Terra Incognita (41 page)

∗

I was installed once more in the same office in the Crary. I could see the ghostly outline of words I had written on the board the previous summer. My identity this time was manifest in the label W-006; I had been demoted from W-002. The lab was inhabited only by three groups of atmospheric scientists busily making the most of the period of ozone depletion, and some hardy individuals heading for the Dry Valleys. These included John Priscu and his S-025 entourage, en route to their home on Lake Bonney, and the contents of their large lab exploded into the otherwise pristine corridors. Cristina of the flying condoms was back, and so was Ed, the physicist and mountaineer with whom I had hiked to Lake Bonney the previous summer.

‘Another pilgrimage!' he shouted down the corridor when he saw me. We sat up late in the lab, once the radioactivity work station, and Ed sipped bourbon from a 250-millilitre glass beaker while two of the graduate students sang karaoke into a Geiger counter.

I continued talking to the Polies by email. Their season hadn't ended yet – winter at the Pole lasted eight and a half months, and planes couldn't go in until the end of October. I received enthusiastic reports about the Three Hundred Club. Admission to this exclusive outfit involved enjoying a sauna at 210 degrees Fahrenheit and then running out of the dome into a temperature of minus 101 wearing only a pair of tennis shoes. Such excitements notwithstanding, the Polies were ready to leave. One of them was still banging on about Airdrop. His job had been to drive a snocat out to the drop zone after the pilot radioed an all-clear. ‘I tell you,' he wrote, ‘some of those packages I brought in were labelled Do Not Freeze. Ninety-five below, you're searching in the dark and they expect the fucking gear to stay unfrozen.'

One day, another WOO appeared. She was an artist; a water-colourist, mainly. Her name was Lucia deLeiris, and she came from Rhode Island. She was very beautiful, with shoulder-length mahogany hair, fine bones and a diffident manner. She had been south before, nine years previously, to paint wildlife on the peninsula. A plan had been conceived to despatch us both out on to the sea ice in our own hut (it would be towed to a site of our choosing) where we could build up a head of creative steam away from the confines of Mactown. We both thought this was a splendid idea.

As we were going to camp on the sea ice, we were given our own tracked vehicle, a Spryte, and inducted into the mysteries of driving it by Marvellous Marvin from the Mechanical Equipment Center. Our tomato-red Spryte, with which we immediately bonded, was numbered 666 and bore the logo A
NTISPRYTE
. Lucia and I thought this was a hoot. Later, we were not so amused.

We took a day-long sea ice course taught by a lively character called Buck with a handlebar moustache who, when things got pretty seedy and very cold, had the habit of assuming the voice of an ancient redneck and proclaiming with brio, ‘Yep. Just doesn't get any better than this.' He taught us how to distinguish a spreading crack from a straight-edged crack, and introduced us to an ice drill, with which we were to become very familiar.

A day was spent scouting for a position for our huts (we were to be given two, in case one burnt down) in a temperature of minus forty Celsius. At the fuel pits the Antispryte froze in running mode, so we couldn't turn it off. It was so cold that fata morgana
¹
shimmered around the distant sea ice. These mirages created a landscape of their own – a berg floated along in the sky, a row of peaks perched on top of another like skittles and a dark mushroom cloud rose gracefully from the horizon.

Having trundled around the frozen Sound for several hours, testing the thickness of the ice with our new drill and sliding down snowhills on our bottoms, we fixed on a spot in the lee of the Erebus Glacier Tongue. It faced the four Dellbridge Islands that mark the rim of an inundated crater which once stood among the volcanic foothills – Big and Little Razorback, Inaccessible Island and Tent Island. The site was about twelve miles from McMurdo. The ice there was six feet thick, and its surface was uniform, as if it had been hoed with one of the long-handled, small-bladed implements used by Italian hill farmers.

Further instruction followed at McMurdo on the status of the airwaves (some of the repeaters were not yet up), maintenance of the drip-oil Preway heaters with which both huts were equipped, and procedures for refuelling them by towing the diesel fuel sledge out to our camp. We dropped isopropyl alcohol into jerry cans to keep our vehicle fuel from freezing, visited Food (this was like going round a supermarket where you didn't have to pay – The Price is Right, they called it), and spent hours at the Berg Field Center, checking out a vast array of gear ranging from crescent wrenches to tin-openers.

The Antispryte conveyed us safely to the fuel pits before quietly breaking down. As the first field party out since the previous summer, we were fortunate to have taken Buck with us for a one-night shakedown to see that everything worked. As it turned out, nothing did. When we got it going again, the Antispryte moved very slowly, with the result that it took two hours to cover the twelve miles to camp. It had no radio, no headlights and no door-handle on the passenger side (a handle is useful for a quick exit when poised on the edge of a crack), and it complained vigorously if jammed into reverse. But it got us there, and Lucia and I whooped as the two red huts hoved into view. They had already been christened Wooville.

The fuel line had cracked on one hut, incapacitating the Preway, so confining us in the other, smaller hut. The temperature took the opportunity to plummet to minus forty-two degrees Celsius. We watched the flashlights dying almost as soon as we turned them on. Having breathed life into the remaining Preway, Buck, whose role was to ensure that Lucia and I were capable of maintaining a camp on our own, sat in front of it to watch us struggling to set up the Coleman stove.

‘Fuck this thing,' I said in exasperation. I had set up hundreds of camp stoves in my time, but this one was making a fool of me.

‘The metal's cold,' purred Buck from his position by the heater. ‘You need to warm up the fuel rod.'

Once this task had been accomplished and we were fortified by hot cocoa, Lucia and I went outside to rig up the antenna. This involved splitting the top of eight bamboo poles to make a resting place for the wire, and then drilling the poles into the ice. At least Buck didn't come out to watch. When the antenna was up, to palpable relief all round the high-frequency radio behaved perfectly. Then we battened down the hatches and made some soup.

I awoke to find massive snowdrifts inside the hut. McMurdo reported the news that, with windchill, the air was a sprightly minus eighty-one Celsius.

‘Yikes!' said Lucia when this information was relayed. It was her favourite expression.

The generator, which we had been obliged to bring if there was to be any hope of starting the Antispryte, had frozen, despite the fact that it had spent the night on the floor of the hut between us. Buck burnt his new hat on the Preway. We thawed the generator, and to squeals of surprise and delight the Antispryte started. As I nudged it out of its snowdrift, I noticed that the huts kept reappearing through the front window. The others had come out, and they were screwing up their eyes to look at me. Buck approached the vehicle and started mouthing.

‘The hydraulics must have gone,' he said when I opened the door. ‘You're going round and round in a circle.'

Visibility shrank to thirty feet. All hope of returning was abandoned and, once again, the hatches were battened down.

‘Just doesn't get any better than this,' said Buck.

The following morning a tracked vehicle came to our rescue. We returned to McMurdo, and left the Antispryte to gather snow.

∗

The fiasco of the shakedown did not deter us, and within twenty-four hours Lucia and I had obtained all the equipment we had forgotten the first time and prevailed upon Ron, the glowering figure who presided over the Mechanical Equipment Center like a malign deity, to part with another of his Sprytes. Why it was, with virtually no scientists on station and enough Sprytes to invade a small country, that he had chosen to give us the one vehicle famed for its unreliability, only he knew.

The Woovillian huts were ten feet apart, but we roped them together. ‘People have been lost in whiteouts in less space than that,' Buck had warned. One was a small high-tech affair called a Solarbarn which offered the luxury of a small solar light, and the other was a regular red wooden box hut twenty feet by twelve equipped with a set of built-in bunks. A small dead cockroach lay supine between two panes of plexiglass in one of the Solarbarn windows. Lucia had a sideline in the administration of acupuncture, and when she laid out her needles on the body-sized table bolted to one wall, the red hut quickly became known as the Clinic. We planned to cook in the Solarbarn, so this was named the Dining Wing.

The bathroom facilities consisted of a small metal drum with a lid which lived outside next to the one wall of the Clinic that didn't have a window. It was lined with both plastic and burlap sacks which we removed when full and took back to McMurdo. The contents were frozen, at least. We also established a pee flag by drilling a bamboo pole into the ice fifty yards from the huts. Peeing on the sea ice was allowed, but it was sensible always to do it in the same place, so the ice around our home did not begin to resemble a Jackson Pollock painting.

Now we were alone in our own camp for the first time. Before we set out, Joe in the McMurdo communications hut had dispensed lengthy instruction in radio operation, and we were then obliged to check in with base every day at an appointed time. The call sign of the communications hut was Mac Ops.

‘Mac Ops, Mac Ops, this is Whiskey Zero Zero Six, how copy?' I said, loudly and clearly, as instructed. Joe's voice flashed back.

‘We're sorry, no one is home at Mac Ops. If you leave your name and number after the beep, we'll get back to you as soon as we can.'

Nothing happened. ‘I didn't hear the beep,' I said.

‘Beep,' said Joe.

∗

The weather was good, at first. We had a fine view of the Transantarctics shredding the horizon across the Sound. The landscape was dominated by Mount Erebus, the volcano named by James Clark Ross when he arrived on 28 January 1841 at what was to become Wooville on 2 September 1995. It reached right down to us, as a tongue extending from one of its glaciers extended as far as Wooville. There, the sea ice had frozen around it. One day, when I was poking around at the base of the tongue, a beam of sunlight on a cluster of ice blocks caught my eye. If it had been at home, the beam would have captured spirals of dust motes, and if it had been in the hills, clouds of midges. The blocks were gleaming in this light like rocks at the edge of the sea made slippery by the rush of a rising tide. In effect, that is what they were.

The temperature leapt capriciously up and down. One day I threw a mug of boiling water into the air, and it froze in mid-flight. When the mercury hit minus forty, our eyes froze shut if we blinked for too long. After a long session outside we would come in and cling to the Preway like cats. When the wind abated, and we grew hot digging or engaged in other work outside, we licked one corner of discarded items of clothing and pressed them on the iced-up walls of the Clinic, where they instantly froze into position. Despite frequent total cloud cover and limited sunlight, the HF radio continued to run off its solar panel, which we had taped to a window of the Dining Wing.

We made mistakes, but we made them only once. Frozen food brought in a cardboard box was stowed under the front step of the Dining Wing. After the first storm the box had blown right underneath the hut, and we were obliged to lie on our bellies on the ice, prodding with an ice drill to recover our freezer. Forgetting to weigh down the toilet lid with a block of ice resulted in us having to chase it halfway back to McMurdo. The huts were positioned far enough apart to prevent a fire spreading from one to the other – and then we parked the fuel sledge between them. In addition, the sleeping arrangements caused difficulties. On the first night, Lucia slept on the top bunk. I woke up in the early hours to perceive her, through the gloom, climbing down the ladder and dragging her sleeping bag after her.

‘What's the matter?' I asked.

‘It's like the tropics up there,' she said. ‘I'm sleeping on the floor.' The concept of the tropics in our hut was too difficult to contemplate in the middle of the night, so I went back to sleep.

When I woke in the morning, she was already painting.

‘I've worked it out,' she said. ‘The temperature differential between outside and inside is so acute that above head height the air in the hut is like the Arizona desert.'

‘What was it like on the floor?' I asked.

‘Glacial,' she said. ‘I moved on to the long table after an hour.' Thereafter, I remained on the bottom bunk, where the air remained stable at a pleasant temperature, and Lucia slept on the table.

If there were no jobs to be done at camp, and we needed a break from painting and writing, we would get into the Woomobile – altogether a more successful machine than its infernal predecessor – and drill a few more flags into the ice to mark our route. First, we had to get the small generator going, as the vehicle was always far too cold to start without having a current run through it for an hour. Lifting this object out of the hut and on to the ice was an awkward, two-woman job.

‘I bet our arms aren't strong enough to get this started,' I said as we prepared to pull the handle.

‘We did it on the dry run at McMurdo, didn't we?' Lucia said.

‘Yes, but it started first time then. If it doesn't now, and we have to keep pulling, our arm muscles will get tired.'