If you live long enough, things in life come in cycles. I was marveling at this just now while doing some research online for an ongoing research project. The research had me using my laptop to look up PDFs of articles from the New York Times in March 1912, specifically the ones that contained the first reports of the discovery of the South Pole by Roald Amundsen and his party of fellow Norwegians.
Exactly forty years ago, in the Spring of 1982, I was a junior at Fort Collins High School, and I enrolled in a course in the English department on compositional writing. The class was taught by Mrs. (Sandy) Turk, whom I had previously taken for an American literature course as a sophomore, where we read The Scarlet Letter. Mrs. Turk had the reputation of being very rigorous and tough, and that is one of the reasons I enjoyed her courses very much. In another course of hers, Grammar Review for the College Bound, I learned how to diagram sentences, mapping out the parts of speech. That course may have been the high point of my academic career. I routinely blew out the curve on the exams, scoring much higher than the other students, including the "smart girls" who were used to being the best in the class, and who were irked that a boy could come and show them up so easily. Mrs. Turk, although on the English faculty, was decidedly not a feminist. By certain comments in regard to Hester Prynne in Hawthorne, I concluded that she was one of those women who are wise to the wiles of femininity, and who can provide insight into female nature to clueless young men such as yours truly. No doubt she had voted for Reagan.
In that compositional writing course, we had to pursue a number of projects, including a compare-and-contrast paper, and an argumentative position paper. The big project, however, was to be a research project, on any subject we chose, that would specifically require us to use the microfilm resources in the library of Colorado State University, the campus of which was across the street from the high school.
Many of the students found this project to be a burden, but I absolutely loved the challenge. Back then I was much more of a rules-follower than I was later in life, so I had no problem conforming to the instructions. I did what teachers asked me to do. Dutifully I use the family car to drive to the CSU Library. As a routine, night after night, I went down into the basement where one found the microfilm archives of the New York Times, checking out the spools I needed for my research that night, and then loading them up into the machine. How I love the whooshing sound that the spools made in the mechanical reels as one scrolled through them, and then pressed the rapid rewind button.
For the subject of my research paper, I had chosen the discovery of the South Pole, and specifically the race between Amundsen and Scott in 1911-1912 to be the first to reach there. I had been fascinated with Antarctica and its exploration even in elementary school, reading all the books on it in my school library. So I was already familiar with the overall facts, including the triumph of Amundsen in reaching the pole and returning, and the tragedy of Scott and his party, with their Shetland ponies, perishing just miles away from salvation.
I was very methodical in my research, tracking down the newspaper accounts from the embarkation of both expeditions in 1910 until the final reports in the spring of 1912. After a couple weeks, I set about writing up the paper, meticulously citing the articles in an account I wrote using one of the school's typewriters. I've always been prone to typos, as I am still now, so I went through lots of correction tape and whiteout, but in the end the paper was perfect and I got an A for it and for the course too.
Weirdly enough, just days after I finished that paper, an old-style shooting war broke out in the South Atlantic Ocean, over a group of obscure islands that only Antarctica geeks like my knew about, namely the Falkland Islands. It was the center of world news for weeks on end, in a throwback way. At the time I already had map of the Falklands on my bedroom wall, and had always wanted to go there. I was pissed off that Argentina had invaded them and spoiled it all, and put the islands in the focus of the attention of the world. The final project in Mrs. Turk's class that spring was the argumentative paper, and I very enthusiastically typed up a well-documented paper on the righteousness of the British cause versus the Argentines in claiming sovereignty over the islands.
As I got older and went to college, my boyhood fascination for Antarctica waned. I went many years without caring much about it, in the way I once had. Even a stint working in Arctic climatological research in Alaska in 1987 didn't rekindle my interest much. When a friend of mine recently proposed that we book a tour to the ice sheet, I responded with a rather negative sentiment. I could only imagine the relief I would feel at getting back.
Lately, however, due to a scientific research project I am following my mind has turned to Antarctica again with a ferocious interest, and this morning, with my laptop, the descendant of the Apple IIe computers of the early 1980s, I am sitting in my comfortable home office looking up the very same articles in the New York Times that I did forty years ago, and snipping out sections and printing them out on my laser printer, compiling a massive research report that probably only I will ever see. It is the making of such things that one finds the great value, even if one never consults them directly.
These kinds of cycles make me think about the surreal comedy of time. When I sat in the basement of the CSU Library, exactly seventy years had passed since the reports of Amundsen's success had surfaced in the world press, following his return to Australia. Now forty years more have passed. Forty is less than seventy, but it is approaching the same order of magnitude.
The world has changed a lot since 1982, but compared to the changes between 1912 and 1982, it seems almost stagnant. Pretty much everything that has changed since the 1980s is because of the Internet. The world looks mostly the same in a lot of ways. Automobiles are sleeker and houses are bigger. People wear the same casual clothes, but almost everyone is fatter, even the young people, because of the changes in our life styles.
The Falklands are once again quiet and forgotten by the world. My old high school was shuttered in the 1990s and was remodeled to become part of CSU itself. The basement of the CSU library was flooded in a massive rainstorm that inundated the campus in 1997, and caused the drowning of people living in a nearby trailer park. I wonder what became of the microfilm I used.
Everything is online now, preserved digitally. Someday all those 0's and 1's may be all that is left of our entire civilization.
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