More Lesbians in Antarctica?

Now there's a question for the ages. Gretchen Legler received a National Sciences Foundation grant and went to Antarctica to study the impact of the environment and isolation on the people working at McMurdo Station. It's a sort of international science lab for adventurers and those now grown up kids we used to call geeks.

She ended up writing a series of essays entitled On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (The World As Home). What happened is that about halfway through the book, Ms. Legler, a lesbian with a recently broken heart, met a lesbian mechanic and fell in love. All reviews indicate that while the book lost some focus from that point on, the emotional honesty more than makes up for the weaknesses the interlude brings to the final product.

In an interview with Ms. Legler that I found on Salon.com, the interviewer asks if and why there would be a lot of lesbians in Antarctica. The question was never fully answered. Even so, I felt that little clutch in my gut. I may have missed the boat. Here I have spent almost 30 years in San Diego, never knowing all the dykes were living with the penguins.

I hate it when that happens.