I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [188]
Raul and Daniella in their backyard, November 1993 (image credit 19.10)
During the performances of Rosebud’s Song in New York, Sondra stole the show. Her heart-encompassing smile, swaying hips, and gentle fluttering hands in her Hawaiian dance, represented all who live near water. Her dance was the key segue into our finale, danced by thousands of children to the music and lyrics written for us by Judy Collins.
The driest as well as coldest places on earth are found in Antarctica, but for where people have established cultures, Antarctica does not fit—except for frozen scientists and explorers.
The driest inhabited place on earth is the Atacama Desert on the western coast of South America. Archaeological digs have found beautifully preserved mummies from 10,000 years BCE. In the Atacama, there are places so dry that for hundreds of years, there are no records of anyone ever seeing a plant or an animal.
In the barren desert, in a field on the outskirts of San Pedro de Atacama, we held our auditions. Local children danced for us, and others came from settlements hours away. As we were dancing together, dust devils would appear. These miniature swirling tornados, from two or three to eight feet high, would materialize like ghosts out of nowhere, spin, wave in slow motion at us, then dematerialize. Minutes later, haunting us, another would appear, form, then shift and wave for half a minute, and just as you released your held-in breath and exclaimed, “Look! Oh my God!” they were gone. Carrie tried to capture one with her camera, but failed. I don’t think they liked being impressed permanently on anything. The next day, we chose gentle and beautiful Daniella and Raul to represent this arid and eerie landscape of the Atacama. The dust devils did not protest.
For our coldest extreme, outside of Antarctica, Siberia and the town of Yakutsk won out. It is not uncommon for temperatures to drop as low as −80 to −90 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the town consists of concrete buildings held six to eight feet off the ground by stilts sunk deep into the frozen earth. Giant insulated pipes go from one building to another in a topsy-turvy maze. They bring steam and hot water, while others carry waste and sewage. Telephone poles are crooked, leaning at different angles due to the heaving of the earth.
There are still a handful of charming wooden homes, though none are original. With thick walls, double doors, and triple-paned windows draped with quilted curtains, they are heated by wood- or coke-burning stoves; gradually, the warmth melts the permafrost they’re built on. The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński describes the plight of these houses in his book Imperium:
Released from the grip of the cold, the houses become limp and slide deep into the earth. For many years they have been standing considerably below street level; that is because they were built on permafrost and the warmth they have radiated over time has hollowed out niches for them in the icy soil, and with each year they sink into these more and more. Each little house stands in a separate and increasingly deep hole.
Now the wave of April warmth hits … and its lopsided, poor little houses twist, grow misshapen, sprawl, and squat ever closer to the earth. The entire neighborhood shrinks, diminishes, sinks in such a way that in some places only the roofs are visible—as if a great fleet of submarines were gradually submerging into the sea.5
They are tough in Yakutsk; schools stay open unless temperatures drop below −58 degrees. Try to expectorate outdoors in that temperature, and your spit will explode as it exits your mouth, and be ice before it hits the ground. I tried to imagine what would happen to the smoke and soot when it froze coming out of chimneys. Again, Kapuściński explains:
The smoke and soot spewed from the chimneys,