Photograph by John Fedele
No one owns Antarctica. It has no government, no countries, no indigenous peoples, no official flag. Ice—sometimes a mile thick—covers its surface. Ice shelves, ice walls, ice streams— about 90 percent of the world’s ice is here.
It is the coldest, windiest, driest, highest place on Earth.
Penguins and seals live here; scientists survive only short stays. Every year, they come from all over the world to drill ice- core samples, collect specimens of tundra plant life, and study the startling existence of microscopic creatures in lakes deep beneath the frozen surface.
But before the sun vanishes completely and Antarctica’s winter blackness descends, with temperatures averaging 58 degrees below zero and gale-force winds whipping the snow into a million stinging darts, those scientists want to go home. So the lucky ones climb back into the capable little U.S. military planes that brought them—planes that can land on a sheet of sea ice or take off from a snowy skiway.
Researchers from less-equipped countries have to wait a year for the next boat and make a six-week tractor trek across land to reach it. But the U.S. has always had a strong presence here. The U.S. Navy ran what it called Opera- tion Deep Freeze for 50 years, flying National Science Foundation researchers in and out, and rescuing injured climbers or stranded crews from other countries as well.
Then the Cold War melted away, and the Navy handed off Operation Deep Freeze to the 109th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard.
That was in 1996. At the time, Ronald Smith was a major in the Maryland Air National Guard and a navigator for U.S. cargo planes. For 12 years, he’d flown mainly humanitarian missions, landing on dirt airstrips in Somalia to bring food to famine victims or airdropping food at 2 a.m. inside the ring of mountains surrounding Sarajevo. “The enemy was all around us, and we’d have to go in at a very high altitude and drop down to take the food in,” he recalls. “We were keeping them alive. When they tallied it up, it was bigger than the Berlin airlift.”
Smith loved his work, but he’d just learned that his Lockheed C-130 cargo plane, the last to use human navigators, was being replaced by a new model with a fancy computer—and no seat for a navigator.
Smith applied to the New York Air National Guard to be part of Operation Deep Freeze. He was hired immediately, bumping ahead of the locals who were waiting in line. “They put me in charge of Antarctic Operations, all the equipment and procedures,” he says. “And I didn’t know a darn thing about any of it.”
First, though, he had to win the trust of the men he was supervising. He flew to St. Louis and persuaded experts at what was then the Defense Mapping Agency to make the unit an aeronautical chart to fly by. “I even had them put the wing logo in the corner to say it was our chart,” he recalls, grinning. “They unveiled it at a meeting and said, ‘We have Major Smith to thank for this.’”
That relieved the tension—but he still had some learning to do. “Just something as sim- ple as taking off or landing an airplane is very complicated in Antarctica,” he says. “There are no highways, so you have to maintain miles of snow road. We make parallel roads, so there’s always an alternate if one starts get- ting slushy from the soot of the vehicles.”
The unit also had to build and maintain three very different runways for takeoff and landing. “You can construct a runway on the sea ice,” Smith says, “but it’ll only be good until the first week of December, austral sum- mer, when the ice starts to break up and melt. When it refreezes, you drill to make sure the ice is fresh and has enough brine to keep the bonds strong. You look for pooling or frozen- over cracks that will break from the pressure of equipment rolling over them.”
Seven miles from the sea-ice runway was a second runway made of blue glacial ice. Before the unit could use it, they had to shave off all the snow. Then there was the third run- way, a snow-covered skiway on a glacier that moved about 10 inches a day. (Glaciers start in the continent’s interior, at dizzyingly high altitudes, and gravity pulls them through the mountain ranges and down to sea level.)
Smith would be based at McMurdo Station, the largest of three U.S. research outposts: a four-block town with the only ATM in Ant- arctica. Located on Ross Island, it sits at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. “You can be just 10 miles from McMurdo and be in a survival situation,” he says. “There’s crevassing all around you, ice that’s weak.”
As soon as he arrived in January 1997, the rescue calls started coming. Once, an elderly lady managed to break her leg—no doubt tea dancing—on a cruise ship as it sailed past Ant- arctica. Smith’s team flew her to Christchurch, New Zealand. That was easy; the weather was manageable. But it was 60 degrees below zero in 1999 when they evacuated Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, the doctor who’d performed her own breast biopsy at the South Pole research station and tried to stabilize her cancer with airdropped chemo drugs.
Then there was the guy who was fishing ille- gally in the icy waters and had one of his fingers torn off. And the Australian kid who oversped his snowmobile, flipped it, and broke just about every bone in his body. And the climbers who fell, the eco-adventure tours that didn’t have the resources to get themselves out of trou- ble, the scientists from other countries whose research stations couldn’t rescue them.
The most challenging rescues, Smith says, involved stranded aircraft. Machines break as readily as people, often out in the middle of nowhere. “We use satellite technology, cur- rent scientific data, and crevasse detection radar to determine whether it’s safe to land on the snow in an area where no man has ever set foot,” he says.
“In one rescue, we had to create a runway in a shallow bay of water, so we used tables to determine how thick the ice had to be, and what landing speed and pattern we had to use to avoid setting off reverberations that would crack the runway. You could manage it by com- ing to an immediate stop, but that’s impossible, so you have to vary your speed—slow down and speed up, slow down and speed up. If you start to gather momentum, you either turn off the runway or slow way down.”
In another rescue, a crew had tried to take off nine times, and finally the ski under the plane’s nose buckled. They radioed McMurdo. “We got all the intelligence we could from the crew: Where did they land? Where did they assess that we could land?” Smith recalls. “We sent someone out to fly over the area and report back. We sent a very, very light aircraft out to pick up the crew. And then we had to send a maintenance team out to fix the plane.”
They pared down, taking the minimum amount of fuel and equipment so they could land as lightly as possible. Smith sent a cook and a mountaineer with the maintenance workers, because they thought they’d need at least four or five days to fix the plane.
“They finished early, but before we could get there, a blizzard came in, and these guys had to spend another three days out there in pup tents, weathering the storm!”
... severed by a sword
of one word,
secret of an only sky
commands the sun
to fall,
falter in flattened sheen
against glacial waves,
ziggurats of ice
on a blue plate.
Poetry was buried deep inside of him: His great-grandfather was reciting poems by heart well into his nine- ties; his grandmother started writing poetry in her seventies and had four poems made into songs.
But none of that was uppermost in Ronnie Smith’s mind. His dad had gone straight into the Air Force after high school, and Ronnie was born in Udine, Italy. Even after the Smiths transferred back to Baltimore, his parents lovingly used the Italian diminutive, Ronucci— which of course was shortened to Nucci, which of course baffled the other kids at school.
Nucci grew up doing everything with his brother, Jimmy, who was one year older and a lot taller. They lived for sports, worshipped their chosen teams, and dreamed of playing pro basketball.
By eighth grade, Smith showed scary apti- tude in advanced math and science. But one Friday afternoon, his art teacher gave the class an assignment about Baroque art, and over the weekend, while he worked on it, he found himself writing three poems.
“They were just things that were weigh- ing on my heart,” he says. “They weren’t necessarily about me—they were world events—and I didn’t know where this was coming from. But when I turned in my assign- ment, I put these three poems underneath.” He looks as embarrassed now as he felt then. “I really loved this teacher,” he mutters.
The following week, she handed his Baroque art assignment back—without the poems. He glanced at the top: He’d gotten a decent grade. But she hadn’t written anything else. He slumped back in his desk, waiting for the bell, trying not to feel disappointed. He didn’t know why the hell he’d written the stupid things anyway.
The teacher cleared her throat. “Any questions? OK, now I’ve got something very special to talk about, because we have a very special person in this class. We have a poet, and that poet is Ronnie.”
“I was floating!” he says now. “’Cause I was always in my brother’s shadow. He was already 6–2, on his way to 6–7, and I hadn’t shot up yet. I was still only 5–2. Anyway, in the hallway I hear her, and she’s reading my poems to other teachers as we change classes! Then, at the parent-teacher meet- ings, she told my parents, ‘Ronnie needs to go to a special school when he leaves here.’
“Well, when you are a little kid and you are aware of your parents’ finances, you kinda know there’s no way. There was one school I could go to, an engineering high school for all boys. You had to qualify, and I did.”
He endured it, but he couldn’t wait to go to a liberal-arts, coed college. He followed his brother to Loyola College in Maryland and majored in “the easiest thing I could major in and play sports, which was sociology.” Jimmy was already on the basketball team, and Ron- nie made it, too, but after a run-in with the coach, he quit and focused on lacrosse.
Exhilarated to run the full field, he became the team’s star; he had the speed, agility, tenacity, and wit the game required. He was eager to play the pro circuit. He was the all-conference pick. And that year, the pro lacrosse league folded.
Crushed, he went to Nottingham, England, and played semipro basketball for two years, making MVP in the league his first year. Then his brother joined the team as the center. Jimmy made the All-Star team, too, and they won the division, and in the last second of the last game of the finals, the National Cup.
But Smith was homesick. “I wanted a girl- friend,” he admits. “I came home and got a job bartending and lived on the beach.”
His father let three years pass before he inquired just what Smith planned to do with his life. “I was kind of in love with this girl, and I knew her parents would never let her marry a bartender,” he says. “So I thought, ‘Flying sounds like it could be pretty cool.’ I didn’t know a thing about planes, and I had hair down to here.” He points well below his shoulder.
“With my math-and-science background, I got the highest score the Baltimore base had ever seen. I went through officer training and flight school in 1983.”
He’d gotten married the previous spring. “I went to a New Year’s Eve party, and three weeks later, the girl tells me she’s pregnant,” he sighs. “I stayed in the marriage 18 years; I wanted to do the right thing.”
It all happened at once—the switch from bartending to the military, the marriage and fatherhood, and coincidentally, the urge to lead a more ascetic life, learn how to meditate, study the world’s religions. “My whole life was kind of regrounded,” he says. “I’d been with a big party crowd. My friends couldn’t under- stand what was going on with Ronnie.
“When I joined the Air Force, I was 27, right on the line. If I’d sprained my ankle, I wouldn’t have made it. So I was older than everyone else. These guys all grew up want- ing to be astronauts. I was like, ‘Hey, dude, I was bartending!’”
He didn’t fit in, and the coursework didn’t come naturally. “The whole left-brain logic, compartmentalizing everything—when you fly a plane, everything’s in a checklist. I had to work very hard to train myself to think that way. But after about five months, I’d opened up those pathways, and flying and navigat- ing got easy, and I started liking it. Especially when we got to train on celestial navigation— navigating by the stars—and I thought, ‘Whoa. Magellan did this. Columbus. Captain Cook. Cook’s second voyage was to observe Venus transiting the sun and to find Antarctica.”
To tread your
ice leads me
to you—
You, the bitterest hiss
from the alabaster
of the South—
as if I could face
and fade into you...
Always, before leaving for Antarctica, Smith made a practical checklist of things to pack (like thermal under- wear and 20-year-old Scotch) and chores to do before he left. Then he pushed his personal life aside and mentally prepared himself for the operation.
He thought about the logistics, the vari- ables, the procedures. But he also thought about the symbolism.
“Our planet has a place of deep cold,” he says. “It’s part of the mythology, the psychol- ogy, of our civilization. And it’s still revered and feared by people who live in these far regions, because it’s uncontrollable. Where we live, we can kind of control our environ- ment. There, nature dominates.”
He can’t talk this way with his military buddies, though.
“They can’t relate to it,” he says with a shrug. “Which is why I have one life at work and another that’s pretty much separate.”
Nobody he worked with at McMurdo knew, for instance, that he was writing poetry about Antarctica or that he’d been published in a long list of poetry journals. Finally, his friend Tony German, who learned about the poetry seven years into their friendship, sent around a poem of Smith’s that had appeared in The New York Times on May 26, 2003.
“I knew he wasn’t going to do it!” laughs German, now the 109th Airlift Wing com- mander. “The artsy side brings him a bit on the introvert side.”
So how did Smith avoid rolled eyes and derision? “He’s always been a deep-thinker type of person, and he’s not loud,” German says slowly, “but he’s tall, so just his size makes him intimidating. He’s not going to catch much flak for not being macho.”
Even German, an extrovert whose literary interests stop with email, sensed the effect Antarctica had on his friend: “He had quiet time there, because there aren’t many dis- tractions. It let his mind wander.”
Smith used to hike up Observation Hill, and when he reached the top, pause at the giant wooden cross, which bears the names of those who perished on British naval officer Rob- ert Scott’s South Pole expedition in 1912. His moment of silence dissolved into the immense white stillness that surrounded him.
Antarctica is so quiet, seismic readings there can pick up movements all over the Earth. The air is so pure, the atmosphere so thin, astro- physicists travel there to study deep space.
“There are times when you are out on the ice, actually walking across it,” Smith says, “and you see in the distance that all there is is white, all the way to the horizon, and the only thing you can hear—because these polar places are the most silent places in the world— is the crunch of your feet on the ice or snow.
“There have been times when it was snow- ing and just for the experience, I’d lie flat on my back and look up into the snow coming down. You talk about silence! And after a while, your thoughts go away and you are just watching the flakes come down...it’s like a blessing.
“But it’s bone-chilling, too. You’re feeling that wind in your face and there’s no remorse in it. There’s no question that in this beautiful place, this totally white, pristine setting, you have this thing that will destroy you. And it is so beautiful.
“If—if—you could get beyond the temper- ature’s rigid grip of you and just for a few moments be at peace out there, it’s a kind of understanding going back to that deep arche- type of the cold in our psyche: its beauty, and the barrier of cold that keeps it inviolate. This is the part of the Earth that people can touch, but they cannot violate; it’s as if the Earth itself is saying that. Antarctica is so pristine, so untouched by exploitation, that it takes the breath of the wind away.”
Whenever Smith returned to the East Coast after months in Antarctica, he had to readjust. “My senses were blasted with nature’s warmth, flowers, leaves, grass,” he recalls. “And I didn’t have to be ‘on’ 24/7. I could go to bed without wondering what the night’s missions might bring.”
What he couldn’t shake, even when he was shooting hoops in 90-degree weather and toweling off the sweat, was the immensity of the antarctic experience.
“I was seeing all these things that 99.9 per- cent of the world’s population would never, ever see,” he says. “More people have been to Mount Everest than have been to the South Pole. I wanted to start articulating this pris- tine world: ‘Hey, this is what’s up there. You may never see it, and that’ll mean you won’t appreciate it when it’s gone.’”
Those Taj Mahals on swan lagoon
cut from cataracts white with cold,
crashing column—floating moon,
gouged by sun-fire's jagged cold.
Smith first started worrying about global warming in 1999, when he was flying over Greenland. “We’d fly out over the ice cap, and there were these great pools of water, standing lakes, develop- ing from year to year. One time, we were flying, and it was very warm, and it was raining. That was the first indication.”
The next came in Antarctica, where gla- ciers on the western side have been melting faster than expected. If that continues, the sea level could rise precipitously. “Back in 2003, part of the ice shelf broke off. It was the size of Rhode Island—I mean, it was huge, it was the largest moving thing on Earth. If you’d taken all the fresh water out of it, the Earth could have drunk it for years. It broke off, and it floated in front of McMurdo Sound, and it stopped. Blocked all the currents. The sea ice, instead of being 5 to 7 feet thick, became 20 feet thick. Now scientists don’t know if that’s just going to remain part of the permanent ice shelf or not.
“The ice is always changing,” he adds. “Every year, you go back and look at this incredible tableau of domes and tetrahedrons. The ice changes costumes.”
Asked what emotions it evokes, he answers instantly: “There’s a sort of spiritual joy that comes from seeing beauty in its essence, pristine, undisturbed. There’s violent anger, because the ice crushes things as it moves. There’s definitely the aloneness that a cold place musters. There’s the brutality. But there’s also the siren calling you, because you start lusting after that beauty, and you never want to leave. It makes you want to protect it.”
And will we?
“I think we will get the momentum to over- come global warming,” he says, “because I don’t think we’re going to sit around and watch these island countries become inun- dated with water and do nothing about it.”
escaper from cloud-dream vapor
I poured; I lifted the sea—
scallops of wind gyred for me.
In 2005, Smith was made a colonel; six weeks later, he was given the command of Operation Deep Freeze, reporting to a three-star general in Hawaii.
In December 2008, Smith left Antarctica to come here, to Scott Air Force Base, as Air National Guard advisor for strategic planning.
“That means everything from the cur- rent war to future airlift planning for the Air Force,” he explains. “My boss is a two- star major general, Susan Desjardins. She was in the very first Air Force class that had women graduates. We’re working directly with the Pentagon, and things are very, very dynamic. We have to make sure everyone’s moving down the same path.”
As we went to press, he was at an arctic con- ference in Europe, debating policy on the High North. Chatting over cocktails with the ambas- sador to Norway, he couldn’t help but chortle when they called the hour an “icebreaker.”
He’s thrilled that one of his ideas—to name the waypoints on the airway to Antarctica for the sled dogs and ponies that helped the first explorers make the trek—will take effect this June. But he admits, “I’m looking forward to the day that I can just write!”
That’ll be July 1, 2012. His orders end in June 2012, and once he’s out of the military, he’ll be free to publish the adventure book he’s writing about antarctic rescue missions. Meanwhile, he’s looking for an illustrator for his latest book of poetry.
“There have been numbers of military men who have written,” he says, a bit defensively. “Patton wrote poetry. There’s a spiritual dimension to every single human endeavor, but the military goes out of its way to hide it, because it’s perceived as weakness. The illusion our society’s been under is that you can’t be a spiritual person unless you are in a church, and I think that’s held us back as a civilization.”
This spring, Smith wants to climb Erta Ale, in northeastern Ethiopia. Why? It’s one of only three known permanent lava- lake volcanoes in the world, and he’s already flown repeatedly to the top of another, unclimbable Mount Erebus (“keeper of the gates of hell”) in Antarctica. “I want to go to Ethiopia, climb that one, and tie the two continents together symbolically,” he says. “Then I’ll climb the third, Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to complete the trilogy.”
He’s no armchair poet.
His words are traveling from Los Angeles to Portland to Vancouver this winter as a part of “Polar Dialogue 2009,” an exhibit of paint- ings and sculptures by K.A. Colorado. Texts from scientists and humanitarians, as well as poetry by Smith, are embedded in Colo- rado’s sculptures, which replicate scientific ice-core samplings. The idea was to show how ominously conditions are changing in the polar regions.
Smith and Colorado are continuing to col- laborate, sculpting glaciers in the wild and then reading poems engraved in the ice as it’s melting. Meanwhile, an editor in New York introduced Smith to St. Louis photographer Michael Eastman.
“He came over for dinner,” Eastman says, “and we hit it off. He’s just so...unexpected.” Smith has, in other words, the math-and- science aptitude of a nerd, the sensitivity of a poet, and the edge of an old rock-’n’-roller. (He just bought a Victorian house across from The Chase, and he’s busy figuring out how to fuse its high ceilings and elaborate millwork with his collection of original rock-concert posters: Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, Santana, Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin... “With the right lighting,” he reassures himself, “anything can be done.”)
Smith and Eastman have the Air Force’s permission to fly out to the Arizona desert and document—in words and images—the 4,200 planes in the “boneyard” near Tucson. Then they’d like to go down to Antarctica together and do a photo project there.
“Neither of us ever dreamed Ronnie would spend one second in Antarctica,” remarks his brother, who’s still in Nottingham, working as its basketball development officer. “But he did take to ice-skating quicker than me.”
All poetry excerpts reprinted here are from Smith’s Antarctica poems, many of which can be read online at ronniejsmith.com.
