by Jean McNeil
‘What are those?’
‘Grounding lines.They show where the ice starts to float.’ Luke had been true to his word. He organised it for her to be a co-pilot, so that she could see this landscape. The ice-core team were uplifted a week before, they were already back in the UK. Nara and Luke would collect equipment left behind; they would stay at Berkner for three or four hours and then fly back to base.
Luke banked the plane and swung them out to sea so that she could see the sea-smoke and the frazil ice. Then he levelled out the aircraft to approach the ice shelf with their nose to the south.
They touched down with a jolt. The now-familiar flurry of ice crystals flew up and coated the windscreen. They bumped to a stop, and he cut the engines. They climbed out into a silence so profound it had a sound, like bells ringing all around them. It was New Year’s Day.
For a while Nara stands completely still on the ice sheet, forearm thrown across her brow to shield her eyes. Here even her sunglasses are not enough to cut the glare. Unlike in the Ellsworths, there are no mountains to puncture the skyline at Berkner. There is no visual field, only mist, veils, languid sheets of white muslin. They hang in the air until dispersed by wind. The light and energy mass balance do not change throughout the day at this time of year. The snow is different from the snow on the peninsula. Here it is hard white meringue, sliced by sastrugi.
She can see the plane’s ski tracks from where Luke has come and gone before, when the ice-coring team were there. Then he had also landed into the south, making his final approach over the ocean. He’d had no windsock to guide him, only the Met Man’s predictions over at the base, whatever Horace the computer model was saying about wind direction over the Weddell, and his intuition.
They look toward the sea. The edge of the ice cliffs is twelve kilometres away, but it looks more like a few hundred metres. A gigantic iceberg is adrift, not more than a kilometre from the coast. But this might be an illusion, the mirage they call the fata morgana.
Nara walks toward the camp, mounting and descending each of the sharp sastrugi wavelets, the wind tossing miniature clouds of snow crystals upward. A smoky, dry ice place, vapourless. An intense dryness burns the back of her throat. Parked on the ice sheet, the plane looks enormous, much larger than usual – another optical illusion.
The surface of the snow shines, hardened gelatin under an enamel sky.
They put on their full padded thermal boiler suits and went to work. First they fired up a skidoo and harnessed a sledge to tow the boxes into the plane. But first the Avtur fuel barrels would have to be placed in the underground ice-chamber used for this purpose. If time allowed, they would fire up the plane’s Primus stove and have a cup of tea. Then they would load up the plane and leave.
Luke laid two planks out of the back of the Otter as a ramp for rolling the fuel drums out. Once the heavy drums had thundered down their makeshift slide, they lashed them to the sled. Nara towed them to the fuel depot on the skidoo while Luke manoeuvred the remaining drums into position at the top of the ramp. They input ten drums this way, in preparation for next season’s drilling.
It was time to pick up the ice-coring equipment. The A-frame aluminium hut that covered the ice-coring chamber was blown in with snow. They each grabbed a shovel and dug. All this they did in silence, without stopping to comment.
Then they broke for tea. She went to collect snow while Luke fired up the Primus. They did this without any discussion or negotiation over who would do what. They decided to have their tea outside, in the sun. There they sat, backs to the corrugated wall of the weather haven, while the sun beat down on them. Between the exertion, the heat of the sun and the tea, they were finally warm.
They rose from their tea break in silence. The rest of the equipment was stored in a weather haven fifty feet away from the A-frame entrance. She went to fetch it. Inside the weather haven, it was cold. She put back on her layers, readjusted her salopettes, put on her fleece.
The door opened. She turned around to see Luke standing there. Behind him, the flimsy door slammed shut in the wind. Suddenly it was dark inside.
He advanced toward her. She did not feel fear – she had never been afraid of him – but her heart pounded painfully, driven by a giddy recklessness, a bizarre expectation. She told herself, whatever happens, I won’t care. I will survive it.
His face was drawn; little hooks tugged at the edges of his mouth. His blue-grey eyes were darker than she remembered, the terse, brooding look within them denser. She had seen this before, this was nothing new. But in the past she was able to brush it away as tiredness. Eyes so tired from looking at empty sky.
‘Luke?’ How strange it sounded. She used his name so rarely. It was not an idle or self-protective use. It was not a shield.
He stayed there, in front of her.
She had a powerful feeling of things gathered, or gathering in front of her. Spies or sentries had forewarned them that she would take this path, and they had been waiting for her.
Luke came closer, his body blocking the light from behind him. The weather haven became darker, as if a cloud had passed over. But there were no clouds in their sky.
She stared at his mouth, watching it become larger and larger, until his mouth was the world. She felt his mouth on hers. The kiss was soft, not insistent. She kissed him back. There was no word for the loneliness that overtook her then. It moved through her and inside her, like a gust of wind searching for an exit.
He turned away. The weather haven was suddenly an empty chamber of cold. Outside it, the white plain unpleated its skirts. Apart from a few emperor penguins, the seals, the Orcas and leopard seals that patrolled the waters of the Weddell, they were the only two things alive for at least a thousand miles in all directions.
She wanted to say, I’m so sorry. She wanted to say, You are my family. But she could not open her mouth, she could not form the words. She had an urge to sit down and let events overtake her. After a while – later she would be unable to recall how long – she walked out of the weather haven to see the plane taxiing along the snow.
She stood still, she could not move; it was as if she had suddenly put down roots into the ice. She watched the Otter slide away from her. When it lifted off, she half-cheered it into the air, out of habit.
At first she took an interest in her abandonment. She thought: How strange. She imagined him returning, imagined herself climbing, sullen, miserable, unresponsive, into the cockpit. What are you going to do next? Crash the plane?
She watched as the plane rose into the sky, knowing in some chamber of her being that her life depended upon it, yet curiously detached, thinking: now the plane will turn. Now, now, now.
As he flew away he drank in the bitter chromium glint, the sun, the blinding blankness of the ice sheet. He no longer loved this landscape, he no longer even liked it, he realised, although he could tolerate the landscape around base, the mountains with their bruised glamour.
Almost as soon as he was in the air the camp – weather havens, bamboo flags, the aluminium A-frame which covered the entrance to the ice-coring chamber, the skidoos covered with tarpaulins – vanished into the ice sheet. He concentrated on his instrument readings, on the empty sky in front of him, on the distance he had to go, until Midas.
Watch, altimeter, speed, fuel gauge, watch, altimeter, speed, fuel gauge.
He banked left and flew over the ice shelf. It was thinning rapidly at the edges into a thin parchment of frazil ice. He saw vast sheets of ice flowers, rime, glare ice, ice pans. Yes, this was his favourite time of year, the time of the high summer sea ice. In a week perhaps the tetrahedrons would fragment into smaller and smaller floes, and the Weddell would open, if only for a month.
It was in this sea, just to the north of his present position, where Shackleton’s Endurance had become trapped in pack. Over a hundred years later they were still all but unnavigable, these waters; apart from heavy, powerful icebreakers no ship could get in. Years ago he had spent a week in a
ship in these waters, moored off an ice shelf, flying fuel from the ship into the Bluefields depot. He remembered only the cold, grit ice crystals in his face, as if it were a sandstorm.
Yes, he wanted to live by the facts of experience, and not by abstract ideas. Occurrence is mysterious. He liked its dark energy: the positive, the negative. Both were present in all the things he had seen in his life – the black snows of Marble Hills in the silver Antarctic sun, so platinum it looked like moonlight, or the abyss of the crevasse, the white body of the albatross as it rode the endless thermals.
He does not know what he will say – to Midas, to field ops. But he will think of something. He has an hour and forty minutes to fly yet.
The plane flew away, higher and higher and still she expected it to come back for her. Something must have gone terribly wrong; Luke had lost his rudder, his hydraulics, and he could only fly in a straight line.
She was hit by blowing snow in the face, because she had taken off her sunglasses to strain for the plane. It stung; the snow was thin and grainy, like sand. The white was too sharp, too intense. She risked burning her corneas. She put the glasses back on.
The wind caught her unawares, from the back. She knew that Berkner was one of the most windy, exposed places in the western Antarctic, much more so than the peninsula. If the wind picked up speed she would not be able to stand. She pictured herself being blown over the icefields like a tent or a sleeping bag, tumbling over and over until she was tipped over the cliff and into the icy sea.
The idea of the plane was so strong in her mind that she nearly willed it into existence. The plane blaring through the sky, vermilion, ecstatic.
But even as she thought it, she knew he was gone, due east, to Midas. There he will land and someone will notice she is not with him. She is logged on the roster, Adelaide base Ops know she went out as his co-pilot. Midas will radio to Adelaide to say, something’s happened.
But what if he tells them she is dead, that there has been an accident, the body unrecoverable? Would they believe him? Would they come to look for her anyway? The burn of the sun disappears under a skein of thin cloud. She is already thirsty. Unless she finds a manfood box and a Primus with meths, she will not eat, she will not be able to melt snow. She will have to eat snow, but this does not satisfy the body roasted under a summer polar sun, cooling its insides even as it dehydrates from insufficient liquid. She remembered this particular irony from one of her field-training sessions: people die of dehydration in the Antarctic, because although surrounded by the greatest mass of fresh water in the world, it is in the wrong form. The human mouth cannot melt enough ice on its own to quench its thirst.
She jolted awake, fully clothed, into the blare of perpetual day.
I am very cold. Then, another hasty thought, too quick, on the back of an accelerating heartbeat: mustn’t sleep. All her training told her that she must sleep only when protected by goose down, by the heat of a Tilley Lamp.
She went outside the weather haven and looked out to sea. Loose pack. Ice pans. Glare ice. A steep descent toward open water. She would run to the edge, and throw herself off. How else to avoid slowly freezing or starving? Even if an emperor penguin did wander across her field of vision, she would have nothing to kill it with.
She had been reading South, by Shackleton, that past winter, just before Alexander’s accident. She read how the old explorers were sickened by an unrelenting diet of penguin and seal-meat, its rubbery, fish-stew taste. How small fissures in the ice yawed like chasms, how they lived in a perpetual terror of crevasses. Shackleton’s men were so tired of waking in their tents, alarm surfacing through them as the ice shifts beneath them. They were stranded on ice floes in the Weddell Sea, not far from her weather haven. They might never see England again. Trapped on the ice, watching their ice island become smaller and smaller, they watched as killer whales circled, mistaking them for seals, the shriek and gurn of their voices. For two of the men, the experience erodes their sanity, their trust in their God, which after all might be the same thing. Although strangely this disintegration was a slow process, taking many months to happen, and the men held it together until nearly the end, only becoming insane on the eve of their rescue.
She can see them on the horizon, just behind the curtain of sea-smoke that rises from the ocean and billows out over the ice plateau. Figures bundled in grey, marching through snow. Are they soldiers, or refugees? No, now they are playing a game of soccer, they rush toward each other, hug, rush away.
The visions evaporate with the sea-smoke.
She listens for the voice. But the voice is not there, or it has nothing to say.
Rummaging around the camp she finds the ice-coring chamber is empty of anything that might keep her alive, such as food or a radio. Although she does find an old report, fuel, boxes of machinery and drilling fluids. She looked up: the sun was mistaken, square, a tile plastered against the sky. The air hurt her lungs. Sweat had dried now, and created a layer of subtle chill on her skin. She shivered and went to try to find a shovel.
Firn, ablation. Basal shear stress. Alexander is looking at scars, at foliations, the convex direction of flow. Narrow tensional cracks which have closed or been filled with snow or refrozen meltwater, cracks into which water has percolated and frozen.
Fourteen thousand miles away in Devon, as far away as it is possible to be on this planet, Alexander is at work in the spare room of his mother’s house.
Glaciers formed by the merging of two or more tributaries often have a separate system of arcs corresponding to each tributary with longitudinal folaition near the boundaries between them.
Ice never lies. It is older than us, better than us, with its intersections of honesty, its shards of hard truth. Ice exists only to build more of itself, and to preserve the record. There is no melt in the crystal desert, no possibility of erasure. The bodies of the dead explorers may never be found, but they are still there, trapped in the ice.
His virtual ice is less treacherous than the real thing. He discovered that he did not need to live on the ice in order to believe in it. He did not mind theorising without data. His was a theoretical field, after all; he built his own horizontal distances and velocities. He built the ice sheets of the past and the future, with no thought for the land they covered, which would one day be unburdened from its glacial slumber, into spring.
His needs are equally simple. He needs to be unconfined. He needs no one to have a piece of him. He is interested in other people only in inverse relationship to the extent to which they are interested in him: a simple equation, with perfect symmetry. What he can keep for himself, what he can give away. He is one of those people who will give very little, and for this reason someone or other will always want him.
It is New Year’s Day and he goes for a walk on a small crescent beach near his mother’s Devon home. He has already decided to return to the Antarctic in February, to finish his fieldwork. Without another two months on base he cannot complete his PhD. An uncompleted PhD means no conferences, post-docs, papers, panels, invitations to speak, no colleagues, no place in the world as a prophet of its disintegration.
It is ten degrees; England is warm now, even in winter, although within ten years the mean temperature could drop ten degrees, plunging the British Isles into its own ice age. This is if the Meridonal Overturning Current – the Gulf Stream – shifts, dislodged by cold fresh water melted from the Greenland Ice Cap. He has seen the models, they mostly agree on this scenario.
For now, he will enjoy this perpetual spring which has replaced their winter. The diluted spring light, the English Channel. The Antarctic feels very far away, now. He has no idea of the drama which is playing out there, for Nara, as he sinks his bare feet into the cold sand on a beach fourteen thousand miles away. He can almost not believe in the Antarctic’s existence, as if it is a shape which has been hastily sketched on the globe, an experiment in balancing the symmetry of the planet. Even though he has lived through a winter there – or par
t of a winter, his mind still skates over the accident – still it is not quite real.
She saw the plane before she heard it, coming at her through an unbroken veil of ice crystals. The sun dimmed and flared in the sky. The lace of ice, dry as dust, filled the air. The sun shone through it, rigid silver pearls of polar sun. She wanted to touch them. She took her hand out of her glove, fingering them. They settled upon her skin, where they melted. Slowly, as if from a long way away, the sensation came to her: her fingertips stung. In another few seconds they would freeze. She put her hand back inside the glove.
Then he is coming toward her and she wants to put her hand out, again: Stop! You’re not real! Go away! Then his arms are around her, her cheek thrust into a boiler suit. A cascade of words, all the same: I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry.
She sat down, or collapsed. She got back up again; she was reluctant to stop moving. As long as she kept moving and was under the heat of the sun, her core temperature would stay high enough. She ran in a circle. Her throat was parched. She stopped, and sat down again. The snow was coarse and grainy, it smothered her footsteps. The wind was not wind, but a thousand tiny fiery quartz spears.
The knot in her gut spelled an old word, something to do with sin, with memory. With a vanishing. Light, but within it a black pit, the stone of an olive. Her mind was a curling black bone of treason. She was alone, finally, caught in this bright albedo snare. She saw no aliens, no wolves. Only this rigid God’s country spread all around her, its vacant glinting squalor.
Luke – he must be real! – was still saying sorry, sorry, sorry.
A thin curtain of snow crystals blew up all around her. Refracted through the sun they turned blue, and suddenly she saw the sheets of ice all around her as blue, fields and fields of throbbing turquoise, indigo, cerulean: Bluefields.
