by Jean McNeil
We were all out on deck for the arrival. On base we could see stick figures at the top of a hill of granite stone, waving. The ship’s arrival was as keenly anticipated by those on base as it was for us: we carried the summer’s supplies, including innumerable crates of beer.
The JCR sidled up to the wharf and the familiar churn of the ship’s engines receded. New sounds took its place: the distant buzz of a generator, wind zinging off wires. Around the back of the base was a tangle of radio transmitters and satellite domes. The VHF radio transmitter was strung in a crazy trapezoid-oval, a dreamcatcher ranging northeast, toward England.
I was surprised to find I didn’t like being against solid land. I didn’t want to leave the ship. It was my first morning in the Antarctic, the mysterious continent where only a few lucky humans ever set foot, and I had to force myself to take account of my surroundings.
From other people’s reactions I knew I wasn’t alone. Caroline the diver and the Unfriendly Vehicle Mechanic were looking at what would be home for the next eighteen months, or even the next two years, should they decide to extend their contracts. As we gathered in the ship’s bar for the Base R base commander’s briefing, we were all uncommonly subdued.
“You will disembark the ship at ten hundred hours,” Simon the base commander informed us. Suddenly I no longer liked being told what to do, although I had accepted it while at sea.
But we had no choice, because the ship no longer tolerated us. We were told to strip our beds. “Anyone who doesn’t won’t get a fockin’ drop to drink on this ship from now on,” Mike the purser warned. “And remember to leave your bedding outside in the corridor.”
And suddenly that was it. Mike settled our bar accounts and handed us back our passports. Max, Nils, and Emilia would remain aboard the ship until they flew out in three days’ time. I was jealous that they could remain on the ship, that they didn’t have to commit to the new human ecology of the terrestrial base.
As if on cue, a roar filled our ears and the Dash 7 appeared, its four turboprops grinding the sky, its red fuselage framed in the windows of the bar. At the last minute the wing slipped by the ship’s conning tower and disappeared behind a cloud of runway gravel dust.
“Chancers,” muttered the purser.
Almost immediately Simon gathered those who would be staying on base for a walking tour of our new home. As we stood waiting there was a sullen note in our postures; a few hours before we were desperate to arrive at base, but now that we were there we recoiled. Instead of staring in wonder at its impressive position, we dropped our gazes to the tips of our rigger boots.
My first impression was of sounds. I had become used to the tinny silence of the ship stopped in ice, the only sounds the grind and wrench of the sea ice as it nudged the hull. Base emitted a hushed grandeur, as if a vault door had been closed, and all sound guarded fiercely behind it. A gunshot crack Dopplered through the air from time to time — icebergs imploding, I would come to learn, or rotating, and a sound like a distant waterfall when a piece of the ice shelf collapsed into the bay. Antarctic birds are largely soundless, but sometimes we heard the rough squawk of a skua, magnified in the empty air.
It felt warm and cold at once. The air was dry, as if we were inhaling paper. Meltwater rivulets coursed alongside the paths but it lacked the dewy, ionized smell of water. There were no smells of soil; no trees nor grass nor flowers. I did perceive a smell that I would come to associate with the Antarctic and that I would never experience again, except to a muted degree in Greenland, but if I were to smell it now, I would recognize it immediately. When asked what the moon smelled like, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on its surface, said, “Two stones rubbed together.” That’s the smell of the Antarctic — flint.
We passed men in orange padded boiler suits driving JCBs. The jetty apron was frantic with activity — containers swung, snagged by cranes. The Dash 7 appeared again, this time on a takeoff run, roaring into the air. Rugged men walked toward us wearing slit-eyed sunglasses. It looked like the set of a polar James Bond film.
We rounded a corner and were confronted with a series of boxes on rocks. The largest of these was the aircraft hangar. It housed the Dash 7 and two Twin Otters when they were at the base.
We threw each inscrutable other looks which were reflected back to us by our mirrored sunglasses. We had all been briefed, of course: how Base R’s role as an Antarctic airport was key for BAS’ operations. How it was the largest of the British bases and in high summer, January and February, up to a hundred people could be accommodated. Many were scientists and field assistants returning from tent field camps or being deployed to them. This, as well as the presence of “drop-in” visitors (anyone staying for less than a three-month tour was considered a fly-by-night at Base R) such as Foreign and Commonwealth Office lawyers, BBC journalists, and government VIPs, gave the base a transient, cosmopolitan feel, we were told. Still, the granite quarry-crossed-with-a penal-colony air of the place unnerved us, accustomed as we were by that point to three-course dinners on the ship, and to the gracious, purposeful ethos of life in motion.
We were shown the boat house, the laboratory, the dining hall/office complex, which also harboured the communications and air traffic control tower and the pilots’ offices, the accommodation complexes, the food stores, the “sledge store” where the skis and mountaineering equipment were held and repaired, the skidoo garage, the sewage treatment plant, the generator hut, the Miracle Span — a machine that gobbled everything and turned it into neat bales of waste, to be removed by ship. And that, bar a couple of small storage buildings, was it.
Simon left us to wander around base. We peered in clouded windows to see large packages wrapped in silver paper or ancient skis stacked like lumber against walls. It all looked like a giant Joseph Beuys installation. It felt exciting, in a forlorn, abandoned way, to know that this shed town would be my home for months to come.
But there was an element of siege in the place too. There would be nowhere to go for months, other than the collection of huts we had just passed through. No parks, no art galleries or museums, no cafés or bars or restaurants or seminar rooms or lecture halls, no trains or planes or shops or supermarkets, hairdressers, clubs, pubs, beaches, or swimming pools. No animals, or children. And crucially, no strangers, past a certain point at least. At no moment would someone not know where we were on base; safety regulations forbade us going off on our own. Privacy would be difficult to come by. We were voluntary exiles in a reduced civilizational plane not too different from a medieval village. Perhaps we hoped our time here would teach us something necessary and irreplaceable about the world, would furnish us with an unordinary knowledge which our previous life, rife with distractions and bombarded with trivia, had denied us.
At lunchtime Simon led us to the dining hall. We were told we had to first remove our rigger boots in the boot room. Battered boots the colour of butterscotch scrawled with the owners’ initials had already claimed the benches. Ours, newly minted, were the tan-orange of fresh caramel. Hi-vis jackets streaked with grease hung on the nails.
We left our suspiciously new clobber behind and padded upstairs in our socks. As we queued for food in the cafeteria those of us from the ship talked among ourselves. The base personnel wove in and out of each other, cajoling, teasing, slapping each other on the back. They did not interact with us or acknowledge the presence of newcomers.
Next we were lined up against the filing cabinet in the doctor’s surgery and Melissa the base doctor — who, I would discover, doubled as the photographer and the hairdresser — took our mug shot. This picture was to remain on the bulletin board outside the base commander’s office for the duration of our stay. We were given a little plastic bar with our name typed on a piece of paper, which was then taped to the bar. The plastic bar had a small hole on one end, for hanging on a nail. This, we learned, was the most essential piece of equipment for our
stay — our tag for the tagging board. For the next weeks and months we would be required to record our every move. The tagging board would tell whether we were On Base, Off Base, In the Field, Flying, On the Runway, In the Hangar, In the Bonner Lab, The Boatshed, Local Travel Area, or Around the Point.
At eleven that night our group from the ship decided to go skiing. I couldn’t ski so I drove the skidoo up and down, towing people up the slope. On the way down to base I stopped halfway and cut the engine. Rob, a field assistant whom I’d met briefly earlier that day, pulled up beside me. “Quite the view, isn’t it?”
In silence we both looked at the white ring of mountains. The sea ice that plagued our passage down had drifted into the bay. The ship was snug next to the wharf below us, locked in ice once more.
The silence, while convincingly silent, was missing something. I thought, soon I will hear the wash and draw of the tide, the slide of water over rocks. Soon I will hear the swish and hum of the slim wake of a boat, or the shout of a human voice.
Then I began to hear barking dogs, tinny music, people shouting.
“What’s that?” I asked Rob.
He stared at me, perplexed. “What?”
“I thought I heard something.”
I tried to shake the sounds out of my head, but they became more insistent. I could hear the grind of a Ferris wheel, the clink of money cascading through a machine. A ghost carnival had installed itself in my mind, in defiance of so much silence.
I shivered. Rob’s gloved hand lingered near the Skidoo ignition. We’d been standing still for too long. I was trying to hold it at bay, what the Inuit call ilira — the mixture of fear and awe that landscape can provoke. I thought, I will never be able to write about this place.
Suddenly I was cold. My hands were encased in black padded skidoo gloves and I wrapped them around my shoulders. My eye was drawn again to the hulk of Jenny Island. In the waning midnight sun, it was impressive, its battlement rising rigid from the sea. In between its two bruise-hued flanks a glacierlet lolled. The island had a wolfish quality.
That night sitting on a cooling skidoo I couldn’t know how so many times in the months to come I would look at this island more than any other feature in our landscape. How it would become jailor, oracle, fortress of the dead.
December 21st
The southern hemisphere solstice. Today is the longest day of the year; the sun will hover high over base, the lazy ellipsis it will draw the only sign of its passage between day and night.
I stand on the veranda looking out toward the wharf. I have never seen colours like this before: a thin gold coats the pancake ice that has formed in the bay. The sky is olive and around the sun is a mango gleam, fluted by flares of an intense, fluorescent white. This is what it might be like to stand on another planet: to see the sun from the light face of a nightless star, somewhere on the other side of the moon.
There was a party on the ship the following night to say goodbye to the group who would fly out the next day and also to the JCR itself, which would leave that same afternoon.
Somehow I hadn’t registered that the officers had come all this way, struggling to arrive here, only to leave after thirty-six hours. But that was Antarctic life: people come and go and the ship had work to do, a survey down near Pine Island Bay. As I would learn in the coming months, the same rule of human engagement that applies in normal life is also found in the Antarctic, but with more intensity and consequence: the people with whom we feel a natural felicity are usually on their way out before you know it, while the people you struggle to connect with stay until their presence is a kind of taunt.
The ship’s hold was empty. The JCB construction vehicles and drums of aviation fuel, known in the Antarctic world as avtur, had been unloaded. We had spent nearly two days carrying boxes in a human chain, loading the kitchen stores, alcohol stores, the freezers and the sledge store, carting ski wax and sledge rigging made of reindeer gut, as well as less exotic items: enough boxes of tinned mushrooms to last a century, surely, and cases and cases of Guinness-in-the-can. In Antarctic-speak, unloading the ship was called relief. There was no such relief for us, who had aching arm muscles and split nails from the cold and the heft of so many boxes.
For the party I returned to the ship, so recently my home. I couldn’t stop myself from passing by my cabin, but it was no longer mine. A hard hat was placed proprietorially on my bunk.
Mike the purser came barelling down the corridor. “Couldn’t stay away, could you?”
I watched Mike walk down the corridor, his put-upon gait, his shiny Clarks brogues now so familiar. I could stow away under a bunk in an unoccupied cabin. Nobody would notice, would they? I could go for five days without food, or I could sneak into the duty mess at four in the morning and survive on toast and cheese. We’d be back in the Falklands before anyone would raise the alarm and at least I would have lost some of the weight I put on eating cooked breakfasts every morning.
I didn’t know why I had lost my nerve so quickly. But even after only a day on base, I knew we were in a new dimension, that the Antarctic is extraterrestrial in that it has no knowledge of humanity. Humans have never lived there and so the land does not remember us. I found it strangely pleasing to have been so forgotten, but I wasn’t sure I could withstand this amnesia long-term.
The party in the bar ebbed and flowed with people from base. The base population was entirely made up of fit young people sporting a telltale Antarctic panda tan: their faces a brick sunburn and a white stripe where their sunglasses covered their eyes. Us ship dwellers looked meek compared to these hale new people. A fume of the outside world clung to us still, as if we might change at any moment into skinny jeans and leather jackets. The base people wore the exact same clothes: a fleece the colour of blood oranges and green moleskin trousers inside, orange padded boiler suits outside. With hats and sunglasses donned, it could be quite difficult to tell one person from another.
“We’ve been going to the same bar for a year,” Rob, a field assistant, said to explain the base people’s apparent euphoria. I remembered what Elliott had told me about base life on the ship, only two weeks before: “It’s like a cross between university and the Army.” They did look as if they’d been through something together, all these ruddy, vital people. They also trasmitted a hunger, an impatient, almost manic appetite to talk: “fresh meat,” perhaps, as Max had said, noting the ravenous yet resentful note in the Falkland Islanders’ gaze.
Eventually the base people returned to their pit rooms and by three in the morning it was us, the ship people, who were left to drink the bar dry, to be a group for the last time.
Max and I didn’t speak. He was buoyant with new acquaintances, but aloof and alert with me. There was an irony in all this I couldn’t quite define. Max had been my accompanier on this journey, but he was the only person I couldn’t speak to, now that it was over. His rebuff was as plain as if it had a physical prescence; he had his own Antarctic Convergence ringed around him. How easy it is to end up in the company of people who we could take or leave, who are pleasant and kind, but how difficult to find someone who is like another, possible yet impossible, version of yourself, and you them. And when we find this strange affinity we can’t resist the temptation to abandon it.
I went outside to observe the light. The sun was suspended above the horizon, bathing the ice floes in Ryder Bay in a cold peach gleam. The clouds — stratus and altostratus, high-altitude, slim clouds — emitted lemon prongs of light. A flute of copper was flung across the ice field in an unhinged flash; the ice turned rose. The colours changed by the second; now lavender, now mint.
I wondered if I would ever be able to get a perspective on this place. I could see that we had all — Max and I especially — been thrown together in that great human lottery known as the Antarctic. There, we might be temporary friends with a pilot, a plumber, a marine biologist, a radio technician, a w
riter, someone ten or twenty years our senior or junior. There, freed from our little cordons of demographics and peer groups and shared interests and activities, it was possible to meet anyone. It was a social experiment, a frozen Ark. But this capsule of random affinities would by necessity dissolve once you were no longer in Antarctica.
I had promised to give Max a present when he left Antarctica. I left it on his desk while he was up at the glacier enjoying his final ski run. My gift was a weak parody of Edwardian Antarctic explorer diaries:
September 9th
One pony — poor Trixie — lame. Not much longer to go, I fear. None of us relishes the thought of pony stew.
September 10th
Sledged all day then, two feet from camp, all fell into a crevasse. Dogs dangled by harnesses thirty feet deep, sledge arrested fall. Pulled ourselves out, using ice axe and ropes. But all forgotten in the warm bosom of a jolly good cup of tea!
September 12th
All but one of us afflicted by snow blindness. Better not to see where we’re heading, I wager! Poor Tiny went over the cliff edge today.
September 13th
Ate the last dog — poor Boris. A bit tough, but better than penguin leg.
September 15th
Everybody dead, but in good spirits.
In the morning ten people stood at the edge of the veranda, waiting to follow Simon across the runway to the hangar, where the Dash 7 awaited. Among the departing personnel were Nils, Emilia, and Max. I caught a glimpse of Max among the crowd. He was laughing, his head thrown back, his mouth open, thin muscles straining on his neck. He was keen to get home for Christmas, I knew, to join his mother who was waiting for him in Zurich. In twenty-four hours he would be there.
Max left me two presents. I found them on my desk in my new office, Lab 7, after the plane was gone. A clock and a book, Introduction to Geophysics, sat next to my laptop accompanied by a long note written on pink Post-it notes. He wrote a few lines about the book, and why I needed the clock (“to help you keep track of time!”). At the bottom he drew a smiley face underneath his name.
