Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The ice fragments measured up to twenty feet across, in shapes that suggested an eagle, a Volkswagen Beetle, an emoticon, a relief map of Spain. Most climates have sunlight and shadow or else a neutral gray, but here we found an amplified, shadowless ice-white like a strobe. Some of the older ice wore an apron of turquoise just below the waterline, and a few of the icebergs had refracted pockets of cerulean. Elsewhere, much of what is beautiful can be seen in a glance, but what strikes the visitor to this area is the hostile, exquisite, primitive vastness of it, which you can interpret only by entering it. The world ends in ice. Russian crewmen stood at the prow looking out for thick obstructions, and the first mate directed us accordingly to port or starboard; the captain reviewed navigational charts from the bridge. The boat would ride up a little on the finer, floating ice, then the weight of the hull would bear down and the ice would crack open. Late that afternoon, we were all called onto the foredeck for mulled wine as we crossed the Antarctic Circle.

Heading south at about 180 degrees longitude, where seasonal currents usually facilitate passage through the Ross Sea, we entered the endless daylight of the antarctic high summer, and we stayed up that night and the next, many of us, until 2:30 a.m. to take it in. The morning that followed, January 14, we woke to bad news. At a “briefing” in the airless lecture room in the ship’s bowels, Rodney announced that the pack ice was thicker than expected, and that we had turned around at 3:00 a.m. to retrace our course so we could attempt to reenter the ice farther east. “The boat could have made it through the way we were going,” he said to us, “but we face a hundred and fifty miles of pack ice and were going just three knots.” My rudimentary math showed that this meant it would have taken us two more days to get through, and I wondered about the wisdom of losing a day going backward, but lack of experience rendered me mute. Dmitri, the captain, spoke next. “This boat not icebroker,” he said in his affectingly poor English. “This ice too much.”

Someone voiced our collective fear: “Is there a chance of our not getting through at all?”

Rodney’s face was ashen. “I have made thirty-six trips to the Antarctic, and I’ve always got through.” He spoke as though his oldest friend were standing him up for a dinner he had organized in its honor. When we went on deck, those great expanses of sea ice that had, when we’d first seen them, given us such joyous anticipation of the frozen world we had come to explore were now brooding and unwelcome barricades to our advance. Whereas we had once felt glee at the soft ka-thunk of the boat heaving against them, we now felt constant concern that we were in an icy cul-de-sac, stopped short of the tantalizingly proximate Ross Sea. Our sunny exchanges took on a forced quality, like comments about fine weather in a POW camp. Over the next day, we lived in a strange bunker-afloat mentality. We went down regularly for briefings in the lecture room, and Rodney would tell us what looked good in the ice maps, and Dmitri would tell us what looked bad, and some passengers would champion making a go of it and some would champion giving up.

The ship followed an iceward course at 178 degrees. At bedtime the third night following, the ship was rising up and sinking down on the ice, but we woke in a motionless vessel and obediently trooped down to the lecture room yet again. Rodney had been staying up until 3:00 a.m. every night to try to seduce or bully Dmitri into sticking the course; Dmitri wanted to go to bed by 3:00 a.m., and the passengers were out of the way by then, and so that was the ritual hour of the journey’s failures. To the casual observer, the ice we had been going through seemed much of a muchness, and the boat seemed to go through it now faster, now slower, but steadily. But once more at 3:00 a.m., the captain had declared the ice impassable. Rodney acknowledged that it was atypically dense for the season, but emphasized that the ship could do it. The captain, who had a distinctively Russian ability to be uncommunicative and melodramatic at the same time, said that the ice was “still too much” and shrugged. He said, “I try hardly,” which we feared might be more accurate than “I try hard,” which is what he had intended to say. It seemed we would not get through.