The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  What Thoreau said: in wildness is the preservation of the world. He is often misquoted as having said wilderness, but he meant pure wild-ness. Not wilderness in the sense you usually conceive it, a space set aside to be chaotic or fierce or biodiverse. He meant it in the sense of ‘wild’ as in ‘self-will’ in the past participle. Like looking out over the ocean, or into space, a blank and human-void place, and feeling tiny; this is what Thoreau meant. The very opposite of culture or civilisation.

  It is an overwhelming feeling because it reminds you of how you are not like it; vast, indifferent, unfathomable. The ice will erase you. When you and everything living here leave, the ice will swallow up all of your traces. No symbols at all. You. Not you.

  The ice sheet refuses human cartography utterly. It is an empty and markless expanse with nothing to anchor the lines of a map to. Well, probably there are glaciologists who can map it in some way, density of ice maybe, accumulation of atmospheric particles perhaps, but this can only be seen with a very specific kind of vision. An esoteric landscape does not help a person to find their way if they are lost; you could walk from the centre of here and never find your way again.

  It makes me feel light-headed, this nullification, if I stand and look out into the expanse. But it is not like a paralysing onset of agoraphobia; instead it is the jolt of a sudden release, the severing of an anchor. It is so not at all like home, where cartography is inescapable, knitted into the soil, and there is no chance to get lost, not really. This is a place for walking, this is not, Welcome to the County of Worcestershire, Private Property, Do Not Walk On The Grass.

  I asked Amos if he thinks we are on course to get there in time for the ferry. He just said immaqa, which kind of means maybe and is the catchphrase of Greenland. Bodes well. Most methods of transport here only happen on a weekly basis.

  ON BEING OF GREAT ADVANTAGE TO MY SEX

  Sledding across all this snow it kind of feels like we are doing an antithetical version of messianic explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctica expedition. I watched the Herbert Ponting documentary for inspiration before we left England. At the beginning there is a slide with a quote from King George V along to some jolly colonial-era trumpeting. King George said, I WISH THAT EVERY BRITISH BOY COULD SEE THIS FILM FOR IT WOULD HELP TO FOSTER THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE ON WHICH THE EMPIRE WAS FOUNDED.

  I wanted some of that spirit, even being of the 50 per cent already excluded by KG. Positioning myself as male again; my masculine counterpart who lives in my brain, appending a fraud penis so I can traverse Scott’s Antarctica in my imagination.

  We hunt and shoot some seals, but we have to feed the dogs that way so it is not too bad of us. They introduce me to the camp mascot, the black cat Nigger, at which point I am reminded of the terrible inconsistencies of their moral vision. And then they start to anthropomorphise the seals, which is kind of sweet, oh, nice guys, right? But we get all fond of this one seal and her pup, who is too fat and small to clamber out onto the ice when some killer whales chase it because they are hungry. Then we harpoon the killer whales to rescue the baby. Then we sit down to a bowl of seal stew.

  Scott and his men died to put a flag at the South Pole. This is where the fine line between exploration and imperialism was crossed. The expedition was not an exercise in curiosity and adventure but a race of nationalistic pride. Men just love to stick their flags in places. North Pole, South Pole, on the seabed underneath the North Pole, on the tops of mountains, on the moon. Like territorial animals pissing on things.

  Annie Smith Peck was a mountaineer who beat Indiana Jones to the summit of Mount Coropuna and stuck a ‘votes for women’ flag on the top of it. She was one of a handful of female explorers to be recognised for her success. Okay, ladies, Annie Smith Peck can have that one, although she is a ‘superwoman’ so don’t you mere mortal women go getting any ideas.

  People go mad for that stuff still now, this boyish British Peter Pan nostalgia for exploration and empire. Scouting and wilderness techniques and Bear Grylls, the zealous Christian outdoorsman on the Discovery Channel. When it came out Scouting for Boys was only beaten as a bestseller by the Bible. It actually came out after the imperial age of Scott and Shackleton when British masculinity was feeling threatened by the waning strength of empire and the rise of the women’s rights movement. The emasculation of men. Which is maybe what the current resurgence of Mountain Man documentaries on television is all about. And they made Bear Grylls the new Chief Scout.

  I want my documentary to be the opposite of colonial exploitation. I want it to explore, quietly, without imprinting. To be porous to all things without contaminating. I want it to be conscious of its tracks in the snow (I did get footage of this to use to that purpose).

  THE RESURRECTION OF RACHEL CARSON

  Today I ride with Genen again. I go to the furthest places at times like this, when I am stationary in transit and alone with just my own head. I fell asleep and had a dream about Rachel Carson. I was in the ‘woods’ that are near my house, which really is just a square of lank trees they did not cut down when they built the estate. It is also laced with radon. It is kind of a recreational area for the housing estate, where everyone walks their dogs. It stinks of dog shit. Mum told me not to play in there when I was young in case it somehow got in my eyes and I got blinded by the shit.

  I was in the woods, standing in the woods and being very still because I could hear buzzing and I was trying to figure out which way not to walk. Then next to me what I had taken for a very ordinary mound of undergrowth started to move. It began to rise in the horizontal shape of a human body. The human shape pulled up all the turf around it as it began to sit up, plucking the plant roots out of the soil like snapping violin strings. They made a noise like that, pluck pluck pluck. When the human shape had sat up it started to brush itself down, its clothes caked in mud and its skin smeared with dirt and dog shit. I recognised Rachel Carson even though I don’t know what she looks like and her face was just a smudge with lichen for eyes.

  ‘Pigeons are suddenly dropping out of the sky dead.’

  I was not sure if she was addressing me. It was hard to tell what way her lichen eyes were facing, but her head was turned away from me anyway. Then I woke up from pins and needles because Genen was sat with his femur digging into my shin.

  FIRST FOOTPRINTS IN THE FRESH SNOW

  Every day here is just a slight variation on the first, differentiated by switching sledges, sluggish topics of conversation, and a sky that will sometimes bleed dramatically pink to orange like the belly of a rainbow trout. Sometimes there are strong winds. The constants are the smell of the dogs, wincing at the whip-crack, tensing for the snowdrifts, pins and needles, and the white nothing. I am trying to stay proactive and read but I am kind of too bored to concentrate.

  A THOUGHT: This nothingness is going to be a very prominent part of the trip. Lots and lots of sitting around, waiting on things, being in transit, but out on the ice like on the ocean this is intensified, your own small contours marked out against the vastness of ether, so that you look at your hands out in front of you and follow the line of your fingers up and down and think, I end here, all of me fills up this container that is my body.

  Like proprioception. I keep on thinking that this is the closest I will ever come to moonwalking. There are parallels: the same bulky outerwear, the same being-in-emptiness. Yes, it is almost like moonwalking.

  All day I was with Urla and we did not speak more than ten words. Today is day nine, entries are sparse because, mostly, I had nothing to say. It is hard to think with no stimulation. Doing nothing is exhausting. We have slipped into this kind of mental hibernation, except Umik and Amos, who have their tasks to occupy them. Mostly I have been sleeping lots and dreaming vividly. And the ice has saturated my dreams. After a while nothingness becomes potent and textured because of the sense of what is absent. Things are evoked more than if they were actually there: colours, heights, depths. Slight changes in the monochrome landscape c
ome out in relief. When the ice-mountains precipitate onto the horizon they appear as a whisper and disappear as quietly. The horizon is the only spatial marker and it is always on the horizon. We are perpetually at the centre of nothing.

  It feels like trespassing to be alive in a place that is not dead but is inexistence, negation of potentiality. Anything alive is only ever passing through. I cannot put a word on it and when I try I can only think ‘primordial’, but that word entails potential because a beginning initiates a narrative. The one I want is the very opposite of origin.

  Words are getting harder and I am starting to think like the ice; without contrast there is no definition. The ice is self-referential and there is no way into the tautology. I cannot get my bearings if there is nothing to grasp.

  THESE ARE SHINING PARTS

  I was sorry to leave Umik behind to look after the dogs and sleds. We all hugged goodbye awkwardly, which made him visibly uncomfortable. It felt strange to be walking, and to be walking off the packed snow. I thought permafrost was a permanent frost that kept the ground crispy, but Amos explained it is underneath the ground, and keeps the water up so everything is actually wet and boggy. It was a difficult walk with all the sucking mud, and the weight of our rucksacks. It got a bit warm, even with the wind, so we had to take our coats off, but the wet brings all the insects out and some of them were biting through our thinner sleeves.

  I had managed to walk all that way without looking up much from where my feet were going and what insects I was slapping into my skin so it did not even occur to me that the ice was gone until we started driving. Amos was so excited to be in a car, he drove the whole way with the window down and his arm resting on the door, which made it cold in the back but neither of us wanted to say anything. He was talking to his brother, who picked us up in his 4x4, all animated, which suited me because I like to zone out when people are talking a language I do not understand.

  Then I started to look out of the window and it hit me how colourful everything was. Not really objectively, but in such contrast it nearly hurt my eyes. All this space just mossy and vaguely pink and it just went on and on and on. It hardly changed for the whole journey, flickering on in muted colours, and in front and behind the road was a thin wisp existing through it. The only shape to change was the twisting spine of the mountains.

  Wilderness, vast open spaces untouched and just left be. Not a reserve portioned off as a space where you are supposed to go and be recreational. It made me think of Alaska, and how much left I have to see, and how out here it is easy to imagine yourself alone and happy in it.

  As I watched the landscape thaw I thought I felt my spirit thawing a little with it. As if there was something deep inside me that was frozen and had maybe always been frozen and like an Alaskan wood frog frozen dormant for winter it was beginning to wake up to the world again with the spring.

  A RECURRING FEELING: getting excited like forgetting something and then remembering you already did it, like I was waiting for a phone call from Mum asking me what the hell I thought I was doing, young lady, and to come home right now, but realising, nope, she was not going to.

  Amos was really apologetic about leaving us at the hostel and seemed genuinely distressed that he did not have room to accommodate us, which was very sweet. We gave him money, which he took with some sort of feigned coaxing; he kept saying, ‘Lovely girls, lovely girls.’

  Kangerlussuaq was only built quite recently by America for the airport. The hostel seems like it is made from slotted-together foam board, partition walls. Like knocking into it would just make it collapse. All of the furniture looks like it was bought from Staples and the mattresses are made from foam.

  There is a television with American cable and the Discovery Channel. I am taking notes from Bear Grylls for the documentary, both for handy tips and for a character profile of the kind of idea of ‘man and wild’ I keep going on about. As though modern feminism is more ubiquitous than ever before (or so it seems to me, as maybe it does to each new generation) and in backlash, with renewed fanaticism, a strain of hyper-masculinity has occurred. Compensating; which men have always liked to do!

  THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ENDURING THE MOST DRAMATIC HARDSHIPS YOU CAN IMAGINE

  INT. – Erin sits on the corner of a bed with a notebook and pen in hand facing a television – outdoor survivalist show with presenter Bear Grylls – interior is sparse: desk, table, chair, window, rucksacks and possessions spilt on the floor – Erin turns to notice camera and snorts – zoom in on her face – then on television screen – Bear Grylls is hoisting himself up a waterfall –

  BEAR GRYLLS (ON SCREEN) (YELLING): SURVIVAL can be summed up in three words (PAUSE) Never. Give. Up.

  – camera pans back to Erin –

  ERIN (PUTTING ON AN IMPRESSIVE IMITATION): I have penetrated every crevice of the planet and conquered the WORST nature can haul at me. There is nowhere I haven’t taken on. I’m going to show you the skills I invented that you need to be as man as I am. And survive anywhere on this unforgiving planet

  – Urla is laughing behind camera – camera back to TV screen – zooms in and out erratically on presenter struggling against onslaught of water –

  ERIN: If you’re stranded in the wilderness you need a weapon. Ideally a rifle. If you don’t have a rifle nature will sometimes throw you a rope in the form of a makeshift weapon. Behold. For example

  – Erin flourishes her pen to the camera –

  ERIN: This thousand-year-old arrowhead I found on the floor. I will tie it to a stick with the cord from my parachute. If you don’t have an arrowhead or a parachute cord, use your initiative. Initiative is man’s best weapon

  – she winks – Urla laughs –

  ERIN: I am on a journey of SURVIVAL. (THROWS BACK HER HEAD AS SHE SHOUTS) Every step of this journey is me. Man. Surviving. Not dying. Never succumbing to the weakness that is death

  CUT TO –

  INT. – still in same interior but props have moved – belongings piled in corner – Erin has T-shirt tied to her head turban style and is brandishing a broom handle like a scythe –

  ERIN(GESTICULATING BROOMSTICK ON EMPHASISED WORDS): The tropics are home to most of the plants and animals in the world, most of which are trying to KILL YOU. Not every creature in the jungle wants to kill you. Instead these ones want to EAT YOU ALIVE. Sometimes in the jungle it can feel like everything is out to get you. BECAUSE IT IS. Man must reassert his dominance in the jungle. I flick the tarantula off my leg

  – Erin mimes flicking her leg –

  ERIN: Petty bug

  – pan to television – presenter is in a desert, talking with spear-clad barefoot gentleman who is holding up to him the corpse of something furry – pan back to Erin, who is looking at the screen –

  ERIN: If you are stranded in the desert you can expect a visit. FROM DEATH. It would take years to learn all the skills of the sand bushmen but I have done it in a matter of hours. They eat every morsel of the desert hare and respect its soul. I will bite out its liver and leave the rest because its liver contains a vitamin that is vital for preventing something bad I mentioned earlier

  – onscreen presenter passes the carcass back to the sand bushman –

  ERIN: Take the rest of the carcass. I have no use for it. No, you may NOT have one of my adventure-sports-sponsorship power-bars, Sand Bushman

  – camera shakes with laughter –

  CUT TO –

  EXT. FROZEN LAKESIDE – Erin in snow next to a body of frozen water – she is now brandishing a large stick –

  ERIN: Here in the Arctic there are fish under the ice. I have a frozen deer leg so that’s what I’m going to use to smash through the ice. If you don’t have a frozen deer leg, use your initiative. I’m going to make a line using some cord from my parachute. And some other really useful stuff I found in my pocket

  – she takes to hitting the ice with the stick –

  CUT

  HOW TO CONVEY INVISIBLE DEATH

  CO
NTAMINANTS THAT CAUSE ADVERSE CHANGE

  I was back standing on the ice sheet in a blizzard. There were two figures in orange jackets with their hoods against the blizzard and goggles on, glaciologists. They were peering over one of those big drills they use to get ice core samples. As the core came up its gradation changed, from glowy green like a nuclear ore on top down to pure white. The glaciologists conferred.

  ‘Witnesses described huge bonfires on which the bodies of the birds were burned,’ said Rachel Carson from beside me.

  I could hear clearly what the glaciologists were saying even though they were very far away.

  ‘The core shows residue,’ said the one. ‘Hmm, yes, they also found it in the underground rivers,’ said the other.

  ‘When some of the Eskimos themselves were checked by analysis of fat samples, small residues of DDT were found (0 to 1.9 parts per million).’ Rachel Carson always spoke with no lilt of emphasis in her voice. Not to me or anyone really. Maybe to herself.

  ‘It’s much worse than we thought.’

  ‘Much worse.’

  ‘The fat samples were taken from people who had left their native villages to enter the United States Public Health Service Hospital in Anchorage for surgery.’

  I asked, ‘Where have the bees gone, Ms Carson?’ But my voice was lost to the wind.

  ‘For their brief stay in civilisation the Eskimos were rewarded with a taint of poison,’ she said instead.

  ‘Quick, empty it and let’s go.’ The glaciologists emptied their lab pockets into the core hole. There was a pause as they leaned and peered into it, then a succession of plops like pebbles in still water. Then they replaced the core.