Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  Okay, I admit that photographers, as a rule, are probably wonderful people, as likable as the idiot kayakers no doubt were, but while at work the average outdoor photographer is not to be trusted. Once, in South America, I stood under a heavy waterfall wearing raingear made of a "new generation" fabric while photographer Nick Nichols took shots for a catalog, shots designed to show that this stuff was impervious to water. It was a cold day on the high plateau known as El Mundo Perdido, the Lost World,

  and the fourth time I walked through the falls, I called up to Nick that I was soaking wet and cold.

  "This stuff doesn't work," I screamed, "not even a little bit."

  "Gimme one more walk-through," he shouted back. "I haven't got the shot."

  "But the stuff doesn't work." A bit of logic and fine good sense howled into the empty space between a working photographer's ears. "It leaks like a sieve."

  "I don't know that," Nick shouted. "Gimme one more walkthrough."

  "This stuff is the fabric of betrayal. . . ."

  "Looks great," Nick yelled, "real good. One more walkthrough."

  Nick has actually asked people to give it one more walkthrough over a bed of coals. That was in Surinam, where he was working on a story about the people who live deep in that country's tangled jungle. Nick spent three weeks in one jungle village, long enough to count the people he met there as friends.

  The villagers finally agreed to perform their fire dance for the camera. "I still don't know how they do it," Nick told me. "Whether they go into a trance or whether their feet are just so callused they can stomp the fire out. Anyway, the head dancer goes first, then his assistant comes out, then a trainee comes and stomps out the rest of the fire."

  It was a difficult lighting situation—shooting into a fire at night —and Nick was worried about the shot. He asked his friends to give it one more walk-through the next night.

  "I think," Nick recollected, "they thought I was disappointed in the size of the blaze, because this time they built a bonfire. The head dancer didn't stay in very long, and neither did his assistant. The magic wasn't there that night. Something. When the trainee came in to put the fire out, it was still blazing away, and I could tell he was definitely getting burned."

  And so they learned in Surinam what it means to have a photographer as a friend.

  Far and away the worst of the breed are underwater photographers. I've had enough scuba experience to know that, in any given group, the person with the camera is likely to be the best and most knowledgeable diver. Just don't get buddied up with him. The scuba photographer drops down the anchor line, swims ten yards, and finds something to engage his or her interest. As likely as not, the fascinating stuff involves a couple of tiny organisms the size of your thumbnail swimming around a coral knob no bigger than a coffee cup. The rest of your group is off hanging on the backs of manta rays or watching green turtles mate, but the inflexible rules of diving won't let you leave your buddy, the motionless photographer. No use even swimming over to see what the camera sees. You'll stir up the sand, frighten the organisms, and spoil the shot.

  After the dive the photographer will be in a state of near sexual excitement. "A feeding phenomenon no one has," he'll mutter in ecstasy. "No one's ever seen it before."

  "Especially not me," you point out.

  "Hey," the photographer says, "I've got it on film," as if photography is somehow superior to experience. "I'll send you a copy." The shot, when you get it, will be beautiful, suitable for framing, a photo you could label "The Conservation of Underwater Experience."

  I was thinking about the treachery of photographers when Paul said it was okay, I could go ahead with my practice rappels. When I was just about at the end of my rope, he called, "Hey, Tim, could you hurry back up here? There's a big raft coming down the river."

  I clipped out of the rappel rig.

  "They're coming pretty fast," Paul called. "Could you run, please?"

  flrtautic ^attaqei

  I am sitting on hard snow and ice here at Cape Evans, on Ross Island, in the Ross Sea, and this Antarctic beach feels like the last beach on earth. I sense a prophecy: This beach will encompass the earth at the end of time when the sun is a feeble glow, without heat, and the world a ball of ice hurtling through infinite space.

  There is a beauty here, at the edge of Antarctica, at the end of time. A high wind rips a line of wispy clouds into shreds that flutter under a cold silver sun. The white plain that backs the beach takes on the color of the sky. The snow is vaguely pink, like watermelon. Ahead, across gray waters littered with ice floes, looms a high headland of ice and snow. A brisk wind blows loose, dry snow over the lip of a two-hundred-foot-high cliff like a pale pink waterfall. More clouds mass under the sun, and the powdery snowfall in the distance has become a dark, vaguely purple curtain: falling snow like inky dusk.

  Above, a royal albatross, a great white bird of good omen, soars past the purple snowfall and over the watermelon plain. Skuas, gull-like seabirds, shriek overhead. Fifty yards away, a fat gray seal basks on a seaside snowbank. It has the characteristic

  upturned smiling mouth of a Weddell seal. The animal blinks once, flirtatiously. The black eyes are large and gentle, doelike, adapted for hunting in dark waters under the sea ice.

  Not far behind me is the hut where Captain Robert Falcon Scott prepared for his ill-fated march to the South Pole, about 820 miles away. Everything inside is perfectly preserved in the perpetual deep freeze of the continent. I saw a table where scientific experiments were conducted; beakers and electrical wires littered the shelves nearby.

  It had been dark and gloomy in the hut: Windows let heat escape. Reindeer sleeping bags lay on wooden bunk beds arranged around a metal stove. There were English magazines from the turn of the century, discarded gloves, and provisions stocked on the shelves: Colman's mustard, Fry's Pure Cocoa, Huntley &: Palmers biscuits, Belmont Stearine candles "made expressly for hot climates."

  Antarctica is not tolerant of mistakes. In front of the hut, on a beach of icy volcanic rock, is a ship's anchor tailing a length of frayed rope. In 1915 Ernest Shackleton used the Scott hut to prepare depots for the first transcontinental overland crossing. Two parties in two ships were supposed to land on opposite sides of the continent and then trek until they met, but Shackleton's ship was crushed by ice and sank. His men survived. The other ship lost its mooring in a blizzard and drifted to sea, leaving ten men marooned ashore. Only six lived. The annals of polar exploration are filled with dozens of sagas like this.

  Up the slope from the cabin is the mummified carcass of one of Scott's sled dogs, covered in drifting snow. Above, on a commanding hill, is a cross commemorating the death of three members of Shackleton's Ross Sea party.

  It is a sobering scene, here on Cape Evans, the very edge of mortality. I have wandered off to sit between two hillocks of snow, on a small plateau that overlooks the sea. In the midst of all these symbols of death and hope and glory, I feel a need to savor the nobility of living things.

  I have plunked myself down near a series of meandering tracks in the snow. I am waiting for the creatures that made them: Ade-lie penguins—stout, ill-tempered little birds about two feet high

  and weighing perhaps eleven pounds. Soon enough, I hear a few Adelies calling to one another. They sound like indignant baritone crows. And here they come, over the top of the icy drift, five of the robust little birds with the distinctive and clownlike white Adelie circle around each eye. They flop onto their bellies and bodysurf down the slope, struggle to their tiny feet, and then waddle importantly up the near hill. One bird cuffs another with its flipper. All squawk and caw at each other.

  These Adelies, so darling in documentary films, are, I see, lusty, powerful birds, very intent on survival. They surround me in a rough semicircle and stare. One lifts its head, beats its flippers, and croaks out a challenge to the sky: "Ahhhh, ahhhh, ahhhh, AHHHHH." The others follow suit. They seem to be saying, "I am a penguin, and what a hell of penguin I
am!"

  Having made their point, the Adelies waddle off toward the beach, presumably contemplating the dive that will take them out to sea for most of the coming winter. They tend to plunge in large groups. This disorients predators like killer whales. But these Adelies seem to hesitate, as if debating the matter: "After you, my dear fellow."

  "Tim! Hey, Tim!"

  It is Peter Carey, a penguin biologist currently employed as a lecturer aboard Salen Lindblad Cruising's newly built Frontier Spirit, a 365-foot passenger ship anchored a mile offshore. Dr. Carey says it's time to pile into a rubber Zodiac and head back to the Frontier Spirit to join the eighty other passengers for dinner. The ship is unusual—an iceworthy vessel that combines luxury and ecological sensitivity. It's filled with all sorts of antipollution gear, including an entire sewage-treatment plant, aimed at minimizing our effect on these waters.

  I liked my fellow passengers. They were informed and enthusiastic people of all ages, ranging from those in their mid-thirties to one remarkable man in his early eighties. They included a number of medical doctors from the United States and Australia, a famous Japanese photographer, a pair of journalists from Chicago, bird fanciers from several countries, and one resilient woman in her late seventies who found the entire trip "magical."

  They had come to discover, for themselves, the continent of

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A I 54

  Antarctica, this glittering wilderness that encircles the South Pole: 5,500,000 square miles, most of it capped by ice so thick that the land beneath may never be seen until some future cataclysm heats up the entire earth. The Antarctic, we soon learned, is a savage place, as soul-stirring as it is unforgiving.

  We had not embarked, strictly speaking, on a pleasure cruise. Oh, no. Despite the regal saloon, complete with piano, despite the gourmet meals and well-equipped lecture hall, this trip was billed as an "expedition cruise," suggesting physical discovery and intellectual enrichment. Such a cruise necessarily requires a measure of flexibility and hardiness in its passengers, embracing, as it does, a small degree of physical discomfort and an uncertain schedule dictated by the weather. In this case, on this trip, there were also twenty bad minutes of real life-and-death drama.

  It was the expedition's coleader, Mike Dunn, who told the passengers in an orientation lecture that the twelve Zodiacs carried by the Frontier Spirit made the difference between a cruise and an expedition. There is no place to dock a large ship along Antarctica's icy shores. The Zodiacs, inflated rubber boats with outboard motors, were our ticket into the continent, ensuring some kind of communion with the awesome land and whatever life we could find there. It would be, Mike explained, no small thing to step from the ship's boat deck into the Zodiacs as they bobbed on swells that were often four and five feet high.

  Mike told us all this soon after we set sail from Bluff, New Zealand, and headed south toward the Ross Sea through some of the world's stormiest latitudes—the ones sailors call the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, the Screaming Sixties. We encountered three or four major storms, one after the other, boom-boom-boom, just like that. The Southern Ocean generates the worst weather on earth for navigation, according to Heinz Aye, our captain. He ought to know. This was Captain Aye's sixty-second trip to the frozen continent.

  Instead of indulging in conventional shipboard diversions like shuffleboard, we spent our days at sea attending lectures about the history, wildlife, and politics of Antarctica. At the same time

  the storms raging outside quickly got our attention, lending our studies a surreal quality.

  One day I went to the well-stocked library, on the fifth deck, and read a book about penguins. The wind was howling bitterly, and the waves were running about thirty feet, hitting us from the starboard side, where I sat, next to one of the enormous windows that I never could call portholes. For a moment, as we crested another wave, I was staring up into a troubled gray sky—there was a now familiar "top of the roller coaster" sensation in the pit of my stomach—and then the ship began its slow slide into a mammoth trough of water. In that instant the sun, which was low in the sky, bullied its way through the clouds and fell across the tops of waves that ran all the way to the horizon. The sea was a savage morass of gold and gray, both terrifying and beautiful. Then, as the Frontier Spirit dropped into the depth of the trough, a great, upwelling mass of gray water filled the entire window.

  The radiant and illuminated sea was dazzling, and that was a surprise, something I hadn't imagined in my dreams of Antarctica. It was, in fact, only one of a number of astonishments I was to encounter on the cruise. I had, for instance, been uninterested in the sub-Antarctic islands we would visit on the way down and back from the frozen continent. But our first landfall, on Campbell Island, two days out of Bluff, was a revelation.

  The temperature hovered around 50 degrees, and our Zodiac churned through a kelp bed dotted with perfectly round, perfectly purple, pizza-size jellyfish. An escort of Hooker's sea lions, the rarest in the world, frolicked alongside, keeping pace with the Zodiac and staring at us with large dark eyes set in smiling, doglike heads. The island is volcanic in origin, and directly ahead a silver waterfall fell against an ebony wall of rock. Campbell is a New Zealand meteorological base and nature-conservancy area. A boardwalk winds through a boggy stretch of land, replete with ferns and thick vegetation of all kinds. The single tree on the island is distinguished by the Guinness Book of World Records as "the loneliest tree on earth."

  The boardwalk emerged onto a marshy hillside of green, tus-socky grass and low shrubs. Above were black rocky spires and

  specks of white dotting the treeless hillsides below. The specks were nesting royal albatross, dozens of them, separated from one another by twenty to twenty-five yards. I sat about twenty-five yards from one of the great birds and examined it through binoculars. It was huge, the size of a bald eagle at least, and a brisk wind ruffled its white feathers. The bird had a hooked beak, a dark filigree on the back of its wings, and tubular nostrils, and it stared back at me with a kind of serene awareness.

  A heavy mist, driven by the wind, blew off the spires above. One of the albatross stood, spread its wings, caught the wind, and disappeared into the vaporous sky. The bird I had been watching stood for a moment, as if to reveal its rather large chick, and then squatted again with a comfortable back-and-forth motion, like a fat man settling into a soft sofa.

  These birds, or birds very like them, circled the Frontier Spirit all the way to Antarctica. They rarely flapped their wings but soared on unseen currents of air. We counted them good omens, in the manner of ancient mariners.

  Several humpback whales, the most acrobatic and playful of the species, kept pace with the Frontier Spirit, swimming only yards off the starboard bow, then crisscrossing in front of the ship. There was a mother with her calf, and when the young one breached, I could see the underside of its scalloped flukes, as white as the good omens sailing overhead.

  Far in the distance I saw strange, coffin-shaped icebergs that had calved off the continent and swirled in a slow-motion outward spiral. The Frontier Spirit, Captain Aye pointed out, was not an icebreaker, but it did have the next-to-highest ice classification that can be given to a passenger ship.

  Dawn the next day was brilliant, and the sea appeared somehow sluggish under a cold golden sun. The water glittered strangely, and it seemed gelatinous, viscous. The entire surface was now covered over with closely spaced shards of forming ice the size and shape of knitting needles. The sea rolled slowly, thickly, and for the first time in days there were no whitecaps, even though a wind of perhaps twenty miles an hour was hitting us from starboard.

  And then, later in the day—just that much farther south—the world changed again, from horizon to horizon. The sea was covered over with perfectly round medallions of ice, some of them the size of pancakes, of phonograph records, of coffee tables. There are names for the various kinds of ice encountered in the Southern Ocean: names for slushy water and fast-moving pack
ice, and a name for the ice I had seen earlier in the day: frazzle ice, the spiky crystals that formed on the surface of the sea. This lily-pad arrangement was called pancake ice. The edges of each frozen, shimmering plate of ice were turned up neatly, and the sun lay across the icy medallions in a long, glittering golden tail.

  Antarctica is governed by an international agreement, signed in 1959, making the land at the bottom of the world a demilitarized zone preserved for scientific research. Twelve nations—including the United States and Soviet Union—originally signed the treaty, which was renewed in 1989. It was the overwhelming feeling among passengers and crew that the treaty should be made permanent but that no more scientific bases are needed.

  There is a Greenpeace station at Cape Evans, and a representative of that organization was invited aboard to lecture. He said that the organization favors ship-based tourism in Antarctica compared with the alternative, a land-based hotel and landing strip. Passengers aboard vessels like the Frontier Spirit learn about the continent and leave with a desire to preserve it.

  It was the expedition leaders themselves who flipped their Zodiac. They were on a scouting trip, assessing the safety of a landing site, when they plunged into ice-clogged waters no more than a thousand miles from the South Pole. In such conditions, passengers had been repeatedly told, a person has about two minutes to live. I stood on the fifth deck of the Frontier Spirit and watched, powerless, as Mike Dunn floated farther and farther from the luxurious ship, carried away on the current. He was in the water for five minutes, for ten, for twelve. Every half minute or so, one of the five-foot swells washed over his head. It was 25 degrees