by Jean McNeil
Ascension is part of the quirky commute from the UK to the Falkland Islands and British Antarctic Territory. Before it was taken over by the UK and US military to be used as a mid-oceanic satellite/runway, its main use was as the Atlantic Relay Station for the BBC World Service, broadcasting to West Africa via vast electromagnetic installations that still stretch across a cindered lava field on the southern tip of the island. Nowadays it functions as a refuelling and spy station for the British and American governments. The island bristles with so many antennae, satellite domes, and giant wire contraptions like outsized dream catchers, I really did feel my cells buzz with microwaves.
Along with Tristan da Cunha and Easter Island, Ascension is also one of the most remote islands in the world. It lies nearly eight degrees south of the equator, on longitude 14°36’ W, a desolate meridian only shared, roughly, with Dakar, Senegal, and Tristan da Cunha. It is almost midway between Africa (1,600 kilometres away) and South America (1,400 kilometres away). The nearest landfall from Ascension is St. Helena, 1,300 kilometres to the southwest, and we had another 6,000 kilometres to fly to the Falklands. As I sat in the Cage that March morning, I wasn’t sure those distances defined anything at all. We were just very, very far away from anywhere else.
Two and a half years before, at Conference, as the yearly predeployment British Antarctic Survey gathering is called, I’d met a meteorologist who had done a six-month tour of duty on Ascension some years back. We stood clutching the stems of wineglasses in the cavernous dining hall at Girton College. I took to this met man: he was mischievous and slightly dishevelled. He wore professorial glasses and a striped polo shirt. He swayed in a way that suggested the glass in his hand was not his first of the evening.
“What goes on there?” I asked.
“You know, even though I was forecasting the weather for the UK and US military, I didn’t have security clearance.” He paused. “But there were flights nobody knows about coming in from the States to Botswana, Kenya, and Senegal.”
“Botswana?”
“Apparently. I didn’t even know Botswana had an army.”
He proceeded to tell me another few choice anecdotes about the military ops on the island. “And now,” he said, doing a little sashay of his hips and taking a step back from me, “I’m going to have to shoot you.”
My last trip to Ascension was two years before I landed up back in the Cage that March morning. Then, I’d spent five days on the island as part of my homeward journey from Antarctica, out of curiosity more than anything. “You should definitely do a layover there,” Paul, the director of the communications division at BAS, had advised. “It may be your only chance to see it. In fact you need permission from the governor to visit, but we can sort that out for you.”
On Ascension I hired a car and drove around the island’s forty kilometres of roadage in circles, in spirals. There were hardly any places on the island apart from military bases. The shabby conglomerations that did exist were called One Boat and Two Boat villages — Three Boats, it seemed, did not exist. I went to the gym at the RAF base, Travellers Hill, which looked like the summer camps I’d attended in Canada as a child, with flimsy wooden huts and beach towels hanging over the rails. Then I would drive down to the altogether more solid-looking American base, swinging by Wideawake Airfield on my way back into town, back to One Boat, then out to the BBC World Service radio transmitters with their signs warning of radiation. I convinced myself to drive up Green Mountain, the rainforested peak, and the only truly green landscape on the island’s ninety-eight square kilometres. I wound around the serpentining road, passing through eerily quiet pine forests full of giant boulders, until a lava flow blocked my way. If Ascension ever got tired of being a spy station it could make a good living as a film set for movies with titles like Volcano Apocalypse. Certainly this was what the genesis of earth must have looked like: a wasteland of lava flow rubble and cinder cones from its forty-four volcanic craters.
I tried to parse the land; just as the island has no native population, it has no native species. The trees and flowers of Green Mountain were planted here beginning in 1850 when deliveries of nursery trees, flowers, and plants arrived from the hothouses of England, Argentina, and South Africa. Now the forest atop Green Mountain captures the moisture of passing clouds, enticing it to fall on its flanks as rain.
The greening of the top of Ascension’s crater has been a great success; if it hadn’t happened, the island would look like Lanzarote. Buffeted by dry, sand-laden winds from the Sahara, it needed a long-term freightlift of trees to create enough rainfall for anything to grow. Ascension now has enough rainfall to support a menagerie of interestingly named species: the blushing snail, the bush cricket, babies’ toes, and bastard gumwood.
I walked the sand-blown streets of the “capital” (actually a collection of jerry-built sheds) Georgetown, spooked by the island’s remoteness, not caring whether I got sunburn on my Antarctic-white back. On the beach, giant green sea turtles tumbled ashore at night. I saw the tracks made by their flippers in the morning, the craters which they dug laboriously during the night to deposit their eggs. Nothing ever appeared on the horizon. The water and gas tankers permanently stationed offshore in case of shortages pirouetted on their anchors, and bored St. Helenan port guards slumped in pools of shade on the docks. Despite the heat, I couldn’t even muster the energy to swim in the municipal pool by the docks — the only place to swim on the island, as the surf was too rough, patrolled by suctioning breakers, or fringed with knife-edged basalt reefs. If these were not deterrent enough, the island’s waters fizzed with hammerhead sharks.
At night I sat on the floor of my room, accompanied by the bottle of Chilean shiraz I’d bought in the West Store in the Falklands, watching the single British Forces Broadcasting Services channel on an ancient TV. It wasn’t only my shrieking anxiety that kept me awake, but the coughing St. Helenan man in the cubicle next to me, as well as the feral donkeys that roamed the streets of Georgetown, squealing their banshee hee-haw call all night.
The only other guests were St. Helenans waiting for the ship home. A group of ladies addressed me. Dressed in Sunday church attire — neat polka-dotted dresses and blue hats — they sat on the veranda, watching the wild donkeys wander down the road.
“Hello,” they said amiably. “Are you married?”
“I — well.” I decided to lie. “Yes.”
“Oh,” they grinned. “Good!”
I went to walk away, then returned. “Why did you ask me if I was married?”
“Well, that’s what everyone wants to know on St. Helena.”
I didn’t say, You’re not on St. Helena now. I only smiled and basked in their approval.
Now, sitting again in the Cage, drinking my salty coffee, I realized every man looked like Tom: checked shirt, outmoded jeans, shoes a cross between hiking boot and trainer, complicated watches on their wrists. Their balding, often greying hair sheared sharply at the neck, their faces speckled with age spots from flying too close to the sun.
Sometimes I actually see Tom, or think I do — in the street, in train stations, airports — when in reality I saw him last two years before, on the apron of the aircraft hangar at Base R. Another Antarctic ghost.
I struggle with an aspect of my life which I can only term phantasmal. People come and go inexplicably, like badly announced characters in Elizabethan drama. They stand rigid in the spotlights, compelling, seemingly eternal. Then they vanish. I don’t kid myself I am innocent, nor do I think it’s a particularly unusual experience of life — that people are transitory, unreliable, unfathomable.
Still, on that morning on Ascension, I felt the return of a sensation I had in the Antarctic during the months I spent there two years ago. It was the impress, faint but unmistakeable, of a larger, nameless intelligence. I was under its jurisdiction again. Outlandish places not subject to the usual safeties of life make us feel more a
ware of the vulnerability and arbitrariness of our existences. Here I was on an island with no mobile phone signal, no cash machines, no cash for that matter — apart from the raucous St. Helenan currency, with its blue wirebirds and pink anemones. I was in a place that supports the Global Positioning System that tells us where to find a petrol station on our mobile phones, but which the UK and US would keep secret from the rest of the world, if they could, in an age of satellites and flight tracker airport codes. I felt the newness of the land there; it was still working out its level of commitment to the planet. It could be sucked back down to the ocean floor in an implosive volcanic burp, and all us with it.
Start from the beginning. I’ve learned this as a novelist, and it’s almost always good advice. But often a story begins in the middle, or even at the end. Just as the iceberg, once calved from the continent, revolves restlessly, caught in the gigantic gyre of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, we also turn round and round. We are not caught in a single line, a narrative, a parable that lurches from A to B, nor a circle, but in a spiral.
An announcement came over the tannoy. A snappy voice issued our orders.
“Attention, everyone; would squadron leader Christian please report to the Air Movements NCO. Would passengers replane the aircraft in the following order: officers, civilians, followed by personnel.”
On the RAF plane there was a new hierarchy, quite different from the über-businessmen or Home Counties Brahmins you see in first class on British Airways. Here the people in the front of the plane were the officers, while the squaddies and civilians travelled in steerage. There was a square for rank on the boarding pass (mine was “Ms”). Then there were the Falkland Islanders and the St. Helenans, who everyone calls “Saints.” A couple of Saints stood in front of me, sleepy in the early morning, slumped against each other, their hands around each other’s waists. This was their patch of the planet, our two-hour wait in the military lockup as unremarkable for them as a Heathrow transit lounge.
We filed toward the aircraft; I had the impression we all dragged our feet, reluctant to leave the tropical sun behind. In the southern hemisphere the planet had tipped into autumn. I could already feel its taciturn, enigmatic presence. Everyone in the British Antarctic crowd calls it simply “South.” As if everything else plunked south of the equator were drowned in the dazzling reality of the ice continent that needs no name, only a cardinal direction.
I remembered what Tom told me about the continent’s allure, the magnetic pull it exerts on you. We were sitting in the fuselage of the Twin Otter in a mild whiteout, waiting for the visibility to clear so that we could take off and return to base.
“I’ve been working South for twelve years now,” he said. “In the beginning, when I first flew down here, I couldn’t get it out of my head. In the winter I’d be working in the Falklands, or flying in the UK, and suddenly I’d have to stop what I was doing. I’d just see it: a solid plain of white. And need it somehow. I always felt reassured, knowing I was coming back here at the start of every new season.”
“And now?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. He looked … I don’t know what to call the expression. Defeated. Possibly guilty. “Now I see only the deprivations. Now, once I leave, it doesn’t seem real. Why do you imagine that is?”
“Maybe because your family isn’t there. No one you really love is there.”
“All I know,” he said, “is that once I leave it now, it stays behind me.”
Seated on the plane, an ancient DC-10 — a gas-guzzling 1970s model flown only by cargo companies these days, chartered by the RAF — I turned my face toward the day’s first rays, and felt the ghostly appeal of a journey I was not supposed to be making. I was on my way to the Falkland Islands, where I would undertake a two-month-long writing residency.
But I was supposed to be somewhere else. Most people I knew thought I was at sea in the Southern Ocean on a research vessel. Behind me lay an abandoned trip, a strange lie, and a catastrophe which I had, to an extent, foreseen. I was flying to the ends of the earth over empty ocean on a creaky plane, so I listened to myself for signs of the turmoil I felt only weeks before in Cape Town, and which vaulted me off my intended path.
I no longer felt I knew who I was. This had occurred to me before — the possibility that we do not own our own bodies, even our souls, rather they are on loan to us from the destiny-givers to see what we do with them. As for character and identity, those constellations of sparks and instincts and fears which drive us, these might be a necessary fiction in which we largely believe.
Then, a very few times in life, we do something — take a sudden and inexplicable decision, make an avoidable mistake, are overtaken by an emotional breakdown — that shows us that we don’t know who we are, or what we want, or even what we are going to do from one minute to the next. The illusion of the coherent self is spoiled, and we become strangers to ourselves, commuting between the mystery of our desires and the limits of our abilities.
Suddenly my limitations were just what they were: limiting. I hardly needed the mesh and wire with which the Royal Air Force had seen fit to enclose me. I was my own cage.
Some places do stay behind you. But others refuse to assume their rightful position on the linear timeline. These form islands in the river of time and in memory, persistent and opaque. There live people and events that happen over and over again, spiralling out beyond that which can be described as already experienced and so known; something about them is being worked out on a timescale far grander than the moment, or our individual lives. They are the past, but the future also.
Max, the climatologist I met in the Antarctic, told me how computer code gave him entry into the hidden pockets of the continents’ past, so that he could make accurate predictions about the rate and intensity of the warming planet: “If you want to know the future,” he said, his voice ringing with the bell-like certainty of the very young, “you must look into the past.”
We roared up the four-kilometre-long runway, the fifty-something Texan stewardesses of the aircraft leasing company vibrating in their seats. Then we were aloft, and the air around us tightened with sudden cold. There would be ten hours of ocean and sky before we saw another scrap of land.
The plane banked, then righted itself over the brittle edges of the island, its shark-stocked waters. We were back in the troposphere. The ancient plane roared. Its nose pointed away from Africa, South America, toward a nullity. We were heading south.
2.
A PROPHECY
rime
A white or milky opaque granular deposit of ice which forms on exposed objects at temperatures below the freezing point.
The taxi serpentined around roundabouts, past hulking gabled buildings, grey-brown, sandstone, russet, which poked out of woodlands and puffy trees and clearings like eternally reposing cranes. Cyclists streamed past, dressed in tweed and demure skirts, as if time had stood still, or maybe they were extras in a film, a biopic of Wittgenstein or Turing perhaps, or any one of the great minds who had flowered there.
Cambridge, of course. There is nowhere like it, with its ashy buildings and Waitroses where Nobel Prize–winning physicists queue to buy sushi.
We had an Indian summer that year. It was a warm day in early September. The train from London had passed through hot horizontal towns and fields so flat and neat, it was as if they’d been drawn with crayon.
I shared a taxi from the station with Suzanne, a Cornish sculptor, lately a Londoner like me, who was to be the visual artist that year on the programme. She would make ceramic sculptures not of ice but of the outbuildings and electrical installations, the VSAT domes and the mechanized snow-movers found there — the unlovely detritus of heavy machinery. “Post-industrial aesthetic,” she explained.
We didn’t know what to expect. Only that we’d been told any trip with the British Antarctic Survey starts at a red brick C
ambridge college. Here, as summer draws to a close, hundreds of people with disparate jobs and nationalities converge for a three-day-long conference. They have only one thing in common: Antarctica.
The British Antarctic Survey has one of the longest-running programmes of Antarctic science among the thirty-odd nations that maintain research programmes on the continent. In part this endeavour is a hangover from the great British era of polar exploration, led by the Edwardian hero-rivals of Antarctic discovery, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton. Nowadays BAS is purely scientific, although its prowess in earth sciences and physics has been supported by Britain’s long expertise in mounting Antarctic expeditions.
Girton College had been hosting BAS’ summer conference for as long as anyone could remember. As a building, it was strict and imposing. To escape its endless hallways and grumpy portraits of past dons, I went for a run around its perimeter that first day, and had a strange experience. As I was running, a mass of air, person-sized, came up behind me and whispered something across my neck. I started and looked around me, but there was no one there — no other runner, no would-be assailant. I remembered the gust of air that accompanied that voice long afterward. It had mass; it was electric but invisible. Girton must have its share of ghosts, I thought, particularly the ghosts of unhappy young women married off after obtaining a token education — for most of its history it was a women-only college.
In its basement bar those nights, young men and women wearing fleeces honed their pool-playing skills and drank pitcher-sized mugs of beer. It was bracing to suddenly be in the company of so many young people. The atmosphere was boisterous, heady. Everyone looked the picture of health; most of the field assistants, as the mountaineers who accompanied scientists on expeditions were called, had just descended a mountain to attend Conference. After it was over, they would return to Snowdonia or the Cairngorms to perch anew, waiting the waning of the days when they could trade northern hemisphere summits for their cousins in the Antarctic.
