by Jean McNeil
Donna takes another swig. “Well, maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I don’t want to live in fear.”
“Nobody does. It’s just a practicality. Given the situation.”
“Is Michael looking for him?”
“Everybody’s looking for him. Michael won’t let me walk home. That’s why I get picked up from school in a patrol car every day. Needless to say my popularity has taken a nosedive.” Donna hits herself on the head, very lightly, with the bottle.
“You’ll always be popular, don’t worry.”
I have only three or four friends, a legacy perhaps of having moved to this city in junior high, too late to establish myself in the local hierarchies. My other friends — Christine, Summer, Morgana — are children of hippies. They live in homes with log-cabin interiors and kitchens stocked with lentils. Donna is my lone normal friend, from a long-established local family. Her religious parents and six siblings keep Donna under constant surveillance. A particular thorn in Donna’s side is the watchful, restless eye of her older brother Michael. He used to be an ally until he joined the RCMP. “He’s on his high horse now,” she says. If he discovers anything of her real life, she will be carted off to Pentecostal camp in Ontario for the whole summer.
The climate is completely different again from the island where I was born, ten hours away by road on the Trans-Canada Highway. This town is a place of rigid winters and cloying, humid summers.
The edges of the air are cold. We shiver in our down jackets as we walk the narrow paths lined on either side by thick spruce. This province is so densely matted with trees that some of its landmass is still not properly charted. From a plane you see its black tangle threaded by the sand-coloured arteries of woodlot roads. The town where we live is large in terms of its population, but it feels like a small town, with its wide eventless streets and highway strip malls, its hockey rink flanked by a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Dairy Queen. I moved to it to live with my mother, who I only met some six or seven years ago, in order to finish high school. Before that I lived with my grandmother in a provincial capital city where I took art and tap dancing lessons and had classmates from Colombia and Germany.
“I can’t wait to get out of here,” Donna breathes, casting her gaze upward, past the branches which razor the sky. “The next two months are going to feel like forever. You know, I don’t even know what these trees are called.”
Sumac. Larch. I am learning to identify the local trees in geography: Siberian and European elm, hawthorn, laurel, jack pine, trembling aspen, tamarack — trees that bequeath their names to the streets in this town, along with its scant human history, the two or three names repeated over and over again, the upright, English names of the early settler barons of the province who had immediately set about flensing it of its trees, minerals, fish, and animals.
“We shouldn’t stay here too long.” Donna shivers. “Dad says that when it’s this cold so late into spring you can expect a hot summer. But he used a word I didn’t know,” she frowns. “It started with a T. Like torrent.”
“Torrid,” I say. “A torrid summer.”
4.
A VORTEX
frost flowers
Growth of ice crystals by condensation from the atmosphere at points on the surface of young ice.
December 4th
We set sail into the Southern Ocean — the officers still say this, “set sail,” although it is the ship’s four engines and a type of diesel called marine gas oil which propel us through the water.
The ship reverses out of the jetty and twirls on its rear stabilizers. We glide out of the placid waters of Stanley Sound, a narrow gut of water separated from the open ocean by only a kilometre of land. The calm is deceptive; on the other side of the headland lies a different sea. “We’re heading out straight into Force 8,” Captain David warns us. “You’ll all have to find your sea legs fast.”
As the ship begins to grapple with the swell, we play Scrabble in the bar. I watch my opponent Nils quickly turn lime green. He abandons the Scrabble board and makes a hasty exit. The worse the motion, the better I feel. The sudden unsteadiness of the ground beneath our feet invigorates me. I do a turn as barmaid, planting my legs against the sink so as not to be flung face-first into the bar’s ice-cube-making machine.
Next on the agenda are safety drills. We sit in the bar, accompanied by life jackets and smothering glassine shields called smoke hoods which turn the world amber. Mike the purser instructs us in doom scenarios in his Glaswegian buzz, so thick I pick up only every third word: “Brrrr … iceberg! … Grrrrr … fire drill! … Muster point … brrgggrrr … all of yez!”
As it turns out, fire is as much of a danger as being overwhelmed by a freak wave, or engine failure. Fires on board can rapidly become uncontainable. Once started they quickly rage out of control in the confines of an oxygen-rich, flammable environment. We practice fire-fighting, donning smoke hoods, our sucking breaths loud in our ears. On deck we learn how to manhandle the thick snakes of water hoses.
Safety training over, we sink into our ship’s cosseting routine: two seatings for dinner (we are too many to fit in the saloon all at once), one at six, one at six thirty, lunch is at twelve and twelve thirty, and breakfast at seven and seven thirty a.m. Our names are assigned to slots: we cannot wander in when we like. We have fabric napkins with silver napkin holders, and on these our surnames are pasted. Gash — cleaning duty — is also assigned.
At night in my cabin, I rock in my sleep. I dream of tsunami-like waves that capsize the ship, although everyone seems to survive, and the event takes place in tropical rather than Antarctic waters. Ejected from the ship, we try to hang onto the hull but our fingers slip on gooey seaweed. I wake after these dreams and register a heightened version of the emotions I feel as I move around the ship by day, or plant myself in front of the giant windows of the bridge — isolation, insecurity, awe, gratitude.
There’s another element to being on board a ship which is hard to define: a claustrophobia twinned with excitement. No new input will come into our world for the next two weeks. We are a sealed society. Over the long term, this can settle into the boredom and inevitability that breeds discord. But in these early days, our confinement generates an emotional mystery, a sense of drama. Because there is no escape from each other, a reckoning might take place.
Max hovered on the threshold to my cabin. I was busy tacking up postcards of Frank Hurley’s photographs of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition. Men with euphoric faces beamed at me while drinking tea out of billycans and ruffling the fur of one of their sledge dogs.
“What will you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“All day, while we’re doing science?”
Everyone on the ship had an assigned role: the officers on their clockwork watches, four hours on, four off; the scientists doing twenty-four-hour oceanography; the cooks and the stewards making Yorkshire pudding in the kitchen.
“I’ll write.”
Max leaned his shoulder against the lintel. “Write what? Nothing’s happening yet.”
“I’ll write about things not happening, then.”
He scowled. He knew I was humouring him and was unhappy about it.
I relented. “I’ll write poetry. I’m going to write a piece called ‘Night Messages.’ I got the idea from the captain’s night orders book on the bridge.”
Night orders is what the captain writes before going to bed, if he is not on watch. They are nautical instructions, about courses made true, knots, hazards to look out for. They all end with the same phrase: Call me if required, or if in any doubt whatsoever.
We had been at sea for twenty-four hours. I felt like sleeping all the time. Apparently this was a well-known effect of the beginning of any journey by ship; in heavy seas especially, the inner ear has to work hard to maintain balance in a suddenly moving and tilt
ing world, and this tires the brain. I was also getting used to the constant electric shocks — electrical charges build up in the enclosed environment — and to staggering along the corridors, bouncing from one wall to the other, or keeping a leery eye on the lip of the soup bowl at lunch lest it slosh over, and a thousand other tiny adjustments to life on a roller coaster.
There was an immediate ease to ship life too. I sensed how the purposefulness of being at sea was its own justification. Our entire reason for being was to move across space. We were on our own, ploughing through the worst seas in the world, on an important mission. For the first time in my life, just to be in motion felt thrilling. But at the same time there was a hesitant, uncertain timbre to life on the ship, like a faint music. We were on an ice-strengthened ship in the Drake Passage, widely acknowledged as the most challenging seas on the planet, and every hour at sea felt like a fresh peeling away from the world. Events and families as much as the background trivia of life — newspapers, train journeys, TV, shopping, espresso — began to take on an outlandish glint.
The Antarctic world was unordinary — this had been clear from the beginning, at Conference. Now, a power hierarchy and social structure made itself plain to us during those first days on the ship. Our first inkling was on the afternoon we were due to leave the Falklands, when a strange thing happened.
The captain was conducting a briefing in the bar to inform us passengers what to expect on the passage to Base R. He stood in front of us in the saloon, tall and slightly glacial in that way of so many Englishmen. He wore a white shirt with four gold bars on his epaulettes and brogues shined to liquid tar. His hair was thinning, but he was vigorous. He looked about fifty-five. We discovered, during the voyage, that he was ten years older. The source of his command seemed integrated into every fibre of his being. In the narrow corridors of the ship, you could feel him coming before he rounded the corner: his authority sent out an advance force field. The very air stood up straighter in deference. There was a note of ownership in all his gestures. This was his ship.
So we were all surprised to discover we were invited to call the captain by his first name. “Normally, if we steamed straight, it would take us four to five days,” Captain David told us. But oceanographic studies on the Drake Passage water column on the journey down meant that the ship had to be stopped for periods of time. While it was not normally advisable for a ship to be still in rough seas, the James Clark Ross could remain balanced thanks to a system called dynamic positioning. After the oceanographic studies had been completed, we would bring cargo and equipment to two bases on the way down. “We’re looking at a week and a half, maybe more,” the captain said.
A carpenter who was part of our group flight from the UK got up during the captain’s address, walked to the bar, and extracted a beer from the fridge. My eyes followed him. This carpenter had started drinking on the plane from London to Madrid and carried on through our stopover in Santiago, and all the way to the Falklands.
Later that day, we were informed by the purser that the carpenter was already on his way back to the UK. He had been called into the captain’s office and summarily dismissed from the ship for drinking during the briefing.
“Does that happen often,” I asked Mike the purser, “that someone is sent back?”
“Quite rarely. The bosses at BAS get it right with who they send down here, most of the time. But it’s better and cheaper to do it now. Think about it,” he said. “If the shit hits the fan — if something goes wrong with the ship, say — do you want to have to shoehorn a drunk guy out of his bunk and into a life raft? And once he gets to base there’s a £10,000 ticket to fly him home.”
We all had prices on our heads here, I was reminded. It had cost a certain sum of public money to put me into the Antarctic. During our launching into the seas in the lifeboat drill the day before, the plunging drop into the ocean as the winch let us go and we crashed onto the waves, I felt a scrawl of anxiety in my stomach. I had a job to do here. I hoped I was up to it.
In those first days of our passage south, the weather was calm, even balmy. I took to spending hours outside on deck in the last supra-zero temperatures I would feel for several months.
I hadn’t bargained on the bird life of the Southern Ocean. We had a voluble, careening escort of storm petrels; cape petrels; sooty, black-browed, and grey-headed albatross; and small cessnas which turned out to be the wandering albatross. All capable, fierce-looking birds, they rode the troughs of the waves in an oracular manner. They knew what the sea would do before it did. The sea spasmed, then flatlined, washed itself in the wind, tossing spray, then funnelled, slapped back by the ship, and still the birds flew with their stomachs only a millimetre from its surface. I watched this pas de deux with the waves, fascinated by their precision. They didn’t even get their wing tips wet.
The grey-headed albatross was the most elegant, I thought, with its ermine head and nape and intelligent, roving eye. I watched the wanderers from the outside deck, where they skimmed the waves in the wake of the ship. You can identify Coleridge’s albatross immediately by their size — they have a total wingspan of over two metres — and by their phosphorus-white colour. Wanderers also have a large, flesh-coloured bill which gives them something of the thuggish look of the skua. They fly as if motionless, their wings held static like aircraft. I watched a single bird for an hour, thinking, Now he must flap his wings, now, now, now. But he never did.
Life was slowing down. My bird observation installed an unfamiliar quietude. It had been a long time since I had looked at the detail of the land or the sea. For thirty years I had been living a headlong life, soaked in stimulus. I would have to re-train myself to notice detail again, to notice the innocuous. One of the deprivations of so-called modern consciousness is a latent expectation that observable reality should deliver us a personal satisfaction: that every incandescent sunset or every mild morning is blamelessly complicit with our desires. It is an egoistic fantasy, of course, but it is remarkable how difficult it is to not expect the next jolt of satisfaction around every corner. In environments barren of stimulus one can encounter an interior horizon you didn’t know existed, a kind of calm, interior core of consciousness, but this experience is hard to engineer in cities.
It was useful that we were going there on a ship, I thought, instead of in one of the BAS planes which flew people into the Antarctic from the Falklands in four hours. On a ship you approach the Antarctic gradually, crossing a series of thresholds. The world outside your cabin porthole becomes more and more unfamiliar, and you enter into the alternate reality of the continent, a transition signalled by a new language — ablation, sublimation, drift, terrane — never mind the Stygian mists and chrome skies. The words of the French glaciologist Mathieu returned to me: “The Antarctic looks like nowhere else. At no other point on the planet can you see those colours, or that relationship between land and sky.”
But for the moment we were still in the known world. The sea looked lumpen and agitated but not lethal. It was cold, but no colder than England in the winter. In the bar those first nights at sea we played Trivial Pursuit — raucous, winnerless games. We played blackjack and snap, we laughed. We did pub quizzes, listened to each other’s CDs. We drank and talked in aimless wide ellipses — purposeless, floating discussions of the kind I hadn’t had since my undergraduate degree.
At night I retired to my cabin, but I was not alone. I had a chaperone. For the whole trip, he, or versions of him, would accompany me. One day a black-browed albatross, the next the giant of the southern skies, the gaunt white wanderer. He flew level with my porthole, day and night. From time to time, he turned and looked into my cabin porthole and I locked eyes with him. His gaze was steely, disapproving — an envoy sent to gather intelligence but not friends.
December 7th
Max wanders the ship at night long after I have gone to bed, in a self-appointed mission to map those spaces list
ed on the internal telephone card in each cabin and which we wonder about: the Rough Workshop, the Cool Specimen Room, the Transducer Space.
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” I say. After all he’s on duty for the oceanographic studies for twelve hours every day.
“I think sleeping is a waste of time.”
Max’s statement bears his trademark certainty. He has never thought about this, he just decided it. What do I do, in contrast? Ruminate and examine. Procrastinate. Plump for fairness. I have become one of those diplomats of existence, trying hard not to upset obvious truths, treating them like ageing monarchs with an urge to sharpen swords. Meanwhile the tyrants, neglected, accumulate.
Sleeping is a waste of time. Why do we do it? Everything Max does or says — picking up his dinner knife, pouring himself a beer — carries a low shrill sound, like an unfamiliar bird’s call. It says, I am alive. Too alive to submit to that nightly coma we call sleep.
On the ship we all saw each other constantly; we met by chance or design twenty times a day. We were coming into focus for each other at an accelerated speed — faster certainly than in London, where it can take three weeks to secure an appointment with your most treasured friend. Our confinement made it difficult to distinguish between accidental and sought interactions. There was a physical code on the ship for signalling you were available to talk: a closed cabin door meant I’m busy or sleeping. A cabin door with a curtain drawn over meant I’m available but working. An open cabin door was an invitation to come straight in.
Max poked his head around my cabin curtain. “How’s it going? Finished that novel yet?”
My scowl, he knew by now, was an invitation to talk. He was on a break from reviewing his supervisor’s ice stream data in the lab. We see-sawed with the ship’s motion as he told me about his life. School was still close enough to his experience to want to talk about it. He went to “prep school.” The term was foreign; it belonged to a private school system, I guessed. I had the sense not to ask what it meant.