Authors: Sarah Andrews
“We’re still in the wind shadow of the buildings and these hills. Why do you think they put this armpit of a station where it is?”
They emerged from the cover of the buildings and headed away down a trail in the volcanic rock that formed the island.
Valena pulled off her fleece hat and stuffed it into a pocket. The gravel of the trail moved oddly under her feet, and she looked down to study it. It was formed of bashed-up scoria, a volcanic rock filled with little air bubbles because it had flowed out of the ground frothing with rapidly expanding gasses. It was odd to think that in this world of ice, the island had been born of fire. She had been to Hawaii, where volcanic rock weathered quickly under invasive vegetation and other organisms, but this scoria was so cold and perennially bound in ice and snow that nothing could grow on it or live in it, nothing to break it down into soil. She glanced around, confirming to her still disbelieving eyes that there was not a single nonhuman organism anywhere in sight: no trees, no grass, no moss, no lichens, not even a bird in the air. The great blue-white landscape of ice and distant mountains was punctuated only by the line of aircraft parked on the ice, the few
ski-mounted small structures that attended them, and this odd gathering of humans.
They kept moving. Cupcake led the way down the long, shallow slope toward a point of land that jutted from the end of the peninsula on which McMurdo Station had been built. Valena was having trouble walking in the big, soft boots. “Who are we going to see?” she asked, trying to get Cupcake to talk more so that she would have to slow down. She threw open her parka, which was so warm that she had not, in the twenty-four hours she had been using it, ever actually zipped it up; she had used it instead as a wrap.
“You are about to have the honor of meeting the master blaster.”
“Master … what?”
“Blaster. Didn’t you—oh, right, you just got here, so you don’t know. They’re blasting the road that leads towards Castle Rock, trying to straighten it, for some goddamned reason. He’ll be out at the hut today. He goes out there every time they open it up and let us wackos in. I think he likes to photograph ghosts or something. Anyways, you can corner him there and ask your questions.”
“And I want to ask him questions because…?”
“He was out in your dude’s field camp last year.”
“I see.”
“Gotta go right to the source around here. Otherwise, all you hear is rumors. That, and suppositions. It’s like this place is a halfway house for paranoiacs.”
Valena asked, “What’s this hut he’s photographing?”
“Discovery Hut. Actually, it was a warehouse. I guess they lived aboard the ship, which of course got stuck in the ice. Those boys were good at getting things stuck. You’re lucky; they don’t open it to visitation very often.”
“They
lived aboard the ship? Who built it? When?”
“Scott, 1902. His first expedition. Got his butt to eighty-two south, had to turn back. Not the 1911 expedition where he froze to death.”
Sir Robert Falcon Scott!
Valena drew in her breath with surprise. Scott’s first attempt to reach the South Pole was
mounted just two years into the twentieth century. He had arrived aboard a ship named
Discovery. And this is the hut named for that expedition! She thought. I am walking on ground on which he walked!
As she continued down the trail, her heart now racing with excitement, they came out from the lee of the hills that surrounded McMurdo and were caught by an exhalation of frozen air off the ice sheet. Valena was instantly cold, so cold that her muscles began to contract. She hurriedly put her hat back on, pulled up the hood, and tried to get the slide of her big red parka’s zipper engaged. As she fumbled with chilling fingers, the wind found its way down her neck. The zipper was jammed. She tried it again and again, reseating it, pulling at it, cursing it.
Twenty strides down the trail, Cupcake turned around to see why Valena had dropped behind her. “Oh, hell, hasn’t anyone given you the short course on how to work the zipper on your big red yet?” She strode back toward Valena and grabbed the two sides of the track, yanked the one on Valena’s left down sharply, slapped the slide from the other side onto it, and whipped it up to her chin, all in the space of three seconds. “You gotta let it know who’s boss,” she said. She opened it again. Showed Valena how to hold the pieces properly, tugging the left side down sharply and holding it taut while she worked the right. “Now you try it. Yeah, that’s it. You’d think they’d make it idiot proof, considering that your life depends on it, but there it is.” As she turned around to resume her march, she said, “It’s like just about everything else down here: it’s essential, you need a short course to know how to do it, and that course doesn’t exist.”
“I’ve got survival training tomorrow.”
“Happy Camp. Have a party. They’ll put a five-gallon plastic bucket on your head to simulate a whiteout, like that’s going to really learn you.” She shook her head. “It’s not their fault. There’s just entirely too much to absorb. I’ve been down here seven seasons, and some days I feel like I’m only just getting the hang of it.”
Five minutes’ additional brisk hike brought them to the
end of the point. There, the ground dropped off precipitously on three sides, plunging fifty feet to the frozen sea below. The ice met the land in a jumble of heaved-up slabs where the winds and tides had worked it, like puckered waves stilled by a snapshot in the act of slapping the shore.
Someone had erected a cross at the summit of a small rise at the very end of the point, and just below it, Valena could see a gently sloping roof made of wood and built in the shape of a shallow pyramid. It was supported by posts. Valena assumed that this must be a protective canopy erected to preserve the original structure, which must exist as ruins underneath; after all, she reckoned, more than one hundred years of fierce Antarctic weather had thrashed it since Scott’s men had built it.
One hundred years
, thought Valena.
Not much more than the average human lifetime.
In all the lifetimes of the human species, great civilizations had arisen and fallen and been built again on all six other continents, but here in Antarctica, the touch of humanity was this new, a tiny foothold on an unimaginably large expanse of ice. This had been the last continent to be located, the hardest to reach, and by far the most difficult on which to maintain even this fragile encampment. Less than two hundred years ago, there was no southern continent on world maps. In the 1770s, Cook sailed around a southern sea choked with ice but could only hypothesize that land lay beyond it. So obscuring was its veil of ice that land wasn’t sighted until 1820, tantalizing yet unapproachable through a ship captain’s spyglass.
Valena moved closer to the cliff to look off toward the Transantarctic Mountains, drawn simultaneously by emptiness and fulfillment and the fear that she would not make it to the continent itself but instead be sent home in an agony of frustration.
“Don’t wander too close to the edge,” said Cupcake. “That cross there? It’s for this guy Vince somebody, who was the first man to die in McMurdo Sound. He fell off this cliff in the middle of a blizzard. They never found his body.”
“I shall proceed with respect, then.”
Cupcake pointed at the hut. “When you’re done ogling the scenery, join me in there.”
The sun was high in the northern sky, throwing shadows to the south, the reverse of what she had grown to consider normal back home in North America. She shook her head. Her world was turned upside down and inside out or, more accurately, outside in. As a particularly strong gust of frozen wind bowled in off the ice, Valena turned and followed Cupcake to the low, square structure.
Two women stood underneath the overhanging roof by a door that led into the hut. “Please brush all the snow off your boots,” one instructed, as she welcomed them in out of the wind.
Valena scraped her enormous blue boots. “Where does the original hut begin?” she inquired.
“This
is
the hut.”
“But the wood looks almost new!”
“Things don’t rot out here.”
The windows were small, sparse, and recessed under the veranda, so the interior was dim, its darkness exaggerated by a thick accumulation of soot on the walls and ceiling. Two pairs of antique outer pants hung on a clothesline. Heaps of strange substances were stacked near one wall.
Catching her inquiring gaze, a man who was standing there wrestling the legs of a camera tripod said, “Hundred-year-old seal blubber. Want to try some? It’s good with garlic.”
Valena gave him a smile. He was a moderate-sized man of husky build and was endowed with pendulous mustaches that bristled with gray. He wore a blue watch cap, and instead of the blaze-red Valena wore, the shell of his parka was made of light brown canvas. A pair of faux tortoiseshell half-glasses gave him an oddly professorial air, and he gazed through them now at the leg-extension catches on his unruly tripod. With a final tweak, the last of the legs slid down into place. He jiggled it around, getting it into position, and then, apparently satisfied, he opened the top of his parka and produced an old Nikon F2 camera, which he clipped onto the top of the tripod.
Cupcake appeared at his elbow. “Oh, good, you’ve found each other. Ted, this is Valena. She’s a student of Emmett Vanderzee’s.”
Ted closed his eyes for several moments. When he opened them again, he wasn’t smiling anymore.
Valena waited.
Cupcake said, “Valena just arrived yesterday afternoon, and it was news to her that her professor wasn’t going to be here to greet her.”
Ted closed his eyes again and sighed heavily. “That’s very bad luck for the young lady, but what exactly do you expect me to do about it?”
“I want you to talk to her. Tell her what you know.”
Pain suffused Ted’s voice as he said, “I know very little.”
Cupcake put a hand tenderly on Ted’s shoulder. “But you were there, so you know stuff.”
“I was in the camp, but I wasn’t there when the guy died.”
“Then tell her that much.”
Ted finally reopened his eyes and looked deep into Valena’s.
“Anything you can tell me would help me understand,” Valena said. “Anything at all.”
Ted looked away. After a moment, with great consternation, he unclipped his camera and began folding up his tripod.
“I’m sorry,” Valena told him. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your work. Would you like me to meet you later on, maybe? When you’re done?”
“No, young lady, I am now done for the day, trust me on that. But we’re not going to talk about this here.”
Cupcake said, “When someone dies out here, it really gets to people, especially if they knew the person, even if he
was
a raging jackass.” Focusing her sharp eyes on Ted, she added, “Especially if you think you could have changed things had you stayed in camp. It wasn’t your fault, Ted.”
“Then it was nobody’s fault. That’s what’s so ridiculous about yanking Emmett off the ice. He didn’t kill that man any more than I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
“In a previous life, Ted. That’s why you’re so good at contacting your feminine side.”
“Stuff it up your tailpipe, Cupcake.”
Ted dropped his camera into a ziplock bag, then opened his parka halfway and tucked the bag inside the top of his bib overalls, up against a layer of navy blue fleece, and pulled his zipper back up to his chin. With a softly paternal tone, he advised Valena, “If you take your camera indoors when it’s cold, the condensation will screw it up. And the battery has to stay warm to work. It will die at these temperatures so fast you wouldn’t believe it, but if you warm it up again, it comes back.”
“When are you going to get a digital camera?” Cupcake chided.
“Sweet thing, I am a devout Luddite. I will still be shooting film when you’re gumming your soup in some home for the ancient and insane.” He glanced over his shoulder at Valena. “Kind of silly shooting print film, considering that I don’t see the results of my work until I go back north, but it’s what fires my rocket.”
Outside in the glare and reflection of twenty-four-hour sunlight and wraparound ice, Ted led the way up the short hill to Vince’s Cross. There, he set down his gear and looked out across the frozen sea toward the continent. “You know your landmarks yet, Valena?” he inquired.
“Not really.”
“That bit of meringue is the Royal Society Range, just one small section of the Transantarctic Mountains. Scott named it in honor of the sponsors of his 1902 expedition. You’ll find lots of stuff like that around here, things named for people who never set foot on the ice. The Transantarctics run for three thousand kilometers, and here and there, glaciers flowing from the Polar Plateau flow down valleys onto the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Ross Ice Shelf. To get to the Pole, you have to climb up one glacier or another and then continue on across the Polar Plateau. He had to drag his supplies up over the mountains somewhere, but where? You want to go inland as far as possible across the ice shelf before you start to climb, because the higher you get, the colder it gets, and the pole is 9,200 feet above sea level.”
He pointed southward, to the left of the range, toward a group of lower summits that stood somewhat closer. “He headed out past those islands. That’s White Island to the east, then Minna Bluff—keep an eye on Minna; if it disappears, a storm’s coming and you have about two hours to take cover—then Black Island, Mount Discovery, and the Brown Peninsula. Black Island is the closest, at about twenty-five miles hence.
“They came in by sea, not like us lazybones who fly down; they were at sea in the wildest weather for weeks. They sailed in during the height of summer when the ice was broken out, all the way to this point, and dropped anchor, spent the winter, and started out south the following spring. That was the way of it. They couldn’t get close enough to make the pole in one season, because the ice freezes out hundreds of miles to sea, and it doesn’t break out until December or January, and some years not at all. So they had to wait for their access, then unload their supplies and begin to set up depots, then hunker down and wait out the long winter night. When the sun rose again, they went out around White Island and continued south across the Ross Ice Shelf. The ice is riddled with crevasses where it flows around those islands, so that must have been a joy. That’s my job, you see. I blow up things that are in peoples’ way around here.”