Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  “No you won’t.”

  “Why not? Besides,” I say, “if something happens, you’ll save me. Right?”

  He looks at me again. He has heard the note of challenge in my voice. There is a glint in his eye this time, sharp.

  In that town darkness does not distribute itself evenly, but gathers in clumps like bunches of blackberries. The woods are glutted with blackberries and blueberries, thickets of mauve corpuscles — I have learned the word from my science teacher; this is what lungs are made of. He showed us a slide on the overhead projector. They looked like the dusky purple grapes shipped from Ontario or Florida.

  The road is a woodlot road, just up from the old bridge with green arches that groan in the night. Pulp trucks rattle across it, their loads unstable, like the one that killed the girl at my school.

  I slap my thigh and bring my palm away bearing blood. The mosquitoes and the blackflies will eat me alive, before the killer ever gets to me.

  Don’t tell anyone about this. Michael’s words ring in my ears.

  Michael and his partner, Dave, are out there, somewhere, in the patrol car.

  The walkie-talkie is flat and cold against my skin. I wear it concealed between the small of my back and bottom, inside my jeans. My outfit is ridiculous: jeans, pumps, a tank top, turquoise — the kind of clothes I would never wear. I have make-up on. My hair is crimped — Donna did it.

  I walk along the gravel shoulder of the highway. Cars pass, beep their horns. The sound continues long after the car has gone by, like a ragged ribbon flapping behind. Two boys, their faces yellow streaks, yell out the window, “Yee haw!”

  I watch the cars, waiting for the red taillights to flash on. The vehicle slowing down, waiting for me to catch up with them. Or maybe even backing up, pulling up alongside. What’s the matter, darlin’? Need a ride?

  I walk in the cooling empty air, the crunch of gravel beneath my feet. Every so often a lumber truck thunders by, and I am nearly knocked off my feet from the air it displaces. Its balsam smell trails long behind it. Little pieces of bark fall off and get caught in my hair.

  After an hour of walking, no one has tried to kill me. Finally I hear a car pull up, a spew of gravel as it eases onto the hard shoulder. I turn around.

  “Hey,” Michael says. “Time to call it a night. Get in.”

  We repeat this scene, four, five times on different roads next to the river. It is an experiment that Michael and his partner have hidden from their superiors. He is hungry for promotion, I suppose, hungry to be the hero of the town. As for me, I am used to walking on the sides of roads. I have spent several evenings the past winter walking thirteen kilometres home from the stables in the dark.

  There are no more attacks that month. It is as if the killer knows I am a decoy and has decided to take temporary retirement while this piece of backwoods theatre is played out for his benefit. I feel certain there is a relationship of some kind between our efforts to ensnare him and his reluctance. An understanding, a truce.

  My mother comes into my room the next morning. I am worried she will see the unfamiliar clothes spread on the floor. But she doesn’t seem to notice them.

  “How is it going?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With — him.”

  Him — she refers to him as I do, evading the name and role neither of us can bring ourselves to say.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because.” An unusual expression alights and at once flees my mother’s face.

  “What’s the matter?” I press.

  “You can’t always trust that what he tells you is true.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He tells lies,” she snaps.

  I laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I thought you were going to say something much more serious.”

  “You don’t think lying is serious?”

  “Then why did you encourage me to meet him now?”

  “To get him off my back. And because I thought he could have changed. Maybe he’s had counselling, or whatever.”

  Doubt sprouts in my mind. “What kind of lies?”

  “Anything,” my mother shakes her head. “Everything. I didn’t realize it myself, until it was too late.”

  Michael and I sit in the police station, in his office. We are alone — all his colleagues are out on patrol. We have come in from another failed decoy session. I sit there, ludicrous in my tight-fitting jeans and neon green halter top.

  “You’re different.”

  I narrow my eyes. “What do you mean, different?”

  “You’re hard to get to.”

  “Hard to get at, you mean.”

  “To reach.” Michael draws back. His expression says, Are you happy now? Just as with my mother, the main currency between us is frustration. “It’s as if you’ve decided everyone is out to get you.”

  “Everyone is out to get me.” As evidence I gesture to my outfit, our surroundings. “Why would you want to reach me?”

  “It’s natural for us to want to connect, don’t you think?”

  “Why? Because I’m your sister’s friend?”

  “What do you want?” he asks.

  “I just want more control.”

  “Over what?”

  “Over what happens.” I add, for emphasis, “to me. I just want a say here. A say in my life. That’s all I want.”

  He seems to consider this for a while, his expression at once bemused and sombre, as if it is a fabulously exotic request. Then he plays his trump card. “I saw you at the Dairy Queen. With a man. Older.”

  I don’t want to tell him but I will need it, as a defence. “He’s my father.”

  Michael raises an eyebrow, triggering a bunching of skin on his forehead. He is only twenty-three. Those lines hadn’t been there before. His job, I suppose.

  “We’re getting to know each other. He’s from out west.”

  “Well that can only be a good thing.” He sounds older then, knowing.

  I study his face — a face I have known since junior high, or maybe even earlier. I can’t remember when I first met Donna and started to visit their house, packing away my oh my Gods, and for God’s sakes on their doorstep in deference to their strict Pentecostalism, donning my friend-who-goes-to-church persona like a smock. Michael was always there. Always seven years older, always watching me, even if he seemed to be ignoring me — playing basketball, driving off in his first car, blowing a kiss to his sister. It didn’t surprise me at all when he joined the police force. He had good peripheral vision.

  “We’re going to try again, Thursday night.”

  “I’ll be there,” I say.

  Those dusk evenings of summer when I walk down woodlot roads on my own, waiting for the feel of hands around my neck, nails piercing skin, a blow to the head — the murderer has used all these tactics — I recite the names of the trees of the province to keep me company. For my university entrance exam I wrote an essay on them, quoting their genus and species in Linnaean classification, their distinguishing characteristics, their susceptibilities to the cyclical plagues of insects that beset the Maritime seaboard.

  They rotate in my mind, an internal compass in verbal form, like the psalms my mother intones during Mass: cedar, pine, balsam fir, balsam poplar, oak, maple, walnut, Siberian and European elm, larch, hawthorn, laurel, alder and pussy willow, sumac, sycamore, white spruce, black spruce, balsam fir, jack pine, white birch, trembling aspen, tamarack, beech, maple, black walnut, hickory, oak.

  My mother is folding laundry, her face softening at the small white jumpsuit her youngest baby has just outgrown.

  “I think he honestly doesn’t know the difference,” she says. “He thinks he creates his own reality,
so they’re not lies. He thinks if he says he’s a pilot, then he’s a pilot.”

  “Are you sure he’s lying about that?”

  My mother purses her lips. “Who knows. He might actually be a pilot.” She laughs again, that tinkling laugh, like so many stones dropped on a marble table. I will hear this tone of voice many times in my life, perhaps I will even voice it myself — that of a woman burned by her own susceptibility.

  Yes, she had avoided that particular fate, of being with a man who is perhaps a fantasist, but perhaps not. The stories he’d told me were detailed — the make of plane and model, its capability, wingspan, engine thrust, the length of the runways, fuel capacity, weather. The exact sort of detail Tom would later recount to me in the Antarctic.

  “He’d make a good writer, you know,” she says. “That’s what he should have been, then he could make up stories all he liked.”

  What is my own relationship with the truth, I wonder. I am not a liar, but I am a dreamer. Could they be one in the same? I want things to be so different from how they are, it’s true — for me to live in a different place, to have a different family, to be more beautiful, more exotic. Surely to make up stories could only be a way of accelerating, rather than distorting, the truth you want to exist.

  I didn’t know then that truth is alive; it can only be lived. It exists in a single lived moment. Any attempt to flense it into its constituent elements of imagination, desire, fact, belief can only result in a bloodied corpse.

  To not tell the truth is not to lie, or not exactly. Lies might have their own momentum, their own truth, even. Once you tell one lie, others follow effortlessly until a fabric of reverse truth is knit, as convincing as its simulacrum.

  There is never only one lie, but a cavalcade of them. This was another of the words I had learned from The Alexandria Quartet. Horses tumbling over each other, galloping so thick and fast some of them fall and are killed by those who come behind. The novels that made up the Quartet were also full of liars, but it was for a purpose. There was a war, and you had to lie so that people would not be killed. A sort of justification, I imagined, but it would not protect the liar against that basic multiplication equation: one lie requires another, then another.

  The temperature remains twenty-two, twenty-three degrees at night. I know this place after nearly six years here, years which have felt twice as long as the rest of my life that came before them, as if time has become involved in a mysterious marathon. I know that one day in late August there will be a chill on the fringes of the air. Blackflies will breed in furious clouds, intuiting their days are numbered. Reeds will pulse through the edges of the river. Small river birds will raise their young there, out of sight.

  3.

  CLIMBING

  cirque

  A large circular or nearly circular steep-walled recess or hollow in the side of a mountain or a hill, generally ascribed to glacial erosion.

  March 18th

  It’s been snowing for days. The sat dome is coated with, as the comms manager says, “the wrong kind of snow.” It is slushy and cancels our comms. We are deployed to brush it off, standing on ladders in a bitter gale. Now, stepping outside is like entering a blasted open-air cathedral, the organ wind grinding some nameless requiem. Simon the BC tries to jolly us along: “Big deal,” he says, “it’s only minus ten. Real winter temperatures are minus thirty.”

  George the radio operator and I decide to go climbing. It might cure us of our cabin fever. We are both twitchy. For several days we wait for a weather window. Finally it comes — the forecast goes up on the whiteboard: Sunday will be “bonza!”

  The day was blue and clear. Our destination, Stork Peak, stood on the other side of the glacier, just out of sight of base. One of the highest points on Adelaide Island, Stork Peak looks out onto the Wormald Ice Piedmont toward Laubeuf Fjord to the east; to the west is open sea all the way to Australia.

  We put on our cross-country skis and skied up the ramp to Vals. From up above base it was another hour’s skiing across a flat ice field. We were weighed down by ice stakes, an ice axe, climbing ropes, and jingly janglies.

  The snow squeaked; the only other sounds were our breathing, wind, the scour of snow as it was harried by the wind. It sounded like distant snakes hissing.

  When Stork was in sight, George and I took off our skis and roped ourselves together to cross the crevasse field that lay at the bottom of the bergschrund. It is better to cross crevasses on skis, as they distribute weight evenly and make it less likely you will fall through the bridge of the crevasse, which might be as shallow as only a foot or two of snow.

  The sky was rigid with sun. We needed the strong contrast to pick out the crevasses, which can be near invisible; when you can see them they appear as fractures drawn in a very slightly lighter white than the surrounding glacier.

  George went first, prodding in front with a stick, the climbing rope taut between us. After a few steps the stick failed to meet resistance and passed clean through. He looked over his shoulder and pointed downward.

  When I reached the place where his ski pole went through, my instinct was to tiptoe. During the time it took me to pass over the crevasse, I could not stop myself from imagining the ground giving way beneath me, the glass-hard edges of the slot, then the fall into the crystal chamber.

  The deepest and longest crevasses on earth are found in the Antarctic. They tend to occur in patterns: intersecting, chevron fields of zig-zagging lines, or long fractures parallel to each other. Sometimes they are visible from the surface but very often they aren’t — you only know they are there when you find yourself falling. In Antarctica crossing a crevasse is the equivalent of crossing the road in London. You do it often, whether you are aware of it or not. Mostly the mouths of crevasses are gummed together with snow, and this snow bridge may hold up to forty-five to fifty-five kilograms. But you never know.

  The crevasse field behind us, we switched our ropes and re-knotted them for climbing. We took our crampons, ice axes, and snow stakes from our backpacks and these, along with the weight of the rope around my neck and the karabiners chinking on my waist, meant that I was hauling half my weight again up the mountain. I called to George, who was climbing dextrously above me. We took a break, although I could tell he was eager to crack on. It took us an hour to reach the summit.

  There I struggled to stand upright. After an hour of climbing, my thighs trembled.

  We stared in silence at the view: mountain, ice field, mountain, ice field. Wave after wave of blue and phosphorescent white ploughing into the horizon. There was Orca — so named because it looks like a killer whale’s black dorsal fin, the sister peak to Stork — and Trident. Beyond these, we could see the edge of Adelaide Island and the ocean.

  We breathed in, our breaths condensing on our eyebrows and eyelashes, frosting them. George had been there before, but I’d never stood on the summit of any peak before, let alone one in the Antarctic. I understood the appeal of mountaineering at last: we hadn’t walked to a destination, but into a dimension.

  In The Spiritual History of Ice, Eric Wilson quotes Wordsworth’s assertion that we need not literally climb mountains to undergo what he referred to as cosmological experiences, but that we “can attain such heights psychically.” In book six of his Prelude, published in 1850, even as he fails to summit an Alpine peak, Wordsworth’s pilgrim “apprehends the transcendent powers of his imagination,” Wilson writes. “He realizes an unseen, infinite power, a universal mind animating and organizing” the entire world — the fearsome peaks as well as the placid valleys. He realizes that home lies not in sensual attachment to matter but “with infinitude.”

  As Wilson argues, quoting Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s hero becomes “something ever more about to be”: “a mountain theologian, a limen between sky and earth, boundless reaches and rugged forms.” Limen means threshold, as in the limit of a physical or psychol
ogical response, or the place between space and form, spirit and matter — the pattern of invisible immensities. Wordsworth’s poetry suggests that we are in a circle “whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere,” to quote Shelley. Mountain climbing is a metaphor for climbing toward God, toward the infinite. Here, in the thin air of fear and endeavour, we are closer to the divine.

  The ice fields of the Wormald Piedmont stretched into the distance, until they ran into the broken wall of the Shambles glacier, its snow-waves arrested at the moment of cresting, like the frozen tsunami Max told me about on the ship.

  The air temperature freeze-dried my sweat instantly, but the sun kept us warm. We sat in the snow to eat a bar of ten-year-old Bournville chocolate — “quite new, for the Antarctic,” as George said.

  As we ate, George and I talked of Good Ice Years and Bad Ice Years. A Good Ice Year is when you can travel long distances over the ice. Through his binoculars we could see far beyond the bay, out to Piñero and Pourquoi Pas islands. There, refuge huts had been set up thirty years ago, in case sledging parties had been caught on the sea ice. “They’re full of thirty-year-old manfood.” George said. “That makes ten-year-old chocolate an appealing prospect.”

  Between us and the huts were fifty kilometres of crevasses, capricious sea ice, fast-running channels. If we had to reach those huts on sea ice from where we stood, we would face ice cliffs and crevasses galore. We were on the eastern flank of Adelaide Island, on the Wright Peninsula, only a speck of the Antarctic compared to what Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen had traversed, and even such a relatively short journey seemed an impossibility.

  George told then that two men from Base R had been killed in 1981 on the Shambles Glacier, not far from where we stood and only a few hours’ ski from base.

  “What happened?”

  “They went on a jolly, climbing like we are now,” he said. “On the way back they fell into a crevasse.”

  I thought of the story Elliott told me at Lockroy, of the French yachtsman who went for a short walk and died. Or the Twin Otter operated by a Canadian charter company that crashed into an iceberg after takeoff from Base R ten years before. Apparently a passenger survived the initial impact, but he had a broken leg, and the base rescue team could not safely traverse the ice in the bay to reach the iceberg in time, and the survivor died of exposure.