Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  But like all the glaciologists I met, Oddvar was gripped by his profession, by the remote, metaphysical aspects of glaciology’s collision between the numinous and the numbers, the pure math of it, so he humoured me.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I take the data and give it to my PhD students, who are modelling ice sheet behaviour. They’ll feed it into the models and, depending on the parameters and the forcings, we’ll refine the equations that govern the flow velocity and its increase.”

  “But is it the warming sea that’s causing it to flow faster?”

  “That’s part of it, but not the whole story. The flow rate is governed by what happens on the bottom of the ice sheet. The base is where the increased heat speeds up melting, which speeds lubrication, which speeds outflow.”

  Max had told me that much of the behaviour of ice sheets was still not well understood. Looking at Oddvar’s maps of the Rutford Ice Stream it was difficult to imagine that such a broad tongue of solid ice was buoyed by a greasy layer of slush, heated to the melting point by the thermal energy of friction as two kilometre-thick ice slid over rock, far beneath us.

  “The ice sheets are in constant motion,” Oddvar went on. “Just as the continents are, just as the earth is spinning. I always try to remind myself that I’m not standing on solid ground.”

  I left the melon hut to go to the bathroom. At Ice Blue a pyramid toilet tent sat above a pit of frozen shit and piss called the Craporium. There was no smell, but still it was not recommended to dwell too long on the stalagmites and stalactites that coated the ice chamber beneath me. The Antarctic made you acutely aware of bodily functions. I wondered what I was going to do the next day in the Ellsworths, in a remote field camp with four men and Tom. There were no snowdrifts or rocks or trees to hide behind there, there was no Craporium.

  I returned to the melon hut to a raging argument. “Scott was gay!” Oddvar was shouting. “I mean, I have nothing against gay people …”

  “Amundsen was an alcoholic,” Eric rejoindered.

  “Scott was gay and an alcoholic!” shouted Oddvar.

  This was known as the Romanticism vs. Practicality debate, an Antarctic conversational trope so common yet gripping it was impossible not to join in. It goes something like this: practical Amundsen, mechanically shooting and devouring his faithful dogs on his Formula One dash to the Pole, versus Scott the humane animal-lover, refusing to put animals through such cruelty (despite unwittingly slaughtering a brace of Siberian ponies he imported to the continent, unaware that they would be no match for its supernatural cold), and who insisted that he and his men manhaul to the Pole.

  “That race was won on calories,” I said, provoking a hum of approval.

  “Why must the English glorify those who have failed?” Oddvar shouted back. “Why are they insisting on this bloody romanticism? The only mistake Amundsen ever made was not to die!”

  I bedded down in a lightweight tent pitched beside the melon hut that night, an eye mask clamped over my eyes against the light. It was a long time before I could get to sleep. I was safe, among other people, and it was summer. This was not the lethal Antarctic which Scott and his brethren had encountered. Still, as I listened to the hiss of the wind I found myself thinking of the dire final days of his expedition.

  I had read Scott’s diaries; they were salutary and almost required reading for anyone who sojourned in Antarctica. It is still perhaps the best-known story about the Antarctic: how the British Antarctic Expedition from 1910–1913, led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, competed with the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen to be the first human beings to reach the geographic South Pole. How Amundsen beat them to the Pole by five weeks. Scott, accompanied by four men, Lawrence Oates, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, and Edgar Evans, did manage to reach the pole, but died of starvation and exposure on the return journey to their base camp at Cape Evans on Ross Island.

  Scott’s diary suggests the leader may have lived for a day or so after the two other remaining men alive, Wilson and Bowers, succumbed to death, frozen in their sleeping bags. By then he may not have been able to stand, let alone walk. He may just have lain there, his feet ruined, their soles separated from the flesh and bone.

  As is well known, the tragedy of Scott’s demise is partly because it could so easily have been different. Only eighteen kilometres separated Scott and his men from survival — the distance from the frozen tent, found a year later, to the cache of food and fuel at One Ton Depot. Had he placed the depot at a shorter distance, or managed to press on to reach it, at least three of the five men may have lived.

  That night in the tent at Ice Blue was the only time I have slept alone in the Antarctic. It was only minus fifteen outside, and it was light. Next to me was the melon hut where four men bedded down, and beyond it, a pyramid tent where the two Ice Blue petrol station attendants on long-term secondment had retreated in favour of the guests. I was hardly alone. Still I stared at the pale canvas wings of the tent flapping in the wind, at the dark slit of the tent’s zipper, closed against the outside air.

  I wondered at the closing of a life in such a place. How it would feel to know rescue is impossible, that one’s body, even, may vanish, eaten by the ice. How it would — how it will, eventually — feel to know you are about to enter into an order of truth that is beyond experience. To be so far from humans, from human history, to die that way, would have seemed to me a distinct death. I had the idea that somehow the abandonment of the self by the self that death entails might have felt less bitter, here. That Scott might have been overtaken by a feeling of protectiveness, of responsibility — that he needs to stay close to his death, or it might leave him behind. As if it is he, and not Death, who is in charge of his dying.

  The next morning, Tom and I packed up to go. The Otter had only a rudimentary navigational system, so we would fly using a map marked with GPS coordinates to the deep field camp pitched in the shadow of the Ellsworth Mountains, where two geologists were collecting rock samples.

  We took off and headed northeast. After two hours of flying, black crystals appeared on the Otter’s windscreen. As we got closer, the crystals became the triangles of mountains. The Ellsworth mountains are a ruche in the otherwise flat fabric of the ice sheet. Located south of the frozen perimeter of the Ronne Ice Shelf, the Ellsworths are part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that forms the neck and tail of the Antarctic continent.

  We spotted the camp, located in the lee of the Vinson Massif, the highest of the Ellsworths, three black specks on a glaring sheet of ice. We banked and landed in a flurry of snow crystals and suddenly I was hugging two orange boiler suits I had never met before. The boiler suits loaded their samples into the plane while Tom took me for a walk. Bamboo sticks with black flags marked an area safe from crevassing.

  The Ellsworths towered above us, black tors against a lordly blue sky. I could see the crevasses huddled in their skirts. Apart from geologists, only rich climbing adventurers came, I was told — heart surgeons and venture capitalists brought by specialized tour companies to pit themselves against this still largely unexplored range.

  I lost track of time: we had arrived at eleven a.m.; now it seemed close to midnight. Or was it noon? Was it possible we had only been here an hour? I asked Tom, who gave me a puzzled look. “We’ve been here six hours, probably more. Don’t you wear a watch?”

  I was hefting a box of samples into the fuselage when Tom guided my eye back toward the tents. “Look,” Tom pointed into the sky. Above us, the sky was black. Two silver haloes ringed the tops of the tents, and the sun. They were not perfect circles, but incomplete parabola, like rainbows.

  “Parhelia,” Tom said. “Sun dogs.”

  We both looked at the ground beneath our feet. Snow crystals, light as coconut, flurried over our boots. On base we had the sea next to us, a recognizable dimension. The ice cap on the other hand felt exactly like its name — like li
ving on a hubcap.

  We finished loading and clambered back into the cockpit. The snow was packed hard, unlike the slush at Base K: we were airborne quickly, buoyed on the anoxic air of the plateau. I caught a glimpse of Tom’s watch; it was two in the morning. The sun gave us no clue as to the time; it merely patrolled the sky in an ellipsis.

  We circled the camp, banking at an abrupt angle. My shoulder was forced against the cockpit window. The geologists stood between the two tents, waving furiously. Even at an altitude of only three hundred metres the whole speck of human endeavour had virtually disappeared: the tents, radio transmitter, skidoos, and sledges were only a cluster of particles against the ice sheet.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I couldn’t see Tom’s eyes behind his sunglasses, but I could hear it in his voice, the tug of consensus.

  I nodded, although I was not sure what to call it.

  “Time to earn your keep,” Tom said.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to fly the plane. I’ve got some paperwork to do.”

  I put my hands on the controls. The Otter was less difficult to fly than the Dash. It is a rustic, two-engine plane, ideal for polar environments and the bush, one of the strongest and most reliable planes in the world. I fixed my eyes on the artificial horizon and the altimeter, but from time to time I managed to look out the window at the landscape we were passing over.

  Below us waves of sastrugi were caught by the sun, turned into shimmering ice snakes. Glaciers hunched, hummocking toward the sea. Over my shoulder, to the northwest, I could just glimpse open water, two narrow channels of blue — that deep, gem-like blue of water in the Antarctic. But this was a mirage. We were too far from open water. On the ice field I watched our shadow chase us. On its edges was a prism of light like a moving rainbow.

  We flew for hours. Beneath us, flat white turned into land that looked like a crumpled piece of paper. This was the peninsula and its familiar mountains.

  Our flight was smooth. I was getting better at holding altitude. I relaxed enough to look over my shoulder, back at where we had come from. I imagined the perimeter of the continent, sea ice hunched against its shores.

  Tom poked my shoulder. I thought he was rebuking me for taking my eyes off the sky in front of me. I pulled my gaze back. His voice came over the intercom.

  “Never look back,” he said. “It’s bad luck.”

  He shook his head. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. Instead I saw a mirror version, compressed, of me, my hands on the controls, my earphones and microphone.

  “But why?”

  “Pilot’s superstition. Keep your eyes focused ahead of you. You never know what will happen.”

  We arrived back at Base R at seven in the morning. We were exhausted. Tom powered the plane down and we sat in silence for a moment. The sky was spliced into layers of orange, blue, gold.

  “Well,” Tom said. “Home for tea and medals.”

  At home Mark is watching Wimbledon. Mark did his PhD in England; he’d lived there for four years. He spoke about punk, strikes, a whole nation watching itself fall apart. He talked about those years as often as possible, inserting them into conversations. A light came on inside him. As if only there had he been truly alive.

  I have never been to England. From television, PBS serials, and the music it exports, I have cobbled together an unseemly puzzle of contradictory images: a grittier place, poorer and conflicted, yet it supports dowager monarchs and disintegrating mansions. I don’t know it, but in four years’ time I will go to live there, initially for two years, then forever.

  My mother comes in the room and stares at the rectangle of green on the television, the two cavorting figures in white. “Those women shouldn’t walk alone at night.”

  “Men walk alone at night,” I say. “Why shouldn’t women?”

  “Men get attacked too.”

  “Not the same way women do.”

  “They do,” my mother says. “Believe you me. You just don’t hear about it.”

  My mother gives me an opaque look. I have the impression she is trying to muster concern but can’t quite arrive at the pitch and temper required. If something were to happen to me, I have the feeling that my mother would not be glad, exactly, but that it would confirm some essential supposition about the universe and its workings for her. There would be a symmetry, a vindication.

  We meet again, this time at the Executive, where I work. I can’t be seen to drink at work so I decline his offer of a beer.

  “What do you do here?”

  “Bus tables. Serve alcohol, although not legally of course.”

  “But you work at that store.”

  “I have three jobs, technically.” I don’t tell him about the stables where I work, the horse I keep there and which I have managed to support for several years now.

  “How do you keep it all going?” He squints at me. “With school and all that.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I never think about it. All I know is nobody’s going to pay for my university. Since my mother married Mark all her money goes to their children, and because the authorities take his salary into account, I don’t qualify for a provincial loan.

  He gives me a look I’ve never seen before. Admonitory, but with a shallow note of kindness buried in it.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how old I am, what my plans for the future are?” I am trying to be sharp to give some substance to the boggy feeling inside me.

  “Not if you don’t want me to. Which it sounds like you don’t.”

  “So what have you been doing?” I don’t add all these years.

  “Well, for five years or so I worked up in the Northwest Territories as a bush pilot. Then I flew out west, in British Columbia. For Air Canada.”

  That might explain the expensive watch. I know nothing about watches but his has a foreign glint — a soft brushed metal I have never seen before but not unlike the pewter earrings sold in Shades of Light.

  “Where were you based up north?

  “Resolute Bay. I flew in Greenland for a summer, when Air Greenland were short of pilots. That was interesting — it’s covered by a permanent ice cap.”

  “I know. That’s what sunk the Titanic, an iceberg from Greenland.”

  He smiles. There is a hesitation and a delicacy in it I have never seen in any other man’s smile. A note of disbelief.

  He sits back. His coffee is nearly untouched.

  “Do you have any children?” I mean to say, any other children. But something stops me.

  “Yes, a boy and a girl. They live with their mother out west.”

  “Why aren’t you there?”

  “I wanted to come home. I have to go back soon. I can’t stay.”

  I find myself staring at his mouth. A hungry mouth, a shade crueller than my own.

  He starts to speak. It is a long while before he stops. I am unused to adults coming out with such soliloquies and listen, blinking.

  He tells me about Africa, the Namib Desert and a strange German town where he was based while flying there, about the desert elephant who roam the sands searching for water, the plants that never see rain but which feed on the mist of the cold ocean. “The colours were incredible. How the sun would hit the dunes in certain lights. They looked like they were on fire. As far as you could see, stretching into Angola. A coast on fire.”

  My mind leaps to life, as if I had been anaesthetized. I can see the desert that locks into the ocean’s edge. This landscape I find myself in — the woods gnarled with tightly packed pine, the cryogenic slumber of its endless winter, fails to move me.

  “The ocean is cold there. There’s a current from Antarctica. When it hits the hot shores of Namibia, it throws up a thick fog.”

  I am lost for a while, thinking of a place where h
ot and cold collide in two rigid streams. Antarctica, Namibia. Their names have the ethereal sound of distant kingdoms, haunts of dragons and ogres.

  How differently he speaks, I think — fulsome, descriptive, like characters in novels. My mother speaks in cryptic remnants of intent, in orders and instructions. For the first time I take the estimation of this man I have in front of me as someone separate from me, released from the burden of the word. Father.

  We take a walk by the river. When he moves it is crisp, urgent. Maybe all pilots move like this, I think. I like to look at his profile hard against the sky and the razor tops of trees. I decide what I like about him: he is certain, he doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t act guilty or furtive.

  “I thought you were a stalker, or even this guy, the guy who has been,” I stop, unable to say it. “When you followed me in the car.”

  “I didn’t want you to think that.”

  “Do you remember me when I was a baby?”

  “I only saw you twice, just after you were born.”

  “What did I look like?”

  “Like a baby.”

  I laugh.

  “Let me show you where I’m staying.” He had told me he’d rented the apartment downstairs from a friend. The house was a short walk from the river, one of those prosperous bungalows with a separate apartment attached.

  To his friend, a man his age named Mr. MacKenzie, he introduces me. He does not say, my daughter. He leads me into an anonymous living room. It contains a rocking chair, a sofa in a checked pattern, an outmoded television.

  “How long are you staying?”

  “A week, maybe.”

  Maybe what? Another thing I don’t voice. Meeting him is refining the dual current I am learning to cultivate in my mind, and which seems to be part of being an adult, that of the things you think versus the things you say.

  He gives me a look of disinterested appraisal. “You know, you don’t strike me like an eighteen-year-old girl. Not that I know so many of those.”