by Jean McNeil
Chills rippled through my body — from the antidepressants, likely, more so than the drama of the view. My brain felt tight, as if it had been placed in a vice.
I stood there, surveying the grandeur of the mountains, its crisp silence, until I felt the cold soak into my bones.
March 27th
Eight days to go before the ship arrives. It was due to arrive tomorrow but has been delayed in the Falklands with engine problems.
Time presses itself into my eyes. I struggle to open them in the morning, I struggle to keep them open. New visions have replaced the wolves. Flowers, black and canopy-like — miniature umbrellas — bloom in fields fertilized by flesh. Fungi flowers feeding on the rancid cadaver of hope. I close and open my eyes, willing the flowers away.
We have three hours of lilac light in the afternoon. Venus and Mars shine on the edge of the western horizon. The snow on the runway is too deep now; I’ve had to transfer my allegiance to the treadmill in the food store. I run for an hour, staring at boxes of tinned mushrooms and cauliflower, a vista so dull I miss the fur seals.
I go back to the office and stare at the runway, the line of black and red bamboo flags that lead up from what used to be the crossing point, curving up the traverse; the oil drums that cover the runway lights, a scoop of wind-drifted snow curling against them.
I am enveloped by a brass ringing sound, the sound of no sound at all. I know from my very basic physics that negatives form until they occupy just as much space as a positive force, if not more. That these forces can expand infinitely until they explode, creating a dark void of antimatter. This was how our universe was born — in this negative radiance of eternal darkness.
It feels like a group of cheetahs are consuming me. They gnaw and gnaw, they are growing faster, more lithe; crucially, they are luckier than me. They’ll leave me for dead, then move on. Time has that smell, something amphibian and engrossing, bent on plucking you from the earth. It is much, much bigger than me and I am afraid.
The last time I ran on the runway, I found the North Cove end littered with the corpses of skua chicks. I remembered Xavier telling me about the bird’s habitual fratricide. While two chicks are born, one kills the other, just as shark embryos devour the other in the womb.
“Filial love is a fiction,” he said. “Think of how many children try to harm their younger sibling just after birth. They know very well what threat it presents to their survival, the arrival of a brother or sister. Think of King Lear.”
“And is that the case in your family? Have you wanted to kill each other?”
“No.” I could see he was shocked by my question. “My brothers and I, we love each other.” He fixed me with that look again, poised between suspicion and interest. “So your book, the one you will write: will it be about survival?”
“I don’t think so.”
“All Antarctic stories are survival stories.”
“Well maybe it’s time that changed.”
In my office I was surrounded by these books, survival stories all: The Heart of the Antarctic, South, The Worst Journey in the World, Scott’s journals. They were appealing in their simplicity, I was coming to think. There was a threat, but it was obvious and external: the cold, starvation, exhaustion, the crevasse, the whiteout. There was the journey and the arrival, which was fleeting, anticlimactic, incomplete. When you look at that photograph of Scott’s party at the pole, all facing the camera, swaddled in their inadequate clothing, their faces black with cold and exhaustion, you see not one note of barren triumph. Their faces are soot-streaked, frozen: awful masks of dread and failure. They look like they are thinking, Let’s just get this over with.
I wondered if I really was meant to come here. Denise’s strange vision of me standing in the snow dressed like an “Eskimo” was likely just a psychic stab in the dark, one that I took far too seriously.
But the idea that there is a crystal river of fate, of circumstance and consequence, is far from a crackpot idea believed in only by telephone psychics. Shelley, along with many Romantic thinkers and writers, was convinced that the crystal could throw light onto the future. In the Victorian era, scrying was the esoteric craze du jour.
In the crystal river, time flows forward but in it shapes congeal; if you learn to read these shapes you can see the general direction of the future. In the case of sentient beings such as humans, they “are determined to be moderately undetermined,” writes Eric Wilson in The Spiritual History of Ice. “Some are able to gain greater distances than others from the flows of fate. These freer beings are thus able to entertain wider arrays of possibilities for turning these flows.” And so, he says, man is capable of concocting “complex plans of navigation.”
This seems to suggest that the direction of our lives might be dependent upon our psychic energy — meaning the flexibility of the psyche rather than anything purely esoteric — and not destiny. Fate itself might be determined, but if our directional energy is come-what-may, it might be possible for outcomes to remain undetermined.
Wilson writes,
The human mind yearning for holistic powers beyond the divisions of time and space perhaps recollects an origin in an eternal consciousness … if the divisions of space and time are illusory, based on arbitrary mental habits, it could follow that a mental principle beyond space and time generates life and being … if “to be is to be perceived,” then an intuition of a universal mind is just as valid as an empirical perception of mechanism.
This may be the crux of the relationship between cosmic power and poetry, specifically of the Romantics so associated with snow and ice: Coleridge, Shelley, Byron. Wilson suggests that the poet’s mind could be a glacier, creating and destroying as it flows with the universe of things in the “eternal rhythm of terror and tranquility.” Could ice be a bridge between mind and matter? Ice — no longer an agent of death, the manifestation of a coming frozen apocalypse, but rather of scintillating revelations.
We are hopeful creatures. I had believed that everything would be all right. I believed in myself, in my future, in my luck. But in the Antarctic, for the first time in my life, I began to think such a universal mind might exist. I could feel it in the land. It felt neither malevolent nor benevolent, rather regally indifferent.
Captain Scott, hero of ultimate failure, believed in his men. He believed in luck. In recounting Scott’s death in I May Be Some Time, Francis Spufford shifts into a fictional mode and assumes the consciousness of the explorer:
Sometimes you wake from a dream of guilt or horror that has filled your whole sleeping mind, a dream that feels final, as if it held a truth about you that you cannot hope to evade, and the kind day dislodges it bit by bit, showing you exits where you had thought there were none, reminding you of a world where you still move among choices. Day has always done this for you. It seems unfair that it should not, today.
“Scott can make no effort that would change anything,” Spufford writes. The Antarctic does not give you second chances, and perhaps no chance at all. As is well known, Scott was lax on planning; he believed a decent man deserved a decent chance. The lesson seems obvious: not to abandon ourselves to such an unstable and capricious force as luck.
“Great God!” Scott said, on arriving at the South Pole. “This is an awful place!” Amundsen, the victor, said, “Farewell, Pole, I fear we shall not meet again.” Both likely spent only minutes at the pole. Then they turned around and started back. So much survival, and so little living.
At Shades of Light, I stare at the numbers I have written in the sales column. My eyes water. I am tired from working so many long days, from the pressure of the future that makes its presence known to me more and more as the days pass. In only six weeks, I will be on my way to a distant city, and university.
My eye is attracted by a glimmer. One of the crystal suns. A ray has pierced it, refracting the beam into four or five separate shards
of light.
Then he is in front of me. I didn’t even hear him come in.
There is a tangled wreck in his eyes. I am able to see right through him.
“Don’t come here.”
“Why not?”
“Because. I’m at work.”
I look around hopelessly. The crystal sun has a moon which orbits it, kept at a certain distance by a thin pewter wire.
“Then meet me later, when you finish.”
Later we walk along the river. Anyone passing us would think, A father and a daughter — of course, they look like each other — out for an evening stroll.
We stop by the edge of the path. He takes my face in his hands. I freeze. The look in his eyes is depthless. They are as flat as seeds. “I’m losing you.”
“You never had me,” I say.
“It’s possible to lose something you never had,” he says. “One day you’ll understand.”
Now they have a make of car. Michael tells Donna and me a car was caught driving too slowly near the old bridge. When the patrol car started up its blue light, the driver sped away. He managed to evade the policeman.
“If it was me driving, he wouldn’t have gotten away.” Michael shakes his head. “That’s the exact spot we went trawling,” Michael says. Trawling — the word hits me in the stomach. But then that is what I am, after all. Bait.
What kind of car could it be? Jeep Wrangler, K-car, Plymouth Sundance, Chevrolet Corvette, Honda Civic, Audi 9000, Ford Taurus, VW Cabriolet, Mazda RX-7. The car names are so familiar, so much a part of my life, but I will forget them, they will become as otherworldly as the numbered call signs of distant planets astronomers discover weekly. I don’t know yet that I will manage to forget almost everything, not only of that summer but of the six years I spent in that town.
“Mazda RX-7, black. Blacked out windows,” Michael reports.
Donna laughs and I join in. “Stoner car. Too obvious. It can’t be him.” We think the murderer will have a family car — a Ford Fairmont, say.
I remember the night before, walking on the highway shoulder, the empty crunch of gravel, car horns tearing through the wind as they sped by, then disappearing into the blue of distance.
A week later I am walking toward the apartment where he is staying when my suspicion is aroused. Suddenly everything has an etched quality; the casualness of the world has been erased. I see the drooping elms; two goth-type kids of junior high age, ice creams a caustic purple in their hands; cars sidling by, always, always obeying the speed limit; a fat woman walking a tiny white dog.
The purposefulness of what I see can augur no good. I dismiss it, because I have no explanation. It is not dissimilar to what will happen many years later on a ship in Cape Town, waiting to depart on a second trip to the Antarctic.
There is a fear, ready-made. I may not live past this summer.
I stop, try to catch my breath. My heart is pounding, my head feels like it will evaporate. I sit down on the curb, afraid I will faint. I raise my head and see heat waves convecting upwards from the asphalt.
This is what I have been waiting for, the signal from myself that I am in danger. I must stop my trawling missions with Michael. If I do it again, something will happen.
That night I am on shift at the Executive bar. There I will wear a white skirt, yellow top, white sneakers with those little ankle socks that have just been invented, inspired by tennis players. I will serve men — dentists and insurance salesmen — with stalled blue eyes, handing them plastic cocktail glasses amid splashes from the pool where their offspring play, the sun’s lazy censor’s eye overhead.
How different my father’s eyes are from these blue-eyed men. Dark, restless. Sharpened, I imagine, with knowledge and the things he has seen from above: migrations of elephants through fat floodplains, caribou treks among pastel fields of wildflowers, mustard tundra. He is not lying. I can see their reflections in his eyes.
4.
WINTERING
rotten ice
Old ice which has become honeycombed in the course of melting and which is in an advanced stage of disintegration.
March 28th
The ship has left the Falklands. Simon announces this over breakfast as another snowstorm blankets the runway. The ship has been delayed by an engineering problem; it is coming to pluck us out with only one of its two engines functioning. But the weather is bad: fifty-knot winds, the limit of what the ship can cope with. Normally the ship would not put to sea in such a condition, but there is no other way to get us out, and they are running out of time.
The news confirms my fears that something will go wrong — the ship will not make it across the Drake Passage on its single engine — that we will be left there.
That afternoon the weather cleared to leave us with an oyster sky. Shoals of ice had been shoved into the bay, where they were broken up by the gyre-like giant sheets of scrap metal. On the edge of the runway we saw a single fur seal, its back arched as if in supplication, staring up into the clouds against the tobacco light.
In the evening we saw nacreous clouds, also known as polar stratospheric clouds, which are common in winter in Antarctica. They appear as waves or funnelled clouds and shimmer with a raw mother-of-pearl effect. Their iridescence is beautiful, but they are also associated with low or zero ozone.
Our world was being emptied. Like a bar at closing time, one by one they went off into the night. Most of the Antarctic creatures present in summer — the albatross; skua; petrel; and shag; the crabeater, leopard, Ross, Weddell, elephant, and fur seals — had departed for warmer climes.
The announcement came over the bing-bong. “Orcas!” We all scrambled. Pods of whales had come right up to the end of the runway, bobbing their slick black heads above the water, staring us straight in the eyes, as if to bid us goodbye before setting sail for South Africa or California.
“They look like they’re trying to tell us something,” Mark said.
“They are,” Simon replied. “They’re saying, ‘Get out of here while you can!’”
The winterers were eager for us to go, Glen the carpenter confirmed. “As soon as we leave, they’ll make the place homely. Do a scrub out, get everything as they like it. Put the tables away, get some comfortable chairs in the dining room.”
“Then what happens?”
“Then they settle down to watch The Thing. That’s the ritual as soon as the ship goes. It’s this film about an alien invasion of an Antarctic base in the winter when no one can save them. It’s really good — the alien eats the dogs first, then everyone on base.”
The winterers wanted only to lock themselves away from the world. Rob the field assistant told me, “To spend a winter in the Antarctic is something few people on the planet get to do. It’s like being on another planet. They’re keen to get going with their unique experience.”
That afternoon, as another dank pre-night took hold, I had an obscure urge to read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” again. I hadn’t looked at it since Caroline the diver and I had performed our ill-starred recitation on the ship.
I looked for it in the library but couldn’t find it. In the end I looked it up on the net.
Reading the poem again, I was struck by the vividness of his lonely vision, the remorse, horror, fear, longing, anxiety, confusion. How violent are the mariner’s dreams, how terrifying the ice, his strange delusions of an abyss that is alive, beyond his fantasies of perfect maps, of science. The mariner is convinced that the icy realm into which he has wandered is more than it appears: it is a portal to the cold dread mysteries of life. The ice rises to fill the horizon of the poem, glittering with threat, much as Stephen Pyne describes the advance of the continent in The Ice: “The ice field rises and shreds into a mosaic of mountain and glacier, like a mixture of planets, all rock and ice, among stars.”
And there, in t
his cold diorama, next to the corpses of the mariner’s dead crew members, it is, hovering — Coleridge’s white vision, as totally white as the strange visions I was having and which I became convinced were connected to the onset of winter, luminous and terrifying: an angel.
That night, to celebrate our departure, base held an End of the World Party. Three people came dressed as Death from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal; one of the Marks came as the real thing — a Weddell seal with the number 7 emblazoned on his foam costume.
Jonah the gigantic engineer dressed as Nostradamus. He’d tried to dye a white bedsheet brown by tipping in a jar of cinnamon. He smelled like a walking hot cross bun. I came as a Mayan astrologer, dressed in a white tunic made from a bedsheet, but everyone thought I was a patient from a mental asylum.
We were all friendlier now that the ship was on the way and it had become unlikely that we would be locked up with each other for the next seven months. We shared impressions of our impending separation. The departure of the last ship of the season in Antarctica has a finality that echoes leavings in other, less connected ages — the ship pulling away from the coast of Scotland, laden with immigrants, headed to New Zealand, say, in 1790, or the polar expeditions themselves, seen off from the quay at Portsmouth or Southampton with fanfare and little certainty of when, if ever, the ship and her company would return.
Now, there are few places in the world you cannot buy a ticket out of or extract yourself from. Even those parts of the Arctic I would get to know in the years to come are accessible; northern Greenland is served by Air Greenland helicopters through the winter, and in Svalbard the SAS flight from Tromsø gets in and out most days.
On one of those final nights on base, I had a dream about our departure. We were lined up in the dark early winter morning, those leaving on the ship, and those staying on the quay. It was not clear in the dream where I was — on the ship or on the wharf. Or I was in both places, a split consciousness.
The moment of separation was coming closer. I realized I was on land. I could only watch as the ship drew its ropes up, slid the gangplank in to the aft deck, and its thrusters began to hum. As in nightmares I could not scream or speak, nor move a single limb. The Ernest Shackleton pulled away into the gloom. I watched it slide around the massive hexagonal iceberg in Ryder Bay we called the Pentagon. It curved the edge of the peninsula and slipped from sight, and our futures — those of us on the quay, those on the ship — diverged.
