Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  The winch came down, hooked onto the RIB, and we were levered into the air, whole, and swung onto the aft deck. The ship felt more stable than a planet. It felt like home.

  That night we glided through a channel between Anvers Island and the peninsula.

  “Why aren’t we in open water?” I asked Martin, who had finished his watch on the bridge and come down to the bar to have a drink.

  “Dunno. The Old Man must have an idea.” The officers called David alternately “Captain” or, when he was not present, “The Old Man” — possibly a term of endearment, possibly a rank-and-file custom. David didn’t look particularly old; he had begun his career when a young man, and that year was his twenty-seventh season in ice. It was also his last. After this cruise he would retire, and this gave our voyage a sense of finality, as if his retirement was not only a milestone for him but for the organization itself. When we reached base — at that point there was no question of if we reached base — there would be a party to bid him goodbye.

  Caroline the diver and I went up onto the bridge and found David there, alone apart from an able seaman keeping lookout to starboard. David wore jeans, a cable-knit sweater, and — incongruously, on such a manly Englishman — clogs; with his jeans rolled up on one leg, exposing calves more sinew than flesh, he strode from chart table to console, whipping out the flag-sized pieces of paper on which detailed nautical charts were drawn. He greeted us but seemed preoccupied. I went to the chart board. Our course was drawn, as usual, in pencil — lines crossed with x’s showed the distance we had travelled, and the time of our position. A message flashed on the electronic maps displayed on the ship’s computers: Warning — uncharted waters.

  Caroline and I decided to recite “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” To our mutual surprise we could remember entire chunks of it. We parked ourselves at front of the bridge and chanted:

  And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he

  Was tyrannous and strong:

  He struck with his o’ertaking wings,

  And chased us south along.

  With sloping masts and dipping prow,

  As who pursued with yell and blow

  Still treads the shadow of his foe,

  And forward bends his head,

  The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

  The southward aye we fled.

  And now there came both mist and snow,

  And it grew wondrous cold:

  And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

  As green as emerald.

  David interrupted us. “Okay, boys and girls, we are doing sixteen knots in uncharted waters. We need some quiet on the bridge.”

  Caroline and I were horrifed to be thrown off the bridge by the Captain, never mind the boys and girls. We left, chastened. Downstairs in the bar, we were so quiet people asked us what has happened. “Don’t you know?” Mike the purser told us, “It’s bad luck to recite that poem on a ship. Especially in the Antarctic.”

  There it was again: luck. That the Antarctic was as superstitious a realm as the theatre was not surprising, maybe. I remembered the jester duo, death and luck, which patrolled Antarctic literature. I retreated to my cabin. My chaperone had returned. For a while, while we were stationary at Lockroy, he had disappeared. Now I saw him outside my cabin porthole, a sooty albatross. He flew stalwart with the ship all night.

  December 15th

  Six a.m. There is a knock on my door. I wrap a sheet around me. My muscles ache from carrying boxes into Lockroy.

  It’s Max, fully dressed: parka, hat, woollies. “We’re going through the Lemaire Channel. I thought you’d not want to miss it.”

  I get dressed: long underwear; thermal T-shirt; fleece no. 1, no. 2, no. 3; woollen socks; boiler suit; parka; waterproof; two hats; rigger boots. In this costume I waddle up to the Monkey Island.

  We are moving very slowly through thick fog. I can’t hear the engines. The ship seems to be gliding. On either side diamond-shaped tors of rock, dusted with snow, congeal out of the fog. They are five hundred metres high and close enough to touch.

  The channel must be more of a trench, I think, if our ship with its deep keel can get through here. It is alarming to be only inches away from vertiginous scraping rock. In front of the bow is a cul-de-sac. Our exit is blocked by a glacier; its white tongue lolls into the tar-black water. We are sailing straight into it. At the last moment possible, the ship veers to starboard and the tors part to reveal a narrow gap. Beyond it we see open water and ice-coated islets.

  Max reads the ice for me. “Frazil ice,” he says, pointing to the splintered rime on the surface. Then, “Old ice. You can tell because of the discolouration.” I see its giant flakes, like rock shale. Some are light blue, others are grey or chocolate brown with grit. “From the basalt,” he says. His voice is narrow and impatient, so I leave him hanging over the top rail of Monkey Island, his eye fixed on the dark water.

  The ice pans are forming. Once out of the strait we proceed slowly, at only two or three knots, as if the captain is afraid to startle the ice. It parts willingly, shifting its gruel-like soup. The sea ice glares. White is an absence of colour. Yet this deprivation glitters, it is dazzling.

  White is an elusive colour. In my cabin, I looked up synonyms in a thesaurus. Many words for white are suspicious and pejorative. In humans the colour is linked with illness: whey-faced, sickly, ghostly, poorly, sallow. Many of its synonyms rely on naturally occurring substances or chemicals: ivory, wax, cream, zinc, titanium, quicklime. Quicklime — calcium oxide, a chemical compound that is caustic and alkaline. It is good at cutting the scent of decaying flesh and this was its use, for hundreds of years. Quicklime describes the snow at sea level, where the temperatures are milder and the snow granular. But on the glaciers, I noticed at Lockroy, the snow was dry and powdered, as light as coconut. In the wind it rattled, a million minute wind chimes.

  White is the colour the eye sees when light contains all the wavelengths on the visible spectrum. If you pass white light through a prism it is sliced into a rainbow: orange, green, blue, red. White is all colours combined until it looks like none.

  I strove to see anything in the ice field ahead of us. Its glare was painful to look at: it had glamour, but was also phantasmal. Glace — the French word for ice sounds more faithful to the true nature of the substance, with its brittle slipperiness. Spread out in front of us, as far as we could see, it looked less like ice than crushed metal.

  That afternoon we left the ship to go into Vernadsky, the Ukrainian base. The water darkened to a thick celluloid. The mountains, by contrast, shone with a floodlit phosphorous white. We had entered a silverprint world; what was normally light was dark, although throbbing with a substanceless, unstable white.

  We went into Vernadksy in the RIBs, wearing our immersion suits this time. Once again we zipped through clouds of stinging flurries. In our immersion suits and lifejackets we waddled stiffly in single file up to the base through a corridor of snow to meet the welcoming committee.

  The Ukrainian chief biologist wore those glasses which adjust with light. Although the day was overcast his shades were dark. He looked like a racecar driver temporarily marooned in the Antarctic. He was dark-skinned and (I imagined) dark-eyed and wore only a fleece and stood outside in minus five with no gloves and no hat, as if he’d met us on a slightly overcast day in England.

  “Well, he’s acclimatized,” said Peter, an oceanographer.

  We stood, a group of orange overstuffed penguins in front of stern tin sheds, surveying the base. One of the oldest bases in the Antarctic, Vernadsky was first built on the Argentine Islands as a British base, during the British Graham Land Expedition (1934–1937). Perched on a rocky tip of Galindez Island, the base was once called Faraday, and in the 1980s the British, unable to either maintain or dismantle the base, as the Antarctic Treaty requires signatory nations to do, so
ld it for £1 to the Ukrainians, who began research there in 1995, naming it after the Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, who also founded the Ukrainian Academy of National Sciences.

  We were shepherded from lab to lab. I wasn’t sure the Ukrainians had got a good deal. Peter elbowed me discreetly when the chief scientist’s back was turned. “Look at that microscope!” I spotted my high school chemistry class microscope on the bench. In the labs we saw several of the original British notices stating emergency procedures and VHF radio frequencies still tacked on the wall.

  The base had a meteorology room staffed with creaking PCs, a serviceable though dusty VHF radio, and a makeshift gym, one room with rusting antiquarian weights and a token rowing machine. Of all the rooms on base, only the gym struck me as particularly Ukrainian, thanks to the posters of big-boned blonde women in 1980s workout leotards on the wall.

  We were ushered upstairs to the bar for shots of vodka — it was ten in the morning — and slices of smoked salmon. Behind the bar we found the diesel mechanic, dressed in a pristine white shirt and grey trousers. He was greying, with a bushy moustache and mournful blue eyes.

  “How many of you are here?” I asked.

  “We are thirteen. Lucky number!”

  “Are you all men?”

  His face slipped. “Yes, there are no women.” That explained the peek-a-boo chorus of eight or so staffers who kept looking at us (we were two women amongst twenty men) from round the corners of the base corridors, as if they’d just spied an Easter egg.

  Vernadsky enjoyed the reputation of having the best-stocked bar in the Antarctic, and, for being 67.15° S, it wasn’t bad: Johnnie Walker, Talisker, three types of vodka, four types of gin — another triumph of the British legacy. A massive brassiere was slung between the bottles of vodka and whisky.

  Suddenly a group of people burst into the bar. A woman wearing a fur coat and hat plunked a bottle wrapped in Christmas paper on the bar and embraced the diesel mechanic over the counter. Our party turned as one, astonished, as more and more people poured through the door, laughing, singing, a parka-ed, jolly herd. We had peeled off our padded boiler suits, but we still looked a motley crew in comparison to those fur-coated people, with our grease-stained jackets and moleskin trousers.

  “It’s a Russian cruise ship,” Martin, the first mate, who came ashore as our RIB driver, answered my questioning look.

  “I don’t remember seeing a ship.”

  “They’re anchored around the other side of the island, I saw it on the radar. The cruise ships like to hide, to give their passengers the impression of pristine wilderness. I’ve heard them on the radio arranging to sneak past each other so that the passengers don’t realize there’s another thousand people hot on their heels.”

  The Russians installed themselves in the corner and started on the vodka.

  The diesel mechanic took me by the arm. “I need assistant.” He manoeuvred me to the pool table in the middle of the bar.

  “No, no,” I protested. “I’m a terrible pool player.”

  “No. Assistant. You stay here!”

  He returned with a handful of coins, which he placed on the pool table, and two coils of rope. He said something in Russian and the cruise ship passengers gathered round. “Magic show!” then more Russian. The crowd clapped and roared.

  The diesel mechanic put me through my paces with the coins and the ropes. I was a poor magician’s assistant, not to mention unglamorous, in my oversized moleskins and lumpy fleece. I got the rope tangled, I failed to tie the magic slipknot, or untie it. The Russians didn’t seem to care, they laughed and clapped. Everyone downed more vodka.

  I continue to walk home from Shades of Light, but now I avoid the railyard, where oxidizing freight cars could easily harbour an attacker. Instead I stick to side streets on which giant elms have only just come into leaf. I walk without my Walkman, passing in and out of clouds of early blackflies.

  A car appears on the street beside me and slows. I glance to the side. Inside it, half-hidden in darkness, is a man. A shaft of evening sun falls across the windshield, obscuring the interior with its reflection.

  “Excuse me.”

  I squint. The face has my eyes.

  The voice comes again. “Excuse me.”

  I keep walking, faster and faster.

  I take the exit to the Trans-Canada highway, driving past the reservoir, the lake, the dam, up the long sloping hills rising from the river valley into a sharper, colder plateau. The only other traffic is juggernaut tractor trailers which pass me in an orange blaze of light. This isn’t safe, I think. What if I broke down? Those roadside emergency payphones are a long, long way in between. Walking at night, kicking gravel, I’d be perfect bait for the murderer.

  A man — everyone assumes it is a man — has murdered two women in the past six months. Both women were walking alone; one on the side of the highway I drive now, the Trans-Canada, one on an isolated riverside path. Both were heading home, not particularly late, four thirty and seven o’clock.

  These murders have been reported hesitatingly by the town’s media. Both women were working class, one a chambermaid in a highwayside hotel not far from her house, the other a teenager who was truant from school. I know about them because I know Donna, who hears these little-known details from Michael. But many people are unaware that the police are pursuing a connection between the two.

  There is no mention of these attacks in the local newspaper. The town has its reputation to protect — of being the kind of town where young couples stay, rather than moving to Montreal or Toronto, to raise their children; the kind of town where you don’t need to lock your door at night. But even before the murders, women walking on their own have always been frowned on here. There is something unsavoury about it, apparently, as if not having parents to drive you, or who are willing to drive you, ought to seal your fate. Many nights I walk alone to the new library beside the river. The next day in school classmates lean over their desks and whisper, “I saw you walking last night.”

  I drive toward the distant hills and mountains of the north of the province, which stretch away like an inland sea.

  More trucks stream by me, their cargo of ex-trees strapped to their backs. Bark falls on the windshield and my nostrils fill with the balsam tang of their wake. A girl in my grade was killed the year before by one of these trucks. Logs the size of houses had been piled on the back of its flatbed, oozing sap onto the chains which bound them. They’d slid free just as the girl passed the truck on the inside of a curve in her Honda Civic.

  I watch these trucks warily, my foot hovering over the brake. What would have been the last thing that girl saw on earth? Giant bark rings like the rings of Saturn filling her windshield. Or maybe there wasn’t even time for that. Perhaps there was no time for thought at all.

  On Sundays my mother drags me to Mass, enraged by the natural reluctance she sees in me for religion. In Mass the priest talks about lives being “snuffed out,” like candles. Yes, I decide, it would be like that. A micro-second of panicked perception, a sliver of fear, then oblivion.

  “Have you called him?”

  “No but I think he followed me.”

  “Followed you?”

  “In his car. He stopped and tried to talk to me.”

  “Jesus, it could be anyone. It could be that killer.”

  “Well you don’t have any photographs of him, how would I know? It’s a great choice, isn’t it: get in the car with the father I’ve never met in my life, or get in the car with a man who will rape and murder me.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic. All you teenagers, you live at such a pitch I don’t know how you don’t just explode.”

  “Well good luck. You’ve got two more of us to come.”

  My mother gives me a strange look. Later, I identify the unfamiliar note in it that I’d seen and
couldn’t place — regret.

  The evenings lengthen. I take a third job at the Executive Motor Inn, a hotel, restaurant, and bar complex favoured by the town’s big shots — town councillors, police, judges, local captains of industry.

  The Exec, as everyone calls it, is located on the shores of the river. Before my shifts I walk down to the river’s edge in the smoky dusk. Tables are put out at the back of the Exec bar, so guests can sit overlooking the river. There they are nibbled by the town’s languid mosquitoes. They watch the surface of the river, static as plastic.

  The river is nearly two kilometres wide. In its centre a current tugs the water toward the coast over 150 kilometres away. Its oily margins are home to June bugs while secretive river birds fly low under the stanchions of the bridge.

  I work a shift from six p.m. until four a.m. I don’t get into bed until seven in the morning. Before the evening starts, I lean out over the river’s edge. The balcony is three or four feet above the surface of the water. Kingfishers fly low over its surface, mirroring themselves so there are two birds, perfect copies of each other.

  One day in early May, it is six degrees; the next day it is seventeen. I will never get used to these convulsions, the lack of transition. Even though I come from the adjacent province, I find this province’s essential character so different: cloistered, self-regarding. I was brought up by the ocean. This province meanwhile is like a mini-continent. In summer there are three or four weeks of glutinous heat when everyone seeks the salt air of the coast, driving hundreds of kilometres to the sludgy mudflat beaches that hem it.

  Now that my escape is in sight, I have gained a perspective on this place where I did not choose to live, where I never would have come if my mother hadn’t married her husband. Now I can afford to regard it with a detachment that stops just shy of affection, and which is in fact an abstract kind of regret. I will leave here none the wiser and unchanged for my years in this place. Somehow we have failed to understand each other, this place and I, and it is no ordinary misunderstanding. Already I feel a kind of danger lurking in my final months in this town. I am being presented with a choice too subtle for a seventeen-year-old to grasp. I can embrace or evade its pull. It is up to me.