On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica

by Gretchen Legler

Book Overview

Travelogue, cultural meditation, and love story, On the Ice casts a panoramic view on one of the oddest communities in one of the most extreme places on earth.

Negative 70-degree weather. Canned food that dates back at least a decade. Wind storms powerful enough to lift a human off the ground. Extremely unfashionable clothing. Welcome to Antarctica, the farthest-away place in the world.

Hoping to get away from the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 157131282X
• ISBN13: 9781571312822
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Place, A Culture, A Personal Journey

Review of On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station by Gretchen Legler (Milkweed Editions, 2005) How much does a particular place influence our personal life journey? Does each place provide a unique inspiration? Does a specific geography provide a road map to a distinct internal destination? Or does the quality of a landscape at an exact latitude and longitude, rich with both natural and human history, demand a certain journey from us - requiring us to examine and explore our own being in a manner that no other single place would do? ON THE ICE suggests to us that every natural setting provides a valuable tool to focus self-reflection, but certain places can dramatically shape a personal journey, just as the wind carves the ice in Antarctica - the harsh but surprisingly spiritually nurturing location of this book. Gretchen Legler's adventure to Antarctica was initially intended as a trip to gather stories, and wonderful ones she found, but the place also sent her on a journey through her own soul. It is this personal story - a love story and a tale of self-discovery - which creates suspense and drives the narrative forward. Legler brings to life an entire population of adventurers in Antarctica through colorful portraits of current and historical inhabitants. She continually explores the relationship that individuals have to the place and looks for the common qualities that mark people who have spent time "on the ice". She visits the huts of early explorers, Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, and finds both despair and vigorous life in Antarctica's relationship with man. This seemingly contradictory relationship continues today at McMurdo Station, where Legler spent much of her trip, and at other outpost she visits - Black Island, the South Pole, Siple Dome, and the ship the Nathaniel B. Palmer. The characters she meets - both present day and historical - speak of the harshness and difficulties of the place and yet most return to it again and again. They are somehow defined by and deeply spiritually attached to it. Antarctica itself is of course the primary character in the book. The book includes interesting essays on the science of Antarctica, both the study of the natural world and the techniques and unique skills of the many scientists and experts Legler encounters. Legler often finds the intersection between art and science and illuminates for us the symbiotic relationship between the two. The chapter called Visible Proofs is a lovely essay on the work of Edward Wilson, who traveled to Antarctica in the early 1900s and documented what he saw with drawings. His illustrations are both scientific record and evocative art. Legler observes, "For Wilson, the concepts of God, Art and Science were not incompatible." During her journey through both physical geography and internal landscape, Legler comes to believe, "that there was a sublime power in this land that could mysteriously he

At Home at the Bottom of the World

Nature writing is changing. The surest mark of that change is the fact that Gretchen Legler's book, On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, was chosen as the best book of environmental creative writing published in 2005-2006 by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. On the Ice is the story of what it means to find home, and heart, in the frozen place at the bottom of the world. With other artists, Gretchen Legler was offered the opportunity to spend a season in Antarctica under the auspices of the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program, to tell the story of the land, to try her hand "at making some human sense of its vastness and its terrible beauty." It was a quest, she says, not only to explore and discover new lands, but also inner worlds, "places that I hoped being so far from my ordinary self would help me find." Antarctica as a place is extraordinarily far from the places our ordinary selves inhabit, and Legler wants us not just to know but to feel the distance, and to feel it as the explorers of a century ago must have felt it. She sleeps in a room that is only a stone's throw from the hut where Robert Scott set off in 1911 for his tragic bid to reach the Pole: "Good God, this is an awful place," he wrote. She spends time with other explorers who are looking even farther back, into the unthinkably remote geologic past of the Polar region, into samples of sea floor at Cape Roberts, goes naked into the coldest water on the globe, and ventures into ice caves in the Erebus glacier, blue caves, blue, blue "like an endlessly deep hole in your heart . . . a color that is like some kind of yearning, some unfulfilled desire, or some constant, extreme joy." And then there is the sea ice, glowing "peach and pink, nearly neon, buttery yellow, lavender, jade, and indigo," colors painted by Edmund Wilson, Scott's chief scientist, whose watercolors, she says are filled with, focused on light and color, color and light. And finally, there is the Pole, a "sacred destination," she says, not only for explorers but scientists and, yes, artists and writers, who find it the perfect place to look down into the mysteries at the earth's heart and up, into the mysteries of the universe, "the very farthest edge of darkness." On the Ice is a luminous study of a remarkable place, a place that is so sublime as to almost defy human description. But as humans, we must place ourselves: we long to live in place and to make even the remotest place a home. And so the book is also about the men and women who live there, about the scientists, support staff, builders, workers, engineers, electricians, cooks, communications technicians--all the people it takes to make a home in an inhospitable place. These are people, by and large, who are willing, perhaps even anxious, to shed their ordinary selves and live in an extraordinary way, coping with the isolation and the cold and the loneliness, building

Her visit was intended to research the landscape; her book is about the crazy people she found there

McMurdo Station, Antarctica is home to freezing temperatures, months of nearly total darkness and regular near-hurricane force winds. It's also home to a permanent station, McMurdo, and for a season was home to author Gretchen Legler, who tells of this season and those who have journeyed to Antarctica to escape life. Her visit was intended to research the landscape; her book is about the crazy people she found there. ON THE ICE is thus about an exploration few others will make: you'll have to read the book to live her discoveries vicariously. Diane C. Donovan, Editor California Bookwatch

Finding love in Antarctica

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 i