Brother in Ice
Page 4
Captain Shackleton’s expedition (1914–1917) named his ship Endurance, in reference to his family motto “Fortitudine Vincimus,” which means: “Through Endurance, We Conquer.” Beyond the conquest of new lands and the encounters with dangerous enemies, this was a journey into extreme weather conditions. As the ship’s name indicates, this was a feat that would put the crew’s physical and psychological endurance to the test.
Before setting off on their adventure, the personal diaries and images of the crew members had already been sold; Shackleton encouraged the twenty-seven crewmen to keep a journal on the ship. The expedition would be documented by Australian photographer Frank Hurley.
The ship captained by Shackleton set off toward Antarctica in August 1914. After more than eight months of sailing, they reached the cold southernmost seas; the deeper they got into the Weddell Sea, the slower they moved: immense masses of ice weighing thousands of tons blocked their way.
At seven in the evening, Greenstreet steered the Endurance between two large icebergs toward a stretch of open water. Halfway there, the ship hit one of the bergs and the other closed it in from behind. […] Six cold, cloudy days passed before the sky cleared on January 24. By that point, the Endurance was already surrounded by ice on all sides.4
4 Caroline Alexander, The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.
They were trapped for some eight months. Finally, on October 27, 1915, the wooden hull of the Endurance began to crack, making a sound similar to cannon balls crashing into the ship. A dejected Shackleton ordered his men to abandon ship. From that moment on the crew was adrift in lifeboats or on ice floes, until they reached Elephant Island on August 30, 1916.
After losing hope of rescue from Elephant Island, Shackleton set sail with five men in a small boat, seven meters long, the James Caird, to search for help on South Georgia Island, located 1,300 kilometers away. Sailing through twelve-meter-high waves for fourteen days, they finally managed to reach terra firma. When they got to South Georgia, they realized they were at the island’s south coast, which was uninhabited. The two extremes of the island are separated by a mountain chain with peaks higher than 3,000 meters, which at that point were yet to be explored. Three of the five men undertook this second journey, without any equipment. They added a few nails from the ship to the soles of their shoes and headed off through the mountains and glaciers without even stopping to sleep. The journey took thirty-six hours and Shackleton, who did not consider himself a believer, declared that he felt they were accompanied by a fourth traveler. After a difficult descent that included climbing down a frozen waterfall, they could make out the whaling port of Husvik. Once there, they were able to ask for help, though the challenging weather meant the first three rescue attempts, with three different vessels, failed. The British Government was busy with World War I and did not send aid. Finally they made it on the fourth try, with a ship they’d rented at Punta Arenas, Chile, rescuing the remaining twenty-two crew members, all still alive. By that time, those on the expedition had spent nine months surrounded by ice in the most adverse of conditions. In a letter to his wife, Shackleton wrote: “Damn the Admiralty. I wonder who is responsible for their attitude to me. Not a life lost and we have been through Hell.”
Artificial Snow
The young nuclear physicist Ukichiro Nakaya arrived at the University of Hokkaido in 1932. Hokkaido is the northernmost island of Japan, and as such the closest to the Okhotsk Sea. The Physics Department had meager research funds and equally scant facilities. The only thing they seemed to have in abundance on Hokkaido was ice. In fact today it is known as a skiing destination. Taking advantage of what was on hand, Nakaya began to research ice crystals. Snow forms in nature when a drop of water or steam freezes inside a cloud around a suspended particle (such as a bit of dust or pollen). When frozen, the drop of water becomes a crystal in the shape of a hexagonal prism. This transition process is called “reverse sublimation” and describes the direct conversion from the gaseous state of the steam to the solid state of the snow crystals. Snow can form in the atmosphere at or below 0°C when there is a minimum of humidity. It is never too cold for snow; it forms at extremely low temperatures. The six arms of a snow crystal reflect the internal order of water molecules. Which is why the six points of the hexagon appear in the process of crystallization. The way these branches grow depends on the atmospheric conditions (temperature, pressure, amount of water …), and that variation leads the flakes to take on semi-random shapes that are always different; there are no two identical snowflakes. They typically measure about a centimeter and a half, even though there are recorded cases of snowflakes as big as five centimeters in diameter. The first person who photographed these crystals was Wilson Bentley, a farmer in Vermont, in 1885. After many unsuccessful attempts, Bentley managed to attach a microscope to a camera in order to capture the phenomenon. He amassed a collection of 5,000 images, and is the father of photomicrography, the photography of objects invisible to the naked eye.
Ukichiro Nakaya in his laboratory, 1938.
Nakaya took three thousand photomicrographs of snow crystals, allowing him to establish a general classification of the shapes, which he subdivided into forty-one types.
One day in his lab, Ukichiro Nakaya found a snowflake on the tip of a rabbit hair on his jacket. As if in a strange variation on Alice’s search, it was a rabbit—albeit a dead one sewn onto a coat—that pointed the way toward the creation of artificial snow. Following its trail, the young scientist copied the temperature and humidity conditions in his laboratory at the moment the snowflake formed. On March 12, 1936, Nakaya created the first artificial snowflake, again on a rabbit hair. Up until that point, there had been numerous famous scientists and philosophers who had taken an interest in the phenomenon of snow crystals. The first ones were described by the Chinese in the second century BC. Subsequent attempts to address this problem in a more systematic way were carried out by the scientific philosophers of the seventeenth century in the West. Johannes Kepler began in 1611 with his treatise “On the Six-Cornered Snowflake,” followed by Descartes, and then Robert Hooke, who enjoyed the advantages of the latest technological advance—the microscope—and to whom we owe the first detailed drawings.
In The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination—whose title sums up my fascinations of the last two years—Eric G. Wilson speaks about the strange obsession of some thinkers with snowflakes: Emanuel Swedenborg, a hero of the Romantics who spoke with angels, began his career as a crystallographer. He had the theory that ice crystals reveal the inner laws of the universe. In 1721, before his attentions became captivated by heavens and hells, Swedenborg wrote The Principles of Chemistry. In this work he put forth a theory that was taken up by eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century scientists: the tiny geometries of snowflakes are portals to the essence of the cosmos. Thoreau concluded that the crystals, despite their cold geometry, are emanations of a vital principle, thus he perceived a comfortable regularity in the crystals’ delicate structure; the world as a geometric organ.
Nakaya described his first experiments with snow in this way:
I recall that, in our artificial snow experiments, there were some failures. We were therefore delighted to find similar mishaps in natural snow. In preparing papers for presentation we select only the photographs of well-formed crystals we have made, but in fact there were, and still are, a considerable number of failures. There are times when a crystal that starts on the right track will suddenly make an unexpected turn and assume a shape that defies any attempt at categorization. Such oddities that cannot be identified as crystals are considered failures, and we must start all over again.
However, if you look at natural snow with that perspective, you can find similar weird forms. After you discover one irregularity you notice others, one after another, at various stages of development, showing that natural snow is also capable of failure—to our great relief.
5 Ukichiro Nakaya, an excerpt from Snow Postscripts. Translation by Keiko Murata.
The islands of Antarctica named after Nakaya.
Ukichiro Nakaya had three daughters: Fujiko, Sakiko, and Miyoko. Fujiko Nakaya, born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, in 1933, is an artist known for her sculptural fog installations, or environments, that she began making in the seventies. Going against her father’s geometric order, Fujiko enlisted the same medium, water vapor, to create spaces where geometry is erased and shapes lose their name.
Man in Ice II
Unlike the clichés about autism, my brother doesn’t hit his head against walls or avoid physical contact. He’s simply passive; when he’s hungry he doesn’t go to the fridge, and when he’s tired he doesn’t go to bed. If we didn’t tell him what to do, he would remain blocked indefinitely. So, from when he gets up until when he goes to sleep, he has to be told to do every action, or it has to be done for him. We don’t know what is going on inside of him. It seems to me that in his brain the fissure is an obstacle between the I and the you, between one action and the next. Like a video streaming online, when the internet connection isn’t fast enough, sometimes his actions freeze up. The doctor told us about a problem with neurotransmitters that makes him unable to hug us or ask how we are. It means it takes him at least half an hour to tie his shoes. It means that he might stop in the middle of closing a door. M stutters, as if there were also snow between one syllable and another.
“Mo-mo-mo-mo-mom, should I go to the bathroom?”
He stutters, on average, about four times before saying the whole word. When he eats a salad, he leaves the olive pits lined up, one by one, on the side of the plate. At the end of the meal we have: his plate and cup lined up, his silverware parallel at the same distance, olive pits in a line perpendicular to the silverware and at the height of the cup forming a horizontal line. Pure constructivism.
The Heroic Age
The so-called heroic age of polar expedition—taken as stretching from the last decade of the nineteenth century to Captain Shackleton’s death in 1922—coincided with the development of photographic cameras and the invention of cinema, so it’s not surprising that many polar explorers saw the potential of this new medium as a research tool. There are a series of films from this period, though they’ve received little attention from historians of documentary film. Unlike other, more recent conquests—like the conquest of space—the polar explorers left behind a large quantity of documents of unquestionable scientific value, which often are testament to the literary talents of their authors. One of the survivors of the Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica (1911–1912), Apsley Cherry-Garrard said: “Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.”
This age of polar exploration basically began in order to showcase nations’ achievements. The conquest of a moving point became a race, sometimes with rather dubious scientific aims. The representation of man in a hostile environment was depicted romantically; the sublime landscapes were the backdrop to a masculine epic journey whose only enemy was the harsh weather.
Both the Inuit guides, who led so many men to the North Pole, and the women, who waited, accompanied or spurred on the expeditions, got left somewhere beneath the snow.
Research Notes IV
August 26, 2012
Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, has died. His obituary says that it is our mission to conquer Mars for the coming generations.
August 27, 2012
It’s hot but I’m talking about snow.
August 30, 2012
News item:
Today Scott’s ship, the Terra Nova, was found in Greenland. Some scientists who were carrying out underwater tests with sonar detected an object fifty-seven meters long. One of them, a fan of the history of that expedition, suspected that it could be the famed boat that left England to conquer the South Pole. The article has an embedded video. In it, you can blurrily watch a probe exploring a very dark marine floor. At first all you see are well-lit plankton particles, eventually very decomposed pieces of wood appear. Disturbing the Terra Nova in its white tomb seems like sacrilege to me.
September 15, 2012
Lately something unprecedented has been happening: my brother, who is generally passive and calm, gets enraged when he can’t unbutton his pants, or shave himself. Then he picks up whatever’s nearby, throws it, and cries. Only my mother has seen it happen; she told me about it recently, with concern.
My brother will outlive my parents, who fear for his future. Making sense of all this, when you don’t believe in God, is difficult. I imagine my brother in other time periods, in other families. Would the Inuit have abandoned him on the ice? Would he have lived to middle age? Would he have been put in an institution, fifty years ago? What responsibility do I have in all this?
November 12, 2012
News item:
Two people die, an eighty-two-year-old mother and her forty-year-old daughter. The mother’s death from natural causes is followed by her disabled daughter’s death: of starvation. Did they live alone, isolated, at the North Pole? No, they lived in my country.
Miss Boyd Land
In 1955 Louise Boyd became the first woman to fly over the Earth’s rotational axis. At sixty-eight years old, she hired a private plane with expert pilots and headed for the North Pole. This wasn’t the whim of a rich old lady; since 1926, she had led seven polar expeditions of great geographic, scientific and strategic value. Boyd, whose last name is reminiscent of “void,” explored still-unknown corners of the Arctic map. She specialized in the northeastern region and in the sea floor of Greenland, which she measured and photographed with the era’s most modern technology. To show their appreciation, the Danish government named a region of the Arctic that she discovered Louise Boyd Land. Her publications, photographs and films are still used today to evaluate the effects of climate change on the Arctic.
Born in San Rafael, California, the daughter of gold-mine owners, Louise grew up in Marin County, north of San Francisco, with her two brothers, Seth and John. When she was a teenager, both her brothers died of heart disease in a short span of time. Her parents were devastated and invested all their hopes in their daughter.
At twenty-two she was already heading up the family investment company. At thirty, in 1919, Louise bought a car and crossed the entire United States in an era when there were no highways and many roads were still unpaved. Her parents both died soon after, before 1920 was out. Rich and orphaned, she threw herself into the social scene. But she soon grew bored with that, and the dream that she’d had since childhood of seeing the North kept coming back. In 1924, she set out on a series of trips to the Arctic, starting in Norway, where for the first time she saw the fjords touching the polar cap. In that journey to the coasts of Spitsbergen, when she glimpsed the masses of ice in the distance, she said: “I want to be there, looking out, instead of out here looking in.” Am I looking out or am I looking in? I wonder, as I see myself reflected in those words. Are we reading ourselves, when we read others? Are we looking in or out when we write?
I go back to the facts and the documents: one of her photographs on the internet shows a glacier flanked by two mountains. The white tongue that slides between them transcends the coldness of the frozen matter; its sinuous form—semi-liquid, semi-solid—slithers along, like a silent, sexual licking of the known world by the uncharted.
Boyd was drawn to the conquest of the void. In this photograph the victor is the unknown, indeed the immeasurable, which invades the solidity of the landscape.
This epic voyage to delimit the abyss by someone who had lost all points of reference highlights the fou
ndational nature of house and family, as a centripetal or centrifugal force. Like a home, like a refuge, like a battlefield, or like a haunted house.
The Continuity of Pools
Secretly I’ve always thought that all the swimming pools in the world are interconnected. Depending on the hemisphere where they’re located, their waters filter through underground veins toward the Arctic continent or Antarctica. The melting of the floes brings them back together and sends them into the sea, where they gather in desalination plants before finally returning to ponds, reservoirs, and municipal pools. That same water is filtered through us daily, making up seventy percent of our bodies. Imbibed and instinctively expelled to the tune of two liters a day, it leaves us through our urine, tears, excrement, saliva, sweat, and the steam we exhale through our mouths and skin. Each of our eighty-six billion brain cells is made up primarily of liquid, without which we would progressively lose consciousness. So we could say that our consciousness is comprised of seventy percent water; oceans, lakes, rivers, pools continue through us and filter into the depths of our thought. The other thirty percent—permanent dry residue—is completely renewed every seven years. Hardly anything remains of you besides the continuity of your history, that which you manage to retain despite the constant pillaging of your physical body, an extremely fragile, permeable barrier that is traversed each and every day by rivers, waterfalls, continents, multitudes.