Into the Cold: Antarctica travels to Minneapolis

Don't we look like cousins? Katy Jensen on the left, me on the right. We read together from Antarctica: Life on the Ice on November 11 at Mager's and Quinn (a fabulous bookstore--both new and used) on a balmy early evening in Minneapolis. Katy--whose essay is about wintering at the South Pole--finds Minneapolis too cold...

We had an extraordinary audience. My real cousins Polly and Deborah Talen were there with their three girls Grace, Lydia, and Eliza (in reverse order of age). Polly is the funniest woman alive and Deborah is a founder of Rainbow Families. Victoria Nohl, a former student from Bard, showed up still looking like Queenie (her name while at Bard). But most of the standing-room only crowd was Katy's family and step-family. They stretched back into the stacks of books and listened, enraptured, while Katy read her beautiful and emotionally complex essay. When I first met Katy it was through her essay, which has an amazing grace and intelligence to it. Meeting her was that rare moment of person living up to their writing...and then adding that special something that comes only with sitting down and having tea with someone.

Here is Katy's account of the reading, which I post with a blush.

Katy writes: "For

me, there were two best things about the event at Magers and Quinn. One was

the overwhelming range of emotions associated with being on “this side” of

a reading... from apprehension to acceptance to the rushes of adrenaline

that kept me awake all night. But my favorite best thing

about the event was finally meeting Susan in person. Nobody understood how

we could have collaborated on a book without even talking on the phone, but

when we stepped into Lucia’s for tea, I felt like it was something we did

every week. And when the ball of leaves in my tea glass expanded into a magical

flower, it was both wondrous and appropriate. Susan has that effect on people:

she disarms them with candor and then delights them with vivid adventures.

I can’t wait to see what’s next!"

And I can't wait to see what's next for Katy, who has just started working for Lockheed Martin. She shared one story of meeting an astronaut she admired. She was a bit tongue-tied until he shook her hand and said, "I never thought I'd meet someone who has been to the South Pole." Katy hasn't just been to the South Pole, she has spent more than four years in Antarctica, including three winters at the South Pole, where, for two seasons she was the station’s first female area manager.

Here is a cool fact about the Antarctic: geographical features can be named for living people (unlike in the rest of the world where you must be dead to be remembered in this way). Five contributors to Antarctica: Life on the Ice have features named after them: Uberuaga Island, Joyce Peak, Ainley Peak, Guthridge Nunataks and for Katy, Jensen Rampart, a set of cliffs in the Darwin Mountains. Some day she hopes to visit her cliffs. And I want to tag along.

You can read more about naming on the continent in an Antarctic Sun article from November 12, 2000.

Antarctica: Life on the Road

Antarctica: Life on the Ice hit the road this past weekend. First stop: Boulder, Colorado where I read with Traci Macnamara and Beth Bartel.

Traci brought a blow-up globe so that everyone would know where the

Antarctic is (not "up there with the polar bears"). She read from her

essay about spending Thanksgiving on the ice, while Beth read from her

essay that describes her time spent on Mt. Erebus. They were both

stars. In the audience were a lot of ice people, including Elaine Hood,

from Raytheon who was my guardian angel during my trip. And then there were friends and fellow writers BK Loren and Sallie Greenwood. Christine Weeber, who contributed to Solo: On Her Own Adventure showed up, as did Jenny Dellaport, from my hometown of State College, PA! Watch for news of more readings at my website: www.susanfoxrogers.com

Karen Joyce: Frozen Hard and Thawed Out

A storm has been walloping Antarctica for the past few days. Karen Joyce, intrepid to the end, has ventured out to take this photograph. I wish I’d been there…

The contributors to Antarctica: Life on the Ice lead fascinating lives. From time to time I’ll track them down and find out what they are doing.

Karen, who contributed a hilarious essay, “The Day It Rained Chickens,” to Antarctica: Life on the Iceis currently in McMurdo, as she has been for the past 17 years during the austral summer. She will be joining us live from the Antarctic for our virtual book tour on November 29.

“It's strange how much I love this place, even though I

am absolutely the wrong body type for Antarctica. Cold places select

for gigantism, for a ratio of surface area to interior space that

maximizes the latter, and I am a wee peanut of a woman. I have been

frozen hard and thawed out so many times, I ought to be a quaking

gelatinous mess by now.”

Karen should be working on her second novel, The Winter of My Discount

Tent but instead, this is what she reports from the ice:

“I dream

about missing airplanes, traveling in unrecognizable countries, always

enroute somewhere and there is always trouble. I suffer this job for 10 hours a day and in the evening I paint, teach

exercise classes, write and drink single-malt Scotch. For the first

time in my life, I count the days till I can leave, but I don't know

where I want to go. That's it in a nutshell.”

'Antarctica: Life on the Ice' Hits the Street!!!

Antarctica: Life on the Ice is the just-released anthology that I collected and edited to bring you first-hand stories of those who devote their lives to the most beautiful and cruel environment on the planet -- Antarctica. Inside you will meet explorers, penguinologists, geologists, iceologists, cooks, pilots and others who have been drawn, almost mystically, to life at the bottom of the world.

In the 2004-2005 austral summer, I spent six weeks in the Antarctic as part of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Based at McMurdo Station, I also visited the South Pole, several camps in the Dry Valleys and Cape Royds. When I was a young girl, my father regaled me with stories of the Antarctic. To walk the terrain and visit the outposts of explorers like Scott and Cherry-Garrard was the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

Following is an excerpt from my Introduction to  Antarctica: Life on the Ice (Click here for the full Introduction and Table of Contents):

In the austral summer of 2005, I made a day trip by helicopter to

Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island. This was

Scott’s base in 1910, the expedition that ended with his death and the

death of four of his crew. The story of this expedition is one of the

saddest in Antarctic history and is my favorite, so to visit the hut

where they lived was a sort of pilgrimage. The hut was busy with a crew

of New Zealand men digging out ice from its south side.  I

knew how the ice piled up there as I had read about it in Scott’s

journals and in Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s marvelous account of Scott’s

final expedition, The Worst Journey in the World. The men handed me a

pickax and for a while I chipped away with them with the great sense

that this small gesture connected me to the past, even to heroism. Soon

enough, though, this heroic traveler was tired, so I gave up my digging

and wandered into the hut.

Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light I stood, overwhelmed by what had

been left there: cans of collard greens and bottles of medical supplies

above Dr. Wilson’s bed; reindeer sleeping bags and finneskos (the

Norwegian-style boots). When I looked closely I could see that the

leather soles were peeling away. The daily lives of these explorers I

so admired became clear to me as I looked at Cherry-Garrard’s bunk bed,

and noted where Ponting processed his photos. When I saw toothbrushes

propped in glasses at the head of some of the men’s beds I wanted to

weep. For me, their lives were contained in those toothbrushes.

Daily details allow me to imagine a place and the bigger the place, the

more I need those details. Lucky for me, Scott’s narratives are filled

with passages like this from his 1901 expedition: “The first task of

the day is to fetch the ice for the daily consumption of water for

cooking, drinking and washing. In the latter respect we begin to

realize that many circumstances are against habits of excessive

cleanliness, but although we use water very sparingly, an astonishing

amount of washing is done with it, and at present the fashion is for

all to have a bath once a week.

A bath a week in melted ice water--for almost two years. With this sort

of detail the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration is brought down to

the basics. What they ate, how they slept and other facts of daily life

make up much of the 1,200 pages of Scott’s narrative of his 1901

expedition. Readers are dragged through days of manhauling; along with

Scott and his men we suffer great cold and eat a lot of hoosh and

biscuits. It is these details that are the foundation their great feats.

What is remembered is the tragic manner in which Scott and his men died

in 1911, eleven miles from a food supply on their return from the pole.

A cross rests at the top of Observation Hill above McMurdo marking the

deaths of Scott, Bowers, Wilson, Evans and Oates. On it is inscribed

Tennyson’s great line: To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

When I arrived at the top of Observation Hill, breathless in the thin

clear air, tears emerged spontaneously and unexpectedly. I realized

that the cross told the same story as that contained in their

toothbrushes. I looked at the Ross Sea, made sure no one else was

nearby, and kissed the cross. (Click here for the full Introduction and Table of Contents)