Susan Fox Rogers

In the Antarctic Ocean

When I traveled to Antarctica, working on finding writers to contribute to Antarctica: Life on the Ice (then just a hope in my heart and an idea in my head), I spent a night in Christchurch, New Zealand. There, I shared a hotel room with a complete stranger, Julie Rose, a scientist who was heading out to research on the Nathaniel B. Palmer. I tracked down Julie recently to find out what she's doing and how her research is coming along. It wasn't hard to find her, since she works at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the world's largest private, nonprofit, ocean research, engineering, and education organization. Read on to hear about Julie's experiences on a research vessel and to get a sense of polar ocean research.

Antarctica is for Dreamers and Readers

World Hum is a marvelous website devoted to travel writing. Editor Jim Benning interviewed me yesterday--it was a fun conversation--about the Explorer sinking and about Antarctica: Life on the Ice. Here is the World Hum interview.

They have lots of wonderful material at World Hum, and in their dispatches they published Jason Anthony writing about the Antarctic: "A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth." This essay was selected for Best American Travel Writing, 2007.

Here is the opening of Jason's "AGO 1" from Antarctica: Life on the Ice:

November, 2000: After five seasons of fairly civilized Antarctic work, I took on a ominous job offered to me at the end of the polar summer by a drunken friend. Kip reeled across the floor of McMurdo Station’s darkened carpenter shop during its massive end-of-season party in February and shouted a slurred version of the question we all ask at the end of an Antarctic contract: “Hey man, are you coming back next year?” When I shrugged the shrug of the restless, he yelled “You should come back and work for AGO next year. It’s crazy!” AGO (pronounced like the end of “Winnebago”) is the Automated Geophysical Observatory program, the maintenance of which demands some of the most notorious work in the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). Kip had graduated to management, and would be doing the hiring.

Thanksgiving in the Dunes

My wish on Thanksgiving was to spend most of it outside, and to eat lobster (not turkey) as I did last year with my father. So I headed to Cape Cod to visit my friend Jody Melander, who has lived in Provincetown year-round since 1984 and knows every tree and bird and fish. Together, we walked out Snail Road, a path I’ve walked many times but will never tire of it. After a short passage through trees the path explodes out on the dunes, which stretch to the ocean. The endless mounds of beige sand and above blue sky (and it was very blue)—there is nothing more exhilarating. A constant warmish wind kept the temperatures around 55 but out of the wind we both were hot. In the distance flitted Snow Buntings. They could look like snow flakes falling, but I thought more of moths, disoriented in the light.

Thanksgiving on Ice

Happy Thanksgiving! For those of you sitting warm inside, watching football and smelling the turkey roasting I want you to send a warm thought to our friends on the ice who are not eating turkey. To give a glimpse of what Thanksgiving can be like on the ice, I'm offering up the first few paragraphs of Traci  McNamara's richly detailed essay from Antarctica: Life on the Ice. The woman in blue with the marvelous warm smile is Traci. Enjoy!

                We Ate No Turkey: A Holiday on Ice
                       Traci J. Macnamara

    Instead of spending Thanksgiving Day as I usually did in Colorado Springs—watching the Macy’s parade on TV in my pajamas--I was shivering in my work clothes on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, learning how to make a storm-worthy shelter by cutting dense snow into blocks with a paper-thin saw.  Snowcraft, as our mountain-savvy instructor called it, was only one portion of McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s two-day survival skills course optimistically called Happy Camper School. 

Into the Cold: Antarctica travels to Minneapolis

Don't we look like cousins? Katy Jensen on the left, me on the right. We read together from Antarctica: Life on the Ice on November 11 at Mager's and Quinn (a fabulous bookstore--both new and used) on a balmy early evening in Minneapolis. Katy--whose essay is about wintering at the South Pole--finds Minneapolis too cold...

We had an extraordinary audience. My real cousins Polly and Deborah Talen were there with their three girls Grace, Lydia, and Eliza (in reverse order of age). Polly is the funniest woman alive and Deborah is a founder of Rainbow Families. Victoria Nohl, a former student from Bard, showed up still looking like Queenie (her name while at Bard). But most of the standing-room only crowd was Katy's family and step-family. They stretched back into the stacks of books and listened, enraptured, while Katy read her beautiful and emotionally complex essay. When I first met Katy it was through her essay, which has an amazing grace and intelligence to it. Meeting her was that rare moment of person living up to their writing...and then adding that special something that comes only with sitting down and having tea with someone.

Here is Katy's account of the reading, which I post with a blush.

Antarctica: Life on the Road

Antarctica: Life on the Ice hit the road this past weekend. First stop: Boulder, Colorado where I read with Traci Macnamara and Beth Bartel. Traci brought a blow-up globe so that everyone would know where the Antarctic is (not "up there with the polar bears"). She read from her essay about spending Thanksgiving on the ice, while Beth read from her essay that describes her time spent on Mt. Erebus. They were both stars. In the audience were a lot of ice people, including Elaine Hood, from Raytheon who was my guardian angel during my trip. And then there were friends and fellow writers BK Loren and Sallie Greenwood. Christine Weeber, who contributed to Solo: On Her Own Adventure showed up, as did Jenny Dellaport, from my hometown of State College, PA! Watch for news of more readings at my website: www.susanfoxrogers.com

Karen Joyce: Frozen Hard and Thawed Out

A storm has been walloping Antarctica for the past few days. Karen Joyce, intrepid to the end, has ventured out to take this photograph. I wish I’d been there…

The contributors to Antarctica: Life on the Ice lead fascinating lives. From time to time I’ll track them down and find out what they are doing.

Karen, who contributed a hilarious essay, “The Day It Rained Chickens,” to Antarctica: Life on the Ice is currently in McMurdo, as she has been for the past 17 years during the austral summer. She will be joining us live from the Antarctic for our virtual book tour on November 29.

'Antarctica: Life on the Ice' Hits the Street!!!

 
Antarctica: Life on the Ice is the just-released anthology that I collected and edited to bring you first-hand stories of those who devote their lives to the most beautiful and cruel environment on the planet -- Antarctica. Inside you will meet explorers, penguinologists, geologists, iceologists, cooks, pilots and others who have been drawn, almost mystically, to life at the bottom of the world.

In the 2004-2005 austral summer, I spent six weeks in the Antarctic as part of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Based at McMurdo Station, I also visited the South Pole, several camps in the Dry Valleys and Cape Royds. When I was a young girl, my father regaled me with stories of the Antarctic. To walk the terrain and visit the outposts of explorers like Scott and Cherry-Garrard was the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

What Money Can’t Buy: Christmas in McMurdo, Antarctica

In the holiday spirit I'm offering up this essay I wrote shortly after returning from Antarctica in 2005. Happy Holidays to all.

January 2005, and the wind at Cape Royds on Ross Island, Antarctica, had me pinned inside a Rac tent, with few books I wanted to read, two people I hardly knew, a dwindling food supply, and intermittent satellite access to the internet. When I logged on to see if anyone was missing me, one of those endless internet banners floated across the computer screen: holiday blues? Buy what you really wanted.
    I turned to David, a grey-haired, middle-aged bespectacled penguinologist, and his young, attractive assistant Jen.
    “How did you celebrate Christmas?”

Antarctica, Rhinebeck and Bowermaster

We had our first reading for Antarctica in Rhinebeck’s cosy and wonderful, independent bookstore Oblong. One of the great pleasures of doing these readings is getting to know the writers whose works I’ve read and re-read for months. For this reading that person was adventurer, writer and filmmaker Jon Bowermaster, who is a marvelous, generous storyteller with a wealth of experience in the Antarctic.