Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  “I’m not eighteen yet, I’m only seventeen.”

  He nods. “Ah. Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t you remember when my birthday is?”

  “I do,” he nods, but I am not convinced.

  “It’s a strange age. I don’t feel young.”

  “Do you feel old?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He is very close to me. Only the table separates us. I think, this is the closest I have been to my progenitor since I was conceived.

  I see that he is nerves and surfaces, as I am. Skin. It seems an inadequate sheath for muscles, bones. I want to tear his off, to plunge my hands inside, into the tissue I learned in human geography is called adipose. Fatty, greasy, and yellow, flooded with blood. I want to travel his network of veins, like the thin roads that snake through the woodlots of the province; once inside him I will rummage for the code. He has it inside him. I am not sure if it is his, or mine for the taking.

  He is not going to let me walk home but I insist. It is still light; the sun does not go down until eight p.m. now, on the cusp of summer.

  To the west the sky is gold. I walk past the shabby downtown outlet mall, the Canadian Tire store, into the elm-shrouded streets where dark-eyed clapboard mansions clump like mushrooms in their shade.

  5.

  UPLIFTED

  ice rind

  A brittle shiny crust of ice formed on a calm surface by direct freezing, or from grease ice, usually in water of low salinity. Easily broken by wind or swell, commonly breaking in rectangular pieces.

  January 17th

  The height of the Antarctic summer. Base is disintegrating. We hear more sounds now — the sound of water trickling in rivulets, full-on funnels, waves and waves of water washing down from base into the bay.

  Around the point there is so much life. The elephant seals thump and sigh as they turn their bodies over. I have never seen so much blubber. It ripples. Their skin is tobacco coloured and peels off in giant flakes.

  Skua chicks have appeared in nests at the north end of the runway. Their mothers strafe my head as I run. Fur seals are expected soon. The population of Adélie penguins has tripled daily since late December, when we began an informal census. Every day now we see a couple of Adélies tottering toward us in their dinner jackets, like a special delegation of miniature diplomats.

  The Dash flies to Stanley and returns laden with scientists. I love the sound of the propellers, the chop-buzz-whir as the planes hurl themselves down the runway.

  This morning I was given a temporary new office-mate in Lab 7, Helen, an atmospheric chemist. Thirties, I would say. She tells me she is married and has two children at home who are currently being looked after by their father and her sister. She has short strawberry-blonde hair and dark green eyes. She looks so much more welded to the world than I am.

  I take a shine to Helen. Her desk is littered with high-end sunblock and Clarins super-strength moisturizer. She says, “The sun is a killer here, really, don’t even put your face out there for five minutes without Factor 50. Have you been told to put it under your chin yet?” I have. Last year a newcomer contracted a third degree burn after being out on the snowfield for six hours with her chin unprotected.

  Helen is keen to get out into the field, get the job done, and get home, she tells me. Her husband is less than happy about her five-week sojourn in the Antarctic. “He seems to think I’ll be seduced by a handsome pilot and never come home.”

  “Has that ever happened?”

  “I suppose one did try, about ten years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “I married him.” He shows me photographs of her pilot husband, an ex–Antarctic bush pilot who now hauls 737s for British Airways.

  Helen’s arrival reminded me that I hadn’t spent much time with women on base, apart from Suzanne, who had just left base to return to the UK. Not for lack of them — women made up about thirty percent of base population that summer. Perhaps it was demographics rather than gender that kept me from making friends with other women; the scientists were all very young. Even Melissa the doctor was five or six years younger than me.

  The history of women on base was relatively short. At Conference I’d learned that BAS’ programme in the Antarctic was off-limits to women until the 1990s, a proscription that was on a basic level about pregnancy — the medical dangers it posed, theoretically, and the difficulty of extracting a pregnant woman from the Antarctic in the winter. (Although a number of live births have taken place on the Argentine and Chilean military bases at the tip of the Antarctic peninsula.)

  Women’s introduction to the British Antarctic Programme was gradual. In 1986 at Signy, the sub-Antarctic island base, the first female scientists spent the summer; in 1993 the first woman spent the winter, and in 1997 the first woman overwintered at Base R. Since then there had been a gradual increase of the number of women on British bases.

  “There’s no longer any novelty, really,” Melissa the doctor said. “This year all of the doctors are women. We’ve had a woman plumber, even a woman pilot. It’s not all about sex, you know.” She gave me a dark look, as if I might be a proponent of this delusion. “In winter, you’ve got this overpowering sense of responsibility for your well-being, for everyone’s as well as your own. You function as a unit.”

  “A family unit?”

  “More like siblings. That’s how I think of the guys I wintered with. They’re my brothers.”

  I remembered advice — warnings, really — I had been given at Conference. It’s no place for dark horses. People like you to be real on base, to be readable. Honest, straightforward. The message was that as a woman you needed to be good company, fun, cheerful. Seductresses are bad news for Antarctic communities, dividing men, and women too. Here we were a benign army, only of any use as a unit.

  We were sitting in Melissa’s office. It was like any other GP’s office I had been to, with Post-it notes on the bulletin board, a small dispensary behind locked glass doors, and pharmaceutical manuals ranged along the wall. But a pair of crampons occupied a corner of the room, next to a ski mask and a pair of polar-issue down-filled gloves.

  Melissa exuded gravitas. Doctors necessarily played a dual role — on the one hand they were a member of the team, skiing and drinking with the rest, but they were also party to people’s deepest bodily or psychological secrets, and at any point they might be called upon to save a life, often working completely on their own.

  Talking with Melissa, I began to imagine a scenario: of being in love with someone on base, overwintering together, but for something to go wrong. I tried to imagine what it would be like to pass seven months voluntarily stranded with someone you are in love with. There would be the evanescence of the place, the uncanny light displays and celestial trompe l’oeils of a polar winter. But what if unrequited love, or jealousy, or betrayal entered the picture? No one could walk away.

  I mooted this scenario to Melissa. She looked grave for a moment.

  “Yes, that would be the nightmare. Everyone knows everything about you here. You can’t even sit at dinner together for three nights running without generating rumours. That’s why everyone is so cagey here, at least until the summer is on the horizon.

  “The thing I was most afraid of here was sparking some sort of —” She gave a sharp intake of breath. “Passion, which would lead to jealousy. As a woman among men that’s always a possibility. Over winter that would be bad news.”

  I lingered on the word, passion. Its true meaning is located in the Latin verb passere, to suffer. Even in its white-hot, requited version, passion is still a suffering, because it can never be truly sated.

  February 6th

  The light has changed. When did this happen? One day it is full blitzkrieg sun, the next there is a note of hesitation in the light.

  The summer science season is winding
down; the ice coring and radaring teams are being brought in from the field; no new teams are going out. The population of base stabilizes to sixty or seventy faces. The frantic pace eases. We linger over meals again.

  At lunch I talk to Russell, a marine biologist. He is tall and lanky, kept thin and fit by marathon running on the airstrip.

  “Why do you think people on base dislike the idea of the writers and the artists who come here?”

  “It’s not only the writers and artists,” Russell says. “It’s anyone who isn’t a scientist. If you’re a scientist, you’ve fought so hard to get here. Every person here is someone else left off the boat. The Antarctic is the only place on the planet reserved for science, and resources are finite. But also —” He pauses, as if uncertain to divulge a sudden thought. “I think it’s because here, no one is anything special. As soon as you think you might be — the arrogant types, the VIPs — you earn the ire of the crowd. Maybe there’s a feeling that writers and artists make too much of things that don’t stand up to such scrutiny. Plus, there’s jealousy of course.”

  “About what?”

  “Of all the airtime culture gets. Meanwhile scientists are working away behind the scenes, being thorough, not asking for any particular recognition, only for understanding.”

  “Actually I think we’re in an age where science has the purchase on truth,” I say.

  “It might have the purchase on truth but it doesn’t have the money or the glamour.”

  There is a truth here: I’ve learned that research science is not very well paid, until you are on a professorial salary. Then it occurs to me that people on base might think that because I am a writer I have money, or will make money out of this experience — a comical thought.

  Behind Russell’s shoulder an iceberg the size of Heathrow Airport sits framed in the dining room window. It blew in on a southerly wind this morning and parked itself at the end of the runway. This is a problem for the planes: the wind is from the north today and the pilots have to use the southern approach. But a mountain of ice stands in their way to land.

  “The pilots will just land with the wind behind them, if the chief pilot thinks it’s safe,” Russell says. “Otherwise they’ll wait it out in the field.”

  “When will the berg move?”

  “Who knows? Could be tonight, on the change of tide. Could be next week. Or never. It’s the charm of the Antarctic. Nobody knows what is going to happen from one minute to the next.”

  That night Xavier appeared in the doorway to my office with two books in his hands.

  He had returned at some point in the previous day from nearly a month on Berkner Island. He looked just like the pictures I’d seen of him in Cambridge HQ: his rosewood complexion had turned ashen. The shadow of a recently shaven beard stalked his chin.

  “I thought you might find these interesting reading.” He held up their covers. The History of Glaciology and The Spiritual History of Ice.

  I thanked him, adding, “I’ve been trying to read the Annals of Glaciology but they’re full of papers called —” here I picked up a couple of journals from my desk and read the contents page, “‘Correlation of Marine Isotope Stage 4 Crytophera Horizons Between the NGRIP and GRIP Ice Cores’ and ‘Glacier Mass Balance Modelling of the Tibetan Plateau — Mesh Dependence Issues.’”

  He laughed. “You’ll find these books a little more accessible I think. The first chapter is excellent. It describes when dinosaurs fed on tropical forests here.”

  Until 180 million years ago, the Antarctic had been part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland. Then, it had been tropical, carpeted by forests of clubmoss trees, the giant ferns of the Carboniferous era. The Antarctic is geologically similar to South Africa; you could see this in its fossil record, Xavier said, in the mineralogy: moist, carbon-rich soil, signifying coal, diamonds, perhaps gold, all buried underneath one or two kilometres of ice.

  “One hundred and fifty million years from now,” he went on, “Europe and Africa will heave together, their stone edges crumpling before finally welding together in a single continent, consuming the Mediterranean Sea. North America, Australasia and India will collide to form a new supercontinent, while South America will drown in the mid-Atlantic trench.”

  “And Antarctica?” I asked. “What will happen to it?”

  “It will stay where it is. It will become more and more isolated as the other continents move away.”

  “Then it will have what it wants,” I said. “To be alone.”

  Xavier went back to his computer. Outside the window the glacier gleamed. Two skidoos threaded their way up its flanks, carrying midnight skiers. I settled in my office, my feet propped up, soaking up the radiator’s heat, and began to read the books Xavier had lent me.

  Reading The Spiritual History of Ice, American academic Eric Wilson’s luminous study of the Romantics’ relationship with ice, reminded me that Shelley, in much of his poetry, was suspicious of ice. It was cold, aloof, haughty, deadly, Wilson writes. Glaciers were generally seen as evil. But with the coming of the Enlightenment the dark spell lightened. Glaciers became, in Wilson’s words, “repositories of magic.” Science and art combined to describe and capture the mystery of the allure of ice, and its changing fortunes.

  Goethe, meanwhile, believed that science and art were a mirror to each other, Wilson notes. “Like art, nature is a lawful, outward pattern of inner, unruly energy; it is disciplined and extravagant; it is purposeful and purposeless.… While the groaning ice of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was possessed by devils, the sublime ice of the eighteenth century was haunted by spirits connecting human souls with cosmic powers.” Glaciers, Wilson writes, were “ambiguous immensities of rectitude and weirdness, necessity and violation,” then were transformed into spirits called daimons, “familiar spirits connecting poets to life.” These translator spirits guided poets in their quest to know and represent nature. And so, Wilson concludes, the modern sublime was born.

  It was three in the morning when I stopped reading. In my window the black peaks of Reptile Ridge — so called because its spiny back looks like that of an iguana — loomed, tipped with the fire-glow of the perpetually setting sun. There was no sign of the midnight skiers but they could have returned long ago, driving the skidoos in the blue twilight.

  I walked through the silent corridors of Bransfield House. In each of the laboratories silver equipment boxes were stacked, just returned from the field. Inside were ice core driller bits, radaring equipment, echo sounders — the instruments of the search for the frozen lakes trapped kilometres beneath the surface of the ice, the accelerating ice streams, the fracturing glacier at Pine Island.

  All base was silent except for the hum of the generator. Only Bubba the skua — who I knew would be waiting for me on the other side of the door — and I were awake. I liked base best at this hour; deserted, it felt fully extraterrestrial, a landlocked spaceship held fast in the ice.

  I swung the door open to say goodnight to Bubba and recoiled in shock. I put my hand out into the night air and felt a substance thick and dark, like the pelt of an animal.

  It was night, or a version of it. The skies were changing quickly; gone were the days of blaring sun and the lava fields of the stalled sunsets we witnessed in early January. Out of a cream sky a half sun showed itself. It hesitated above the horizon, as if undetermined whether to rise. Its light was glaucous and stringy, like albumen.

  In two weeks’ time the planes would begin to leave; first the Otters, then the Dash, after flying one last sortie to the Falkland Islands. Then the base population would be reduced to those of us awaiting the last ship of the season, the Ernest Shackleton, due in late March.

  I reached for my little plastic name tag and moved it from the On Base section to Pit Rooms. I said my customary goodnight to Bubba and went to bed.

  February 7th

  Today was Tom’s turn to le
cture at the University of the Bottom of the World. He talked about his recent trip to the South Pole, illustrated with photos.

  He tells us there are actually four South Poles: the Geographic South Pole at the southern end of the earth’s rotational axis — this was what Roald Amundsen first reached in 1911. The Magnetic South Pole is where the lines of force of the earth’s magnetic field converge. This moves, or “wanders,” every year and is currently somewhere in the Southern Ocean. The Geomagnetic South Pole is a theoretical point that marks the southern end of the earth’s geomagnetic field. It also moves, and is currently somewhere near the Russian station, Vostok, in southeast Antarctica. And finally, there is my favourite, the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility — the place farthest away, in all directions, from the Antarctic coast.

  We get to see the American Antarctic. Tom witnessed the American summer traverse from the McMurdo base on the coast to Amundsen-Scott at the South Pole. He cycles through photos of lunar, lumbering vehicles, hybrid tractor-combine harvesters, snow caked on their treads, hauling shipping containers on giant sledges.

  “It’s a little different down there,” he says. The American Antarctic is slick and big, predictably: a far more corporate approach than our modest Edwardian venture. There is an ATM linked up with the mainland banking system via satellite. Their accommodation looks like a large university block building in, say, Wisconsin. They have a bowling alley and basketball court.

  We stare in wonder at the potbellied C-130 landing on the ice runway, the tractor-combine harvester snowblowers like winged steel dragons, the Moon Unit three-storey accommodation blocks, their giant probing telescope, their lavish ice runway, the Coors and Miller shipped by crate all the way from California while we make do with Uruguayan beer procured in Stanley. We can’t help but look around at the walls that enclose us: the Portakabin décor of the dining hall, the photographs of dog sledge teams and wind-shredded Union Jacks, the dart board and pool table. The Americans are living in the present, if not the future, while Base R lives in the stalled Edwardian fable of Scott’s Antarctic.