Antarctica is for Dreamers and Readers
World Hum is a marvelous website devoted to travel writing. Editor Jim Benning interviewed me yesterday--it was a fun conversation--about the Explorer sinking and about Antarctica: Life on the Ice. Here is the World Hum interview.
They have lots of wonderful material at World Hum, and in their dispatches they published Jason Anthony writing about the Antarctic: "A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth." This essay was selected for Best American Travel Writing, 2007.
Here is the opening of Jason's "AGO 1" from Antarctica: Life on the Ice:
November, 2000: After five seasons of fairly civilized Antarctic work, I took on a ominous job offered to me at the end of the polar summer by a drunken friend. Kip reeled across the floor of McMurdo Station’s darkened carpenter shop during its massive end-of-season party in February and shouted a slurred version of the question we all ask at the end of an Antarctic contract: “Hey man, are you coming back next year?” When I shrugged the shrug of the restless, he yelled “You should come back and work for AGO next year. It’s crazy!” AGO (pronounced like the end of “Winnebago”) is the Automated Geophysical Observatory program, the maintenance of which demands some of the most notorious work in the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). Kip had graduated to management, and would be doing the hiring.
Eight months later, I was back in McMurdo preparing to journey outward
with a few others to a string of isolated motes across the top of the
godforsaken East Antarctic ice cap. Bella, the lead groomer, and I
would be joining engineers Joe and Jack on journeys to AGO 1, AGO 4,
and AGO 5. Another team would be flying out to 2, 3, and 6. East
Antarctica is the coldest and most inaccessible geography on Earth, a
plateau of ice ranging from one to three miles deep, larger than the
United States and, except for a handful of people in government-issued
parkas, empty of land and life.