the history of rural and wildland fire in the United States—it looked for a time as if Stephen Pyne, despite his unquestionable talents as a scholar and writer, might fail to find a permanent academic position and would have to seek employment in a line of work that would not permit him to keep writing history. It was at about this time that he was given the chance to spend three months in Antarctica, a journey that profoundly influenced him and led directly to the writing of this book. But it was also in Antarctica that Pyne broadened his historical horizons beyond the North American continent where he had obtained his scholarly training, and began to consider the possibility of writing history on a much broader canvas. It is no accident that a short while after finishing The Ice he chose to write Burning Bush, a “fire history” of that other great southern continent—Australia. In it, he finally declared to himself and everyone else his ambition to write the world history of fire that he has since entitled Cycle of Fire. Without The Ice, Cycle of Fire might never have materialized.
But the kinship between The Ice and the other volumes of Cycle of Fire runs deeper still. Anyone familiar with Stephen Pyne’s other writings will recognize his trademark virtues in this book. The energy and passion for making physical and organic phenomena come alive as real actors inhabiting a historical stage that we too often perceive solely through human eyes: these are just as powerfully in evidence when Pyne writes about ice as when he writes about fire. We are unlikely soon to find another book on Antarctica that offers such an exhilarating, kaleidoscopic vision of this strangest of all continents. Readers of the fire books will not be surprised (though they will be just as delighted) by the ways in which Pyne manages to mingle tales of early polar explorers with painstaking explanations of ice crystals and the aurora borealis, or the ways he combines close readings of Antarctica’s literature and art with discussions of its legal jurisdictions and geopolitical conflicts. Pyne is an author whose curiosity and enthusiasm for anything and everything connected to his subject are positively voracious, so that by the end of his books no reader is likely ever to think about their subjects in the same way again. This turns out to be as true of ice as it is of fire.
One must dig deeper still, though, to realize that The Ice occupies a place so organic to Cycle of Fire that the series could hardly be complete without it. If one truly wants to grasp the source of Stephen Pyne’s passion for his chosen lifework, one must recognize that fire is for him both a metaphor and the ultimate physical embodiment of all that makes the Earth such a special place. We humans often congratulate ourselves for being the highest forms of life on a planet that as far as we know possesses the only life in this solar system, if not in the universe itself. We regard organic life as the phenomenon which more than any other sets Earth apart from everything else in the dark void of the heavens. But what Stephen Pyne long ago realized was that life is only a special case of the more general chemistry of carbon and oxygen that is constantly setting Earth aflame. The great fires whose stories he tells so compellingly in Cycle of Fire are one kind of burning, but so is life: a slower, cooler combustion which nonetheless enacts the same basic chemistry as the burning Earth. The fact that organic life plays such a central role in preparing the way for its hotter, more all-consuming companion is just further evidence of their basic kinship.
If fire and life have thus been bound together since the instant of life’s first creation, then in a sense so profound as to be almost mystical they share in common a birth and death that mark the beginning and end of all things. When the last animal stops breathing, when the last plant stops processing chlorophyll to turn sunlight into sugar, and when the last earthly fire completes its oxidation of the carbon carcasses these organisms will leave behind, what remains will be … The Ice. The frozen waste of Antarctica is thus a glimpse of the future that awaits us at the end of all time, when life and fire finally cease, and with them the human passions and ideas that have lent them so many meanings throughout the long sweep of human history.
Why does The Ice belong in Cycle of Fire? Although it was only the second book in the series, it in fact marked out the beginning and the end that would provide the narrative framework for all the rest. Standing beneath the aurora and gazing out across a seemingly endless expanse of land and ice that provide little fuel for fire and little food for life, Stephen Pyne discovered the epic frame that would yield a scholarly creation like no other in history. We are lucky indeed that he made his unexpected journey to the south and wrote this extraordinary record of what he found at the far end of the Earth.
Preface
to the 1998
Paperback Edition
The parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
From its inception The Ice has been exceptional. That had not been my intention. I thought it would continue themes in the history of science and exploration that I had studied in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, particularly the argument that William Goetzmann had made (I thought brilliantly) for a Second Great Age of Discovery and that eventually appeared in his 1986 book New Lands, New Men. Meanwhile I began sketching the contours of a Third Age, an era propelled by the revelations of remote sensing, which probed the inhuman geography of the deep oceans, interplanetary space, and Antarctica and which found a cultural ally in the intellectual syndrome that the twentieth century has come to call Modernism. When I learned of the Antarctic Fellowship sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, I proposed to place Antarctica within this schema, more specifically within an evolving symbiosis of exploration and earth science. I went to Antarctica with those expectations.
And I failed. The longer I was on The Ice, the more perplexing the scene appeared; the more problematic it became to place Antarctica within a context outside itself; the more the experience became one of things missing; the more I realized—and reluctantly admitted—that I would have to write a very different kind of book, one centered in Antarctica and on the properties that made The Ice what it was. The book would be about ice. Ice was the essential Antarctica. And continental-scale ice was precisely the feature literature most avoided.
To be honest, I would have to inform the book with ice. Yet I could find no literary or conceptual models for such an enterprise, only the gnawing intuition that I might do for Antarctica what Clarence Dutton had done for the Grand Canyon, transfigure it into an Earth emblem that could give shape to the ruling ideas of an age. Dutton had rendered the Grand Canyon into a great symbol of the Second Age, a place where culture and landscape had converged as powerfully as river and plateau. I would—would try to—do the same for Antarctica, a metaphor of the Third Age, for the Earth as Modernist.
But ambition alone does not make art. The prevailing literature of Antarctica centered on people, either for journalistic human interest or as a source of moral drama. The typical formula begins and ends with humans, who enter The Ice in one condition and leave in another. But the Ice I experienced denied that formula. The Ice simply Was, not merely uninhabited but uninhabitable without artificial life support. Humanity would not restructure this landscape in its own image, only polish the cold mirror of its surface. Nor would The Ice resist. It would simply Be. It would absorb, reduce, and reflect what was brought to it. This journey to the Underworld would have no guide, no Tiresias, Sybil, or Vergil. Here was an existential Earth. Its story must begin and end with Ice. Into this world humans would enter, do whatever they would—the choices were limited—and then depart while The Ice continued unchanged.
The structure of The Ice became deeply (and deliberately, if reluctantly) ironic. While the narrative would conform to the classic journey to a source, its perspective would be Modernism. The Second Age had a suitable narrative sledge, but one ill-previsioned to survive on the solipsistic Ice. Modernism had the conceptual apparatus to appreciate The Ice, but little motivation to go there. The book would thus simultaneously critique both syndromes. This design was a necessary, not a happy, one. I assumed that it would make the book too alien, too abstract, and too formidable for general readers, and perhaps reach beyond my talents. But I could find no other way to approach the experience honestly. I was ready to try.
When I applied for the Antarctic Fellowship, I was unemployed except as a seasonal