On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (World As Home, The) | 
|  | | | Title: | On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (World As Home, The) | | Author: | Gretchen Legler | | Publisher: | Milkweed Editions | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 25 October, 2005 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 157131282X / 9781571312822 | | List Price: | $15.95 | | You Save: | $1.60 | | Amazon Price: | $14.35 | |
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews:
• Her Visit Was Intended To Research The Landscape; Her Book Is About The Crazy People She Found There 20 May, 2006
McMurdo Station, Antarctica is home to freezing temperatures, months of nearly total darkness and regular near-hurricane force winds. It's also home to a permanent station, McMurdo, and for a season was home to author Gretchen Legler, who tells of this season and those who have journeyed to Antarctica to escape life. Her visit was intended to research the landscape; her book is about the crazy people she found there. ON THE ICE is thus about an exploration few others will make: you'll have to read the book to live her discoveries vicariously.
Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch
- Reviewed by customer ID: A14OJS0VWMOSWO
• Simply Horrid 27 December, 2006
I read this book while in Antarctica last year and had to force myself to finish it. It became a contest of wills to see if I could red the entire book. McMurdo is a weird place, no doubt about it. But somehow, while the author perhaps had the best intentions, it veered off into something that becomes rather incomprehensible. I spent over seven seasons on the ice and there are so many other stories to tell; the people, scientists, raytheon, projects, science, bureaucracy, idiocy, etc., that would make a great story. This book is unfortunately not a great story. Buy another book, any other book...
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2NC86L7T7NVL9
• A Place, A Culture, A Personal Journey 26 January, 2008
Review of On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station by Gretchen Legler (Milkweed Editions, 2005)
How much does a particular place influence our personal life journey? Does each place provide a unique inspiration? Does a specific geography provide a road map to a distinct internal destination? Or does the quality of a landscape at an exact latitude and longitude, rich with both natural and human history, demand a certain journey from us - requiring us to examine and explore our own being in a manner that no other single place would do? ON THE ICE suggests to us that every natural setting provides a valuable tool to focus self-reflection, but certain places can dramatically shape a personal journey, just as the wind carves the ice in Antarctica - the harsh but surprisingly spiritually nurturing location of this book.
Gretchen Legler's adventure to Antarctica was initially intended as a trip to gather stories, and wonderful ones she found, but the place also sent her on a journey through her own soul. It is this personal story - a love story and a tale of self-discovery - which creates suspense and drives the narrative forward.
Legler brings to life an entire population of adventurers in Antarctica through colorful portraits of current and historical inhabitants. She continually explores the relationship that individuals have to the place and looks for the common qualities that mark people who have spent time "on the ice". She visits the huts of early explorers, Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, and finds both despair and vigorous life in Antarctica's relationship with man. This seemingly contradictory relationship continues today at McMurdo Station, where Legler spent much of her trip, and at other outpost she visits - Black Island, the South Pole, Siple Dome, and the ship the Nathaniel B. Palmer. The characters she meets - both present day and historical - speak of the harshness and difficulties of the place and yet most return to it again and again. They are somehow defined by and deeply spiritually attached to it.
Antarctica itself is of course the primary character in the book. The book includes interesting essays on the science of Antarctica, both the study of the natural world and the techniques and unique skills of the many scientists and experts Legler encounters. Legler often finds the intersection between art and science and illuminates for us the symbiotic relationship between the two. The chapter called Visible Proofs is a lovely essay on the work of Edward Wilson, who traveled to Antarctica in the early 1900s and documented what he saw with drawings. His illustrations are both scientific record and evocative art. Legler observes, "For Wilson, the concepts of God, Art and Science were not incompatible."
During her journey through both physical geography and internal landscape, Legler comes to believe, "that there was a sublime power in this land that could mysteriously help a person reconnect with that subtle magnetism in wildness that would show her the way." The reader comes to understand that while physical life and spiritual life find a way to grow in all places, in Antarctica certain lives are perhaps richer and more robust because of the obstacles they must overcome to thrive.
- Reviewed by customer ID: ASZGVOCBGRN8J
• At Home At The Bottom Of The World 19 July, 2007
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
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3734S7RAY2KDF
• Horrible...sorry, Really Horrible 15 May, 2006
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A35YJVK6A8MY4U
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