A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth
Travel Stories: Jason Anthony was working as a U.S. Antarctic Program fuels operator when he was called to remote Vostok Station. It was a trip he would lie to take.
Pushing through heavy wooden doors into the small dark common room of the main building, I stepped into another world. Vostok’s residents were gathered around an old billiards table, smoking their raw Russian cigarettes and talking quietly. They sat in a dense smoke that had years ago seeped into cracks in the balls and left a stain the color of sunburnt grass.
Murmured Russian syllables followed me into the empty dining room. Spare and plain, the room was clearly Vostok’s heart, a repository of old culture and simple food. Years of smoke and grease had browned the high pale-yellow ceiling. Much of the paint on the yellow walls had long ago flaked off, and beneath it an older icy blue spread like frost, as if the snow outside the windows had seeped through.
A mound of boiled eggs glistened in a large bowl like dabs of white paint. Withered window box plants stood silhouetted against the snow. In the dusty light, half a dozen scuffed dark tables held slabs of black bread, a brick of yellow butter, and a plate of sliced pink salami. On the sideboard, a massive cutting board and heavy cleaver wore the deep scars of years: the labor, hunger, anger, and celebrations of men living difficult, cloistered lives. I’d walked into a Russian still-life that seemed to breathe in its dark frame.
A transient, I was still bundled up in my parka as I shuffled between the modest invitations of the dining tables. Camera in hand, I was on the prowl for images. The strangeness of entering another culture in central Antarctica was almost dreamlike. How could I walk in from the palpable center of nowhere and find a stained wooden kitchen extracted from the pages of Solzhenitsyn?
The cook, with a blue and white broad-striped shirt and a broader smile, walked in from the kitchen to offer me tea. His arms were open, with a cup held in one hand. To this day, I wish I had accepted.
“Tea, for you?” he said (I think), in Russian.
“No, no, I’m just - I’m looking around. I - no, thank you,” I said, lost in my thoughts.
A shrug and another smile said: “As you wish.”
He was the only Russian at the camp I spoke with, and it lasted just these few seconds. He gestured to me, and I paused in my bustling exploration—so much to see, a mental map to make—to consider his kindness. Then, to my regret, I declined, so I could spend my last twenty minutes outside where there was enough light to take bleak photos of their industrial graveyard. I wanted to frame Vostok’s strangeness, as if I was the empty Antarctic.
And maybe I was. What was this trip? Not work, certainly, and scarcely travel. It was motion without emotion. As I look back, I remember my big red parka as a bubble of self-absorption. My thoughts and experience of Vostok were all exterior. I had found my way to one of the rarer places in the world, but didn’t have the insight to take off my coat, sit down, and talk? Pathetic.
As proof of my disconnect, the photographs I took of Vostok are dismal—blurry, fragmented and boring. One exception is an abstract of the BOCTOK sign seen through a window of the plane, taken on arrival, before I’d replaced awe with an intellectual hobby.
Soon it was time to go. I loaded up silently with the departing Russians as they began their ascent into the warm latitudes. None of them had complaints. Vostok is a place of hardship, but it’s also a landscape of their choosing. Like many of us, many of them return to the ice again and again. We all go to the trouble of returning to the Antarctic out of some strange love for the human experience of this inhuman landscape. These exhausted Russians on board the Herc with me, heading north, formed a community that I had not touched. While flying back to McMurdo, my camera stayed in its case on my insulated lap.
Even as I clicked off my roll of film at Vostok, I realized I should instead have sat with their friendly cook to sip some tea, eat an egg, and slab some butter onto the local dark bread. I tried to see this strange place from the outside rather than taking the time to taste it. That was bad traveling. I bypassed Vostok, Russia, and the warm human thread stretched thin between them. I wish very much that I could go back and do it right. But even this wish is a tourist’s wish.
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