Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  I had heard of Tom. Several of the scientists had recommended him as a friendly and helpful pilot, if a bit of a chancer, as they all were. He didn’t look particularly daredevilish. He was lean, in his early fifties, perhaps, with hair that would have once been dark but had now greyed. From one of his wrists hung a chunky watch with many complicated dials. He saw me looking at it.

  “Aviation watch,” he held it up to me, so I could inspect at closer range more moving parts I didn’t understand. He was just back from a trip down to the Amundsen-Scott base, also known as the South Pole, he told me, and this was why we hadn’t met before.

  We leant against a skidoo and talked. Tom was Scottish, originally, but he’d spent many years as a bush pilot in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, and his original buzz had been intermingled with flat Canadian vowels. His lean frame had a reticence about it, also a confidence. His eyes had a hawkish, evaluating glint: he scanned the terrain in front of us as if the ground might rise up and take a swipe at him.

  I was fascinated by what these pilots could do — taking off and landing on snow and ice in the most volatile weather conditions on earth, finding a site in the middle of a featureless ice sheet with only the sun and a GPS for guidance. They regularly landed the wheeled Dash 7 on an ice runway, something the pilots apparently called “wrestling a greased alligator with one hand tied behind your back.” Tom flew both types of aircraft on base. I asked him which he preferred.

  “The Twin Otter, now that’s the classic bush plane. It’s quite … rustic. You’ll find out, hopefully, when you get out on a co-pilot.”

  “I don’t know if I will,” I said. “I’m not sure what the field operations manager has in mind.”

  The field operations manager, known to everyone as “the FOM” was the real power on base; he controlled the movements of all the logistics and science personnel. Everyone on base was subject to the FOM’s overarching will.

  The FOM that season was a lanky Antarctic veteran named Steward, “with a ‘d,’” he was quick to tell us, when we first encountered him. One of the field assistants, a young northerner and one of the six Andys on base, gave me an account of what it was like to be subject to the FOM’s all-powerful whim.

  “You’re in your tent and there’s a blizzard blowing a hoolie outside and you radio to say, uh, Stew, when are you going to come and get us? And he says, maybe tomorrow, maybe not, maybe next week if such and such happens. Then again, maybe in three weeks. Easy life!” This was the FOM’s favourite phrase, something of a campaign slogan for the Antarctic, inherited from the all-male days of the past.

  “Then what happens?” I asked.

  “Then Stew puts the phone down and you sit in your tent for another ten days.”

  The lesson was clear; each morning at sit rep it was drilled into us — in the Antarctic plans were scrawls on a whiteboard to be scrubbed out when the next snowstorm hit or the plane encountered a mechanical fault. As if to demonstrate the principle, the eventual day of my co-pilot mission was scheduled and abandoned three times.

  It was dawning on me just how big the Antarctic was, and how long it might take to really see the ice cap. On base a week was the minimum for going out “into the field,” because even a two-night trip down to the refuelling station and logistics encampment at Ice Blue, the geographic equivalent of a citybreak to Barcelona or Berlin, could become a two-week trip if the weather took a turn or mechanical problems arose (or both).

  “The snow is changing. There’s a lot more moisture in it now,” Tom said at breakfast the following morning. He told me about the time it took him three tries to get off the ground at Base K, a geological base located on the shoulders of Graham Land, where the Antarctic peninsula joined with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. “The skiway is on a slight incline.” He raised his hand, fingers sloping upwards, to demonstrate an angle. “The snow was grippy. The field assistants with me were pretty nervy after three aborted takeoffs.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just revved her and revved her until we got airborne.” His expression was matter of fact, even bored. For him, I would learn, a machine was a challenge. The objective was to control and master it. Like all the pilots, he was a character, an instantly appreciable presence who punctured his conversation with matchless anecdotes and dramatic stories, accumulated in this specialized job where experience counted. Most of the pilots on base had been flying in polar conditions for more than ten years, I would learn. There was the time we holed up in the fuselage for a week until we only had a tin of beans between us. The time we had to medevac out a Chilean soldier in a whiteout. The time when … For all their anecdotal prowess, they struck me as loners, these pilots. It could be that the weight of their responsibility kept them solitary. They were never alone in the plane — BAS policy was to always have at least one other person with them, as “co-pilot” — but on base they kept to themselves and were only rarely sighted in the bar. They never came to the weekly film night; they never came skiing.

  Tom took an interest in my personal mission. He gave me newsletters he’d collected down at the US Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole. He had been there to fly an electrical engineer in a circuit of successive nowheres, programming the GPS for the non-places where low-power magnetometers, weather instruments, lay covered in feet of snow.

  “Those flights were the limit of the Otters’ range, sometimes,” Tom said. “Ten hours at a stretch without refuelling.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “At times I flew high, higher than I should have, by rights, in order to save on fuel. Lower levels of oxygen means the engine burns fuel more efficiently. The Otters’ ceiling is about 12,000 feet. Beyond that, you risk passing out.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, thank God. But I’ve had several ‘moments’ over the years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Moments — that’s what I call when things could have gone wrong.” There was a reluctance in the cast of his mouth. He wasn’t accustomed to discussing failure, or even near failure. I pressed him for examples.

  “Once I was showing a geologist the strata on a col down near Patriot Hills. There we were, flying into the face of a nunatak — the peak of a mountain buried in snow — and I realized I couldn’t get the power I needed to clear it. I think a crosswind on a col took me by surprise. I did it, but it took maximum power. You don’t want to have to do that too many times.” His face clouded. Like Max, Tom had one of those quick-change masculine faces which seem so readable, but which keep their actual emotions hidden behind a curtain. I saw Tom’s eyes better. They were an unusual grey-blue, like winter woollen blankets.

  Later that night, Tom and I took a walk together up to the Cross. At two thirty a.m., sunlight beamed from the horizon, tracing the edges of the glacier in gold.

  “By next week, the sun will be touching the horizon and the colours will be pink. By early February, the sun will go over the edge.” He paused. “There was a girl — a young woman,” he corrected himself. “She died here two years ago.”

  I had heard about the incident before coming to Base R. The young woman was a diver, and had been attacked by a leopard seal. The seal had likely mistaken her for a Weddell seal, its usual prey, and had dragged her down to a depth of sixty metres before letting her go. She was only twenty-eight.

  “She died over there —” He pointed to a place in the bay, near the end of the runway.

  “So close to base?”

  “Yes. I’m told people saw her — that she was in trouble. They saw her disappear under the water. They got in the RIBs, but by the time they found her it was too late.” He gave the horizon a flat stare. “I flew her down to Ice Blue; it must have been about six months before she was killed. She was so — so thrilled, you know. At first I thought, She’s a bit over the top, this girl. She was so enthusiastic, like a child. But then it
reminded me of what I’d felt, my first few seasons down here. The wonder of it all.”

  “You don’t love it here anymore?”

  “I do. It’s just the novelty has worn off, maybe. But I still love it.” His voice was resolute. Perhaps he was thinking of the danger inherent in loving a place which had so summarily killed people he knew. “It’s the simplicity of life here I like. Deal with the cold, survive, do the job at hand.” He gave me a searching look. “Once you’ve known this life, you never forget it. It holds you, in some way. It’s like a horizon you measure the rest of your life by.”

  We turned our eyes toward the icebergs grounded in North Cove, their flanks now cast in mint. “Yes,” Tom said. “You’re here at the right time. The sun won’t set now till February.”

  I felt the pull of the horizon and thought, Now the sun will sink. But the sun remained in the sky, stalled just above the lip of the world, hovering over a sea greasy with congealed ice. This was our world, at four in the morning: mountains, ice, water, sky — all lit in lava, tangerine, mauve, and that dark black-purple of dogs’ gums, like a bonfire, when the embers have burnt low.

  January 5th

  The met man scrawls the weather, wind speed and direction, and temperatures on the whiteboard each day. Today it is one degree above zero. The mercury has been hovering at freezing or just above for a week now, and melt is underway. There is no smell — not even the ionized smell of melting water. Only that moon smell of gravel.

  A biologist (Karin? Karine?) gives an evening lecture. Her PowerPoint reveals the screensaver on her laptop. We catch a glimpse of two blond children immersed in a lake.

  Nothing can grow on the ice cap, Karin/Karine tells us, except moss, particularly a type of black moss that has developed a resistance to the UVA and UVB rays they receive over the three-month-long summer with only a thin veil of ozone to protect them. At the top of the peninsula, she says, are fields and fields of strange waving grass, dotted with perfectly intact carcasses of seals who died ten thousand years ago. She shows us pictures of these seals and they are remarkably lifelike with their dun fir, their toothy death mask grins.

  To be in a place with so few terrestrial life forms concentrates the mind. I have been taking life for granted — not only my life, the life force given to me so arbitrarily, but any life form. The next time I see a tree I will look at it properly, I will thank it for existing.

  Summer was term-time in the Antarctic. “The University at the Bottom of the World,” as Xavier said at lunch, as we sawed through another frozen turkey steak served with tinned asparagus. “It’s a tradition from the days of Scott.”

  In the evenings, scientists gave informal seminars. For these lectures we sat at flimsy cafeteria tables in rows, dressed identically in our BAS-issue tangerine fleeces and moleskins, a paroled polar army.

  The talk one night was by Gavin, a professor of marine biology. Gavin was considered a “big picture” man and was frequently invited on Newsnight and Channel 4 News to explain the complex interrelations between the polar regions and climate change.

  “Here human beings and science have slightly different objectives. Science seeks to understand, ideally in a way that’s disinterested and detached from politics and economics,” he tells us. “For human beings it’s less about climate change itself, but finding the solutions. It’s about the struggle to find new energy sources, fundamentally. And to ration what we already have.”

  After dinner I ended up sitting next to Gavin at the dining table. It was nine o’clock and the white polar sun streaming through the windows warmed our arms.

  Gavin was easy to talk to, with his loping energy, his cackling vaudevillian laugh. I could imagine him in the seminar room: argumentative, challenging, an inspiration to his students.

  “So what will you write about?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What is your research process?”

  “Everything,” I said. “Talking to you now, in fact.”

  We talked about uncertainty and the creative process. I could tell immediately he was one of those scientists who understood the value of an open-ended enquiry, of groping in the dark.

  “But all Antarctic stories are the same stories,” he said.

  That was true, I replied. “But I’m not just looking for a story. Fiction is a form of abstract thought.”

  He shot me an alert look. “Based on what?”

  “Based on what the individual consciousness perceives of the world.”

  “Really? Is that so relevant? What about communities, nations, families?”

  “Even a consensus is just a concert of individual consciousnesses.”

  “Why write fiction, though? Why not write a non-fiction account of what you learn here?”

  “Because fiction frees you from fact. You move into the territory of metaphor, which gives you a density lived life usually evades. Sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth.”

  Gavin stared harder. A click — not unlike Max’s trap door — took place somewhere behind his eyes.

  Polar science is intensely competitive but paradoxically colla­borative. Intellectually thrusting characters like Gavin abounded — people with real self-confidence, often backed up by the physical courage and sang-froid required to withstand the captivity and extremity of Antarctic field seasons. Gavin routinely dove beneath the ice in the Antarctic among carnivorous leopard seals and orcas. I tried to imagine being in that darkened water, the surface completely iced over, like a sarcophagus.

  “What the ice record tells us is this,” he said as we finished the traditional cake and tea served that afternoon at smoko, as morning and afternoon tea breaks are called in the Antarctic. “Our climate has been volatile in the past. But now it shows a steady upward temperature trend that is irrefutable. To our knowledge, such a steady unbroken trend has never taken place since the Carboniferous era, and it’s directly linked to carbon dioxide. The concentration of CO2 in the ice cores just goes up and up. The final thing to prove is that the CO2 is anthropogenic. I think that’s been proven inconclusively.

  “Now it’s about building a consensus, to do something about it,” Gavin added. “That requires political will and also economic incentives. Human beings are not very good at paying for the future in the present. You know you’re not going to be around to experience either the best or the worst of what we do now, in this time-frame of our individual lives. Naturally people adopt a live-for-the-moment attitude. We’re very bad at delayed gratification.”

  “We’re not very good at no gratification either.”

  “We’re selfish and romantic, basically,” Gavin said, his burly diver’s arms crossed over his chest. “The Antarctic has long been a magnet for romantics, but also their graveyard.”

  I was not the only one to stay behind to chew over Gavin’s talk. With his New Romantics hair, Ben the marine biologist stood out, not just for having brought hair wax to the Antarctic.

  Ben was a winterer — in the Antarctic the seasons also described people: winterer, summerer. Although it was summer, Ben was still a winterer, because he had overwintered. Summerers were lightweights, fly-by-nights by comparison. Such class politics were never discussed on the ship, but this distinction was clear after only a few days on the terrestrial base. Winterers were the Antarctic elite.

  How’s it going out there in the real world? Ben told me this was the phrase he used to begin his weekly phone conversations with his mother. He spoke with her sometimes against his better instincts.

  “Sometimes I think it’s better just to live in the bubble,” he said. “It can be torture here in June or July, when you’re living in total darkness and your mates email you pictures of barbecues and parks. You know what it’s like to miss someone so much your skin hurts? I think they had it much easier in the old days, when you had one hundred words a month.”

  Ben was
referring to the pre-internet communications system, when the base commander sent one hundred words a month as a situation summary over a satellite fax; this, along with a patchy telephone line, was the only form of communiqué until the late 1990s.

  “But don’t you think this is the real world?” I asked.

  “It depends what you mean by reality.”

  On base people — especially the previous years’ winterers — repeatedly referred to the “real world” as being located somewhere else, usually the UK, but on closer questioning it seemed it could be a spectrum of possible locales: places they’d been on holiday, or had lived or worked were also considered “real.” How could they live in a sliding scale of realities, with some realities more “real” than others?

  Ben shrugged. “Things don’t really change here. I can’t explain. You’ve got to live here to understand. It’s as if once relationships stick over the winter, then that’s it, no matter who comes on base. I want to get back to the real world because there change might happen.”

  “What do you want to change?”

  “Anything!” He looked euphoric and also crushed.

  “Are you glad you went through a winter here?”

  “I’ll never forget it,” he said. “But I’ll never do it again.”

  “What did it teach you?”

  “To rely on myself. That I could not be swayed. That I could choose not to.” What did he mean? I wondered. What could he be swayed toward, swayed from? He didn’t elaborate. He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a near whisper. “You know, all through the winter here I had the strangest feeling — I felt as if I’d been put here as a custodian. As a caretaker. I felt I’d been left in charge of a child. If I wasn’t careful, it could die.”

  In was two a.m. I had lost track of time again. I went to leave.

  Tom caught my arm as he was coming out of the bar. “Are you turning in?”

  “I thought I’d go up to the Cross to watch the sun that never sets.”