by Jean McNeil
They slept and ate and went outside to get snow, or to pee, or empty their bowels. They read and talked. They would take turns melting snow for water, transferring it to another pot, then dividing it in two; in the remaining pot they poured dehydrated mashed potatoes. Sometimes she couldn’t finish hers, it was too heavy for her. Manfood – it was still called this, thirty years after the Antarctic had been evacuated of the last of the dogs and the dogfood and manfood boxes had been separately labelled – had a high caloric content, to help cope with the cold. They finished their meal with chunks of seven-year-old Bourneville chocolate (‘quite fresh, in Antarctic terms,’ the pilot said) then hung the Tilley Lamps from the metal loops in the fuselage, and read. She was only truly warm in her P-bag. Even then a fringe of damp, a buzzing cold needle of air, pressed at her edges. She began to dream of immersions, of being surrounded by warm water. A bath or a shower took on an almost supernatural appeal.
‘I’d love a nice wood fire,’ she said.
‘Did you ever read that story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London?’
‘I had to read it in school. I didn’t like it very much.’
‘Why not?’
‘I think I was spooked by stories of hunger and luck.’
He laughed.
Suddenly, she felt desperate. ‘You don’t think it’s serious? The situation we’re in?’
‘No, I don’t. Not like in that story, anyway. But it wasn’t just his luck, remember. He was warned by the old-timer not to do the journey alone.’
She nodded. ‘Like Captain Scott. He was warned, too, wasn’t he – and he still went ahead and trusted to luck.’
‘Something similar, I suppose,’ he said. ‘They both thought luck was on their side.’
‘What do you miss, down here?’
‘Red wine, Syrah or Merlot preferably, grilled fish, something fresh and meaty. Monkfish. Dancing. A hot shower. Heat of any kind. Wood-panelled rooms, animals, music...it’s easier if you don’t think of things that are impossible.’
‘But you think of them, still.’
‘We’re all perverse that way, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘I only want things I can’t have. When I find out I can have them, I don’t want them anymore.’
She agreed. ‘Almost everything I want, I can’t have.’
‘You wanted to come to the Antarctic, you must have. Nobody comes here without wanting it badly. And you got what you wanted. You’re here.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re definitely here. Wherever here is.’
A silence followed, long enough that she took the conversation to be over. But the pilot’s voice interrupted her drift toward sleep.
‘So what is it that you want so much and can’t have?’
‘A man.’
‘So you ran away from love.’
‘I ran toward something better. That’s how I think about it. What about you? I mean, are you married?’ For days she had been skirting round this question, trying to come at it from the correct angle.
‘Me? Well, I got married when I was twenty-eight. We had three children, quite quickly I suppose. It’s just what you were supposed to do, to get on with it.’
She wondered how long ago twenty-eight was. He might be twenty years her senior; it was hard to tell. He inhabited what was for Nara an indefinite age, too young to be her father, too old to plausibly be her lover. Although really, she supposed, there was no real limit on the latter.
The wind cuffed the plane once more and set it rocking. The pilot mumbled something then, some mild disbelief, or was it laughter? She asked him what he meant but heard nothing in return. In another moment she heard his breathing alter. He had fallen asleep.
What she will remember of those Otter days in the coming months: hunger and luck, the manfood too heavy for her to eat, the cold gnawing at her like a small, sharp-toothed animal. Their luck, if you could call it that, of a two-day field trip turned into ten. Awkwardnesses. Mad days connected to each other by a wire. If I tugged, you would feel me. Leaving the plane to relieve herself, trying to locate the pee flag in a whiteout, the lifeline on her back, the pilot discreetly turned away. Lemon stains on the snow now frozen to blocks of urine-ice. On the second day polar agoraphobia overtook her and she did not want to leave the fuselage; the pilot had to all but shove her out. Terrible constipation because she could not bring herself to defecate anywhere he might see her, the stalemate broken only by the blizzard that arrived on the third – or was it the fourth? – day and which offered her complete cover. Blinded by so much white as she squatted, vulnerability but also a strange power coursing through her. The thrill of their aloneness; who has ever been so alone? Pilots shot down in wartime, she imagines. The terrible story of Amelia Earhart and her navigator, crashed on a near-invisible Pacific atoll, only skeletons and one of the navigator’s shoes left. Did they starve to death? Did they make love? Did they devour each other?
We’re safe, he’d said, once, cooking dinner. There’s no need to worry.
Don’t worry, I’m not worried. And they’d laughed, and after dinner spent an hour trying to find synonyms for the word: preoccupation, anguish, concern, doubt, hand-wringing, brooding, getting worked up, anxious, tense, despair, dark night of the soul. I always liked the sound of that, she’d said, but with a ‘k’, the man on the horse, you know, who comes to save you: all I want is a dark knight of the soul.
Right away the pilot is there, floating around the dark fuselage of her dreams; in her dreams they are both suspended, gravity-less, as in a space capsule. His dark blue eyes framed by eyebrows of a certain, definite cast. His hands, surprisingly delicate and small. In her dreams he says, ‘We’re safe, don’t worry.’ Even within the dream she thinks how much of life is contained in this dispute between safety and danger: illness, family, dying, hope. Life is not safe, she remembers her mother saying, her voice hissing on the final word. Her beautiful, vengeful mother who had too much disappointment invested in such thoughts to risk optimism, like a dark day of rain that refuses to brook the light.
When she awoke the pilot was talking – at first she thought to her, or possibly to himself. Then she realised it was base on the radio.
‘Well never mind…’ A hiss of static. ‘No we’re ok down here.’
She went forward, her head bent in deference to the low ceiling of the fuselage, and slid into the co-pilot seat.
When he’d finished talking, she pointed ahead and asked, ‘what’s that?’
The pilot squinted at the windscreen. ‘What?’
‘There are people,’ she said, simply. A haze had settled in her eye. But within it, very small, were the black shadows of people on the move, perhaps – a ring of people, dancing in the snow. They were towing what looked like a snowmobile.
‘I don’t think there’s anything there.’
She closed her eyes, opened them. The figures were still there, black dots against a grainy canvas of white, round and shapeless, like peppercorns scattered on snow.
‘It’s a mirage. The air’s so clear here, there’s no pollution or haze. But also there’s nothing to get a fix on in your visual field, and if one thing appears – a tent or a ridge or an island, your eye magnifies it. Isn’t that interesting, how for us, emptiness is a magnifier? Everything looks a third closer than it really is. Even pilots misjudge the distances sometimes.’
She shook her head. She couldn’t get the vision of the people towing the skidoo out of her mind.
‘The less there is to see, your eye compensates by making things bigger, or manufacturing things to look at. That’s why you have the hallucinations, the fata morgana, when sailors start to see towns and cities, or other ships, or icebergs. You usually see what you want to see most: a rescue ship, your mother,’ – he hesitated, gave her a careful look – ‘or other people, in your case. But there’s nothing there. That’s one of the things you watch out for, as a pilot,’ he went on. ‘In a whiteout, you start hallucinating horizons, then you ignore what your ins
truments are telling you, then you begin to tip the plane down. They call it the dead man’s spiral. The eye sees what it wants to see, not what’s there. You have to train yourself not to see what you hope for. It’s strange, when you think of it, that hope can kill you.’
The following day the sun came out. Nara had not seen it for days and now its lordly beam seemed excessively intelligent, even malignant in its intentions.
She stepped out of the Otter and saw their world transformed. There was camp, more or less as they had left it, but with new snow cornices wrapped around the gear in sweeping parabolas, as in dreamy modernist architecture. The green tarp which covered the skidoo had disappeared beneath a drift. A line of green and red flags attached to an emaciated chorus of bamboo sticks led to the tents. Under the glare of the sun the snow burned the white-blue of phosphorous.
The spine of the Ellsworths soared above her; she had the impression the mountains were rising like loaves of bread, expanding, growing taller. The sun cast two black haloes above their peaks and she saw a black sky with white rings of powdered sunlight drawn in it. She had heard about these false suns, seen only in the highest latitudes of the polar regions. A single throbbing sun had parked itself over the tent, and to the right and the left, equidistant, two acolytes shimmered as if from behind a curtain of ice.
Later, back in the plane she told the pilot.
‘We call them Sun Dogs. Ice crystals in the sky, they refract the light. At times I get so used to seeing two or three suns, when I see the single one I think, where have the others gone? Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if we had multiple suns?’
‘I think the planet would burn to a crisp, if we did,’ she said.
‘I suppose. But it would be so beautiful.’
‘You see so much flying down here.’
‘I see it, but I don’t always understand it. I wish I had a better education, sometimes. Maybe if I didn’t spend so much time with scientists – with you –’ he said it hastily, an awkward gesture of inclusion, ‘I’d be more content with the education I had.’
‘I’m not sure we’re so well-educated, just specialised, more and more in fact, until you can only look at your little corner of the universe. You’ve seen more with your own eyes in a month than many Antarctic scientists would see in their entire working lives.’
‘I suppose,’ he said. But this time the hesitant note had been evicted from his voice, and he sounded pleased, even vindicated.
The comms manager’s voice stuttered into the cockpit on the radio. ‘Bravo Bravo, this is Adelaide calling. You can expect company this afternoon. Over.’
The pilot went to the microphone. ‘Roger that. Over.’
‘Who will come?’
He shrugged. ‘A mech, some scientists.’ He no longer seemed to care whether they were rescued. And suddenly there it was, another plane, taxiing to a stop in front of them. They heard no buzz, no sounds of arrival. The other Otter opened its hatch and out spilled a mechanic, the spare part, some fuel drums, and two scientists.
The shock of other people made her euphorically friendly. She threw her arms around the pilot and the mechanic, although she had met them both only once on base. But she was also cagey, territorial about the Otter, the tent, the lifeline, their nightly talks about fear and survival. Only now, with the arrival of outsiders, did she realise how quickly had they built a universe between them, how complete it had been.
In an instant they tilted from a surfeit of time to a dangerous absence of it. Again her life became a haze of urgent actions: boxes; secure straps; blank down; valance; dig; snow. The mech was perched on the wing of the Otter, of her Otter, the pilot busy with dials. The other two scientists, whom she had never before met, would spend a month down in the camp she had painstakingly erected. They were geologists. We heard you had to lay up, they said. Back on base the field operations manager had been tearing his hair out – would have, had he any left, they said, and laughed.
Within an hour their plane was fixed. The pilot let her help unblank it. The plan was to get the plane going, fly to the fuel depot, then grab a couple of hours sleep and start back to Adelaide base. They would be flying all night, the pilot said. It would take them six hours, ‘at least’, he said, to get back home.
They accelerated, skis sliding down the ramp of pristine snow. The wind snagged the Otter’s wings from above and threw them into the air in a violent, shuddering ascent. ‘Thermals’, the pilot said through the radio microphone, to reassure her.
The sun was a burnished white ellipsis in the sky. Fields of snow corrugated with sastrugi appeared beneath them, chromium in the glinting sun, raw mirrors from which they had to avert their eyes. As they rose, open meltpools appeared, then outlet glaciers, streaming toward the Bellingshausen Sea.
She looked back, over her shoulder, out the window.
‘Don’t look back.’ The sharpness of his tone startled her. She hauled her gaze forward.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. But I never look back. It’s a superstition, I guess,’ he said.
The altimeter clicked, rolling its numbers higher and higher: four, five, eight thousand feet. They cleared the mountains and levelled out, heading east, toward the fuel depot. For a while they flew straight, interrupted only by radio contact with Ice Blue, and base. Suddenly, the pilot said, here.
She understood immediately what he meant. She shook her head.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can do it. Just keep your eyes on the artificial horizon, then look out the window. Take your cue from the land. Try to feel you’re flying steady, then look back to the instrument panel to check. Keep your altitude, don’t vary more than a hundred metres. If I ask you to take it down, dip your wrists very slightly. Watch your trim. Here, I’ll show you.’
She put her hands on the controls and the pilot removed his. In her wrists lay the heaviness of the aircraft. It vibrated. Like an animal, she thought – the trembling, the indecision, the willingness to respond. As when she had ridden horses and directed their tonne of flesh with a flick of her wrist.
She flew it under his watchful eye, for how long she didn’t know – it might have been half an hour, or several hours. Time ceased to flow as it normally did, because everything she was doing was so new. She was coming into the world, all over again.
She flew until they were over the nunataks which ran in waves from the Ice Blue runway toward the interior. The pilot said, ‘Here, I’ll take her back.’ They dropped altitude and she watched the arrow on the altimeter swing round and round: 9,000, 8,000, down to 500 and then suddenly they were on the ground and skiing to a stop.
The two field assistants in the melon hut gave them the same euphoric welcome she had given the stranger geologists. The pilot took a skidoo to do a radio check with base. She could imagine the field operations manager, the chief pilot, ordering him to stay the night rather than risk flying on no sleep and him saying, I’ll tell you what I’m not going to risk, I’ve got one generator down and an indicator, the aft fuel pump...
At two in the morning they took off. When they had reached altitude he said here and again she took the plane in her hands. She had never concentrated so hard in her life. Her head throbbed with the effort.
The pilot might have noticed this because he said, ‘Here, give her back to me. I’ll take us down lower. You’ll be able to see – can’t sightsee much when you’re learning to fly.’
He dropped low to the ground, well underneath the mountains of Alexander Island to the west, a hundred miles away, over sliding serpentines of turquoise, glacial meltpools, minor freshwater lakes forming temporarily at the foot of a glacier. Some had amoebic, formless shapes, others drew sharp calligraphy with sudden upright characters.
Then the plane whipped over the cold white river of an ice stream. There were long blank periods when they did not talk, only looked down at the icefields, so void-like that her mind – whether through fatigue or some ordinary hallucination – began to produce a prairie and she saw w
heat, trees, a floor of flowers; faint things becoming visible, then melting back into the whiteness. She thought she saw wolves loping over the ice, but this was only the light, grey and feral, and the shadow of the Otter with the sun behind it.
She wanted to imprint all this on her memory: the sheets of sea ice beneath them, the cold gold light of the early morning sun on the snow, the pilot beside her, an exhausted vigilance in his eyes. But just as quickly as impressions formed, they slid from whatever had produced them, neurons or synapses, before she could capture them, and she understood that these moments were meant to be lived, not thought, not remembered or savoured. Any real joy and thrill contained within it this elusiveness, and she would have to learn to be still, to observe, not to grasp at these things, even as they slid away.
The evening light wanted to condense into dusk. Her body waited for it to happen, an unnameable force tugging from within her, at the strings of the universe, asking for night. But it remained stalled, just as the sun was anchored in the sky, low over the horizon but not set, emitting two flutes of violent mauve and gold. She had never seen a sky so phenomenal. It was like looking out to space from another planet, the heavens familiar but subtly rearranged.
Suddenly they were levelling out in front of a gravel airstrip. ‘Keep your hands on the controls, but don’t do anything,’ he instructed. ‘I want you to feel it.’
She felt the power then of what he could do. It was immense, it encircled her but was inside her, too, it emanated from the empty land below them and their aloneness and the clouds.
He powered the engines down and they opened the cockpit doors. The light that greeted them was of a perpetual dawn. The hangar doors were shut, base was quiet; only the Met man would be up at this hour. A gang of skuas circled lazily at the north end of the runway. The engines off, the only sounds were of the plane creaking from the effort of what it had been through, the hangar doors rattling in the wind, the distant hum of the generator, the skuas’ raw squawk.
