#encounters at the end of the world

[tealin]

Antarcticans

I may not have used my sketchbook as much as I thought I would, with regard to locations, but I did fill a few pages with one of my favourite pastimes back in The World: people sketching.

My biggest anxiety about going to McMurdo was the human factor.  Whether it was school or work, a recurring motif in my life is that I do not do well in a big box full of Americans, and that is, almost literally, exactly what McMurdo is.  Sure, the continent wants to kill you, and every way of getting to and around it comes with risk of serious accident, but the only thing I was actually afraid of was finding myself in a stressful social situation and not having any recourse to escape.  I know how to build a snow cave.  I don't know how to deflect the ire of people who've taken a set against me – and, for whatever reason, I tend to rub people in the States the wrong way.  When I was shortlisted for the placement, the person handling the admin briefed me about the process and asked me if I had any further questions, and I raised this concern.  She responded that, speaking purely from her own experience, she had never felt more comfortable being herself than when she was at McMurdo.  Not knowing who 'herself' was, I took this with a grain of salt, but it was an encouraging answer nonetheless.

It turned out that the best thing about McMurdo was, in fact, those very people I had been afraid of.  Everyone I met was absolutely splendid.  In my first days there, my supervisor joked that if you shake the world, all the best people end up at the bottom; the remainder of my time there proved how right she was.  One of the main things that attracted me to the Terra Nova story, and has kept me committed to it for so long, was how wonderful the people were – far outside what I had come to expect from humanity.  Warm, genuine, accepting of and attentive to each other, a wide range of personalities and dispositions that nevertheless got on and functioned together as a society, in the face of environmental and emotional extremes ... I needed to know such people were possible, and clung to them as an ideal.  It was a wonderful surprise to discover that they would not be out of place amongst their modern counterparts.

Is it because they're scientists, as someone theorised? But they're not – most of the people at McMurdo are support staff, working in the kitchen or waste disposal or shuttle fleet; helping the science happen, yes, but that's not necessarily why they're there, personally.  Is it because a harsh environment triggers something in the human psyche to support each other, rather than compete?  Maybe, but these people seem like they'd be solid wherever they are, and were like that before going South.  

I suspect there is an element of self-selection – something about the sort of person who would want to go to Antarctica correlates with a certain mindset, one that gels extremely well with others who share it, however different they may be in other respects.  There is no denying that everyone there is a bit odd.  They tend to be types that exist on the fringes back in The World and, like me, may struggle to conform to its values.  A few years ago, I came across this adage from an Antarctic veteran: "You go the first time for the adventure.  You go the second time to relive the first time.  You go the third time because you don't belong anywhere else."  Many of them live in remote places, or travel, or do itinerant work when not on the Ice.  There is a bit of a running gag in Where'd You Go, Bernadette? that everyone doing a mundane job in Antarctica is a high achiever in something amazing, who left it all behind – and that's not exactly untrue.  Perhaps what unites Antarcticans is an awareness of what really matters, when you get right down to it: they've played the game enough to see through it, and are done with it.  "Glory? He knew it for a bubble: he had proved himself to himself. He was not worrying about glory. Power? He had power." So Cherry wrote about Wilson in 1948, but many modern Antarcticans might sympathise.  When you come out the other side of self-aggrandisement and jockeying for status, and are happy just to be yourself and let others be themselves, you get a happy, harmonious society.  Or so it would seem.

At midnight on my last day there, I had a deep conversation with someone I'd only met in passing before, but who was totally down to have a long talk with a random stranger on a footbridge in the middle of the night. I presented her my hypothesis that no one at McMurdo was popular in high school.  No, she replied; there may be a handful who were popular in high school ... but they're not popular at McMurdo.  Maybe the secret is in there somewhere.

Anyway, I didn't do nearly as much people sketching as I'd have liked, given that the base was populated entirely by Characters, but these are the pages I did manage to get. 

Two pages of random McMurdites, likely in the Galley:

These last four are from a meeting where team leaders were presenting their projects to some high muckymucks visiting from the NSF. I was only there because my project was allotted a space in the presentation, but the main focus was the massive Thwaites Glacier project, a collaboration between the US Antarctic Program and the British Antarctic Survey to study one of the most unstable regions in Antarctica.  They quite rightly took up the whole meeting time, and the privilege of being there meant I learned a lot about the project.  My longstanding habit is to draw during meetings, so I captured some of them in my sketchbook while absorbing the science into my head.

Notable characters in my sketches include: - David Vaughan, heading up the British contingent of the Thwaites team, was quite an engaging and affable guy but had a concentration scowl that puts mine in the shade. I was shocked when I heard he died of cancer earlier this year (2023) – a great loss to BAS, glaciology, and Antarctic science generally. - When Erin Pettit isn't studying glaciers with an eye to climate change, she's taking girls on wilderness adventures to foster an interest in science and art, as well as self-confidence. - Britney Schmidt, Queen of Icefin, not only earned my profound respect but has a whole episode of PBS's Terra dedicated to her work developing sub-ice autonomous robots with the aim of exploring Europa. (Seriously, so cool.)

I could go on about Antarctic people, but there's nothing so good as showing you, and luckily I can do just that. PBS sent a small team down in 2018 to do a YouTube series, and one of their episodes is all about the cool people who call McMurdo home.  It might make my point better than all my whittering, and is certainly more fun. If you'd like to see more, Werner Herzog's film Encounters at the End of the World is much of the same, but more so.  It had been recommended to me several times, but I hadn't managed to get my hands on it until a week before I left, when it turned out a Cambridge friend had a copy and lent it to me.  'I don't know how true it is,' he said, 'but I want it to be.'  When I got back, I was happy to confirm to him that it was, indeed, exactly like that.  And I miss it so much.

[letsdocuboutit]

- Let's Docu 'Bout It -

Episode 23 - Encounters at the End of the World In this episode I recap and talk about Encounters at the End of the World, an Oscar nominated documentary by Werner Herzog about Antarctica and the people who choose to spend time there. 

Listen wherever you listen to podcasts!

Spotify - Apple - Amazon - Castbox - iHeartRadio - Google - Podcast Addict

Photos: a jellyfish swimming beneath the ice, McMurdo station,  Dr. David Ainley with the penguins, inside a fumerole, Transantarctic Mountains

Werner Herzog Foundation

[gelo-p]

takamatsu tomori

[cemyafilmarsiv]

Road Movies

180 South [Chris Malloy]

Walk About [Nicolas Roeg]

Holy Motors [Leos Carax]

Into The Wild [Sean Peann]

Sideways [Alexander Payne]

Nebraska [Alexander Payne]

Midnight Run [Martin Brest]

Eat Pray Love [Ryan Murphy]

Death Proof [Quentin tarantino]

How it ends [David M. Rosenthal]

The Straight Story [David Lynch]

Arizona Dream [Emir Kusturica]

The World's Ender [Edgar Wright]

The Motorcyle [Diares,Walter Sallas]

Moonrise Kingdom [Wes Anderson]

The Darjeeling Limited [Wes Anderson]

Every thing is İlluminated [Liev Schreiber]

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty [Ben Stiller]

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [Terry Gilliam]

The Cave Of The Yellow Dog [Byambasuren Davaa]

Little Miss Sunshine [Jonathan Dayton-Valerie Faris]

Encounters at the End of the World [Werner Herzog]

Hector and The Search For Happiness [Peter Chelsom]

[okayto]

Encounters at the End of the World - Antarctica documentary by Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog's narration was so delightfully odd in the Fireballs documentary, particularly when that doc featured Antarctica, that when I found out he'd made an entire other documentary about the people who live and work on the lonely continent in 2007, I had to find it. And it is fascinating and just as weird as I'd hoped.

Highlights:

Werner Herzog starts us off with some philosophical musings on deep questions, like why don’t chimpanzees ride goats. This is because he is interested in the human condition.

According to the commentary track, he asked all the scientists he interviewed this question. No one had answers. This did not make it into the film.

The cafeteria has a soft-serve ice cream* machine. Its name is Frosty Boy.

Frosty Boy is very, very popular. Everyone loves Frosty Boy.

*Frosty Boy serves something LIKE ice cream. It’s not actually ice cream. But they don’t tell us what it is.

Before going out in the field the team had to take survival lessons. One of these lessons is how to do things in whiteout conditions. Whiteout conditions are simulated by wearing buckets over your head.

The buckets all have faces drawn on them.

DVD commentary track clarifies the bucket faces weren’t done for filming, they’re just like that.

Weddell seal researchers take milk samples from nursing seals. They have a very scientific method of getting the seal to cooperate that was captured on (public) film for the first time in this documentary.

The method is: they walk up to the seal and stick a bag over its head.

I cannot emphasize enough how hilarious it is to see a person walk up to a seal longer than he is, with what looks like a big tarpaulin tote bag slung over his back, and then just WHOMP it quickly over the seal’s head.

Afterwards they clarify that the seals are fine and gruntled afterwards, making them ideal animals to work with.

Antarctica has an active volcano! Like, pool-of-lava-bubbling active!

Philosophical Penguin Musings

Questions of penguin philosophy are put to an introverted scientist who looks like he may be regretting agreeing to participate

“Dr. Ainley, is there such thing as insanity among penguins?”

The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has a frozen sturgeon stuck in what appears to be a shrine carved out of the icy wall of a tunnel.

“The strangest of all, the real strangest footage I saw in my entire life” is the real frozen sturgeon "mysteriously hidden away" beneath the ice of the “mathematically precise true South Pole.”

Possibly this was done by a maintenance worker.

There is also a container of Russian caviar.

And a letter that I couldn’t read.

“And this is very strange, I mean, paper cut-out flowers from magazines and this little poem. Very, very odd. And this is my favorite sequence in the film: a garland of frozen popcorn around it.” "You cannot invent it. Reality is so strange, in a way it outdoes all your fantasies.”

Werner Herzog is also I think so strange that you cannot invent it.

[kickerofelves]

Seal Sounds from Encounters at the End of the World

[toweringclam]

I've laughed harder at Werner Herzog narrating a penguin's suicide than at anything Elon Musk has ever done on purpose

[lyssahumana]

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

My great-uncle was like one of those ants who, coming upon a line of marching ants, turns and goes in the opposite direction for reasons of his own. Ants being ants, this is not supposed to happen, but it sometimes does, and no one knows why.

Charles Simic • The Renegade: Writings on Poetry And A Few Other Things

[cassowary-rapture]

Nihilist Penguin (Werner Herzog)

[rwpohl]

[wilsonjobs]

Encounters at the End of the World (2007) vietsub

Gặp gỡ giấc mơ của bạn ở nơi tận cùng thế giới. Chú chim cánh cụt quay đầu tiến vào đất liền là hình ảnh thu nhỏ của những kẻ mộng mơ chuyên nghiệp này, khiến con người cảm động, kinh hãi và đầy cảm xúc lẫn lộn.

[caviarsonoro]

Thomas Feiner: Encounters at the end of the world/ Michelangelo Antoni...

"A film you can explain in words is not a real film". Michelangelo Antonioni

[cemyafilmarsiv]

Encounters at the End of the World directed by Werner Herzog

[prsnla]