So I could argue that I am learning a survival skill when I learn
how to operate the Zodiacs, which, along with thick Sorel boots and ice
crampons, provide the main means of transport at Palmer.
Taking a 15-foot rubber boat through floating fragments of brash
ice, I spot a leopard seal lazing on an ice floe. I maneuver around to
take some photos of the snaky, blunt-headed predator. As I am doing
this, a panicked penguin jumps into my boat, tripping over the out-
board’s gas can in front of me. We exchange looks of mutual bewilder-
ment before it leaps onto a pontoon and dives back into the icy blue
water.
Incidents like this make it hard to maintain a sense of gloom and
doom on the last wild continent, at least for more than a few hours at
a time. Along with nightly discussions over Pisco Sours made with gla-
cier ice at the Penguin Pub (the open bar located above the machine
shop in GWR), I also manage to distract myself with recreational
sojourns on the Southern Ocean. You need at least two people with
radios to take out one of the Zodiacs, so on days when I’m not work-
ing with the Schnappers or the Sundevils, I spend time looking for a
boating partner. Doc Labarre, the station’s big, balding fatalistic physi-
cian who used to work the emergency room in Kodiak, Alaska, before
it was taken over by an HMO, is among those regularly up for an
adventure.
One day we cruise past Torgersen Island, where I take the Zodiac
up “on platform” (as you speed up, the bow drops down, giving you
greater visibility and control), and head us toward Loudwater Cove on
the other side of Norsel Point. The following seas allow us to surf the
15-foot craft past the rocky spires of Litchfield Island and around the
big breaking waves at Norsel. We then motor around a few sculptural
apartment-sized icebergs, crossing over to a landing opposite the gla-
cier wall. We tie off our bowline, watching a big lanky leopard seal
sleeping on an adjacent ice floe. We dump our orange float coats and
climb several hundred feet up and over some rocky scree and down a
snowfield splotched with red algae to the opening of an ice cave. Down
in the cave, it is like a dripping blue tunnel, with slush over a clear ice
floor that reveals the rocky piedmont. Hard blue glacier ice forms the
bumpy roof, with its stalactitelike icicles and delicate ice rills forming
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