by Jean McNeil
“Why the polar regions? What is it about them?”
“I just loved the life, the outdoors life.” As he speaks the russet outdoorsman shine in his skin deepens. “I want to be outside, always — in the snow, on the sea, in the air. And we had such an important job to do, with the science, and maintaining Britain’s historic claim on the continent.”
I don’t agree with everything he says — certainly not its imperialistic tinge — but I am taken by Elliott’s wonder and conviction. How to communicate this, without sounding mawkish, besotted, especially to an audience whose emotions have been sanded at the edges by complacency?
This is a question I ask myself over and over here: Is it possible to convey these emotions in fiction, and what is the point, anyway? Sometimes life just has to be lived, not recorded, examined, re-framed in aesthetics and imaginary worlds. Is this why I feel thrilled and awake, as if I have been sleepwalking all my life, or at least for an interim — because I am surrounded by people for whom life as it is lived is simply enough?
You have made a career out of your sadness. We were in the hallway outside his cabin, waiting for Nils to come out and go to dinner together. Max came out with this rejoinder to something I had said. I recoiled. Then Nils appeared, and my chance to give a riposte vanished.
I ate at the same table as Max that night, but two or three people away. He lobbed questions at his interlocutors much the way he did with me. Perhaps our rapport was not what it seemed, rather just an ordinary engagement for him. The crucial factor was whether the other person responded; many did not. His inquisitiveness and open manner invited confidences, but I already knew these were misplaced. Why did I persist? Was I so desperate for someone to talk to?
As we were eating, David’s voice, smooth as molasses, came over the PA. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering the Gerlache Strait.”
The Gerlache Strait was named after Adrien de Gerlache, the Belgian explorer who mounted the Belgica expedition to the Antarctic between 1897 and 1899. Named for the ship which conveyed them, it was the first expedition to deliberately overwinter in the Antarctic; de Gerlache’s strategy was to allow the vessel to become iced in at the beginning of the austral winter, then to hopefully be freed in the spring melt some seven months later.
Aboard was a man who would make his mark on the history of polar exploration: Roald Amundsen, sailing as first mate, who would later be the first man to sail the Northwest Passage in the Arctic as well as the first man to reach the South Pole. It was also the first entirely scientific expedition to the continent.
The ship was iced in early March. On May 19, the sun set, and would not rise for another sixty-three days. From the beginning, the expedition was beset by discord, drunkenness, and ill-discipline. Although he managed to eject the troublemakers before the ship reached the Antarctic, de Gerlache found his men hounded by illness, mental and physical. One member of the expedition died of a heart attack and at least two others succumbed to severe depression. Amundsen kept a diary of the winter spent trapped in the ice, as did the ship’s doctor, a young American named Frederick Cook, who would also leave his impress on the history of polar exploration when he would claim, controversially, to be the first man to set foot on the North Pole in 1908.
Cook documented the winter and the men’s ordeal in an unsparing light, blaming the confines, the peculiarities of the ship’s captain, and the constant darkness for the men’s psychological disintegration. Cook’s account of the thirteen months spent aboard the ship read in sharp contrast to the narratives of collective endeavour and relative harmony that Scott and Shackleton would later pen: “The truth is, that we are at this moment as tired of each other’s company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and the unpalatable sameness of our food. Now and then we experience affectionate moody spells and then we try to inspire each other with a sort of superficial effervescence of good cheer, but such moods are short lived. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed.”
It is a remarkably honest account, especially as the word depressed did not enter ordinary lexicon until some fifty years after Cook’s diary. In the end, only one of the Belgica expedition’s members died, Lietuenant Danco, a seaman whose name graced the coast to our port side as we steamed south that evening. But there was another important casualty — Nansen the cat, a great source of amusement and comfort to the men. Around June, the time when the men began to withdraw into fits of distemper, the cat mimicked them. Previously friendly and affectionate, he hissed and spat whenever one of the men tried to feed him his daily ration of penguin. Then he simply died.
The darkness was of a different order, as was the cold, than anything he had ever experienced, Cook wrote. It was as if the human body knew it and shrank away. The men’s faces became green, then jaundiced. Their vital organs began to pack up. The body abandoned them, perceiving itself to be in an alien place.
That evening I parked myself behind the bar and played barmaid while Steve told me stories of living five metres below the surface in the old Base Z.
Steve was the real Antarctic item: a burly man in a checked shirt with a beard. “The base was covered with more and more snow every year,” he said. “Until we had to build a staircase down through the ice and snow to get there. Our breath frosted and in the mornings we’d wake covered in a film of ice.”
After Steve left, one of the ship’s deck officers came over to the bar. “So now you’ve seen a PermaFID. That’s what we call guys who come back to the Antarctic, year after year. Some of them do multiple winters, one after the other. They find they can’t leave the life.”
“Why?”
“They get completely institutionalized. The organization feeds you, clothes you, it insures you, transports you, it gives you a social life. A kind of family, even. There’s not many places you get all that now. Except maybe the Army.”
Later that evening, on his way to the UIC Lab, Max appeared in the doorway of my cabin.
“What’s that term, when the weather mirrors your feelings?”
“Pathetic fallacy.”
He was still trying to charm Emilia. He was annoyed with himself; this was not something he would normally do. He was acting compulsively, irrationally. He was no longer capable of making a choice where Emilia was concerned. He was becoming aware that much of what we do in life has nothing to do with choice at all, rather with interior switches which are thrown or not thrown, and the implacable intentions of fate.
I saw a former self in his abjection. Did I not chase people at his age, thinking I could apply my will to people the way I applied it to my Political Science Advanced Topics seminar? It didn’t help that we were alone there, in those rough seas, the thickening ice, thrown back on ourselves with only our characters for armour. Over the last few weeks, the tether that held us to our normal lives had stretched, then thinned, then finally snapped.
So much of what we think of as ourselves is actually borrowed from external circumstance — our sphere of professional power, the liens of family, status, money. In the Antarctic, scientists are secure in their power; in fact the continent serves as a giant outdoor laboratory for science. Along with the support personnel, scientists are imported into this world entirely so they can enact their expertise, divining for frozen subglacial lakes, calculating the shear of a moving glacier, mapping rogue ice shelves which dissolve into the sea each year.
But a writer is always without a sphere of power and the social legitimacy it brings because it is only consecrated in her books, in this book, which does not yet exist and may take several years to materialize. Or it may never appear. Even Suzanne had more of a three-dimensional presence in the Antarctic world; she moved around the ship making short films, studies which would inform her future giant sculptures of ships’ hulls and CTD canisters.
I had only the power of my persona on the ship, and it was not enough. I am an introve
rt, a thinker, a watcher — not enough of a personality, a character, to triumph without the other spokes that keep me centrifugal in my normal life. But somehow, despite his greater charisma, Max and I shared a category-less aloneness there, on a ship at the bottom of the world.
We were learning, all of us, that on a ship it is impossible to disperse emotion. There are no parks to walk in, no friends to drop in on, no shops or art galleries to distract you. I had lived without these everyday comforts before — I was raised without them — but lately I had come to take them for granted, I realized. Confinement of any kind is a test. We have to find our own ways of dealing with the tension, boredom, and irritation that come with it, especially when these are underwritten by a barely acknowledged note of fear.
As our ship climbed and plummeted the crests of waves, I thought, I can’t take these highs and lows, it’s too volatile for me. I felt myself to be the victim of a dark prank of an indeterminate nature but which made me feel my aloneness and the consequences of choices I had made far more on that ship than I did in London. I felt an appalled fascination. I carried this around the ship with me like a scientific specimen.
In the meantime, Christmas was coming and we planned on decorating, which, the ship’s officers informed us, was traditionally a job for the FIDS, and particularly the women. But among the FIDS a lassitude had crept in. I went up to the bar at four p.m. to make a cup of tea and found a group drinking and playing Trivial Pursuit. The same group was there after dinner, at eleven p.m., at one a.m., at five a.m., by then in a state of slumped disarray. No one was rowdy or aggressive, rather crumpled and impassive. Our futures lived on the continent, still several uncertain days away, and for the moment there was nothing to do but drink.
December 14th
Elliott and I stand in our parkas on a rocky outcrop, surrounded by over a hundred Adélie penguins. Penguins — or rather penguin guano — smells like fish and rotten hay, with a fringe of chalk thrown in to dampen its worst effects.
“It’s the ammonia.” Elliott sniffs. “But after a few days we won’t smell it anymore.”
The guano is a pale green, like the mucus of a thick cold. It is smeared across the rocks, making them more slippery than if they were covered with pulverized banana skins. One or two people have already tripped and bashed their knees on the smooth hard stone.
“It’s a relief to smell something for a change.” I don’t say, I can’t believe you’re going to stay here for four months. That wouldn’t be helpful, and besides Elliott looks like someone who knows what he is in for.
Elliott surveys the exposed and isolated point which will be his home for the next four months, along with his two companions, Mike, a mountaineer still on a high from his recent successful ascent of Everest, and Liz the avid birdwatcher from Norwich, who will assume the title of world’s most remote postmistress.
The hut sits at the foot of a towering glacier. Approaching base from the ship, we saw it first as a speck, a tiny beacon painted the colour of cooking chocolate, with blazing red window frames and a tattered Union Jack fluttering on a toothpick flagpole. As we got closer we could see a multitude of small black forms, slick and glistening, like leeches or polyps, lumped all around the hut. These were the penguins, who we spied on through binoculars and who wiggled their behinds and sprayed green goo in response to our arrival.
Lockroy is a lonely place, dwarfed by regal mountains, surrounded by white loaves of hummocked glaciers that spill from them into the sea. The hut itself is like a piece of Lego. My eye is still accustoming itself to the gigantisms of the Antarctic. “I can’t get a fix on the size of things here,” I tell Nils when we take a break from hefting boxes.
“It’s a problem of scale, fundamentally,” he says in his precise way. “Everything is too big, and too empty of anything human. It’s just the same as how humans can’t get a fix on the atom, visually — it’s not an issue of belief but of scale.”
During the Second World War, Lockroy was an important communications post, ferreting out the German submarines which slunk across the ice shelf edge. Now it is a live museum. Each austral summer thousands of cruise ship passengers are ferried into Lockroy to visit and buy memorabilia and stamps for postcards that will eventually make their way to their destinations, emblazoned with philatelic penguins and Edwardian heroes.
“They come just after their champagne lunches or bouts in the jacuzzi. The women wear heels! And what do they find?” Elliott shakes his head. “Three nutters in a hut in the middle of nowhere.”
We had only a few hours to unload four months’ worth of stamps and provisions. Postage stamps turned out to be twice the weight of tinned mushrooms. We struggled on the slippery rocks in our bulky cold weather gear.
Pitching in is the first rule of the Antarctic, unwritten but sternly conveyed in a myriad of ways; almost nothing else about one’s behaviour or demeanour matters. You “muck in,” and with energy, otherwise you will be termed “slack” and risk being shunned — one of the many ways in which collective endeavour is privileged over personal preference in Antarctic society. A month before I might have been working at my day job as an editor sitting at a desk in London fielding manuscripts, but suddenly I’m wearing rigger boots and being winched aboard a cargo tender among seamen, ready to offload four months’ worth of provisions to an Antarctic base.
Once ashore we started emptying the tender, wending through the obstacle course of penguins, who took no notice of us, preferring to loll, squawking, on their stomachs on the pathways up the rocks. They looked like ice curling stones. We must have looked equally bizarre to them as we performed a waddling choreography of weaving and ducking, slipping on the guano, sliding dangerously close, and no one wanted to squish a penguin underfoot.
“We’re ready for our summer. Over,” I heard Elliott say on the radio to Base R. Elliott would report to the Base R communications manager every day, once in the morning and once in the evening, on the “radio scheds.” He grinned — that ecstatic, matchstick smile I would see so many times in the Antarctic, which burned so bright for a moment, before fizzing into a black, dazed awe.
Just as we were readying to head back to the ship the weather closed in. It started to snow, stinging flakes that seared our faces. A wind came barrelling down from the glacier and the sky darkened.
This was the first time I experienced a katabatic wind. The term is derived from the Greek word for descent. Katabatic winds are the only winds on the earth driven by gravity and not by the rotation of the earth. Born high on the ice sheet and pulled down toward sea level by gravity, as they accelerate down the ice cap and glaciers they gain velocity. One moment it’s windless and the next you’re knocked off your feet. These winds regularly flip Antarctic aircraft over like toys.
Captain David came on the radio. On the ship they’d had to take the tender out of the water and put it back on deck. It was rough for it to get through to us. “We might send the RIBs in,” the first officer said on the radio, referring to the Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats BAS used for quick transfers. “That’s what they say but it’s too rough for RIBs,” Elliott informed us.
We all huddled in the kitchen. We knew the ship’s officers were thinking about their schedule — we were expected the following day at Vernadksy, the Ukrainian scientific research station down the road, so to speak. We were already behind schedule and Captain David was thinking, no doubt, about the inconvenience of having twenty people stranded at Lockroy, waiting for a change in the weather which may or may not come any time soon.
We went to the window. We couldn’t see the ship. We peered through its snow-encrusted panes, watching as the slabs of glacier were eaten by mist.
“Well, I guess I’d better start cooking dinner for twenty-five,” Elliott said.
Elliott began to tell us a story. Two years before, a French yachtsman had pitched up in Lockroy. He had sailed his yacht across the most treache
rous seas in the world. He ignored Elliott’s warnings and went for a walk only a hundred metres from the hut. A moment’s inattention meant he failed to see the tell-tale mint blue seam in the snow. He fell into a crevasse.
“He actually died from head trauma,” Elliott informed us. “We winched him out within minutes. But he wasn’t wearing a helmet and he banged his head. Spring ice is hard.”
The VHF radio crackled to life. We heard the first officer say, “We’re sending in the RIBs.”
We said goodbye to the hut nutters and the penguins. I took one last look at the hut and the glaciers that surround it. They looked benign, like a pristine slope at a ski resort, with their fresh icing of snow. We were in a different realm now, I realized. The dangers of the sea would soon be swapped for those of land. Elliott’s story was a warning. Life was tenuous in the Antarctic, he was telling us, this joking, boisterous horde of polar ingénues. A second’s unawareness could kill us.
That night the three Lockroy staff would cook dinner on a couple of Primus stoves, huddled in the kitchen with their Tilley lamps as the only source of heat. They would bed down fully clothed on hard bunks with cold duvets. On the ship, meanwhile, we would have dinner in our finery, we would drink scotch in the bar as the ship’s doctor, Dan, administered his weekly pub quiz — being the quizmaster is part of the Antarctic doctor’s job description, a stipulation inherited from the days of Shackleton and Scott and their multitalented expedition doctors.
In the RIBs we gripped the hard sides of the inflatable as we zipped through the waves. We wore no immersion suits and the third mate was careful not to hit a wave straight on. I was wet, although not soaked. I didn’t feel the cold.
Ahead of us the ship rose and expanded; as we curved underneath its bow its red hull and its superstructure soared overhead, the height of a six-storey building. My heart surged — that was how it felt, a wave, a rush, from inside the muscle itself, a heady brew of thrill and gratitude. I thought of Shackleton’s men, how they must have felt the same passionate admiration for the Endurance, which had conveyed them so faithfully to the bottom of the world, then to watch it be crushed. It would be like having your own heart smashed in a vice of ice.