Writer Hal Higdon ’53 Reviews “Cold”

Hal Higdon ’53, senior writer for Runner’s World magazine, reviews “Cold” by former Carleton president Laurence McKinley Gould.

27 January 2003
Hal Higdon
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Hal Higdon ’53, senior writer for Runners World and author of numerous books on running, has submitted the following review of “Cold” by former Carleton president Laurence McKinley Gould.

“And so on November 4th began the high adventure of all the expedition for me–adventure and opportunity both–for I could not have been dropped any place in the world where I could have found so aptly combined and so perfectly balanced the glamour and romance of adventure with such rare opportunities for sound scientific research, for I was headed into a land of glaciers and ice clad mountains geologically and geographically untouched and unknown.”
–Laurence M. Gould

How do you separate the legend that was Laurence McKinley Gould from the man? For those of us who were students at Carleton College during his term as president (1945-1962), Dr. Gould became a dominant father figure. “Every single word he spoke was the exactly right word,” writes one classmate in “Beyond the Tower,” the book of 1953 class biographies. Who would disagree? The feature I remember most about Gould was the eyebrows: dark, stern, foreboding, looming over eyes that flashed lightning yet generated warmth. I crossed him once and experienced the weight of those eyes and eyebrows. I didn’t let it happen again.

Gould was second in command during Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Antarctic expedition in 1928-29. That was the badge he wore proudly when we were undergraduates a quarter century later. Once a year, we would gather in the chapel, and Dr. Gould would show a film chronicling the expedition. It was black and white, without sound (although I understand that later he narrated a sound track). It was the expedition that helped to define his life–and ours. I still recall vividly a scene from that film: that of a whale breeching in the Ross Sea as the expedition sailed from New Zealand toward the Antarctic base it would establish, called Little America. Did such a scene exist in that film, or do I only want it to exist? A mammoth whale emerges from the depths, dark as only whales are dark, dark as Gould’s own eyebrows. The whale hovers momentarily midair, as though defying gravity, then plunges back beneath the surface. And so that Ahabian image represents Laurence McKinley Gould in my mind.

I approached a recent reading of President Gould’s “Cold” with, well, trepidation. Given the scientific discoveries in the second half of the twentieth century, could a book written seventy-five years ago remain fresh and undated? Would the reading of it serve merely as a mandatory exercise, an assignment, something I felt obliged to do as my class approached its fiftieth reunion? I also wondered how many from that class of 1953 who had sat with me in the chapel watching Gould’s annual screen show had bothered to read “Cold,” then or now?

The book is slender, 213 pages. Originally published in 1931, “Cold” was republished by the college in 1984 and is available through the Carleton bookstore (1-800-799-4148). In my reading, I discovered that “Cold” exists on three levels. Gould’s first audience was the admittedly small number of explorers who he thought some day might follow him to Antarctica. Thus there are lists of supplies (pemmican, biscuits, powdered milk, for example), maps of routes taken, even one chart showing cloth signals that could be used to relay information to planes flying over. Obviously, this was in an era before cellular phones.

The second audience was fellow scientists, who might not come to explore the Antarctic, but who would be interested in what he learned there, even if only out of curiosity. The geologist in Gould proudly reports that the mountain range reached by his exploring party in an epic sled journey was formed by pressures beneath the earth, not by volcanic explosion. “We had determined,” he writes, “that the Queen Maud Mountains were a continuation of the extensive fault block mountains that mark the western boundary of the Ross Sea–that they were a part of the most extensive mountain system of this kind to be found anywhere in the world.” Does this seem tame to those of us who have daily access to the “Discovery” channel on our TV sets? If anything, the scientific knowledge we have at our fingertips in the twenty-first century whets our appetite to learn what scientists had to overcome in the twentieth to create that knowledge.

On the third level, there is Gould’s ability to address a universal audience. As a reader, I was prepared to slog through scientific material in a book of polar exploration; what I was not prepared for was the poetry of Gould, the man’s ability to attack the reader through his grasp of words. Regard this description from an early chapter of the coming of spring to the Antarctic:

“During the latter days of August and the early part of September we had a sort of repetition of the long colorful twilight days of late March and early April. As we watched the miracle of the returning sun we could easily understand how man might worship him, purely from the standpoint of beauty. The color effects seemed to have been cumulative. It was as though the sun had been storing up over the four months that he had been gone for the great splashes that colored the early days of his return. And it is when the sun is near the horizon that the snow takes on its richest colorings, shading from the pale blue of celestite to the deepest purples where the shadows are heaviest. It is a kind of giant fairyland for in the flatly oblique rays of the sun everything casts long skeletal shadows that give an effect of only semi-reality.”

The consummate team player, Gould defers to the expedition’s commander, Admiral Byrd, when it comes to telling the story of that expedition. He seeks only to tell the tale of the sled journey that he and a handful of others made to a central mountain range, not the South Pole itself. Byrd himself made no attempt to reach the South Pole, except by plane. The Norwegian explorer Amundsen had reached that destination two decades earlier, as did the British explorer Scott, who lost his life on the return journey. At that point in time, bagging the Pole would have appealed to Byrd and Gould as unnecessary and unscientific, a stunt. Their accomplishment was to remain in the Antarctic for a period of eighteen months, coping with the cold and mapping uncharted regions. That a single satellite passing over the Pole now provides more data within a few minutes than Byrd’s explorers learned during their entire eighteen months is beside the point.

Even those who have experienced a Minnesota winter may find it hard to comprehend what it is like to exist for months in snow tunnels when temperatures on the surface dip below 60 degrees, not counting the wind chill. Winds of 60 mph were not uncommon during their stay. Can anyone who has not lived near one end of the world or the other comprehend what it is like to pass months without sight of the sun. Short days drive many in the Scandinavian countries to drink, but Gould seemed to thrive on this enforced loneliness. In this era before CNN, the expedition had brought 3,000 books with it for their amusement. Even during the long summer with its continuous sunlight, Gould found himself with ample time for reading, because sled dogs can only be pushed so hard and must rest before moving on again. “It had never before occurred to me that one of the real advantages and benefits of an Antarctic Expedition would be the opportunity to read Shakespeare in his entirety,” he writes. “I have never appreciated all the tragedy of Lear quite so much.” Gould identified the most widely read single book as W. H. Hudson’s “Green Mansions.” He also mentioned as favorite authors Donn Byrne and Joseph Lincoln along with Mark Twain. A complete set of Rudyard Kipling, however, was hardly touched by the explorers. Gould’s personal favorite books were Romain Rolland’s “Jean Cristophe” and Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Saga.” He wrote: “To me these are two works of this day that will live if any do.”

In some respects, the climactic sled journey that forms the central narrative of “Cold” was uneventful, the result of meticulous planning that cached supplies along the planned route. Despite losing a snow tractor early in the trip, Gould and his companions pushed across the snow and ice, conquered the elements, saw what they had to see, and came home to report on it. Nobody lost their life; nobody seemed even to have been threatened by the extreme weather conditions. The closest call anyone had occurred near the end when Gould–foolishly he admits–rose early to break trail alone and nearly tumbled into a crevasse when an ice bridge collapsed beneath his skis. But thanks to his vivid writing, even the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Most touching was the relationship of the men to the dogs that hauled their sleds. “A dog could not haul a sufficient weight for food for himself all the way to the mountains and back for the time we expected to be gone, much less deliver any pay load,” explains. Gould. Thus, the dogs had to be killed–and eaten by the other dogs. Even at the end, the remaining dogs had to be slaughtered because there was insufficient room on the boats returning to New Zealand. Gould understood the reason for this, though he did not like it: “Even now it makes me shudder when I think of these grand creatures pulling for us until in some times they could do no more, only to be relieved by death, and their carcasses fed to their living companions that they might carry on and complete our journey for us.”

In summing up that journey, Gould describes scientific discoveries related to the geology of the region, but the poet in him continues to burst to the surface like a breeching whale: “One finds little change in the character of the shelf ice as he sails along it or sledges across it. It is ever a flat or gently rolling limitless plain of snow. By all tokens it should be monotonous, but it rarely seemed to affect us in that way for its charm lies not so much in its actual scenic beauty as in the feeling that it gives one. There is an atmosphere, an impression, an intangible something that is intriguing.”

So it is with Gould’s book itself. My classmate was right: “Every single word he spoke was the exactly right word.” And every word he wrote, too.

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Additional excerpts from Laurence McKinley Gould’s “Cold”

With the coming of full darkness we had more spectacular displays, yet I shall not forget my first sight of one on a night early in April; a shaft of greenish white light streaming up from the horizon to the east that soon arched the heavens in a dancing band of light. Suddenly it was faintly aflame with all the hues of the spectrum. It was a rainbow which seemed to be infused with the spirit of jazz.

Outside today it is calm and dark and still–so very still. When there is no wind this is a land of unparalleled quiet. But it is a different quiet than one feels back home. I have stood in the woods at home when the world seemed dead. There was no kind of sound. But in that world where a variety of sound was the rule rather than the exception such a silence was oppressive if not ominous. Not so here–this is a land of silence. One stands in the midst of it without any feeling of oppressiveness. It is an expanding sort of silence. It is inviting. It is the natural state here and I like it–I have come to feel at home in the midst of it.

And what a varied and colorful world this all becomes where there are no clouds. I long ago ceased to miss the objects that are so much a part of a landscape at home. I think I have at times even forgotten that there were such things as trees and grass and flowers–not that the sight of these things will be less wonderful and arresting when I see them again–but this is a different world entirely. It is a new world to me and in its way is complete and satisfying.

The one quality in a man’s character that was most necessary and transcended all the rest was of course honesty. In no company was frankness such a necessary part of one’s attitude; the unforgivable sin was duplicity. But those more unfortunate qualities never loomed large among us. As time passed men of character and poise unconsciously added an increasingly individual effect which made the picture of the whole, a colorful and interesting mosaic of personality. In such a life it matters little whether a man is a corporal or a captain, the strong man will dominate.

My feelings were a mixture of curiosity and very real awe, as I looked up this new glacier and across the mountains to the east, knowing that ours were the first human eyes to look upon them, It falls the lot of few men any more to thus view parts of the earth for the first time. And we knew in very truth that we were the first, for not even had primitive man ever existed on the Antarctic Continent, and civilized man had not been this way before.