Cold? Nah, not me!
Several time in the last few weeks I
have found myself playing the old geezer on the cracker barrel, spinning yarns
of times long past. I guess this is an
occupational hazard of senior citizenhood.
It may not be dignified, but it beats constantly snoozing in the
recliner. And, you can only waste so
much time thumbing through Facebook. So,
there being nobody around right now to inflict my memories upon, I decided it
would be amusing to write the history of my brief career as an Antarctic
Explorer.
Well, I wasn’t really an explorer, of
course – I was a lecturer on a cruise ship and, as an unwelcome adjunct duty,
an on-land cop and an all-purpose drinking buddy. I will explain.
I retired from teaching at the end of
1997. I continued to do research –
entirely for fun; nobody paid me, of course – until about 2005. That also was the period during which I
worked on the campus tree tour – identifying the campus trees, taking their
pictures, and writing short blurbs about them.
In case you like trees, you could
click on
But tree identification, thinking
about tectonic plates – even (especially) golf – grew boring after a few years, so I was
susceptible to temptation. One day I got one such from a notice on the Geology
Department bulletin board.
Seems one of our recent graduates had
landed a job with a tour company based in Seattle, called Society
Expeditions. Why it was called that was
never clear to me: had it been an offshoot of some Exploration Society, or did
it specialize (at one time) in tours of the Society Islands? I never found out, but it doesn’t matter,
anyway. They had one ship, called the
World Discoverer, a thoroughly gussified Korean car ferry that served very well
as an upscale tour boat. At any rate,
suddenly they found themselves without someone to lecture their passengers about
geology. Our ex-student notified the
Geology Department office, Vicki (our secretary) put up the notice – I saw it, and
I got the job.
The World Discoverer was at sea
almost continuously. Spring and Fall it
would tour the central Pacific islands (Fiji, etc.), summers it would operate
out of Nome, Alaska, and in winter (summer in the southern hemisphere) it
butted head with icebergs and very large waves in the Southern Ocean. I signed on for two tours, which used up the
month of November, 2002. Note that
November in Antarctica is the equivalent of June up here; in other words, very
early summer.
I was stoked. I knew another geologist who regularly did
this sort of work for a different cruise line.
He ate well, was housed magnificently, was given elegant T-shirts to
keep – and generally treated like a VIP.
As it happened, however, on the World Discoverer lecturers were just
hired help. Maybe we were one step above
the Phillipine ladies that made the beds, but in no way to be compared with, or
treated like, paying passengers.
What did I get for my efforts? Well, they paid $50/day. They flew me to Punta Arenas, on the Strait
of Magellan to start the trip – and then back home from Ushuaia, Argentina when
my tour of duty was over. They also gave
me a liquor allowance of $3.00/day. They
did this because one of a lecturer’s explicit duties was to schmooze with the
passengers after dinner – and buy them drinks!
My allowance would buy maybe one $3 beer. However, I quickly fell in with some very
interesting people with whom I sat (and drank) nearly every evening. (This ate up my $3.00 plus a significant
fraction of my daily pay.)
They were cheap in other ways,
too. For one thing – we had to wear
their shirts, but we couldn’t keep them.
We didn’t even get a discount in the gift shop. And, their most heinous sin in my eyes – they
housed us in dingy little closets below water line; two guys in maybe 40 square
feet, two bunks, a toilet, and a desk.
The passengers were wallowing in luxury on the higher decks, living like
royalty. There were empty cabins – but
they didn’t let us (lecturers) use them.
The company later went bankrupt, lost their only boat, and went out of
existence. My eyes were dry; no tears
for skinflints.
(But, come on! They gave me a trip to the White Continent,
something I never have been able to afford otherwise.)
So, we flew to Santiago, Chile, and
assembled at a fancy hotel in the ritziest part of the city. There the passengers were plied with Pisco
sours (I snuck my share), and introduced to all the “staff”. I had to make a little speech, warning them
of what I planned to talk about. They
were surprisingly enthusiastic.
While I was there I caught the Santiago
Metro (a very good subway system) and went across town to visit with some of my
friends from my old Chilean field-work days.
Then, the next days we flew to Punta Arenas, got a tour of the city (not
much there I am sorry to report), and were welcomed aboard. That very evening we unmoored and headed east
through the famous Straits of Magellan.
Well, heck, we did the whole trip at
night, so nobody saw much of anything.
The next morning we were pretty much in the Atlantic Ocean, heading for
the Falkland Islands.
The Falklands are very
interesting. First we stopped at a
little island on the west side, mainly to see Rockhopper penguins. Of greater interest to me was the single
family that lived there, apparently owning the entire island and running sheep
on it. They lived in a snug, fairly big
house, surrounded by outbuildings and agricultural equipment. I think the various tour companies paid them
to allow passengers to visit their farmstead, where they served various baked
goodies (excellent) and coffee. They
were friendly enough, but you could sense that they were uncomfortable around
all these chattering strangers. It is
hard to imagine a more solitary life than the one they led. My guess is that their nearest neighbors were
a day’s boat ride away. When the Argentines
invaded a few decades ago, I wonder if these people even learned about it until
it was all over. (No, of course they did
- they have a good radio,). Their island
seemed to consist entirely of rolling hills covered with coarse grass. There were a few trees near the homestead,
but apparently not anywhere else on the island.
Next we put into the capital, Sidney,
on the east side, and stayed one day.
Sidney is – how shall I put it – a little peculiar. It has an excellent harbor, with lots of
shipping – but there also were a bunch of rusting hulks littering the
seascape. The church and government
house are worth seeing, as well as some of the (well, yes, peculiar) houses
scattered about. One had a garden
consisting entirely of little concrete gnomes!
.
They also had a fine pub. Several of the ladies wanted to go in, but
felt they needed an escort – so they asked me to go in with them. What me? In a pub?
Well, just this once. – and in we went.
The barkeep looked at us a little sourly. The ladies sat down while I strode up to the
bar and asked for three pints of his best bitter. The barkeep looked at me with a small smile
and said “Sir. London is 10,000 miles
from here. Our beer is in bottles.” Well, of course – with 3,000 people max, the
Falklands aren’t about to support a brewery.
I felt a little stupid – but later he came to our table and told us about
life on his island, and why he wouldn’t live anywhere else.
My impression of the Falklands is
that it is very interesting and fun to visit, if the weather is right. (It was for us, but we were lucky.) Basically it is treeless, wind-swept
grassland, covered with sheep. Why do
the Argentines want it so desperately (they call is Las Malvinas)? Well, partially out of hurt pride – but also because
both to the east and west of the islands lie excellent offshore oil prospects.
One last Falkland observation: The Argentines initially over-ran most of the
Falklands, but when they realized they were going to get their butts kicked by Margaret
Thatcher and the Royal Navy, they laid fields of land mines, out of spite, or
so it appears. The Falklanders haven’t
bothered to dig them up. Instead, they
built fences around each mine field and put up warning signs. This has, strangely, benefitted the penguins;
the stupidly adaptive little buggers have turned some of these mine fields into
rookeries. Seems the little devils are
too light to set off a land mine, so building nests in a mine field makes
excellent sense – nothing much heavier than a penguin is going to bother them.
After the Falklands we headed further
east into the south Atlantic to visit what I regard as one of the major wonders
of the natural world – South Georgia Island.
S. Georgia is a big island,
approximately 170 km by 20 km, with a permanent population at the time of our
visit of two. There also was an outpost
of the British Antarctic Survey, with 15-20 temporary residents. S. Georgia is much cut up by deep fjords, and
down its spine stretches a mountain range with peaks that reach nearly 3000
meters in elevation; 11 peaks are more
than 2000 m. Most of the range is
covered by glaciers or huge snowfields. The
only fauna consists of birds (most notably nesting albatross and King Penguins),
seals (fur seals and elephant seals), and large herds of caribou that were
introduced by whalers in the late 1800s, to provide fresh meat.
About the turn of the last century S.
Georgia was a big-time source of whale oil.
There were at least four large “factories”, with permanent workers/residents
numbering in the hundreds. Whales were
killed in the Southern Ocean, and then brought to S. Georgia for final
processing into the whale oil that lighted the homes of the affluent in Europe
and the United States, before John D. Rockefeller and kerosene. The famous Antarctic explorer Sir Earnest
Shackleton stopped in S. Georgia several times; in fact, he is buried
there.
Well, of course, the whaling stations are in ruins now;
mainly rusting metal buildings slowly collapsing into picturesque heaps. Human beings are forbidden to enter (by the
U.K. government, which administers S. Georgia); the only inhabitants at the
time I visited were fur seals. Fur seals
are nasty little (well, not so little) devils, especially during mating season,
which this was. The Expedition Leader
lived in constant torment lest one of these horny buggers – frustrated by not
having been able to collect his own harem of females – took it out by biting
one of our high-paying passengers. Thus,
we lecturers sometimes were posted near particularly menacing seals, with
orders to scare them off if they charged our precious supercargo. They hated loud noises, so you were supposed
to run at them, yelling your head off, while banging several rocks together. In my experience this always worked. If it didn’t, I guess we were supposed to
kick them in the chops, then run like hell.
They are surprisingly fast on land, considering the fact that they have
no feet – but not as fast as a terrified lecturer.
One afternoon I spent three hours
protecting a trail used by passengers, from a sleeping male fur seal. I called him George. About every ten minutes George would wake up,
open his eyes, and look around. I would
then say – “Go back to sleep, George” –in an authoritative voice: - and he
would do it. George was better behaved
than my cats are, that’s certain.
However, the paramount attraction of
South Georgia Islands has to be elephant seals and King penguins. We spent one whole day anchored off a beach upon
which there were 50,000 breeding pairs of King penguins*. There also were thousands of yearlings
wandering about; covered in brown feathers that gradually gave way to the regal
splendor of an adult. These latter are
called “Oakum Boys” – I’ll leave it to you to figure out why.
*The only thing that smells worse
than a big penguin rookery is a mink farm.
According to various treaties, humans
are not permitted to approach any animal or bird closer than five meters. However, nobody said anything about standing
still and letting them approach YOU.
King penguins are curious. There
were a bunch of un-mated females wandering around. Three in particular, sticking together, were
determined to figure out what manner of creature I was. On land penguins have no natural enemies, so
they had no hesitation about waddling right up to me. One particularly persistent bird was bound
and determined to peck one of my buttons – but she couldn’t quite get up the
courage. She would extend her beak to
within about two inches of me, then suddenly jerk back. I felt like breaking off a button and giving
it to her, but I’m sure that the Expedition Leader, would not have been
pleased..
In amongst the penguins were harems
of elephant seals. These must be among
the strangest creatures ever to inhabit the earth. The austral elephant seal (male) can weigh
8,800 lbs. and be as long as 19 ft.
(Females are tiny by comparison).
The males have a strange, hanging, floppy kind of nose resembling, with
imagination, an elephant’s trunk – hence the name. They spend most of their life in the
water. However, in the spring they haul
out on the beaches of S. Georgia and other sub-Antarctic islands, to await the
females. As the ladies arrive, the bulls
fight each other for dominance,; the winner then gathers a harem together and
gets on with the job of creating more elephant seals. By the time we had arrived the fighting had
mostly stopped, but the mating was in full, conspicuous swing. (Some of our ladies were not amused.)
Every so often a bull would decide that he
needed a bath, and would thereupon flop his 4-ton self-down to the water,
sometimes right through penguin rookeries.
Somehow the birds mostly escaped; I can’t vouch for the eggs.
Okay, so I spent more than a page on
S. Georgia Island. Does it deserve
it? Yes.
In spades. Like I said, it is one
of the natural wonders of the world. In
some ways it’s better than the Galapagos Islands.
All this and we hadn’t even gotten to
Antarctica proper. However, we did in
about two more days. The stretch of
water we had to cross is widely considered the roughest stretch of navigation
anywhere. It is called the Drake
Passage. I crossed it four times. Three times it was very smooth; the fourth it
was quite bad. From what I have been
told, I was very lucky.
And from here on the trip becomes a
blur. We cruised through straits defined
by ice-covered peaks on either side, we explored island chains, we visited
Antarctic research stations, and we just soaked up the scenery. I’m into mountains, ice-covered and jagged,
and this was the ultimate. If you much
prefer grassy hills with flowers and bubbling brooks, this might not be for
you, although I’ll bet you would get off on it, anyway.
Oh, I should have said – we visited
penguins. There must be six thousands
kinds of penguin in Antarctica, and by God we were determined to visit every
last one of them! I like penguins as
much as any sane person should, but after a while all short, waddling
black-and-white birds look exactly the same.
Fortunately, I usually was assigned fur-seal duty. I’m not saying that penguins are
uninteresting; they certainly are not. All
the same, I would have preferred to look at more rocks, glaciers and icebergs,
at the expense of one more colony of chin-straps!
So, I only spent one month at this
“adventure”, and already I have burned up five pages and 2,700 words, so I will
get on with it. The best I can do is to
recount some interesting experiences.
We had looked forwarded to putting
into the U.S. base Palmer Station. We
were to get a lecture or two, tour the facility, and admire our tax dollars in
action. We had received permission in
advance. However, as we approached,
Palmer Station radioed us to be on our way – they were too busy to “entertain”
us. I think lots of congresspersons
received letters about that when our highly educated, successful passengers got
home.
The Antarctic Treaty states that the
continent is not to be claimed by nation states, but rather held in trust for
all. However, Chile refuses to sign the
treaty. Thus, whenever a tour ship
approaches the Chilean station they are radioed with a demand to identify
themselves and state their business. One
and all, the cruise ships simply ignore the poor devils at the station, who
certainly were required to do this by the home government. If we ignored them, what were they supposed to
do? Throw snowballs at us?
We did get to stop at the Polish
station. Everything about it reeked of
poverty. They seemed to have spent a lot
of time making little trinkets to sell to tourists. Their station buildings were run-down and
looked positively unsafe, let alone uncomfortable. To enter we had to take off our boots. When we came back, several pairs were
missing! Poor buggers – they even had to
swipe their footwear!
We tried to put the passengers on
land at least once every day, and often more.
They were transported from ship to shore by zodiacs; rubberized rafts
that can hold up to about a dozen people.
They travel fast, can go into very shallow water, and are easy to put on
and off the big ship. They were run by
sailors from the Philippines; short, very strong, always smiling guys. The captain of the ship was German, as was
his wife, who was sort of head concierge.
The waiters in the dining hall were German, and the guy behind the bar
was, too. It was a funny situation: an
American ship, crewed by Germans, with all the hard work done by Philippinos. Also, there were lots of maids – all from the
Philippines. Half the passengers were
from Germany; the rest from the U.S.
Given this mix of passengers, the home office had laid on two separate sets
of lecturers; half American, half German.
Unfortunately, the Germans lecturers all were kids in the middle of
their graduate studies;, none had much
experience giving talks. By contrast, we
three Americans were all veteran blabber-mouths. Most of the German passengers easily
understood English, and so gradually they took to attending our lectures. Toward the end the German geologist kid took
to sitting in on my lectures and also asking me to vet his talks. (He would write them out!)
Okay, an adventure. There is a place called Desolation Island
which is an “extinct*” volcano. At some
time not long ago it evidently blew off its top and then subsided, with the
result that the crater is full of sea water.
However, there is a hole in the rim through which you can sail a cruise
ship. At one time not long ago there was
a whaling station there (buildings still standing), but a lava flow persuaded
them to move. We sailed into the middle
of the crater, and then took those passengers who wanted to go to a place where
hot water was boiling up from the magma beneath. You could jump in and find places where the
water was like a nice hot tub. Five feet
away it would be cold, and in some places it was too warm for comfort. The active young things among us would get
warm, then swim out into the icy water, then back again. Me – no swimmer, that’s for sure – I
dog-paddled around in the comfortable zone. But after this all our passengers could say –
Oh, yes, we went swimming in the Antarctic!
*You can see why I put the word
“extinct” in quotes.
The various cruise lines running
ships in Antarctica collaborate to make sure that they don’t encounter one
another; that gives the passengers the illusion of being in a complete
wilderness – only us, against the ice.
The captains and expedition leaders constantly consult one another by
radio to maintain this apparent solitude.
We heard of one ship, a Russian “trawler” modified to take 50 or so passengers
that had a most unfortunate experience.
They had just put their passengers on the beach when up came a ferocious
katabatic wind; these are winds that arise when the air above a glacier becomes
cold and dense, then “flows” down the glacier slope. Katabatic winds can push the largest ships
around; we had to skip one of our stops because the captain said he couldn’t
safely anchor the ship near land.
Anyway, these passengers – all Americans, I seem to remember – had to
watch as their ship sailed away into the distance, stranding them in
Antarctica! I guess they started a fire
with the bits of drift wood around (strictly verboten) and sheltered in the lea of a big rock, singing old
campfire songs, and ten or twelve hours
later the ship returned. They at least
had a darned good story to tell.
What else? Oh, yeah.
Some of the more mature ladies on our trip became totally smitten with
penguins. Through lectures and reading
they became aware that the chief enemy of penguins in the area was the leopard
seal. One day somebody discovered one
of these miscreants, sunning itself on the beach. They are ugly brutes; spotted and blotched in
dingy colors and shaped rather like a fat eel.
Like all other Antarctic critters, they have no fear of anything on
land. We had to restrain several ladies
from throwing rocks at him. Instead,
they took lots of pictures and then sat around after dinner discussing how ugly
he was. If concentrated hatred can kill,
that was one sick seal.
How about an “on ship”
adventure? This cruise fancied itself
the nee plus ultra of upscale, luxury
touring. At dinner the passengers were
served in courses; often freaky gourmet tidbits I could scarcely
recognize. Lecturers were required to
eat with the passengers, and to dress up a little. We ate off white tablecloths and were
elegantly served by the German kids. Two
girls spent the entire dinner hour walking around with bottles of wine in their
hands, filling glasses. Well, this was
great – when the seas were calm.
However, several times the seas came up during the dinner hour and the
ship began pitching and rolling through preposterous angles. I remember one time sitting with two ladies,
talking geology, while I watched the stern of the ship go up – until I could
see only sky – and then down, with nothing but sea water visible. That’s called “pitching”; we also “rolled” –
side to side. As you can imagine the
plates slid off the tables and into our laps, the little frauleins- with wine bottles found themselves on the floor – and
very soon all the passengers were heading for their staterooms. Sensibly, they also had a buffet – you could
make yourself a sandwich, grab a beer, and find yourself someplace to anchor
to. It was stupid of them to keep up
this pretense of luxury, but they tried.
Another nautical adventure. We were heading across Drake Passage for the
last time; I would be heading home in a few days. All of a sudden the captain comes on the
intercom, sounding like a man in the grip of frenzy. He has spotted a pod of fin whales heading
our way. Fin whales are the second
largest of the whales, and I can vouch for the fact that they are
impressive. They also must be closely
related to dolphins, because they seemed to want to play with our ship! They swam along with us for several hours,
mainly keeping just ahead. They were these monstrous big brown things that
would roll their backs out of the water.
They easily kept pace with us without, apparently, ever moving their
tail flaps. They played and then, as if
a trumpet had sounded, they swam off
Okay, this certainly is more than one
month in my life deserves. I want to
finish by giving some advice.
1) There are two kinds of Antarctic
cruises that normally are offered. The
longer is about three weeks. It goes
from Ushuaia to the Falklands, South Georgia, and then to the Antarctic
Peninsula for a week or so, before returning to Ushuaia. The second goes straight across Drake Passage
to the Peninsula, putts around for about a week, then goes back. It takes about 10 days. If you possibly can afford it, take the
longer trip. I did both. On our 10-day cruise a bunch of people got so
sick on our first day out that we didn’t see them again until about day 5! Drake Passage can be very, very rough, so be
prepared.
2) Try not to go to early (November) or
too late (April). In November pack ice
and horny fur seals will get in your way.
In April, I am told, the pack ice begins to return and many of the
animals and birds are gone.
3) Pick the smallest boat you can
find. They may not serve five course
dinners on fine china, but they can get you to shore quickly – and go anywhere
the big ships can go, and some places
they can’t.
4) Buy good-fitting, quality rubber
boots before you leave. Otherwise you
will be burdened with some real crap.
And, believe me; you will need rubber boots, especially when crossing
those shallow lakes of penguin waste-products.
Anyway: An Antarctic cruise should be high on your
bucket-list – if you can afford it!
Very interesting and enjoyable narrative.
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