Beyond the Ice

To you, packing your gear,

Welcome to the Storm Post Office. March 1991, Antarctica, and this letter travels with the supplies: blue-gray waxed paper, bold stencil capitals that look stamped on a crate, and beside them one handwritten signature. A cream nautical chart lies over a row of miniature supply stencils; a restrained orange serial tag is tied on; and across the lower corner, in dark blue, runs an engraving of ice and old ruins, older than this camp.

In the poem, an aging voyager refuses to stay by the fire and means to sail on past the sunset. He ends: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses (1842)

We will not ask you to strive, and we would never ask you to yield. What lies beyond the ice, nobody can say, but a letter can go first. Write it, seal it, and leave the rest of the road to the rain.

Full crates and gentle weather

Storm Post Office

March 1991 · Antarctica