Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

We eventually reached icebergs. Many looked almost avant-garde; we saw the Frank Gehry iceberg and the Santiago Calatrava iceberg and the endearingly old-fashioned Frank Lloyd Wright iceberg, not to mention various Walmart and IKEA icebergs along the way. They put to rest the common wisdom that snow is white: snow is blue, with white reflections glinting off it in certain light, except that it is sometimes green or yellow, and very occasionally striated with pink. Caught in its glacial heart is the dense snow that absorbs all but the bluest light, that glows as if neon fragments of the tropical sky had been trapped in a southbound gale and transported here. The last tabular iceberg we approached marked our final farewell to the fantasy of Antarctica that had brought us together. It was the most beautiful we had visited, and the largest, and while we were close to it in our Zodiac, it calved a slab the size of a walk-up apartment, which plunged into the gelid sea with a roar worthy of the Fourth of July.

Among the islands of our funereally slow return, Campbell Island was a joy. The royal albatross nests there, and a group of us were privileged to see a rare changing of the guard, when the male comes to relieve the female from sitting on their egg, so she can fly out to sea and get food. After half an hour of affectionate mutual grooming, the female cautiously stepped off the nest and the male settled in for his long shift. Even the tour’s ornithologist had never seen this ritual before.

Otherwise, our strategy consisted largely of approaching an island to take in the view of its hills, then climbing the hills to look at the view of the boat, then returning to the boat for a last look at the hills. Rodney would charge ahead, leaving his older clients to struggle over steep and muddy ravines unassisted. People were crossing off the days: not that the islands were uninteresting, but Heritage offers tours of the subantarctic that last as little as a week and cost about $5,000 per person. This trip, by the time we had paid the various extras, had cost the magazine that sent us more than $40,000 for a double cabin, not including airfare to New Zealand or unreimbursed time away from work.

We waited for Rodney to propose at least a partial refund, or even to give us an open bar for one night, but it never came. When I confronted him, he said, “This trip has cost me as much as if we’d made it through.” That last evening, the weather was inconceivably lovely, and we stood in that bright warmth, so opposite to our purpose, and were depressed as hell by the clear blue sky, the shimmering water, the gentle beauty of the summery New Zealand shore.

We were like foreign visitors who had dreamed all their lives of seeing New York City and set off with that goal only to end up stuck in downtown Newark with no way home for a month. Disappointment had surged in waves. There was the initial shock. Then there was a lulled feeling that one couldn’t stay upset indefinitely, and the very real pleasure of seeing more than a hundred species of birds, some two dozen mammals, and a sea’s worth of ice. Finally, there was the sensation of getting off that boat without having done what we’d set out to do—a feeling of rage, failure, gullibility, self-blame, and doubt. We had boarded the vessel with the hopefulness of youth rekindled in us, and we came back with the disaffection of age.

Initially, we had viewed the informality of Heritage Expeditions as unpretentiousness and relished the aura of discovery that Rodney conjured. The Nimrod Centennial had turned into a disaster because a real problem in nature had coincided with equally real amateurism. We later learned that another boat, the Marina Svetaeva, faced with the same ice at the same time, had changed course and made an Antarctic landing in Commonwealth Bay. There was something lovely and fresh about Heritage’s bluster, something almost heartbreaking in the feeling that we were all in this together. We never quite felt that we were tourists who’d purchased services; we felt like strangers who had met in friendship and agreed to hold hands and stride boldly into the world’s greatest remaining wilderness. Traveling this way has a potent romance, but also risk, and for us, alas, the risk outstripped the romance. Had we reached the great white bottom of the world, I would have loved the very qualities that, in our failed trip, I deplored. Still, we had witnessed kinds of beauty that few men have seen. We held that warm happiness against the hard ice of our regret.