Read China Mountain Zhang Online
Authors: Maureen F. McHugh
China Mountain Zhang (11 page)
The ice has ground against the west side, mounting the side of the tower. We’d need a light-hammer. I mention that.
“There’s one in the station,” he says, “we have to clear ice every couple of weeks.”
We park the floater on the ice and walk across to the station. Without the blow of the floater I can hear the ice groaning all around me. It groans like metal under stress, but there’s
hectares
of it. Wind moan and ice groan, black sky and white-blue ice in the dark. We climb slabs of ice to metal rungs set in the side of the tower, and I follow Jim up to the top where he opens a hatch and we see the lit stairs curling down at our feet. He gestures for me to go first and closes the top after us. The wind stops and I realize I’ve been holding my shoulders tense. They ache. The stairs are a circular metal staircase in a reinforced concrete tower with a ribbon light down the wall, but ugly as it is in here it’s better than out there.
hectares
of it. Wind moan and ice groan, black sky and white-blue ice in the dark. We climb slabs of ice to metal rungs set in the side of the tower, and I follow Jim up to the top where he opens a hatch and we see the lit stairs curling down at our feet. He gestures for me to go first and closes the top after us. The wind stops and I realize I’ve been holding my shoulders tense. They ache. The stairs are a circular metal staircase in a reinforced concrete tower with a ribbon light down the wall, but ugly as it is in here it’s better than out there.
Our steps echo as we go down. Underneath is a large space, maybe twenty meters across, with windows for the outer walls. It’s bare unfinished concrete floor and ceiling except where someone has started finishing one of the walls in porcelain white. “The actual shell is raconite,” Jim says. “We’ve got this level wired so the lights come on whenever anyone enters but then there are two
more levels below us. The middle one isn’t as finished as this one, the bottom is labs. I need some help setting up some stuff for a lab, then there’s a building protocol you can use to do some work on the place while I run some tests. Ah, the hammer is under stairs, there’s only one.” He’s embarrassed that there’s only one, he doesn’t want to tell me to do the ice myself.
more levels below us. The middle one isn’t as finished as this one, the bottom is labs. I need some help setting up some stuff for a lab, then there’s a building protocol you can use to do some work on the place while I run some tests. Ah, the hammer is under stairs, there’s only one.” He’s embarrassed that there’s only one, he doesn’t want to tell me to do the ice myself.
“Well,” I say, “that’s what they’re paying my inflated salary for.”
He grins, relieved. He’s a nice guy, big and wooly as a bear. “It won’t take you too long,” he says. “Just break up the top stuff and be careful not to cut too deep, remember there’s water underneath. I’ll be on the first level.”
“Meishi,
” I say.
” I say.
“What?”
“Meishi,
you know, ‘no problem,”’ I say.
you know, ‘no problem,”’ I say.
“Is that Chinese?”
I guess it is, I never thought about it. Everybody says
meishi.
Except Canadians.
meishi.
Except Canadians.
I hoist the hammer, brand-new, just like the cutter, but a little more used, and climb back up the steps with it. When I open the hatch the wind is still going and the ice is still groaning and creaking and my shoulders bunch up again. I close the hatch behind me and wonder if people get accustomed to this. Man is an adaptable animal, I tell myself, you’ll get accustomed to this. I sling the hammer across my back with the shoulder strap and climb down. How am I supposed to use a hammer on a substance I have difficulty standing on? Cleats would help. Remember when back at the base to ask someone about ordering some kind of mountain-climbing boots. I wrap the contact round my wrist and jack into the hammer. Ice is freaky stuff, it’s not like concrete because it’s got a weird surface and the density is different. It’s hard to judge how much headway I’m making, first I think I’ve done a lot and then when I look I haven’t done anything. Then
I really whale and suddenly I’ve cut the surface too deep and the hammer is skipping all over the place.
I really whale and suddenly I’ve cut the surface too deep and the hammer is skipping all over the place.
Someone who knows what they’re doing would finish a lot faster than I do, but in an hour I’ve cut away a lot of ice. I don’t know how close I am to water and that makes me nervous, there are all these cracks on the ice and I’m not sure it’s safe, don’t people get killed out here? I walk away from the tower out on the groaning ice—I almost think I can feel it move—to the floater and pull the cutter out of the back. I walk farther out, about thirty meters away from the tower and jack into the cutter. I focus the beam as tight as it will go and aim straight down and in no time I’ve cut a hole straight through the ice to water. One meter before I register a change in density. The ice is about a meter thick. Well, a meter of ice isn’t likely to dump me into Lancaster Sound. But if it stress fractures it would shatter spectacularly and I’d.hate to be there when it happened.
When we get back to the base I’m going to do some reading about ice.
In the evenings I study engineering, and a letter to the Bureau of Education brings back the information that workers under thirty-five years of age who take hardship jobs for one or more years get preferential treatment when applying for school in China and qualify for loans to help with their education, if needed.
To go to school in China. Chinese citizens can take the entrance exams, and ten percent of the seats are open to overseas Chinese and foreigners by competitive exam. If I could get a B.A. Engineering in China I’d be set. I’d be able to get good work anywhere, in New York, maybe even in China. I could probably get a job and stay in it, I’d be assigned good housing, maybe after a couple of years I could live in Manhattan. Talk about luck, like winning the numbers. I begin to request math texts from the library so I can prep for the entrance exam.
Most days I spend at Halsey Station doing construction while everyone else checks recordings and makes observations. Maggie Smallwood tells me everything is going to happen in the spring, when the belukha and the bowhead mate. She says the Sound is just constant activity then. Even now the lights attract plankton and the plankton attract all sorts of fish. Everyone is nice, everyone is friendly, but distant. They’re scientists, they have a mission. I’m a six-month techie, and although no one would say it, working class. Muscle rather than brain.
Still I hang around sometimes with a cup of coffee and listen to them talk about what they are doing. When Janna needs someone to label bottles I’m happy to oblige. When Jim’s atmosphere suit—excuse me, his ARC—seems to have mike problems, I find the fault in the receiver and use one of the lab’s microtools to repair it. Eric can never keep all of the tools he needs at hand, so I hang a toolholder over his lab table, like chefs use to hang pots and pans in a kitchen where they’ll always be in reach. I hang a rack over Karin’s and rig it so she can raise and lower it so her samples will be out of her way when she needs the workspace. Soon they’re asking me to do little things for them and I’m busy all the time.
Then we go back to the base in the dark, and the evening is dark, and we wake up in the morning and it’s dark, and since we spend most days under the ice at Halsey the only sunlight I see is the blue glow filtered through a meter of ice. Every couple of weeks I have to hammer the ice free of the tower and usually replace ladder rungs where it’s torn them away—I never do get my mountain boots—and although I can’t get used to the groan of the ice I look forward to it because I do it at noon, when the sun is above the horizon and the ice is blinding white and I feel surrounded by light. If it’s after ten and someone mentions they left something on the floater I’m the first to volunteer to get it.
“Do you miss the sun?” I ask Maggie Smallwood. Maggie looks Chinese to me, but she doesn’t act Chinese. She acts Canadian.
She thinks a moment, looking at the black windows. “Yeah, some. But after summer it’s nice to have some darkness.”
Summer. In July the sun never sets. “Is it warm in the summer?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says. “There’s grass and flowers and baby caribou. You’ll see it. Wait, you won’t, will you, you’ll be gone in April.”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I have to find out about this school thing in China.”
“Great,” she says abstractedly, then, “look at that seal!”
Outside the window a seal is coasting past, gray and sleek with a neat head like a cat’s, looking in at the lights with its great almond eyes. Maggie turns to me, beaming from her round Eskimo face. “Isn’t he wonderful?”
I’ve never seen a live seal before. “Yeah,” I say, and then without thinking, “do they all look so sad?”
She looks at me oddly but doesn’t answer.
Early in November we stand on the ice at 11:54 and watch the sunrise with the rest of Borden Station. The edge of the sun’s disk flashes above the horizon for less than a minute and then sets. I watch the red sky darken. Tomorrow the sky will redden as if the sun will rise but then darken. This is the evening of a long night. Dawn is in February. The Arctic landscape is beautiful at night.
It just isn’t meant for human beings.
Maggie’s people have lived here for generations. She says I shouldn’t worry about the darkness, but suggests full spectrum light therapy, so once a week I go to the clinic and get thirty minutes of full spectrum light. I feel foolish lying underneath the lights like a sunbather but the doctor explains to me how some people are more sensitive to light changes than others. “Do you experience bouts of depression in January?” she asks.
According to Peter I experience bouts of depression if I miss a subway connection. “Not that I noticed,” I say, “but my friends say I’m moody.” I smile apologetically.
She smiles back and says, “Why did you come here?” It occurs
to me that in less than two months a lot of people have asked me that question.
to me that in less than two months a lot of people have asked me that question.
I study engineering texts under full spectrum lights wearing only my underwear.
I work on construction on the first level and they work in the labs on the third.
So I cope, and people are nice to me, if distant, and it’s only a year. It’s a great experience, back in New York I’ll be able to say, “When I was in the Arctic Circle …” One day Jim says to me, “I’ve got to go out on the ice, want to come? I could use some help.”
I don’t particularly want to go, I don’t want to stay at Halsey all day. It will be an experience. It will make the time go faster. So we load gear into the floater and take off across the ice. We’ll plant some pick-ups either in open water or drive them through the ice and then we’ll come back. It will only take the morning.
Morning. It’s not going to be morning until February. I keep thinking of it as “dark in the morning.” I find myself waiting for it to get light. The doctor prattles on about the need for something to focus on, a goal. It seems that the reason the scientists are less likely to have problems with depression is because they have an obsession and that orders their
Umwelt,
their self-world. We live in the same physical space but our feelings about it make us order it differently. Maggie Smallwood tells me that her ancestors used to be able to draw marvelous maps from memory but that their hunting-grounds were always drawn disproportionately large. That’s because in their
Umwelt,
those were the places where their lives were lived, and everything else was thought of in relationship to them. I think if Maggie had to draw a map, the largest place on it would be the open water of the Sound where her beloved whales live. Her whole life is organized around whales. Her lab is where she organizes her data on whales, so in a way that’s where the whales are. If she goes someplace else, she’s away
from her whales, out of her normal world. She would probably be homesick.
Umwelt,
their self-world. We live in the same physical space but our feelings about it make us order it differently. Maggie Smallwood tells me that her ancestors used to be able to draw marvelous maps from memory but that their hunting-grounds were always drawn disproportionately large. That’s because in their
Umwelt,
those were the places where their lives were lived, and everything else was thought of in relationship to them. I think if Maggie had to draw a map, the largest place on it would be the open water of the Sound where her beloved whales live. Her whole life is organized around whales. Her lab is where she organizes her data on whales, so in a way that’s where the whales are. If she goes someplace else, she’s away
from her whales, out of her normal world. She would probably be homesick.
When I look outside the window, I don’t see whales, I see dark. This place isn’t even in my
Umwelt.
Skimming across the ice with Jim I look out across the empty land. It has been a full moon for six straight days. It never sets, never rises. Sometimes it’s east, sometimes it’s north, sometimes west. It’s hard to believe we are on earth.
Umwelt.
Skimming across the ice with Jim I look out across the empty land. It has been a full moon for six straight days. It never sets, never rises. Sometimes it’s east, sometimes it’s north, sometimes west. It’s hard to believe we are on earth.
We go farther away from Borden Station than I have ever been. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, Jim has done this before, we’ll get back. I could walk back across the ice if I had to. I realize that this morning I don’t care. I’m too tired of it all to care. I am along for the ride.
As we go Jim explains that the ice we are on is called “fast ice” because it is shorefast, meaning it’s attached to the shore. We’ll cross the lead (that’s a strip of open water) and then we’ll be in “pack ice” which is ice that’s floating. Ahead of us the ice changes abruptly from white to black. We come closer, the ice beneath us shading from blue-white under the moon to gray. Behind us a long streak of darker gray marks where the floater has crossed, and then we cross to the black ice. Jim shouts, “The lead!” over the sound of the floater. We’re over open water. Across the open water I see more ice, rough and tumbled, not like the ice we just came over. Floating free. As we cross I see that between us and those mounds is a flat skirt of ice. Big flat gray plates that have ridden up over the edges of other big flat plates so they overlap. “Nillis ice,” Jim explains, “when it does that it’s called ‘finger-rafting.’”
Why?
Jim turns the floater west and we run along the lead for about twenty minutes. He’s watching his location on the board and when it satisfies him he cuts the motors and together we manhandle one of the pick-ups—with their pointed noses and tail-fins they look like old-fashioned missiles—and heave it over the side. It disappears into the water, heading straight down to anchor in the
bottom and monitor the area for animal life. Jim jams the floater back into forward and makes a wide turn that kicks up the black water and we head back the other way, east. With the full moon hanging above us we can see quite clearly, but it’s hard to tell how near or how far things are. I know we came over a kilometer across open water, but the ice shore could be just twenty meters away.
bottom and monitor the area for animal life. Jim jams the floater back into forward and makes a wide turn that kicks up the black water and we head back the other way, east. With the full moon hanging above us we can see quite clearly, but it’s hard to tell how near or how far things are. I know we came over a kilometer across open water, but the ice shore could be just twenty meters away.
Jim cuts north towards the pack ice, but we run for over twenty minutes before we reach it, then we’re on the flat sheets. The floater skims. There’s no snow, this far north is a desert, it rarely snows. We ride over a lip of bluish-white ice and then it’s like riding rough seas as the floater bounces over the terrain. Jim runs fast but steers carefully, the floater could ram a spire of ice. We rise over a lip—
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