I have never had to eat my dog.

McMURDO STATION, ANTARCTICA

Douglas Mawson, a polar explorer from Australia who was first to explore and map much of the Antarctic coast, lost two of his companions in 1912, and nearly died himself, from what was later diagnosed as probable overdose of vitamin A due to the over-consumption of dog meat, particularly the livers. It is but one of the differences between Mawson’s experience in the Antarctic in the early 1900’s, and my own 100 years later. Mawson, and others before him, relied on their dogs as emergency rations. Modern expeditions tend to rely on dehydrated meals.

I recently finished reading Racing with Death by Beau Riffenburgh, the latest book on my informal reading list of Antarctic tales. I enjoy reading the tales of Antarctic explorers while I’m here in the Antarctic, because it lends history to this place, my seasonal home. I enjoy, too, reading stories of those who traveled and worked in many of the places I have been. I have stood in the same hut that Mawson wintered in. I have marveled at his acetylene generator. I have run my fingers over Oates’ signature on a wall in the hut at Hut Point. I have also marveled at the poor insulation of these buildings in which people have spent the coldest parts of the Antarctic winter, and shivered looking at the meager cold weather gear left behind, paltry compared to my layers of polar fleece and down. The experience of the hundreds of men who set foot on this continent when no one was quite certain that it existed at all is vastly different than my own. While Mawson and others like him took months to arrive in Antarctica via aging icebreaking ships, I arrive in a matter of hours via a behemoth of an airplane. It took Mawson two days of sledging to travel as far as I do each morning to reach the airfield. My existence here is quite plush in comparison- a warm place to sleep, an abundance of food, not to mention the luxuries of modern washing machines, hot showers, and reliable communication with the outside world. And I have never, not once, found myself raiding crates for rusty nails to push through salvaged leather straps in order to replace the crampons that I left in a crevasse. (Mawson found himself in this position twice in a matter of days). 

But while the differences are apparent, the thing that intrigues me most is how often I read journal excerpts from a hundred years ago, and find myself nodding, or laughing quietly because I know exactly what the writer is referring to.  Mawson writes of walking into a stiff wind, leaning far forward in order to move through it, and then a lull in the wind suddenly drops one to the ground. Yessir, been there.

The most striking aspect for me of these polar ventures is the human component. Life in Antarctica has been one very large sociological experiment for hundreds of years. The challenge of life in close quarters with a finite amount of people has apparently always been quite a struggle. There is an intimacy in relationships that simply doesn’t have the opportunity to develop in the rest of the world, where one has the pull of family and various social circles; where one always has the option of leaving; where work and life operate in separate spheres. But there is tension too, the unique strain of not having those escape options or distractions. Here at McMurdo, the largest of the U.S. research stations, the January phenomenon strikes every season- the point in the busy austral summer season when the novelty of Antarctica has all but worn off for even the new folks. The point at which we have all been working long hard hours for months now, living with too many roommates, eating lousy food, and suddenly run out of patience for all of it, and particularly each other. Tempers flare, blame is laid for the pettiest of incursions, friendships strain. There are always the team members who slack off, having decided they’ve had enough. But none of this is unique to our generation of polar travelers. They are exactly the same troubles described in journal after journal left by the old Antarctic explorers.

Over the course of his expeditions, Mawson found himself with a wireless operator who developed paranoia and delusions, a captain with whom he couldn’t seem to agree about fairly basic things like direction of travel, and a crew member who simply refused to work. I find myself plugging names into each of these scenarios, the major difference between then and now being that when the situation got bad for Mawson, he had to find a way to make the best of it for the duration of the trip, while at McMurdo, my bustling seasonal home, these sorts of folks are usually met with a pink slip and a plane ticket home fairly quickly.

I wonder how similar perhaps the men (the first woman to set foot in Antarctica was Caroline Mikkelsen in 1935) who joined Mawson, Scott, or Shackleton, (who placed the notorious recruiting ad promising poor wages, terrible living conditions, and likely death), are to those who choose to work in Antarctica in modern times. Certainly the element of likely death has been all but removed, but still those that come are drawn by some version of a sense of adventure, and some lack of ties to the conventional world of family and career. And of course, the science: the possibility for discovery that left Scott dragging hundreds of pounds of rocks across the ice shelf, and Mawson steadfastly recording daily meteorological data, and the entire reason for the modern day Antarctic programs.

So here I sit, typing on a laptop, hooked up to the internet, drinking hot tea for which I did not have to melt snow, making comparisons to those who huddled in damp sleeping bags in meager tents scrawling in a journal in the face of frostbite. Things have changed a bit over the years.