite felt that we were tourists who’d purchased services; we felt like strangers who had met in friendship and agreed to hold hands and stride boldly into the world’s greatest remaining wilderness. Traveling this way has a potent romance, but also risk, and for us, alas, the risk outstripped the romance. Had we reached the great white bottom of the world, I would have loved the very qualities that, in our failed trip, I deplored. Still, we had witnessed kinds of beauty that few men have seen. We held that warm happiness against the hard ice of our regret.

  * * *

  The sea ice that impinged on our trip has become even more abundant as glaciers continue to break up, making it increasingly difficult even for scientists to reach their research stations. Ice blockages are exacerbated by the fierce wind that results from the depletion of polar ozone, the increase of greenhouse gases, and the temperature differential caused as the tropics warm faster than Antarctica. Those winds drive relatively warmer water up under glaciers, causing them to melt. Structural characteristics of certain glaciers of West Antarctica render them particularly vulnerable; degeneration of the West Antarctic ice sheet will likely raise sea levels by at least four feet in the near future, a process NASA describes as “unstoppable.” Meanwhile the Totten Glacier in East Antarctica is taking on warm water through two gateways. The glacier holds back land ice three-quarters the size of Texas; if it melts, sea levels could rise by a further eleven feet.

  On March 24, 2015, a record-high recorded temperature of 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit was logged at Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. New varieties of fungi are cropping up in Antarctica, buoyed by such warmer temperatures; the number of fungal varietals could be up by a quarter by the end of the twenty-first century. Such fungi could support an onslaught of invasive species. Warmer weather has made Antarctica an attractive destination for king crabs, which may pose significant risk to other sea animals that lack defenses against them. Melting glaciers deposit iron in the water, which is good for phytoplankton, which is in turn good for penguins, but which also significantly disrupts the ecosystem.

  The ban on polar mining established by the Antarctic Treaty expires in 2048. The Chinese have already built four research stations on the frozen continent and are working on a fifth. China is harvesting vast quantities of krill from Antarctic waters. Liu Shenli, the chairman of the China National Agricultural Development Group, said, “The Antarctic is a treasure house for all human beings, and China should go there and share.” China has recently signed a five-year accord with Australia that permits vessels to refuel before continuing south; that pact will enable the Chinese to harvest sea life, exploit the continent’s abundant oil and mineral resources, and obtain fresh water from icebergs. Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, said, “China is playing a long game in Antarctica,” adding that the wish to initiate mining operations there has been broadcast “loud and clear to domestic audiences.”

  INDONESIA

  * * *

  When Everyone Signs

  Far from the Tree, 2012

  Nicholas Evans, an Australian linguist I met in 2006 when we were on a shared fellowship program, told me about a village in Bali where a hereditary strain of deafness had led to the development of a deaf-normative culture, and I had long wanted to visit. After the frustrations of our Antarctica trip, John and I were pleased to stop in Bali on the way home so that I could pursue this research.

  When I described Bengkala as an idyll in Far from the Tree, some readers supposed I was enthusing
about the primitive lives of noble savages. I would never want to gloss over the struggles of people in villages such as this one. It is utopian only from a disability-rights perspective. Deaf people the world over experience social exclusion; a society in which everyone can sign responds to a common dream of shared fluency even if that idyll is circumscribed by the toil of subsistence farming in an impoverished locale.

  * * *

  In the small village of Bengkala in northern Bali, a congenital form of deafness has persisted for some 250 years; at any time, it affects about 2 percent of the population. Everyone in Bengkala has grown up with deaf people and knows the unique sign language used in the village, so the gap between the experience of hearing and deaf people is narrower than perhaps anywhere else in the world. I found that where deafness is commonplace, it is not much of a handicap. Deaf and hearing people marry each other freely, and people are essentially as happy with a deaf child as with a hearing one.

  Bengkala is also known as Desa Kolok, or Deaf Village. When I went in 2008, forty-six of the village’s two thousand residents were deaf. I met hearing parents with deaf children, deaf parents with hearing children, deaf families with deaf parents and children, deaf or hearing parents with a mix of deaf and hearing children. It’s a poor village, and the general education level is low, but it has been even lower among the deaf. The only education for deaf people supplied by the government was in a signed version of Indonesian, and the only school for the deaf in Bali was in the capital, Denpasar. Signed Indonesian uses an aural grammar to dictate a sequence of signs; people whose grammar is primarily visual find it difficult to learn. Kanta, a hearing teacher in the village, introduced a program in 2007 to educate the deaf of Bengkala in their own sign language, Kata Kolok; the first deaf class had pupils from ages seven to fourteen because none had had any previous formal education. They were learning fingerspelling for Balinese words and were also working on numeracy.