Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  8.

  ICEBOUND

  névé

  Loose granular ice in transition from snow to glacier ice.

  December 16th

  Sixty-nine degrees south. The world has closed around us. We have come to a stop amid ice floes.

  The only fixed visual points are icebergs paralyzed in pack ice. In the far distance are white pulsating smudges — the officers identify these as the mountains of Adelaide Island. Between the floes are thin blue veins. We watch as seals squeeze out of these and flop onto the floe, from where their wet, placid eyes study our behemoth of a machine suddenly stalled in their world, then disappear back through the fissure into a black sea.

  The light is scrawny yet intense. Even under cloud it is impossible to look at the ice field with the naked eye. This light has nothing in common with the consoling skies of the temperate latitudes. Now it is tungsten, a slow-burning, blue-white phosphorous. It is broadcast from somewhere inside the brooding stillness of the ice field.

  The sun comes out from time to time. To say it stings is not quite enough. It feels like it is burning through us, a cauterizing. Now we are under the force of the spring Antarctic sun. I remember that in spring the ozone level in the Antarctic atmosphere drops by sixty percent, mostly due to the return of polar stratospheric clouds, which cause chemical reactions that diffuse ozone. On the bridge, two drawers beneath the gyro console are stuffed with bottles of SPF 50 sunscreen, which we must wear if we are going outside, even if only for five minutes.

  Stuart the deck engineer came on the bridge. He wore a hard hat, engine-room earmuffs, and a soiled white boiler suit with a hi-visibility jacket on top. Spectacles perched on his nose.

  As well as being a deck engineer, Stuart revealed he was a trained atmospheric chemist. “I left science because I loved the ocean too much.” A furtive guilt passed across his face. “I love living in perpetual motion. I followed my passions.”

  We retreated to the tea station at the back of the bridge. “Just a little tip,” Stuart offered, as I laid out the cups. “The Old Man says he doesn’t take sugar but put about a quarter of a teaspoon in.”

  “What do you think?” I asked, throwing my glance out the bridge windows.

  “It looks fast.”

  With ice, fast is not about velocity, but strength — how formed it is.

  “Have you seen this before?”

  “A few times. Last year.” Stuart’s earmuffs and his hard hat made him look like a Lego figure: blocks of red and black, piled on top of his beaming putto face.

  “Do you think we’ll get through?”

  “Hard to say. It always surprises us. We come South every season expecting there to be no ice left at all down here. But the truth is you can never tell what the ice will do. Sometimes it increases mass.”

  “But I thought the west Antarctic shelf was disintegrating.”

  “It is, but that puts more ice in the sea, quite likely. Climate change isn’t about how much ice there is in the world, or how cold it gets. It’s about climatic systems and climatology, and very few people on the planet understand these, let alone care about them. Possibly even presidents and prime ministers don’t. We’re rather relying on you to do that.”

  “I’m not sure I can single-handedly save the situation.”

  “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the official reason.”

  “Is there a secret reason too?”

  “Writing a book is always a secret mission,” I said. “Kept secret even from yourself. Because you don’t know what you are going to write, or even why, sometimes.”

  On Stuart’s face was a faint note of suspicion, one I would come to see often on people’s faces in the Antarctic. Those who do season after season — scientists and ship’s officers, communications and IT specialists, directors of divisions of BAS, Foreign Office people and the government ministers — think of writers and artists and journalists as useful to the cause as communicators. But we do not produce knowledge in a hard-facts sense and, like any society, the Antarctic world has its priorities and its hierarchies. The journalists and artists who are put into the continent are witnesses to the scientific findings that are taking place there, but we are not, strictly speaking, necessary.

  But then most people, if pressed, would avow that writers, or literature, are not necessary to human society, although they might be a desirable good. While the organization had taken good care of Suzanne and I, I was not sure the scientists knew what to do with us. Journalists communicate in a more direct way: they tend to have an encapsulating type of mind, trained to parse complex information and transform it into the equivalent of an astute phrase, an aphorism. As a writer I lack that kind of mind entirely. I can only see the smoke and mirrors of ordinary experience, and rising out of these necessary obfuscations, in the very far distance, an outline of the truth I must write.

  Stuart and I talked over our rapidly cooling cups of tea. Drinks did not stay hot for long on the bridge, which was kept cold to encourage alertness. We went to stare in front of the bridge windows. The chrome ice shield was still there, broadcasting the buried white comet of its light.

  The ice fields of the Arctic and the Antarctic are a giant mirror; the amount of light they fling back into space is called albedo. The Antarctic’s reflection rate is about thirty percent, the highest on the planet. The Antarctic is Earth’s cooling system, reflecting the heat of the sun back into space. Max’s computer model calculated Earth’s historical albedo precisely, charting its changes over time as the ice sheets advanced and retreated.

  From one of the bridge wing decks, we could see crabeater seals lolling on the ice field below us, thumping and sighing contentedly. Their fur glinted in the sun, making them look like bars of solid gold scattered across the ice field. I imagined a game among hallucinating, deranged Antarctic explorers in which they rushed onto the ice to collect the bars of gold, risking their lives for this great prize, only to find one of the moist-nosed crabeaters snorting at them.

  The following day we were still icebound. The JCR is an ice-strengthened vessel, but it is not an icebreaker; the difference between the two is horsepower. The ship could slice through ice, but its limited thrust must be cannily employed. Even icebreakers are bested by Antarctic pack ice. It’s not uncommon for at least one ship every summer season to spend a couple of weeks stopped by pack — I learned to say this word, stopped, or beset, and never stuck, a serious taboo on a ship.

  An announcement went out over the tannoy: two reconnaisance flights from Base R would try to help us find a way out. The pilots of the intercontinental plane, the Dash 7 which flew from Base R to Stanley and back, made a detour on their northbound leg to try to help us.

  We watched from the bridge as the pilots approached the ship flying low, propellers churning only a few meters above the surface of the ice, igniting a flurry of snow underneath the fuselage. Apart from Vernadsky, the plane was the first thing that was not us we had seen in nearly three weeks and it was like a beacon from a more advanced civilization.

  “Base is only forty kilometres as the crow flies,” Martin told me. “It takes them about five minutes to fly out to us, but we might not be able to get to them before January.” The year before the same thing had happened: the ship had reached even closer to base, managing to round the southern tip of Adelaide Island before being repelled by pack. “We could practically see the wharf,” Martin said.

  But the ice had been completely impassible and entrenched. If the JCR stayed any longer it would have risked the channel it had broken behind it freezing over, locking it into the ice for weeks. In the end, the ship had to sail all the way back to the Falklands and fly essential cargo and personnel down in relay flights. For the ship to be beset by ice was a once-in-a-decade event; for it to happen two years running was unheard of.

  The red plane climbe
d and buzzed over, not more than a hundred feet above us. Chills travelled up my spine. And also, instant vertigo. I craned my neck and saw sky pans, ice pans, and the plane, a carmine bird of prey.

  “I can’t believe how low they fly.”

  “They love it — they’re daredevils, all of them,” Martin replied. “Watch out when you’re on base, they’ll have you flying the plane in no time.” I thought he was joking, and laughed.

  The pilots’ radio reports were audible to everyone on the bridge. The pilots had capable, dashing, slightly militarized voices.They said that the pack looked solid to the south for over thirty kilometres. It was the most disheartening news possible. Even if the wind changed and the ice started to move on the gyre, thirty kilometres of pack wasn’t going to shift as quickly as we needed it to.

  The plane sliced the air, travelling away from us. I watched it get smaller, until it was a black dot in the sky. In between blurs of static, the captain signed off, “Okay, Greg, thanks for that. Over.”

  A hiss, then the pilot’s voice said, “Good Luck. Over.”

  Sea fog enveloped the ship. Now there were no mountains to puncture the skyline, no visual field, only mist, veils, languid sheets of white muslin. They hung in the air until dispersed by wind, because the light and energy mass balance did not change throughout the day in the springtime Antarctic.

  The ship, eerie when not in motion, became stranger still enveloped in this frozen mist. I spent hours sitting in my cabin watching as silver shadows, like rays of ice emitted by the sun, colonized the space.

  It was a kind of ambush. On the bridge the officers and seamen had hushed communions; their conversation all about the ice — whether we would get out of it, whether we would make it to base or have to turn around and head north to try later in the season. The bridge windows were like a giant cinema screen. I thought, This is not real. My inability to accept what I saw had something to do with impotence, I think. Rarely in my life have I been less able to affect a situation.

  The pack had hardened. From time to time the brown darting shadow of a skua or a storm petrel flashed across the ice. The ice was hard-packed and sliced by sastrugi — sharp, wave-like ridges formed by wind that look like a frozen version of the ridges on an alligator’s back.

  The captain stared out at the ice field, his face encased in bug-eyed polarized glasses. “Where has all this ice come from?” I asked.

  “Pine Island Bay. There’s an ice stream there: it’s pushing out a lot of ice; glaciers are calving fast.”

  He led me over to the chart table, where a maritime map of the west coast of Adelaide Island lay, our course marked in a pencilled line of x’s. If we went out to sea, he told me, heading to the west, into a lonely body of water with no landfall until Australia, we would very likely encounter the pack again, further to the south where it might be thicker. If we headed east, toward the coast of Adelaide Island, there might be a lead through the ice, but there were also hidden reefs and the charts were unreliable. Unlike the HMS Endurance, the Naval polar survey ship and sister vessel to the JCR, we didn’t have a depth sounder to guide us away from undersea ridges.

  “I think we might have to back out,” David went on to say. I thought I hadn’t heard him correctly. How could we back out when we couldn’t even turn the ship around? We were locked in.

  “There’s another strategy,” he added. “We wait, see what the wind will do.”

  Even if the ice which held us in its grip looked solid, it travelled on the wind and the tide. With the right shift in either or both, it would break up like a puzzle, nudged into disintegration, and we would emerge from this icy maze.

  The stalled nights brought out a careening, childish energy. That night the Bar Stool Challenge was won by IT man Bruce, who was from somewhere up the coast north of Aberdeen. The nature of the challenge was to thread your body in and out of the bar stools, snaking through them faster than anyone else. Bruce did it dressed in a kilt, wearing no underwear. We all covered our eyes.

  At one point, a man I’d come to privately call the Unfriendly Vehicle Mechanic turned to me.

  “What makes you think you can do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Write books.”

  “What makes you think I can’t?”

  His mouth curled and I saw myself in his eyes: someone along for the ride, someone who would make what sociologists call symbolic capital out of this whole experience. I heard it, not for the first time, the unsavoury clang in the phrase, which people on the ship sometimes used when introducing me: the writer. This was my role and profession, of course, and no different in its intentions from “the captain,” or “the principal scientific investigator,” but the term had the odd effect of jolting me out of myself, of making me see myself as others saw me.

  What was happening to the writer? She was writing, yes. Every night in her cabin she writes prose poems about ice and desire that she calls “Night Messages.” But the writer is spooked, more than ever in her life, by what happened on the ship that night when she thought, if only for a moment, that she might throw herself into the ocean. The writer wants to feel no more anticipation, love, desire; she tries to turn these off at source, but like a dormant computer programme they are there, humming away insistently, underneath her heartbeat.

  Meanwhile her mind is a trap made of words. All her life, words have been a talent, yes, but even more than that an exile, a consolation prize.

  She has been so ecstatic on this journey, released into knowledge and discovery. But also miserable, incarcerated, addled. She has never before felt this particular helix of emotion, or even thought it possible. Her life before these days was a shadow, a waning memory of a dream.

  The Antarctic has always required people to identify what they value, what they are prepared to risk and to lose. Even so, I don’t know why this all felt so final in this place, on this journey. Something about it seemed bent on determining my life, both my past and my future. I felt the sense of a snare, of a destiny not formed by my own instincts and desires, but by some intent located in the boxy unfamiliar constellations in the southern hemisphere sky.

  This journey by ship would resound in my life for many years. I didn’t know yet how it would cast a long white shadow over my heart.

  “The stock and the till take just aren’t adding up some days.”

  Elin frowns. Long amber shadows fall between the tallow candles, the coasters crocheted by old women in hamlets by the river.

  Elin is tall and what people used to call “big boned.” She has blonde hair bluntly cut and a long face.

  “I don’t know why that is, I’m sorry.” The adult cadence to my voice is new. It is something I have only recently acquired. I like trying it out.

  “Let’s go over the list.”

  Together we pore over sales of earrings, sand dollars, gift cards, wrapping paper, stained-glass ornaments, crystals dangling on transparent plastic string, stuffed lobsters and seals.

  Eight dollars is missing, plus sales tax. I pretend to peer at the numbers column but I am looking at Elin’s shoes. She wears flat leather wraparound sandals I have never seen before with a name emblazoned on their side: Birkenstocks. In the winter Elin wears leather shoes which look like the shoes worn by hunch-backed medieval peasants in my History of Europe textbook. “Granola shoes,” says Donna when I tell her about Elin’s apparel, wrinkling her nose, meaning hippy.

  “Can you explain that discrepancy?” Elin has a Scandinavian accent that gives her voice an authoritative edge. She comes from a fair-minded country. Denmark, or Sweden. She will give me a chance.

  “I remember entering the earrings as $10, but is it possible they were $18,” I say. “An eight can look like a ten.”

  “I need you to pay careful attention to the price tags. No matter how much you’re chatting to customers” — this was another thing
Elin said: chatting, not talking.

  It dawns on me that she suspects me of something, other than fatigue. This has never been a trusting town. It is the kind of place where people worry they are not getting the best possible deal out of life and begin to cast looks at their neighbour, wondering who is to blame. The most extreme form of this might be the murderer, whoever he is.

  “I will,” I say. “Promise.”

  Apart from the woodlot and the river and the library, the only places to go in town are stores. Stores are refuges, or would be, if the sales assistants’ eyes did not snag on you, willing you to buy. Stores sell neon clothes, scented bags of potpourri, the snakeskin pumps all the girls in high school are wearing that year.

  My favourite is the Canadian Tire hardware store. I go in to get away from the heat or cold, depending on the season. I find peace wandering the aisles that smell of rubber and steel. A manly, useful smell, cooled by the chromium air pumped out from the ceiling.

  Men in red shirts ask if they can help, if I am looking for anything in particular. I make things up: I am looking for a sink plug, a stovetop reducer, things I only know exist thanks to my job at the Exec and because I am forced to care for the children my mother and Mark have now. I linger in the blow-up paddle pool section, dazzled by the blue water and the unreal green of the pools, comparing weight and volume, the time they take to inflate.

  The days extend themselves with a reluctant sinuous languor. Now it is light until eight in the evening. Blue hills stalk the river valley. In the distance, the hoods of mountains. Low and exhausted, these are the last of the Appalachians. A hollow yearning, completely new to me, installs itself near my lungs. I learn to carry this new hollowness around with me like a phantom limb; before I had been complete.