Ice queen

In Antarctica, Gretchen Legler found a tribe of eccentrics living at 70-below under the biggest ozone hole on earth. She also found love.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Dec 20, 2005 | Near the South Pole, seismologists measure the vibrations of earthquakes as they circle the globe. Astrophysicists try to unravel the mysteries of dark matter in the universe by scrutinizing subatomic particles under the ice. Writer Gretchen Legler went there to find out what this land of 80 mph winds and 70-below temperatures does to the people who work there, and how it might change her.

In 1997, through a National Science Foundation program for artists and writers, Legler sampled the scientific projects taking place on the continent, which is owned by no nation, but studied by researchers from many. At McMurdo Station, the South Pole and Cape Roberts, she met not just geologists looking for deep sea geologic core samples and biologists trying to discover new organisms that thrive in freezing waters, but also ordinary civilians, from graphic designers to counselors, who had put their lives back home on hold and gone in search of an icy adventure, working in the research stations as cooks, cleaners and ditch-diggers on ice.

The 17 essays in Legler's "On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica" offer vignettes of her own explorations of Antarctica, told in a kind of self-consciously antiheroic style. She chronicles the rigors of life in the frozen environment, but also explores the emotional impact of this landscape on her sense of self. When Legler arrives in Antartica, she's struggling to get over a failed relationship with another woman, and on this icy continent she finds a new love, too.

Salon spoke with Legler by telephone from her office at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she now teaches English and creative writing.

Why is Antarctica such an important place for scientists?

The South Pole is a clean and dark place, so they can study ice and be pretty sure that it's not been polluted. And there is so little human life in Antarctica that it creates this sort of perfect, dry, dark environment for doing astronomy. It's unpeopled, and unpolluted, and basically untouched.

It's almost like this living sterile laboratory. Antarctica's place on the planet gives it interesting weather patterns, and Antarctica is right under the earth's biggest ozone hole. People who want to study global warming go there too, because Antarctica is so central to the world's weather patterns, and the ocean that surrounds Antarctica is so crucial to the whole riddle of global warming.

Antarctica is really an unstudied place. It's really a new place. Despite the fact that there are scientific stations from almost every country you can imagine in Antarctica right now, it's a place that humans really haven't been long -- only about 100 years -- and then we've had this very, very slight footprint.

So, some scientists are drawn there because of the lure of discovering something new?

Scientists like adventures, too. There was this funny debate while I was there. Some of the scientists would accuse others of being "adventure scientists" or "gee-whiz scientists" -- scientists who were mostly in it for the adventure, not for the science, as if going for the adventure is somehow not a valuable goal.

Yet, until recent decades, American women scientists were not allowed in at all. How was it that this continent that was owned by no country was off-limits to female U.S. researchers?

It's a great example of the patriarchy in action. It's astonishing to us to think that some high-up Navy person could justify keeping serious, women scientists out of a country because of their gender. That just seems outrageous to us now.

The year I was there, 1997, was the last year that the Navy was in charge of operations in Antarctica, before it shifted control over to the National Science Foundation. It was military ideology that kept women out. Navy brass said: "We couldn't possibly have women here; we don't have bathrooms for them." Or: "We can't have women here; it would upset the men." In the '60s, they used these excuses to restrict women's movements.

Dr. Mary Alice McWhinnie was a scientist who studied krill, but she had to study it from her laboratory in Ohio. She had to have men go to Antarctica, and bring back samples for her. She became the first woman to winter-over at McMurdo Station in Antarctica in 1974. And once they sent one woman, the precedent had been set, and so more and more started to go. Now, you'll see plenty of women who are there as assistants, or who are there as principal investigators running their own scientific projects.

And women are among those providing support services to the scientists, too?

Yes, the National Science Foundation hires a company called Raytheon Polar Services Co. to basically run things for them now -- a private company. They hire people to do all kinds of things: cook, bake, laundry, cleaning. They hire carpenters, plumbers and electricians, and people to take care of computers, garbage and hazardous waste, to dig ditches and to run the hydroponic greenhouse.

But they're not all cooks and bakers in their normal lives?

Some of these people are adventurers, people who really, really want to go to Antarctica. It sort of reminds me of that movie "Close Encounters." Richard Dreyfuss has this overwhelming urge to go to Devil's Tower, and he can't explain it, he keeps being drawn there. I met a lot of people in Antarctica who were like that.

Next Page: Why do women -- especially lesbians -- like Antarctica?

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