by Jean McNeil
There is nothing I will miss about this town, other than my friends. I know its rhythm now, the spring and fall exhibitions when farmers bring their livestock for show, the purple world of the fairground rides and the rigged games booths that can be heard from blocks away, the long summer days spent at the beach on the man-made lake by the dam.
All night I serve food to the people this town has made, although it is the alcohol that people come for; the Exec has a late alcohol licence. The men who come to eat Chinese food at three a.m. in the dining room are of a piece, sired by the town and the fertile river valleys that surround it — chunky, check-shirted and cowboy-booted, blunt bodies, their faces a mix of Scots, Irish, English, Huguenot. The occasional upturned eyes and narrow, elegant nose that bespeak Native blood. It is these men I like: slim, delicately curved, like the stems of flowers.
It is four, five, six in the morning when I finish my shifts. I don’t risk walking. I drive or get a taxi home. But I still walk home from Shades of Light. I walk to the library every night too.
Everyone I know cautions me to stop this. Even Donna’s mother, who disapproves of me, tells me to take better care, that she’d hate to find out something had happened to me.
“What can you do?” is my mother’s response, when I tell her about my lone walks, her eye on the baby monitor. “You can’t live your life swaddled in cotton. Eventually bad things find us all.”
9.
EROS the bittersweet
stamukha
A single fragment of ice stranded on a shoal.
December 19th
We have been stopped for four days now. We stand on the bridge in the wraparound BAS-issue sunglasses that make us look like Steven Spielberg aliens, staring at the ice. We just want it to let us go.
Now, everything we say, every chance meeting in the corridor carries the charge of a live wire, like the electrical shocks that plague us. The ship’s four engines are turned off. In the hollow silence I imagine sounds — unfamiliar antique church bells, the clangs of farriers, the sound of knives sharpening.
Max visited me in my cabin, his eyes migrating compulsively to the window, into the glare of the ice field and the stalled rapture it inflicted upon us.
“I don’t know why I’m feeling all this now,” he said. “I can’t get a handle on my emotions. I don’t like being out of control.”
“It’s not possible to be in control all the time.”
“I know, but I can’t tell whether this is a damaging experience, or a good one. For the first time in my life, I can’t make that judgment.”
“Everything that we feel, or see, or experience leaves its imprint upon us. You have to be careful what and who you let yourself get close to.” I was impatient with myself. Why was I offering him this grim chalice of advice?
“You sound like you don’t trust people.”
“It’s circumstance I don’t trust. Life is volatile, much more so than people think, and almost completely beyond your control. You have to approach it like a ship sailing through ice-infested waters.”
He gave a smile then — the first I had seen in some days. There was tolerance in it, the kind of patient amusement you might bestow on a parent.
“Here, geometry always makes me feel better.” He sketched isosceles triangles in his swift, certain physicist’s hand. “Look, this is the rate of sublimation of the ice sheet, remember I told you? This is the subduction zone.”
I misheard him and for a second thought he’d said seduction zone. Sublimation, subduction — it was an emotional tongue, this ice language.
He opened his laptop and I could see again see those streams of numbers and letters separated by coded prompts. It amazed me that from these sequences of numbers and letters he could concoct vast sheets of ice that have not existed for 100,000 years.
Max told me how ice crystals’ exact shape depends on temperature and vapour tension. Prismatic crystals are short, solid, or hollow; needled crystals are almost cylindrical. Plate crystals are more or less hexagonal, he said. The star crystals are, as you would expect, stars. Then there are the frosted particles, or the clusters of tiny crystals. Glaciers and icebergs are made up of innumerable crystals of these varying designs, each of them in internal motion.
“But how does a glacier begin life?”
“As snow, freezing rain, ice condensed directly from vapour, freezing meltwater, avalanches. Snow, crystals, trapped air, tough ice called firn, which hardens into glacial ice.”
“Firn.” It had the sound of good whiskey, or a task.
He scribbled an equation about mass and velocity. “Look, there is a velocity, a net loss and gain of mass. There is ablation, melting, the flow downhill into the sea. In the western Antarctic the ice sheets rest on bedrock that is already below sea level, so the downward trend is reinforced.”
He paused to draw another swift hieroglyph. “I’ll show you how a glacier moves. There are several ways — by kinetic waves, which are something like a flood wave, like a frozen tsunami.”
I thought of the watercolour by the great Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, the arcing, giant wave, its arresting mixture of movement and classical restraint.
“Mostly by basal sliding — that’s when the ice is lubricated at bottom, where it touches rock, by the heat generated as the weight of the ice meets the resistance of rock. Glaciers can also flow upward, to an extent, in ablation zones, and true to their name, cirque glaciers seem to move in a circle. But glaciers are never a single ice terrane, they’re several scattered ice masses.”
Max reeled all this off as if he were talking about a journey to the supermarket. It was internalized knowledge; he’d been studying glaciology for the last three years. I allowed the logic and process of his explanation to slide by and again fixated on the language he used, its medicinal tang, terrane, cirque, tongue, ablation, how it commuted between anatomy and architecture.
Later, we hung over the rail of the bridge, looking down on all this ice, so blank to the untrained eye but, like any desert, actually bristling with detail once your eye has been made alive to it. But in the frozen détente between our ship and the ice our predicament was worsening. We were down to a final twenty-four hours; soon the captain would have to turn the ship around and we would steam back to the Falkland Islands.
Or, if we could reach base, we would be there within a day. Many people on board, Max included, were booked on a flight to the Falklands, then to the UK on December 23. Everyone wanted to get home for Christmas. Base was tantalizingly close, the kind of distance you would traverse on a train in half an hour, yet it was unreachable.
For two days we had been sallying to prise open the grip of the ice. Sallying is a deliberate see-sawing of the ship from side to side using a release of thrust from steam built up in the engine valves. In the old days on the explorer ships, sallying meant getting everyone on board, including the dogs, to run in a gang from one side of the ship to the other. We were now accustomed to the roar and sigh as the ship heaved, lolling several degrees to the right, then the left.
When the sallying failed, Captain David turned off the remaining engine. He entered the dining room with the look of a doctor who had tried defibrillation, adrenaline — everything — to restart a heart. He came down to the bar and sat on the banquette, arms folded across his chest.
“How do you feel about spending Christmas on board?”
“That depends,” I said. “Have we got any turkey?”
No one laughed. To our meals and our board games there was now an unmistakeable sludge of claustrophobia. Another day in the ice meant that Andy the engineer would not get his trip to the South Pole to fix low-power magnetometers. Another day in the ice meant that I might never see the base myself. A writer was hardly essential personnel and the organization might not fly me in, should we have to turn back and go to the Chilean base, Marsh, where there
was an airstrip. I might be put on the next plane back to the Falklands, rather than Antarctica. So close, but yet so far. It had never occurred to me that we could be stopped a mere sixty kilometres short of landfall.
I went outside on deck again to survey our prison. The contented crabeaters were still there, lounging on the ice just below us, snorting and sighing. This is the Antarctic, I said to myself. This is the place where Mawson was pulled alive out of innumerable crevasse falls. Where Shackleton took four months to rescue his stranded men on Elephant Island. Scott and his men, who died for eighteen kilometres and a badly placed depot. And the American aviator Richard Byrd, with his shipment of straitjackets to the continent, lest his men lose it in the long winter. Why, after reading all the classic explorer narratives, with their catalogues of misfortune and near-misses, of logistical disasters and bizarre rescues, did I think it would all go smoothly?
That afternoon a lead finally broke through the ice, but it turned out to be a blind lead — a channel of water that leads only to another white tongue of ice. After a couple of hours of creeping through it at four knots, we ground to a halt.
The sun had come out and colours were reversed: a black sun, black ice, and white sky, white water. I couldn’t remember how many days we had gone without night, now. Before this trip I had never lived a day of my life without seeing night. Could it be that my eye was manufacturing it, creating dark where there was only light?
That night we had a Christmas decorating party. We vented our frustrations on the Christmas tree, choking it in ugly garlands, and on the alcohol stock behind the bar. We drank everything in sight while Bruce the IT man undertook another Bar Stool Challenge in his kilt, scattering us to the far side of the room.
Max and I did not seek each other out amidst the raucousness. A very subtle note of rebuff had crept into our conversations. He may well have picked up that I had become attached to him, and he had been intending to abuse my sympathies by exiling me, but he held back. That was one limit of his compassion. But on the ship it was hard to tell what was really going on between people. The confinement forced those of incompatible temperaments to live as a family, sharing meals and chores and work and DVD screenings and nights in the bar for hours, or it threatened to erode natural sympathies, as between Max and I, with the boredom that comes with overexposure.
After the decorating party, I retreated to my cabin. I had to do this many times in those days. I was so used to spending my days reading and writing and had become unaccustomed to the blare of circumstance, to the banter and jokes that are the currency of group dynamics.
In my cabin, I opened one of the few non-polar books I had carted with me: Anne Carson’s essays Eros the Bittersweet. Carson is a poet and a Classics scholar, also a renowned translator of Sappho. In ancient Greek, she explains, error (hamartia) was something which had to be gone through, in order for life to progress. Aristotle put it more bleakly — error is the false step that leads the protagonist to his or her tragedy, but in meeting that tragedy, the hero was set free. Errors have a larger purpose which we cannot, in the moment of committing them, determine.
Sappho wrote that love was “sweetbitter.” The word, glukupikron, Carson explains, puts the sweet before the sour. The word sounds different with the senses swapped: first the sweet, then the bitter. Desire has a language of heat, of liquidity and melting, Carson notes. Sophocles compared the experience of desire to a lump of ice melting in warm hands, pleasure and pain intermingled: the bite of cold, not kind, built from ferocity, then the hot liquid charge of melt.
Love, Sophocles said, takes shape through a series of crises of the senses. A krisis calls for decision and action. There is a blind spot in Eros, a moment of time in which absence and presence converge to make a slim paradox. You bite into the long-desired apple, and await the sweetbitter moment when your desire will be gone.
At the centre of desire, Carson writes, is a cold, primal pleasure. Ice is pain, but also a novel enjoyment. As a child, a snowflake on your tongue or face gives you a shock, and this shock spirals upward, throughout life, into the logic of your existence, into the psychology of desire, and the shock wanes to the point that as adults we can withstand an entire blizzard and not feel anything.
Ice is a novelty, then, still, and like love, an unexpected form of torture — fresh, untried. But then there is also the catastrophe of its dissolution: the longer you hold it, the colder your hands get. The longer you hold it, the faster it melts. Carson seems to take this twinning of hot and cold, of fire and ice, as a way to explain the trauma that love enacts on the heart.
But cold also burns. Look at any picture of frostbitten fingers and you will see they are charred black, as if they have been held to a flame.
Hamartia, krisis, glukupikron, cryos. Error, crisis, bittersweet, ice. That so-called night trapped in the ice, I took a strange consolation in this cool language.
I went back upstairs to the bar to get a bottle of water. I was tired of the flat, ionized taste of the water the JCR so capably made in her desalination tanks. I found a party in full flow. Someone had drawn the blinds against the blaring sun and put on a Christmas carol CD at full blast. We women were corralled to sit on the bar stools to be decorated: Santa hats on our heads, garlands of tinsel around our necks. Mike, the purser and the man with the keys to the alcohol store, brought up extra supplies. “Yez can all drink as much as yez like.”
We danced to “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree” as a last-ditch sally was about to take place. As the ship rolled, its engines exploding steam in an effort to unlock the ice, we lurched heftily to starboard, then to port. We started on scotch, on rum, on beer, on wine, and ended on angostura bitters with whatever was left.
In the morning, we would turn around and head north, shunned from arriving at Base R by the greater power of nature. I would remain in the Antarctic for the three days that it would take us to steam up to Marsh base of course, but the sense of discovery, of making a journey which I had never made before, would be gone.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I began reading another of the books I had brought, Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North, an account of his overwintering expedition to the Arctic, locked fast in the ice. Like his brethren, Nansen was a gifted writer, moved by his environment to an awed precision for description.
It was five in the morning, and the bright tangerine sun of the Antarctic coated my cabin. I finally fell asleep on the page that ends with this passage:
Nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist than the Arctic night. It is dreamland, painted in the imagination’s most delicate tints; it is colour etherealized. One shade melts into the other, so that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms — it is all faint, dreamy colour music … The sky is like an enormous cupola, blue at the zenith, shading down into green, and then into lilac and violet at the edges. Over the ice-fields there are cold violet-blue shadows, with lighter pink tints where a ridge here and there catches the last reflection of the vanished day …
I have never been able to grasp the fact that this earth will some day be spent and desolate and empty. To what end, in that case, all this beauty, with not a creature to rejoice in it? Now I begin to divine it. This is the coming earth — here are beauty and death. But to what purpose? Ah, what is the purpose of all these spheres? Read the answer, if you can, in the starry blue firmament.
PART TWO
MEAN SOLAR DAYS
1.
PRECESSION
fast ice
Consolidated solid ice attached to the shore, to an ice wall or to an ice front.
December 20th
We are all outside on deck; we mill about in excited knots, our eyes shut behind our sunglasses. We sail past the black flanks of Jenny Island. Beside us the dark dorsals of minke whales. We struggle to accept the change in our reality. Only a few hours ago we were caught in a fist of ice
and now we are doing sixteen knots, accompanied by this wing-guard of minkes.
Somewhere on the other side of a horn-like headland lies base. On the bridge it looks so close. The readout shows three or four rectangular lozenges — the base buildings — and a long brown strip bisecting the peninsula — the runway.
I hadn’t realized how much I missed the sound of the engines, their reassuring rattle. It feels like a miracle, simply to be moving through the water again, which, unfrozen, returns to being a conduit, a friendly substance.
Veils of mist hang low to the surface of the ocean. The sea is a deep tanzanite blue. We round the headland, listening to whales breathe alongside us.
Early that morning, around six o’clock, Captain David had found an exit from the ice maze. He decided to chance it and travel east, toward Adelaide Island and its bony reefs, wagering that the pack would not blow in and trap us there. For four hours we crept along the reef at a slow speed. If we hit one, even at six knots, the JCR’s reinforced hull would be rent open like a can opener slicing through a tin.
I woke later that morning after only three hours’ sleep to find the ship in motion for the first time in four days, slinking along Adelaide Island, the mountains of its western spine glowing blue-white in the morning. Skuas began to appear once again. Skuas are land-based, in contrast to the albatross, which can go for many months without putting their feet on solid land. A skua at sea means you are close to land.
The sun glanced on brilliant blue open water. Wisps of cloud hung between the mountains, so low they hovered only a few feet above the sea. We passed through this veil of vapour clouds, which remained intact in our wake.