Terra Incognita (43 page)

The storm seemed to have blanched our interior landscapes too. We sat outside in the evening calm. Often we saw nacreous clouds
¹
then, drifting high up in the infinite reaches of the sky – about ten miles up, actually, far higher than the fluffy white clouds at home that send down rain. There might be twenty-five of them, in twenty-five variations of opalescent lemons, rich reds and reedy greens. They were brightest just after sunset, when the glare of the sun had disappeared at ground level but its light still illuminated high clouds. The nacreous ones were small and oval, and they floated along in a line like fat iridescent pearls on an invisible thread. As Gertrude Stein said, ‘Paradise – if you can stand it.'

The dignity of the landscape infused our minds like a symphony; I heard another music in those days.

We got to know one another pretty well. Lucia was a perfect companion. In the early days she often looked worried, especially if she was concentrating on the exigencies of sea ice travel or the problem of how to prevent her paints and fingers from freezing. But if something really funny happened she would throw back her head and laugh loudly. Her whole face was transformed when she did this. It was like watching the sun break through the clouds after a storm. I liked her all the time, but I liked her most then, and sometimes I contrived a reason to tell her a funny story, to make her throw back her head and laugh. She was good-natured, good-humoured and equable, and when she was absorbed in a task she twittered quietly to herself like a small bird. I wasn't as good at living alongside another human being as she was. Cherry wrote that in Scott's hut you had to choose whom you sat by at dinner according to whether you wanted to talk, listen, or just sit quietly. We had no such choice. Lucia gave a lot, unwittingly, during those weeks. I always felt that I couldn't give as much as she did.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Beyond this flood a frozen continent

Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual storms

Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land

Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems

Of ancient pile, all else deep snow and ice.

John Milton, from
Paradise Lost

A
HAGGLUNDS
tracked vehicle containing six winterers pulled up at Wooville. They were out checking the ice to the north. That morning, a rainbow had arched over hundreds of miles of the Transantarctics.

‘Jump in!' said the driver.

The unheated back half of the Hägglunds was coupled to the front like a railway carriage, and I lay in it on top of a mound of survival gear and a bundle of flags. It was thirty-five degrees below, and ice clung to the nuts, the pipes and the leaking jerry cans of fuel. As the small windows were frosted up I snuggled underneath a sleeping bag, swaddled like a mummy. When we lurched to a stop, the radio by which I communicated with the cab, and which was stowed down my shirt to keep the batteries alive, jabbed its antenna up my nose.

The back door swung open to reveal a Beard. He began rummaging around in the debris among which I was entombed.

‘We've come to a crack,' he said. ‘We have to drill the ice inside it, to see how far down it goes.' With that, he drew out a drill.

I wriggled out from underneath the sleeping bag and slid down from the back of the vehicle. The snow squeaked like styrofoam.

The Beard and another man were hunched over the drill. Neither of them was standing on the tread of a vehicle, as we did when we drilled. The crack was about four inches wide, and the men got the drill three feet down into the ice inside it in about two minutes. Lucia and I exchanged guilty glances.

Having established that the crack was safe, the men extracted the drill and strode over to another crack they had spotted, whereupon they both began sliding the pick of their axes over the top to locate the safe edges. Lucia and I had forgotten that we were supposed to do this.

‘Yikes!' she mouthed at me.

A third Beard appeared from the front of the Hägglunds, clutching a clipboard.

‘Are you mapping?' I asked.

‘Yep. The guys at the Berg Field Center gave us this rough map of what the sea ice is looking like this year – in so far as anyone has seen much of it, which they haven't really, this early in the season. We're marking any new cracks.'

‘Hey, look at this!' said Lucia, peering over the Beard's shoulder. ‘Wooville's made it on to the map!' I went to look at the man's clipboard. Someone had inscribed
Wooville
on the map next to a tiny black triangle representing our hut, and it was followed, in parentheses, by our radio call sign, which was the Artheads.
¹

∗

Ice was everywhere in those days, like sand in the desert, though it was never uncomfortable. I would not have wished to be elsewhere. Shackleton wrote a poem called ‘Two Ways', and I tried to remember it so I could stick it on the wall of the Clinic.

Of course, we never washed while we were in camp. We did have a fair supply of clothes, however. I was reading Nansen's
Farthest North
at the time.

‘Listen to this,' I said to Lucia, who was lying on the table and sticking needles into her arms. ‘In Franz Josef Land, Nansen and Johansen turned their shirts inside out once a month instead of washing them. We could try that.'

‘You always want to do what the old guys did,' she said, ‘despite the fact that they had such a miserable time. We can go back to McMurdo and use the washing machines.'

‘What about the “dry washing” system then?' I persisted. ‘Loads of the polar explorers adopted that.'

‘What does it involve?' Lucia asked patiently, wiggling a needle.

‘It's quite simple,' I said. ‘You put away dirty clothes until the ones you're wearing are even dirtier, then the old ones seem clean, so you can change them round.'

She started laughing, so I decided to keep this gripping subject to myself. I was especially keen on other people's ingenuity. Admiral Byrd used to wash a different third of his body each night, and I had heard an engineer on station explaining how to make a pair of underpants last a month. (Switch them back to front for a week, then turn them inside out and do a week each way round.)

Outside, Wooville had created its own landscape of windscoops and drifts, and inside it looked increasingly like home, scattered with the ratty pages of a typescript, balls of tissues tinted with blue watercolours, and wodges of photocopied diaries. We established inter-hut communications on our VHFs.

‘Dinner is about to be served,' Lucia's voice would crackle over the radio. ‘All residents of Wooville proceed to the Dining Wing.' After three weeks I solved the intractable camp problem of how to read in bed by positioning the Coleman lantern on our only stool next to the bunks, and each night ended with its sigh as the mantles faded into the gloom.

I had been in many Antarctic camps, but nothing compared with having my own. I developed a more intimate relationship with the continent, living with it at Wooville. Already I looked on Erebus as a friend. We had claimed Antarctica back from the colonisation of science. Wooville was the only non-science camp on the continent, and we had as much right to be there as the beakers.

I have nothing against either science or scientists, but they don't own Antarctica. You might think they do – the entire human occupation of Antarctica is predicated on the theory of science as an unending process of amelioration. Whatever is said about knowledge for its own sake, the only justification for science in any sphere is that it is a tool of improvement – and, as such, it functions as a highly effective shield for concealing the truth about Antarctica. Collective consciousness must believe in the deification of science on the ice, otherwise it would have to admit that the reason for each nation's presence in Antarctica is political, not scientific. Like the emperor's new clothes, everyone knows but nobody says.

∗

Every week or so we cleared the snowdrifts from the inside of the Woomobile, fired up the generator to warm the engine and headed back to McMurdo, where we would see Ron's little face spying on us from his tiny window at the top of the Mechanical Equipment Center. He was very paternal about his Sprytes. In town we washed ourselves and our clothes, recharged all the batteries, raided Food, took slices of wheat bread from the galley, unpacked and repacked, and filled up our fuel tank and our water containers. We stayed one night, occasionally stretching it to two. I picked up electronic mail messages from the people I had left behind at Rothera. They told me stories about their snowmobiles breaking down in the darkness of the far reaches of Adelaide Island. Rothera was 2,000 miles away, but it seemed close.

We socialised during these stopovers. Sometimes I had dinner with the Kiwis at Scott Base, where I felt more at home than ever. Their winter had apparently passed without a hitch. ‘Only the North Islanders got sick,' someone said.

I had expected Lucia and me to cling together at McMurdo, having grown accustomed to each other's company, but in fact we barely saw one another. In addition, and as if by unspoken agreement, when we set out again for camp neither of us asked what the other had done on station. It was as if an unconscious release valve were in operation.

On one particular occasion we stayed an extra night in McMurdo for the annual Flag Tying Party in the Heavy Shop. The whole population mustered at this event to drink beer, eat pizza and tie flags on to bamboo poles in preparation for the forthcoming science season. The Heavy Shop was a cavernous building dotted with huge pieces of mechanical equipment in various states of repair, and at the party dancing broke out among the pools of engine oil.

The largest machine in the Shop was a D-8 low ground pressure tractor with fifty-four-inch treads. It was inscribed with the word ‘Colleen' carefully painted in a Gothic script, and a man in blue overalls was leaning against it. When he saw me looking, he shouted over the strains of Joe Cocker,

‘Want to see my Antarctic girl?'

We climbed up over the tracks to pat the padded ceiling in the cab and admire the monster blade.

There were fewer than six other stretch D-8s in the world, and three lived at Willy Field, an outpost of McMurdo about a mile from the station. The next day an Antarctic veteran called Gerald, Colleen's swain, drove me out to meet them.

The enormous canary yellow machines, made by Caterpillar in the fifties, had seen forty years of Antarctic service and were engraved on the hearts of all who had worked upon them. They had walked themselves to the Pole, and they had flown there dismantled (this took four flights). One of them, at Byrd Surface Camp on the West Antarctic ice sheet, was back in use after spending seventeen years buried under the snow. The catwalk platforms, once fixed above the tread, had regrettably been removed by some philistine of the past. Veterans could remember seeing operators sunbathing on the platforms while the machine was moving along.

When we arrived at Willy Field, Gerald leapt out of our truck and up on to the tread of a D-8 in one movement.

‘A gasoline engine gets the diesel engine started,' he shouted as he fired it up. ‘Which is why it's suitable for these temperatures.' He jumped down, crunching the snow. ‘This is Becky, by the way.'

We contemplated the steaming beast.

‘They could almost be living creatures,' I said.

Gerald stared at me blankly. Then he blurted out, ‘But they are living creatures.'

Fetching a chair from a nearby hut, he positioned it in the cab, next to the driver's seat. We climbed in, I sat on the chair and Gerald began dozing a pile of snow the size of a minor English county.

‘I could tell which of these I was driving with a blindfold on,' Gerald shouted as we dozed along, rocking gently to the rhythm of the enormous tracks. Suddenly he yelled, ‘You try,' and whipped back the brakes until they screeched like a freight train. We shifted places, and I drove Becky down the skiway. On the way back, in the limpid light of Windless Byte, we stopped.

‘You see, Sara,' said Gerald, taking off his glasses, ‘I can't paint, or write, or hold a rhythm. I express myself by making perfect flat surfaces on ice.' He came from a German Baptist background and an Amish community, but he had left it and moved to Wyoming with his wife.

‘What was leaving like?' I asked. Having spent some time in an Amish community myself, I knew how they felt about members leaving the fold. I admired the Amish very much – that was why I had gone to Lancaster County to live with them – but the way they shunned men and women who could not be as they were was one aspect of their faith that I found hard to swallow.
¹

Gerald thought about this for a while. Then he said, ‘It was like going to Antarctica.'

∗

A helicopter put down at Wooville at nine o'clock one morning to take Lucia and me over to Lake Hoare in the Taylor Valley. We had been invited by the residents of one of the only other field camps set up this early in the season.
²
We had often chatted to them on the VHF, comparing temperatures and being neighbourly.

The Sound was veined with cracks, and the band of open water I had seen the previous week was gone, submerged by a pressure ridge which meandered over the landscape like the Great Wall of China.

Three beakers and a mechanic were in residence at Lake Hoare. Condom Cristina was living there too but she had temporarily returned to McMurdo. Every helicopter brought condom advertisements for her from her colleagues at Bonney; the story had become enshrined in the legends of the valley. Nobody had put their tents up yet – it was too cold. I slept on the floor of a small lab. It was odd to be in a camp doing science. It seemed unnatural.