Cape Horn, the end of the world, yet it is only an island really. You could imagine the island as a fortress standing guard, a first line of defense against the wilderness to the south: the powerful seas and the remote icy continent. I do not see it that way. I imagine Cape Horn as nature to the north standing on its tiptoes trying to stare further southwards with hope and a little envy.
Soon enough we will see the evidence that we are back: trees, dolphins, a dirt road, a house and finally a town, Puerto Williams in Chile. There is no other ocean passage I know of or have heard rumor of, that takes one so far away. The distance from Cape Horn to the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica is not great, indeed, it is less than the miles between San Diego and San Francisco or between Chicago and Memphis.
The difference between taking a road trip in the United States and travelling to and from Antarctica is the Polar Front, on one side it is suddenly temperate and on the other side suddenly polar. A wall if you will, greater than the one in China, a wall that holds back most everything to the north. A few hardy organisms visit during the short summer, a few others, mostly unseen or overlooked are there always.
We are neither the hardy nor the unseen. We are something new. We find something south of the Polar Front, not easily described, but something most of us seem to need: grandeur, beauty, solitude, or maybe just penguins. For those who have been there, even if we never plan to go back, we know that we need that place, the southern continent and its surrounding ocean to exist, always, in a way as close to what it is now, forever…redundancy intended!
Oh yes, there is still lots of nature and beauty north of the Polar Front, perhaps a bit less exotic, perhaps a bit more tame. For instance just now in the Beagle Channel, just a few hours before we dock at Ushuaia, back in “civilization,” we have encountered a group of very large whales, sei whales, cousins to the blues and fins. They are in a frenzy, dashing about, presumably feeding on the creatures that make up their movable feast. We are lucky, they come in close and the water is clear enough to see them before they surface and after they blow and submerge, and so our journey continues.
