Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  “Well, take care of yourself. Make the most of it and don’t worry about anything. If it all gets too much, I’ll come back to get you.”

  We laughed. We both knew this was impossible.

  “I won’t say goodbye,” he said. “Pilot’s superstition, I guess.”

  “Like the not looking back,” I said.

  “That’s right. ‘Don’t look back, don’t say goodbye.’” He looked down at his feet, kicked them together — for warmth, I suppose. “Well. I’ll write from the road.”

  Tom went to join Lanier in the cockpit. The passengers were seated. Steward appeared in the doorway and hauled the stairs in, giving us a final crisp wave.

  The runway was covered with a dusting of snow. Tom and Lanier turned over the plane’s engines. One by one the propellers began to whip the air, creating eddies of gravel and flurries. From my time in the jumpseat I knew that they had the white laminated sheet of the departure checklist balanced on the controls and were working through it methodically: spoilers retracted, avionics on, elevator trim set for takeoff.

  The plane trembled with the combined thrust of the four engines. It turned with that demure grace it had for such a large machine, and taxied to the end of the runway. The tremble became a shudder. The takeoff run was sudden and absolute — depending on its load and the wind the Dash could be airborne after six hundred metres of the runway’s nine hundred metre length. When it passed us standing by the hangar, it was already flying.

  Tom and Lanier banked the aircraft around the pen­in­sula. They would return and fly over base for the traditional end-of-season flyby. For a while the air­craft disappeared from view. When it returned it was flying so close to the ground, gravel on the runway scattered.

  As the plane headed for us, the drone of the engines was deafening. The pilots climbed and the fuselage passed above our heads. We could see its pale underbelly. Then Tom and Lanier climbed further to clear the icebergs at the end of the runway, and soon the plane was only a dot in a silver mesh of cloud.

  Everyone drifted away, back to the warmth of the dining room, walking in slow clumps across a runway where suddenly there were no aircraft, and we would no longer have to obey the siren warning us not to cross. A sharp wind had brewed from the south, but I stayed behind even as it started to snow, staring at a place in the sky where a plane used to be.

  March 12th

  My thoughts are smudged suddenly. I can’t write more than a few lines at a time. If I pick up one of the books I have brought with me for research — Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind, for instance — I can only read a paragraph.

  I can just about manage to read email. Tom writes to me from the “ferry flight” as the pilots call the long journey to Canada. They must take a route that allows the Otters to refuel every eight hours. The Dash can fly longer; all the planes have extended range thanks to full auxiliary fuel tanks.

  Before Tom left, I photocopied atlas pages and drew a thin red line between his stops: Stanley, Montevideo, Florianópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Recife. Then a long hop to Caracas, then Curaçao, the British Virgin Islands, then Texas and Montana. The final leg will take them to Calgary where the planes will be maintained over the northern hemisphere summer.

  Tom had seen so much of the world from his cockpit capsule, and not only the ice world. I envied the marvels he was witnessing and which he described briefly in his emails — the giant thunderstorms of Rio Grande do Sul, a lavish sunset over the Amazon. “I’m just an observer,” he’d told me on base. “The scientists, they’re the ones who are doing something about it. I just watch it happen.”

  There always has to be a watcher. I suspected he was made for this, and that it was part of the reason why he had become a pilot. “They’re loners, these pilots,” Gavin had said, and it was true. Tom was self-sufficient. He only really needed himself and his plane, to fly through the air, to feel that power in his hands. Everything else was supplementary. I had the sense women were like this for him, too, the equivalent of his new flat, new motorcycle, new car — each one catching his interest for as long as it remained unsullied by fault, shimmering with transitory beauty, not so different from the land passing by underneath him: seas, glaciers, mountains, a wide, lazy arc of rivers.

  For a couple of days after the planes left, I felt calm despite the eraser-like quality of my thoughts that deleted themselves as soon as I perceived them. I tried to get on with my work, making notes, consulting the library.

  It first happened at lunch in the dining room. I was eating tinned asparagus soup. The anxiety did not build slowly. Like the Dash on its takeoff run, it went from nought to sixty. Knives erupted from everywhere in my body: my lungs, my mind.

  Some creature, valiant but black-hearted, had leapt on me from behind. Spooked by the ferocity of the strange attack, I retreated to Lab 5 and to the photographs of green, beaches, sunsets. Loneliness washed over me. Without Tom’s or Xavier’s presence, the insulating safety of their comradeship, I was exposed.

  You’ve made a mistake, the voice inside me said. You should have been on that plane.

  Who are you? I asked it.

  I decided I should be very busy. First I went to the sledge store and learned how to wax skis. In the mechanics’ workshop, I held a greasy skidoo chain while one of the wintering mechanics replaced its drum. In the alcohol store, we stacked and re-stacked boxes; the facilities manager showed me how to use the Miracle Span recycling machine. On Fridays there was “scrub out,” when we cleaned in a messianic frenzy, collecting fluff-less wine corks and dust-less debris from corners.

  Winter’s peculiar marriage of industry and contemplation overtook us. Winter is a fallow season. If we were to lose winter to a warming world we would forfeit this time of dormancy, reflection, soul-searching. We would lose the starved grandeur of this season of ice and snow, as well as the tenacity it confers upon those who last its course.

  The strongest characters are forged in times of little hope. Without winter, will we become flaccid, sybaritic; will we become perpetual heliotropes, those flowers that turn their faces to follow the sun?

  March 14th

  Sunday is the longest day on base. Now we are forty-two people; twenty-one winterers and the rest of us who are leaving on the Shack. Now people come to breakfast late or not at all. Or they come in their pyjamas, as if we are children at a sleepover. They seek to re-create a Sunday “back home” and sit with the two-colour printouts of the online version of the Observer we must all share, swapping sections when we are done.

  Later, there will be a Sunday lunch. What are you doing today? we ask each other. We can ski, or go back to bed to watch videos, lying underneath the duvet. Later in the bar there will be games of backgammon, pool. Then a film night, pints of Guinness.

  The day is dark; our first taste of real winter. The windsock says thirty-five knots, maybe gusting to forty, from the northeast — an unusual wind direction. Later I will go for a walk, but only if the wind subsides. A strong wind can augment the wind chill to a point where your face will freeze, even covered in a balaclava.

  I work with the nightshade pulled down against the blizzard outside, and concentrate on the cheering miniature universe I’ve tried to create around my desk: photographs taken with the underwater camera of the slope over by Lille Island. Starfish, sea squirts, sea sponges — flares of colour in the deep.

  That afternoon I did a head count of those of us left on base. Now we came in twos, like Noah’s Ark: two boatmen, two carpenters/builders, two chefs, two vehicle mechanics, two base commanders, two meteorologists, two engineers (mainly meteorological, one outgoing, one incoming), two plumbers, two doctors (one outgoing, one incoming), two terrestrial biologists, two marine assistants, two marine biologists, two electricians, two guys whose jobs are unknown to me. And then the unsettling odd numbers, the singles and the threes: one facilities manager, one engineer, one
station support manager, one operations assistant, five GAs, one base GA (the “PermaFID” who can’t keep away from the Antarctic), three Saints, one writer.

  Now that we were a small group of people, the distrust and suspicion of the writer ripened. I had more cover when base was full of us exotics: journalists, government ministers, foreign office people, Royal Navy trainees. To counter my growing estrangement I became conspicuously jolly, chatting in the dining room for hours to people I’d never spoken to when there had been a hundred people on base. It didn’t work. I knew most people thought me a spy of sorts. But they needn’t have worried: I wouldn’t write about them personally, in a way they could be recognized. To write about the essential emotional truths I witnessed and experienced, I would need to create entirely different people. The only entities who required no such protection were the Antarctic, and me.

  March 15th

  The skies are our television. The light is slanting and elusive; it changes from second to second. We see whipped meringue clouds, as if some giant had raked a five-pronged fork through them, separating them into five perfectly rutted architectural seams. The clouds mushroom until they hover overhead, consuming the sky. Then there are the lenticular clouds — high velocity mountain clouds. These are frequently taken for UFOs. They do a good impression, these slim saucers that peak at the top. We begin to see nacreous clouds too: they waver like thin sheets of mother of pearl. The colour of green melons, the subdued silver of the moon.

  My anxiety sharpened. I was no longer treating it like a transitory symptom; now I was frightened. That day I went into the rarely used bathroom by the doctors’ surgery to throw up.

  Opposite the bathroom, old topographical maps of the peninsula were taped to the wall. In close scale they showed our immediate surroundings in Graham Land: the Oscar II, Foyn, Loubet, Bowman, and Fallières coasts, the Eternity Range, the Trinity Peninsula. The dead men/sci-fi names chilled me.

  The taste of bile and spit stayed in my mouth. It was hitting me forcefully that there really was no way out of here until the ship came, the knowledge a greasy shear in my stomach, my mouth, my mind. On the tagging board on the way back to my office I looked at Tom’s plastic nametag. It hung in the Flying Off Base section, waiting for him to pick it up at the beginning of the following summer, seven months in the future.

  Over the next few days, the anxiety and insomnia worsened until I could only sleep a couple of hours a night. It felt as if I had imbibed a truckload of coffee. Every muscle clenched. The panic was prefabricated; it had been manufactured somewhere else in my life and shipped to me intact and posthaste. I was aware that it was an abstract panic, of finding myself outside time and abandoned, but I couldn’t reason it away.

  I would manage to get to sleep around two a.m., but would consistently wake soon after to the hiss of snow against the window. We were losing nearly an hour of daylight each day. I would look at my watch every evening as I sat in Lab 5, trying to write. Now dark at seven thirty p.m., now at seven ten; the next day, six forty p.m.

  I began to take sleeping pills but would waken two or three times, woozy. When I closed my eyes I saw shimmering white figures against the screen of my eyelids: white wolves, white faces with elongated faces and slit eyes — Steven Spielberg–film aliens — and figures I could only describe as Vikings, helmeted, with braided hair in pigtails. All of these creatures would look at me disapprovingly, as if I was not up to a mystery task they had set me. They could have been right. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t wait for time to pass and time, in retaliation, slowed down and stopped, then, with an almost audible grind of gears, went into reverse.

  I told myself that it was the spooky speed at which the light was going that made me see these things. I remembered Xavier saying that strange visions were common in the Antarctic: ultrarational physicists had them, JCB drivers had them. Why shouldn’t I?

  Even the atmosphere felt different now that I was thinking of such things, as if all the energies of the planet had sunk and were congealing in a cold layer of thought. Scientifically there is some evidence for this: the earth’s magnetic field is drawn downwards by the weight of the ice continent and distorted, so that magnetically the planet looks less like a sphere than a pear.

  New threats blossomed in my mind; as soon as one was banished another took its place. I imagined war, epidemics, the collapse of the global economy, tsunamis. Other threats were more proximate. There was only one ship to take us out, and the Drake Passage at that time of year was notoriously rough. I realized belatedly that by staying I had put myself in a situation where there were no guarantees.

  One morning in sit rep, Simon informed us that all power would be shut off at eight p.m. All the power had to be turned off to simulate a failure of the main generator over winter, and the backup generator must be tested in its ability to handle the basic workings of the base.

  I sat in my office awaiting the darkness, drinking the last of the bottle of Sangre de Toro Tom had given me before he left.

  The generator powered down. Suddenly there was no light. We were not allowed to light candles on base — the wood and air were so dry we could easily spark a fire. I put on my parka and went outside. It might be my only chance to see base in total darkness.

  The sky was stark with stars. Their light was cold, more platinum than silver. Silver-cobalt clouds filled the sky.

  Others joined me. We looked into a little-known quadrant of space. The sky was stitched together by constellations I was beginning to recognize; waypoints like the Southern Cross tilted on the horizon, soon to disappear. The night sky pulsed and flared. The stars had more intensity, also volatility. They blinked like frozen nebulae, a dying pulsar. I felt vertigo knowing we were looking down into space. Antarctic skies seen by very few people, only by telescopes trained to find the echoes of the Big Bang, by satellites and space stations.

  Around us the world was hardening. In the bay it started as an impasse; days of ice flowers, tiny pellucid formations, accumulated in the shapes of crystals. As the carpet of flowers knit together in the cold nights they were soaked by seawater and transformed into grey gruel; overnight, as the temperature plummeted, the gruel became porridge. Within days ivory pancake ice formed. Ice welding itself together produced a metallic sound, like steel grinding.

  Simon stood beside me. We watched the sea ice in the gathering darkness.

  “This is it,” he said, staring into the darkness. “The sea ice has begun to form. This is the beginning of winter.”

  Donna’s house is beside the cement factory her father owns. He built the house himself. It is cream-coloured, with pillars at the entrance. All the floors have thick carpet, apart from the kitchen. On the kitchen wall is a clock in the shape of a butterfly. The hands are converging on midnight.

  It’s hot — over twenty degrees still. Tomorrow will be a real scorcher.

  Donna and I are sitting at the kitchen table. I am sleeping over that night.

  “I can’t imagine what it would be like to meet my father now,” she says.

  There are things I can’t imagine either. I have never imagined myself as a lover, although I know of other girls my age who are definitely some boy’s, some man’s, lover. The word itself threatens to disintegrate every time I try to hold it in my head or it mutates into its close cousins. Loser, loner, lover — only one consonant separates them.

  My friends seem to think that being someone’s lover is only a matter of time, a choice we or someone else will make, but I’m not so sure. I have always felt more mineral than human. I think of the coal in the Carboniferous forests, edges pressed and pressed by centuries of decay until I am as smooth as the soapstone seals sold in Shades of Light. Would anyone want to enact such a fleshy, trembling manoeuvre with me?

  Michael comes in. The screen door creaks behind him. His eyes are red around the rims. As he makes himself a cup of insta
nt coffee, I see his hand shaking very slightly.

  “What have you been up to?” Donna asks. “Tonight wasn’t your patrol night.”

  He sits down beside us. “What have you two been doing?”

  We glance at each other. Not that we have been doing anything particularly illicit. We’ve spent the evening grooming Donna’s quarter horse, trying on new shades of eyeshadow, watching television.

  “Talking,” I say.

  “About what?”

  Donna sighs. “School, guys, killers on the loose. What else is there to talk about?”

  He sits back in his chair, takes his baseball cap off. His hair is plastered to his forehead. He runs his hand through it.

  “You’ve been driving around looking for him, haven’t you?” Donna says.

  Michael looks off into the distance. “ I just thought I’d let him know that we’re watching.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Along the river. The woodlot roads. The usual places.”

  “Did you see anything?” I say.

  “A couple of winos sitting on the park bench, the two that are always there.”

  He opens his mouth, closes it. “I talked to my lieutenant today. He said we should set a trap. Give him the situation he likes best, and wait to catch him. A woman, a girl, alone. Maybe her car broke down and she has to walk to the payphone. Maybe — I don’t know. Some situation where she’s out there alone, and then we wait for him.”

  “You’d get a policewoman to do that,” Donna says. “Go undercover.”

  “There isn’t anyone on the force young enough. All the victims have been in their teens or early twenties. The youngest we’ve got is a thirty-year-old. And she’s fat.”

  I find I have said it before I have thought it. “I’ll do it.”