Freeze Frame

As these books passed through my mind, displaying their various wonders and horrors, the morning paper’s news from Antarctica equaled them all. The color photo showed the place at its most unearthly. Turquoise lobes and fingers of suavely sculpted ice arise from dark seas, reaching up to a fretted roof, which filters the light into ethereal traceries, and at one side 56 penguins huddle on a white ramp, like suits queuing to enter a conference hall. Twelve thousand feet down in the ice beneath the Russian science station, Vostok, they have found a spread of water the size of Lake Ontario. Forty million years ago, glaciers began to close over the continent. The forests with their dinosaurs and tree ferns died out. The sediments in the lake should prove rich evidence of what life on our Earth was like when the shapes and the latitudes of the land masses were very different from what we take for granted. Now, as the hot-water lance, the thermal probe and the hydrobot feel their way into that prehistoric water world, the polar regions will renew their fascination.

For so long they had been those vast, deathly deserts on whose pure white field men with frozen beards staggered grimly toward, or away from, the poles. Capt. Robert Falcon Scott (the hero of my boyhood books) wrote in 1911, in one of those predictions that are always falsified, that “for one brief moment the eternal solitude is broken by a hive of human insects . . . then they must be gone, and all must be surrendered again to the desolation of the ages.” Nearly a century later, many nations have permanent bases down there. Sara Wheeler offers a sparkling, gossipy picture in which the scientists--when they are not making penguins puke to analyze their stomach contents or examining organisms that thrive at 102 degrees Celsius in the fuming volcano called Mount Erebus--strip naked, walk a hundred yards and hug a husky (to qualify for the Husky Hugging Club), paint their toenails blue or race round the pole at Christmas on a rowing machine, “from the weight room,” balanced on a sledge.

“Terra Incognita” must be the first funny book about Antarctica. Without belittling the scientists, their grit, their imagination or their intricate skills, Wheeler revels in a culture in which it’s normal for a graduate student to stockpile free condoms from the medical center at HQ and inadvertently pull them out of her pocket on the helipad, where they were “whipped into the air by the blades and settled gently over her shoulders like confetti.” When a bottle of bourbon is opened in camp at Lake Hoare, one scientist says, “We should drink this whiskey with glacier ice” and comes back with a large “alarmingly blue ice cube” that his colleague breaks up with an ice ax. Good clean fun, incredibly so, since even the dishwater is helicoptered out in drums for fear of contaminating the virgin land. Both physically and politically, the colonization of Antarctica has settled down to the most scrupulous standards of environmental care. We may even hope that the agreement not to mine or otherwise exploit the continent, recently extended for 50 years, will hold indefinitely.

Wheeler also has a serious matter on her agenda. It partakes of the idealism about the poles that has enthralled most people who have frequented them. Andy Goldsworthy, Britain’s foremost environmental sculptor, who has made wondrous cones and obelisks, stars and arches and mazes in the Arctic, some of them above the pole itself, wrote in “Touching North” (1989), “I can touch North in the shadow of a mountain. . . . When I work with winter I work with the North. . . . I want to follow North to its source. . . . It belongs to no one--it is the earth’s common.” In “I May Be Some Time,” Francis Spufford writes, “The polar landscape does its trick of freezing time” and quotes members of Scott’s expeditions who wrote, “The inhospitable mountains look from the distance inviting and grand beyond conception,” and “To me those peaks always did and always will represent silent defiance.” Wheeler writes, “Most of time and space is like Antarctica.” When she looked over an ice field in the Chilean Antarctic, “it was as if I were seeing the earth for the very first time.”

It is the utterness that does it, those expanses devoid of buildings or trees, the barely rising or dipping planes of the distant horizons, the uncanny distinctness of each thing on its white field. Such places exact from us a purity of concentration. Our minds feel bathed in primal water. They allowed Wheeler “to believe in paradise,” and I understand that. To me, it is still too bare an Eden, without leaves or seeds or flowers or roots, without flowing fresh water, without breezes or winds that do not kill the skin or the blood vessels under it. My own seeing of the Earth for the first time happened as I looked west over New Mexico from Towaya’lane, the sacred Corn Mountain of the Zuni, or over Arnhem Land in northern Australia from Oenpelli, where people have lived for 22,000 years. Great tracts of Earth stretch away, so sheer they let your own self breathe, red ochre and pale gold, fledged with sagebrush and greasewood, mulga and spinifex, dappled blue with cloud shadows. The Rio Grande curls southward, a billabong the shape of a whale reflects the motionless sky. People have been here, with their stories of the “big ol’ flood” and the Rainbow Serpent who sped across country during the Creation Time.

The “paradise” of the Antarctic has no Eve or Adam, no garden to walk in the cool of the day. It is barren. This gives Wheeler “the space to look for the higher power, whatever it was” and to “hear the still, small voice.” To be persuaded, I would have needed much more prolonged dwelling on physical Antarctica than she allowed herself. In Galen Rowell’s “Poles Apart” (1995), there is a photograph of a ventefact, a brown rock graved by wind into the likeness of a yew or bristlecone pine stump with its horns and hollows. It lies on the shingle of the Dry Valleys, which are saved by a mountain range from being overwhelmed by ice. It last rained there 2 million years ago, in the Pleistocene. It is the stillness of that image, its look of having taken unimaginable ages to form, that we need from artists of the far south and far north.

For generations, the poles have been like grails. There had been nearly two centuries of questing after a habitable southern continent by the time Capt. James Cook, on his voyages around the world in 1772-75, disproved its existence. He concluded that the “everlasting frigidness” of the actual landmass, whose existence and climate he inferred from the “vast floats of ice” he had sailed past, made it a place “that the world will not be benefited by.” Alan Gurney, who is a sailor and yacht designer, retails those journeys and many less famous epics with a density of detail that gruels us as we ought to be if we are to realize the hardihood that made such voyaging possible, without engines or radio or chance of rescue or proper food. Half the energy of most crews came from alcohol. South of 70 degrees, they often had to break ice off ropes stiff as steel. When they first met seals, they stove in their skulls with handspikes. Reading about these shipboard journeys in “Below the Convergence” summons up again the almost tangible atmosphere, familiar from so many classic narratives, Melville and Marryat and Conrad, Dana and Slocum. It is at once homely and elementally drastic. We curl up in the cabin; we shudder at the salty blasts.

Because that vein of experience has been woven into our cultural sinews, Spufford has endless material for his elaborate discussions of how the boreal and austral extremes have molded our knowledge, our imagery, our myths. Where the others narrate, he analyzes. If only he had done more of the former. His account of Scott’s dying minutes is most poignantly imagined. For much of his book, he chops logic so fine that his points are sharpened to invisibility. I began to struggle during his critique of what Charlotte Bronte made of Capt. Edward Sabine’s “Memoir of the Birds of Greenland” (1821), as cited by illustrator Thomas Bewick in his “British Birds.” Jane Eyre, says Spufford, makes the Arctic “available for contrast and metaphor as it was not when Sabine and Bewick gave it a geographical location.” In fact, Bewick’s prose is passionate and exalted and rich in metaphor--at least six in one paragraph quoted by Spufford. His book reminded me of a resolution I made some years ago, to abstain from literary criticism written since 1970.

As cultural history, “I May Be Some Time” is rich and complex. Too often, its arguments about the changing views of the Arctic and the Antarctic hinge on quibbles. The Canadian explorer Vihjalmur Stefansson argued in 1939 that the disaster of the Frankland expedition to the Northwest Passage in 1848 had a “cultural cause,” the stubborn unwillingness of the Englishmen to learn from local ways: They hunted for sport, not food, eschewed fresh meat and treated scurvy as a symptom of low morale. This strikes me as unanswerable. Spufford taxes Stefansson with “reducing” the meaning of “culture” to “the social and mental outlook of the period.” What else is it--if we include, as Stefansson does, the behavior patterns in which the outlook is grounded?

If Spufford over-interprets, Bernard Mergen falls backward to make room for the contents of his filing system. Between his covers he packs what feels like the entirety of what Americans made of snow, the cold stuff itself and the imagery it engendered, from 1782 to the present. What I miss is the shimmer, the tingle, the wince of whatever it was in his own experience that fired his project. When he does interpret, his reading is asserted rather than reasoned. The novelist Tom Lea in “The Primal Yoke” (1960) evokes an avalanche, “the white blind monster,” its roar, its needling ice. A wave of Mergen’s intellectual wand and this becomes “postwar America . . . the nuclear age, the loss of innocence, and the threats posed by liberated women.” Free women as blind white monsters? Mergen is on firmer ground when he is detailing the history of snowplows, as in “The Bucker snowplow, designed by George Allen Stoddard in 1866 . . . took its name from the method of bucking, a combination of manually digging and driving a plow ahead of as many as a dozen locomotives.” “Snow in America” is likely to remain unsurpassed as a handbook for novelists wanting to set their stories in North America between November and March.

It is again a yachtsman who reminds us of the more inspiring ways of writing experience, below or above 65 degrees latitude. Myron Arms, a master mariner from Maryland who has sailed more than 100,000 sea miles, was stopped by a barrier of pack ice at Chateau Bay in Labrador, not far north of Newfoundland, in August 1991. The ice atlases and the best information from coastal pilots and weather forecasters had made him expect plenty of clear water in that unusually warm summer. To solve the puzzle, he carried out strenuous research with the help of specialists in ocean currents, climate and glacier movements. He consulted people who are measuring and trying to understand the thawing of permafrost in Alaska, the regular layers of tiny pebbles in cores of North Atlantic sediment. His findings, both the data and the unsolved problems, are dovetailed into the story of his second voyage to the Davis Strait in Brendan’s Isle in 1994.

To say what Arms found would unfairly defuse the outcome of an enthralling story. His workmanlike narrative of his sailing is not remarkable. What gripped me was the lucidity with which he led a layman deep into the mesh of airs and waters that make up the atmosphere in which we live--not some “higher power” but a complex of cooling and heating, evaporating and condensing, thawing and freezing that drives the ocean currents south from Greenland, past the Americas and along Antarctica, below Australia into the Pacific, round again by New Guinea and Indonesia, past the Cape of Good Hope (where I saw the southbound and northbound currents meet in a long crest of foam alive with sea lions) and so north again past Africa to the Arctic. This is what geochemists and climatologists call the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt. I had never heard of it. Now our Earth has become that much less mysterious and more inspiring.

****

TERRA INCOGNITA: Travels in Antarctica. By Sara Wheeler (Random House: 352 pp., $25)

I MAY BE SOME TIME: Ice and the English Imagination. By Francis Spufford (St. Martin’s Press: 372 pp., $26.95)

BELOW THE CONVERGENCE: Voyages Toward Antarctica 1699-1839. By Alan Gurney (Penguin Books: 316 pp., $14.95)

SNOW IN AMERICA. By Bernard Mergen (Smithsonian Institution Press: 322 pp., $24.95)

RIDDLE OF THE ICE: A Scientific Adventure Into the Arctic. By Myron Arms (Anchor Books: 268 pp., $22.95)