Ice queen: out author Gretchen Legler talks about her warm memoir of the coldest place in the world

Some jump from the frying pan to the fire, others from the cooler to the deep freeze. In 1997 writer Gretchen Legler abandoned her lackluster romance and her teaching job at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, for five months in Antarctica under the auspices of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Her memoir On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station (Milkweed Editions, $15.95) describes not only the physical rigors of the icy continent but also the camaraderie of the McMurdo residents, the "deeply spiritual journey" of her months there, and the new love she found at the bottom of the world.

"Antarctica just held such wonderful possibilities," says Legler. "The very name, when I hear it, still makes me tingle with excitement." Although women were barred from Antarctica until the 1970s, the population is now about 40% female, with many lesbians. Legler recounts a joke making the rounds when she was there: "How do you get a woman in Antarctica? Answer: Be one."

"Antarctica is still far enough away from the real world to be a place where people can imagine themselves able Go break free from who they once might have been and reinvent themselves," she says, "or maybe just express parts of themselves that they felt they could not in regular life. In that way Antarctica is a natural place for people to be out--not just about their sexual orientation but about all kinds of other things."

In Antarctica Legler watched a drilling operation for core samples of ancient mud, hiked alone, and jumped naked into the coldest ocean in the world. She visited the eerie and affecting "living museums" dotting the ice near McMurdo: prefab shacks assembled by early explorers over 100 years ago and abandoned in a moment--food on the stove, seal blubber hanging on a nail by the door--when rescue ships arrived. She wrote, fell in love with a woman named Ruth Hill working at McMurdo as an electrician (with whom Legler now shares an old house in Maine), and read Leaves of Grass with an Antarctic wind howling around her, buffeting the sides of her tent.

"The natural environment there was so extreme--the cold, the wind, the blinding sun," Legler recalls. "I learned all kinds of tricks about staying warm in temperatures most people cannot even conceive of--75 below zero [figuring in windchill]." She knows now that meeting these challenges has transformed her for good. "It creates a confidence in one that goes deep to the core."

Marler writes for The New York Observer and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

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