by Jean McNeil
I wake out of a long sleep into a world of white ashes. Black trees against the sky, black birds threading through their branches. White snowfields, last year’s hay sticking out, sparse and spiky, like tiny plinths of brown glass. I am left alone on the veranda, swaddled in blankets. They had done this for generations — putting infants outside in temperatures of minus thirty to toughen them up.
At ten years old I still do this — cover myself in the rabbit fur blankets I have made from animals I have trapped and skinned myself. Our skies are empty. No planes traverse them. There is no roar of traffic, apart from the rip of the odd car that winds its way up the denim tarmac of our road. But there is a hum, barely audible, a fizz at its edges. This is the sound I will not hear again until I go to Antarctica — the sound of blood coursing through my veins, the low-frequency electricity produced by a body.
The hayfields are dun. The leaves are magenta but the earth is a defeated sallow yellow, clammed up for the year. It is October. The land awaits its annual devastation of winter.
Autumn is our time of industry; from September to November we stockpile; autumn is hunting season; every day the air is pockmarked by the retorts of rifles. At eight years old I know how to hold and fire a gun, at ten I am allowed to kill.
My great-grandmother is the best shot in the family; when my grandfather was my age she taught him to shoot. Now it is my turn. First she backs me up against a tree so that I won’t be knocked over by the recoil. She teaches me to clean and load the rifle, and how to keep ammunition safe. One of the first things I learned to read was the gauge on a bullet box.
In autumn there are rabbits to be skinned, partridge and grouse to be hung and plucked. These too will go into the freezer. In the garden plums must be harvested and made into jams, pies, muffins, cakes, conserves, just as in the summer we had done the same with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries, in that order. All this we have learned from my great-grandmother, who is as competent a woodsman as any man, as well as a resourceful homemaker. It is she who crochets our rugs, sews the quilts, skins the animals for the furs we sleep under.
Even now that my great-grandmother is a knock-kneed old lady, I fear her. Something inside her is missing, some essential ingredient. Like a missing limb, she can survive without it. She is amusing in the way that all my family members are — characters on a stage-set, given to contradiction and confrontation, but even at ten years old I can tell she is a strategic, manipulative character who seeks purely her own advantage.
I hop off the veranda, ready for my next lesson. I follow her; she has a rifle slung under her shoulder and is dressed in a lumberjack shirt. She smokes a pipe. From behind, it is impossible to tell if she is woman or man.
The land is making strange sounds. It creaks and sighs. A hush has befallen it, not a voluntary one. Somehow I know no good can come out of the long, silent winter to come.
I am eleven. The veranda is gone. The house is gone. These things have been whisked away from us like a magician’s trick, the one with the tea set and the tablecloth. We are all that is left. We are the table.
My grandfather has terrible car karma. He buys a succession of second-hand cars — Ford this, Chevrolet that — with something wrong. If it’s not the steering, it’s the alternator. Cue many hours spent at crossroads with the hood up. We have to hitchhike home. We make a great vagabond team — he gets maximum mileage out of the driver while I charm them.
Other times he disappears and we discover he’s been up with the Buddhists. I am not sure what Buddhists are, but they have established a monastery up the cape. Apparently our province rests on very powerful ley lines. He tells us this when he comes home from his mystery weekends at the monastery, where he has a whale of a time playing the harmonica and telling stories about the days when entire families — horses and dogs too — were lost through the ice on the inland sea where we live.
The Buddhists drop him off, sober, on Monday mornings. By then my grandmother is convinced he has been dead in a ditch somewhere for at least two days. He brings home the excellent macrobiotic muffins the Buddhists bake.
Other times I find him in the bathroom, applying mascara. He had most of his eyebrows and eyelashes singed off in a tank in the war. This was in Sicily — he was the only of his buddies to get out of that tank alive. He liked to apply mascara to accentuate the sparse strands that were left.
“It looks good, don’t you think?” Frankenstein turns to me. These are the days before waterproof mascara.
“I think you should use less, maybe,” I say, dabbing away the rivulets of black with a Q-tip.
“You know so much about damned mascara, you put it on me.”
“There,” I say and hand the wand back to him.
He looks in the mirror and grins. He will do this later too, when he has lost all his teeth — take out his false teeth and grin ludicrously in the mirror, making faces at himself with his gummy, suddenly old-man’s, smile.
6. the
ORIGIN AND EFFECT of water
pressure ice
Ice having any readily observed roughness of the surface. Ice that has a history of disturbed growth and development.
December 10th
I hesitate on the threshold of the door to Max’s cabin. He has summoned me by remote, sending me an email from his cabin one deck above.
He has told me more about his life in the past few days. He tells me he spent the year between undergrad and graduate school working on “luxury yachts” in the Caribbean. As an experienced sailor, he was “a crew member, not just a glorified waiter. I did some of the sailing.”
“How was it?”
He shrugs. “The people were rich. The women were hot.”
“No, I mean, how was it, really?”
He scowls. “I suppose it wasn’t that illuminating. Or not as much as I’d hoped. I got to do a lot of really cool sailing. But otherwise it was monotonous. Very wealthy people are so boring. I missed my mum, actually.”
His mother is a lawyer. She works for the Red Cross in Geneva; currently she is in Sudan, he tells me, helping create a civil code for women’s rights. He is very proud of her. His father he is more cagey about. “He’s in Dubai, now. I think.” He tells me about his sister who is several years older. “She’s doing a stage at the UN in Nairobi.”
“What do you tell your family about the Antarctic, so far?”
“That it’s beautiful. And cold.”
Hot. Cold. His language is Iceland, fire and ice. Yet he is unmoved by experience, largely. What will animate him into passion? There is an inert quality to his being; he is daring experience to prod him into motion. He seems committed to finding everything underimpressive; even the corners of his mouth express this, how they turn down very neatly, like bedsheets in an expensive hotel.
This kind of brazen confidence ought to have thrown a dead zone around him, a sapping energetic field. But there is a countercurrent: a strict generosity, a willingness to talk to anyone, a sense of wonder about how the world works which is fresh and untainted by cynicism. Only under interrogation about his life or his feelings does he become inert, determined to reduce experience to unsatisfactory rubble.
The ship was sawing through the remote twilight we would come to equate with the Antarctic over the next few days, an interstitial light, neither day nor night. The screen of Max’s laptop showed lines and lines of hieroglyphs; sequences of letters, numbers, and symbols known as computer code.
Again we talked about our shared vision of a cold, slumbering earth trapped in a winter that would last ten thousand years. Humans lacked the lifespan to have witnessed this complete seizure, although modern man saw the tail end of the last ice age slightly less than ten thousand years ago.
Would there have been an observable moment when the ice sheets began to retract their long fingers, raking them over the land? W
ould those early hunter-gatherers have been aware of how the climate balance had shifted, could they have intuited the repeal of their hunger? The caribou would return, the seas retract, exposing shoals of flopping fish. Was there an observable turning point? This was the focus of Max’s calculations.
I thought of how, as a literary form, the novella flourished in nineteenth-century Germany. Literary lions of the day such as T. W. Schlegel and E. T. A. Hoffmann made their names on this slim conundrum that hovered between a short story and a novel. The literary critics of the age identified a common denominator in this new literary form, at the time called a nouvelle, the French word for “news” and also “new.” The novellas rotated on a turning point, the critics noted: in German, wendepunkt. There was an identifiable moment in these works that you could locate and which both changed and redefined everything that came after, recasting the events before it in a bright bath of aftermath.
I realized that in my own work as a writer I was following this principle, more or less: a story or a novel should have a moment which, if you could rescind it, would recast all that then happens. A moment that rewrites the future.
“Can you show me a picture of all this?” I asked Max. I was hoping to see a three-dimensional model, not just numbers.
“Of course.” Max switched screens and a glacial, watery landmass came into view. Beneath the visual model was a list of categories: sum of separate drags, sliding velocities, shear stress. He had written more categories: debris in ice, subglacial water pressure.
“What’s this for?”
“The chapter I’m writing about the origin and effect of water.”
The phrase stalled in my mind. The origin and effect of water. Max’s glacial, waterlogged landscape was familiar. I saw conifers, bogs, gneiss, schist. The gouged peninsula province I had come from. Clouds of summer blackflies, moose, wolves. Then came a disorderly succession of images, like a film which has been hacked apart. They were of the trailer we lived in, after we were evicted from our grand clapboard house. Houses burning down, car accidents, funerals, abandoned houses, more car accidents, drinking, more drinking, arrests or near-arrests, miraculous reprieves, escapes in the middle of the night.
If I had had Max’s knowledge, what would I have become? To be jealous of someone’s knowledge is perhaps not very different and no more noble than to be jealous of their possessions. I studied the hieroglyphics of his mathematics equations again. I am too old, I thought, I will never know what they mean.
“I’m going to the salinometer room. Want to come?”
I was overtaken by a sudden gust of loneliness. I didn’t feel like returning to my cabin, populated as it was by postcards of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition and its mournful sled dogs watching as their ship is devoured by ice.
In the salinometer room, Max sat on a stool in his typical eagle posture, alert, long limbs tucked underneath him. I stood with my back to the sink, legs planted wide apart, for ballast. Our knees absorbed the shock of the hull’s contact with the concrete surface of the ocean. It felt as if the steel of the ship were only the thinnest of membranes.
“Why does water freeze?” Max interrogated me.
“Because it gets cold.”
He scowled. He wanted a real answer. Max then began to tell me a story which still perplexes me.
Ice crystals are of course made of water; but here, on this simple scientific terrain, we encounter a mystery — one which governs not only the behaviour of water, but of ice, and by cause and effect, everything in the planet.
Crystals begin life as water. But in an age of nuclear fission and particle physics, the way water behaves as it freezes is still a puzzle. When they freeze, most substances shrink and become denser. Water is unique: it expands and becomes less dense. If water did not behave this way there would be no life on earth; if ice were more dense than water it would sink to the bottom of the world’s lakes and oceans, choking them with ice, allowing no room for the water that has given birth to and supported multiorganism life on the planet for billions of years. Because ice is less dense than water it floats, which means that water freezes only when it comes into contact with the bottom layer of ice, so freezing from the top down, and leaving the depths of oceans, even at very cold temperatures, free to sustain life.
Max and I looked at our watches in the same instant, but we hardly needed them. Our institutionalized stomachs knew the time, six twenty-five p.m. In five minutes dinner would be served. We bolted from the lab to get changed.
That evening we were again separated. Max sat opposite the captain, on whom he tried out his interrogating intelligence. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I watched the body language. Captain David bristled slightly at Max’s lack of deference. I wanted to sidle up to Max and suggest that annoying the captain on an Antarctic vessel was not a smart move — he might be put ashore on a penguin colony or to man a lone radio mast until another BAS ship returned in a year’s time.
As the main course of seared scallops was served, icebergs loomed in the saloon’s windows. There we were in our finery, drinking a bottle of Macon-Villages, watched over by portraits of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, but if the ship were to founder on an undetected flank of iceberg we would be instantly pitched into a struggle for survival. I pictured us upended, me in my black trousers and boots, awash in a cold soup of polar water, ice, and vomit, huddled in an inflated flotation raft.
The ship wound through the alley of bergs. They slipped past, their flanks amber with the reflection of a perpetually setting sun.
December 11th
I wake in the middle of the night to the churn of the bow thrusters. We are stopped again. Under normal circumstances a ship stopped in the open ocean means disaster, and even a landlubber’s body seems to understand this on instinct.
Every sixty kilometres or so, the officers are required to hold the ship as still as possible so that the conductivity, temperature, and density of the water column can be measured. The repeat hydrography of the Drake Passage is an annual study of the water column of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. All the oceanographers call this journey a “transect.” It’s examined at the same time at exactly the same places each year. The coordinates are taken from GPS and stops — called stations — are marked on the Master’s chart with small X’s.
The engines are cut. The waves don’t like our stillness. They slap and bounce against the hull, the greedy note to their attentions which is absent when we are in motion. I have a sense of what it would be like were the ship to founder in these seas. Those videos I watched before I left London, nights Googling “freak wave disasters” and watching YouTube videos titled “Terrifying monster wave hits cruise ship.” I remember that on average each week two ships disappear, globally. No one knows what happened to them. If they were aircraft, it would be a major story. Freak waves are becoming more common. The place they occur with most frequency: the Southern Ocean.
In the UIC Lab (whose full snappy name, the Underway Instrument Control Lab, we never used, for obvious reasons), I found Nils in front of his computer, feet propped up on a table once again. A different river of numbers cascaded from the top to the bottom of his computer screen, too fast to read.
Nils was two years away from completing a PhD on carbon dioxide uptake in the Southern Ocean. Trained as a physicist, like Max he wanted to apply his knowledge to understanding climate change, so he’d switched to oceanography.
“Why are we doing these CTDs?” I asked.
“Because the Southern Ocean plays a major role in the ocean-atmosphere climate system. Basically, if it didn’t behave as it does, the Gulf Stream wouldn’t exist, or many other currents for that matter. We’re trying to understand if the Drake Passage is warming, long-term, and if so, at which level in the water column.”
Nils explained all this in his calm, future lecturer’s manner. Nils was so much more a likely friend th
an Max on this journey. He was a meditative, pleasant person. He was prone to borrowing the books I had brought as references, however obscure, reading them and inserting those Post-it index markers at passages that struck him. He was capable of remorse, as demonstrated in conversations about past relationships gone wrong, whereas for Max remorse might as well be a tree hyrax or a rare chameleon. Yet somehow our friendship, while cordial, never blossomed into real understanding.
Instead it was Max, incendiary and moody, who had become my unlikely confidante. He dropped into my cabin with unbidden cups of tea. He revealed his uncertainties — that he had them at all reassured me he was mortal. But confidence came at a price. I know he thought me peculiar, eccentric. Like many young people, he felt a distrust in the face of my years on the planet, as if experience was something unsavoury. He cast me suspicious looks, as if I might be his secret enemy, and so he needed to hold me close with these daily invasions of my space. If I approached him when hunched over his laptop in the lab, he stiffened and switched the screen.
“I’m not working for MI5, you know.”
The shutter came down on his eyes. “I’m naturally secretive.”
“As if that’s something to be proud of.”
It was too early to have an outright confrontation — we were all going to be on this ship for at least another ten days — so I walked away.
I wandered around the ship with my notebook and mini-disc recorder, writing down gnomic phrases from the Master’s Night Orders book, from the Admiralty charts of the Southern Ocean, taking photographs of the instruments and GPS readouts, of the radar screen with its little yellow wedges scattered in a field of midnight blue.
