Looking for Antarctica

I nearly missed Antarctica. I was looking for something specific, something silent and empty, the ultimate study in white space. It showed up in the nick of time, just not where I’d been looking for it.

Eleven days out from Ushuaia — the southernmost tip of Argentina — on a Canadian Royal Geographical Society expedition ship headed for the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands, I was still looking. After landing on Cape Horn and walking into the magnificent wind, cruising among icebergs in a Zodiac dinghy to watch whales, landing at Vernadsky Research Station, buying picture postcards and English stamps to mail from Port Lockroy’s post office, and after exploring a caldera (the remains of a blown-out volcano) on Deception Island in the South Shetlands, I was still looking. I sensed that I was missing something vital, the thing I’d traveled all this way for.

By now I was intimately acquainted with the charming gentoo penguins and their less charming smells, and with the way the albatross soars and breaks your neck and your heart as you lean and crane in a vain attempt to follow it forever. I’d learned the many names for iceberg and the way the cliff-size bergs groan and crash as they calve and splash into the warming water beneath. I’d also become acquainted with the voices and voiceovers of the other eighty-nine passengers on the vessel who seemed incapable of living an experience without indulging the need to loudly narrate it for the benefit (or otherwise) of the rest of the ship and crew. I privately named these fellow passengers Thieves of the Silence. I was not amused.

At last I had the opportunity to retreat and observe, in peace and silence, the naked night sky above me. A small and blessedly quiet group of us opted for an overnight adventure, and just before dusk we trudged up the hillside of Useful Island, a tiny island in the Gerlache Strait, hauling sleeping bags, bivy sacks, dry packs, and shovels. We dug sleeping trenches in the hard-packed snow to protect ourselves from the wind, an endeavour that used up considerable energy, and by the time I’d settled into my bivy sack and sleeping bag, switched off my headlamp, taken a last look at the alien, thrilling landscape, I fell asleep in an instant.

I woke up shortly after midnight with a freezing cold, wet neck and a hood filled with fresh snow. I shook out my hood and fumbled in my sleeping bag for the contraband miniature of Johnny Walker that I’d smuggled ashore. I sat up in my makeshift bed, tipped back my head, and downed the whisky in a few burning gulps. I looked all around, slowly, and then up at the sky.  

Something was off.

The night was silent, other than a bird call that I didn’t recognize. The landscape was not empty, but the outlines of distant islands and the odd shapes of other human bundles in their various sleeping arrangements all made sense. Under the light of the waxing moon my icy hillside campground struck me as remarkably ordinary.

But the sky. The sky confused me. It was as close to black as navy blue can be — the deepest, most profound shade of beyond-midnight, shot through with miniature silver bullet holes in arrangements I’d never seen. At first I thought the sky was upside down, or that I was upside down. I thought about this for some time, sitting up in bed with a cold wet neck and a whisky-warmed throat. I wondered whether, at 64 degrees south, what I was seeing was in fact familiar constellations that had been rotated for my amusement or edification, or both. It was only mildly disarming. I lay awake feeling deeply relaxed, captivated by the night and engulfed in the comforting quiet.

I was captivated by a strange knowing that I was awake and alone in the night, quite at home at the end of the world, with a skyful of stars to entertain me. And it was so far from white, and not at all what I’d expected, yet so familiar. It was Antarctica. Here was Antarctica.