by Jean McNeil
After his talk, Tom and I went for a walk around the point. At North Cove we passed patches of brown goo and blood, shockingly bright on the snow. The Weddell seals had recently given birth. I lingered. The chromatic deprivation of the Antarctic was such that any colour, even the brown of seal intestine muck, was salve for the famished eye.
“The trick of the Antarctic is knowing when to leave,” Tom said. “You need to leave on a high.” He would leave, flying out in the Dash, in a month’s time. In a place where people voluntarily incarcerated themselves for two-and-a-half years, a month didn’t seem very long.
“I know,” I replied. “I hope I don’t overstay my welcome.”
“You’ll see something very few people in the world will ever see, the onset of Antarctic winter.” He did not sound encouraging, despite his words. Perhaps that was to be expected: the onset of winter in Antarctica was sobering, I was sure, a force of nature, like watching someone die.
I watched Tom pick his way amongst the stones. A new, pensive note had settled inside him. I didn’t know him well enough to ask what was wrong. On the surface of it, the Antarctic encouraged sudden intimacies. In the Ellsworths I was alone (apart from Oddvar, Eric, and other boiler suits) in the world, more truly alone than I had ever been in my life, with Tom as my only companion. And yet something within me held back from asking personal questions.
Tom and I walked, observing the Weddell seals; as we suspected, many of the cows were calving. Their pups lolled by their mothers’ sides, dewy lozenges of fur and fat.
Suddenly the sky darkened. Night was beginning to claim more of our day. Once a banished entity, it was returning with eerie speed. The sun lowered itself to a point just above the horizon. As the sun skirmished with the land its light was refracted into two sharp rays held apart from each other at a ninety degree angle, like the hands of a compass. One spear pointed northeast, the other southwest.
Tom and I climbed up to the monument to the dead at the Cross to find Gavin and Ben already there, staring into the sunset. We stood in silence, our bare hands shoved into our jackets.
It will never be any better. This thought came to me. What do you mean? I asked the voice that had generated it. I could feel a pressure coming toward me, distant but distinct, a barometric gloom.
Should memory be a shrine of moments? Certain moments in the Antarctic consecrated themselves in my memory. There they are, still, intact and recollectable, rotating like grounded icebergs.
This is one of them: Tom’s pleasant, square face lit by the cold glow, Gavin’s restless eyes scanning the sea ice. Alexander Island, Jenny Island, Ryder Bay, the icebergs still trapped in last year’s sea ice in North Cove, Reptile Ridge, the string of mountains that stand sentinel, Valkyrie-like, behind Piñero Island. Behind it, Graham Land, the long spine of ice mountains tentacling north to Tierra del Fuego. The sun never sets, but neither does it appear. I will always struggle to describe what we see in that moment. I will write bruises, lava, combustion. Also apricot, tangerine, carmine.
If I close my eyes, now, I see us even now, four people at the end of the world bathed in the glow of perpetual sunset: Gavin, his explosive, eager intelligence; Ben, his shock of hair gelled by cold; Tom, the intuitive, dextrous pilot. Me, the writer/spy who will one day make too much of this, trying to capture the fugitive moment, which does not want to be held or known. The sun that never slept, and us, standing at the Cross, frozen in that moment of cold awe.
PART THREE
WINTERING
1.
IF NOT, WINTER
rough ice
First-year ice subjected to fracturing and hummocking at the stage of young ice that has formed as a result of the freezing together of pancake ice or of fragments of fresh ridges.
february 16th
In two days the air unit will begin to leave, flying the planes in pairs and in stages north to Canada. The Dash 7 will be the last to depart. It will go in early March, taking the essential summer personnel with it. The rest of us will be collected by the ship, the Ernest Shackleton, due at the end of March.
The end of March is six weeks away, but it is presented to us by Simon and Steward as if it is tomorrow. We have to start the end-of-summer clean-up, equipment has to be brought back from Base K and Ice Blue. Some of the winterers have already started packing. Their future is rushing toward them now, returning from a place where it has been held at bay. The Antarctic is one of the few places on earth where you can put your life into stall mode, in pursuit of science or money, or simply time out from the world. Until now, when our departure date is set, we haven’t felt the press of the future, or even believed in its possibility. But like night it has returned. Now that it is back I feel the relentlessness of it. The future builds itself, moment after moment. It just keeps coming.
The summer camp atmosphere on base was replaced by an end-of-term feeling. The field parties had all come in and returned to the UK. That weekend Steward and the field assistants would fly in to close Base K and Ice Blue. Each Dash flight north to Stanley had a full cargo of passengers.
On one of those empty afternoons Gavin invited me to visit the marine labs. I had poked my head in before and knew what awaited: a supercooled vault filled with large, shallow tanks. In them lived the strange and fascinating species of the shelf and sea floor of the continent.
The lab was a new, purpose-built structure. It was built in some haste a few years before to replace the previous science lab, which had burnt down. It smelled like all the buildings on base — a dormitory/Portakabin odour I would recognize instantly for years to come, in university classrooms and temporary offices.
Gavin took me on a tour of the shallow aquaria. I peered into the jade waters. Among Gavin’s subjects were giant sea sponges, some of them two meters tall; a man could crawl inside them. I looked at the giant starfish, giant sea spiders.
Gavin reached into one of the tanks and extracted a creature, a black disc the size of my hand. I took it. It was surprisingly heavy. I watched its tentacles wrap themselves around my wrist.
“It’s a sea spider.”
“Why do these creatures grow to such a size?”
“It’s a paradox, isn’t it? You’d think that in water this cold they’d barely survive, and instead we find these gigantisms. These waters are the most nutrient-rich on earth, despite the cold. There’s abundant krill, and a lack of natural predators. Everything — sponges, sea squirts, starfish, spiders — flourishes here. People think that not much will be lost if these waters warm because they’re barren of life. But things flourish in cold in a way they never do in heat.”
Things flourish in cold in a way they never do in heat. Another sentence, casually uttered, that careened around in my head long after it was spoken.
“What are you studying here?”
In the split second before he answered, Gavin’s posture changed. He stood straighter — he was at least six feet tall — and he seemed to expand: his lecturer posture, perhaps, or the version of Gavin who was often interviewed on television to “explain” global warming.
“The waters around the peninsula are warming faster than any other ocean on earth. Warming disrupts these creatures’ nervous systems, and they start to die in large numbers. That in turn disrupts the food chain. All the creatures here are adapted to extreme cold. A single degree of warming and the krill could diminish, or even disappear. And then, well, it’s game over for everything. Even the penguins.”
The Antarctic is a tough and fragile environment at once, and these seemingly opposing qualities are inextricably linked. Once the creatures Gavin studied had adapted themselves to a relatively narrow range of normally killing temperatures, they made themselves vulnerable to even slight changes in their environment. Warming — normally a condition for abundance — is what will kill them.
I shivered involuntarily. I was bundled up in three fleeces, but
it was not enough against the ambient cold of the aquaria.
“Let’s get a cup of tea and have a seat in the office,” Gavin offered. His office had a view of the runway. It was quiet, now that the Twin Otters spent most of their time in the hangar, undergoing maintenance for their long trip north. The sky was dull and overcast — a default Antarctic sky. Still, it had presence, a tangible dimension. There the sky was never a distant diorama, as in London. After my time in the polar regions, the milky tones of the temperate zone skies would always look fatally complacent.
Issues of New Scientist were scattered on the table in front of us. Their covers advertised articles about power blackouts, cyber-terrorism, aging populations, the psychology of suicide bombers, the dangers of materialism.
Gavin caught me glancing at them. “It doesn’t affect us here, what’s happening in the rest of the world: that’s one reason why people enjoy coming here. It’s a holiday from the real world. From threat. Ironic, don’t you think, considering this place killed so many people who set foot on it, once.”
Another paradox was also true, I responded — of being in a place whose destruction we were forced to consider daily, as well as our role in it, but where at the same time we were insulated from the negative capacities of civilization, from its rapaciousness, its trivia and bad faith.
“But the more I think about it, I see the Antarctic like a mirror, although angled permanently toward the future,” I said. “In the rest of the world, we have to deal with certain threats. But here we’re standing on a continent whose disintegration has the potential to threaten most of what we think of as civilization — coastal cities, infrastructure, agriculture. So actually we’re at the epicentre of threat, although it’s still in the future.”
Gavin gave me a penetrating stare. He might have been deciding whether to tolerate this hazy panoramic vision, the writer’s promiscuous horizon-scanning, unsubstantiated by facts or by computer models that calculate the future.
“This is the kind of place you can feel very abandoned when the planes leave,” he said.
“Is that a warning?”
“Just a piece of friendly advice.”
There was a strange note, empty, slightly clanging, to his voice. I tried to come to terms with his attitude: professorial, paternal almost, which grated and comforted at the same time. He knows more than you do, I reminded myself. Gavin dove under the ice for a living; he was ten years older and on Newsnight every other month, a world authority in his sphere. I was the ingénue: a necessary position for a writer, but almost never a comfortable one. Normally I can’t stand being the person who knows the least about a particular subject in the room, yet in coming to the Antarctic that was what I was, always. I was ill-informed in a place where scientific knowledge was the only authority.
“It will seem like a long time and also a short time,” he said, referring to my remaining six weeks on base. Again I heard the note in his voice: a distant, wiry sound, like the call of an unfamiliar bird.
In the corridor between the laboratories, I bumped into Xavier. I was surprised to see him; I’d thought he would have disappeared north by now. Nearly all the scientists had left, ferried out on the plane to the Falklands. Base was small, but it could be surprisingly hard to keep track of where people were. Sometimes the departing scientists were so busy packing their instruments they didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. The rest of us would run around base trying to find them to go skiing or watch a film only to find they left on the Dash three days before.
I hadn’t realized the planes would leave so early. I had expected them to still be on base when the Ernest Shackleton came to collect us sometime in late March. But Tom told me that the flying conditions in the Antarctic became quickly unviable with the onset of winter.
“No, I’m staying until the last Dash out,” Xavier said. “The prospect of a quiet place to write up the data is appealing. If I go back to Cambridge I’ll be immediately distracted. I’m the line manager for fifteen people, et cetera.”
“Do you like base life?”
“Base is a microcosm of British society.”
“That’s not quite an answer, Xavier,” I hazarded.
“Well, I find it interesting. Here, you have something unusual —” He rubbed his fingers together, as if he were sifting sand. “Here you have the grain of experience. Things stick with you, like grit. Every conversation, every action. It’s very … intense.” His expression brightened. “It’s easier, for me, not being fully English. I can be a watcher, here.”
“Have you ever overwintered?”
“I did a couple of winters, a long time ago.”
“What was it like?
“It was —” He looked out the window of Lab 7; the day was overcast again. A steel current had entered the light in the last few days. “Long.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“Well hopefully you won’t have to.”
Winter is the real season: this was a mantra of the Antarctic. People meant the mystique, of course: the darkness, the starry isolation, the uncanny aurora borealis australis. The cold. On the other hand, something of a polar class system had developed over the years: those who had made it through the marathon of isolation were considered the elite of the Antarctic. There was a truth in this: such a voluntary stranding was tough, if often financially rewarding, thanks to the tax-free salary and wintering allowance they were paid. Winterers saw incredible natural phenomena, went on demanding winter camping trips; they had access to a knowledge that was off-limits to most of the human population.
As winter approached on Base R, I began to understand that summer had been a dream, a reprieve. Until so recently base had lived under the onslaught of a relentless sun. Now the sun’s declination reapproached earth. On February 23 my shadow returned. I went for a walk around the point and found that I was being followed. I started and looked around. I had last seen this black simulacrum somewhere in the Falklands.
Later I passed Xavier’s office and caught sight of him in front of his laptop, his greying hair, a white cable-knit jumper, surrounded by printouts of graphs. His computer screen was stuffed with coding.
I thought again how the glaciologists were a breed apart. The proficiency required with math and physics meant they were by necessity intelligent, but there was also an alpha quality about them — they were achievers, driven perhaps by the prescience bequeathed to their science by the climate-change agenda. They were also characters; they had passions outside of expedition kayaking and wildlife documentaries, precise and cultured obsessions you might sooner find among philosophers: tango, opera, jazz.
Xavier had given me one of his papers to read on the retreat of the Fennoscandian sheet. I understood about twenty-five percent of it, until I arrived at the math.
To look at an ice sheet is to regard something fatally static, or so you think. The ridges, palisades, and buttresses are charged with holding up the air. The icescape appears eternal. But it is in motion all the time. I learned about the violent pressures which develop in the base of the ice sheet, the heat brewed by the intersection of ice with rock, even while the surface appears implacable.
Xavier looked up from his screen. “Let’s get a cup of bad coffee.”
“No, I don’t want to disturb,” I said. “Besides I’ve had three cups already.” Activities on base were winding down. No longer did we have evening lectures or group film screenings in the bar. Now all we did for entertainment was to sit in the dining room and talk, play cards, leaf through climbing magazines or National Geographics we had looked at thirty times before.
We ended up going for a coffee anyway. We settled into an empty dining room, our coffees made pale by constipation-inducing Nido powered milk.
“So, have you found the inspiration you were looking for here?” Xavier asked. Everyone spoke like this now, as if our time in base was over, although I had five m
ore weeks to run.
“I don’t know. I’ll only know when I start to write.”
“Is writing always like that?”
“Always. Like groping in the dark.”
He was silent for a while. “I’m not sure that writers — that creative people — realize that nature is purposeless. It is a pattern of unruly energy. You project the human onto it.”
“I think writers are well aware of that, and that’s why they write books. We have that in common with scientists. We study patterns.”
“What patterns?”
“Aesthetics — style and so on — is actually about looking for the meaning that lies just beneath the surface of so-called reality. That surface is a decoy. To excavate it you need to use metaphor and stylistics.”
“But you’re not looking for information?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But in the abstract. What the writer is really trying to do is to give order to experience. To humanize life.”
At this he scowled. “To humanize life?”
“Life is pretty inhuman, really. It’s a disassociated state that may or may not support your existence.”
“So what is the task for you here?”
“You can’t write a book without characters. Literature isn’t based on facts or setting but on society and on human conflict and choice. There has to be some moral dilemma, to make a story resonate,” I said. “That’s the difficulty — classic explorer narrative has one story only, the struggle against death. Which tends to drown out more delicate dilemmas. What you get in most Antarctic literature are monologues, soliloquies, barren stories of individuals’ struggle to survive. We have a great literature of first-hand accounts, but otherwise fantasy, science fiction.”
“But everything is science fiction. All this —” Xavier swept his arm in an expansive gesture, taking in the dining room, the flags, the heroic photos, the whiteboard where our fates and weather and transport arrangements were written “— is just here. It just is. The only truth is in the lived moment. There is no interpretation. There is only information.”
