Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet

  In the daytime there were icebergs that looked like pool tables or Cambodian temples or Walt Disney castles or Uluru, some so blue it was as if the ice had trapped a piece of the sky. We stood on the bow as the ocean changed around us from open sea to water like heaving marble with long veins of white through it. One morning there were frozen pancakes of ice with their edges kicked up, an ocean of severed ears. Over the days the ears changed to huge waterlilies of ice, then oblong chunks twenty metres across, then vast sheets, ice-rink sized.

  On the ice chunks were seals and their blood – it was the pupping season and there were many births. There were penguins that scurried in a panic away from the ship and left tracks in the ice like lines on a hand. In the channels between floes were minke whales, their backs breaking the surface in a stately arc. And circling around the Aurora were snow petrels soaring and dipping like hundreds of angels watching over us, such a fragile craft in such an unknown world.

  Martin was contemptuous of the voyagers who spent most of their time in the video room in the bowels of the ship. ‘Some of them haven’t seen daylight since we left Hobart. They live in a world of virtual darkness. Maybe they’re acclimatising themselves to twenty-four-hour darkness in winter, but no one has told them that they’re going down in summer.’ There were 300 videos on the ship, it took five weeks to sail from Hobart to Davis, and by the end of the fourth week, the video-heads were so bored they weren’t fast-forwarding through the previews any more.

  ‘I feel so alive in this place,’ Martin laughed in vivid contrast, exhausting me with the ferocity of his enthusiasm. He was 37, the age of reckoning as we career into middle age, and he was gulping this world like a gleeful boy. He said that we must live differently after this trip, do all the things we really wanted to do. He was constantly dragging me up on deck to seize the light, the sky, the ocean. One day I forget my special-issue sunglasses but didn’t care because I wanted to see unfiltered all the different shades of white around us, but then I got snow blindness like a thick film of milk over my eyes. It took me three days to recover and from then on I always wore my sunglasses, Martin made sure of it. He made sure of many things. That our lives would change after this voyage, they must. That they would veer from their proscribed course like an ocean liner heading off to unknown climes.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  A ‘winterer,’ helicoptered on board from another station, bit into an apple. ‘That’s better than sex,’ he declared. It’d been a long time between apples. We, the ‘summerers,’ were delivering the first supply of fresh fruit and vegetables Davis had seen in seven months. Another newly-arrived winterer ate five apples in a row. There’s an old Antarctic saying that Wednesday nights are wank nights and blizzards are a bonus. Apparently someone had a tape of the sound of a blizzard for when things got really rough.

  Just before the ship arrived at Davis, the women were gathered together for a talk by the female ship’s doctor. Women’s business. We were told that in the strange and constrained social world of an Antarctic station, touching was often misconstrued. A veteran of several trips said she was a constant focus of attention for the simple fact that she was female. That she was always being watched, even when she ate her muesli at breakfast, and after the initial gift of the attention, it was utterly exhausting. ‘People are always wanting a piece of you. I had to go for ten-minute walks outside just to get away from it all.’

  We were told that if an attachment was formed, then the absolute rule was discretion – because it was so hard on everyone else if it was flouted. Later the chef, an old Antarctic hand, told me that if there were two single people on a station then invariably they paired up, but it was not the done thing to openly fraternise because ‘it wasn’t fair on the people who weren’t having sex.’ I was single when I began this voyage. I was intrigued, by all of it.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  The Aurora sailed up an avenue of icebergs and cracked the sea’s skin to within three kilometres of the coastal station, but could crack it no further. The ship parked by a line of 44-gallon drums placed on the frozen surface by a two-lane highway bulldozed freshly in the ice for the cargo operations to commence. The gangplank was lowered to the surface and we walked or skied the last joyous wondrous leg, across the surface of the Great Southern Ocean, to the continent. Tears pricked my eyes with the sheer monumental emotion of it all, the wonderful strangeness of it.

  Davis Station was a scattered collection of brightly coloured buildings that looked like large shipping containers. ‘Legoland,’ it was dubbed. The Australian mainland was ‘the real world.’ I wanted to leave the real world far behind, drown myself in this brave new existence, so vulnerable and lonely and exhilarating and replenishing in the vastness of the unsullied continent.

  Yet Legoland’s decor was almost disappointingly plush. There were carpets and tubs of Tim Tam biscuits, Apple Macs, an electronic board with up-to-the-minute temperature and wind-speed readings and a daily newspaper of stories culled from the net. I thought I’d at least be doing it tough, but walking into the Legoland living quarters reminded me of a small airport lounge. The oddnesses slowly dawned. There was no money; it wasn’t needed – the government provided everything from alcohol to shampoo to condoms. The milk was powdered; the eggs were up to a year old. They were oiled to preserve them, but the chef had to ‘crack and smell’ before he put them in an omelette. The rules were ferocious. No one was allowed to go beyond the station boundaries by themselves, and Martin hated that one. There was a surgery and an operating theatre and a doctor but no nurses. If an operation was required the diesel mechanic and the chef would help out; they had gone through a two-week course on the mainland.

  Outside were utes and bulldozers and a small cement-mixing truck, all with government number plates. Tank-like vehicles called Hagglunds were so noisy you had to wear headphones when you were in them, assaulting the silence that felt thousands of years old, untouched. And at night, the vehicles in the open were lined up obediently and plugged into heaters to keep the oil in their engines warm.

  The Legoland buildings were scattered because one of the biggest dangers was fire. You couldn’t afford to have everything in one complex because if it burnt down in May and everything was wiped out, there couldn’t be a rescue until October. Smoking was taboo, only allowed in one small and reeking windowless shipping container. I didn’t smoke, but if I did, that shipping container would have made me quit. And always in Legoland there was the hum of the generator. Martin told me to walk Antarctica, to move beyond that hum, any way I could, to listen to the thick silence of the land. It’s a silence that thuds in your ears.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  The Australians were rigorous about keeping their chunk of the world’s last wilderness as pristine as they could. There were many rules. No souveniring rocks from the continent. No taking polystyrene balls from packaging and bean bags to the continent, because they didn’t degrade and they got stuck in the throats of animals and choked them. No leaving anything behind in the field but footprints and urine (and if possible, urinate down a crack in the ice). Everything else in terms of human waste was to be removed because it would never rot. Plastic bags were handed out for defecating during field trips and women got an extra device, a FUD (Female Urinary Device), plastic and pink and shaped like a funnel. It meant we could go standing up like a man.

  There was a lot of camping by scientists in the field when the light pushed out darkness for much of the time. There was so much to see. Coastal icebergs shining like white plastic in the sharp sunlight. A baby seal a day or two old, its umbilical cord still attached, snap frozen to its belly. Seal blood whose hotness had plunged it into the snow. Penguins, thousands of them, clucking and calling in a frenzy of hormones as the breeding season began. A strangely lunar landscape of rock and ice in the hills surrounding Davis. And always, the stretched sky. One day the strap of my camera froze into a stiff scribble. The flesh of my cheek stuck to the cold metal of the camera
back and panicking, I pulled my skin away. I had been trying to take a photo of a woman’s eyelashes dusted with ice. It looked like white mascara.

  I didn’t want to leave this place. Didn’t want to go back to my cluttered, inner-city life. Didn’t want to leave Martin. He had entered my heart, was riveted to it, the relationship sanctified by the shared wonder of this land. But he was staying behind, his work wasn’t finished. As we said goodbye our cheeks felt like plastic as they lingered a touch.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  I smelt Tasmania before I saw it, smelt trees and soil on the breeze. Then I saw green, in all its exotic vibrancy. It had been so long since I’d seen that colour in nature after my strict Antarctic palette of white and blue and grey and black. When the Aurora docked, I stepped onto a pavement that was too hard and after two days I’d jarred my shins. There were too many people, too much noise. The only things I wanted from home were the sun on my skin and the dirt on my hands and the taste of bananas in my mouth. Apart from that I wanted to be back in Antarctica, achingly.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Three weeks after I returned, I got a phone call from down south. I recognised the crackle on the line and instantly felt the tug in my belly I always got when I spoke to Martin.

  But it wasn’t him, it was the station leader. It was about Martin. He had been killed in a fall. He was climbing a bluff beyond the station boundary to read his book, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and watch a spectacular sunset over the ice and listen to the wondrous silence. At a midnight barely touched by darkness.

  My world fell apart. I foundered. Just wanted to go back down south and wrap myself in the solace of the silence and not emerge for a very long time. The real world was too hard. Too complicated, back home, where Martin had a different life, a different world that I’d never been a part of. I had nothing of him now but a bundle of emails and a battered old paperback with his name written in it and the words of wisdom at his memorial service which I held onto tight – to always live life vividly and with passion.

  It took a while but slowly, gradually, I began to feel weirdly euphoric at times, as if I was scrubbing my life, starting afresh. Martin’s wish, for both of us. At the age of twenty-eight I grew up – it was like I was being hauled into adulthood. Grief gave me clarity, it stopped the silliness. I realigned my priorities. Martin’s death taught me to grab at life with his enthusiasm and passion, and the importance of following your heart before it was too late. To not let people fool you into giving up. I lost the hunger for journalism, the observer’s life. Learnt to live closer to the earth, to be still with it and to listen to it. I wrote a book about the experience, a novel called Shiver, which balmed me through the whole process of grieving. My gift to Martin and his gift to me. Because finally, in my late twenties, I was doing what I really wanted to do with my life.

  Nuestro Pueblo

  BY TEA OBREHT

  Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, the New York Times, and the Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2011 Indie Choice Award for Debut Novel, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been named by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York.

  I grew up visiting sacred places. Pilgrimage was a condition of my childhood, largely resulting from my family’s nomadic existence following the breakup of Yugoslavia. Somehow we always managed to land someplace where the most remarkable history existed side-by-side with the everyday. By the time I was eleven years old, I had seen the Vatican and the great temple complexes of Luxor, Edfu and Karnak; I’d squinted up at the Pantheon, the Parthenon and Petra; I’d paddled around, for better or worse, in Seas both Dead and Red. In several family albums, my chickenpox-riddled face grins out from under a straw hat at the feet of Ramses the Second’s colossi at Abu Simbel. Growing up surrounded by other children whose families were on the move, I had no concept of the great privilege of this existence, how lucky I was to have the Sphinx and pyramids in my backyard, or how unusual it was that my family (a Muslim, a Roman Catholic, and an Orthodox Serb) didn’t care whether the monument we were visiting was a mosque, a church, or a pagan temple whose convoluted representation of Hell would throw me into a panic-stricken, afterlife-affirming identity crisis – as long as the fact that it was sacred got some awe out of me.

  Now, years later, sacredness is more clearly defined for me. It is personal, intimate, something totally individual. I understand that its temples, whether manmade or wild, are havens of the self at rest, and it is the story of their respective origins out of which their sacredness is constructed. This is why I make a pilgrimage, whenever I can, to what is probably the most incredible and unlikely sacred place I can imagine.

  In the middle of Los Angeles, nestled in one of the city’s most notorious neighborhoods, stands a complex of structures built by a single man over a period of thirty-odd years: the Watts Towers. As with every site of pilgrimage, the way is labyrinthine and bizarre enough to confuse even the most steadfast devotee, confound the most sophisticated GPS. It meanders through tight alleys of low-roofed houses; dead-end streets and ramshackle shops; fenced-in yards where weeds that have squeezed through the paving nod absently through the day; tightly packed cars that, for want of use, have spent years trapped under a coating of perpetual L.A. dust that seems to have a life of its own, while the Towers themselves dart in and out of view.

  Coming here, I am aware that I am as likely to drive these streets in reverse as in the right gear. Yet every time I visit, I am joined by at least five or six other pilgrims, strangers all. At first, we drift in like shadows and do not notice each other; life goes on around the Towers, and not everyone in the vicinity is there on pilgrimage. But inevitably, we wind up gathered around the iron fence, and from every angle a viewing of the Towers is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle of Alice’s Wonderland: is that yellow hook sticking out of the mortar a cup handle? That huge, round, red thing – is that a bowling ball? From how many christenings and funerals, Sunday lunches and failed restaurants, weddings and broken homes, no-particular-reason parties and birthdays, have the thousands upon thousands of glass shards and bits of crockery that make up the Towers been culled?

  I did not fully understand why this was a sacred place to me until I became a writer. As a student at the University of Southern California, I was reluctantly introduced to the Towers as part of a college art class, the aim of which was to better acquaint its students with Los Angeles. While I thought the Towers were ‘cool’ – and then, as time went by, ‘really cool’ – their emotional impact on me did not manifest for years. I was not thinking about death, or how everything in life tries so hard to work against it. I was not thinking about time, and how it is made up only of stories and memories. I was not thinking about the human spirit, and how its most triumphant compulsion is to make something out of nothing. Now I realize that the builder, Simon Rodia, was doing exactly what writers do: making a patchwork out of fragments, a whole out of disparate realities. Every object studded into the concrete of his Towers has a story connected with some other life, and together they make up a new story, the fabric of his experience, his own understanding of the world.

  When I think of Simon Rodia, I always imagine him waking, sitting up in his tiny house on a plot of land barely bigger than a tennis court. It is dark, and he is alone. Decades and thousands of miles separate him from his hometown of Serino, Italy. Through his doorway, he sees what he calls Nuestro Pueblo, the monument he has built to remind himself of it: arches and spires and coils of steel and mortar, inlaid with seashel
ls and bowling pins, glass bottle bottoms and broken pottery, a ragged tile mosaic culled from the household accidents and disposed debris of a community that is convinced he is insane. He will get dressed, assess the damage his unwelcome life’s work may have sustained at irreverent hands during the night, then walk for miles, searching for more materials in the abandoned lots and garbage dumps of Watts. When he returns, he will climb the Towers and build on. When he abandons the site, ten years before his death, he will have no idea that his structures, built entirely by his own two hands, will withstand municipal condemnation and the devastation of the Northridge earthquake, or serve as a center of the very community that shunned him, or become a gathering place for dreamers.