Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  All day and all night the CTD went down, slowly, and came up equally slowly. Max’s task was to extract the canisters once the CTD came back on deck and measure the salinity. I tried to follow their conversations, Max, Emilia, Nils, but they spoke a different language, one of ghosts and stars, of shifting mysteries: fluid equations, finite difference method or spectral method, flux correction and linearization, transient climate simulations, zonal differences, polar night jets.

  The distinction between night and day was being erased. We sat in the UIC Lab at night, one, two, three in the morning. Darkness failed to make an appearance; now night was only a murky ermine light.

  I wondered, Is there a night boundary, an invisible meridian, a real place which is the threshold of night and where we run past its edge and into perpetual day? I thought of the nightmaps on planes, the ones that show darkness moving across the world in a parabola. The edge of night lapping against a continent, then creeping inexorably across it. A frontier between two countries. One might not speak the other’s language, or allow re-entry once the border is crossed.

  “Come on, we’re goin’ for a drive.”

  “Where?”

  There is no where, no destination. He drove to put some distance between him and turmoil, to attempt a pre-foiled escape from the giant continent that bound us. They all did. I would do it too, one day.

  We’d seen the signs earlier that night. We could tell if we might live or die by the angle he parked the car, by the message written in rubber burn marks on the highway.

  There isn’t a lot of room to hide in the trailer to which we’ve moved since being evicted from the clapboard house by his mother, who’d seen a better opportunity and sold it to a couple of artists from Boston.

  I am under the bed, my grandmother barricaded in the living room. He breaks down the door. I hear the sounds of furniture crashing, her screams. He tugs me out from under the bed with one arm. I slide out on a carpet of felt-like dust.

  Through the door to the living room I glimpse my grandmother. She sits in a heap on the floor, blood tricking from her mouth. Her glasses lie on the carpet, shattered. Her leg is folded underneath her body at a peculiar angle.

  She’s dead, I think. She’s dead and now there is just him and me. He will wait until I am bigger and then I will be that heap on the floor.

  It is always the same with these journeys. Still in my nightdress, he shoves me into the passenger seat of the car. No seatbelt. I am never scared. Stars, tops of trees, stars, tops of trees — these pass in a blur until they are the same substance, hewn from jewels and shadows.

  He drives the darkened highway, swerving from one side to the other — not because he is so drunk. He is an excellent drunk driver. No, he’s bored. On one swerve he hits the gravel, overcorrects, and we are spinning into the ditch. It’s like the tilt-a-whirl I ride at the North Sydney exhibition every fall.

  I am catapulted into the windshield, then thrown back onto the seat. I keep my body limp, like the rag doll I have left underneath my bed where I had been hiding.

  Beside me, he is still. I begin to panic. How will I get him out? How will I get home? It is the middle of the night and I am not sure where we are. I am not yet big enough to see through the windshield without standing.

  After five minutes he comes to.

  “What the?” His hand goes up to his jaw. “Ha ha,” he chuckles. “Not bad, eh?”

  “How are we going to get home?”

  “Don’t you worry about that.” He is still rubbing his jaw. “Don’t you worry.”

  He says someone will come by, but no one passes. Hours later we are still sitting there and I am very cold. He takes me in his arms and squeezes.

  He carries me home that night, walking for two hours along a dark highway. When we return, my grandmother is sitting in the chair. She has put her glasses on, even though the left lens is shattered. She looks at us from behind this spiderweb. I can’t see the expression in her eyes.

  We survive these episodes, which sprout to life from time to time like mushrooms in a neglected corner of a field. He brings home a paltry pay from the Naval yard, then the coal mine. When that is shut down he accepts a veteran’s pension. He keeps busy — fishing, smoking the fish, setting traps, hunting, skinning, dismembering, freezing. Drinking.

  Everyone drinks. No one drinks quite like him, though. The others are anaesthetized drunks, drooling and snoozing at the kitchen table in the morning, their feet so cold they have to be revived with tepid water, like frostbite victims.

  Drink releases a demon inside him. It is not the friendly, commuting-spirit sort of demon, not a spiritual accompanier, nor even the dark side. It is a red-winged dragon.

  Picture a young girl holding a rifle. It is aimed at a demon who sits at the table, his face a cloud of destruction, his fists bleeding from where he has punched a hole in the wall. The demon won, and the wall gave way.

  The girl casts a wary glance at the scene. Behind the wood panelling are red wires, probably telephone wires. They dangle like shredded nerves. She will need the telephone, later.

  The red dragon slobbers. The dragon has a limp left ear, a flap of skin on which she can see the veins and capillaries rushing blood to its extremities. She can see the chaos foaming in its lungs. The dragon is only good for absorbing and producing this entity, an amalgam of fury and escape. When it hits you it is like a gust of wind, but from above, as if fallen from the sky. She feels some sympathy — she will have a dragon too one day. The raw anger it will drink will smell like beetroot juice.

  Violence is a cloud, she thinks. It darkens the horizon, it comes and goes on self-propelled logic. She can no more fight it than she can fight the weather.

  So, a strange tableau, but not uncommon in that country at that time: a girl in her nightdress, a badly upholstered sofa and rocker set and avocado bath fixtures (it is the 1970s, after all), a .303 in her hands. Despite being roughly the same length as the rifle she is perfectly capable of shouldering it and pulling the trigger.

  His head lays on the Formica table, his body in one of the stuffed chairs with their akimbo metal legs. The telephone is from the 1930s, a party line, still. The girl picks up the phone and dials her grandmother, who is waitressing at the Puffin Inn. Despite the shredded wires, the telephone works.

  She talks with the muzzle of the rifle pointed toward the floor as she has been trained to do, unless you are ready to shoot. Her words echo in the avid ears of listeners-in. “You can come home now.”

  7.

  UNCHARTED WATERS

  ram

  An underwater ice projection from an ice wall, ice front, iceberg, or floe. Its formation is usually due to a more intensive melting and erosion of the unsubmerged part.

  December 12th

  We sail into a shifting matrix of sea ice; the ice is carved into trapezoids and hexagons. It looks still, but as we approach we see it is in motion, a gelid progression that requires the ship to haul back from time to time and nudge its way through this moving geometry.

  There are more and more bergs now. When they meet they groan. It’s a sort of ice language, I suppose. They sound like disaffected whales. The air stings. A new note within it, not cold, or not exactly, more like desiccated air.

  No night now, only a sullen twilight. Something is alive but hidden inside it, a lazy grey-opal animal. Grey, blue, chalk, silver. Why haven’t I seen this colour before? Something in me responds to this dimming, a peculiar urgency. Desire to live, at any cost.

  As we passed further into this sombre twilight we all took to spending more time out on deck, swaddled against the cold, staring with a cowed fascination at the new landscape we were entering. Nils and I shared a position on the starboard deck, a low angle from which we could observe the striations in icebergs as we passed. We saw veins of dark grit followed by planes of turquoise transpa
rent ice so pristine and captivating we forgot to take pictures.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Nils said, more than once. In his voice I heard that note I would hear so often in Antarctica, of hollow rapture. There was dread too, at encountering such a beautiful place but one so unmoved by our gaze. In the coming months on base, Tom would tell me, “The Antarctic is the perfect unrequited lover. It takes everything you have to give and offers nothing in return except itself, but somehow that’s enough.”

  The association of coldness with deadness has as long a history as its antithesis, the idea that heat is vital and sunny. The psychological character of coolness versus heat is similarly well established, a metaphorical antithesis worked out very often in fiction; witness the coldness of Karenin and the duel of frost and fervour in Vronsky in Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina, or Dickens’ Miss Havisham, turned into a living ice sculpture by her refusal to accept the passage of time. If heat and cold have been converted into established psychological tropes, the directly spiritual dimensions of ice have largely vanished from the cultural map of the twentieth century.

  Ernst Haeckel was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, and artist. In 1895 he posited the concept of “soul-snow” — a sort of crystallized soul. He believed the soul to be bodily substance, a form of gas that could be liquefied under high pressure. If it could be turned to liquid then it could be frozen, and become evanescent, like the scattered ashes of the cremated, to flow in the wind. This was called religious thermodynamics, a short-lived philosophical vogue that sought to interpret the godhead within the laws of temperature: a cosmology of heat and cold.

  I decided to find Max — he was German-speaking after all, he might have heard of Haeckel — to see what he thought of this bizarre soul-snow theory. I passed by his cabin on my way back from the upper observation deck. His door was open but his curtain was drawn. I found him sitting at his desk with his forehead cupped in the palm of his hand. His hair streamed through his fingers. He stared blankly at the desk.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing.” He was not very convincing. He seemed to realize this. “I’ve just found out something that …” He paused. “About someone …” For the first time since I came into the cabin, he looked at me directly. His eyes were clouded with uncertainty. “I might as well just tell you.”

  He had been hoping to have a relationship with Emilia, the Italian student, but she had told him the night before she was to get back together with her ex-boyfriend.

  “I have no idea what she is thinking. We have no real rapport. She’s so —” He frowned. “Cagey.”

  It was there at once, the illogic of love. He knew there was no real connection between them, and still it didn’t change the way he felt.

  He retreated to the far side of his bunk, pulled his long legs underneath him, rested his chin on his knees. “I’m used to getting what I want. Whenever I’ve wanted someone, they’ve always been available to me.”

  “Well it won’t always be like that.”

  He gave me a look. He had heard the tart ring in my voice.

  “I wasn’t looking for it,” he said. His expression was familiar — the peculiar guilt which arises from wanting a miracle. “Love.”

  I sensed a trap. Not a conventional one, rather the kind of snare sprung by fate, to test your commitment to life. Anything I said now would be a cliché, which I dutifully delivered. “That’s usually when it comes.”

  I made to leave him to his misery.

  “Wait. Don’t go.” His green eyes had darkened to charcoal, flecked with small bits of pain that glimmered. “Can I show you some pictures?”

  He levered open his laptop and clicked through to a series of images. A dog like a lean question mark with a narrow, melancholy face appeared. “He’s a borzoi,” Max said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Bismark. But we call him Biz.”

  Then a swimming pool, a cool tourmaline rectangle in the midst of a lawn so perfect it looks stencilled in. A house with two turrets. Beyond one of them, the cold lip of a mountain.

  “Is this your house?”

  He nodded. “It’s just outside Zurich. It’s strange. I love being here — in the middle of nowhere — but I’ve never missed home so much.”

  A tall blonde woman appeared. Her eyes were the same colour as the swimming pool. A gold watch reposed on her wrist. She had Max’s mouth, or he hers, but their faces were not the same — she lacked his severity and drama. Beside her was a photocopy of herself, the same blue eyes, the same flaxen hair.

  “My mother and sister,” he said.

  “I guessed. Where is your father?”

  “Away. He spends a lot of time in Stuttgart these days. That’s where the venture in the capital is, apparently.”

  “Stuttgart? I thought all the finance was in Zurich.”

  He shrugged. “The truth is I find making money so boring.”

  There was a bite to his words — so boring — usually easily uttered, with a lime-coloured sigh. No, he was angry at money, for having taken his father away.

  I glanced out the porthole. The sea had turned suet. Globules of ice accumulated on the ship’s railings. The sombre cloud Max emitted had an unfamiliar density.

  I realized I had been wrong about him: he felt too deeply, rather than not enough. He was not reducing experience to rubble as much as waiting for it to live up to an unuttered promise he felt it was reneging on, to enliven him. He hadn’t experienced enough deprivation to calibrate his emotions properly — he had grown thick on the fat of prosperity. But his essential nature was lean, acute, like an isosceles triangle. His spectacular upbringing had put him to sleep. He was waiting for something to jolt him into life.

  “Thank you,” he said, “for the talk.” Something had snapped shut in his voice. He was not really thanking me. He wanted to be the person to dismiss me, rather than me abandon him to his sorrow.

  “You’re welcome.” The note of formality in my voice was new, or I hadn’t used it since we first met. It rang, tinny, in the air between us.

  I went out onto the aft deck, which was low, close to the water. I wore no coat. It was cold, but not unbearably so. I hung my arms over the gunwale and felt the spray vaulted up by the waves. We were moving through moderate seas for the Antarctic, light swells, waves no more than a metre high. The ship juddered as we sank into a trough. The water was black and slick; it shone like dark stone.

  I imagined myself in the water, the ship pulling away, kneading the waves until it was a white beacon against the horizon. It would be a long time, perhaps the next day, before anyone noticed I was missing. I had already skipped meals in an effort not to balloon in weight (a real risk on a ship where you could eat a full English breakfast every morning and a steak each night) and no one had come to check I hadn’t tumbled into the southern Atlantic.

  This is how you die in cold water: first the cold shock, a heart spasm provoked by the initial jolt of immersion into zero or sub-zero waters. The spasm makes the lungs gulp. Without the buoy of a lifejacket and the protection of a mouth guard I would have inhaled water and filled my lungs within a minute. Cold shock causes the heart rate to accelerate so rapidly that you breathe desperately, trying to get enough oxygen to feed your sprinting heart. This is when most people drown, long before hypothermia sets in.

  The water was so black. It looked almost solid, like licorice.

  “Hey!”

  I turned to see someone walking toward me: orange boiler suit, rigger jacket, woolly hat. I scrutinized his face. I hadn’t met this seaman before. Where had he been keeping himself? There was a wary deliberateness in his expression.

  “You’re not supposed to be out here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.” This was a lie. I knew full well I shouldn’t be on deck without rigger boo
ts, a hard hat, and a jacket.

  “You’d better go inside.” He accompanied me to one of the outside portal doors, as if he were certain I had other intentions.

  Back in my cabin, I stood in front of the mirror. I saw a small woman, not entirely familiar to me. She was thirty-seven years old. She was shocked by how easy death would be in the Antarctic, how available.

  That night I took photographs of this woman in the cabin mirror. I still have them on my digital camera. For some reason I turned on the black and white function. I moved while taking them, or the ship was rocking, so the photos show indistinct outlines: black, white, a mirror, then grey. A blurred figure, a ghost.

  December 13th

  Today I begin a series interviews with people on the ship. First Captain David, then Elliott, an Antarctic old-timer and the base commander at Port Lockroy, where we will arrive in two days and where he will leave the ship. I ask Elliott about the old days when there were dogs, not skidoos, and no women.

  “I don’t approve of it, really, women here.” Elliott gives me an expectant look. When I refuse to be scandalized, I can tell he is put out. “Because it upsets the balance, the equilibrium we had. Men start competing for women, and then it’s not so easy to be a community. In my winters we were as one —” he raises his hand, his fingers intertwined. “We were unbreakable.”

  “From what I’ve heard the mixed communities manage a similar spirit,” I say. “I’ve had several people tell me they think women in the Antarctic are a good thing, that they bring a civilizing influence, that the communities are more emotionally stable.”

  “We had it good in the gold days: dogs and us. That’s all we had to rely upon. There was a peace in this, a kind of glory.” He gives me a valedictory look which says you had to be there.

  In the end Elliott doesn’t play the role of bigoted scandalizer well. Gallant and well-spoken, he is a mine of information about the Antarctic, and the Arctic too — as it turns out he is a champion dog-musher and lived in Alaska for years.