keyshape

i have been reading a lot about the north and south pole.  they are very different each other.  when i was a kid i always imagined both being equally as cold, desolate and dry.  the north pole has a surprising amount of life for certain periods of the summer, including some of the most beautiful flora.  i scanned some pictures from a 1956 LIFE encyclopedia that i picked up at a junk shop in bushwick.  you can of course google tundra biome, but there is something about how these images look on thick matte paper...

Top photo by Karsh, Ottawa for Time, bottom photo by Eva Beckett

Photographs by Fritz Goro

Top photos by Fritz Goro; Bottom photo by V.E.F. Solman for Canadian Wildlife Service, Department of Northern Affairs

Photographs by Fritz Goro

Scans from The World We Live In.  Published by TIME Inc., Simon and Schuster Inc., and Artists and Writers Guild, Inc. in New York, 1956.  See each image for proper photo credit.

One of my goals in the next five years is to see an arctic summer...

so, for the antarctic, one of the driest places on earth, harbors very little life, and its landscape is about as alien as the ocean floor.  i have been reading about roald amundsen, from norway, the first european to reach the south pole, racing neck and neck with robert scott of england.  i actually can't bear to read the scott parts, because his approach towards the land is so wreckless, that is costs him his own life, and that of four others.  he scoffed at amundsen for using techniques developed by the greenlandic people (amundsen himself spoke and was part greenlandic), including animal hide clothing, dog sled teams and consuming uncooked seal and penguin meat to avoid scurvy.  i indulge in descriptions of his meticulousness in facing perilous conditions...  "Not a millimetre must be wasted".

Since the pemmican was cylindrical, there were empty spaces in between.  Into these, Johansen packed the dried milk in thin bags... like sausages.  There still remained some space in the interstices, and into this he managed to fit the chocolate, carefully broken up into individual squares.  The biscuits had to be taken out of the maker's boxes, counted, repacked in the sledging cases, and the number, layer by layer, entered in the provision books.  Johanson finished this tedious work at the end of July, by which time, he noted in his diary, he had counted 42,000 biscuits, opened 1,321 tins of pemmican, and stowed the contents, likewise 100.8 kilos of chocolate and 203 "sausages" of fried milk holding 300 grammes each.

Image via the East Carolina University Joyner Library Digital Collections

that being said, there is also another great story, that involves less obsessive planning and more a feat of sheer will, this time of a woman named ada who was stranded on wrangel island in northern siberia for a year and a half, after a team of men, who she was hired to accompany to sew clothes and cook, perished one by one due to exposure and scurvy.  ada somehow mustered her own strength, taught herself to shoot a gun and keep herself from going crazy during sunless winter, mainly through routine (i think it also helps that the cat, Vic, also survived).