10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #10 Jonathan Franzen's "The End of the End of the World"

Illustration by Blexbolex, from The New Yorker

Let’s begin this series with an account of a luxury cruise to Antarctica – Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant “The End of the End of the World” (May 23, 2016). Franzen tells about inheriting money from his Uncle Walt; about wanting to take his girlfriend to Antarctica; about booking with Lindblad National Geographic for a three-week expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands; about his girlfriend backing out and his brother Tom subbing for her at the last minute. Franzen writes, “Tom reported being excited, but my own sense of unreality, of failure to pleasurably anticipate, grew only stronger.” It’s a strange start to such an exotic (and expensive) trip.

Franzen puts us there with Tom and him on board the National Geographic Orion. The ship departs Ushuaia, Argentina. Franzen is a birder. He wants to see birds unique to Antarctica. When the Orion arrives off the coast of the Antarctica Peninsula, the crew arranges a landing on Barrientos Island. Here Franzen sees thousands of gentoo and chinstrap penguins: 

Some of the chicks had fledged and followed their parents back into the sea, which is the preferred element of penguins and their only source of food. But thousands of birds remained. Downy gray chicks chased after any adult that was plausibly their parent, begging for a regurgitated meal, or banded together for safety from the gull-like skuas that preyed on the orphaned and the failing-to-thrive. Many of the adults had retreated uphill to molt, a process that involves standing still for several weeks, itchy and hungry, while new feathers push out old feathers. The patience of the molters, their silent endurance, was impossible not to admire in human terms.

For the first time on the trip, Franzen is happy: “Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come.” 

The expedition crosses below the Antarctic Circle. Franzen is delighted with the views. In one of the piece’s most beautiful passages, he says,

I’d never before had the experience of beholding scenic beauty so dazzling that I couldn’t process it, couldn’t get it to register as something real. A trip that had seemed unreal to me beforehand had taken me to a place that likewise seemed unreal, albeit in a better way. Global warming may be endangering the continent’s western ice sheet, but Antarctica is still far from having melted. On either side of the Lemaire Channel were spiky black mountains, extremely tall but still not so tall as to be merely snow-covered; they were buried in wind-carved snowdrift, all the way to their peaks, with rock exposed only on the most vertical cliffs. Sheltered from wind, the water was glassy, and under a solidly gray sky it was absolutely black, pristinely black, like outer space. Amid the monochromes, the endless black and white and gray, was the jarring blue of glacial ice. No matter the shade of it—the bluish tinge of the growlers bobbing in our wake, the intensely deep blue of the arched and chambered floating ice castles, the Styrofoamish powder blue of calving glaciers—I couldn’t make my eyes believe that they were seeing a color from nature. Again and again, I nearly laughed in disbelief. Immanuel Kant had connected the sublime with terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.

But the best is yet to come. In Lallemand Fjord, Franzen sets up a telescope on Orion’s observation deck and immediately glimpses what looks to be an emperor penguin. He tells the ship’s captain. The captain maneuvers the ship for a better view. Franzen’s sighting is confirmed. The crew arranges for a landing. Franzen writes,

I’d already made a quiet, alienated resolution not to take a single picture on the trip. And here was an image so indelible that no camera was needed to capture it: the emperor penguin appeared to be holding a press conference. While a cluster of Adélies came up from behind it, observing like support staff, the emperor faced the press corps in a posture of calm dignity. After a while, it gave its neck a leisurely stretch. Demonstrating its masterly balance and flexibility, and yet without seeming to show off, it scratched behind its ear with one foot while standing fully erect on the other. And then, as if to underline how comfortable it felt with us, it fell asleep.

The expedition continues. The Orion’s route takes Franzen north again and then far east to South Georgia island. South Georgia is the principal breeding site for the king penguin, a species nearly as tall as the emperor and even more dramatically plumaged. Franzen says, “To see a king penguin in the wild seemed to me, in itself, sufficient reason not only to have made the journey; it seemed reason enough to have been born on this planet.” He continues,

When I sat on the ground, the king penguins came so close to me that I could have stroked their gleaming, furlike feathers. Their plumage had the hypercrispness of pattern, the hypervividness of color, that you can normally experience only by taking drugs. 

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the best travel pieces I’ve ever read.