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Susan Fox Rogers: Antarctica for ‘Dreamers and Readers’

11.28.07 | 11:59 AM ET

As a child, Susan Fox Rogers read stories about Antarctica explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott that sparked her imagination. In 2004-05,  she spent six weeks at McMurdo Station as part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. She went there with plans to edit a story collection that included contributions from professional writers and others who work there. The result is the new Travelers’ Tales anthology, Antarctica: Life on the Ice. It’s the 11th story collection she has edited. I dialed her up this week at her office in the Hudson River Valley—she teaches creative writing at Bard College—to ask her about the book and the allure of Antarctica.

World Hum: First off, what’d you make of the cruise ship wreck over the weekend?

Susan Fox Rogers: There are a couple of things that are really fantastic about it. Here’s this ship built specifically to go into dangerous terrain, icy waters. None of the reports say the ship was structurally weak. I don’t know much about boats but I know the technology of tracking what’s below a ship is powerful and accurate. You know what’s around you. The fact that this happened shows that the variables involved in traveling in this terrain are enormous.

And the trip was called “Spirit of Shackleton.” They got what they were looking for. These passengers must have been terrified. They didn’t know they were going to be rescued when they climbed into these boats. Shackleton’s men kept their spirits up by singing. And apparently, these cruise passengers were telling jokes to keep their spirits up. Psychology is a huge part of one’s survival there.

I was astonished to read about the growth of tourism in Antarctica—from about 7,000 tourists in the 1992-93 season to more than 35,000 expected this year.

Isn’t it extraordinary?

Yeah, what do you make of it?

Most of those 35,000 people are on ships, and it’s not like there are condos going up or big hotels, so it’s low-impact tourism. People get out and walk around among the penguins but they’re not setting up any structures, for the most part. You’re not even leaving a trail behind, though I’m sure ships have their own pollutants they’re putting out. Of course, there may be a limit to the number of ships the place can support. If you see a cruise ship everywhere, the wonder is diminished.

If you think back to the disaster on Everest when [Jon] Krakauer wrote “Into Thin Air,” I don’t think that has kept people away from Everest in the years since. On the contrary. I wonder if this wreck will actually encourage some people to visit Antarctica.

Somehow I don’t think tourism will diminish there. Antarctica has a powerfull pull for some people, doesn’t it?

Yeah. I saw a blogger ask why people have to go there. Well, it changes how you see the world. That’s why people have to go there. When you’re thrown into such extremes, at least where I was in McMurdo, the sensory deprivation is extraordinary. Colors are reduced to white, blue, and suddenly blue has 9,000 variations you didn’t see before. And there’s no sound when you’re standing on the Ross Ice Shelf (pictured above). There’s always some kind of noise around us when we’re at home, even the hum of the refrigerator. Suddenly you can be in a place where there’s no sound at all. You realize that’s not an experience you can have many places in the world. It’s spooky. Now, I don’t know whether anyone on these cruise ships is having that experience.

What’s more, all things are frozen so there’s almost no smell. And where I was the diet was really limited. So your taste is kind of reduced, too. When I left—I didn’t want to leave, but my time was up—and got to New Zealand, I was just assaulted by the warm air. I went out to dinner and ordered a salad and just chewed and chewed. I was so delighted and thought, how could I have not wanted to come back to this? I was on this sensory overload when I got back. It made me see the world differently.

With anything that’s as extreme as that, you have to be changed. To me, the point of travel is to come back changed. I am a pilgrim. When I go out, I want to return to where I’m from and see things differently from when I set out. Antarctica does that to you.

I can understand that.

Also, everybody at McMurdo wants to be there. It’s not like going to Paris where you’ve been dragged there by your parents. It’s expensive to get there, if you’re on a cruise. Or it’s hard and competitive to get there, if you’re in McMurdo working. To be surrounded by people for even a brief time who are doing exactly what they want to be doing is incredibly inspiring. And this place matters to them more than anything else. It makes you realize that you’re often around people who aren’t happy with where they are. There, you’re entering into a kind of Utopian community. 

You write in the book’s introduction about growing up reading Antarctica stories, like those of Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. These stories are essential to our understanding of Antarctica, or at least a kind of mythic Antarctica, aren’t they?

They are, because these expeditions and stories are so fantastic, and because they’re really one of the few ways to get to know this place. That’s why it’s such a shared literature. If you’re going to France there are a couple thousand books you can read. That’s not true with Antarctica. When you read this stuff you enter into the world of these explorers. You start to see how they lived day to day. Either you find it appealing or you don’t. If you do, it’s a kind of intoxication.

In Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, there’s this wonderful section where they wander out onto the ice. It’s negative 70, their teeth have split because they’re so cold. They get the penguin eggs they were seeking and return to their tents when a blizzard hits. The tents are blown away, leaving them exposed. They think they’re going to die. Cherry looked back and said I wish I had had more fun. He looked back and said, “I wish I had had peaches and syrup badly.” Now, I was in McMurdo and they were serving peaches and syrup, and I said to a guy standing next to me, just sort of talking out loud, “I wanted peaches and syrup badly.” He looked at me and smiled and it was clear he knew exactly who I was quoting. That couldn’t happen anywhere else in the world. People in Antarctica are readers and dreamers. Why else would you be there? For someone who reads about places like this and wants to write about them, it’s a kind of paradise.

When I was down there I was sending out e-mails to hundreds of people and those people were forwarding them on. There’s something simply marvelous about that. We feel that the whole world is known and explored, but not Antarctica.

What do you want these stories in this collection to do for readers?

My sense of a big place like Antarctica is I could have tried to write a book, but a chorus of voices could offer a wider range of experiences. The stories almost all contain some kind of emotional element to them. Quite a few of them are about falling in love. There’s an element of passion and love, whether for a person or place. David Ainley, a penguin specialist who has a story in the book, has been going down there for 28 years. He read the collection and said to me, “Wow, I had no idea what was going on down there—that there were all these emotions.” I think he was teasing me a bit, but my bias is for the emotional, for stories that let you into the inside story, and how the outside story is reflected in the daily life.

Any plans to go back?

I’m working on it. The U.S. has three bases there: South Pole, McMurdo and Palmer. To get to Palmer you go down through South America. You go by ship across the Drake Passage. There are many more species of penguins. I would love to see that part of the continent.

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Photos Courtesy:  REUTERS  |  iStockPhoto  |  flickr  

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