The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

In Antarctic Light

reverted to its natural form—my jump rope tied to the banister. I pulled off the oversized ski gloves I’d dug out of the hall closet and bounded down the stairs. “Who is it?” I asked from behind the heavy wood of the front door. I couldn’t yet reach the peephole. ~~ Maps are poems. They’re paper dreams. They’re kaleidoscopic amalgamations of information and imagination. When my parents bought me a behemoth atlas one Christmas, I lost myself in its pages. I could barely lift it, but I’d drag it into our family room and spread out on the carpet, hair falling into my eyes. Each reverent turn of the page promised a new adventure. I rafted azure rivers, climbed trees in emerald forests, and braved the sandstorms of golden deserts. But no map captivated me more than a two-page spread of a roughhewn continent rendered in shades of white and blue. A continent with no cities or towns. No rivers or forests or sand- swept deserts. Could such a place really exist? My parents assured me that it could—that it did . And that was it. I wouldn’t know it for decades—wouldn’t understand it for even longer—but my life was set on a collision course with Antarctica when I was five years old. ~~ In the years after I received the atlas, I fixated on the White Continent in the way children do, memorizing every name, story, and inane fact I could find. In that age before the Internet, I turned to volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica at my local and school libraries to match the namesakes in my atlas with their eponyms: The Ross Ice Shelf. Named for James Clark Ross, who commanded the Erebus and the Terror . The Gerlache Strait. Named for Adrien de Gerlache, who commanded the Belgica , the first expedition to overwinter in Antarctica proper— not by choice.

The names of explorers, their ships, and the places of their greatest exploits became a language I spoke fluently. At night, I curled up under the covers in my bed long after the house stilled and read the stories of these voyagers by flashlight. And though it was clear these expeditions were hardships of the tallest order—that they frequently ended in amputated digits, physical illness, madness, and even death—I fell asleep dreaming of my own swashbuckling adventures sailing tempestuous seas, ascending ragged peaks, and dancing at the feet of danger. ~~ What does it mean for a childhood fantasy to come true? ~~ The full moon floated above the horizon, playing peekaboo from behind an iceberg. In the indigo waters of the Weddell Sea in the waning hours of a decade, reflected light illuminated the shadows and folds of the colossal tabular bergs before us— some as large as cities. It was my first expedition to the White Continent, and I couldn’t yet fathom that it wouldn’t be my only expedition— that I would make the passage twice more in the next eight years. That I would trade the 367-foot, ice class vessel with stabilizers and chef-prepared meals for a 52-foot sailing yacht with a butchered lamb tied to its stern, then for a 297-foot former NOAA research vessel with a wild yaw that sent chairs, and sometimes people, somersaulting through rooms. I couldn’t yet fathom that I would be anticipating my fourth sojourn even as I wrote these words. At that moment on New Year’s Eve in 2009, on that very first trip, I was simply trying to wrap my mind around the light. It was warm, warmer, it seemed, than even the sunshine of those California afternoons. I soaked it in, listening to the sea lap at the hull of our ship as the captain throttled down the engine and we began to drift, meandering through the moonlight.

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