Vesper Flights

by Helen Macdonald

  Cabrol’s search for life in extreme conditions began in the Atacama but took a turn in 2000, after she watched a French television documentary that showed the crater lake atop Licancabur on the Bolivian Altiplano. There it was, onscreen, the perfect place to search for extremophile life adapted to the punishing conditions of high-altitude lakes. She wrote a research proposal and three years later donned a black wetsuit with a weighted belt and free-dived into the lake at an altitude of nearly twenty thousand feet, discovering zooplankton species new to science.

  ‘Water is my thing,’ Cabrol tells me. ‘I feel comfortable. I feel at peace.’ On a family vacation when she was two years old, she wore water wings to float on the surface of Lake Garda in Italy. She clambered onshore, took off the wings and went back to the water. ‘I am thinking to myself that if I go underwater, I cannot sink,’ she laughs. Submerged, she swam instinctively in a new world of shining pebbles and vivid colours. She learned to free-dive as a teenager in Cap d’Agde in the South of France. ‘It was always beautiful and peaceful; there was no stress,’ she says. ‘There was this sense of being responsible for myself, of being in charge and seeing beautiful things, and exploration and discovery.’ We are talking in her tent, and the silence between her words is filled with the crack and ripple of nylon stock, the sides of the tent inhaling and exhaling in the wind, the floor billowing up around our planted feet.

  ‘When I entered that lake,’ she went on, ‘I was thinking I was entering the past, actually entering a time machine that was telling me what Mars was like four billion years ago. It’s really a place where time and space get warped.’ Diving in these high lakes provokes emotional states, she says, that are intensely beautiful and spiritual. There was one time, in 2006, when she was suspended in the middle of the volcanic lake, caught midway between earth and sky, the water arctic blue and each ray of sunlight diffracting around her, so that she felt surrounded by diamonds. ‘And on top of that,’ she says, ‘copepods, little zooplankton, tiny shrimps, and they are so red. It’s a symphony of colour. I’m suspended like that, and time stands still. And for one fraction of a second, everything is perfect. I don’t need to have to explain anything. For that very moment, you understand everything. And there is nothing to understand.’ Then she remembered she was on a not-so-dormant volcano. ‘I thought, I have a suit and forty-five minutes of oxygen,’ she says and shakes her head. ‘My last thought would have been so serene and so peaceful.’

  As we take the trucks in a convoy up to our final site, I look back on the Atacama and think of the Apollo astronauts. Far behind and below us is a haze-softened blue expanse streaked with clouds, making this climb feel like a journey away from Earth. We are among volcanoes now, vast blisters on the plateau. Cabrol points out Simba, which the group plans to climb to sample the bacteria in its crater lake. Cabrol has a history with Simba. She was climbing it with her team in 2007 when the Tocopilla earthquake hit. They avoided the avalanches, but when Lascar, the volcano sharing a slope with Simba, began to emit poisonous gases, Cabrol fell into what she called a ‘surgically cold’ mindset, concerned only with logic, practicality, survival. During their descent, a large tumbling rock just missed her. ‘And this,’ she said, ‘was when I got mad.’ She stood up in the middle of the gully and started yelling at the volcano. ‘“Is it going to be all today?! Is there anything yet you can?!” I was shouting! I was outraged!’ She got everyone down safely and then nearly passed out in the truck back to base camp – partly from an adrenalin crash, partly from the knowledge that everyone might have died.

  We camp under an extinct volcano in an abandoned military barracks that the team calls Chilifornia. The cinder-block rectangle has no roof, but the walls shelter our tents from the wind. Cabrol gathers us together and warns us not to go wandering. In the 1970s, this territory was disputed with neighbouring Bolivia, and there are still land mines here. It’s a worry. I grow even more anxious when I overhear Cabrol and Cristian Tambley, who is handling logistics for the expedition, talking about installing UV-monitoring systems in this region. Strong UV radiation damages DNA, and the World Health Organization warns against being outside when the UV index is over eleven. In 2003 and 2004, Cabrol observed unexplained UV storms here of extraordinary intensity, though they lasted only a few hours. On Licancabur, she detected UV spikes of over forty-three. That night I dream of wearing a spacesuit.

  It takes an hour to drive to Laguna Lejía the next morning, a copper-coloured lake shivering in the hard light of the sun. Cabrol is visibly shocked as we arrive. ‘It’s substantially reduced in size compared with when I last saw it, in 2009,’ she says. ‘Our planet is actually changing in front of our eyes,’ she tells me later, ‘at a speed that is extremely scary.’ We are heading along what was once a drove route for cattle from Argentina into Chile, and I can’t look away from the bones littering this place. The skulls left behind are so old that the keratin layers of their horns have peeled apart to make them things like delicate pine cones or the brittle pages of old books left in the sun.

  Cabrol has worked closely with robotics engineers for many years, and her 2011 Planetary Lake Lander project set an autonomous floating robot in Laguna Negra in the Andes. Ever since, Cabrol has made it her mission to push the two things together: climate change on Mars and climate change on Earth. The Planetary Lake Lander wasn’t just preparation for future missions to lakes and seas beyond Earth, or simply an analogue for climate change on Mars, but a way of investigating climate change here and now. The region near Laguna Negra is suffering from rapid deglaciation, and we see that change too. We move to another lake, surrounded by creeks and frozen grass. The wind is brutal, the sky the darkest blue. Cabrol crouches at a site where she found freshwater springs seven years earlier. Fascinated and forlorn, she tells us that this is like Mars three billion years ago. The surface water has receded, but there is some water underneath. She is shocked by how fast the climate is changing here. ‘Seven years ago, this was a beautiful spring, a pond with zooplankton, but now you can’t tell the difference between this and the rest of the desert.’ She scrapes gently at frozen mud with the point of her geologic hammer. Later, she points out that the Earth itself is in no danger whatsoever. ‘It will survive whatever we throw at it. What is in danger is the environment that made us possible. We are pretty much cutting the branch we are sitting on. So either we understand that very quickly or life will go on – but a different one.’ She thinks it will not be a slow disappearance. ‘It’s going to be sudden and frightening,’ she says.

  At night in my sleeping bag, I woozily speculate on the meaning of life and death, the fate of Earth, the end of things. I ask Mario, one of the expedition doctors, if déjà vu is a recognised symptom of altitude. ‘Absolutely,’ he says. I am relieved. It keeps happening. It is starting to scare me. The day before, a llama sheltering from the wind behind an outcrop stepped down with leisurely, measured grace across talc-dusted slabs of rock. I knew I’d seen it before. More than twice, certainly. Perhaps five times, six. I knew I hadn’t, of course, but these miraged recollections were instantly telescoped and pleated together like a pack of cards all of the same suit flicked through with a thumb. There is a sense that reality is unreliable here, as if I could put a hand to the air and it could slip right through to another universe if I weren’t paying sufficient attention, or paying a little too much. As if I could free another reality by rubbing corners of air together like trying to open a recalcitrant plastic bag. And the wind pours on us as we drive, making dust devils spin over the distances, everything outside seemingly inimical to breath.

  These high places, Cabrol says, were sacred to the Inca people, who would climb the mountains to make ritual offerings to the gods. Crouching behind a rock to keep us out of the sharp mountain wind, she explains how up here the scientific search for life beyond Earth and the spiritual search for meaning cannot help but run in parallel. ‘The Incas would come here to the mountains to ask questions of God – and so, in a way, are we,�
� she says. ‘That’s the same question. Who we are, where we are coming from, what’s out there? We are trying to connect to our own origins. So we are doing this scientifically; they were doing it in a more intuitive way.’

  Cabrol has a deep respect for the cultural histories of the landscapes she works in. Her Quechua guide Macario made offerings to Pachamama, an Incan goddess, before he and Cabrol’s team climbed volcanoes, and Cabrol always makes offerings, usually crystal spheres, to the high crater lakes she dives in on mountains. She had planned to climb to Simba’s crater lake at the expedition’s end, but she hadn’t brought an offering to give its blood-coloured waters. Tentatively, she asks me if I have anything that might work as a replacement. I hand her a piece of lapis lazuli polished into the shape of an egg that I bought in San Pedro de Atacama. The exchange seems an entirely rational act. Both halves of Cabrol, scientific and spiritual, are perfectly conjoined in her work, in her insistent, careful reaching for the deepest of questions: why are we here?

  Cabrol has stopped working. She’s staring at plumes of vapour rising from the volcano on the near horizon. Bright white at their bases, they soften rapidly into haze that climbs up and up, before losing coherence and resolution against the sky. The steam is ascending vertically, even in this vicious wind, so there is serious force behind it. The volcano is Lascar, the one that shares a slope with Simba. And the team has people on Simba right now, local guides preparing our ascent.

  Cabrol calls everyone in. We stand in a line before her, waiting for orders. She pushes her mirrored glasses up on to her hat and speaks to us with terse authority. As soon as the guides are down from Simba, she says, we’ll go back to camp. She’ll get out the satellite phone and speak to Bill Diamond, who is now back at the SETI Institute, and call the United States Geological Survey and the University of Chile to find out more about the situation here. And then we will need to decide not only if the team should cancel the planned ascent of Simba but also whether any of us should stay in camp at all.

  The phone call brings no immediate bad news, so we stay. Cabrol will keep an eye on Lascar’s activity and let us know if it worsens. She instructs us to sleep in our clothes and keep our passports at hand, ready to leave in the middle of the night if need be. All of this gives me a strange kind of dread. It has a lazy, slow, opiated quality. It’s been a long time since I’ve had none of the tools I need to judge a situation. We find out that very recently there’d been a 5.5-magnitude earthquake in Calama, only an hour and a half away. That isn’t optimal: if water makes its way into the magma chamber beneath the volcano, the volcano might explode. This is not comforting. I withdraw to my little orange tent, sit on my cot and scroll through photos of home on my phone. Outside, the light is dying on the old volcano. I can hear people packing and the generator buzzing behind the cinder-block wall. Tambley is assembling a weather station and playing Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, the saddest of songs, on his laptop. Zips, whispers, laughter, the sounds of Pelican cases being hauled over rough ground.

  I stare at my hands. They look like ancient lizard skin, each crease outlined in pale dust. All my clothes are white with it. My hair feels like greased fur. There is a moth in my tent, but I am too numb to move it. Blankly, I watch this scrap of life bump about the orange walls. The tent flap is open; all it needs to do is turn around and fly the other way. It does not. I lose sight of it for long minutes, then jump at its touch. It has bumbled its way on to my hand and rests there, quivering. I put it outside. We leave the next day.

  Hares

  I’d left the snow behind for a work trip to California, for hot blue air and palm trees and bougainvillea and a mockingbird that serenaded my first sleepless night with an exquisite repertoire of stolen phrases. Numbing cold at home, searing heat in Santa Barbara brought a confusion that was more than jetlag; I’d lost any sense of the season I was in. Driving back from Heathrow a week later the snow had gone but my seasonal disorientation was worse than ever, disquiet lying dully inside. But as I passed a field of winter wheat beside the A505, somewhere between Royston and Newmarket, I glimpsed something that made everything right itself, slam me back into what I knew must be spring. Brown hares, five of them, circling, running, hopping, turning to stand on their hind legs to box at each other, kicking mud around under wide and wet silver skies.

  I first saw boxing hares out on a misty field near Winchester when I was a teenager, convinced that what I was witnessing were buck hares competing with each other for does. So perfectly did this reading of their behaviour correspond with our societal mores, it had the force of absolute truth. The hares circling the fights, I thought, were does, carefully assessing the pugilists’ prowess, and I assumed the victor would take all. I was wrong. Most boxing hares are does unwilling to mate with bucks making sexual advances on them. They rise up and fight them off, an animal analogue to a form of violence just as much a feature of our society, though only in recent years have we begun openly to speak of it.

  Talk to people of hares and you’ll hear the word ‘magical’ again and again. Books about hares are rich with lore and legend. Of the hare Boudicca kept under her cloak to release before a battle, the direction of its flight a prediction of the outcome. Of shapeshifting hares. Of hares with an affinity to the moon. Hares as a sign of Easter, of resurrection, of renewal, of spring. Most of us think of hares as magical and mysterious because lore and legend tells us they are so. But these old stories were based on the behaviour of real hares, which are indeed mysterious. They might not be able to change sex at will, as early modern writers assumed, but female hares can become pregnant again before they give birth to their young – leverets that enter the world fully furred with open eyes and rapid independence. Hares eat their own droppings, can run at forty miles an hour – they’re our fastest land animal – and they feed mainly at dusk and dawn, dim presences in the gloom. Solitary animals, they’ll gather in numbers to feed when pickings are rich. Two years ago I was standing in a Norfolk field of beet at sundown when down the tractor lines loped a crowd of hares, astonishingly slow and eerie, their ears glowing red in the dying light and their fur sabled by shadow.

  Humans brought hares from the Continent and released them into our landscape around the time of the Romans, or perhaps earlier, and these creatures from elsewhere quickly turned to natives with a talent for invisibility. Hares don’t burrow. They live always under the sky, making a series of depressions called forms across their territories. These are body-shaped spaces into which they’ll crouch, close to the ground, turning themselves into a low curve of russet you are sure must be a rock sunk in winter cereal before you notice two black-tipped ears laid to its back. A form is the space a hare makes to see everything and be invisible. Tread too close to one and the hare will spring up at your feet, tearing herbage with its hind claws, white tail flashing, and your heart thumping in surprise as it races into the distance. Hares are things of eyes and speed and fear; they have an astonishing capacity to outrun, jump and dodge things that pursue them – foxes, dogs, eagles.

  Predators aren’t the reason hares are declining in Britain; it’s agricultural intensification that has hit them hard. Leverets crouching in silage fields are mown down by harvesters and modern monocultures leave adults short of food. I don’t see hares often these days. I encounter them mostly in photos, in paintings, or in shop windows displaying boxing hare figurines – stylised, long-eared forms wrought into shapes of graceful confrontation. But you don’t need to have ever seen a real hare to know what it is supposed to mean. They’re magical harbingers of spring.

  Spring has of late become thin to me. It’s starting to mean supermarket daffodil bunches and Easter promotions, rather than its richly textured changes, the scent of new herbage, algae greening on the trunks of oaks, the echoing drum of woodpeckers, rising skies and the return of that indefinable light to hollow out winter. All these are things I’ve missed after a few years of mostly working inside. And just as the meanings we have
given hares are nowhere near as rich and complex as the living, breathing creatures hares are, so our firm ideas about spring belie what is happening to it. Climate change has made our seasons creep; now catkins appear in winter, cuckoos are rarely heard, and rather than a slow progression, springs are increasingly a short flash of sudden warmth before summer, hardly a season at all. Those boxing hares were a glorious sight, but behind their sparring forms flickered a shadow of disquiet, a glimpse of how the meanings we have given things like hares and seasons persist so strongly once their models have gone that it’s hard to see, sometimes, the precipitous alteration in things we’ve long assumed eternal.

  Lost, But Catching Up

  Fate saw fit to make me allergic to horses, dogs and foxes. I discovered my dog allergy early: we had a dog. I discovered my horse allergy during riding lessons, and my fox allergy while skinning a road-killed fox to turn into a rug. Which, I realised, I couldn’t have in my house.

  Allergies never fail to make life new. A few days ago I discovered I was allergic to reindeer. Indeed, the longer life goes on, the more I realise that most quadrupeds make me ill. Though I can ride, I can’t ride for long. Twenty minutes on a horse, and my eyes are closed, my hands mottled with nettle rash and I’ve lost the ability to concentrate on anything other than fighting for breath.