Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  “You remind me of my ex-girlfriend,” he said.

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “You have remarkably similar physicality” was his retort, his voice clinical, or perhaps that was his very faint German accent. I felt as if I’d been subjected to an examination.

  In other circumstances I might have avoided Max, but there was no avoiding anyone in Antarctic World. During those days in Stanley, we all banded together. Suzanne was on the ship; she had been able to take more time away from her life than I, and had the benefit of a ship tour around the sub-Antarctic island bases — Signy and King Edward Point, plus a call at South Georgia, where Ernest Shackleton is buried.

  In those days we all fell easily into each other’s company. We went for meandering walks to see the penguins at Volunteer Point, to play five-a-side football. Through all this, Max and I carried on a long conversation which we picked up effortlessly after hiatuses.

  On the first of those waiting lounge days in Stanley after we’d been told of the ship’s delay we walked out of town to the lighthouse; its red and white plinth was a popular destination for a walk out of town, past the obligatory minefield and the dingy sheep and the jerry-built shed that housed, we were told, stacks of automatic weapons for the day when the Argentines come again and the Islanders would queue up for them the way Londoners queue to buy sandwiches at Pret A Manger.

  Max was a good talker. He was a climatologist and so interested in the larger picture, in how pieces of the puzzle fit together.

  He told me he was part French and part German. He spoke both as well as English. He refused to divulge his father’s profession, saying he was a “kind of financier.” I thought, Arms dealer. Venture capitalist. Both, maybe. Whatever his father did for a living, Max had the caginess of the very wealthy.

  Until sixth form, he had gone to school in England. This explained the lack of accent. Although it seemed that his father had also been based in New York for three years, and a vague memory of an American accent tugged at his vowels. He’d studied physics and then glaciology. He had wanted to join the Army and put his skills to work, perhaps as an engineer or situation modeller, but he’d become fascinated by science. “It holds the key to explaining everything,” he said. “All the past, and all the future.”

  Max’s PhD would investigate how the ice sheets formed. And why, once they had reached their apogee in numerous cyclotherms — cycles of freeze and melt — did they start to retreat? Why was the planet put through this cold trauma of successive ice ages — so that it could flourish anew? He told me the evidence suggested that, while the ice age killed off many species, after it was over birds, animals, insects, and plants took a gigantic leap forward. Earth flourished in cold in a way it never did in heat.

  “The truth is, certain species do well out of ice age extinctions,” he said. “Humans, for example. The last one cleared the way for Homo sapiens to become the dominant species.”

  I was so busy processing this idea — that ice was not a symbol of a frozen hiatus, that it might accelerate human development rather than hit the pause button on it for thousands of years — that I failed to hear his next question the first time.

  “Will your novel be about climate change?”

  “You can’t really write novels based on issues. They have to be grounded in emotion, in incident and character. I want to give life to what I experience there.”

  The wind flung our hair into our mouths. The wind really was different in the Falklands. It arrived unannounced, like a single piece of energy, as if it had just been generated from the ground. I picked my hair out of my mouth and laughed.

  Max scowled. “What’s so funny?”

  “I’m trying to describe being a novelist here. With you.”

  His scowl deepened. I could see him trying to parse whether the with you was a positive comment.

  “It’s the unlikelihood,” I said. I could feel the moment — made up of the bizarre fission of me trying to describe something as urbane and effete as writing a novel while standing with a twenty-three-year-old climatologist-in-progress at a lighthouse at the end of the world while we were torn by cyclonic-strength winds — slipping away.

  I let it go. A small loneliness settled inside me. Max caught it, or caught something, because he set about trying to reassure me as we walked back to town, letting loose a volley of acute questions: Do you believe in absolute truth, that such a thing exists? Why are you interested in an emotional realm? Do you write out of will or desire? What is the relationship between them? What is the relationship between intellect and emotion, in a writer?

  With most people I would take this kind of questioning as a bid for supremacy, part of the constant tug-of-war for dominion that humans indulge in. Max might have been testing me, but he was also genuinely trying to understand. I was surprised by how readily, and how certainly, I answered his piercing questions. Max was energetic, curious, articulate. In those hiatus days in the islands, I’d seen through small gestures how he could be sweet and generous. But I had a sense that any sign of weakness — of intent, of character — might attract his most obvious quality, that go-for-the-jugular instinct of the confident young man. He was not a people pleaser; he did not think about decorum or the effect his questions had on me. He simply wanted to know, so he asked. There was a bracing clarity to this approach, although at times I suspected I was just another ice sheet and he was coring me, excavating for data.

  We might as well have been separate species, Max and I. He was young, handsome, confident; he had been raised on a diet of certainties and accomplishments. I was fourteen years his senior — long enough on the planet to understand that life can be a kind of dismantling in which you are taken further and further away from any original certainties and power you might have possessed, further from yourself, until you are only a moon orbiting the sun of who you once thought you would be.

  December 1st

  Morning in Stanley. The wind is beginning to pick up, at eight thirty a.m. Soon it is as stiff as a plank. Clouds are coming in from the west. The coconut smell turns out to be yellow gorse.

  The QE II is expected in today. We can see the ship’s motorboats coming ashore. The tourists get in our way. They buy stuffed penguins in the gift shop and yogourt in the West Store. The passengers are dapper men with cream-coloured scarves wrapped around their necks and thin women wearing bronze-coloured ankle boots. “Argies,” the West Store cashier says darkly.

  Today we are going on a planet walk — this is one of the many quirks of this place, that around Stanley Harbour is scattered a model of our solar system. The planets are placed at intervals which are to scale with the sun. The sun itself is located front of a shipwreck, the Jhelum, but Pluto is out of town, apparently, somewhere on Mount Tumbledown.

  Now the weather is changing. A rain squall has just arrived, emitting fierce wintry hail, while one side of the sky remains placid and vernal. “That’s the Falklands for you,” someone says. “Four seasons in one day.”

  The outlandishness of the Falklands played its part in those hiatus days. We were all decoupled from our usual lives, and drunk on the effervescent air. I walked the streets of Stanley grinning, my sunglasses deflecting the sun’s near ozoneless orb, past bad-boy bar Deano’s, the bakery that churned out sub-Greggs white rolls, the 1970s constabulary, the teal-headed upland geese snoozing in the sun or efficiently mowing the town’s greenery, aware that I had freed myself from a nameless prison by the simple fact of coming to the end of the world.

  The next day we went for an outing, piling into Land Rovers. We were driven over bare hills that turned flaxen in the sun. We pulled up at a trim white farmhouse overlooking a crescent-shaped beach and set out walking over peat bogs, the peat like wet espresso. Upland geese squawked at our approach. All the shrubs had been battered to bonsai by the wind.

  Ahead, the penguin rookery awaited. We heard an unfamil
iar chatter, a tight sonar tapestry of honks. Penguins were talkative, as it turned out. Behind the dunes they stood beak to beak and upright, like mini statesmen, having earnest conversations with each other. On this beach, thousands of king penguins congregated to rear their young. The late November sun had a rapier quality I’d never felt before. In its gold light, the ocean was a sweep of blue sequins.

  Max and I walked away from the colony and started down the empty white sands fringed with jade shallows. We watched as small black forms emerged from the waves, slick and glittering in the sun. This was my first experience of penguins in the wild, and they seemed from a different dimension. Here they were, emerging from the ocean and shaking themselves dry in their neat grey and black wetsuits, only to be sandblasted on the beach. They paused on the tide line, shut their eyes against the sandstorm, and soldiered toward their burrows in the dunes.

  Max and I stood on the beach and picked grains of sand from our eyes, transfixed by how different, how new, the world could feel, just by changing one’s position on the planet. It was pleasing to be so disrupted from reality.

  Max and I were commanded to move on — under no circumstances should we disturb the penguins with our presence. Others joined, and the tallest of us, including Max, positioned themselves against the breeze as windbreaks. Max towered above everyone, his head tilted down to better hear what people were saying; the wind ripped words from our mouths. From time to time, he would throw his head back in laughter or duck down closer to his interlocutor and laugh. He had an athletic, martinet stride which didn’t quite seem to belong to this age.

  On our last night in Stanley before boarding the ship, the Women’s House at 38 Fitzroy Road hosted a farewell to the Falklands dinner. Nils came, as did Max, Emilia, Patricia the soil scientist, Tilly, Veronique the “squid woman,” who was throwing over her usual specialism to spend the summer tagging penguins on a sub-Antarctic island, Caroline the diver, and me. Bottles of Savanna cider and Chilean wine were piled on the table.

  Max walked in the door. “Can I see your books?” He said it without introduction or hesitation, as if he had been thinking about this question for some time.

  I showed them to him. He read a page or two. In front of everyone he read a line out loud — I forget which one — and said, “So does that come from your writer’s instinct to feel the pain?”

  The question hit me like a flare. “Maybe there’s another instinct you’ve missed.”

  He grimaced and looked away.

  The party continued. Max had brought a cake. When it was ready to be served, he turned out the lights and lit candles on the table.

  I had brought an issue of the London Review of Books with me to read (thinking, correctly as it turned out, these would not be thick on the ground in the Antarctic). In it was a review of an Edvard Munch — he of The Scream — exhibition.

  Late in his career Munch wrote, “The second half of my life has been a battle just to keep myself upright. My path has led me along the edge of a precipice, a bottomless pit.… From time to time I’ve tried to get away from the path, thrown myself into the throng of life among people. But every time I have had to go back to the path along the cliff top.”

  Munch’s topics were depression, despair, the pain of jealousy. He became a painter of the inner life, particularly his years among the bohemia of Berlin and Oslo (then called Kristiania).

  The painting that accompanied the LRB article was a study for what would eventually become The Wedding of the Bohemian. I looked around our Falklands table: a group of people together for a celebratory dinner, the silver light of the far south, pizza crusts, empty bottles of beer and Chilean wine, a demolished cake. In Kristiania, Munch’s guests, their visages effaced, a Spartan table, two bottles of wine, a casserole, and a dessert. The happy couple in their modest wedding attire sit at the far end of the table.

  Munch was a melancholic romantic, a handsome man who never found his match. He was always attending some dinner party or other where a beautiful, desirable woman said something cutting. Despite his good looks, Munch did not attract love, or luck, and he knew it.

  The Falklands’ sudden spring, the gorse with its Bain de Soleil scent, the unfamiliar sharpness of the sun and wind in the islands had revived me. But now I felt like the disconsolate woman at the dinner table in Munch’s painting, stripped of joy; in its place were stark white stripes of anxiety. In Max’s comment I heard the sound of knives sharpening. For me, criticism and intimacy had always run on the same current.

  Night lingered on our forgotten latitude. A brawl had broken out inside me. I have always been prone to sudden gusts of depression; my mood can turn on a dime. I felt like flinging wineglasses across the table. The moment when Max might have been a friend slid by, observed only by me, on its way to an unknown destination.

  Shades of Light closes at six. By seven I am out; in between is the till reconciliation and the daily dust-down — dust accumulates in thin pelts settling on the stained-glass butterflies, hand-dyed silk scarves, and artisan greeting cards, the dried starfish and sand dollars. Thick amber sunbeams pour into the store. It is nearly spring; winter is finally relinquishing its grip on the land.

  The walk home is ten blocks by the city’s well-ordered streets, but there is a shortcut along the old railway line that I take in the hours of daylight. The town is changing: the old flour mill and the Bata shoe factory are being turned into “luxury apartments.” Billboards show white spaces razed of walls and appliances made of brushed chrome.

  It has been forty years since passenger trains stopped in town. Now there is only the grain train, which slides through town twice a week to load wheat and rye at the silo. An old warehouse next to the track has recently been converted into a laundrette. In the winter I walk through clouds of steam emanating from its windows. Now, in early spring, woolly soap smell floats from the windows.

  I insert a cassette into my Walkman — Siouxsie and the Banshees. I do not hear the car pull up.

  “Hey … HEY!”

  I tug the earphone out. The blue-white car has caught up with me just before the train tracks.

  “Where ya gon?” Michael does not have his patrol light on.

  “Are you following me around?”

  Michael grins. “Just keepin an eye out. It’s my job, remember?”

  “Where’s Donna?”

  “Home, doing homework. Shouldn’t you be too?”

  “Some of us have to work.”

  Michael drew his head back into the car. “Just be careful. Keep your eyes out. I wouldn’t wear the Walkman, not with what’s happening. See you around.” He says it seeyer.

  “See yer.” I wonder if he has noticed I am mimicking him. But he just drives away.

  In spring the woods are mulchy and secretive. Since I was a child, I have always hallucinated in forests — I see creatures, dark-pelted, humanoid, melting between the trees, or giant wolf-bears. I am never frightened by these apparitions. They seem to want to avoid me. These images knit together across my retinas, shadowless.

  Donna and I walk through the paths of the woodlot by the dam. The trees are bones against the sky. In another week they will have leaves. Spring hits like a hammer in this province.

  Geography is my best subject that final year of high school. We learn about the Carboniferous Age, when the coal that once brought riches to the province was forged. This was a world of ferns, bog, and immense pressures as fallen soggy trees were compacted into graphite. This, we learn, is the same substance as diamond, essentially — only a single bond in their structure separates them.

  Mr. McIsaac, our geography teacher, tells us to look for the land’s memory of the ice sheets which once covered the province, to read the history of its abandonment by ice: its chapters of boulders, its lonely paragraphs of drumlins, and the furrows of mica and malachite. This is the tumble left in the wa
ke of a hasty retreat as the ice pulled back toward the north, a giant snake recoiling. He tells us our land is the product of a vanished sheet of ice that had clawed its way almost down to the Mediterranean.

  Donna and I drive out to the woodlot to walk, talk, and occasionally to sit on a log and drink a beer in quick fugitive gulps, secure from the gaze of her parents, jiggling our legs to keep ourselves warm.

  I am seventeen; Donna is a year older. I have skipped a grade and have been put in the accelerated programme, a term which always makes me feel like I am being shot forward into the future in a catapult. We will graduate from high school in eight weeks’ time. After that, for some of us our futures are unmapped. Even those of us headed for university don’t really know what to expect. We don’t know how fleeting it will be, this hiatus in our lives; for the moment our lives are claimed neither by the past nor the future.

  We pad along on a carpet of pine needles mashed into a paste by the winter weight of two feet of snow and ice. Clumps of ashen mushrooms bloom in dark pools where no light has penetrated all winter. Layers of defrosted maple leaves sigh underneath our feet.

  We find a log and pull two bottles of beer from a sturdy paper bag. We hide the bottles behind us. We have to keep an eye out for park staff or worse, police; drinking alcohol in a public place is illegal. We fear the police less than Donna’s parents, particularly her monumental, stern father, a local concrete magnate and strict teetotaller. Even Michael, Donna’s older brother who is on the force with the RCMP, might not be able to save our necks if we are caught.

  “Michael pulled me up yesterday.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I think he was trying to tell me not to take the shortcut through the railway yard.”