Staying away from the virus, we can appreciate the time Shackleton and his crew spent trapped and isolated for much longer than we have been quarantined.
From Writer's Almanac of 4/24/2020
On this date in 1916, Sir Ernest Shackleton (books by this author) set out in a lifeboat from Elephant Island to get help for his shipwrecked Antarctic expedition. Shackleton had set sail from London on the Endurance on August 1, 1914, intending to be the first party to cross the continent of Antarctica. Four months later, the ship encountered pack ice — large masses of ice that are not attached to land — for the first time. They crossed the Antarctic Circle in January 1915, but the ship was soon trapped in the ice pack. The crew had no control over the vessel's movements, and they drifted aimlessly along with the ice for more than nine months. Eventually, the Endurance was so damaged by the ice that Shackleton ordered his men to abandon ship. Each man was allowed to bring two pounds of personal items from the ship, with two exceptions: photographer Frank Hurley's photographic plates, and crewmember Leonard Hussey's banjo. They set up camp on an ice floe, where they watched their ship gradually sink into the frigid waters. They camped on the ice for several months, hoping that they would hit a lucky current and drift northward to safety, but finally, in April 1916, Shackleton and some of the men set off in three lifeboats. They landed on Elephant Island, which was uninhabited. A few days later, Shackleton set off in one of the lifeboats, the James Caird, to South Georgia Island, where there was a whaling station. In August, he finally arrived at the ice camp and rescued the survivors, one of whom later wrote, "I felt jolly near blubbing for a bit & could not speak for several minutes," when he saw Shackleton's ship appear on the horizon.
From Writer's Almanac of 4/25/2020
It's the birthday of poet Ted Kooser (books by this author), born in Ames, Iowa (1939). He said, "I had a wonderfully happy childhood," and, "All this business about artists having to have terrible childhoods doesn't play with me."
He started writing poetry seriously as a teenager. He said: "I was desperately interested in being interesting. Poetry seemed a way of being different." His first poem was published because his friends sent one of his poems to a teen magazine behind his back.
He wanted to be a writer, but he flunked out of graduate school. So he took the first job he was offered, at a life insurance company, and he worked there for 35 years. He said: "I believe that writers write for perceived communities, and that if you are a lifelong professor of English, it's quite likely that you will write poems that your colleagues would like; that is, poems that will engage that community. I worked every day with people who didn't read poetry, who hadn't read it since they were in high school, and I wanted to write for them."
Every morning, he got up at 4:30, made a pot of coffee, and wrote until 7. Then he put on his suit and tie and went to work. By the time he retired in 1999, Kooser had published seven books of poetry, including Not Coming to Be Barked At (1976), One World at a Time (1985), and Weather Central (1994). He resigned himself to being a relatively unknown poet, but he continued to write every morning. Then, in 2004, he got a phone call informing him that he had been chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He said: "I was so staggered I could barely respond. The next day, I backed the car out of the garage and tore the rearview mirror off the driver's side."
He turns 81 today. His latest collection is Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems (2018), published by Copper Canyon Press.
