by Jean McNeil
I watched the plane take off from my office. The Dash 7 taxied to the end of the runway, its propellers grinding the air. At its end, where the runway met the bay, the plane performed a deft balletic turn and stood for a few seconds, its frame trembling as the propellers’ thrust was increased. Then it tore down the runway and was snagged into the air as if by a wire. I craned my neck to watch as the plane was eaten by sky.
Max’s departure instantly emptied the Antarctic. I felt an indefinite hollowness, but also relief. Some sort of ordeal had ended with his leaving.
At midnight I went for a run on the sunlit runway. Running in that brand of cold was a strange sensation — hot on the inside, while the stinging cold of a thirty-knot wind penetrated the heat and cooled it, but irregularly, in stripes, so that my body felt carved into separate strata. Later I grabbed a cup of hot chocolate in the deserted dining room, went to my office, and read.
The geophysics book Max left me had a chapter on precession, which means the movement of the rotational axis of a spinning body, such as a planet. In the case of our planet, the earth’s rotation very slowly produces a cone-shaped graph, although it takes 26,000 years of spinning to produce the completed shape. The exact angle, or inclination, of the earth’s orbit drifts up and down the axis. Precession of a spinning body occurs when it experiences a torque normal to the axis of its rotation: this was Max’s language, the tart, measurable cant I would make my bedfellow in the Antarctic.
I realized I was ignorant of even the most basic workings of the planet. It’s so easy to forget that we live on a moving sphere. Earth is spinning at a rate of 1,300 kilometres an hour at the equator and it spins hardly at all at the poles. A thousand miles to the south of Base R, at the South Pole, the earth rotates approximately a centimetre an hour. How is it that equatorial people don’t get horizontal vertigo? And here, where I sat at the foot of a glacier on the Antarctic peninsula, did the world feel slower? Did we feel the stasis, the still point of this turning world?
The centre of the earth is molten, like an interior sun, and the earth’s magnetic alignment is not stable but wavers between north and south, trying to choose its horizon. We are unaware of these energies, largely, while whales and terns register its fluxes with their sophisticated navigational brains. For the first time in many years, possibly since I had been a child, I felt a basic wonder about the planet and its workings.
I put down Introduction to Geophysics, suddenly aware of the time. Base had gone quiet; no footsteps creaked through the ceiling of my office, no ragged bursts of laughter came from the bar. The sun beamed in through my window. The clock said it was midnight, but my watch said two thirty in the morning. The clock Max found for me had stopped ticking.
The murderer’s third attack does not succeed. It was a lone woman jogger on a rare rainy evening, running by the river. Michael tells Donna, who tells me. The woman fought for her life. She was very fit; she’d done judo, tae kwon do. She didn’t get a good look at him, Michael says; his partner Paul interviewed her. “It was like she was in a daze,” he said.
The incident does not appear in the newspaper. But everyone talks about it: at school; in the downtown café, La Vie en Rose; in the queues for the tellers in the Bank of Montreal. But in the newspapers and on the radio and from the police there is silence.
“They don’t want to ruin the reputation of the town. Nice place to live, nice place to grow old and die. They’re happy to let a couple of young women die so the Tourist Board can go about its business.” This is Elin’s take on it. Elin can say such things because she is Scandinavian and they are opinionated there.
People in that town do voice opinions, about whether to buy a Ford Fairmont or a Taurus, that new refrigerator, that insurance plan, the state of the roads — how many potholes are left over from winter. Or the attacks on the reservation, white boys and reservation boys shattering each other’s windshields with baseball bats. There, boys with eyes like mussel shells play hard-drinking games of pool in smoky bars.
Donna and I are in her house, her parents are out. Michael occupies another corner of their gigantic rec room, lifting weights.
“Why do you think he does it?”
Michael wears only a T-shirt and shorts, even though the night is cool. He is doing arm curls. His muscles look protean, like putty.
He squints at me. “What do you mean, why?”
“I mean, why? Why bother? Why not just get drunk with his friends, play pool, go to the hockey rink. Do whatever it is guys do.”
“Because he’s a wacko, that’s why.”
“Don’t you have criminal profilers? I’ve seen them on TV.”
Michael smiles. He’s already spotted his retort. “This is not TV.”
Michael has the physique favoured by the town’s men; a beefy, overfed quality. Perhaps because no one walks, preferring to jump into their duallies, those trucks with double-barrelled wheels at the back, their hoods flanked with crash bars as if they were going to compete in a demolition derby, and drive down to Chaisson’s convenience store rather than walk ten minutes. If you do walk, especially these days, you might find Michael sidling up to you in his patrol car. Just checking.
There is a raw power in him. He takes off his shirt in front of Donna, unselfconscious around his sister; he seems not to notice that I am there too. But I have a feeling, although vague, that he seeks an audience.
I ought to be attracted to him. But I don’t like blonds, I don’t like moustaches. That discounts most of the town’s boy-men. His physicality translates into a mental abruptness bordering on the mechanical. He is a ship, a plane. Michael is a person who might do this or that, it doesn’t really matter. His thoughts are doors blowing open and shut on gusts of wind.
Still I feel something of his power, the effect he is capable of having, as he stands with his back turned, shirt off, the small hollow which leads to his buttocks visible, a mysterious dark V at the back. Men are given to these cruel displays, I am beginning to understand, but you know they will make you pay to touch them.
The car approaches again. I turn at the sound of my name.
This time I see him. The man is a black nail. Thin, dark-skinned. His skull is familiar. I see my own square forehead.
I run down the street, fling the gate to the house open, and hide in the porch. I watch the car glide past. The driver looks lost, as if he is merely looking for a house containing friends to visit. Long-lost acquaintances.
At the end of May I write my exams — eight of them in a row. I am exhausted by the thought that these separate ordeals will determine the shape of my future.
I am distracted by longings, I don’t know for what. I don’t seem to indulge in the romantic scenarios of Donna and her friends: me and my boyfriend getting married in a church full of white lilies, me and my husband on vacation in Florida; Disneyworld, Orlando. A nice house on the outskirts of town, two four-wheel drives. A kid I would drive to the same school I myself had attended. Instead my future is a series of tableaux I must somehow avoid: the unmarried young mother; the married young mother; the bank teller; the fish processing plant worker.
In the middle of my exams, the temperature shoots up. I remember Donna’s father’s prediction — torrid summer. I should be studying for my chemistry exam but I am reading The Alexandria Quartet. I found it on a dusty bookshelf. The books ranged there must have been important to my mother because they are well-thumbed, the edges of their pages smudged. I drink them in one after the other: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, novels by Leon Uris whose titles I forget, John Fowles’ The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, something by Ursula K. Le Guin.
I neglect my studies because of a more urgent need to discover who I am and could be, who we all are, through fiction. I don’t know this will become a lifelong quest. In Durrell’s slim novels, the women are either wafting, hippie-ish, and seductiv
e, or dangerous and seductive. I can’t figure out if I would model myself on the free-spirited Clea or the ensnared Justine. In any case these novels are a magical trap. I cannot put them down.
One evening, just as the light is waning, I walk downtown. Cars drift by and I stiffen, but their drivers are merely obeying the speed limit. I will get a frozen yogourt in the air-conditioned mall, I will browse the make-up counters in the chilly Shoppers Drug Mart under the vigilant stare of the women who work there, with their Cruella de Vil eyebrows. I will leaf through People magazine then walk back home, my without-purpose gait catching the eye of the man at the wheel of the car I do not notice, the car that drives slightly faster or slower than the others, a sunglasses-wearing figure who, as he draws past, watches me grow smaller in the rear-view mirror.
2.
THE ORDINARY YEAR
frazil ice
Fine spicules or plates of ice, suspended in water.
December 23rd
“Go! Ice axe break your way down!”
Suzanne and I hurl ourselves down the sheer face of a glacier. The task of the moment is to break our fall with an ice axe. This is a fearsome instrument, usually only seen in horror or climbing accident films. If we get it wrong we will end up in the aircraft hangar at the bottom of the ice slope. We throw ourselves, twirl, and scrape the axe down the ice until we slide to a stop. This is hard on the extremities. I have Monet water lily bruises on my legs and arms.
Winter field training takes three days; we learn how to abseil into a crevasse and get ourselves out, how to rescue someone who has fallen into a crevasse, and how to erect and dismantle camp — putting up pyramid tents, cooking on a Primus stove, using methylated spirits to light it — as well as how to load a sledge and attach it to a skidoo.
Field training is a nightmare of ropes and a metal puzzle of “jingly janglies” — karabiners, jumars, and assorted climbing equipment. I discover I have knot dyslexia — I can barely tie a figure eight. I am the slowest person in our group. The outdoors types stand, one leg flung out, bearing the weight of the jingly janglies on their hips, waiting for me to get it right.
We go out in the field for a couple of days, pitching our pyramid tents up the glacier, called Vals, after those distant pistes Val d’Isère and Val Thorens, and which curves above base over the flank of Adelaide Island. We shovel snow to anchor the tents, we melt snow to make dinner on the Primus. We hunker down for the night in our Rab mountaineering sleeping bags with two hats on and a litre of water to drink.
Inside the tent Suzanne and I share, the world turns tangerine, thanks to the canvas. We have to calculate each inch of our space; there is an interior décor to any pyramid tent as regimented as an IKEA showroom: manfood boxes with food and utensils in between sleeping bags, Primus stove on top, gash in the corner by the opening, sleeping bags on three layers of fleece with the head placed downwind from the wind chill, boots outside in the valance, Tilley lamp suspended from the teepee ceiling.
That night it is cold, but not very cold for Antarctica, minus ten or twelve. I wake with my head against the tent canvas and have to manoeuvre it so that a layer of sleeping bag protects it from the wind. All night this is the only sound. There is no regularity, no familiar voice to it. It’s the sound of the katabatic winds, the sound of gravity itself, maybe.
Training over, we descended to base for Christmas Eve. Falling as it does in the middle of the manic summer season, Christmas at Base R was low key. Pilots were still flying in the field (wearing Santa hats), tent parties were holed up a thousand kilometres away with only four mince pies between them to celebrate, and science parties were flying in from the Falklands.
But Christmas dinner was taken seriously. The five-course meal for ninety-odd people used a mixture of frozen and cherished fresh ingredients: prawns, avocados, turkey, stuffing, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce, trifle, cake. For the pièce de résistance the cook baked a giant mince pie on top of which little plastic penguins skated.
The two chefs, a woman in her forties and a young Welshman in his late twenties, were base celebrities, their exploits charted in a haze of snapshots posted up on the kitchen bulletin board — gala dinners, costume parties, giant birthday cakes in the shape of whales or even, in one, a red Twin Otter. The shelves of the kitchen were lined with celebrity chef classics — Jamie Oliver, Nigella, Moro. The chefs worked long hours, doing prep and menu planning while blasting house music or, occasionally, opera. The previous year’s overwinterers treated the kitchen as their personal space. In the winter period only one chef stayed on. On the chef’s off-duty days, I was told, the winterers taught themselves to cook a three-course meal for twenty-one people.
The dining room had been decorated fastidiously with Christmas crackers and bunting. A syrupy sun coated the tables as we sat down to dinner, fading the already bleached Union Jacks pinned on its walls. Photographs were dotted around the room — two orcas in the bay, their black heads just breaking the surface, the Dash coming in against a watermelon sunset, lights blazing, a team of huskies pulling a sledge across a diamond ice field from the days of dogs and sledges.
The aircraft aside, these photographs could have been taken in the fifties or the seventies. Apart from Gore-Tex, the detail of Antarctic life had changed little in fifty years it seemed, whether it was the Nido powdered milk, which gave us constipation; the Guinness-in-cans; the dried coriander, dried onion, and chewy frozen salmon steaks; the crumbling frozen cheese; or the dog-eared climbing magazines.
Men in shorts and sandals gathered around the juice dispenser before going to change for dinner. The men on base dressed for the beach, wearing shorts, T-shirts, and sandals — perhaps they had genuinely become so acclimatized to the cold outside that indoor temperatures stifled them. None of the women wore make-up, jewellery, or perfume. We all dressed the same, in BAS-issue fleeces, moleskins, identical wool-mix hiking socks.
This all changed for Christmas dinner. Field assistants filed in wearing smart suits, the women on base wore cocktail dresses they had purchased a year before at River Island or Zara. After Christmas dinner we played Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit in the bar until three in the morning, in an extended version of the British family post-prandial Christmas Day, minus the television. So much of base life was a simulacrum of the mothership moored so far away in the northern hemisphere: the pub, the dart board, the pool table, the Sunday roasts and fancy dress parties.
By the time I left the dining room, it was two or three in the morning. Downstairs I opened the door to the veranda only to find a solitary skua, looking up at me expectantly. A full-grown skua in flight is a fearsome sight and a possible threat to a human, but there was something of the reckless adolescent about this one. I remembered now: this was a half-tame young bird named Bubba. His photograph was on the base staff bulletin board. He had been known to walk straight through the door, I’d heard. He’d probably join the cafeteria queue if he could find the stairs.
Bubba hopped about. He looked impatient.
“Hello, I didn’t expect to see you here,” I said, uncertainly. (I had never addressed a skua.)
Bubba flew onto the veranda rail and regarded me at eye level. He turned his gaze to the south. He seemed to be beckoning me to do the same. We both gazed out over the bay, where a shaft of sun struck Jenny Island’s fortress flanks with a single sword of silver light. Bubba cocked his head at me, his seed-like eye evaluating me. After a while I said, “Happy Christmas, Bubba,” and went to bed.
December 28th
I go for a walk around the point, the small peninsula which shelters base from north-easterly winds. I hear what I think are human voices but which turn out to be birds and the occasional seal. I look at the horizon and struggle to understand its emptiness. Surely there must be something out there, but what? Some fabulous hidden city, an undiscovered Paris of the Antarctic.
Piñero Island towers
on the other side of the bay. It’s impossible to tell how big these mountains are. There are only four colours: blue, white, gold, graphite. I can feel my retina adjusting to this reduced palette. Already I see more detail in the colours here — streaks of orange in the gold, the citron yellow that fringes it. I miss trees, the variation they provide, their succour. Some people on base haven’t seen a tree in two years.
How to stop this constant needling desire to be somewhere else? The delusion there is another place where we would be more content, more ourselves. I am on the defensive here, but what is it I am afraid of? Why don’t I allow myself to sink, to dissolve into experience?
I’d forgotten about New Year’s. Suzanne confided that she had also lost track of the normal calendar we inhabited in the northern hemisphere. “I don’t even know what century I’m in, here,” she said. “Everything’s still Edwardian.”
She was talking about the pyramid tents and sledges, the skis and their tins of antique varnish, the lengths of reindeer gut used to tie the sledges together, the Primus stoves and Tilley lamps. The Antarctic must be the only place in the world where technology and capitalism had not conspired to invent improvements over a century. “We use this gear because it’s still the best,” one of the four Marks on base (all field assistants) said, when I quizzed him. “The only real advance in polar kit has been in clothing and sleeping bags.”
On their march to the South Pole in 1912 the Scott polar expedition wore wool undergarments and reindeer fur mitts. Their boots were finnesko — felt lined with straw. Because they were manhauling and sweating more they deliberately wore less fur than Amundsen’s team. But if they stopped, as in their final nights, held back by bad weather, they became cold quickly. Even if you are wearing a Rab Infinity Endurance or Polar Alpha jacket (the names say it all), you have little chance in exposed conditions, especially overnight in the Antarctic.