by Jean McNeil
“So for you things have a valueless reality, they just are?”
Xavier gave me a look very like the one Oddvar delivered to me in the melon hut at Ice Blue — a flinty, penetrating scepticism. “That is what I would like to believe. But yes, I think there must be something else, something beyond the facts. I’ve been unhappy, at times, as a scientist. There is a missing dimension to pure rationality.”
He spoke in lithe cadences ruffled by his Indian accent that gave the golden ring of certainty to everything he said. Gavin also had this prophetic allure, but his authority was built on clarity and an obvious surface explosiveness. Xavier’s intelligence was a rumbling one — remote, vaguely threatening, like a capped volcano.
“Before I met you I never realized glaciology was so overwhelmingly white,” I said.
“Well it is. India has many glaciers and mountains, toward the north, so there’s a fair few of us. But it’s an eccentric interest, ice. At least in my country.”
“What does your family make of you being a glaciologist?”
“In my family, you become a doctor, a solicitor, a politician. That’s the limit of eccentricity allowed. But a glaciologist.” He shook his head. “As long as I am successful and prosperous, they tolerate it. But I think they’re resigned to losing me down a crevasse someday.”
Xavier and I were the last to leave the dining hall, which emptied quickly after meals now. We were down to fifty-six people on base, near half the number present in those heady early days of January. There was an air of waiting: waiting to go, or waiting to stay.
I had a different office, as Lab 7 was required by the generator mechanic to talk to his family on Skype. My new office, Lab 5, was plastered with photographs of Wales, the Cairngorms, rugged British coastlines. I tried not to look at these photographs. They instilled in me a thin yearning, and behind this, a vague note of panic. I had so rarely been in a situation in recent years from which I could not escape. The simple fact of being confined to an isolated and far-flung place ought to have put in perspective the things I valued, ought to have provoked avowals about what I never would voluntarily eschew again. I began to write a list: newspapers, espresso, broadband. Try to be serious, I told myself.
I couldn’t face head-on the possibility, which had only recently entered the picture, that our departure might not be so different from our by-the-skin-of-our-teeth arrival, that something unforeseen could enter the picture and delay, or even prevent, us from leaving the continent.
I looked out the window of my new office, toward the tiny cove favoured by elephant seals. As far as I could tell, elephant seals’ day consisted of lolling, attempting to turn over and sometimes actually turning over, sighing, making half-hearted gestures at fighting (males), and emitting strange mewing sounds (females). I watched them until the sun slung low in the sky, then disappeared into the sea.
February 25th
Tom and I go for a walk around the point. The day is cloudless and the sun so strong it stings our bare hands. All around us, ice is succumbing to its power, although Tom says this will be the last big melt of the season.
We sit down on the rocks. The bay glistens. Around us are sounds of fizzing and popping.
“When I first started flying up in the Arctic, twenty-five years ago now, I never thought I was looking at a place that would change. It just seemed so — monumental,” Tom says. “Then hardly any of the science was about global warming. There was some resource conservation, some ecology. But mostly it was glaciology, traditional stuff. The idea was that the ice was going nowhere fast.”
As he speaks, I feel such admiration for Tom — for what he does, his diction, his cast of mind. The admiration is fierce, a warm diffuse haze with a ribbon of chill threaded through it. The collision of hot and cold is not very different from desire. You could easily mistake one for the other.
“How long do you think you’ll keep doing this?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s my last season, that I can’t take it anymore. Sometimes I think I could do it forever. Every year I wonder if I’m tempting fate by doing another season. That there’s only so long you can go before something gives way.”
“What do you mean, gives way?”
“Luck, I guess. Or judgment. Or both.”
An explosion reverberates through the gelatin-still air. We watch as a mid-sized berg not more than fifteen metres away flips over in the water, snow and ice shearing from its edge. A blue-eyed shag that had been sitting on the berg takes flight and we track its arrow-like thrust through the sky, its long, sinuous neck straining, as if searching for something.
“I love to watch those shags fly,” Tom said. “They’re so committed. I try to fly like that, like an arrow thrust through the air.”
Suddenly everything seemed to be happening in slow motion — the crack of the iceberg, the bird’s flight. They stalled and hovered. Tom’s words too. I love to watch them fly. They’re so committed. My head buzzed as if I had just picked up a signal from one of the HF radio transmitters around the point.
I remember thinking, This is not an accident, or random, any of it: the blue throb of the sky, the exploding berg and, most of all, Tom’s words. I have been delivered here, to this moment, for a reason. The connections between us, the iceberg, the mountain, the blue-eyed shag, appeared like a gossamer invisible ribbon, binding us, although loosely. But instead of looking at some mathematical matrix I was suddenly looking into things. Once inside, emanating from this vision was an awareness of the vastness of everything. Then suddenly I shot up into the highest layer of the atmosphere, and beyond, into space, from the starless Antarctic sky. Strange entities were there, huge and transparent. They knew what was happening, and what is supposed to happen, and what will happen. They knew everything.
This journey took a moment, too fast for my brain to record. I knew only that a high-voltage current of knowledge had surged through my mind. And then it was gone.
“I think I lost you there.”
For a moment, I considered telling Tom about the brash ecstasy I had just passed through, or which had passed through me.
“I was just thinking,” I said.
He nodded. He had also done a lot of thinking, I could tell.
I had never had a vision of the kind that had just seized me. I had always been unconvinced about God. It was too soon for me to share what could easily just have been a synaptic blip, a moment of reverie.
Although Tom might have understood. It was impossible to remain in the Antarctic for any time and not have to reset your interior horizon, that measure of our relationship to the earth and what might lay beyond it, not unlike the artificial horizon Tom and Lanier had taught me to read so attentively when flying.
The first blizzards of winter arrived. By late February my body expected more light, and instead it was getting less. We were losing half an hour of light a day. At this rate, I thought, it would be mostly dark by April.
My hair went limp, my nails stopped growing. Somewhere inside me, an alarm was building. I looked at the sun with a ripe, bodily fear. The calendar said it was spring and yet the sun was going away. I recognized an atavistic dread, one which said, The sun has burnt itself out, the harvest will fail, we will all die.
I toyed with the idea of making a joke out of all this, telling people in the bar about my weird fear, just because the days were shortening. But I noticed mine was not the only hunted face.
One afternoon I watched Xavier packing up his crates. Before I knew it, I was telling him about my experience around the point.
He stopped packing and sat down on one of his silver crates. “I think these things are not uncommon in the Antarctic — strange dreams, hallucinations, you name it,” he said. “Here you’re less protected — well, you’re not protected at all — from whatever energies are coming down from the cosmos.”
“You really b
elieve that, as a scientist?”
“To an extent it is scientific: there’s less ozone, the atmosphere is thinner, there’s the tug downward of the earth’s magnetic shield. I think we pick all of this up on a subconscious level.”
The formality of his speech, the foreignness of his accent, was somehow more present. I had the sense he was measuring his remarks — not against me, but against something he himself had known, in his life.
“Or it was a genuine moment of enlightenment,” he said.
“Have you ever had one?”
He was silent for a while before answering. The laboratory machines buzzed loudly in our ears. That was another effect of winter — the silence had become more silent.
“I never saw snow until I was fifteen and in England. I could have gone to the Himalayas, of course. I could have gone to the Hindu Kush. But I never did. I developed my fascination for snow, mountains, ice, in the north. I wasn’t even particularly strong at chemistry or math. But I knew I had to master them.”
Along the way, Xavier told me, he had been called into the Army, where he was an engineer. He had, all told, six university degrees, “although two of them are honorary.” His father was a postcolonial administrator. His mother was a housewife with an unseemly interest in the occult. “I would come home and the living room would be full of shamans,” he said.
“What did you think of your mother’s interest in these things?”
“Oh, I couldn’t bear it. It was all darkness and shadows. It makes you nervous, that realm, because you never know what’s real. It’s unhealthy as well as fraudulent. You go peeking behind the scenes of life and find there’s some gigantic puppet master manipulating us all. You find there are dark energies at the core of our lives. And that bad things lurk in the future. How does that help you? My mother was anxious all the time, because she knew the future, or thought she did. My refuge was science, and rationality. I still believe the emotions are a dark force to be mastered by the intellect. I’m a throwback that way, I suppose.”
We were silent for a moment. With Xavier I could speak my own language of ambivalence, of abstraction. For months I had been speaking another tongue, one built of facts and enthusiasm. I never fully mastered it.
“I see you’ve struck up a friendship with Tom,” he said, after a while.
“He’s a good talker. For a pilot.”
“Great pilot too,” Xavier said. “A real natural. It’s necessary to have someone you can really talk to here. Otherwise it becomes unbearable.”
February 28th
If Not, Winter
No pain.
I want
I yearn and seek after
You burn me.
— “If Not, Winter,” Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
Sappho’s poems exist only in terse fragments. I think of the Swedish adventurer Andrée’s ballooning expedition in 1897 to try to reach Canada from Svalbard, how they crashed on the pack ice after only two days. Their diaries, found in the 1930s when their camp on an outlying island of the archipelago was discovered, damaged and fragmented. Their last entries were a kind of polar Sapphic composition, with lines of ink erased mid-sentence by frozen ink or water. No one knows what killed Andrée and his two companions, but it seems they died within days of their final entries.
Scott’s and Andrée’s are the only two diaries I know of in polar literature which were left behind in the field of their endeavours and outlived their authors, but perhaps there are more. Diaries have an immediacy and poignancy, especially when you know they have not consented to expire but came to an abrupt end not of the author’s choosing. The empty space after the last entries resonates into the future. Perhaps the future is just that: more and more white space.
As the reality of winter made itself felt, we were given new instructions by Simon, the base commander. We were not to walk around the point without telling him first. The sea ice was hardening at the edges of the shore, and with fresh snowfalls it could become difficult to see where the land stopped and the sea began. We risked falling through.
Safety was taken very seriously on base, and indeed in my whole time with BAS I felt safer than I ever have in my life. On the ship we had regular safety drills and major incident exercises. On base the fire alarm shrieked weekly and we would have to file outside to the veranda. We had endless runway and aircraft safety drills (which boiled down to: don’t walk into the propeller); then there was the very thorough mountaineering training we were put through by BAS as soon as we arrived on base. In all these rehearsals it was drilled into us how in the Antarctic tragedies had more than one cause; it was almost always a series of mishaps, or misjudgments, which sealed people’s fate.
How to think about safety in a rescueless place? In cities at least, we live in a regulated, regimented habitus, micromanaging our environments, swaddled in health and safety legislation. This gives rise to a dangerous delusion that we are in control of our lives. By nature I veer between extreme caution and recklessness, without any middle ground in between. The Antarctic suited me on that score.
It was also a place of manic jests, of innocent risks. Like the day, in the name of fun as well as safety protocol, we immersed ourselves in zero-degree Antarctic water to test the immersion suits (they worked fine). Or the day we spent on Léonie Island having a friendly conversation with several large male fur seals (which could deliver a mean bite and which we were under instructions not to approach) after they came to sit right beside us and all but drank from our cups of tea. Never mind what we did on field trips in the planes, flying so low sometimes over the snowfield for a good view we risked snagging the landing gear on sastrugi.
I had become less, not more, concerned for my personal safety. After all, our progress was being followed by an organization that would make a strenuous effort to save us, should anything happen. But beyond that I can’t really explain the raw serenity I felt.
Tom felt the same. We talked about this on one of our trips, in the cockpit, as we were approaching base again, flying over Alexander Island from the south. “You know, I never think of crashing,” he said. “I mean, we could go down, sure. But I always think I could get the plane on the deck. We wouldn’t disintegrate.”
“I know,” I said, “I feel it too.” That somehow we were protected.
That evening I went to ask permission from Simon to go for a walk around the point on my own. I found him in his office in front of his computer. Beside him a paperback edition of The Count of Monte Cristo lay face down. Many people on base set themselves reading-marathon challenges, tackling the stout nineteenth-century classics: War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities.
“Just remember what I said and stay away from the edges,” he said. “If you fall in walk back to base as quickly as you can. Here, take this.” He handed me a radio for good measure.
These walks were perplexing. I always started feeling a relief to be away from base, which meant away from other people. But forty minutes later I would round the head of the point glad to see its olive-coloured buildings again.
I stopped midway, trying to spot where the old path had been. It was now covered with snowfall. I ought to know the way well enough by now. I looked out over the bay to the east. The silence washed through me. In January, I found it soothing. Now there was something ominous about it. Something was nudging me. It was strangely external, not an intuition or instinct. I couldn’t hear what it was saying: Go home. Go back to the world, maybe. I had one last chance to leave with the last of the summer staff, Xavier among them. I knew there was an empty seat on the last Dash out. Otherwise there was no way out until the ship in early April.
I looked out into the waters of Ryder Bay to a by-now-familiar scene: rose-gold clouds, a horizon studded with mountains, icebergs the size of office buildings.
What would I be doing, though, at home in London, 14,500 kilometres away as the cr
ow flies? I tried to picture myself going to a film at the South Bank, shopping at H&M, cycling to my Clerkenwell office. I felt it like a blow, the absence of my friends. For months I had been too busy to miss them. In the meantime, they had gone on with their lives.
My breaths refused to make puffs in the air — there was not enough moisture for it to properly condense. I stood looking out to the barren flanks of Piñero Island. To the north the sky had turned graphite. A storm was on its way.
I wait in La Vie en Rose to meet him again. It is early July and thirty-five degrees. I feel like ripping the soupy heat aside as you would a curtain, to get beyond it, to a realm where thoughts have clarity and purpose.
I have written my exams, I have graduated. In a delayed and useless emotional response, I am frightened. If I have not done well on my exams, I will never escape this place. Not only my future, but my very life, depends on escape. Somehow I have known this all along, but did I work hard enough? Have I engineered a way out of this trap?
Six years in this town have taken their toll, have transferred something of its world view. Would it be so bad to be driving a Chevrolet Chevette through its snow-lined streets to be a teller at the Bank of Montreal, or to teach in the very high school I have just exited, or to be a secretary in the English department in one of the two universities which repose on the flanks of a sloping hill?
There are thousands of towns like this all over North America, and probably other countries too: curiously humourless towns with their one bad-boy nightclub, the unofficial stripper joint on the edge of town, the strip malls — Sobeys, Canadian Tire, Atlantic Superstore. The convenience stores and opticians and the weepy clapboard mansions.
All through high school the message has been clear: don’t stand out too much, don’t be too smart or too different. Don’t be a freak. The characters the town holds worthy of its gaze are lawyers or hockey players for men, while for women all that is required is that you are beautiful. Certainly there are characters too: local poets and cosmopolitan CBC radio hosts and eccentric philosophy professors and hippie entrepreneurs like Elin, drawn to the raw wilderness that forms a cordon around the place, to the autumn apple-picking festivals and the spring horse shows and sleigh rides through shadowed forests in winter.
