Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Rodney’s eyes filled with tears as he explained how hard it was for him to fail, as though his situation warranted the primary sympathy. At first everyone was terribly British and stiff upper lips were kept and socks were pulled up, but many passengers later admitted to crying in their cabins that day, as if the warm saline of their tears could melt the frozen brine in our way. A few ascended into sanctimonious homilies about how inspiring it was to be reminded that one couldn’t always get what one wanted from nature. Then someone asked the obvious question: If we were not going to Antarctica, what exactly were we going to do for the next fifteen days? Rodney said he hadn’t really thought about it. “What do you want to do?” he asked. It was folly to offer a vote to a group of travelers who were neither united nor informed. Before long, desperate and obscure proposals were flying around the room.

The Professor Khromov filled up with contagious sadness. It was not a grand or opulent trip, but it was an exceedingly expensive one to which people had made very profound commitments. Conrad’s family had saved for eight years to give him this trip as a fiftieth birthday present. Lynne, who had done a previous trip with Heritage, had persuaded her husband and five of their friends to join this great adventure. Nick’s mother had asked him on her deathbed to take the little inheritance she could leave and spend it on his childhood dream of visiting Antarctica. Greg had used up all his vacation and some unpaid leave, and would not have time off again until 2009. Lauren had given up her retirement and worked an entire year to pay for her trip with Stephen. And the cool kids—Dean, José, Glenn, John, and Carol—were professional crew on high-level yachts and had signed up for this expedition three years earlier, exhausting their savings. There was something Shakespearean about the disappointment, and nothing could be done about it. The British tendency to make the best of a bad situation butted up against the American habit of pursuing impossible dreams. The British and New Zealanders tended to think we had been given lemons and had best make lemonade. The Aussies, Americans, and Africans thought we had been given lemons and might as well throw them at the authors of our frustration.

The first night after the surrender, only a few of us stood sentinel to look at the endless expanses of sea ice. Yet in a way, it was hard to believe how disappointed we all felt to be in this strange world. Out on the deck, I was lost in the wonderment of where we were as much as in the sorrow of where we weren’t, because the so-called midnight sun had made a spectacular debut at about ten o’clock and gilded a mackerel sky over the hummocky meringue of the furrowed ice. There were mammals and seabirds to see, and we vied to document them with our many digital cameras—the rare Ross seal and the common Adélie penguins alike. The Adélies were scattered, one here and four there, and sat complacently on their islets of sea ice until our boat was almost upon them, then belly-flopped into the water. The snow petrels circled us, resembling, when the sun caught their white feathers, images of the Holy Spirit in Northern Renaissance paintings. If you stood on the metal steps so that you could lean over the prow, you could catch your own prismatic reflection in the shiniest bits of broken ice before the ship sundered them. The air itself was a purifying tonic.

Yet some churlishness in us couldn’t be satisfied with the permanent light of the white nonworld in which we were hopelessly adrift, short of our last continent and outside of time. It is true in general, but especially true of travel, that people are thrilled with anything extra and distraught about anything expected and missed. You may never have heard of the pudding-toed tree chameleon or the Cloister Court of St. Yvette, but when your guide tells you that you’ve been privileged with a rare sighting of the lizard, or that you are catching the nunnery open at the whim of the sisters, you are elated. When the opposite happens, you feel not just disappointed but betrayed. You curse yourself for having spent so much money on an experience you’re not having. You resent in advance the refrain that will begin “Well, actually, we didn’t get there.”