Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

by Helen Garner

  SHORT BLACKS are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

  SHORT BLACKS

  1 Richard Flanagan The Australian Disease:

  On the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom

  2 Karen Hitchcock Fat City

  3 Noel Pearson The War of the Worlds

  4 Helen Garner Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

  5 John Birmingham

  The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999

  6 Anna Krien Booze Territory

  7 David Malouf The One Day

  8 Simon Leys Prosper: A voyage at sea

  9 Robert Manne

  Julian Assange: The cypherpunk revolutionary

  10 Les Murray Killing the Black Dog

  11 Robyn Davidson No Fixed Address

  12 Galarrwuy Yunupingu

  Tradition, Truth and Tomorrow

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  37–39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

  enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Helen Garner 2001

  Helen Garner asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

  First published in The Feel of Steel, Picador, 2001.

  This edition published 2015.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry : Garner, Helen, 1942– author. Regions of thick-ribbed ice / Helen Garner. 9781863957663 (paperback) 9781925203509 (ebook) Short blacks ; no.4. Professor Molchanov (ship) Voyages and travels.

  Antarctica–Anecdotes.

  919.8904

  Cover and text design by Peter Long.

  HELEN GARNER has written novels, short stories, screenplays and many acclaimed works of journalism. She was the recipient of the 2006 Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, The Spare Room and This House of Grief.

  They say that tourist ships to Antarctica, even more than ordinary human conveyances, are loaded down with aching hearts. Deceived wives and widowers, men who’ve never been loved and don’t know why, Russian crew forced to leave their children behind for years at a time, grown women who’ve just buried a beloved parent, people with cancer travelling to the cold before they die. They say people come here looking for ‘solace’. And then there are the married couples: how calm the old ones, how eager the new! – but isn’t a couple the greatest mystery of all?

  *

  The hats. Oh, they’re terrible. One woman broaches the deck pulling on a thing like a sponge-bag, made of purple polypropylene. A little old lady is wearing a grey wool bonnet straight out of a Brueghel painting. A young bloke in spectacles sports a cap of multi-coloured segments, topped with a twirl and several small silver bells.

  My own headgear, a hideous borrowed job featuring red earmuffs and a peak, is still stuffed into a corner of my suitcase, down in cabin no. 521 which I’m there to share with a perfect stranger called Robyn (and I’ve forgotten my earplugs).

  So far, an hour after we’ve disembarked from Ushuaia, an Argentine port in Tierra del Fuego, I am still stubbornly refusing to believe in the cold, though my fingers have shrunk so thin that my wedding ring keeps sliding off, and my eyes and nose are streaming. If you fall overboard, states the Lonely Planet Guide grimly, you will die. I’m not the Antarctic type. I’m hanging out for a short black. I’m not adventurous, and I’m too sad to be sociable with strangers.

  Stop whingeing. As the late summer Saturday afternoon draws on, we chug down the Beagle Channel, a body of calm water that splits the bent nib of South America into Chile and Argentina. The channel lies along a row of harsh, impossibly sparkling-topped mountains, each with its diaphanous scarf of cloud. Our ship is the Professor Molchanov out of Murmansk in the former Soviet Union, where, they say, scores of ships lie at anchor, unused, unwanted, rusting – the detritus of empire. Our crew is Russian; our captain, though only thirty-eight, is an ice-master.

  ‘I look young,’ he says, ‘but I am old inside.’

  He is also, various women agree later in the bar, ‘a dish’.

  ‘Haven’t you taken a seasick pill yet, Helen?’ asks Terry, a vet from Brisbane. ‘Take one. Take it now.’

  I obey. By 8 p.m. I am nodding off at the dinner table among my fellow adventurers, most of them shy, many of them older than I am. In the early hours of Sunday morning we turn out of the Channel and into the Drake Passage – where, while everyone but the crew is sound asleep, we hit a force-seven gale which will rage unabated for two days and nights.

  The pills knock out nausea, but the simplest tasks – going to the lavatory, getting dressed – become Herculean. Robyn and I lurch past each other in the cramped space of our cabin, flung against walls and cannoning off cupboard fronts. Somehow a lifeboat drill is achieved, after which we hibernate. Our porthole is bisected by a madly tilting grey line. I am in love with my bunk, so narrow and perfect, like the single bed of childhood.

  Sometimes Ann, the Molchanov doctor, materialises next to my drugged head, holding out a bottle of lemon-flavoured water, a handful of dry biscuits. Morning and evening a quiet voice comes over the tannoy into the cabin: this is Greg Mortimer, eminent mountaineer – Everest, K2 – and leader of our ‘voyage’. (No one calls it a ‘tour’ or a ‘trip’, and since the storm began I have stopped seeing this as pretentious.) He has a knack of saying only what’s required, without embellishment. To city people disturbed by the screaming wind, his voice is comforting. ‘Sleep well,’ he says at night, like a comforting, benevolent father.

  By Monday evening the huge waves smooth out. People creep from their burrows. Some have, incredibly, been unperturbed, attending learned disquisitions in the bar on the habits of penguins. Other voyagers confess to having spewed in public – a great leveller. Thea, the woman in the Brueghel bonnet, shows off a carpet-burn the size of a dollar coin on her forehead. Everyone is friendlier since the storm: now we are shipmates.

  Around 9 p.m. we gather on the bridge to keep vigil for our first iceberg. This far south, in February, it doesn’t get dark til after eleven. The bridge is a serious place, of work and watching. The Russian officers are big blokes smelling of cigarettes, with moustaches and silver teeth, and voices that rumble from deep in their torsos. They murmur to each other, slip out on to the deck for a smoke, stand at the wheel or bend over charts spread on drawing boards. We are shy of them and keep stepping out of their way.

  Out on deck the air is gaspingly cold but the evening sky is pretty, the water a steely, inky grey-blue. Suddenly there’s a moon, riding tranquil between layers of bright cloud. Leaning over the rail I see my first tiny chunk of ice go bobbing past, very close to the ship’s side. At once I’m seized by an urge to compare it with something – with anything: it’s the size of a loosely flexed hand, palm up; like a Disney coronet with knobbed points; as hollow as a rotten tooth. For some reason I am irritated by this urge, and make an effort to control it.

  Inside, the bridge is warm and dim. Thirty people stand about talking, but intent on the greying line that divides sea from sky. There it is – there’s one. And another. The first iceberg is only a pale blip on the horizon. The second is greyer, straighter-sided, more ‘like a building’. Night thickens as we approach them. Iceberg no.1 is unearthly, mother-of-pearl, glowing as if with its own inner light source. People grow quiet,
their social chatter stills. The only sounds are the buzz and hum of the radar, the dull rumble of the engine, and out on deck the rushing of the wake.

  Then somebody begins to liken the iceberg to a face. ‘It’s got a sad eye. See its nose?’ On and on people go: it’s like a sphinx, a Peke’s face, an Indian head with its mouth open. Again I am secretly enraged by this, and by my own urgent desire to do the same. I stare at the iceberg as it looms two hundred metres away on our port side. It gleams with a pearly purity. It’s faceted: creamy on the left, whiter on the right. It looks stable, like an island rather than something floating. Water riffles around its foot. I strain and fail to see it only in abstract terms. I don’t want to keep going ‘like, like, like’. But I can’t stop myself.

  *

  On Tuesday morning we slip out of the Bransfield Strait into the misty mouth of the Antarctic Sound. While dressing I glance out the porthole and see a tremendous iceberg – big as two houses – shaped like a chunk of frozen cloud sliced off by a downward stroke of a spatula. The tilt of its top is the cleanest, most perfect line I’ve ever seen. Rush up on deck, rugging up as I run. The water is as flat and lumpy with ice scraps as the surface of a gin and tonic.

  In the fog the monster bergs are everywhere. Molchanov cruises among them, gently. Each one is fissured, flawed with a wandering seam of unnatural cellophane blue-green, almost dayglo: older ice, someone explains, more densely compressed. A lump of ice needs to be only the size of, say, a small washing machine for this faery green to be present in it, like a flaw in an opal.

  ‘Unrool, idn’t it,’ murmurs big Dave the diver, a Queenslander with huge square teeth.

  It’s hopeless, trying to control the flood of metaphor. People cry out in wonder. Look – a temple, with pillars. The white ridged sole of a Reebok. There’s one with a curved spine. Hey – an aircraft carrier! A flooded cathedral. Somebody’s been at that one with a melon-baller. Suddenly, we glide into an area of small ice chunks, like the aftermath of an explosion – pieces no bigger than a folded sheet, a dish-rack, a car engine.

  Exhausted with the ecstasy of it, you turn your eyes away for a moment, to rest – and the sun breaks through the cloud cover to reveal a whole further field of icebergs – great flaring blocks of perfect, piercing silver.

  The fog lifts further. There it is – the Antarctic Peninsula, a continent of dark rocks, of ridged and bony snow. They want us to climb into an inflatable, flat-bottomed zodiac and set foot on it? My stomach rolls with excitement and fear.

  I wish I didn’t have to write about this. I wish I could find a silent spot and hide in it to gaze and gaze; or crawl back into my bunk and sleep off the wonder.

  Instead I go to breakfast. There’s bacon. You can smell it all over the ship.

  *

  Our first trip ashore, to Brown Bluff, is apparently to be about penguins. Urk. I’ve got a feather-phobia: birds revolt me. We are told that our behaviour on land must leave no trace: no ‘toileting’; no food or drink; and we are strictly forbidden to take anything away, not even a shell, a stone, a tiny bone. Tubs of water will be provided on Molchanov’s deck for our return; we must scrub every scrap of penguin shit off our boots, or else the air inside the ship will become unbearable.

  The zodiacs rise and fall at the bottom of the gangway, down which we blunder in single file, puffy in our grotesque wet-weather gear of Goretex, rubber, velcro and large coarse zips.

  As we bounce across a kilometre of water towards a line of brown and white cliffs, the penguin stench hits us: shit and feathers, with an overlay of fish.

  On the stony beach, people fan out with their camera equipment and become solitary. Each photographer attempts to establish an intense relationship with an individual penguin. I tiptoe past these strivings, feeling like an intruder.

  I note with relief that some penguins are not waddling about on their flabby feet, or standing in forward-slanted throngs on points of land, but are lying, singly or in twos and threes, flat on their bellies on the grey rocks, their eyes closed to slits, doing nothing at all. Just loafing about. I long to emulate them. But I’m afraid even to seat myself on a rock. What if I fall asleep, or slip into an ice trance, and the zodiacs forget me and I get left behind?

  This is of course impossible, due to a rigorously enforced system of tags, labels, life-belt counting and so on – but it’s my first twinge of primal dread, mixed with a swooning sensation. I’m tired. I’m guilty about not liking penguins. I’m cold. I have to keep wiping my nose. I’m incapacitated by all these bulky clothes. I’m lonely because everyone else is hiding behind a camera. Everywhere I turn, my view is blocked by some keen bean with a tripod. I fight the sense that a person with a camera has a prior right to any view we both happen to be looking at. I am being driven insane by photography.

  OK, one sub-group of the voyage is actually here to be coached by Darren, a tall quiet young professional photographer; but your average punter on board has brought at least one camera and several kilometres of film. I have left my Pentax at home. I tell incredulous shipmates that it’s too old and heavy to carry, but the real reason is that at the pre-trip briefing a couple of months ago, people spoke so fanatically of bringing a back-up camera in case their main one fell overboard or got splashed in the zodiac that it brought out the party-pooper in me. I determined on the spot that I would go to the icy continent in a state of heroic lenslessness; that I would equip myself with only a notebook and a pen.

  But I forgot something. The cold.

  Two degrees Celsius doesn’t sound that scary, specially if you’ve been reading about Shackleton’s journey in the open boat, or Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s Worst Journey in the World – tales in which temperatures of seventy below scarcely raise an eyebrow. Still, the expedition guides urge us over and over again to take the cold seriously, to dress in layers against it, to keep dry, to wear several pairs of gloves. I have brought cotton ones, wool ones, and a pair of mittens made of stiff stuff like leather. Have you ever tried to take notes wearing boxing gloves?

  With my huge bulging paws I wrestle the notebook and pen out of my pocket and start describing things, partly to justify my presence, partly to keep from falling asleep: ‘Penguins: ridiculous, helpless-looking creatures, always in a flap. A penguin looks like a person trying to walk in an inverted sack; it has to strain its feet apart to keep the neck of the bag open round its ankles. The clifftops are crenellated: you expect to see the feathered heads of Indian warriors peep over them, it’s like Arizona.’

  Oh, shut up, smart-arse.

  I stow the book and sit down gingerly on a little point of rock, out of the wind. In this bay the sound of the ocean is hushed. Further around the rocky beach stands a wall of ice. Its vertical face is snicked with tiny hollows, in each of which there lurks a droplet of the same secret, tawdry green that seamed this morning’s icebergs.

  A chunk of ice the size and shape of a double bed (with base) detaches itself from near the top of the wall, and floats gracefully down and out of my line of sight – slow, ethereal. But it lands with a shocking roar and a smash, and there’s a fluster in the water, which dies away. Back inside the ice river there’s a constant groaning and creaking, an occasional crack like a pistol shot.

  Mild sun shines on my up-turned face.

  None of these gargantuan cataclysms has anything to do with me. Nothing is my fault. While the ice behaves as it must, I am permitted to sit here on a rock, strangely at peace.

  *

  Something funny happens to time, down here. The nights are so short and the light so foreign, we’re so buffeted by weather, bombarded by new sights, wrung out with wonder, that the memory starts to pack up. We lose our grip on the sequence of events. Cameras are impotent against the slippage. Our guides work late into the night to counteract it: each morning we wake to find, wedged under our cabin door-handle, a two-page account of the activities of the previous day, complete with map, and plan for the day ahead. This is not just their usual efficiency: it
’s protection against an attack of severe existential anxiety.

  *

  At the lunch table Nicola and Sue, Molchanov workers, relate how they lassoed a small iceberg and brought it back for cubes at the bar.

  ‘We were hauling and hauling! It was like a birth! And suddenly there was this great big THING in the zodiac! Just as well there were no men there! If there’d been men they would’ve gone, “Stand back, girls! Let me handle this!” We were determined – we were like, “This iceberg is not going to beat us!”

  The sole bloke at the table, Michael, another mountaineer, quiet, with a modest, introverted demeanour, who has lost his toes and parts of his feet to frostbite on Everest, sits looking on, half smiling.

  ‘The food on this ship is great,’ says another woman at the table, lifting her forearms off the cloth which is dampened to prevent the plates from sliding about. ‘It must be the cold. – I’ve been eating four times my usual rations and I’m not even putting on weight!’

  *

  That night we sail into our second storm, force ten on the Beaufort scale. It is colossal. I hardly sleep. Never before has it been strenuous just to lie down. I’m stiff from neck to feet all night long. In daylight, speechless people stagger hand over hand along the corridors and up to the bridge, where there are rails to grip, and one grips them hard, gulping and shaking, exhilarated, scared.

  The sea is a heaving grey field of waves as big as apartment blocks, which rise with majestic deliberation and smash themselves over the bridge. For a few seconds after each impact, the ice fragments cascading down the glass blot out the world, then camouflage it, abstracting it into wild patterns of white, grey and streaming loden green.

  Hanging on with aching arms, flexing my knees and swaying with the madness, I begin to understand that the Professor Molchanov is not just a dead contraption of rivets and chunks of metal, but an entity, a living being. It transforms into she. She bounds, throbs, moans. She has a sense of her own springy wholeness, as she quivers on the lip of a wave, gathering herself for the next plunge. The aliveness, the working beingness of her goes straight to the heart: I admire her, she moves me. For the first time in my life I understand how one can love a ship.