Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  Around us fine crystals of snow were scurried by the wind. This faint rustling was the only sound. But then I detected a vague buzzing, like the distant sound of an aircraft. I had heard this once before in the Ellsworths, on our thrilling mission in early January. It was the sound of me, a humid hum of blood pumping, the electrical field of a body, normally drowned out by the sounds of everyday life.

  The sun was overhead but soon it would dip. It was time to descend. George and I picked up our packs. I took one last look at the scene.

  Even though I had been in the Antarctic for months I was still shocked by the landscape, its sudden violence — black nunataks, the omnipresent crevasses — blended with satisfyingly iterative patterns of stern vertiginous mountains rippling into the horizon, thick icing cakes of unstable ice, ripe for avalanche, and the pale blue seams of crevasses and bergschrunds that ribbon across them, like stripes in white candy. It was so impervious to our gaze and our touch that its rebuff felt personal.

  This is another moment I tried to seal against time: George and me sitting in the snow on the top of Stork, looking out into the frozen world of early winter Adelaide Island, eating a bar of time-warp bitter chocolate that looks no different from the day it was manufactured. Everything shimmers. Far from implacable and flat, the ice field seems to be vibrating. Or maybe it is just the beating of our hearts.

  The days darkened. Our skies became lambent and unbelievable. New icebergs arrived in the bay, envoys of winter. Simon told me they were remnants of the Pine Island glacier. An enormous girded berg had drifted in on the gyre from the Bellingshausen Sea and sat in the mouth of the bay. On the water grease ice formed, its surface a dull grey matte that neither absorbed nor reflected the little light that penetrated our dingy skies.

  The runway was frozen. Running was exhausting, as I had to break the hard outer layer of snow, then try to extract my feet from its soft underbelly. The wind chill brought the temperature down to minus thirty-five. I didn’t need a thermometer. I knew this threshold from experience, the stinging-tightening feel that meant my skin was freezing, so I rubbed my face as I ran and kept my fingers moving constantly. There was not much I could do about my toes — running in mukluks would be even more exhausting. I didn’t sweat; my body wanted to, but any moisture was instantly freeze-dried, even beneath three layers of fleece. Icicles built up on my eyebrows until I was running with a miniature ice-ledge on my face.

  Fur seals had colonized one end of the runway. There they lolled and barked and mated. The males were territorial. A male and his girlfriends wallowed in a moat of snow beside the airstrip. I would try to step gingerly around the harem, running in a wide arc into the middle of the strip, but the males growled and gave chase anyway, slumping along behind me, barking, like some computer-animated hybrid dog-seal. Meanwhile the north end of the runway was claimed by outraged mother skuas who dive-bombed me. I ran with the shadows of these miniature pterodactyls swirling around my head, flailing my arms in a polar version of The Birds.

  People watching in the cafeteria got a panoramic view of a snow-covered, panting Frosty the Snowman figure, bundled in fleece and a couple of hats, chased by the palace guard seal-dogs, then set upon by the pterodactyls. The field assistants told me my daily attempts at keeping fit were the only real amusement left.

  What they didn’t know was that these daily routines of exhaustion were the only way I could keep myself steady. More than the anti-anxiety pills I had started to take, even, the runway was my saviour. There, shuttling between the fur seals and the pterodactyls, I tried to dissipate my anxiety and strip myself of the cloying, perverse cloak of Antarctic Base Time.

  The week before I had finally taken the decision to do something. The anxiety attacks, if that is what they were, had spooked me. I was now mixing my anti-anxiety pills with antidepressants — quite a feat for a pharmaphobe who usually hesitates to take an Aspirin. The antidepressants made me feel as if my edges were blurred. The physiological effects were obvious — strange chills rippling through my cerebellum, the instant insomnia — but the emotional ones were harder to pinpoint. Antidepressants often seem to make people feel contained, as if their emotions have been herded into a holding pattern. The pills mute the feeling, fraught with dread, that you are going to lose composure. But in turn they dull the lineaments of the self, leaving an unfamiliar, if calm, husk.

  I hadn’t had an anxiety attack in twenty years. These episodes were different from the ones I remembered having when I first moved to Britain. In the Antarctic, the fear seemed to be generated by my body rather than my psyche. I might have been suffering from claustrophobia and feelings of abandonment, but surely these were not strong enough to produce vomiting and insomnia, the sprinting accelerations of my heartbeat, the blaring, red-eyed fear. I asked myself — or my body — What’s wrong? The answer came back. I don’t know. Just get me out of here.

  The telephone rooms were barren of all decoration, apart from an ice axe affixed to the wall; Very convenient, I couldn’t help thinking, for when the Base R resident gets the Dear John phone call from his girlfriend, or learns that his father has died suddenly and she will not be going to the funeral. I kept a leery eye on the ice axe as I telephoned friends, in Rio de Janeiro, in Sussex, in London, in Toronto. Within a few minutes of talking to anyone I was in tears. I couldn’t understand how this was happening. I called them only to have a conversation, but the sound of their voices, so far away, in another world, turned my panic up several notches.

  As winter settled, the landscape turned dark and blank. I no longer woke up expecting or hoping to see sun or blue sky. The continent was closing in on itself. Each winter the Antarctic doubles its mass in sea ice, effectively locking itself away from the world for seven months as the planet tilts away from the sun.

  My belief that something would go very wrong intensified. I was convinced the ship — which had not yet left the Falklands — would sink and I would be left in the Antarctic for a winter, or forever, among people I didn’t understand and who didn’t like me. I spotted a small item in the world news section of our weekly printout of the Observer: “Buenos Aires engages in sabre-rattling over islands.” Argentina had suddenly slapped regulations on shipping, requiring any ship flying the Falklands flag — as the JCR does — to remain outside of Argentine coastal waters or face seizure.

  Other fears were new to me. I didn’t know where they came from. I was assailed by sudden if vague memories of exile, of being separated from my family, in a time before even letters. There was no communication and I died without seeing them again. But when? Whose memories were these, since none of this had happened to me? These fears didn’t belong to my life, so what was their providence, some other life?

  The paranoia might have been generated by the chemical tension of the pills I was taking for the anxiety. It felt as if all my brain cells were shredding themselves. The pain was on a neuronal level. I clenched my teeth, had heart palpitations, bright lights flashed across my mind — garish fairground colours, purples and oranges.

  I had read about Arctic hysteria — perleroneq in Greenlandic — which comes on the back of the sudden autumn darkness. In the Arctic it affects not only people, but dogs; this reassured me, that not only the weak and fragile human psyche succumbed. The afflicted — people and dogs — often erupt into violence, or fits. Sometimes they try to kill people.

  The despair was spiritual, mental, and emotional. Something was so wrong with me, it was like a disease. It was both part of me — generated by me — but external.

  I had come up against an adversary I had never met before, and it lived inside me. It seemed I was experiencing a direct confrontation with those darkling energies that course just under the skin of our existences, so hidden and elusive they might be like shy animals in the night: once you go looking for them, turning your flashlight on those hidden dark corners, they take fright and run away.

  March 23rd
<
br />   We fill our days with routine: breakfast, smoko, the Team Timed Crossword, lunch, smoko, dinner, then blockbuster films in the bar. There is an air of exhaustion; at night in the bar, few people talk with animation. Most stare silently into their cans of Guinness. We are almost out of beer and ready to start on the cider stocks — a sobering prospect.

  I try to read. But I find I can’t read anything about the Antarctic. But all my books are about the Antarctic. I try to write. This is worse. I break out into a cold sweat.

  I instruct myself to sit down. I deal myself a few basic facts: You are here to write a novel. You will never be here again. You need to live this life before you can write about it. But you also need to get going. Novels do not write themselves.

  Class dismissed, I pace and try to free myself from this nameless vice grip by thinking. An idea begins to cohere. I start on the book I have been sent here to write.

  To write fiction requires a subjunctive cast of mind — what if something were to be true, then how would things be? It is the what if approach. For example, what if, in an alternate Britain in the late 1980s, cloning science advanced sufficiently to have a race of clones living alongside “real” human beings, so that their organs could be mined to keep their legitimate brethren alive? That is the scenario that informs Kazuo Ishiguro’s great novel Never Let Me Go.

  The what if that presented itself to me was less sinister, but it had a similar dystopian tinge. What if, a few years in the future, a pandemic destabilized the world, and in the chaos that ensued a researcher, a writer much like me, were left to overwinter? What if a young woman had died on base a few years before, in mysterious circumstances that looked like suicide?

  Before I went to Antarctica I thought, Whatever happens in the novel I write out of this experience, no one is going to die. I’d had enough of the equation between the Antarctic and oblivion. But now, having lived on the continent for long enough, I knew how available death was, here, and how to die in the Antarctic would be an unordinary death. It would by definition be spiritual; in its white negation of human life, you would not so much die but dissolve into a historyless dimension, into particles of light.

  As I sketched out this fictional scenario in my mind, I looked out of the window onto the runway. Now that the mountains surrounding base were covered with snow, if, for some emergency the pilots did miraculously return, they wouldn’t be able to use their exposed flanks as markers. Everything was too white. When visibility crashed, you could easily find yourself in what the pilots called the “Ping-Pong ball”: white sky, white land, and enveloping mist. “Only your instruments tell you which way is up and which is down,” Tom once said.

  But caught in the Ping-Pong ball, many pilots, even very experienced ones, cease to believe what their instruments tell them and listen to their inner ear, or allow their eyes to manufacture ghost horizons. The plane begins to tip in their hands, imperceptibly at first, but then at a greater and greater angle, until they are locked in a tight downward curve, the dreaded “dead-man’s spiral.”

  I wondered if this was what I was in, emotionally. Now that the planes were definitively gone, I realized that our isolation was not only procedural, because there were no planes to airlift us out, but also symbolic. Flying is power, and knowledge. When we can no longer fly over the Antarctic the landscape assumes its textbook description: a threat, an ice jail, another planet.

  That night a red-gold moon appeared in our sky — an autumn harvest moon. I stood under it in my shirtsleeves. Mark, a field assistant from Northern Island, appeared and tapped me on the shoulder.

  I’d spoken to Mark several times. He had a thin face and watery green eyes. He was friendly, older than his cohorts, a little older than me, perhaps, and easy in his own skin.

  “Aren’t you a bit chilly?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, I’ll show you some pictures of my trip to Berkner in January. I heard you wanted to get out to Berkner with Tom.”

  “Is that who you flew with?”

  “Yes, he’s great, Tom. He likes to show you things. It’s almost as if the Antarctic is his home, and he’s proud to show you around.”

  Mark’s photographs appeared on the screen of his laptop. We saw the Ronne Ice Shelf depot, called Bluefields, the miraging sea smoke that rims it, produced by the open ocean coming smack up against the white cliff of the ice shelf. Mark told me about his three drop-in visits to Base Z, once to have a shower and do his washing. These visits were so swift he didn’t even meet anyone on the platform base.

  Base Z perches on the edge of a giant ice shelf 1,600 kilometres to the east of Base R. While it can accommodate up to seventy people in the summer, it has a core overwintering staff of only sixteen. Base Z is much more inaccessible than Base R. A ship, usually the Shackleton, does relief in late December, when the changeover of personnel takes place. Other than flying visits from Twin Otters, that is the sum of Base Z’s interaction with the outside world. For 105 days at the height of the Antarctic winter, the sun does not rise above the horizon. And while on sunny summer days temperatures can rise to a balmy zero degrees Celsius, in the winter temperatures normally stay below minus twenty with extreme lows of around minus fifty-five.

  Mark would be leaving with us on the ship.

  I asked him, “If you had to stay another winter, how would you feel?”

  “It wouldn’t be the end of the world. There’s enough food on base to last two years, probably more.”

  “Is there anything you miss about wintering?”

  “The skies,” he answered without hesitation. “The aurorae. You see skies down here you can see nowhere else on the planet, skies no other human being has seen, possibly, ever.” He landed on the word, ever, with biting conviction.

  “Also, I like that I haven’t locked anything with a key or paid for anything in a year and a half. I wonder if I’ll be one of those winterers who gets to the Falklands, goes into the supermarket, and walks off with a chocolate bar without paying for it.”

  Mark leaned toward me over the table and looked around, as if to make sure we were not being overheard. “It’s so great to forget that we live in this exhausting world where everything is for sale.” He drew back. “There’s one thing I’m looking forward to, though — seeing strangers. People I don’t know. Faces. People I’ll never talk to, even. I never knew that was so important.”

  “But the people who come down here in the summer, they’re strangers — you don’t know them for a while.”

  “But you do get to know them,” he said. “When I first came here, I thought the limitation of the Antarctic was variety — there was only a set kind of food or set possibilities within a single day. But the limitation is actually possibility.”

  “The possibility of what?”

  “Anything. You might meet a complete stranger, or do something unexpected. Whether it happens or not is unimportant. But the possibility needs to exist.”

  Mark had just handed me the key to my growing internal emergency. It wasn’t about only our physical confinement, or the fact that there was now only one way out, but that every day was mapped before it began. There were a limited number of people, some of whom I had never spoken to at all, and would not, due to enmities and cliques and entropy. The possibilities of each day were constrained; I would go for a run outside or on the treadmill or for a walk around the point; I would read the books lined up on my desk and write up my handwritten notes and work on my book.

  But, I asked myself, in my usual life in north London, would it be any different? Each day would similarly have a limited range of possibilities. I would go to work at my job or write at my desk, go to the supermarket, I would talk to my friends on the phone — it wasn’t as if I would be delivered a life-changing chance encounter simply by occupying that position on the planet.

  But in London there would be the potential, howev
er remote, for something to happen, a chance meeting, an invitation, an event brewed by moving one’s body through a space replete with buildings, streets, people, parks, galleries, restaurants, buses, and trains. I might see a person I would never see again, whom I would know nothing about, but it would be unanticipated. It would be a surprise.

  Here the same forty-two people would eat breakfast in silence, heads in cereal bowls while leafing desultorily through a National Geographic we had looked at many times before. Then we would eat lunch together, then dinner.

  Looking at Mark’s photos lifted me out of my strange terror, if temporarily. I went back to my office. The window was plastered with snow stencils again. In front of it were my books, lined up in alphabetical order — in an effort to quell panic I had turned into an uncharacteristically ordered person, organizing my books, sorting and re-sorting notes and photographs. My computer files now had titles like Magic, The Cosmology of Ice, Crystallography, Albedo, Climbing, Capitalism, Coleridge, Scrying, Catastrophism, Faust, Thomas Mann, Fridtjof Nansen, Edgar Allan Poe, The Little Ice Age (Europe, in the Middle Ages), The Last Glacial Maximum, Aliens.

  I left the building. Base was flooded with silvery blue moonlight, like foil. The ring of mountains around base reflected it, and the full moon on the snow was so bright it drowned out the starlight. I had wandered onto a stage set for a chill Wagnerian opera, the moonlit mountains a theatre backdrop for giants. They might have revealed themselves at any moment, clad in taffeta, magnanimous, beckoning us to a dimension of ease, of golden summers and bucolic trees.