MIDDLETOWN — Naturalist Susan Adie is headed south for the winter — way south. Later this week, she’ll fly to Chile and make her way aboard the Clelia 2, a small cruise ship designed for traveling to unique destinations. In this case, that means Argentina and, later, the Antarctic peninsula, where she’ll help organize and teach on a four-month ‘eco-tourism’ expedition dedicated to the geology and wildlife of the extreme south. It’s nothing new for the Middletown environmentalist, freelance expedition leader and educator. She gave up the time clock more than 20 years ago to travel the world as an expedition leader, and in the years since she’s traveled to places most people have never seen. Her husband is a yacht captain currently serving aboard Freedom, a classic yacht now berthed in Annapolis, Md. They’ll likely not see each other for the better part of six months. Between packing for the trip, she talked about her job:

So, you’re an expedition leader. What do you do? “I do logistics, put together the helicopters, work with the captain, the pilots and organize all of that, then work with our team of lecturers and naturalists. My background is in marine biology, so if we’re at sea and looking at Beluga whales, I’ll do the education on that as well. So I work both ways.”

How’d you get into this? “I grew up in upstate New York, more or less raised in the Adirondacks. I started in terrestrial biology, then I sort of branched into marine biology. I used to work for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I actually come from a variety of jobs, but that was my longest lasting job. It was one of those square peg, round hole things. They punch a clock and I was totally shocked by that; I decided I didn’t like it. In some cases the government creates mediocrity, but in the private world you have a chance to go off in whatever direction you want to go and just be creative. I went private in 1981, and I gave myself five years to see if I could make it work. By year three I was so frantically busy I forgot the concept of giving it five years.”

So, you haven’t had a ‘job’ in years, then: “No! Now I sort of do what I want to do when I want to do it. Being a private contractor has its challenges but I wouldn’t do it any other way.”

Does it become hard to leave, and not see your husband for long stretches? “I think when you live in Newport and you have that sea-based life in you, you sort of roll with the punches. If you can’t cope with it you get out and do something different. We’ve been together for 35 years so it’s what we do, and it works.”

A little more about your trip? “We’ll do a series of trips from Argentina and the peninsula, one of which goes to the Falkland Islands and Georgia. We wake up in the morning on an island, get the Zodiac Mark V’s out, and we’ll go and see the penguins, some of the old historical whaling remains.”

Any connection there? “My great-grandfather, Alexander Lange, was the first whaler to bring a factory ship into Antarctica. That was in 1905, and he came from Norway. I have the lat and long where he anchored his factory ship, and I’ve been to the location many times, and I have his diary. It’s very interesting to read his experiences when he was at anchor in the same place we’re going. He was hunting and killing three, four, five blue whales a day, almost right from our position.”

How many do you see now? “None. We see none. They have recorded them acoustically so they do exist in the Antarctic waters, but sighting them, seeing them, has been super super rare. I’ve never seen one in the Antarctic in 16 years of being there.”

Give us a quick breakdown. Where have you been in your travels? “I’ve gone through a few passports! I’ve been on 140, 145 trips. I’ve been all the way around the Antarctic twice, and south of New Zealand and Australia. I’ve spent a lot of time in Greenland, Norway, the Northeast Passage, Canada, going through the Northwest Passage across the top of Canada. But I’ve also done the Amazon and Orinoco and Polynesia and Coastal and Central South America.”

Any recent trips stand out? “Last year we did a trip, it was my fifth time coming through the Northeast Passage, the section of the Arctic Ocean across the top of Russia. We use an ice breaker to get through there and we have helicopters. We flew into a reindeer herder’s camp to talk to him. He was telling us that things have changed so much for them because the tundra is melting, creating huge meltwater ponds, anywhere from two to 10 feet deep. In the past they would follow the deer .. now they have to go around these meltwater pools and it’s changing everything.

So the trip was much more than sightseeing: “What we do is experiential. You travel with specialists who can teach about nature or culture. Within that framework we end up with experiential things like hiking or kayaking.”

Many of your trips are to the far north or south. Do you prefer the cold? “I sort of pursued it that way because I don’t like being hot, for one, but I hate being cold. But you just dress for it; when you’re hot there’s no way to undress for it.”

Lure of the cold? “I think the wilderness of the polar regions is so limiting to humans in many ways, that it’s much more magical than the wilderness that is accessible.”

Why? “I’m not sure. It’s the magnitude, the size of it. I look at the ocean and I think anyone who lives in Newport goes through the same thing. You look and you’re just in awe and it’s something we can’t control, and it makes me proud.”

Well, that’s nature in general: “Yes. You can’t control it; you can destroy it, which we’re doing, but you can’t control it. You can’t control the mountains, you can’t control the wind that’s going to knock down your trees or not knock them down. And I like that.”

Has our race lost that soul? “It’s hurting seriously, not just in America. You look at people who can’t be near the wilderness because they’re just trying to survive. Then you look at someone, say, from Manhattan who makes a lot of money but never steps off the asphalt, who does not care, whose mind is closed. People seem to be disconnected.”

So your mission is to teach them? “To show them, help them understand. People need to have empathy for nature, so for me my driving purpose for being is to provide the window that people can walk through, or the door, to that understanding.”

But on these eco-tourism trips, aren’t you just preaching to the choir? “No. Very often we get ‘tickers,’ people who want to tick a destination off their checklist. Oftentimes the people I like the best are the people who come off cocky and cold at the beginning. By the end of the visit, they’re standing on the deck and watching the mountains going out of view, and you can just tell that they got it. I have to hope in my heart that I’ve somehow affected them, provided that avenue for them, and that’s very often what they’ll come and say to me. Then I know that they’ve opened up. If they can come home and watch the sunset at Sachuest and be in awe, then they’re getting there.”

How often do people ask what your favorite place is? “Everybody asks that. But it’s hard. When you wake up in the morning and you have that view out of your window, or you go out on deck and look out at the ocean, that’s just the best. There’s nothing better than that for me. What I really like to do is open people’s minds and hearts to that.”

What has the wild done for you? “Any time you’re hurt, any time you have a struggle, (the wild) is a very healing place and a perfect place. It doesn’t need to be changed. It’s some of what John Muir said, that the wilderness is good for your soul, so you feel this completeness of soul when you’re in that environment.”