Up to This Pointe (4 page)

“What?”

“The
rookery.
Don't have a hissy fit—can you just call, please?”

He sits there, seething, pissed at me. I have so much secret Antarctica Code to learn.

“Rookery, my ass.” He mumbles something into the phone and pushes his knit cap off his nearly bald head.

“Excuse me,” Charlotte says. “What was that?” Ben covers the receiver with his hand, overenunciates in a hoarse whisper.

“I said It. Is. Bullshit. This is my third winter. I haven't been to Royds once, and you're taking
her
? Pays to be royalty, I guess.”

Royalty? Huh.

Charlotte heaves a huge sigh. “You know what, Ben? It also pays to not be a douche bag.” She takes the receiver from his hand and hangs it up with a dramatic slam, way more satisfying than tapping the face of an iPhone. “I'll go myself.” Then to me, “Ready, Your Highness?”

She leans her shoulder against the heavy door, and an icy blast of wind pours pain right back into my head. I will never get used to this.

She shouts, smiling into the cold, “You okay?”

I nod.

Charlotte is helping with this training, ten of us learning basic survival skills, should we become separated or lost on The Ice. Information I'm pretty certain I will never use, because I swear to God, I am never leaving the building again until September.

The sun is high and cold, casting short blue shadows on The Ice and mud between the corrugated metal of McMurdo's buildings. The group is laughing, loud volleys of talk echoing in the incredibly clean air. I'm a little light-headed, partly from exhaustion but maybe also from each absolutely fresh, cold breath I draw. Even with tractors and trucks nearby and all these buildings, this air is so remarkably pure it hurts.

A guy instructor joins Charlotte, and the rest of us are schooled about not falling to our deaths in deep ice crevasses, paying attention to black flags and orange cones, and always getting a radio if we're leaving the station. And then they blindfold us. We must learn to find home as if in an ice storm with no rope. Desert ice storms aren't about snow falling from the sky; they are about insane winds whipping across the empty, endless white, pulling up ice and sending it, burning, into a person's eyes. So with bandannas tied on our faces, one by one we flail our way to the small supply shed. Everyone makes it—except me. I am lost. Oh, the irony.

I can't go with Charlotte until I succeed, though, and so I try a second and third time and at last I stumble into the corner of the shed, and they ring a brass bell, celebrating that I did not wander aimlessly to my frozen death. Charlotte is thrilled.

“Class dismissed!” she calls through her ski mask and hood. “Equipment back in storage, and, Harper, let's go!”

I follow her back to the dining hall, where we grab carrot and cheese sticks and Charlotte eats a dinner roll. We drink black tea and jump around a little, warming our hands. She retrieves a backpack from her office, and, ignoring Ben's glare, we march back out into the cold.

At the fire station, Charlotte collects a radio transmitter from a guy in charge, she signs me out, and we hike a few yards to an open shed housing a row of snowmobiles. “Hang on tight, and we'll be there in no time,” she promises. “Ready?”

We speed along the ice and snow away from McMurdo, around black crevasse flags, toward the sun. I turn my head against the back of her red parka and see, for the first time, the full height of Observation Hill, a long-dead volcano that is black and tall in the pale sky behind the station buildings. We are flying straight into the white, the ocean beside us our only landmark. I close my eyes. My heart races. Simone would be so furious if she could see this happening.

You'll break both legs! You'll break your back! You'll never dance again!

I open my eyes.

“You okay?” I barely hear Charlotte's voice sail past me.

“Yes!” I yell.

“Want to piss Ben off?”

I nod vigorously against her shoulder.

She steers the snowmobile inland around a stony rise in the ice to the front of a wooden building.

Shackleton's Hut. I know this because he'd wanted to use Scott's Hut at McMurdo Sound for an expedition, but Scott wouldn't let him. So Shackleton built his own here. Pissing match. In the snow.
Dudes.

It's got a peaked roof and a stovepipe, a couple of windows. Piled behind the hut are big crates of random stuff covered with waxed canvas. Charlotte slows to a stop. We dismount and I stand in numb silence for a moment while the snowmobile engine sound is swallowed by the ocean's roar and freezing-cold stillness. My legs are cramping.

“This is my very favorite time of year.” Charlotte stretches her arms across her chest. “Tourists are gone. Sun's still up. You did so great. Are you freezing?”

“Little bit.”

“Jump around. Keep your blood moving. You'll love this.”

The door is closed but unlocked. Inside it is 1908.

Shelves of tinned meats. Stiff clothes hanging from rafters, beds and blankets, antique research equipment on a wooden table beneath a snow-grimy window. We step into the center of this time capsule, virtually unchanged since the last of Shackleton's crew took refuge here, restocking their supplies to live long enough to make it off The Ice.

“Ben's an Amundsen,” Charlotte says.

“He
is
?”

“Oh, sorry, no—not like you—he's a Peter Pan living for himself with no responsibilities who spends his entire off-season life traveling. I meant that everyone on The Ice is either an Amundsen, a Scott, or a Shackleton. They align themselves—Amundsens are typically the jocks, nonscientists like Ben who act like idiots and jump naked into The Ice to prove…whatever frozen balls proves. They all whine about how unfair it is that Amundsen
won
; he got to the pole first, but Scott gets all the attention because he's the martyr. And Shackleton didn't even get to the pole and yet he's the hero.
Why do they get all the reward even though they lost?
Like exploring Antarctica is a game. How is freezing to death a reward? It's so stupid.”

Ballet is perfection of an art. It is not a competition.

Except when it is.

“All the scientists are Scotts, of course,” she says. “So people are jealous you're an actual Scott. Ben's jealous you're here today because two summers and his third winter and he's never been to any of the huts, none of the graves—not the pole. Which is where everyone wants to go. Right?”

I shrug.

“Well, Ben wants to. And here, too. Scott's Hut is right behind the fire station—it's like three hundred yards, and he won't step into it. Idiot.”

“Why hasn't he been anywhere?”

“Nobody wants to take him! Getting to the pole is something every scientist, every explorer on the planet wants to do, let alone some random jerk who just wants to ‘win.' But unless you've got an assignment or a job at the South Pole Station, or you're support staff and there's a last-minute available spot and you've got a scientist willing to take you with—I mean,
I
could take him.”

“No chance?”

“None in hell. The day I met that guy three winters ago, within the hour I arrived, he told me how great it was that affirmative action had reached The Ice.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Yeah. The Ice is
white.
”

Ballet is, too. Most tights and leotards are made for white skin; people have to dye them to match darker skin tones. And those same nonwhite dancers are constantly rejected on the basis of “wrong body type.”

I am ashamed by proxy.

“What did—what do you say to shit like that?”

“Nothing. He said it right after I'd turned down his drunken offer to escort me to his room.”

“Classy.”

“He'll never get to the pole. His own fault.”

“Have you been?”

She smiles. “Very best day of my life. True South.” She steps to a window, gazing love-struck toward the pole for a long while, then back to the hut. “Look at these blankets. Folded! I don't think they've been touched. Isn't it beautiful?”

Maybe it's the jet lag or the cold, but in this moment, it really is. Beautiful. Sacred? Like being in a church. Like in the ballet studio before class…alone, waiting. The floors are wood—rough—but it's such a big open space, except for Shackleton's small bedroom. High ceilings. Push these beds and tables against the walls and it would be perfect for a balls-out series of grand jetés across the floor.

I shut my eyes.

“Scott was kind of mean to Shackleton,” Charlotte says quietly, studying a pair of laced leather boots. “They were on The Ice together once, Shack got sick, Scott kicked him off the crew, sent him home. He was jealous the men trusted Shack more. Natural leader…Why am I telling you? You know all this.”

Not all of it. The light through the windows bathes the hut, and its perfectly preserved hundred-year-old contents glow.

There are unlit lamps that are fed, Charlotte says, by a carbide acetylene generator above the door. I have no idea what that means. Except that Shackleton was clearly very smart.

“You're a
reluctant
Scott? Right?” I say.

She tips her head to the beams in the peaked ceiling. No dust. No cobwebs. “Yeah,” she says. “In my heart of hearts…I like to think I've got some Shackleton in me. I think everyone wishes that. ‘For scientific research, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get on your knees and pray for Shackleton.' ”

She's paraphrasing Sir Raymond Priestly, a geologist who narrowly escaped dying with my Scott.

I love the light in this room; it is quiet, electric,
waiting
alive-ness.

“All right!” Charlotte says, breaking the spell. “Penguins.”

We step out into the ice air, and the wind is carrying sounds, like floating to the surface of water, waves against the ice and rocks. Wind. Long, low voices and higher, shorter calls. Charlotte grabs her pack, and we walk toward the Ross Sea.

Thousands of smooth little black-and-white penguins. And their
eyes
—

“
Blue
eyes?” I whisper.

“Black,” Charlotte says quietly. “The white ring just makes them look blue.”

They're maybe two feet tall and smaller, milling around, climbing rocks, and calling out to one another. Tuxedoed little kids playing in the snow.

“Adélies!” Charlotte sighs from inside her fur-lined hood.

I've never had any kind of affinity for penguins, despite Mom's love of all things Antarctica. The walls of our San Francisco house are full of paintings and photographs of whales and seals and penguins. But now here, so close, there is a rising lump in my chest.

“This is the end of breeding season,” Charlotte whispers. “And tourist season, thank God, so I can get in there without a bunch of random people standing around, freaking them out. Those piles of little rocks…” She points to clusters of smooth gray stones among the black crags. “Nests. Two eggs at a time, parents take turns feeding in the water. The babies have nearly all finished their molts, but there may still be a few….”

Oh my God. There is a cluster of parents and babies, chicks in various stages of maturity, not twenty yards from us. Miniature white-chested, red-beaked babies hang with the grown-ups, and there is a tiny, fuzzy gray-flocked angel; its head is smooth, his body a pouf with legs. It waddle-runs to a parent, who bends its head to the baby's, and they have a conversation about something.

There's a makeshift wire wall contraption set up in the rocks, just a two-foot section with a gap in the middle. The penguins investigate it, walk through the space, and then ignore it.

“That's a scale,” Charlotte murmurs as she unloads her pack. “It sends aggregate stats for the whole group back to the station. They don't know we're going to put them all on Atkins. Little fatties.” She's got ziplock bags of test tubes, lidded petri dishes, tweezers, some superlong Q-tip things. She pulls off her mittens, snaps on a pair of latex gloves, unfolds a small blue tarp, and arranges it all in rows. “We've tagged a bunch of them. I need some samples of poop and maybe a feather or two if I can get them before my hands freeze. They're very curious. Just stay still and quiet and wait; they may decide to investigate you.”

I forget to be cold, to be anything
but
still and quiet. You know those coffee table books of photography, and there are images of places on Earth and animals, and they don't seem real, like it's all Photoshopped marvelous? This is real. These breathing, moving…I am never this touchy-feely, but…
souls
? They
live
here; this is their
home,
these black rocks and white ice, this dark, undulating sea beneath the upturned bowl of intense blue sky.

I can barely breathe. My heart hurts more than my head.

Charlotte walks carefully toward, then into, the group. She turns and beckons me forward, but I can't move. Her red parka and giant snow boots move carefully among the flightless birds. They regroup and follow her, ignore her and talk to her. They are not afraid.

She kneels in the midst of them all, holds one on her knees for a moment, looks at its tag, swabs its foot and its beak, and lets it scuttle away to shake its feathers and head, annoyed, but still it likes her being here—you can tell. Charlotte collects some poo, watches the babies run around and slip on the icy rocks. She scoops a bit of sand into a bag. Makes notes on a folded paper.

And then one of them leaves the group. He…she…who knows? He is walking toward me. I don't blink. I don't breathe.

He is an adult. His body is sleek and shines in reflected-snow light. The ring of white feathers around his seeming ice-blue eyes makes them brighter in his perfect black face. He stretches his neck to the sky, unfolds his wings, and levels his gaze at me. His family calls to him, someone in the group does, and he turns and runs to them. He stops and looks over his shoulder at me, then rushes back into the rookery's warm embrace.