Michael Schulder: Andrea Pitzer, welcome to Wavemaker Conversations.
Andrea Pitzer: Thanks for having me on Michael.
Michael Schulder: I've called you because of your book, Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. It attracted me because of the amazing stories of resilience. I'd really like to call this conversation “Andrea Pitzer’s Long Journey from West Virginia to the Arctic Ocean.”
Andrea Pitzer: Okay. It's a long journey for sure.
Michael Schulder: It's a long journey, so I just want to read, ‘cause I was- you know, one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you is I read your bio on your website and, you know, first I sampled your book, I got really intrigued, and then on your bio, here's what it is: you received an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1994, later studied at MIT and Harvard as an affiliate of the Neiman Foundation for journalism. And then it goes on: “Before that," this is where I get really interested, "before that, she was a freelance journalist, a music critic, a portrait painter, a French translator, a record store manager, and a martial arts and self-defense instructor." You grew up in West Virginia, now reverse that - start from West Virginia, just for five minutes, how did you get from West Virginia to the Arctic Ocean?
Andrea Pitzer: So I had always wanted to be a writer actually, and my grandparents, my father's parents, had a store in my hometown, a bookstore. And they lived above that bookstore and there was a back entrance. So I could go down when the bookstore was closed and read at will in that bookstore. And they did different in store signings. And again, this was Parkersburg, West Virginia, most of them would not be people you would necessarily know about. Gore Vidal was one of them, interestingly enough, though. And I did not meet Gore Vidal, but a few years later I did meet a guy named Alan Eckerd, who was one of the script writers for Wild Kingdom, which was a show I loved as a child. And he looked like a regular guy, and I had it in the back of my head, if he could be a writer, you know, maybe anybody could be a writer. And so that was always there and I always worked on writing. We had a program at the school that did a Model United Nations when I was in high school and we would come to Washington DC to participate in that. I grew up, my dad's family was not so badly off, but my mom and my stepdad's family, we were pretty poor, and I don't think without actually being part of that Model UN group, I would have imagined myself at Georgetown or another university like that. But sort of having worked with those kids, I thought, “Okay, you know, maybe this is possible. I was a national Merit Scholar, maybe this is possible." And I ended up going to Georgetown, being strapped with incredible debt ‘cause I had to put myself through school. And the reason my degree is from 1994, I finished all my coursework in 1989, but I had, in addition to student loans, so much direct debt to the university that it took me five years to pay off just that, that separately. But I still, I, you know, I loved learning - the way that I was able to learn at university was just fantastic. And then I was still writing, but I couldn't picture how does one translate some poetry being published and some music criticism that I was doing at the time into a real full-time gig and, and to write for a living in some predictable way. And so I ended up getting a black belt in karate and teaching karate and martial arts full time for seven and a half years. I ran a record store - I loved music very much. And then I had always done artwork as well. So I actually became a painter, trying to sort of figure out maybe that was something you could make a living at. But in all the paintings that I did, there would be this text, Greek text, other texts that would creep into the background. And it became apparent to me at some point, the writing was really- even though I hadn't written for more than a decade at that point, that writing was really what I needed to return to. And so I made this slow turn after my children were born. It really did feel like, you know, shifting some enormous ship to go in a different direction, to writing. And that was a lot of freelancing at first. And while I was at Harvard as an affiliate of the Neiman foundation during one year, I took a course on Nabokov, the graduate level course, and became very interested in some of the history that actually tied into my training at Georgetown and started chasing things down rabbit holes. And I will say that that early study of Nabokov, while my kids were still quite young, was what set the course for my next three books, the third of which would actually take me into the Arctic on three expeditions. So it's a very roundabout path. So I'm one of these people that will show up and tell you it's okay not to have a totally purpose-driven, you know, cobblestone laid path for yourself to walk on. It's okay to sort of take these diversions, ‘cause that's definitely how I got to where I wanted to go in the end, which was to be a writer.
Michael Schulder: You know, it's so interesting. So you're a parent. If you don't mind, how old are your kids?
Andrea Pitzer: 14 and 16 now.
Michael Schulder: So my, so my kids are just one step older than yours, just a little bit. And so I don't know if you were sort of obsessed about being the best parents you could be, but, you know, one of the things we've learned in recent years, and it's a recent phenomenon, is this phenomenon of over-parenting and I spoke- I'm actually speaking in a couple of weeks with Dean Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former freshmen Dean at Stanford, who wrote a book called How to Raise an Adult. And one of the key lessons was, in terms of the danger of over-parenting, she had seen on the front lines of Stanford, where you're getting some of the most hyper accomplished kids, she said “Less wherewithal to function as healthy, independent adults.” And I mention that to you because it goes back to your upbringing. It sounds like you had a lot to overcome yourself, and you just kept reinventing and experimenting and testing. So what have you learned along the way that has, from those early days, that has made you a highly functioning individual and author?
Andrea Pitzer: I would say, you know, it's- there's the survivor's bias that we have to be careful of here, which is: I am where I am today and I'm really fortunate to be, and I'd like to think I, you know, worked and earned it all myself, and at the same time, there was the intervention of a lot of teachers who encouraged me to do things. You know, I didn't have some of the normal supports, but I did have other supports that came through. And not only that, but I was, you know, profoundly depressed for many, many years in my teen life and my early adult life, trying to figure out why, why do you have somebody in your household who picks you up by the hair, who hits you with a belt, you know, who loses the house to bankruptcy? Is this the way that other people live? And so I think it's- I don't want to portray myself as somebody who was endlessly resilient, who just got back up and dealt with the next thing. You know, there are struggles that happen and it's normal to have those struggles. And so I think for me, for parenting, since that's sort of where this question started with you, I think that I've tried to do two things, which is one to never terrify my children - like, it’s just a nice base rule that they are supported, they are loved, they are great people. They're going to screw up and that's okay, and I'm there. So sort of to try to show them that I'm reliable, that I'm there to support them, but also, um, I think there is a real danger. I live outside DC today and there are some fantastic schools, I love a lot of the teachers the kids have. The environment in which they're growing up is so, so relentlessly competitive that I worry that everybody feels like they have to like go into this shoot that sort of everything aims them toward. And for my kids, I try to say "Wherever this goes is fine. Be curious, be alive in the world. Think about what you want to do, but it doesn't have to be what anybody else is doing." And so I'm sure I'm guilty of over-parenting in some ways, but I actively try to back off of that because I think none of the abuse that I suffered was very useful in becoming the thing I wanted to be. But that freedom that I had, that sort of nobody was paying attention, there is something valuable in giving kids some space to just screw up, be whoever they are, and encourage them to follow their curiosity.
Michael Schulder: Now, now as- now we pivot to Andrea Pitzer, what happens when a curious person avoids the shoot? Because the shoot does not lead to the Arctic Ocean. So tell me how you got to the Arctic and what you learned there that, and I know from reading your piece in the Washington Post, that this whole deep journey to 17th century history in the Arctic has actually empowered you as an individual, but tell me what led you there and the key takeaways of what you learned on your, on this journey into an untold, pretty much untold history.
Andrea Pitzer: So what led me there was this story when I was researching my book on Vladimir Nabokov, my first book. There were these islands called Nova Zembla North of Russia, and there was a fantasy kingdom in one of his novels called Zembla. And so one of my crazy persuits became “What's the relationship between these two?” And I found this story of William Barents, this Dutchman, who had been in the Arctic stranded more than 400 years ago with a group of- with a crew. And they were trying to survive the winter. And again, this wasn't like totally lost history, but there wasn't really an English language, book-length treatment that covered this. And I just thought “Why don't I know this story?” This was more than a decade ago, and I really stuck with it and kept researching it. And it's important to me when I write a book that I try to bring something to it that maybe nobody else can, or that very few people could. There are lots of great historians out there who can go into the archives who will know Dutch better than if I started studying immediately, you know, better than I ever could. Those are their strengths. I could synthesize that information, but I always think, what do I bring to it that, that maybe somebody else wouldn't and often that's going to the place, reporting from the place. And the Arctic is not a place- the high Arctic, hundreds of miles above the mainland, is not a place a lot of people will go. And so I began to think I would write this as a book, if I could go to the Arctic. And it's a little more difficult than it sounds. How do you get there? Who are you going to talk to? You know, you have to build the networks, but also just knowing the place - how do I get to know this place in a way to speak about it with at least a little bit of authority? And for me that ended up being three Arctic expeditions, the first one was dog sledding in polar night. I ran a dog sled, there were three sleds on the team and we did an expedition to the interior in polar night so I would know what was it like for these men when there was no daylight. And then the second one, I was on a tall ship sailing around Svalbard, which was actually one of the places, it's halfway between Northway and- halfway between Norway and the North pole, and it is, uh, it's first recorded known sighting was by my Dutch cap- by my Dutch navigator, William Barents. And I went there on a tall ship and learned to haul sails. And I spent a lot of time up the mast imagining being the first person to see these shorelines that we know of. And then the third expedition, it was important to me, if it was possible, and it was actually quite a challenge, but it ended up being possible to go to the ruins of William Barents’ cabin on Nova Zembla, North of Siberia. It's very complicated with the Russian government to go to some of these restricted places. And I ended up going there. It was fantastic in terms of altogether across those three expeditions, I was in the Arctic in five months of a year. Not all one year, but I could know what is the, what does the ice sound like when the weather is warming? What does it sound like when it's going toward winter? What does it sound like above freezing, below freezing? What does it smell like? You know, I could capture a piece of their time there that very few people have had a chance to experience, you know? And things have changed, and I was very keenly aware of what had changed in those 400 years and what hadn't changed. So I was able to use some of what hadn't changed to tell part of that story. And on the way back, our engine actually died right as we left Nova Zembla. So we came back on sails alone, which was a lot like what Barents himself had faced. And it was a really- that was also a really evocative time for me.
Michael Schulder: There's- it's more than metaphor, but there are so many metaphors in there. What's it like when there's no daylight, dog sledding in polar nights? So what did you learn about that?
Andrea Pitzer: Well, I learned that it isn't actually night all the time, so maybe there's some metaphor we can draw from our lives for that, but there's moonlight. And when you have snow and ice, it's quite reflective. So it was not completely dark night after night. The absence of daylight felt really profound, but you learn to sort of sometimes see in other ways, although sometimes it is just quite dark. I mean, to be frank, you know, when it was, when it was cloudy, it was very, very dark.
Michael Schulder: And how do you navigate and function and keep your spirits up when it is that dark for extended periods of time?
Andrea Pitzer: Well, you have, you know, team protocols. You don't stay out of sight of each other more than a certain length of time. You have a headlamp on. You come up with a communication system where you don't have to be within shouting distance by, by signaling sort of mini Morse code things by covering up and uncovering your headlight. You can sort of, you know, have a few basic things that you can share. So I think, you know, when isolated, figuring out means to stay in contact and have at least rudimentary ways to send signals to people, but also to, to sort of be aware anywhere, and certainly coronavirus this year has taught us that, but anywhere, anytime things can kind of cascade into problems. A small thing can turn into another thing into a big thing. I would say in situations like that in polar night, in the high Arctic, there is just the chance for something small going wrong to become a very large thing going wrong. So the natural response to that is to kind of feel panicked when something small goes wrong, because it's like, “Oh no, is this the beginning of a big thing?” But that first expedition, the real lesson I learned off of it is: in regular life, but especially in the Arctic, things are going to go wrong all the time. And when that happens, it's not a panic thing at all. It is just have a plan and be ready to deal with it. But you do need to interrupt that cascade more quickly in the Arctic than you do in regular life to make sure nothing huge happens. But I think I had this impulse at first to try to make sure nothing went wrong and it's just not possible. You know, just expect that things are going to go wrong and instead have a plan to deal with it rather than being able to somehow magically control the situation so nothing goes wrong. Things are going to go wrong all the time and it's fine.
Michael Schulder: So a lot of things went wrong on that. There were three expeditions, three journeys and reading each one of them in your book is like after the first one, a lot of people would have just stopped. It's enough. I explored, I discovered some things… But William Barents and you went to the second journey and then the third journey. If you were to, if you were to extract one anecdote from those three journeys, would it be from the first, second or third, and what would it be? Give us one story from those extreme- the extreme hardship.
Andrea Pitzer: I would say from the, it would be probably from the third journey, which is where -each time they would hit so much ice, they couldn't go further and they would turn back, but on the third journey, they would turn back and it would be too late to come home and that's where they then get stuck for the winter. And it's a very small thing, but I think it's quite important that, um, there's a moment in January when, I mean, they've been in polar night for weeks at this point, they're hunkered in this cabin, you know, they've faced relentless, polar bear attacks. They have no way to be sure at all that any of them are going to survive the winter. Wint- you know, the end of winter is still a long way away, a couple of months away at this point, as far as they know. And it comes up to the eve of the epiphany and they realize that that's what it is. And it's a huge feast back in Amsterdam. It's- I saw it described in some historical records as like the most important sort of popular holiday of the year. And here they are, their rations are running thin, I believe at that point they had already run out of beer, which is quite a big deal for sailors. They have no idea whether they're going to survive the next two months at all. It is- there's more than an inch of ice on the inside of their cabin walls. You know, the drift- they can- there's nothing, there’re no trees there. So all they can do is try to find driftwood to burn for fuel, for wood, to stay warm and to cook their food. And it's really looking bleak. And so they decide that it's the Eve of the epiphany. They ask the captain if they can have a feast and they take- he gives them two pounds of meal that were going to be used to make paste with paper, for cartridges, for powder, for gunpowder. And instead they use that and they fry up cakes. They had been saving a little bit of wine and they each get a biscuit from the captain. And so in the face of all this hardship and terror about what's coming ahead and, you know, they don't even know if they're going to survive the next day, they decide to have a party and they do this thing where- it's a tradition in Amsterdam where you draw lots and for one night, 12th night, a lot of people know, is where everything kind of gets turned to topsy turvy, and they draw lots, and the gunner draws the lot to be King for a night. And so this idea of sort of rejecting what fate is handing you in that moment and sort of constructing your own, you know, in this case sort of wildly delusional narrative - they were not Kings of Nova Zembla, you know, they were not even going to maybe survive the next day. But they had a celebration that they wanted to do that, you know, they were still alive and they were going to, they were going to have a holiday feast. I think there's something really wonderful about that moment. And it happens almost halfway through my book. I feel like that's kind of the heart of the book.
Michael Schulder: So much of this is about resilience. Look, it's about how to approach life, so much of your work, but that resilience theme, you know, in football, we always hear, “Oh, you get down and you, you know, you get knocked down and you get back up.” So I had- this is an interview I did a while back with a coach from Georgia, Bill Curry, who had- he was a famous college coach and a real inspirational guy. I want you to listen to 60 seconds.
Bill Curry: Stay in football for any time at all, and we all know what the negatives are, and there are plenty of them - we're dealing with some stunning information that has been guarded and hidden way too long now about brain trauma. But the great stuff about football is that you do get knocked down almost every play. And you got two choices. I mean, there are two pains in life, the pain of discipline, the pain of regret - you choose. You're going to get knocked down maybe a hundred times in a game. You got two choices. You either wallow and feel sorry for yourself, or you get up and do the next right thing. Get back in the huddle, get the next play and get your heart going and give your heart again and again and again. When that becomes the habit, then you have been transformed into a different kind of person and one that is reliable and one that folks can count on. And that's what teammates are.
Michael Schulder: So the reason that made me think of your book is that we often think of resilience as a very solitary individual thing that you need to, you need to bounce back for yourself. But the way he framed it at the end, you know, it's like you're being resilient for people beyond you, for your team, for the broader community. And that plays out everywhere. And it played out in the distant Arctic in the early 1600s, and it played out on your journeys. So if you can just like, what- does that trigger a particular story from your book?
Andrea Pitzer: Well, I think there's a couple things. First of all, I like that he noted, uh, there are costs and costs from and problems with football. And so I think same thing with Barents, you know, these guys didn't meet a new species that they didn't want to kill. You know, their reaction to a lot of what they encountered was sort of plunder in one form or another, and this was very much a product of the time. And I think that it's important not to romanticize the strategies you have to get through life. And so I'm glad that Curry didn't romanticize football and I won't romanticize. Part of the point of writing this book was to take away some of those trappings of the hero and deal with them as humans, as opposed to icons of some kind. And I think it's fine to do that with yourself as well. And you get knocked down and he's saying you can have, you know, either of these, the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. I think it's okay sometimes to lay on the ground for a few seconds. Like, you know, it- just to take stock of that is not wallowing. And while it's important to not be so self-centered that you never think of your context with your teammates or your community or anything like that, I also think that if you function only to serve as somebody else's cog, you're never going to grow into your own self either. And so sometimes having that space of laying on the ground a minute and figuring out what is not just, what does my coach want me to do, but what am I going to do here? It's important to own for yourself. And this goes back to the very beginning, when I was talking about this crazy path I took between West Virginia and the Arctic. You know, you have to find your own strange way to do things sometimes. And so sometimes if somebody frames it as only these two choices, maybe you have your third choice or maybe you lay on the ground and figure it out before you get up to get hit again. It's okay to, to step out of those loops. It's okay to find that time, to figure out what you need for yourself while in the end, still understanding that there are other people in the world that are dependent on you. If you're a journalist, it might be the public, it might be readers. It might be elected officials reading your work. If you're a parent, certainly your children are dependent on you. One thing from the book that struck me, that is just not true for us, is that they were truly isolated. They were off every map in existence at the time. They had each other. And that was a little community that they built. But outside of that little community, no one knew where they were or would be able to find them. So it was entirely on them. But what I discovered for myself, having had some family crises in this last year during Corona viruses, we are none of us cutoff, even in our little communities, those communities are not cut off from larger communities the way that these guys were. We have more resources available to us so often it can be a matter of trying to find what you need to have the tools for yourself to be resilient. And sometimes that comes from outside you. Sometimes it comes from inside you and that's okay, and sometimes it comes from outside you and both of those things are really useful in navigating whatever life throws at you.
Michael Schulder: That's a real perspective changer, because we do feel in many ways, so isolated right now during the pandemic, but there are degrees of isolation. I mean, it's really, really fascinating. You alluded to some of the struggles you've had personally, and you wrote about it in the Washington Post and, and how you connected the wisdom you gained from these Arctic journeys and your research. I mean, why don't you just, if you don't mind, as a final question, if you can just sort of walk us through some of these, would you call them cascading crises in your personal life? Or they seem like separate, but sort of hitting a critical mass all at the same time while you were working so hard on this book.
Andrea Pitzer: It was a little bit of both. There was my mother who had paranoid dementia and has for a while. And that sort of cascaded because my stepfather got very ill with lung cancer and then died in 2020 and a few months before that I brought her here to live with me. And so then that precipitated some family crises. We'll never know if it caused or didn't cause, but I suspect it played a role in my husband's brain aneurysm later in the year, because it was so stressful to be working and having the kids at school and managing your mother-in-law while you see that it's like so hard on your wife while she's trying to finish her book. I'm sure that was stressful for him. He's made a full recovery by the way, so no one needs to be too stressed about that. But in the midst of all this, it was quite difficult. Some of the lessons that I drew on in that Washington Post story, and I made clear that it's like, you know, there's not magic sunshine remedies that people can give you. And so one of the things that I said is “Remember that things can always get worse.” And I don't mean that as a, like, let's all be depressed about it, but like brace yourself. Because if you think like this is it, you know, and you frame it for yourself that I can't possibly take another thing, you know, things really can't get worse in ways that you're not wanting to have imagined. And for me, that was, I knew I was bringing my mother to live with me. I knew my stepfather was dying of cancer. I had no idea coronavirus was going to happen. And that made everything much worse. And so being in a position where you're kind of braced for that I think is important. What the- these guys, every day they would say to themselves, they were dying of scurvy in the midst of all this, so they're getting weaker and weaker every day. And they're trying to get to this open sea and they're out in their small boats. They had to try to sail home in their small boats and they get to where they're stuck in the ice, and they hoist their provisions out of their boats. They hoist the sick people out of the boats. They hoist the boats up, they drag all of this stuff across the top of the iceberg, telling themselves this time, when they get to the other side, they're going to find open sea in which they can sail. And again and again, when you read the book, you see, they wake up the next morning and they're closed in by ice once again. And so the fortitude to go on past the point where you think you can go on, I found was- is actually a real mark of humanity. And it came across in many of the Arctic and Antarctic expedition stories that I read. And I think a lot of us learned in this last year that, you know, you can't imagine how are you going to work from home and you have a three-year-old child that's supposed to be starting preschool. Like how is that even possible? And the answer is it's not going to be good. It's going to be bad. But you'll get up and you'll, you'll do it. And you'll find some way that you didn't think of to manage it just a little bit better. And so I think that for all of us, just as you can't imagine the worst that's going to happen, you can't imagine the ingenious solutions that you and other people are going to come up with. And so sometimes it is just a matter of, not to go back to football too much, ‘cause I'm not actually a huge football fan, but like, you don't know what's going to happen if you get up - just get up and the next play might be completely different, you know? And you're probably going to take it in the teeth a few more times, but you may actually find a way to navigate this that you can't imagine right now. And so, for me, you know, that was enough to just keep going through that year.
Michael Schulder: Let me tie up one loose end, and then I'm going to let you go. But, but just the motivation of Barents and his whole team, and presumably there were different motivations for different crew members, there's only so much we can know. But ultimately, what was the motivation, was the initial goal and purpose and motivation, what kept driving them or did it just become, “I just got to get out of here alive."
Andrea Pitzer: So the initial motivation, and I think it's worth mentioning because it's true today in our times, too, for these expeditions was money. It was a money business trying to fund a trade route to the far East. Within that we know that Barents was very committed to doing this past the point where it made sense even sometimes. And so he had his own stubborn vision of wanting to get there, wanting to see these spaces that no one had seen. So you had the original thing that funded the voyages you had Barent’s personal motivations for pursuing this again and again. He was the only person that we know that was on all three voyages. So not everybody came back and some people of course don't survive. But in the end, when they end up trapped there, you know, their whole vision of that quest of going to the Far East, being the first to see this, of rewarding their patrons and getting this trade route established, like all that was gone. By the time they're stuck in that cabin and it's polar night, making it back to daylight is really all that they can focus on. They know that they're not getting to China anymore. And so there are little smaller things that they're working for around that, but survival becomes the big thing. And so it's fine to cut down on your, you know, your goals list in these moments, and to just say "What has to happen today?" What has to happen today is I have to make it to tomorrow. And sometimes that's enough.
Michael Schulder: Andrea Pitzer, thank you so much for joining me on Wavemaker Conversations.
Andrea Pitzer: Thank you, Michael. It was great to be here.