Falling Up

The globe at my best pal’s place is mounted to have the north pole up top and the south at the bottom. You can flip it the other way round, but it doesn’t sit like that on its own. North, for some reason, is up, it’s up on the 1950’s map I have hanging in my basement, it’s up in all the atlases we have kicking around the house. It’s always up. North is up, south is down, and it’s funny to think about how, from Alaska to my house in Seattle, it’s downhill the whole way. The idea that you’re upside down when you’re at the bottom of the planet is funny, too, as though things start falling out of your pockets as soon as you cross the equator. You need to tuck in your shirt and hold on to your camera, strap be damned. The further you get into the southern hemisphere, the more likely your belongings are to to drift right off in to the sky, like a helium balloon let go at the fair.

Ever since I learned that I was going to Antarctica, I’ve had a weird feeling about physical geography. The husband took my plush toy penguin chick and turned him upside down so his wings flipped upwards. That’s future me, upside down at the bottom of the planet, at 66.33 South (or somewhere nearby), my change dropping out of my pockets and whizzing past my eyes, my hair standing on end, my feet somehow anchored to the ground so’s to keep me from drifting off into space, out past the light part of the sky, and still going, going, gone.

Getting to Antarctica from my home in Seattle is an epic undertaking, but nothing compared to what it was during the age of the great explorers. There’s a book about south pole explorers on the pile of reading material next to my bed. The book is full of pictures of rough but smiling men dressed in sweaters — in a surprising number of the pictures they’re barefoot. They’re on little nutshell boats, or in canvas huts cooking over cast iron stoves. They traveled for a year just to hit the edge of the ice and sometimes they got stuck and waited for months and months to get out again. I’m going to get on an airplane and complain about the indignities of coach. My assigned ship has a gym with workout equipment — imagine, I can cross the Drake Passage and while that’s happening, run on a treadmill, go take a shower, and wander up to the lounge to get tea afterward. My biggest inconvenience will be airplane food or schlepping my own luggage —  I’m not going to have to throw another penguin on the fire just to stay warm.

I have an atlas in my house that predates extensive Antarctic exploration — the closest mention is a little stub called Victoria Land, mapped by James Clark Ross who turned back when the ice became too much of an obstacle. Now, through the magic of the internet, I can go to Google Earth and see photographs taken by people just like me, who boarded big airplanes and traced the longitude of the globe with a jet trail. It takes about a day to get to Ushuaia from my house. One day of stumbling through foreign airports and dealing with that weird little accordion door on the airplane lavatory. A day in the same clothes and that feeling of anxiety while waiting for my bag to appear at the international baggage claim after I’ve cleared passport control. I think about the photographer on Shackleton’s crew and what he would make of my insignificant journey — not to mention my photo kit. Such a huge trip for me and for him, nothing, nothing at all.

Did the great explorers laugh about floating off into space, untethered, as they headed south? I have this idea of a little wooden ship sliding along a pale blue ribbon that marks the length of the earth. As it crosses the belt of the equator, rather than following the arc of the globe, the ship continues with only the tiniest shift, into space. The crew looks over the side to see the ocean below them, further and further away, until, like me in my coach seat,  they’re above the clouds and off to places that they can hardly imagine. Did the old sailors create magical destinations in their minds?  Did they picture the first mate hooking his feet under a rail and grabbing the cook’s ankles as inverted gravity lifted him right off the deck where he stood having a smoke after breakfast?

It’s easy to be jaded about the world, to imagine that every place has been discovered. Been there, done that, watched the National Geographic special. There’s streetview for Antarctica — how crazy is that? But there is no substitute for seeing places with your own eyes, no matter how many people have been there before. I can’t get into the heads of those brave travelers who launched out into the world with no idea about what they would find, it’s just not possible. Still, there is no way to know what it will feel like to be on what is, to me, Terra Incognita. And I love the idea of taking that long history of explorers with me, the idea of saying “Look at what you made it possible for me to do!”

To guys like Ross and Amundsen and Shackleton, the fact of someone like me on the last continent would seem crazy, unimaginable — as their journeys are to me. Because of that sense of impossibility, it feels not so far-fetched to imagine my hat, loosened from underneath my chin, falling upwards, upwards, upwards, and disappearing into a sea of stars.

Image: Photographer Herbert Ponting doing a headstand in Antarctica from Freeze Frame, the Archive of Polar Images.