The Lost Daughter: A Memoir

by Mary Williams

  Happy Camper began in earnest on the sea ice about four miles outside of Mactown and one mile from New Zealand’s Scott Base. Scott Base is a lot smaller than Mactown and sits on the edge of the sea. The total population is under thirty. Its small modular buildings are elevated on stilts. They are all the same shade of green that resembles the flesh of kiwi fruit. From the barren patch of ice that was our home for twenty-four long hours, we could see Scott Base.

  After being dropped off on the sea ice with our gear, we walked a mile and a half along a flagged route to the instructor’s hut. It’s a large, solid, semipermanent structure where the instructors slept and some were courses taught. It was rustic but heated.

  It was Condition Damn Cold. Our instructors continued the course outdoors. As we stood close together listening to our instructors, every inch of our bodies was covered, including our faces. It would be nearly impossible to distinguish one person from another if not for the name tags we wore on the front of our Big Reds.

  Our first task was to go to an unheated shed and assemble sleep kits: two ground pads, a sleeping bag liner and a sleeping bag. We then unpacked and assembled two Scott tents (ten-foot-tall cloth tents) and five regular tents. Then we built a three-foot-high, forty-foot-long wind wall around our camp from snowpack. We actually sawed square chunks of snow from the ground and built a wind wall! We were doing all of this while trying to stay warm, which wasn’t easy. We were not allowed to go to the instructor hut to warm up and have a hot cup of tea. The right to take breaks was suspended. I began to miss my easy days working at the Berg Field Center with my filthy-mouthed but break-loving supervisor, Jesse.

  We started Happy Camper at nine A.M. It was closing in on six P.M., and we had still not had a break. We ate lunch standing up outside. Our instructors were telling us we must build a Quonset hut—a shelter similar to an igloo—made of snowpack. After that we must construct a trench shelter. This is a deep hole that has a sleeping compartment dug out horizontally at the bottom. It looked like a grave.

  Around nine P.M., I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. We were told the virtues of each shelter. The Quonset hut was the warmest, followed by the trench (grave), the Scott tents and lastly the regular tents. I (like nineteen other folks) got my mind set on the Quonset hut. But there were a few housekeeping chores that needed to be done before we would be left to decide among ourselves where we would sleep. The only instruction we got was that there must be at least three people to each structure. However, before all the work was done, some stealthy cocksuckers started moving their gear into the Quonset and the Scott tents. I unfortunately was not one of those stealthy cocksuckers. I ended up sleeping in a regular tent.

  Around 9:30 P.M., we were done setting up camp and the instructors left us to cook dinner and turn in. Though it was nearly ten P.M., the sun was still shining. People were boiling water for dinner and hot drinks, others were planning short hikes before bed, and others were socializing. I was pissed off because I was cold and had to sleep in a regular tent, so I crawled into my tent and wrapped myself in my liner and bag fully clothed. I figured I’d take a short nap before dinner, and within minutes I was dead to the world.

  I woke up to absolute silence and there was no one else in my tent. I looked at my watch—it was 3:30 A.M.! I missed dinner and the others must have thought this tent was full. My feet and hands were as cold as they were before I turned in, despite the chemical hand and foot warmers under my gloves. Worst of all, I heard the wind howling outside and my bladder was about to burst. I spent the next three hours rationing my power bars and trying to use mind control to will my bladder to hang in there until 8:30 A.M., when we would be allowed to make contact with our instructors.

  I finally broke around 6:30 A.M. and made a mad dash for the outhouse. Of course it was freezing. The snow wind wall we spent so much time and effort building was oriented toward the south, the direction from which most wind comes. We also oriented the openings to our sleeping structures in the opposite direction: north. However, the wind decided to blow in from the north. As I walked back to my tent from the outhouse, I noticed that the entrance to the Quonset hut was completely snowed in. The folks who slept there would have to crawl up through the freezing snow to get out. I grinned the grin of the vindicated as I passed the snowed-in Quonset on the way back to my humble tent that luckily had entrances on opposite ends.

  When 8:30 A.M. rolled around, we deconstructed all tents, ate and repacked all tools and sleeping kits. The graves were also filled in.

  I learned later at our debriefing that I was one of only a few people who actually slept. The two guys who slept in the graves seemed to have had it the worst. The folks in the Quonset were blown on by the north wind and had trouble breathing because our instructor forgot to tell them to make air holes. Most everyone said they were cold or uncomfortable. But the purpose of the exercise was not to find a way to survive the night with the comforts you’d find spending an evening at The Four Seasons. The purpose was to get through the night alive and with all your digits. That we did.

  It wasn’t until I was safely back in my room in Mactown that I noticed I had frostnip on all of my finger tips, most of my toes and the tip of my nose. After my Happy Camper ordeal, there were days when I hoped and prayed that my next assignment would be doing data entry at the Science Support Center or the Chalet, civilized assignments that meant I would be indoors, in front of a computer, surfing the Internet, taking breaks, drinking tea, staying warm.

  Because I have office skills, I had had a fair number of such days. But inevitably my job did take me outside. One morning I found out I was getting an assignment that I had been dreading for a while: flagging roads. This entails going out on the sea ice on Ski-Doos with a sled loaded down with an ice drill and flags attached to bamboo poles. Every hundred feet, we would drill a hole and set a flag in order to create a discernible road in an expanse of white.

  This sounds really exciting except for the fact that it was incredibly cold and the task would take all day. The fact that we were flagging the road leading from Mactown to Penguin Ranch, a field camp devoted to emperor penguin research, did little to brighten my mood. I had heard from other support staff assigned to Penguin Ranch that the scientists had not captured any penguins yet. I fully expected to be disappointed as well.

  But my mood brightened when I discovered that I’d be wearing a bright red bunny suit for my Ski-Doo ride. Red is my favorite color. When we got out on the ice and began flagging, the work went by quickly. We started at nine A.M. and were done flagging by noon.

  As we pulled into Penguin Ranch, I spied seven beautiful emperor penguins hanging out in a fenced-in pen. We were told by Dr. Paul Pagonis, the head of the project, that they had just brought them in an hour ago. They seemed pretty calm for birds that had just recently been chased down by an old college professor and several grad students, dumped and sealed into large trash cans, put on a helicopter and flown to this little pen far out on the sea ice. Dr. Pagonis said he had to chase one for half a mile before he caught it.

  He then asked us if we wanted to check out his dive hole. No, he’s not a dirty old man. He was talking about what looks like a manhole cover in the ice. When you lift the top off, you are looking straight down a Plexiglas tube that goes about twenty feet beneath the ice.

  You climb down rebar steps to a small room at the bottom just big enough for two people. The room is encased in shatterproof glass and affords you a beautiful, indescribable view of the ocean and the bottom of the sea ice above. I got an added surprise when I was below and saw a Weddell seal swim by. It was very peaceful and surprisingly warm inside the dive hole.

  When I climbed back out, I met Dr. Pagonis’s wife, Mrs. Dr. Pagonis. She is a doctor too. We talked for a while about penguins and seals. She shared that she had also been to East Africa, and so I found myself speaking Swahili to a penguin expert on the Ross Ice Shelf. I think that might be a first.

  Since we were done with work early, we dec
ided to go by the Weddell seal nursery to see the new seal pups. On the way we saw a group of ten Adélie penguins in the wild. We pulled over our Ski-Doos and the curious penguins began to run toward us. I guessed they didn’t see well and it took them awhile to notice that, though we were standing upright, we weren’t penguins, because they suddenly stopped, about-faced and slid off on their bellies in the opposite direction.

  So we hopped back on the Ski-Doos and went to see the seals. The scientists there led us to the moms and babies. We stood about ten feet from them! The babies were very cute but thin. They were born with almost no blubber. Instead, they had thick fur called “seal pajamas.” For them it’s like being wrapped in five fur coats.

  My day got progressively better. The only thing that could have sent me over the edge was if we were to see a killer whale poke its head up through the sea ice just as we were about to pull into Mactown. But if that had happened, my head would have exploded with joy.

  • • •

  When I found out that I’d be going to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS) for three weeks, I was less than thrilled. The bitter cold of my Happy Camper experience was still fresh in my mind. I wasn’t looking forward to weeks of living out of a tent, relieving myself in pee bottles and unheated outhouses, shoveling snow in order to make enough water for a two-minute shower in a co-ed bathroom, in addition to other field camp hardships.

  Little did I know that these things would pale in comparison to my adjustment to the sheer emotional magnitude of living in such an alien environment and my sudden insertion into the offbeat camp community.

  When I first arrived in McMurdo, it was strange but there were still familiar sights. There were beautiful mountains everywhere, there was the sea. It was frozen, yes, but it was still plainly a sea. There were animals. There were permanent buildings.

  But WAIS was different. It was completely flat, white, no animals; the sighting of the occasional lost skua or snowy white petrel was cause for excitement. You won’t find dirt or rocks because the earth is buried under thousands of feet of ice. Nothing but snow stretching out to the horizon in all directions. There were no permanent buildings. We lived in mountain tents for sleeping and several larger tents for medical, recreation, eating, et cetera.

  WAIS is a place unlike the rest of the world, which is ruled by biology. In the rest of the world, things are mating, birthing, living, dying. WAIS, on the other hand, is ruled by cold, hard physics: pressure, friction, speed, drift. Only dead things grow and fade here: the ice sheet, the cloud cover, the wind, the temperature. Even the sun is alien. In this flat, barren place, it is easier to see that the sun never touches the horizon. It circles overhead like a great unblinking eye. It is a stingy sun. Hardly ever does its warmth reach us. It floats above us, a stark reminder of a familiar comfort hopelessly out of reach.

  The never-setting sun had a strange side effect. I would wake up several times during the “night,” perhaps because the presence of the sun shining through the thin walls of my tent was telling my body it was time to wake up. I woke up on average every two to three hours, every day for the entire three weeks. Once, I left my watch in the galley while washing dishes and went to bed without it. When I woke up, I didn’t have it to let me know what time it was. It’s useless to peek outside because midnight and eight A.M. look exactly the same. I had the choice of crawling out of my tent into the cold and trudging the quarter mile from tent city to the galley only to find it deserted because it was midnight. Or I could go back to sleep, potentially missing breakfast and being late to work. That was a stressful evening. I made the right choice, however, by opting to go back to sleep.

  WAIS is known for its bad weather. This far into the continent, it is quite common to be “treated” to some of the coldest temperatures, strongest winds and heaviest snows Antarctica has to offer. Sometimes a bigger problem occurs when the weather is simply overcast. When the sky is overcast, the contrast between the ground snow and sky is almost zero. You are suddenly unable to orient yourself. A dark hat someone has dropped on the ground twenty feet in front of you looks like a huge building somewhere off in the distance. You stumble around because you step into depressions in the snow that are suddenly undetectable. People liken these weather conditions to being trapped inside a giant white ball. For safety reasons, no outside work can be done on days like this. In short, you never forget for a second where you are. WAIS won’t allow it.

  After I was at WAIS for almost a week, the camp supervisor decided to treat me to a boondoggle. A boondoggle is a morale-boosting field trip or experience to release the boredom and frustration of monotonous camp life. A boondoggle in McMurdo can mean a trip to see seals at the pressure ridges, a trip up Mount Erebus or a trip to Cape Royds to see a penguin rookery. Boondoggles weren’t so exciting at WAIS. My boondoggle was on an old Twin Otter plane carrying eight hundred pounds of explosives, several 55-gallon drums of fuel and some kind of compressed gas in large canisters. I was squeezed in the back of this plane with this menacing cargo. The only other people on the plane were the two pilots up front.

  The mission of the flight was to deliver these supplies to another deep-field research team called CReSIS. CReSIS is the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets. Its mission is to develop new technologies and computer models to measure and predict the response of sea level change to the mass balance of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. I had briefly met some members of this small crew (ten folks at most) before they took an overland traverse from WAIS to their research site. The land traverse took several days. It took forty-five minutes in the Twin Otter.

  During the flight, to keep my mind off thoughts of the plane crashing to earth, leaving behind nothing but a smoking crater and a mushroom cloud, I focused on the single track left by the traverse vehicles, which was still visible in the snow days after they left. There was nothing else to see. Once the WAIS camp was out of sight, there was nothing but a flat, white, featureless expanse with a track across it. Twenty minutes into the flight, I smiled when I noticed the perfectly straight line left by the traverse vehicles suddenly turn into loop-the-loops and a doughnut. I could imagine the driver not being able to stand the monotony any longer and deciding to shake things up. Though the vehicles they used on the traverse can barely break thirty miles an hour, I’m sure the loop-making must have been exhilarating.

  I was happy to see little dots on the horizon. CReSIS. As we approached, I got a lump in my throat. The camp from the air looked so insubstantial in the vastness of Antarctica. It was just a few mountain tents. They looked so vulnerable. Forget that these are experienced field researchers and contractors who had been working in places like this for decades. From my perspective on the plane, they looked as formidable as a splattered bug on a windshield. What chance would they have against a really brutal storm, or if someone got hurt? Help was at least an hour away by air, days by land.

  Several CReSIS team members were on hand to greet the plane. I rushed out of the plane into the arms of my friends. Though it had only been days since our last meeting, it felt like much longer. I made sure to hug each of them at least twice. I’m sure they thought I was just being nice but it was more than that. I was giving them a proper good-bye should anything horrible happen to them. When the plane took off for the return to WAIS, I had the irrational feeling that I was abandoning them.

  That night I didn’t feel so well. There was this heaviness in my chest. The next day I was lethargic, couldn’t eat dinner and had trouble getting to sleep. Somewhere around three in the morning I was able to diagnose my problem. I thought, Could I . . . ? Could this possibly be . . . homesickness? I’m never homesick. Never. Not when I picked up and moved to Morocco or Tanzania. Not once biking across the United States, through-hiking the Appalachian Trail, relocating to Tucson, Arizona. Never. Somehow Antarctica managed to get me. Subconsciously I had translated the vulnerability of CReSIS into a reflection of my situation in WAIS, in the world. I had an epiphany that no matter
how fit, hardy and capable we think we are, from the right perspective we are all vulnerable. I’d stayed in contact with my family and friends via e-mail, even the limited access to e-mail at WAIS, but it was not enough to fend off my crushing loneliness.

  Leaving WAIS was bittersweet. What I thought would be a challenging experience (it was) was also one of the most rewarding of my life. I would have liked to stay longer. But I was needed back in Mactown, so off I went. By the time I returned to Mactown from WAIS, my five months in Antarctica were coming to an end. The thought of leaving was unpleasant. I wasn’t ready. I began to look into staying on and working the winter season, all the time wondering how I’d fare living on a base reduced to a hundred souls. What would it be like to spend months in the winter darkness? I began to covet bragging rights to spending a solid year on the ice. So I reapplied for several winter jobs, and when my summer assignment officially ended, I began the required physical qualification process all over again. But because I was over forty, I was required to receive a mammogram, which could not be done on ice. Arrangements were made for me to fly to Christchurch, New Zealand, for the screening.

  It was early January 2008 when I got off the plane in New Zealand and walked into a world pleasantly basting in 90 degrees. The smells! The colors! Your sense of smell atrophies in the cold. The eyes grow used to only seeing white and the earth tones of the buildings and the dirt roads of Mactown. But New Zealand in January? My God! And so just like that, the spell was broken. Broken by the beauty of wildflowers, rolling green hills, butterflies, a radiant sun and the complex scent of a busy city. I suddenly became acutely aware of all the aches and pains my body had been hoarding all that time on the ice. I thought of other adventures not yet had. I let go. I let Antarctica go. It was time to make room for others. I’d already gotten what I wanted. What I needed. There was nothing left to prove. But I was bringing something away with me. The ice opened up a space in me that I was now ready to fill with family. Again.