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(More customer reviews)Antarctica hardly ever shows up in our national consciousness, and when it does it's usually in odd ways. Ten years ago, it was the science of Antarctica --- the hole in the ozone layer --- that was making news. Five years ago, more or less, it was the rediscovery of a bit of Antarctic history that was making news, with all sorts of books and movies on Sir Ernest Shackleton's doomed expedition, and the leadership lessons to be learned therein. This year, it's Antarctic biology that's taking center stage, with March of the Penguins delighting movie audiences across the globe.
March of the Penguins was a hit in part because it wasn't just about the savagery of the frozen continent, or the mating cycle of the emperor penguin, or the threat of attacks from vultures and sea lions. It was about love. Love is not something you think about much in the Antarctic context. The Antarctica of the mind is populated by brave, brawny, persevering explorers wrapped in mukluks; the occasional research scientist in horned-rimmed, fogged-up glasses; and maybe a sled dog. There's no room for love there. It's too darn cold, for one thing.
ON THE ICE by Gretchen Legler is about finding love in Antarctica --- outside of the emperor penguin context, mind you. Legler got one of those government grants you hear about sometimes on late-night TV. In this case, it was a National Science Foundation grant that allowed her to write about Antarctica and publish this book. The idea was supposed to be, according to the apparently not-so-strict guidelines, a journalistic look at Antarctic science and scientists.
But love got in the way. There's a chapter, about halfway through, in which Legler is trying diligently to write about the problems of refrigeration in Antarctica, which apparently involves keeping food and supplies well above ambient temperature rather than the reverse. We'll never know. Legler felt that she couldn't be an objective journalist in Antarctica, that she couldn't write about "facts and lives other than her own." But then enters Ruth, a woman she has a crush on, who entreats her to take a look at a formation of "nacreous" clouds that are in some way indescribably beautiful.
Legler and Ruth fall in love, and the manuscript careens from there into meditations on lesbian love and the glories of nature, and quotes from Walt Whitman wrapped around the whole thing like a big dingy ribbon. Even when she tries to steel herself to write about science or even the scientific personalities, she veers into the transcendental and the vague. One short chapter, "The Ice King," starts out as a profile of the man who runs McMurdo station, then migrates into Henry David Thoreau territory, and ends as an essay about how global communication is making it harder to experience what might be called a unique Antarctic way of life.
What ON THE ICE really ends up being about is the culture of Antarctica. The best parts of the book are those that illuminate how people cope with the isolation and the cold. Legler tells us about the "toast chart" showing exactly how people coming to the end of an Antarctic idyll feel --- the more burnt the toast, the more stressed out the researcher. "Skua Central" is the local flea market where items get passed around from hand to hand. And Legler illustrates the occasional --- or more than occasional --- heartbreak and loneliness that spurs people on to the bottom of the world.
Given how little Antarctica shows up in the collective unconsciousness, it's unfortunate that ON THE ICE doesn't meet up to the expectations that the National Science Foundation must have had when it funded Legler's expedition to McMurdo --- that it doesn't say more about what all these people are doing down there, and why it's important. It isn't that book because it was interrupted and changed by love; anyone who loves knows that love changes things, that it pops up where you would least expect it, that it spins and disorients things. ON THE ICE has its shortcomings, but they're shortcomings born of love, and therefore should be given the widest latitude for pardoning. --- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds, who writes the "Northbound" blog at http://www.txreviews.com/blog.
Click Here to see more reviews about: On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (The World As Home)
