Grumbles from the Grave (33 page)

(201)

The Antarctic was heavily populated by friendly penguins.

We hiked back into the rookery, through a small stream of very cold water, just barely melted, accompanied by penguins. Those poor little creatures walk about a mile to go fishing, for the purpose of feeding their young.

The penguin walk is quite clumsy, but they have another method of locomotion on snow. They flop down on their bellies and toboggan, which is relatively fast.

They sometimes cluster in groups on rocks at the water's edge, trying to decide whether to go into that water at all. When the cluster reaches a certain size, one brave individual will dive into the water, then most of the others follow. Then another group congregates, and they go through it all again. When returning, they get smashed against rocks, eventually mount them, and proceed awkwardly to their young.

Locomotion in water is by means of porpoising. Up and down, each time garnering some krill for their food, then presently they return to feed the young.

Their white fronts are often dirty with the pink color of the krill, but mostly the white is spotlessly clean. Penguin nests are built of small stones, which they shamelessly steal from each other. One experimenter put a stack of small stones painted red in one corner of a colony, and when he returned, the red stones were scattered all over the colony. One mating habit is for the male to give his chosen a small stone. Another is for two birds to stretch their necks straight upward, making mating sounds.

Rookeries are quite noisy and rather dirty with guano. (And smelly, as well.) However, we found ourselves quite taken with those birds and their ways. After hatching from the egg, the baby penguin is covered with down, which it keeps for some time, shedding it in favor of the fancy dress. Some varieties leave the young with a nursemaid when they are off fishing, and you can see aggregations of those very young birds together. I watched one of the nurseries—the "nursemaid" kept after any stragglers, chivvying them back into the group, where they stayed until the parents returned.

Leopard seals eat penguins, when they catch them swimming. So one encounters orphaned baby birds. Skuas will eventually eat those. Rookeries can be vast; one we saw was estimated by experts to have about a million birds in it.

We looked on penguins as little people. They manage to endear themselves to anyone who comes into contact with them. Perhaps it is their upright posture, perhaps it is their clumsy locomotion on their feet—or possibly the "academic processions" going to and from the shore.

There were many Adelies, chinstraps, gentoos, and some of the larger species, as there were royals and the emperors, which are about four feet tall when standing upright. They look for all the world like elderly professors.

We were taken on Zodiac cruises, which didn't land at all, but simply watched for wildlife from the boats. During one such, whales appeared on the water surface. Humpback whales, weighing thirty tons, we were told. They were playing around during and after feeding. What an amount of krill such creatures must eat. (Krill are tiny shrimplike things—pale pink and almost transparent, with great black eyes. One figure I recall is that it takes thirty krill to make a gram.) Those large whales take in a great gulp of sea water, full of krill, and strain it through the baleen. Their throats pouch out with each gulp, and the water comes cascading out as they strain out the krill.

Several whales came swimming over to the boat and swam under it. We could see their flippers in the water under the boat. Then one breached and we could see its back and finally the flukes, which had barnacles on it in a pattern. Everyone was a bit scared by these demonstrations . . . with those flimsy boats being so close to those huge animals.

Most Weddell seals have scars from contact with killer whales—we saw them. Seals slide into the water without any splash, swim away with a gliding motion. In the water, they sometimes allow their curiosity to overtake them, and they stick up their heads and watch.

Cormorants (skuas) nest on sheer cliffs—there were many nests clinging to those cliffs—all of them with young cormorants watching.

There was a barbecue dinner at the Argentine station in Paradise Bay. It was about to close for the winter, when the scientists would go home. Unfortunately for us, the ship had had a batch of hand-knitted watch caps for sale, each of us had one. Knitted into them was the motto "Falklands War, 1982." We had forgotten about that, and went in with those caps on our heads. I told Robert about it, and he turned his backwards, but hairpins anchored mine in place. I felt apologetic toward our hosts.

Leaving, our boat driver was a fanatic whale chaser, and we spent an hour and a half chasing some fin whales which we never got close to.

The ship stopped at Paulet Island in the Weddell Sea, Deception Island, which is supposed to have the only Antarctic swimming pool-water in that area is warm enough for people to swim in, because of some underground heating (thermal activity). Antarctica has some working volcanoes, such as Mount Erebus, which is where there was a fatal New Zealand airline crash several years ago. Mount Erebus normally has a plume of smoke coming out of it.

Summers, the U.S. has about 1,200 people down in Antarctica, most of them at McMurdo Sound, our chief base there. But we also have Palmer Station, which we visited, Siple Base, and bases at the South Pole.

Probably the visit to McMurdo was the coldest day we encountered—going ashore in the Zodiac, our cheeks almost froze. We struggled up the hill to the base, finding it necessary to sit down for a rest several times. Then I finally commandeered a bus to take us to headquarters.

Robert found many fans among the people in Antarctica. At Palmer Station, one man was sleeping at the time of the ship's visit. When he heard that Robert had been among the tourists, he phoned the ship, and they talked.

(204)

Heinlein met a fan of his at Palmer Station, a U.S. base in Antartica.

On one Zodiac cruise, there were sea lions which played games with our boat. Their heads would come up above water and they would watch us, but when we steered toward them they would go under and pop up in a different place. Sea lions differ from seals in their gait, being able to walk in a fashion with their hindquarters.

One cruise was among icebergs, to see the sculpturing done by the winds, freezing and thawing and melting. Some of the bergs might be as much as a hundred years old, they told us. Bergs come in various shapes—tabular (squared off—just calved from the Ross Ice Shelf), which, after some melting, became castles, medieval monsters and all sorts of imaginative shapes. One evening, while we were at dinner, the captain spotted two huge bergs, and toured the ship all around them. At one point, it was estimated that we were in a field which contained sixty of the monster bergs.

A champagne party was held on a glacier. Ice is a marvelous substance, ice sculpture beautiful, but it's difficult to describe.

There were albatrosses of various sorts, including the wandering albatross—probably the largest bird known. We also saw petrels, and could go up to the nests and look at the young.

On approach and departure, there is a sea area called the Antarctic Convergence, where the water is quite rough. Many of the passengers had to use seasickness remedies, but at most times during these passages, lifelines were rigged permanently around the ship.

Editor's Note: Robert and I took one further trip in the
Lindblad Explorer
through the North-west Passage to the Orient. Although thirty-three other ships had managed to reach the Bering Strait, this was the first ship to go all the way to Japan, having navigated the Northwest Passage.

CHAPTER XIII
POTPOURRI

March 30, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am acquiring sunburn and backaches putting in a completely new and very complicated irrigation system. When I get that and some [Colorado Springs] house repairs completed I'll tackle a new story. My intention is to try to turn out some short stories this summer and not start another novel until about Labor Day.

April 14, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

We are still gardening like mad and I ache in every bone from days and days of pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow work. I've just finished an enormous irrigation project. Well, it felt enormous to me, but it does not look like much now that the pipes are covered up. Today we have rain, snow, sleet, hail, and gropple, and I am catching up on paperwork. I expect to resume writing two weeks from Monday and plan to turn out several shorts and short-shorts before tackling another novel.

July 25, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

(207)

Lurton Blassingame, Heinlein's agent, was an expert hunter.

Ginny has worked out a shenanigan with [a friend] to let you shoot on a resident permit if I don't get one . . . Ginny put in for a license, too—if you shoot on her license all that will be necessary is for you to convince the warden that you are female and redheaded.

P.S. I did my first pistol shooting (aside from one tomcat) in twenty-two years last Saturday. Three 10's and two 9's for a 48 on my first group. I should have stopped there, for I dropped as low as 42 for 5 shots later—averaging around 45.

August 20, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Take it easy on the stone masonry; it can make you old before your time. But I enjoy it more than any other form of mechanics, except that it half kills me.

October 3, 1958: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Thanks for the pic of Socrates, the super-giraffe. He is not here yet: he is still in quarantine in Hoboken and in the meantime they are trying to plan a route to Colorado Springs which will not involve bridges or tunnels too low for him—if it were up to me, I'd shoot him full of barbiturate, stretch him out flat, and fly him here in a Flying Boxcar. They'll kill him getting him here—if not from bridges, then from pneumonia. In the meantime, two widowed lady giraffes are awaiting him here; their deceased husband managed to hang himself—quite a trick for a giraffe. [This is in response to Lurton Blassingame's sending a picture of the giraffe that was to come to the zoo at Colorado Springs.]

July 14, 1961: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I'm in good health but Ginny is not. We've been having atrocious weather, which led to a set of cracked ribs for her. Like this—I've been building an irrigation dam for her garden and designed it to be a large ornamental pool as well as useful. We had been pointing towards a big fourth of July party and, since I had installed an electric pump for irrigation, I also rigged it to operate as a recirculating fountain—a jet thirty feet in the air with spotlights on the jet and floodlights on the sea green pool—very pretty and just right for a garden dinner party. The rains came.

Golly, how the rains came! And on 2 July the pond silted up with brown slime. Ginny helped me clean it out—and slipped in the slime and fell against a boulder and cracked her ribs. Now she is strapped like a mummy and won't hold still and isn't getting well and everything hurts her—and I am finding out how really useful a wife is when she is well.

(But the party came off prettily anyway. We served sixty-four people—we now have enough picnic tables for a beer garden—Ginny had sewn about a hundred yards of bunting, I made an easel for a full-sized replica of the Declaration of Independence, we had martial and patriotic music over the outdoor sound system, and I set up a bar that could serve anything from a mint julep or a Sazerac cocktail to a Singapore sling. Fine time!—and Ginny ignored her wounds until the next day.

Shamrock is going to have kittens again.

PATRICK HENRY AD

Editor's Note: One morning in early April, I fetched the newspaper down to read along with breakfast, in my usual fashion. Robert was still sleeping, and there were standing orders never to disturb him until he woke up. But this day was different.

There was a full page ad by the SANE people, signed by a number of local people we knew . . . I flew in the face of the standing orders, and woke Robert up. "What are we going to do about this?" I asked.