And so speaking of destinations--
borrowing Cybele's computer here--
almost like another world, this is Antarctica.
So I want to close with a very brief passage from The Fallen
Sky.
And actually, after I'm done talking or just chatting,
I'm going to put some aphorisms on the slide show
up here, a little sample from a lyric prose collection
that I've been working on for the better part of two
centuries, actually.
[LAUGHTER]
And hoping this is the last version of that manuscript
and that it'll get out there in the world.
But let me just read this very short passage
from The Fallen Sky.
As Adam said, The Falling Sky is a book about meteorites
and the people who hunt them.
It's a book of science writing-- of sort of literary journalism,
I guess you'd say-- but it's also a memoir,
and it's a sort of odd hybrid of those two things.
So it's about meteorites, and there's actually
a meteorite over on the book table, here,
that you can look at.
You can't buy, but you can look at it.
It's about meteorites.
It's about meteorite hunters.
And therefore it's about obsession, it's about wonder,
and the costs of wonder.
And for this project, I went to Antarctica in late 2003,
early 2004, and one of my expedition mates is here--
Tim Swindle, who should raise his hand--
who teaches here at U of A and is a planetary scientist,
and will be going to Antarctica a week from today.
For your fourth trip?
Yeah.
Fourth time.
He's made of tough stuff.
It was cold.
I arrived in Antarctica at the end
of several months-- almost two years--
of much personal upheaval.
And without giving the book away-- the end
of the book away, it doesn't go well.
So I will read just this passage here.
This is at the first camp.
This is the LaPaz ice fields.
This is what it looked like.
Ralph is the leader of the expedition.
This is an annual expedition to Antarctica,
called the Antarctic Search for Meteorites, or ANSMET.
I use that abbreviation in here, and Andrew and Barb
are both scientists on this expedition.
So a little taste of the destination--
At the LaPaz ice fields.
We're camped on hard snow--
snow that's pocked or flat or broken like flakes--
near dimpled blue ice.
We're surrounded by an Antarctic prairie that in one direction
gives way to low rolls and swells that remind me
of the Smoky Hills of Kansas.
The wind-shaped snow extends to the horizon--
sastrugi, those hard packed furrows
that metaphor can make into hundreds of shapes.
Inches or feet high, the sastrugi
become fishhooks and mesas, plowshares and ridges,
catchy fins and talons.
Some sastrugi have the aspect of tears.
Where snow gives out, blue ice begins,
not smooth but scalloped like a mold of mamatus clouds.
The ice itself is the color of blue eyes with cataracts.
Compacted snow inside the ice and crevasses
filled with snow on the surface across this blue
like a Cubist rendering of crazed kelp.
The low hills not far from camp are the only relief
on the horizon, a low hummocky ridge
topped with nubbles of ice at regular intervals.
Pinnacles, they're called.
They are the round ice peaks, Barb
tells me, of the below-surface topography that
slows the flow of ice here, sort of like the exposed tip
of an iceberg.
But again it's time for work.
We unload the plane, using a snowmobile
to pull a sled piled with boxes of food, emergency
supplies, and isopods.
The latter are white metal bins in which
we'll store the bagged and tagged meteorites for transport
out of the field, when the searches are over.
The isopods hold my attention.
They were used during Apollo missions
to carry lunar rocks here on Earth.
Ralph will tell me later that he doesn't
know if ANSMET'S isopods were spares
or if they may have held, for a time, samples of the Moon.
I like to think that they did.
A stiff wind slows us down, and I have no idea how cold it is.
Cold enough that when I stop lifting my sweat chills fast.
We haul over more tents, food, sleep kits, and the survival
bags of snacks and extra gear that we'll
carry on our snowmobiles."
Which you see here.
And I'll skip this next part, but we would go out
on these searches in these traverse lines,
looking from our snowmobiles, looking for meteorites.
And we'd been at it for, like, four days
when I finally see one.
"We're searching in places we keep straight
with fictive subdivision names such as Kozy Katabatic Kove
and Terrapin Landing Royale."
[LAUGHTER]
Then, "I see a meteorite-- no, two."
I see two.
"After nearly four days at LaPaz and a handful
of weather-delimited traverses, I
see two black chunks cut in the middle by snow.
No mistaking it!
Revving the snowmobile standing, I squint and hope and yell
and speed to the spot, my words lost in the din of the engine
and the clattery-smacks of snowmobile skis on uneven ice.
The stone-- the size of a small gourd put out as a countertop
decoration in the fall--
sits behind a bit of snow that made it appear to be two rocks.
When I get off my snowmobile, I squat and peer
at the meteorite, and I am disbelieving,
and I am thrilled.
Then I stand up, waving briskly, people arriving.
I forget about the persistent pain of throttle thumb
in my right hand and, absurdly gloved, smack the cargo box,
saying, 'Hot damn!'
'Is this your first?'
Andrew asks.
I respond with an enthused, 'Oh yeah.'"
I believe I'd found what I've been looking for.
And later that day, in the evening,
"beside the steady whoosh of our stoves,
Ralph busy reviewing field notes and photographs,
I recall a conversation we had, when
we talked about the sense of connection and dislocation one
feels when traveling across the ice prairies of LaPaz.
Ralph had stunned me.
'You see what's in your heart,' he said,
'not just what's around you.'
On some traverses today, the sunlight
just right, I could see my eyes reflected
on the inside of my goggles.
I stared at myself staring at the sterile sublime,"
of Antarctica.
Thank you.