Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  Gradually other likely suspects joined us. One man, his face mottled by burst capillaries, carried a bag with the organization’s insignia. Then other burly men appeared, their heads shaven close. I sat next to a plumber who said two or three words to me, then folded his arm across his chest and stared at the back of the seat in front of him for the rest of the flight to Madrid.

  In Madrid new faces joined us — Nils, an oceanography student from Norway; Emilia, also studying oceanography, from the Italian Antarctic Programme; and Max, who was from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, although he was Swiss — I couldn’t remember whether he told me this, or Nils told me, or I inferred it. I didn’t know it yet, but we would spend so much time together, all of us, that it would come to feel as if I had always known them, and would always, in a kind of glutinous and total knowledge of another person’s existence I hadn’t experienced since university.

  Max sounded English — more English than the English, with crystalline, carefully acquired consonants. Emilia was small, dark-haired, pretty, and a little stiff. She flashed thin smiles. She had a sheltered look about her. She would shrink from the reckless camaraderie of strangers shoved together by circumstance. Nils was a more muted presence; he might be a couple of years older than Max. Nils publicly turned off his mobile phone, holding it up and waving it at us. “Bye bye, Mum and Dad, bye bye, Nadia — that’s my girlfriend.”

  There would be no mobile coverage in the Falkland Islands, and it was likely our networks wouldn’t be available in Chile, or would be too expensive to use. For some of those headed to the Antarctic on long-term contracts, that hour in Madrid airport was the last time a mobile phone would be of any use to them for two and a half years.

  Max, Emilia, and Nils would be in the Antarctic world for six weeks and on the continent itself for only three or four days. They were all on secondments with their supervisors, whom they were joining on the ship. Nils was doing a project for his postdoctoral fellowship in Tromsø. Max had recently embarked on a PhD.

  I realized that I was not often among people in their early twenties. We are herded into our age and peer groups by school, then university, then career, by friends and family, and what we might call “lifestyle choices.” In Antarctica I would meet almost no one my age. I would discover that the Antarctic world was stocked with people in their twenties, and people in their forties, fifties, and beyond. The thirty-somethings were not banned, but they tended to have young families, and the Antarctic required long periods on the other side of the world with little communication.

  I looked at them around the table with some envy: Max with his long legs splayed proprietorially, enigmatic Emilia, upright, friendly Nils. This voyage would provoke lifelong friendships between them, or perhaps more. Meanwhile my life had solidified into a pattern — work, interests, friends — that hadn’t changed in some years. I wasn’t sure if change was still possible.

  Although short-term convulsions seemed to be a speciality of our destination. People went off the rails in the Antarctic — several people I talked to at Conference had said this, then illustrated it with lurid anecdotes. I had been warned by another writer I knew who had gone to the Antarctic with the American Antarctic Artists and Writers Programme. “They have a saying: What happens on the ship, stays on the ship. What happens on base, stays on base.” The Antarctic, the writer said, was a secret society. As soon as you were initiated into it, your social norms and duties were miraculously extinguished. People fell into catastrophic liaisons, got drunk and made a pass at their bosses, or students, or suddenly forgot they had a wife and three children at home. “The men, especially,” she said, but that was hardly surprising — Antarctic society was still two-thirds male, on average. “It’s quite entertaining.”

  November 26th

  Fourteen hours. It is good to be back in Latin America, even briefly. I fall asleep over the Amazon. I have a dream about a man. I don’t know him. I am keeping him company. He is waiting for my friend Rebecca, who is beautiful. I remember only the marshy, compromised feeling of entertaining a man who is waiting for a more beautiful and seductive woman.

  In the morning we fly over Salta. I think of Lucrecia Martel’s film La Ciénaga, or The Swamp, which was filmed in the province, its lack of an establishing shot. You get lost within it, as confused as the characters who live in the house where it is set. This heightens the feeling of claustrophobia and significance. I want to do this in fiction, but how? To start from the inside, to begin inside the emotion. Instead of having to explain, to make a coherent fabric out of emotion and experience, which in reality refuse to knit themselves neatly together.

  Max, Emilia, and Nils sit toward the back of the plane, plugged into films. When I go to the galley or the toilet, I pass them but they do not look up. We know we will be spending weeks in each other’s company, perhaps more, so we measure our interactions carefully. I read the flight map for hours. La Serena, San Juan, Tucumán, El Salvador, San Luis, Córdoba, Jujuy, Juliaca, Viña del Mar, Copiapó. Names on the moving map rise up to meet us over the artificial horizon, then disappear in our wake.

  November 27th

  Santiago. Nineteen-fifties window displays. Chaotic department stores. The Moneda Palace is actually very ugly. Military police drift around its perimeter, as if awaiting insurgents. But there are only tourists who transgress by stepping on the grass or into the fenced-off enclosures.

  We have dinner together in a group. A scientist in our party — who? Didn’t catch his name, I can’t seem to retain anyone’s names, even though we are only twenty people or so — telling me at dinner about “black smokers”; these are glass spheres raised from the ocean floor by underwater magma. He shows me a photograph. They are gothic vases, twisted yet somehow coherent. Sometimes they implode, he says, from the pressure. When they do, he says, they crumple like pieces of paper.

  The following morning we began our long journey down the thin finger of the country, leaving the vine-tangled valleys of the Chilean winelands behind us, flying over garrisons of spruce, until we arrived on a wind-scoured runway in Punta Arenas.

  There, in Punta Arenas’ airport, where the sword-like light of the extreme southern hemisphere pierced the departure lounge, we began to feel the Antarctic’s presence. There was an empty note to the sky. But it wasn’t an emptiness of vacant space, it was the presence of something else — a bulk, a thickening — emanating from it, in a silent voltage.

  Posters and maps were tacked on the walls of the departure lounge, intricately detailed charts of the shattered tip of South America and its clot of scattershot islands, peninsulas, fjords, and ruse-like channels which only lead to cul-de-sacs. This was Tierra del Fuego. The margins of a map of southern Patagonia presented the native animals and the indigenous peoples, the Tehuelche, before their cultures were broken by the Spanish invaders. They explained how the southern tip of Patagonia got its name, from the fires the Tehuelche lit at night to warm themselves in the frigid southern winter, and which the Portuguese navigator Magellan and his entourage spotted, guttering in the wind, from their barques.

  We were inching, incrementally, away from the world. Only one flight and a turbulent strip of ocean lay between us and our destination.

  “You’ll see,” Paul had told me at Conference. “There’s no place quite like the Islands.” His expression was difficult to read — not encouraging, rather stone-faced, as if the Islands were a test to be endured. I knew almost nothing of the Falklands, although I was old enough to remember static-lashed footage of the 1982 war: battleships on fire lumbering through turbulent seas, fatally wounded by torpedoes, miserable young men wearing green trudging across bleak moors.

  We boarded the only commercial flight to the Islands since Argentina stopped planes flying through its airspace, the weekly LAN Chile flight. The stewardesses announced we were on our way to what they diplomatically referred to as “Las Valkan/Malvinas.” As
the plane pulled away from the ground and banked toward the ocean, I felt a rush of fear; I had just stepped off a cliff. It seemed impossible that any civilization could lie beyond the black shores of Patagonia.

  The sea was sundered by whitecaps. As we climbed we were buffeted by strange roaring sounds — wind shear cutting across the wings. The coast of South America curled behind us, then was swallowed by the horizon.

  An hour later, out of the ocean jagged basalt reefs emerged; the sea foamed at their hems. Behind them were low mustard-coloured hills. I was glad to see it, because it was land, even though nothing in that first glimpse suggested welcome. The pilot descended and we flew two thousand feet above a landscape striped with dark cloud and rivers of stones. Light, dark, light, dark. Like a zebra.

  We were told to fasten our seatbelts. “Señores y señoras, vamos a aterrizar en las Valkan/Malvinas.”

  “Did she just say we’re going to terrorize the Falklands?” Tilly, the soil scientist in the seat beside me, asked.

  “Atterizar means to land,” I explained. We strafed the stern yellow hills of the islands. Peering at the horizon, through veils of low cloud, I made out the blue fissure of Falkland Sound broiling with whitecaps. It was more likely the islands were going to terrorize us.

  We landed sideways, sheared by a gust just as the pilot sunk the wheels onto the tarmac. With the rudder he wrenched the fuselage straight in the same second the wheels thudded onto the ground so hard that Tilly grabbed my hand. The islanders clapped. The rest of us prised our fingers from the armrests.

  In the baggage reclaim area, we were greeted by signs. DANGER said one, although it declined to elaborate. On the other side of the baggage room was a skull and crossbones; underneath it was a small spaceship device with rays of light extending from it — land mines. ALERT STATE: BIKINI said the sign above the luggage carousel.

  “Is that bad or good?” I asked Tilly.

  “They could have said ALERT STATE: ONE PIECE SPEEDO. That sounds more serious.”

  Men in fatigues hefted sausage bags onto the trolleys. We lined up in the queue for “foreigners” — non-Islanders, I supposed. Military police stamped us into the country. The eye of the man who scrutinized my British passport snagged on the place of my birth. “I spent six months there on secondment!” he declared, naming the military base near the town where I was born but have never since lived, delighted to find a random Canadian in this sink-plug part of the global basin.

  Then, before we knew it we were out the door and fending off shafts of sunshine so bright and pre-emptory I had to put on my sunglasses. We were driven away from the airport to the capital, Port Stanley, nearly an hour away. An old school bus that rattled fiercely on the pitted road afforded us our first views of the landscape.

  I stared again at the mustard hills streaked with rivers of stone. These tumbled between bald-pated peaks, veined out into the flatlands below, cascading a jumble of sharp-edged boulders at the edge of the gravel road. Savage-looking sheep walked among them, picking at stones. The wind slashed us. I had read that the Falklands is one of the windiest places on earth. My eyes scouted for trees in vain. Large cinder-coloured birds flew ponderously in the sky, oblong-bellied, like military bombers — skuas.

  In Stanley we checked into our hotel, the Upland Goose. Pink walls, floral carpet. A vaguely musty smell. The walls were very thin, the roof made of corrugated tin.

  Soon we were greeted by a man with a Midlands accent in a chef’s uniform. He emerged from nowhere in a blood-stained apron, a cleaver in his hand, to give us keys. “We try to please, we try to please,” he said, as if he had been put on repeat. “I’ve been brought down here to clean things up. Yes, it’s all looking up at the Upland Goose.” He grinned.

  We women were billeted in a house separate from the hotel, a sort of annex. It was too far to walk with all our luggage. Caroline, a diver, had huge banana-shaped bags. It turned out these were her flippers, as well as her personal wetsuit.

  “I know it’s round here somewhere,” the taxi driver said, “but I can’t for the life of me figure out where.”

  We all looked at each other: how could a taxi driver not know where a house was in this tinpot outpost? We showed him the number: 38 Fitzroy Road. Finally he pulled up on the curb and asked a lone man walking a wolfish dog.

  “I guess he didn’t pass the Knowledge,” Caroline whispered.

  “Been here long?” I asked.

  “All my life,” said our grey-haired driver. “Falklands born and bred.”

  The house was serviceable but anonymous. There was no point in trying to redecorate or modernize it. The nearest IKEA was in Houston, 10,084 kilometres away, according to Google Maps — I checked.

  I mentioned this to Tilly. “You hardly need to worry about soft furnishings. We won’t be here long anyway, unless the ship is delayed.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Shit. That’s the Antarctic equivalent of saying Macbeth in a theatre.”

  Later that night we were told the ship was late arriving from South Georgia. We would cool our heels in the anonymous house for four more days.

  November 29th

  Scalding rain. Starched wind. The names here sound made up, topsy-turvy names for the tip of the world. Whale grass. Darker ferns. Diddle-dee. The islands — 778 of them in total in the archipelago — might all be like this, wind-polished cirques, shattered quartzite mounts scattered with helicopter debris, with wind-preserved tubes of Argentine toothpaste left behind by the invading forces. Sea lions bark like customs officers at their perimeters. Orange-beaked gentoo penguins breed in their thousands. The islands are a rookery for beasts of the underworld.

  Union Jacks, sheep everywhere, including on Falkland coat of arms. Christmas decorations strung from the ceiling, or hanging, sun-bleached, on a tree in the corner, the summer sun ripe in the sky. A smell of hot pine — pine trees heated by the sun. Also coconut — some flower? Dilapidated tin houses, wind-worn. Otherwise like a Scottish suburb, some hill-perched fishing town. Steel water threaded with kelp.

  This is one of those places where animosities are intensified. Feuds, dislikes, outright hatreds — all these coagulate here. No distractions, no escape. The kind of place that makes you think, Why am I here? An instant exile.

  Within a day I had walked every street in the town. Two chunky war memorials stood on either end of the settlement, freshly coated in red poppies. Even without the memorials I could sense the presence of war. This was a taciturn but rebellious land. It wouldn’t let itself be taken easily, this place which was no prize of any country, a scrappy Gondwanaland archipelago orphaned from its geological parents, Patagonia and South Africa.

  We FIDS, as we were now called — from the days when the British Antarctic Survey had been the Falkland Islands Directive Survey — wandered around town, looking at the money in our hands in frank disbelief, a counterfeit-looking currency adorned with sheep (and not, as I had expected, with Margaret Thatcher, the Islands’ saint and saviour) we would be able to spend nowhere else.

  Royal Marines marched up and down the streets in their wine-coloured caps, or drove by in an armada of old Land Rovers, little Union Jacks fluttering from their radio aerials. We found a man who made taxidermy sculptures of whales and dolphins, and visited the museum-like display in his front garden. We took photos of ourselves in the red telephone box outside the post office, to attest to the fact that we had flown all the way down the planet, some 13,000 kilometres, only to end up in the United Kingdom.

  Time stood still in Stanley, in more than one way. In the pubs, people stared intently. Men ranged round the bar would turn, as one, and look over their shoulder. People had wind-reddened cheeks, blue eyes so light they looked transparent; their skin had a reddish, almost Amerindian tint. The islanders spoke with a twang that sounded vaguely Australian.

  The emptiness of the place was thrilling. It was there in the ocean that broile
d just beyond the thin strip of land that cosseted Stanley Harbour, the fact that there was no land between the islands and Antarctica, or on the way to Australia; in the omnipotent skies marked by strange funnel-shaped clouds and torn apart daily by the Tornado fighter jets on sortie from the base at Mount Pleasant; and in the sere landscape of the islands themselves, whose only history and culture had been these tin sheds and hardscrabble farms. There had never even been a cinema in Stanley, we learned, “or a bowling alley,” an Islander said, inexplicably. Superficially it resembled an outer Hebridean town, but there was nowhere to go — no planes to fly you to Glasgow in an hour, say. Nowhere at all, except the mother country 13,000 kilometres away. By contrast the coast of the enemy, Argentina, was only 480 kilometres offshore.

  In the evenings the sky turned the colour of gasoline. Breathing the air in the Islands felt like drinking champagne. I was light-headed, buoyant.

  We entered a pub as a group. All eyes were fixed on us. They watched as we lobbed mistimed darts into the dartboard.

  “Why do you think they stare so intently?” I asked Max.

  He shrugged. “Fresh meat.”

  I’d come across Max many times by now — we were all serpentining in and out of each other’s existences, bumping into each other in the town’s single supermarket, in the swimming pool, as we passed our days as consorts-in-waiting to the Antarctic.

  He was tall and blond. He had green eyes, which I usually distrusted — they don’t seem entirely real to me. His was a face of drastic slopes. There were hollows under the ski runs of his cheekbones; his mouth was beautiful, although there was a cruel cant to it. He looked newly minted, sculpted into perfect life by an anatomist.

  Max had a slightly militaristic air, as if he had reluctantly forgone a natural vocation to issue orders. I could tell he was one of those people who either liked you or he didn’t, and he didn’t think much about it. The decision made itself for him.