Elizabeth Arthur, writer and teacher, was always interested in wilderness adventures and in islands in particular.
But it wasn’t until 1982, when she happened upon the journals of Robert Falcon Scott, that she felt pulled in a new direction: one that would lead her to Antarctica in the footsteps of Scott himself.
Scott was a British explorer who reached the South Pole Jan. 18, 1912, only to find that Norwegian Roald Amundsen had been there a month before. Scott’s party of five died on the return trip, but Scott left detailed diaries, written practically up to the moment of his death. When she read these diaries, Arthur became obsessed with his journey. It wasn’t long before she conceived the idea of writing a novel about a woman obsessed with Scott’s journey, who tries to replicate it and in so doing becomes a heroic role model for women.
To research the novel, “Antarctic Navigation” (Knopf, $25), she would make no less of a commitment than a trip to Antarctica and some time alone in the wilderness.
That meant flying into Antarctica on an LC-131, a turbo-prop plane equipped with skis to land on snow. “It was just terrifying,” she says. The plane “was made in the early 1960s and was very small.
“All flights down to Antarctica are one-way flights. After you reach what is called the point of safe return, which is four hours out from New Zealand, the plane has to land on the continent or it won’t be landing anywhere because these turbo-props can only carry enough fuel for a one-way trip to the continent. So what they try to determine at the point of safe return is whether or not there will be major storms at the landing point-McMurdo Station-at the time of landing.
“I knew that we would need to land no matter what the conditions were like, so that was a little scary, but even more scary was the condition of the plane, which was just a complete wreck. Doors kept popping open; they had to practically sit on the cargo door to jam it shut. The fuel line broke just before takeoff; lights kept going on and off. There were about 40 of us jammed in with an awful lot of cargo, and the flight takes about eight hours.”
But it was worth it, Arthur says, not only because she got to go to Antarctica, but also because she was allowed up to the flight deck just as Antarctica came into view.
“I saw the continent from the air at 30,000 feet on a perfectly clear day. It was so much more beautiful than I expected. It’s like seeing the world for the first time. It’s so disorienting it’s like you have to learn to see again. I was unmoored, in the best possible sense. Part of it is the purity of the air, that you can see farther than you can see anywhere else. Part of it is just the immensity of it all.”
The author of six books and a teacher of creative writing at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, Arthur, 41, is the only novelist ever to have received a grant from the National Science Foundation, which she used to visit Antarctica. She says her interest in wilderness, which has formed the core of much of her work, stems from when she was 5 years old.
“My parents were divorced, and it was a very difficult divorce for me to live through. My mother remarried a man who did not particularly want to marry a woman who had young children; he was 52 at the time.
“It was just a very fragmenting kind of experience. The continuity my brother and I had come to expect was gone. Partly as a consequence of that divorce, I was sent away to summer camp for two months every summer, for five years, starting from the age of 7. And very fortuitously I was sent to the most wonderful summer camp on Earth, Camp Wynakee, which was located in Dorset, Vt. There were 30 boys and 30 girls, and it became for me an extended family and a very nurturing, spiritual experience, very much set in the natural world, and I fell in love with the natural world there.”
The camp was in a hollow at the end of a road, in the Green Mountains, Arthur says, and there was no place to go beyond it.
“It was the first island in my life, and it gave me a sense that an island was both a safe and a wonderful place to be. In fact, islands have recurred again and again in my work, and Ross Island in the Antarctic is important because it’s the island that the American base is now located on and it’s the island that Scott’s expedition set out from.”
Always a reader of wilderness literature, Arthur was so enthralled and consumed by Scott’s journal that she couldn’t put him out of her mind.
“I read the journals that he kept while he was on his final expedition, and they spoke to me very strongly. The immediate connection that I felt with Scott was that it seemed clear to me that he wanted to be a writer. He wrote repeatedly that he felt the inadequacy of his pen, that his mind sought expression that it could not find a form for. So I felt a great sympathy for him.
“What really moved me was that he kept writing right up to the moment of his death. I can imagine the effort it must have cost him to continue night after night to write words down of any kind, much less very eloquent entries of what he was going through in this expedition.
“I was just deeply moved by the fact that he thought this activity was worth engaging in even though as he grew closer and closer to the time of his death, he had no way of knowing that his journals would be found. In fact, there was every likelihood that the tents that he died in, that the bodies in the tents and that the journals would be lost forever. And that no trace of the expedition would ever be found.
“And that act of faith and hope that he engaged in in thinking that the truth of his own experience was worth recording under these extremely difficult conditions would speak to any writer, I think.”
Of her week alone in the wilderness of the Antarctic, Arthur says: “One of the very happiest weeks of my life was the week I spent sleeping alone in the tiny little survival hut, called a wannigan, (which was) anchored with chains to the volcanic ash of Cape Evans. That was about the most remote place I had ever been or was ever likely to get to. Part of what made the pleasure so intense for me was, of course, the knowledge that I couldn’t live there forever. It was a separation that would be followed by a reunion with the world.”
At first Arthur didn’t think it was going to be possible to go to Antarctica. All commercial ships leave from Argentina, she says, cross Drake Passage and go up the west side of the peninsula, across the Weddell Sea, which is the opposite side of Antarctica from where Scott departed. Then she learned that the main American base in Antarctica, McMurdo Station, is on Ross Island, just 20 miles from Scott’s starting point, and that his hut still stands.
“There was a specific place that I wanted to study-this hut-and there was a possibility that I could get there because there was an American base just 20 miles away.”
Arthur started doing research for the book in 1985 and began writing in 1987. She applied to the National Science Foundation during the 1988-89 season because she needed operational support.
“The only way to get down to that part of the continent,” she says, “is to fly in on a military aircraft, which is either owned by or leased by the United States Antarctic Program. The whole experience was difficult-the National Science Foundation had never sent a fiction writer down before-but I’m grateful for the help I got.”
Arthur spent three weeks in Antarctica after her harrowing flight and says of her first view of the place from the plane: “This was a continent that I had been obsessed with for six years and had been reading everything I could get my hands on about and had seen extensive pictures of. And nothing prepared me for what I saw.
“It’s the last wilderness on Earth, and it’s totally pure. It’s ice and snow and rock and light, the basic elements of the Earth. There are no buildings, no houses; you see utterly uninterrupted planet that stretches as far as you can see in every direction. It’s certainly the only place on the planet where you can see that anymore. It’s really indescribable. I tried very hard in the book to describe it, and I think I got in the ballpark.”
Arthur describes the temperatures she encountered in the Antarctic summer as “quite balmy: 20 degrees, 15 degrees, maybe it went to 10 or 5. Sunny, beautiful. And the sun is in the sky 24 hours a day in that season. It’s very exhilarating. Normally I need quite a bit of sleep, but I only needed about five hours a night there; I think it’s because of the continuous sunlight.”
The hut she stayed in was a little plywood box, she says, that was constructed specifically so people wouldn’t have to stay in Scott’s hut if they got stranded on Cape Evans.
“His hut is quite big, 50 feet by 25 feet,” she says, “and it is almost as it was when they left it just before the first World War. There’s a lot of food that they left which is still theoretically edible because in the Antarctic nothing degrades. There are no bacteria to speak of, and there are no mice. You don’t have food mold. Seeing the hut was the most magical thing that I ever had happen to me. There’s a tremendous sense of presence in it that makes you feel that the explorers might have left it five years ago rather than almost 90 years ago.”
From the experience, Arthur learned something surprising about herself: “I discovered I really have tremendous determination. We ran into obstacle after obstacle, including the loss of my paperwork. The satisfaction of finally arriving at the hut after apparently insuperable obstacles was so intense. But there also is a much more spiritual thing that I found from the powerful sense of presence in the hut, as if these people had essentially just walked out the door and closed it behind them. It was really a sense of the permanence of things, that they may appear to be lost, but that there is some underlying permanence. And, for me, that was really important.
“That, too, was a real turning point in my life: For the first time in my life I had a deeply spiritual experience linked to that continuity, despite apparent loss, and it was about being there, in that place.”
Of her decision to put a woman into a leadership role in the rugged Antarctic terrain of her novel, Arthur says: “I think women don’t have heroic role models. As a writer, and a reader, one of the things I wanted to do was to create a female hero. I feel that the more we can do this for one another, the more we can say, `This is us too,’ the more strength we will all have. I think and hope that that’s what I created in my character, Morgan Lamont. I think we have to get rid of this whole idea that there is such a thing as a heroine and go for heroic action and just take it as ours.”
