Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  By the end of the day, I stood alone in a sun-bleached parking lot outside the Cape Town customs house, surrounded by Zimbabweans and Malawians trying to regularize their immigration status.

  I remained in Cape Town for two months, too paralyzed by guilt and frustrated to return home. These people had given me a much-desired place aboard their ship, and I had let them down. Let myself down.

  I could not tell anyone of the real reason for my decision, that I thought something would go wrong with the ship, or the expedition. I had no proof and I would only create unease. They would think me crazy, and I wouldn’t blame them. I thought I was crazy.

  That last morning on the ship when I was talking to the chief scientist, my sleeplessness and frustration got the better of me. I began to cry. I had explained I would have to leave but was unhappy about the circumstances.

  “It is a pity,” he said, “but don’t worry. What can you do? We all have to live with ourselves.”

  I returned to London, from where, in late March, I would take the flight from RAF Brize Norton to the Falklands, to begin my fellowship in the Islands. I was supposed to travel to the Islands from Punta Arenas, after leaving the Southern Cross. But I was now in the wrong place, and the only way to correct it was to undertake a carbon-costly journey to the Islands via the UK. Just after dawn on a late March morning, I would find myself on Ascension Island again, cooling my heels in the Cage between legs of the RAF flight to the Falklands.

  The email arrived from a friend in the Antarctic world, one of the few people who knew I had left the ship. It began, Did you hear?

  Less than three weeks after the Southern Cross finally left Cape Town, a helicopter piloted by Marcus and carrying, amongst others, my cabinmate Anneliese crashed on the Antarctic ice shelf. Marcus and Pieter the engineer were killed. Three others, including Anneliese, were seriously injured.

  I don’t know if I would have been aboard the helicopter, but there is a good chance I would have been. The organization took writers seriously. As the ship’s writer in residence, I would have been at least encouraged to go and see the terrestrial base. I wouldn’t have had any reason to turn this down; I liked and trusted Marcus immediately. He was a good pilot; my time with Tom had taught me that you can just tell.

  The ship carried on, after the two bodies and three injured people had been evacuated by air. No one else was allowed to leave the ship. For seven weeks after the accident, they were at sea. One helicopter and one pilot remained to do the ocean mooring retrieval work.

  For a long time the only thing I could think about was Marcus, our quick complicity as we stood on the deck of the ship after coming back from our shopping trip, the last chance to stock up on consumer goods for many weeks to come. “It was so beautiful,” he said, not of Cape Town and Table Mountain, which shimmered in the heat in front of us, but of Base R. “The mountains, the icebergs. I wanted to stay there forever.”

  April 4th

  Flares zip open a dark morning. The sky to the north is lightening slowly, a blue oblique light. The cold throb of The Ice is loudest, just as the dark is darkest, just before dawn.

  We are on the Ernest Shackleton, leaving Base R. Although I have not sailed on this ship before, it feels like a homecoming to be back in ship life — the tick sheet, the gash rota, the survival-at-sea drills.

  As we curve out of Ryder Bay, there is no sea ice, only the berg, the massive girds of the Pentagon. The Shackleton’s captain confirms our suspicion that if the berg had become grounded toward the east, it would have blocked the ship’s approach. “It’s the biggest one I’ve seen close to base for years,” he said. “We’re lucky, this time.”

  The voyage out on the Shackleton has almost nothing in common with our journey down four months before. There is none of the shock of sailing right through the veil that separates the real world from the Antarctic. The surprise and euphoria are gone. We are subdued, chastened. Something is definitively over, and now all we need to do is get home.

  We inched up the peninsula. The first two days at sea we encountered persistent blizzards. The seas built until we were ploughing through seven-metre swells and shipping spray over the fo’c’sle every three or four wave cycles. The Shackleton’s signature corkscrewing motion began. Many people get seasick on the Shack. It pitches normally, but its empty aft deck, a requisite for its other life as an oil rig supply vessel in the northern hemisphere summer, means that it does a semicircle turn at the back in the wave troughs. It feels like being on a giant pepper grinder.

  I joined the second officer on the bridge as the ship pitched and yawed through increasingly confused seas, snowflakes driven against the window fast, like quarks, fireworks, subatomic matter harried to the speed of light. They glowed beautifully, illuminated by the ship’s searchlights.

  We were the only thing alive for many miles, apart from the Southern Cross. We had passed each other a few miles back, in the night. I saw the ship only as a garland of light laid across a dark horizon. The next time I would see her would be at the dock in Cape Town, two years in the future.

  I went back down to the cabin I shared with Melissa the doctor and tried to get to sleep. At one thirty in the morning, I woke to find myself standing up in my bunk. The ship righted itself enough for me to clamber down to the listing floor. Spooked by the angle of the ship’s roll, I dressed quietly in the dark and went up onto the bridge. I found the second officer at the helm.

  “What happened?”

  “The ship just did a maximum roll,” the second officer’s face was grim. He pointed to the gyro, the mechanism that stabilizes a ship’s roll. “A wave broadsided us on the beam.” The average wave height that night was ten metres with forty-knot winds — not particularly bad conditions for the Drake Passage. As long as the ship’s engines kept running, and the ship was headed into the wind and the wave roll, the conditions didn’t pose any danger to a ship the size of the Shackleton. But this wave had been twice the usual size and came out of nowhere to broadside the ship. I’d woken standing when the ship hit the trough.

  The following day the storm abated — enough that the ship was mainly pitching, a far less alarming motion than rolling. In the lounge everyone was watching films — The Bourne Supremacy, Enemy at the Gates, Two Weeks Notice. I went up on the bridge at sunset. I watched snow petrels and black-browed albatrosses skim the waves, which were blue and orange in the reflected sun. Cloud coated the horizon. The sunset moved within it, a smudge of peach.

  The beauty of the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic returned to me, now that I was going home. In my last weeks at Base R, I couldn’t see it. Anxiety coagulated my thoughts, made them an indivisible substance, a burden to carry around, a lump. Now I had rejoined myself and I could think clearly again.

  A line came to me from a book I had read on the Antarctic although I couldn’t remember which — I felt as if I had come back from another planet. My instincts were right, in a way: I had to be there until the end. The moment of leaving the Antarctic was like the moment that divides life from death, even more so if you are convinced, as I had become, that you would die if you stayed there.

  Just as in the dream I’d had, when we left Base R that final morning we all formed two lines: on the ship’s deck, the leavers, and on the wharf, the stayers. The winterers lit expired emergency flares. The plume they made as they seared the red Antarctic dawn was chemical and livid. It lit the black water in front of the wharf as if it were on fire.

  We looked down from the deck to the winterers. I saw Caroline the diver with her apple cheeks and uncombed hair, having fallen out of bed to bid us our early morning goodbye, dressed only in her fleece.

  The ship’s thrusters nudged us away from the wharf. Slowly, we watched the gap grow. One, two, three metres of black water lit by fire. Then the ship turned and pirouetted on its haunches. We steamed out of the bay, pointed toward the far side of Jenny Island.
Very quickly base receded. We remained on the outer decks for a while, as did the winterers on the wharf, despite the cold and the biting wind, until we couldn’t see each other anymore.

  It is minus thirty. I walk alone on a road that curves round to reveal a farmhouse in the middle of a clearing. The moon is silver and black, a celluloid negative. The sky is clotted with stars.

  For six weeks between mid-December and early February, the temperature remains between minus fifteen and minus thirty-five. At the lower end of this scale your flesh can easily freeze, especially if there is a wind chill.

  I am at stables where I work taking care of horses in exchange for riding lessons. It is thirteen kilometres from our house, out in the middle of nowhere. One night there is no one to give me a lift back into town and I can’t stay at the barn — overnight temperatures will be minus twenty-five.

  I ring my mother and ask for an emergency lift, but she refuses.

  “I’m going to have to walk,” I say.

  “Then walk.”

  It takes me over two hours to walk home. I twitch my face all the way, in order to keep my cheeks from freezing.

  It is a quiet night. Overhead the stars look as if they have been cast from ice crystals. Pine trees line the sides of the road in crisp silhouettes. The houses I pass have a look of sanctuary, like houses on advent calendars, the buttery squares of light in their kitchen windows, a red glow of togetherness just beyond the frame.

  Walking along the road that night, I begin to construct, for the first time, dreams of the future.

  Love is abstract to me, until attached to a person. An image is forming as I walk, one eye on the road as the other casts for a possible escape route thorugh the garrison of trees should a pickup of drunks appear.

  I see a coal-eyed man, his face is handsome. He is thin but muscular. What strikes you is the intelligence in his face, how fluid it is, how easily it changes from one expression to another. But there is another element that can’t be named — an amalgam of instability and ruthlessness, perhaps.

  It might be that people construct their lovers before they meet them, as much from their deprivations as from their desires. He is real, this man. He glitters like frosted kindling. Yes, a pale, dark-haired man; he has done something unusual and daring in the world, and it has brought him closer to a suite of eternal understandings I want for myself. I will want his experience, his knowledge, as much as I will want his body.

  The walk that night is cold and long but very beautiful. I still remember how, as I rounded the curve in the road beyond which the town’s lights would become visible at last, I heard the call of an owl ripple through the frozen forest. I arrive at the house I share with my mother and her family hungry and cold but enlivened by this small feat of survival.

  EPILOGUE

  BLUEFIELDS

  June 21, “the still point of the turning world.” Latitude 51.52° N, longitude 0.10° W — London.

  Today is the longest day of the year; we think of it as the beginning of summer, but technically it is the beginning of winter in the northern hemisphere. The sun rose today at four forty-two a.m. and will set at nine twenty-one p.m. Tomorrow there will be one minute less of daylight: the sun will rise at four forty-three and then set at nine twenty-one. For the following three days, June 23, 24, and 25, the sun will rise and set at exactly these times, while the planet stalls, before tipping into winter.

  For now, though, the light is long and blue. Trees and the spires of churches are cast in iron silhouette against the sky. On clear nights a bronze glow persists on the horizon well past eleven p.m.

  In the Antarctic this day marks the beginning of three days’ midwinter holiday, complete with Christmas trees, winter sports games, and a midwinter gift exchange. The chef prepares a turkey feast, and there are to be days of drinking, a ceilidh. At Base R the only light is a dim glimmer in the sky, visible from eleven a.m. until one p.m., to the southwest. But at that latitude change comes quickly; on July 22, less than a month from now, the sun will once again peer over the horizon.

  I stare into my computer screen in a darkening room lit by the lingering light of summer. The news trills with reports of record thaws in the Arctic. Also food shortages, artificial intelligence, surveillance, the credit crunch: our future seems to be crystallizing. But the future is here, I realize, just unevenly distributed.

  Some effects of climate change — a perceivable average warming of the world’s oceans, increasingly violent storms — are making themselves felt much sooner than even the most pessimistic of climate models predicted. The most radical effects are in the Arctic. Here the melt season has lengthened by more than a month since 1979. The Greenland ice cap is losing more than 200 gigatons a year. Apart from the obvious effects of coastal erosion, habitat destruction, and species extinction — the polar bear in particular — this seismic shift in the morphology of the ice cap will have many ramifications, reaching beyond the far north.

  All that water pouring out of the Arctic ice cap needs somewhere to go. It flows into the oceans, increasing their volume. Coastal erosion is already beginning to make itself felt in the UK, as we could see in the damage caused by the fierce storms in the winter of 2013–2014.

  In the meantime, melting polar ice has opened a northern sea route to shipping, both commercial and military. At least one-fourth of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources is said to be located in the largely frozen Arctic Ocean. Nearly eighty-four percent of the ninety billion barrels of oil are located offshore. In these last-gasp decades of dwindling accessible petroleum sources, it’s unlikely these resources will go unexploited. The retreat of Arctic ice and the sea routes now navigable for the first time since seagoing ships have existed will increase the risk of competition for energy resources.

  Will we witness the dawn of an age of thermopolitics, a new Cold War? Wikileaks cables published in 2011 quote US diplomats referring to “the potential of increased military threats in the Arctic.” At the same time the Russian ambassador to NATO was quoted as saying, “The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources, and Russia should not be defeated in this fight … NATO has sense where the wind comes from. It comes from the North.”

  A newly aggressive Russia has designs on this Arctic motherlode. Putin believes that the Arctic is an essential ingredient in Russia’s ability to maintain its position as one of the world’s largest oil producers. Russia gets fifty-two percent of its budget revenues from oil and gas, as well as seventy percent of its export earnings. In 2012 Russia produced an estimated 10.4 million barrels of oil per day; nearly two-thirds of that came from western Siberia. But many of Russia’s oil fields are starting to decline. The Arctic is a logical place for Putin to expand.

  In Antarctica, off-limits to resource exploration until the expiry of the Antarctic Treaty in 2048, the picture is more complex. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet continues to accumulate mass while the western Antarctic, where Base R is located, behaves much like Greenland, draining ice into the ocean. Each year the ice streams, such as the one Oddvar and his team radared, siphon ice from the continent to the ocean at an accelerated rate. Glaciologists estimate that two-thirds of the continent will accumulate mass through climate-change-generated increased precipitation, while the other third will lose it through glaciers racing down slopes, shunting their cargo of ice into the sea.

  The sea ice picture is more complicated yet, with ice growing in some areas and shrinking in others. Antarctic sea ice dynamics made the headlines in late December 2013 when the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy became stuck in thick sea ice off the coast of Antarctica, in an extended version of our entrapment on the JCR. After an unsuccessful rescue attempt by other research ships, its fifty-two passengers were eventually evacuated.

  All this information blares in my mind like a television picture hazed with static. It seems to have happened so quickly — the cha
nge in our circumstances, the change in the earth’s climate. And we are trying to respond, equally deftly, to manufacture the requisite alarm to do something: witness the films, the documentaries, the computer-modelled scenarios of our future.

  I believe the mind can scan the future, that we have our own computer-modelling software encoded in our brains, but we don’t know how to use it. I am only an averagely prescient person, but through having an anxious nature I have sometimes become more alert to the possibilities lining up on the wave tips of time. Occasionally our intuition transmits what the mind sees there to our psyches.

  But largely we are protected from knowing too much about the future. Unless, of course, you indulge in augury — clairvoyants, astrologers, cards. To know the future exposes the human necessity of living with the aid of the helpful illusions we call desire and hope. Very often, the truth of the future erases these consolations from our mental landscape, leaving us undefended against its certainties. The truth is a cold and blasted place. Are we sure we want to go there?

  I suspect that the future exists in that timeless and spaceless realm inside us, just as does the past, or the present, and we are generating it, at least in part. As proof of this I offer that the future can be predicted — to an extent, at least. The difference between the future and the past is that the future is still subject to change. Although how much change, we don’t know. We might live in a garden of forking paths, but all paths might lead to the same destination.

  There is another possibility: that we are dreaming our future into being. This is not only an individual dream but becomes, through a synergy we are not able to understand, a collective one. This collective dreaming — what Jung called the collective unconscious — is manifested imaginatively. I worry that with every thrill-inspiring apocalypse film about flooding, tsunamis, giant storms, we are shaping ourselves to a particular future, one which is only a projection of fears.