The view from Antarctica
by Andrew Seguin
This is an old story. Strangers meet on a train; they strike up a conversation and a further meeting is arranged. In this case, it’s late 2005 and the train is bound for Washington, D.C., from New York. Our two travelers are Nancy Roberts, a Class 8 parent, and Rosemarie Keough, a photographer who had recently spent time aboard a different form of transportation: a 14 story-high Russian icebreaker, a ship that navigates the frozen ocean surrounding Antarctica so that its passengers can disembark onto a continent of ice.
Mrs. Roberts helps Mrs. Keough get an enormous book and bookstand on the train and finds out that Mrs. Keough and her husband, who live in British Columbia, are the authors of the book Antarctica. Weighing in at 19.6 pounds and packed with 345 color images, the book is as extreme as the place it describes, so Mrs. Roberts arranges, with the help of others, for the book to be displayed in Chapin’s art case. But the story doesn’t end there.
It ends with Mrs. Keough in person at Chapin. She came to the school last Thursday to give a slide presentation of her work and to talk about the journeys she made with her husband and young son to photograph Antarctica from 1999 to 2001.
“We lived on that icebreaker for five months,” Mrs. Keough said, as the Middle Schoolers stared at a slide of the ship, which dwarfed the humans standing next to it. Mrs. Keough spoke of family life — home-schooling her son, reading Harry Potter in a tent — but also of what Antarctica represents as a unique portion of the earth.
The girls saw pictures of sastrugi, the irregular ridges formed in the snow and ice by wind erosion. They saw leopard seals and orcas surfacing. There were huge chunks of ice carved by the wind and water into what resembled floating castles, and a closeup of an Emperor penguin’s chest, which was a gradient of gold that could have been mistaken for light glinting off of water.
But all was not wonderment — where else is better than the Antarctic for generating cold, hard facts? After reading a passage from her book, Mrs. Keough asked the girls what they had just learned. “Seventy percent of the world’s fresh water is in Antarctica,” one responded. “Ninety-nine-point-six percent of Antarctica is ice,” another added.
The latter statistic only encouraged the girls to learn more. “How did you stay warm?” one asked. “I am colder at home in my office than I was in the Antarctic,” Mrs. Keough responded, explaining that her boots kept her feet warm even at 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and that she wore three pairs of gloves.
“How did you get that picture of the Emperor penguin’s chest?” another asked. Mrs. Keough described how she lay prone for five or six hours at a time, with a hole for her chin cut out of the ice so that she could point her camera upward at the penguins, who gradually became used to her presence and approached her. It was a lesson that even in a place as remote as the Antarctic, patience and perseverance are two of the oldest tricks in the book.
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