And now there came
both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold.
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
I first read those words, and the rest of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” when I was 13 years old. I was feeling pretty bad at the time — convinced that I was smelly, ugly, uncoordinated, and geeky. In my darkest moments, I dreamed of entering a convent. Nuns, after all, aren’t expected to have dates.
It was in this dark mood that I first began to study works of horror. I started with Edgar Allan Poe, introduced to him by a teacher with a pinched and pale face. Before long, I moved from Poe’s morbid murders and live burials to the stories of Hector Hugh Munro, more commonly known as Saki. Saki had an odd sensibility. He seemed to know about everything, from the habits of wolves and ferrets to the fondest dreams of children. Where Poe’s ironies brought pity on his characters, Saki’s ironies were bright, fierce, and unapologetic. His characters got what they deserved, and I loved it. From there I moved to Ray Bradbury, a master at transforming the benign and familiar — one’s beloved English teacher, say, or a common mushroom — into the fatal unknown. And from there to the writer many see as the greatest creator of raw terror who has ever lived, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. For Lovecraft, life was an alien thing that could never be understood. Anyone so foolish or unlucky as to glimpse the real world would lose his sanity. These ideas had great appeal to me, a teenager in misery.
It was at about this time that I came across “The Rime.” I read it, spent a week memorizing it and imagining it in light of all I had learned from the masters of horror, as a place that could not be sullied by humans and their small concerns; an expanse of ice, powerful, terrifying and uncaring by nature, yet oh so beautiful. “The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, / The southward aye we fled… / And through the drifts the snowy clifts / Did send a dismal sheen. / Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken– / The ice was all between.”
So began my fascination with Antarctica.
It grew and changed over time. I gave up my dream of a convent in favor of others, among them to become someone who did something great enough to earn a place in history — an astronaut, an explorer. I read whatever I could find about the early Antarctic explorers — Amundsen, Scott, Byrd, and of course, Sir Ernest Shackleton. Alfred Lansing’s immortal story, Shackleton’s Valiant Voyage kept me up many a night, first the reading itself, and then the imagining.
By and by, these dreams changed, too. I had bad eyes, which meant I could forget about going to Mars. Marriage changed things as well. In love, in a way I once thought I would never know, I had no wish to leave my mate. Motherhood made me careful. So careful that yielding to the pull of perilous places seemed, for a time, out of the question. So I spent my life, dreaming and writing, from time to time, of life aboard a small ship in the ice, of rising in the dark to the green glow of the aurora, all of it receding steadily from the realm of possibility as I grew older.
But two years ago, still married, my child grown and gone, I found my life inexplicably turning toward the poles. A friend asked us to go camping in Alaska with her. I yielded grudgingly. Horror writers tend to imagine the worst, and all I could think of was mosquitoes the size of sparrows and grizzly bears with large teeth. But when we got there, I found it magical. It was summer. The sun never went down. Caribou came within feet of us, staring curiously. The conifers were five feet high. We went again the next summer.
Then, out of the blue, an email came. “Would you be interested in joining an expedition to Antarctica? Your job would be to write a book about it.”
What other answer could there be but Yes. Oh yes!
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I have been reading about things Antarctic. Have particularly been enjoying Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of Robert Falcon Scott’s last attempt to reach the South Pole, aptly named The Worst Journey in the World. This is a photo of Charles Seymour Wright, a member of the expedition (and one of the lucky fellows who found Scott’s frozen remains some time later) upon his return from the South. What must he have seen, to look like that?
Teeth are frightening. It has been said that they are a glimpse of the skull leering at us, half hidden. And they are certainly a source of pain. Let them go, and they become infested with aching rot. Keep after them and you are doomed to the pokings, proddings, and drillings of the dentist.
So how, as one friend of mine put it, did I manage to get this amazing gig? I’m always tempted to answer blind luck. Because it often feels that way — as if I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. When I can think about it calmly (not very often), I realize there was probably a little more to it than that, but not much. In point of fact, I still don’t know exactly how it happened, though I expect I will know soon. I can only make conjectures based on what information I have.