Continuing in the family-theme for this post, I have been transcribing my father's journals from the Antarctic. He was there in 1957-58 with the Navy for the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Lewis recently did a report about him (well, really about the mountain named for him, but still), so we had to gather a bunch of documentation. In the process, my mom found these journals that he kept while he was there, which we really didn't know existed before. They are incredibly hard to decipher - his handwriting was neat but VERY tiny, and some of the letters are hard to distinguish from each other. But it has been extremely interesting, and I am gaining quite a bit of insight into my father's personality. It seems like a sort of a gift, since he has had dementia now for 7 years and hasn't been able to talk since his stroke a couple of years ago.
Since I started transcribing the journals, I've started doing some background research on Antarctica, McMurdo Sound, and the IGY. One of the other guys who was there, Paul Siple, said that anyone who spent time in the Antarctic came away a changed man. That was certainly true for my father. Aside from the accident which caused him to spend months in sick bay, come home early, and have numerous surgeries (and which resulted in the naming of the mountain in his honor), my father clearly loved Antarctica. The scenery, the wildlife, even the climate and the isolation. He talked about it for years, and when his dementia started to become apparent, it was one of the only things he continued to talk about.
I doubt that my dad would have wanted us reading his journals - obviously he never shared them with any of us before - but I'm glad to have them. They offer me a window into his life as a young man, and a little more understanding of what it was like to live on the "unknown continent" during the 1950s. On the left is a photo of my dad from McMurdo Sound.
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2 comments:
What a gift those journals must be! I think that even though your father didn't share the journals with you, he must have known they were around for many years while he was well and he kept them. I think, maybe, he would want you to have them now or he would not have kept them.
We looked up his mountain! How cool is that!
It is interesting to go through a parent's papers to get a glimpse into a part of their life that you didn't know much about. I agree with Veronica, if your Dad didn't want anyone to read the journals he would have chucked them out a while ago! So enjoy reading (but you may need glasses by the end!).
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