On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (The World As Home) [Paperback]

Gretchen Legler (Author)

Book Description

Series: The World As Home | Publication Date: October 25, 2005

Travelogue, cultural meditation, and love story, On the Ice casts a panoramic view on one of the oddest communities in one of the most extreme places on earth. Sent to Antarctica as an observer by the National Science Foundation, Gretchen Legler arrives at McMurdo Station in midwinter, a time of -70 degree temperatures and months of near-total darkness. A lesbian struggling with a tumultuous past, she hopes to escape her own demons and present an intimate view of a place few will ever visit. What she discovers is a community of people stripped of any excess by the necessities of existence in a harsh land, where revered scientists are referred to as “beakers”; where cherished belongings are left without regret in a communal lost-and-found; and where women are rare but lesbians in high proportion. Forced to confront her own fears, Legler experiences firsthand how landscape and community allow a life to reset.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Legler (All the Powerful Invisible Things) received a grant to spend several months documenting the life of those at the Antarctic research facilities at McMurdo Station, "an old military installation, remote oil company drilling site, frontier mining camp, and college campus blended into one." Her story emerges in a series of loosely episodic essays, a function perhaps of "Antarctic time," a Zen-like mode in which human agendas submit to the bleak, unrelenting landscape. Legler is a constant observer, whether she's sailing aboard an ice-ramming research ship, visiting the huts of great explorers like Scott and Shackleton, or enjoying a getaway with friends at an isolated camping station. Details scattered about subtly steer readers toward Ruth, a mechanic who works at McMurdo, and her and Legler's romance comes to dominate the final sections. Legler's examination of her feelings after Ruth's earlier departure supplements a thoughtful study of the intense egalitarian bonds and compartmentalized sexual relationships that form among all Antarcticans during their time in isolation. Readers hoping for adventure at the bottom of the world may be disappointed, but the emotional honesty of Legler's reporting significantly increases our understanding of life on the last great frontier. (Nov. 29)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Legler traveled to Antarctica under the National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers Program, intending to "bring back visions, to translate that which could not be communicated in the language of numbers." Legler ventured far beyond McMurdo Station, from Scott and Shackleton's original huts to Siple Dome, where scientists collect ice cores to study climate change. Her attention to detail serves her well, and her ability to explain the history and science of Antarctica in a personable and poetic style truly makes her book sing. Legler's descriptions of the past are fascinating as she explores Scott's Cape Evans hut and recreates photographs taken during his 1911-12 expedition. Equally impressive is her analysis of the region's current residents, people employed in all facets of the station's operation and coping with isolation in their own ways. Legler begins a relationship with Ruth, an electrician, and her thoughts on their romance provide insight into the motivations for her journey. Ultimately, her personal revelations illuminate her Antarctic discoveries, resulting in a perfect combination of nature writing and memoir. Colleen Mondor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 195 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 157131282X
• ISBN-13: 978-1571312822
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #873,160 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finding love in Antarctica, November 29, 2005

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Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (The World As Home) (Paperback)

Antarctica hardly ever shows up in our national consciousness, and when it does it's usually in odd ways. Ten years ago, it was the science of Antarctica --- the hole in the ozone layer --- that was making news. Five years ago, more or less, it was the rediscovery of a bit of Antarctic history that was making news, with all sorts of books and movies on Sir Ernest Shackleton's doomed expedition, and the leadership lessons to be learned therein. This year, it's Antarctic biology that's taking center stage, with March of the Penguins delighting movie audiences across the globe.

March of the Penguins was a hit in part because it wasn't just about the savagery of the frozen continent, or the mating cycle of the emperor penguin, or the threat of attacks from vultures and sea lions. It was about love. Love is not something you think about much in the Antarctic context. The Antarctica of the mind is populated by brave, brawny, persevering explorers wrapped in mukluks; the occasional research scientist in horned-rimmed, fogged-up glasses; and maybe a sled dog. There's no room for love there. It's too darn cold, for one thing.

ON THE ICE by Gretchen Legler is about finding love in Antarctica --- outside of the emperor penguin context, mind you. Legler got one of those government grants you hear about sometimes on late-night TV. In this case, it was a National Science Foundation grant that allowed her to write about Antarctica and publish this book. The idea was supposed to be, according to the apparently not-so-strict guidelines, a journalistic look at Antarctic science and scientists.

But love got in the way. There's a chapter, about halfway through, in which Legler is trying diligently to write about the problems of refrigeration in Antarctica, which apparently involves keeping food and supplies well above ambient temperature rather than the reverse. We'll never know. Legler felt that she couldn't be an objective journalist in Antarctica, that she couldn't write about "facts and lives other than her own." But then enters Ruth, a woman she has a crush on, who entreats her to take a look at a formation of "nacreous" clouds that are in some way indescribably beautiful.

Legler and Ruth fall in love, and the manuscript careens from there into meditations on lesbian love and the glories of nature, and quotes from Walt Whitman wrapped around the whole thing like a big dingy ribbon. Even when she tries to steel herself to write about science or even the scientific personalities, she veers into the transcendental and the vague. One short chapter, "The Ice King," starts out as a profile of the man who runs McMurdo station, then migrates into Henry David Thoreau territory, and ends as an essay about how global communication is making it harder to experience what might be called a unique Antarctic way of life.

What ON THE ICE really ends up being about is the culture of Antarctica. The best parts of the book are those that illuminate how people cope with the isolation and the cold. Legler tells us about the "toast chart" showing exactly how people coming to the end of an Antarctic idyll feel --- the more burnt the toast, the more stressed out the researcher. "Skua Central" is the local flea market where items get passed around from hand to hand. And Legler illustrates the occasional --- or more than occasional --- heartbreak and loneliness that spurs people on to the bottom of the world.

Given how little Antarctica shows up in the collective unconsciousness, it's unfortunate that ON THE ICE doesn't meet up to the expectations that the National Science Foundation must have had when it funded Legler's expedition to McMurdo --- that it doesn't say more about what all these people are doing down there, and why it's important. It isn't that book because it was interrupted and changed by love; anyone who loves knows that love changes things, that it pops up where you would least expect it, that it spins and disorients things. ON THE ICE has its shortcomings, but they're shortcomings born of love, and therefore should be given the widest latitude for pardoning.


--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds, who writes the "Northbound" blog at http://www.txreviews.com/blog.

23 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible...Sorry, Really Horrible, May 14, 2006

By 

ekkomusic "ekkomusic" (Cleveland, OH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (The World As Home) (Paperback)

I'm sorry to say this, but this is simply a horrible book. Gretchen Legler is too self-absorbed, too self-pitying, simply too selfish. Her grant from the NSF Artist and Writers Program surely wasn't intended to fund this whining drivel about how much her parents don't love her, about how she found lesbian love in Antarctica, about tangental ramblings that meander into nothingness.

Surely, it can't be about the prose, either. This writer, simply, uses, too, many, run-on, sentences...the overuse, of, the, comma, is, almost Shatner-esque, in, a, way. Here is a quote...one sentence, mind you, wherein even she has to remind herself TWICE what she's writing about midway through:

"When the first bit of core, real core, not just mud from the surface, came out of the drill, says Brian Reid, one of the bearded, bright-eyed New Zealanders at Cape Roberts, telling a story over tea in the camp's galley - when the first bit of real core came out of that noise, yellow-engine-pounding room full of small, tight men with hard hats, gloves, and mud-splattered faces, when that first long roll of dark clayey material came up, and when driller Pat "The Rat" Cooper, who's drilled all over the world, when Pat himself brought the core into the drill site lab, people started yelling all around, "He hit the hard stuff, He hit the hard stuff," well, you should have just seen it - "Pat and Peter holding it and jumping up and down just like kids, just like kids, just like kids."

Good Lord. That is ONE SENTENCE! Pages and pages and pages of this. It's maddening.

If you really want to read about life on "the ice," I strongly suggest Rolf Smith's excellent "Life on the Ice: No One Goes to Antarctica Alone," or Nicholas Johnson's "Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica." Both are wonderful accounts of the mysterious land down south. Neither will frustrate you, nor do they care one damn bit about why some self-absorbed writer's daddy won't call her. Boo-hoo.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At Home at the Bottom of the World, July 19, 2007

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Susan (Bertram, TX, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (The World As Home) (Paperback)

Nature writing is changing. The surest mark of that change is the fact that Gretchen Legler's book, On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, was chosen as the best book of environmental creative writing published in 2005-2006 by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

On the Ice is the story of what it means to find home, and heart, in the frozen place at the bottom of the world. With other artists, Gretchen Legler was offered the opportunity to spend a season in Antarctica under the auspices of the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program, to tell the story of the land, to try her hand "at making some human sense of its vastness and its terrible beauty." It was a quest, she says, not only to explore and discover new lands, but also inner worlds, "places that I hoped being so far from my ordinary self would help me find."

Antarctica as a place is extraordinarily far from the places our ordinary selves inhabit, and Legler wants us not just to know but to feel the distance, and to feel it as the explorers of a century ago must have felt it. She sleeps in a room that is only a stone's throw from the hut where Robert Scott set off in 1911 for his tragic bid to reach the Pole: "Good God, this is an awful place," he wrote. She spends time with other explorers who are looking even farther back, into the unthinkably remote geologic past of the Polar region, into samples of sea floor at Cape Roberts, goes naked into the coldest water on the globe, and ventures into ice caves in the Erebus glacier, blue caves, blue, blue "like an endlessly deep hole in your heart . . . a color that is like some kind of yearning, some unfulfilled desire, or some constant, extreme joy." And then there is the sea ice, glowing "peach and pink, nearly neon, buttery yellow, lavender, jade, and indigo," colors painted by Edmund Wilson, Scott's chief scientist, whose watercolors, she says are filled with, focused on light and color, color and light. And finally, there is the Pole, a "sacred destination," she says, not only for explorers but scientists and, yes, artists and writers, who find it the perfect place to look down into the mysteries at the earth's heart and up, into the mysteries of the universe, "the very farthest edge of darkness."

On the Ice is a luminous study of a remarkable place, a place that is so sublime as to almost defy human description. But as humans, we must place ourselves: we long to live in place and to make even the remotest place a home. And so the book is also about the men and women who live there, about the scientists, support staff, builders, workers, engineers, electricians, cooks, communications technicians--all the people it takes to make a home in an inhospitable place. These are people, by and large, who are willing, perhaps even anxious, to shed their ordinary selves and live in an extraordinary way, coping with the isolation and the cold and the loneliness, building a community of fellow-travelers, each with his or her own sometimes desperate reasons for coming to a place so unimaginably distant and different from the places where the rest of us live. These are funny people, weird people, misfits, heroes, people who live on hope and thrive on hard truths, people who have come away from the "real" world to invent themselves in a different reality.

But On the Ice isn't just about the place or the people. It's about Legler's own journey to the frozen wastes within herself, into her own frozen heart, which is thawed, incredibly, by the power of love. "How do you come to know place?" she asks. "How do you come to know self? . . . How do you let go of wounds and resentments and fierce anger, not begrudgingly, but as an act of grace?" She finds the answer to this age-old question in her relationship with Ruth, an electrician who helps her to shed "all that junk . . .all those layers of old self" and discover a new and loving self, a warm and passionate heart, in this frozen world. Some readers, particularly those who believe that books of natural history ought to exclude the historian's experience, may think that this part of the journey should have been omitted, as not quite worthy of the heroic spectacle that is the Antarctic. But that's the way it's always been, Legler reminds us: the personal has always been defined, she says, as "somehow gossipy or small, beyond or below the reach of proper recording." But why? Why do we deny the human perspective of place, since this is the only perspective we have? And why exclude the innermost experience, merely to focus on the outer? "Why obscure the intimate?" Legler asks. "Why shorten the story of the glorious complexity and depth of the human in order to make a neater, grander tale?"

Legler's journey--and her record of it--is all the more remarkable because it is an intimate journey, not only to the farthest place on earth but into the deepest desires and dreams of the human spirit. It's a singularly brave journey, as heroic in its way as the journeys of Scott and Shackleton and Amundsen, one more exploration of the truest human question: what it means to be at home on this earth. There are a great many books that will give you the cold, hard facts about the Antarctic. But as a book about place, a chronicle of life at the bottom of the world, and an intensely honest record of a spiritual journey, On the Ice is the most richly illuminating of all.

Susan Wittig Albert, co-editor of What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest, University of Texas Press, 2007