Postcard from the South

Last month he delivered a postcard dated from Antarctica Station. She’d arrived. I heard her scream of triumph 8000 miles away from her gentler sea in southern France. I was envious of her spirit of adventure: the chutzpah, the sheer courage it took to go on such a challenging voyage when you’re in your eighties. She told me her reasons, and I remember our conversation, smiling at the memory, seeing her face lit with excitement.

‘I want to see for myself the truth about what science is saying,’ she told our group of long-term friends, women from different cultures with differing responsibilities.  She had brought us together long ago, to share our experiences in our work and families. Under her guidance we shared our thoughts on what it means to be a woman, and how language, culture and tradition impact on empowerment. We shared our truths as we saw them, without fear or shame, and found we had created a bond that supported us when we were faced individually with large, dramatic changes, or smaller challenges in our lives.  We supported her ambition, and persuaded her family to support her too. Her arguments came from her spirit of adventure, a flame never wavering throughout her entire lifetime.

‘What does it mean for us if the world is warming, melting the ice away?’ she asked us. ‘What does it feel like to walk on that gigantic, southern continent? It’s a new world for me, one with its perils for the unwary.  I love the sense of danger. I want to risk myself again.’

Once they understood, her sons and daughters supported her, naturally. For all their lives, their mother had been the lynchpin of the family, and a world traveller. She had been their refuge and strength after the death of their father. How could they refuse her request at such a time?

I’m reviewing a series of photos she sent to me on her return. A favourite is a study of a giant leopard seal, innocent but intimidating, asleep upon an ice flow. In another image, rockhopper penguins march over what she called ‘the true four shades of blue, born of frozen air’.  

Her love of the natural world was lyrical, heart-felt, and also fearful of irreversible change.  But she knew that beauty abides within terror.  In the deepest night, safe on the ship, southern lights mesmerised her, and moon shadowed icebergs, pristine as they passed, sang sagas to her spirit.  I know that is what she wanted to hear, to see, to experience with her physical senses before her time ended.  In her last communication she painted another portrait of the aeons-old continent.

‘My giants in frost are sentinels in crystal silence.  They float around us, untethered, scattered like pinecones in a vastness of cold azure hues.’

In that sweep of savage splendour, she found a land that measures each woman at her worth. After her death, I truly believe she walks there still.