by Jean McNeil
Suzanne and I hovered by the bar. We exchanged glances, thinking, Safety in numbers, even if the number is only two. We were already something of a double-act, reinforced by the fact that we were physically identical: small, dark-haired women. We were dressed normally but still came across as a couple of goths parachuted into a North Face catalogue.
But we were enlivened too. We would soon leave typical North London bohemian existences behind: raw battles over decent flats in Islington and Stoke Newington, negotiating gallery and literary agents’ sales commissions, keeping a wary eye on whose book was excerpted on BBC or whose show was reviewed in Art Monthly. It was barefaced survival of another kind, where we came from. As we surveyed the crowd of hale, normal youngsters that night, we wondered what we’d got ourselves into.
“No one drifts into the Antarctic,” Paul, the director of the information division and our contact for the Artists and Writers Programme, had told me when we’d first met three months previously. “You passed through the same selection process we apply to everyone — plumbers and pilots alike.”
Up to four hundred people applied for every job going in the British Antarctic, Paul had told us. The pilots weeded themselves out; there were only a handful of people in the world who could, or would, fly in the conditions experienced there. The scientists — I was to be a scientist for logistical purposes in the Antarctic, and for a while basked in an unfamiliar sense of legitimacy — had to go through repeated rounds of funding applications. I was congratulated by those people I met for having passed a rigorous selection process in which my application had been examined by committees I had never met.
Paul himself was an example of the Renaissance men and women who I would come to meet in the Antarctic — a scientist equally well versed in the arts, refined, cosmopolitan, and utterly devoted to the continent-sized chunk of ice at the bottom of the world. He had the unusual intensity and self-possession I would eventually encounter in many Antarctic veterans. They struck me as people who had confronted the limits of themselves, in a way that one witnessed in people who had been through wars or other species of conflict.
For the moment, at Conference it was evident that everyone in the Antarctic world had fought to get there, and seemed to possess an almost messianic motivation. There was no cynicism and no entitlement, and this was refreshing.
At one of the Conference soirées, I ended up talking to Mathieu, a French glaciologist who had worked with BAS for over a decade. He had been drafted in by BAS to give a presentation at Conference on Arctic versus Antarctic ice dynamics. Mathieu had done twelve seasons south; in the summers he went to the Arctic to work.
“I am an Arctic tern,” he announced. I scrutinized his face for signs of polar faceburn. The polar regions were hard on the skin, I’d been warned. The combination of the extreme dryness and the intense UVA and UVB rays from the polar sun could put five years on your face in a single three-month summer season.
Mathieu looked about twelve. He wore a blue shirt over a white undershirt and beige chinos — it seemed this was something of a uniform among the scientists.
“But I haven’t actually been south in ten years. I did my doctorate and post-doctoral research there, but then I defected to the north,” he said.
“How are they different, the Arctic and Antarctic?”
Mathieu’s head rotated — not quite a shake, not quite a gesture of admonition. I had asked an impossible question.
Mathieu was measuring his words, possibly calculating them for the imbecile he had in front of him, who had been to neither pole. “They are both cold, obviously. But even there, no comparison is possible.”
He peered at me again, with his level, brown-eyed gaze. I would get used to this feeling, in the months to come — of shame in my relative ignorance, at being the least-informed person in the room.
I knew about their names, at least. The antithesis between the two regions is rooted in Greek: Arktos, from the Greek arktikos, meaning northern, has its origin in the Greek name for the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear; and Antarktikos is that which is the opposite to Arktos. This mirroring extends further than names. As the American environmental historian Stephen Pyne observes in his magisterial history of the continent, The Ice, “The Arctic is a true ocean surrounded by continents; the Antarctic, a continent surrounded by oceans.” In other aspects, too, they are radically different — their human history, their climates, their ocean currents, their types of ices and glaciological history.
“The Antarctic is far, far colder,” Mathieu said. “You feel it like a blow, on the ice cap.” He thumped his chest with his hand. “You can freeze your lungs, just by breathing. In the Arctic you have to go to Greenland to find that kind of cold. In the winter,” he added. A new expression settled in Mathieu’s eyes. Something clouded, but rhapsodic. “The Arctic is so alive!” He shook his head, as if he still could not believe it. “Foxes, snowdrops, moss, reindeer, people.”
“And the Antarctic?”
“Dead. But compelling.”
“How can something dead be compelling?”
He gave me an unreadable look which might have said, You’ll see.
“Do you miss it?”
“I do,” he said. “I think what I miss most is not what I expected.”
“What’s that?”
“It really is the most lethal place you can go,” Mathieu said, shaking his head. “It will kill you like that!” He clicked his fingers.
“And that’s what you miss?”
“It’s the sensory deprivation. The Antarctic is unique — even the Arctic isn’t as extreme. There is more sound there somehow. Even the wind sounds different. In Antarctica the wind doesn’t blow, it scours. You stand looking at the ice sheet and you can hear nothing, nothing but the beating of your own heart.” Again, he pounded his chest. “Sound and smell are gone, wiped out. That’s two of the senses dealt with. What a relief.”
I wondered if death-wish characters were attracted by the continent, or if the clinical deadness of the place provoked the desire to muffle the self, to disappear. History proves that the Antarctic draws unusual — quite possibly unstable — characters, and its relation to death is well documented.
“The Antarctic is completely Other,” Paul had told me, when I’d visited BAS headquarters in Cambridge in May that year, shortly after being awarded the fellowship. “There really is nowhere on earth like it.” His statement had an obvious, almost liturgical, ring. But also, something of Paul’s fervour began to sink in to me. I started to form mental images, purloined from film and photographs, but which were also a projection of my own specific fears. I saw fields of white rippled by the cobalt seams of unseen crevasses. I had read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. It had given me a sense of what it was like to vanish into one of those frozen fissures, to be eaten alive by the cold earth.
There is a long tradition of death in polar literature, although I hoped it wasn’t obligatory. Before writing my application to the Artists and Writers Programme I had read the classics of explorer literature: South: The Endurance Expedition by Ernest Shackleton, The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and a volume of Captain Scott’s letters. Taken together, these narratives of men (they were all men, then) who had pitted themselves against its annihilating froideur were shaming compendiums of selfless toil and hardship and an effective discouragement against ever setting foot in the place.
While death seemed to be the default story and the only permitted metaphor for the continent, its antithesis was also stirred. As Francis Spufford points out in his cultural history of Antarctic exploration, I May Be Some Time, while purporting to be about the external environment and the challenges the continent sets to your existence, as well as its regal indifference to the fate of any human being, these books are also about the consciousness of the explorers themselves. Explorer literature was affirming. Stalked by death, the c
ontinent elicited extraordinary feats of courage and endurance, pushing those penitents bent on conquering it beyond the boundaries of human suffering and into a near-beatific realm.
Reading these books, the question that occurred to me was less how these men managed to survive their physical ordeals, but about their emotional welfare afterward, if they lived. After such lives of triumph, despair, brotherliness, and grit so powerfully evoked by the writer-explorers of the day, how did those men return to normal life, I wondered, to the hedgerows and weepy hydrangeas of Edwardian England, the endless tea receptions with dowagers that would follow their inevitable lecture tours on their return. Had adrenaline not colonized their senses, simultaneously sharpening and muting them, so that it became impossible to calibrate their emotions to the milky scale of ordinary life?
As I read, another theme appeared in the pages of these gruelling catalogues of mishap, bad weather, bad judgment, confluences of all these, and sorrow: luck. Death and luck — not a reassuring duo. I might have trusted death more than luck, at that impasse in my life. That these two unreliable spectres should duel it out in the blank heart of the continent’s whiteness gave me pause.
I leaned against a red brick wall, listening to the genial ship’s officers regale us with seasickness remedies (ginger biscuits). My journey to the Antarctic was then two months away, still notional, and cancellable. This place, uniquely in the world perhaps, had the capacity to separate you from yourself. You would be divided, flensed into components you might not know you possessed. It was a journey of a different disorder, one which promised no intact return.
September 2nd
My thirty-seventh birthday. I have completely forgotten about it. Text messages from friends say, Where are you? I sit alone at night in my college room. A blank bulletin board eyes me. Blu-Tack stains pucker the walls. It will soon be occupied by an undergraduate, counting his or her fortune to be at the top university in the country.
I am trying to take stock of the situation. The boisterousness I observe in the college bar is in a class of its own, the kind of boosterism that generates pranks and cliques in equal measure. They are all pathologically exuberant, and I’m used to moroseness, a certain hedging of bets. My notes from today: a unique society, likely unreplicated anywhere in the world, a marriage of sedentary thinkers glued to increasingly complex computer-modelling programmes and go-for-it adventurers.
I am keeping a list of the occupations of the people I meet: carpenter, first officer (ship), chief pilot, glaciologist, atmospheric chemist, terrestrial biologist, chef, mechanic, JCB driver. Everyone talks to each other; there is no obvious class division between the logistics people and the scientists. This romance between science and logistics has a military feel to it, in part because of the contribution of the Royal Navy, in the form of their vessel Endurance, and the two certifiably reckless trainee Navy pilots who are here and who will spend the summer on base, as flight and communications assistants.
Why is everyone so thrilled, so motivated? I’m a writer; no one in my profession admits to anything as simplistic as certainty. Here, Antarctic veterans regale me in the bar. They are not telling stories, or not only. Their stories have an aspect of spiritual warning.
The Antarctic is an addiction, they say. No matter how sick of the privations of life there you thought you had become, it always tugs you back. At the end of the season, all you could think of was getting out. But then as soon as you do escape you find you have amnesia and you can only remember the good parts. Now all you want to do is get back.
The world will never look the same again, they say. Nothing is ever quite as real again, because you are not there. Your dreams become populated by vast lozenges of ice that turn into icebreakers, or that house red planes, like frozen aircraft hangars. But you will not be allowed back because you’ve had your shot at it, and there are others queuing behind you, and access to the continent is restricted. Even before you went there they said, This is a once in a lifetime chance, the word once taking on an alarming ring, like a medical condition. For years you will wake, sweaty and disoriented, from your dreams of ice and think, Why can’t I go home?
Two days later the whirlwind that is the Antarctic Conference packed itself away. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office people were driven back to London in Jaguars, the officers rejoined their ship somewhere on the Humber River, the scientists went back to number-crunching in front of their computers.
Suzanne and I shared a taxi and a train back to King’s Cross, to resume our London lives for two months until our marching orders came through and we joined one of the first BAS group flights in the third week of November.
“That was so much more fun than I thought it was going to be,” Suzanne said. I agreed, although I was struck by a sense that artists and writers were, while valued, not a priority to the programme. My first inkling came while sitting next to the FCO polar regions representative at lunch on the first day.
“How closely are Britain’s strategic interests in the Antarctic aligned with the policing of the sovereignty of the Falklands?” I asked. She looked at me as if the potato on the end of her fork had just grown a mouth and spoken. She did not deign to answer and spent the rest of the lunch talking to the deputy director of BAS, seated on her left.
“How about you?” Suzanne asked brightly.
“I don’t know. It was —” I searched for a neutral word. “Overwhelming.”
“What will your book be about?”
“I don’t know. It depends on what happens there,” I said.
She nodded, but I could tell she was not satisfied. I didn’t feel I could reveal to her the full extent of blindness often required in writing fiction. It must seem haphazard and unwise to people who do not charge themselves with making up stories out of thin air. The one determinant factor of fiction is that there will be a narrative of cause and effect, enacted by characters, with a beginning, middle, and end. But I had no idea what this would be.
Outside the train window the same fields flashed by, only in the last three days they had somehow acquired a slight verticality and now tilted into the sky.
“What made you want to go to Antarctica?” Suzanne asked.
“I wanted a creative challenge, I suppose.”
My answer was honest, but its honesty disguised another, more ambivalent stratum of truth. It is a writerly preoccupation, perhaps: to locate the moment when a spark is struck, when an idea occurs to you that will set in motion a train of events we will come to think of as our fate, our destiny, or simply how things turned out.
My enchantment with the polar regions began with a casual prophecy — one I would forget before remembering.
I see people standing around, dressed unusually. Snow, ice. Are they Eskimos? Are you going to write about the Arctic?
Denise was a friend of a friend, a very successful astrologer. She did the charts of the well-off of Holland Park, she advised CEOs of multinationals on the stock market. I never met her in person, but a friend ordered a chart from her to be drawn up for my birthday over a year before I went to the Antarctic. Denise rang me to say that the chart was finished, and that she would put it in the post. There were a few things she wanted to “run through” with me first, though.
“There’s something I saw,” Denise said. I could hear her ruminating on the other end of the line before she told me.
As she said it, I thought, I doubt it. I’d lived through twenty Canadian winters before coming to live in the UK. I’d had enough cold, thanks very much.
I said, “Are you sure?”
In her voice a tiny bell of annoyance sounded. Of course she was sure.
I was in a hotel in Rome when I received the email from the British Antarctic Survey. My trip to Italy had taken me on a slightly surreal and lonely circuit of universities and lectures — Siena, Trieste, and now Rome, where I talked to students about being a writer in cavernou
s university halls filled with a bronze spring sun. The Vatican had just elected a new pope — white smoke had been seen floating from the chimney in St. Peter’s Square, only three kilometres from where I lectured.
Back at the hotel, I fell off my chair — or rather the chair declined to stay underneath me. In any case the wheels slipped on the polished marble and deposited me in a heap on the floor. Dapper Italians looked at me in blank shock.
Denise’s words bloomed in my mind like a neglected flower. I’d forgotten what she’d said, but now I would never forget. That is one of the many problems with prophecy: once you know it, you can’t unknow it. You either pitch yourself against it, or subject yourself to its diktat out of a vague sense of obligation.
I read the email from BAS again, as if the words might expire or begin to erase themselves at any moment. But they remained, etched into the screen. It was no longer an unhinged notion, a creative stab in the dark, an intuition. I was going to Antarctica.
3.
THE IRON ISLANDS
brash ice
Floating ice rubble. Originates from sea-ice that is breaking up or commonly as debris from calving ice bergs or ice bergs that break up as part of their ongoing erosion. The wreckage of other forms of ice.
Late November. For the first time in my life I was handed a group airline ticket booked and paid for by someone else, my name only one of many on the manifest. Our route would take us to Madrid, then Santiago de Chile, where we would spend the night. The following day we were to take a hopscotch flight to Punta Arenas via Puerto Montt, finally pitching up somewhere called Mount Pleasant Airport.
At Heathrow we milled about in an undisciplined group, each of us lunging off to procure last minute toiletries or have their last cigarette for twenty hours. Suzanne was already in the Antarctic, having left two weeks before me, so I had met only one person in our group before: Paul, the head of the information division, who trotted after us, a bearded and distracted mother hen.