Where’s the Romance? [Dispatches from Antarctica]

13 October 2010, McMurdo Station, Antarctica: Where’s the romance?

I think you are a romantic. Now this is a very romantic age, so there is no room for romantics; it calls for practical men. A hundred years ago you would have made a banker or a professor and you could have worked out your romanticism by reading fanciful tales and dreaming about what you might have been if you hadn’t the misfortune to be born into a humdrum period. But this happens to be a period when adventure and romance are part of daily existence. Naturally it takes very practical people to cope with it.

– Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) from Tunnel in the Sky (orig 1955)

Antarctica is romantic, in the classical sense of adventure and exploration. The same way there’s a romance about flying and about the sea and about space travel. It’s romantic, that is, unless you’re actually here. If you’re here, you work. I suppose the point of this dispatch is to permit me to apologize for not aptly conveying the romance from Antarctica that I often feel about Antarctica.

Through these Dispatches I’ve attempted to describe the feeling of romance for the place that I feel when I am not here. There’s an element of artificiality about it that can’t be avoided. Like my compatriots, I’m here to work; to accomplish a mission.

Most days, I wear intellectual and emotional blinders [some call compartmentalization] that permit me to focus on the task at hand. To get the job done. Allowing myself the luxury of enjoying the moment, of feeling the romance, of smelling the polar roses as it were, would necessarily undermine my progress.

So I work. We all work. The default schedule is 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Daylight permits it and the mission requires it. Yet, each day there are moments. Moments when I catch a glimpse of a slanted fog bank full of ice crystals that make a circular rainbow [icebow?] around the sun. Moments at the top of a ridgeline when I can see glaciers and volcanoes and mountains out to near infinity. Moments when the stark beauty of this place literally takes away my breath. These are the moments I draw upon for inspiration when it comes time to write about being here. They are few. And I wish I could share them all with my wife and daughter.

I’ve learned that the longer I am away from Antarctica, the more romance it takes on in my mind. However, the longer I am here, the more pragmatism overcomes my being. That’s not to say that coming here is a disappointment or a let down. Not at all. The work is rewarding. Yet, coming here is transformational. This place changes people.

Such cycles of perception and change may have eventually settled down in the early heroic explorers, who describe the same place in very different terms.

Every day some new fact comes to light – some new obstacle which threatens the gravest obstruction. I suppose this is the reason which makes the game so well worth playing.

–Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912)

Superhuman effort isn’t worth a damn unless it achieves results.

–Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922)

To one degree or another, I believe we all have the capacity for romance and pragmatism.  Most of us carry on somewhere in the middle, rising to the occasion as needed to get through a tough challenge. People working in Antarctica seem on the surface to be more practically inclined.

If you believe Heinlein, and I do, romantic times and places require practical people. Taken one step further, one might argue that places like Antarctica, all at once majestic and beautiful, yet also cruel and unforgiving, force even the most romantic among us to find that inner practicality.

…More likely though, the pragmatic souls gathered here in the name of science seek just a few moments of peace, allowing the romance of this strange land to carry them away.

To that end, please enjoy the accompanying photos graciously provided by USAP participant Nate Peerbolt, and the rich Antarctic poetry offered by the former deputy commander, JTF-SFA, Col Ron Smith. I hope it carries you away.