Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The first attraction on our monthlong itinerary, two days later, was the Snares, some of the sparse scatter of subantarctic islands between New Zealand and Antarctica. The Snares pulse with such dense birdlife that every path disrupts nesting or breeding grounds, so we toured in Zodiacs and saw the charming endemic crested penguins. Back on board, my partner, John, and I mingled with the other forty-six passengers, including two other Americans, one Canadian, one guy from Costa Rica, and a smattering of New Zealanders, Australians, white Zimbabweans and Namibians, and Brits. Sailing onward, we ran into forty-foot swells, which made me feel like a washcloth endlessly stuck in a tumble dryer; the Professor Khromov’s ice capacities, we learned, meant a loss of stability in rough seas. We figured out how to wedge our possessions so that the sound of laptops smashing into cameras was muted by sweaters and thermal underwear. Even in the relative safety of your cabin, your head would at times ram into one end of your bunk, compressing the neck, then your feet would ram into the other and compress the knees. I had hoped to lose weight, not height, during an athletic adventure in challenging climates.

Enderby Island, the first shore stop, stayed mercifully fixed in one place, as islands tend to do. The entire landmass is covered in scrub: forests of flowering shrubs; other thick, prickly plants that cling to the cold, hard earth; and a variety of tufted grasses that were beautiful to view and hard to navigate. We saw a stupefying array of birds, including skuas, several species of albatross, and the occasional yellow-eyed penguin. We came across Hooker’s sea lions everywhere, and you could see why they were called lions: they were the size of refrigerators, with ruffed collars, and if you came too close to them—as you sometimes did given all the undergrowth—they would lift up their heads and roar. Something about their decision to skip the beach and plop themselves in the thickets was surreal, as though they were trying to trick you into believing that they were properly land animals. They would periodically raise themselves up on their four flippers and walk laboriously across the grass, ponderous and deliberate as old donkeys.

More rough seas led us two days later to Macquarie Island, a nature reserve with a small research station that allows only a few hundred visitors a year. Its shoreline is carpeted in wildlife: royal, king, gentoo, and rockhopper penguins, as well as elephant seals. The penguins gather around you curiously, and if you hold out a hand to one of the royals, he will nibble on your finger. Using their flipper-like wings primarily to gesticulate, nodding back and forth to each other as they ran around, the penguins looked like commuters milling about Grand Central before their departure track has been announced, some of them molting like elderly women in moth-eaten fur coats. More than two hundred thousand breeding pairs of king penguins live at one end of the island, packed in conditions that make Tokyo look roomy. The seals tended to plop on top of one another, forming the sort of pyramids that high school cheerleaders perfected in the 1950s. The young ones had inconceivably sweet faces with huge, liquid eyes; the older males had long, knobby, trunk-like noses, wobbling and battle scarred.

We had passed through the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties of latitude, a circumpolar storm belt, and now we were ready for the protracted crossing of the Southern Ocean, where no substantial landmasses slow the winds whipping around the globe. Rodney held a competition to guess when we’d see the first iceberg; the ship’s bird expert counted off species at sea; and the immanence of the seventh continent was great in us. Shackleton attracts Gurdjieff-like devotion, and the ship was awash in experts on polar exploration. The waves gradually gave up the bright, rough quality they’d had in the subantarctic; the water grew thick and sluggish, almost like the muscles of a slow-moving colossus rippling under taut skin. On January 12, we found ourselves in a jigsaw puzzle of floating pack ice, the dark lines of the water sketching through snow-dusted shards like a great black spiderweb.