by Jean McNeil
That evening we took a group walk around the point to watch the icebergs collide. This was a favourite evening entertainment as winter drew near, a kind of Antarctic demolition derby. When the powerful local gyre of Ryder Bay crashed them together, we heard a deafening grinding, then a sudden crack as the weaker of the two succumbed. Porticos and arches tumbled in a flurry of ice crystals and snow.
A single arch iceberg lay grounded in the bay with a broken buttress, trapped in the grandeur of its disintegration. The sunset shone through the giant hole in its middle. We stood in silent contemplation: Simon, Jonah, a quartet of Adélie penguins in their dinner jackets, and me.
Winter was hurtling toward us like a blunt slab of time. The antidepressants weren’t working; my brain was still taut and I couldn’t sleep. Taking them had made me feel worse, as if I had run out of hope — in experience, in life. In myself. I didn’t possess the tenacity and the endurance of the men who gave their names to this landscape, and in some cases their lives. I didn’t belong here. But by not belonging to the Antarctic, it felt as if I did not belong anywhere.
Reading South by Shackleton in my office, I stumbled across a startling passage. Up to that point, the book had been the chronicle of a great adventure gone badly wrong, then the struggle for survival. But in the chapter devoted to Shackleton’s risky break for rescue, in which he and two companions sailed in a leaky dinghy across one thousand kilometres of the most treacherous seas in the world to reach South Georgia, he wrote of their conviction that someone — an extra presence, luck, fate, destiny — had accompanied them through their ordeal:
When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snow fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing place on South Georgia. I know that during the long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.
If these men, so rational, so morally and physically tough, believed in the possibility of fate, of God, or merely of a spiritual chaperone, why did I find it so difficult to conscience?
An interest in future-telling is one of the last taboos operative in our culture. It is considered avid, unhealthy, the terrain of charlatans. The link between crystal gazing and polar exploration might be the theology of crystal itself. Scryers look into crystals to see the relationships between patterns and turbulence, between the micro and the macro, between “lattice and distributed force.” As Eric Wilson writes,
Crystals, glaciers and the poles form invitations to the uncanny, preludes to gnosis. The crystal gazer transforms the frost on the window into strange attractions. The explorer converts the unmapped pole into his inmost column. The climber transmutes the moony ice into a revelation of the ground of being. In each case, the beholder experiences a return of some repressed energy that forces him to evaluate his habitual distinctions between familiar and unfamiliar.
We all have unconscious terrae incognitae in our minds. Carl Jung proposed that in those unknown lands the future might also live, or an awareness of it, and that we might intuit the future because on some level we have already been there.
I was afraid of my future. I realized I believed there was such a thing as luck. I had a suspicion my life might actually be located outside me, programmed somewhere in a vast database, more a string of consequences than an experience owned and inhabited. I had lacked the courage to adopt an entirely rationalist approach to life. I had certainly lacked the more regular kind of courage that might see you through an Antarctic winter.
In I May Be Some Time, Francis Spufford writes, “Do we not all wonder if we are brave enough to do what these men did?” He writes of Captain Scott’s “deliberate decision to inhabit the impossible situation on one’s own terms, rather than flailing uselessly against it.” Is this not a definition of courage, even of heroism, however quixotic?
It is hard to underestimate the centrality of tragedy to the Antarctic continent. But this was now an old story, and I wondered how I was going to supersede it, as a writer. The French novelist and literary theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet examined tragedy in Towards a New Novel. The civilizing influences enacted upon the modern consciousness condition us to accept tragedy, perhaps to even expect it, he writes. “Tragedy may here be defined as an attempt to reclaim the distance that exists between man and things, and give it a new kind of value, so that in effect it becomes an ordeal where victory consists of being vanquished.”
Robbe-Grillet had a revolutionary idea about the aesthetics of tragedy: “Wherever there is distance, separation, dichotomy, division, there is the possibility of feeling them as suffering, and then of elevating this suffering into a sublime necessity.” He takes issue with the “tragified” universe that enlightenment culture has built and which has come to its apogee in the twenty-first century. He asks, might it be time to reject our own tragedy as a dismal and ridiculous fate?
March 31st
The afternoon of our last day on base we go for a last zip around the bay in the RIB. We go to the lagoon, then to Léonie Island. Our mood is buoyant now that our departure is imminent. Andy and I make coffee for everyone in the apple hut on Léonie Island and we all sit down and watch the fur seals chase each other. Two of them sidle up to us and look at our biscuits longingly with long-lashed eyes.
On our return the water is choked with translucent tumbling growlers which we must thread through carefully. On the larger floes a few remaining Weddell seals relax. They give us winningly moist looks as we pass in our orange-and-blue padded polyurethane outfits that make us look like Fahrenheit 451 firemen.
We turn a corner to find an iceberg blocking our return to base — an arch iceberg, with a hole in the centre. The ice buttressing the arch on either side is nearly rubble, like old crushed stones of a castle left to ruin.
Andy cuts the motor and we drift closer. Out of the corner of my eye I see him inspecting the arch, and suddenly I know what he will do.
He turns us in a tight circle, revs the motor, and we drive straight through the arch. At any moment tonnes of ice could fall and kill us all. As we zip through I look up, half expecting to meet my maker in the form of bluemint toothpaste ice. But then we are through, all of us gripping each other’s shoulders for support, grinning. Another reckless quest, another death cheated. We have been let through the portal, and are on our way home.
April 1st
April Fool’s. I woke this morning at four thirty a.m. with my heart pounding, the thought poised in my mind: What if the ship doesn’t come? The conversation with Ben last night runs through my head, Ben saying one of the things the Antarctic teaches you is to accept circumstances beyond your control. “If you have to sit in a tent while the weather clears, you sit in a tent. If the ship doesn’t get here, the ship doesn’t get here.”
I can’t convince my heart to stop pounding. In defeat I take half a pill of Temazepam, but that only gets me until eight a.m. I stay in bed until nine a.m., if only to try to make the day seem a little shorter. This is something I have done only twice before in my life, in episodes of deep depression.
The light is not encouraging. The sun is a black disc. As in a solar eclipse, there is too much radiance to it to call what it produces darkness, strictly speaking. The horizon is lit with a purple light, neither day or night.
In the afternoon we gathered around the computers outside the science labs to watch as the red blip on sailwx.info, the marine website that tracks ship’s movements, approach
ed Jenny Island. We needed to time our welcome: if we stayed outside for too long to watch it arrive, we would freeze. If we left it too late, we would miss its arrival.
An announcement went round on the bing-bong. “Ernest Shackleton sighted in Ryder Bay.” We all waddled up the slope to the Cross. The sky was the colour of thunderstorms. The Pentagon iceberg was unmoved, eating up most of the entrance to the bay; it could have made our rescue impossible, had it been slightly larger.
Someone yelled, “Looks like our big red taxi has arrived.”
It materialized out of a blue night, threading among the cathedrals of icebergs. We were silent, watching its approach. Andy the departing GA lay down in the snow on his back, clad in his padded boiler suit, his arms crossed over his chest, and gazed into the sky.
The ship arced round the Pentagon. Surges of emotion rippled through me: elation, gratitude, relief. Then, suddenly, nervousness. As if it were all a trick, a joke, and the ship would dematerialize just as abruptly as it had appeared.
The ship came alongside the wharf, the gangplank was down, and suddenly we were on board and into another world of fizzy water and Coca-Cola; avocado and lettuce — in Antarctic lingo, softies, freshies; other people, strangers; the return of the tick sheet; the red leather banquettes of the bar; framed maritime photographs: the Shackleton in the North Sea approaching an oil rig, the Shackleton crashing through the ice field.
Elliott the dog-musher was on board. He and his colleagues had been plucked out of Lockroy on the way down. I hadn’t seen them since the day we put them ashore from the JCR in early December. We hugged, our faces lit with Antarctic euphoria: We made it!
In the bar it was warm. For the first time in so long I took off my three layers of fleeces. The anonymous terror evaporated. My nightmare was over.
I walk through the town in the early evening. I have told my mother I am going to Donna’s. My friends are always concocting elaborate lies when they have drinking parties in the woods, or want to have a couples’ night, parked in trucks. I never have to resort to such feints. My mother never questions where I am going.
I knock on his door. There is no answer. I decide to try opening it, and the screen door gives way. The kitchen countertop is clean. Knives stand ramrod out of a knife block. The clock says three thirty p.m. It is now seven. It had stopped when he’d left, perhaps.
I sit down in the chair and hold my head in my hands while the evening darkness leans into me.
I don’t tell my mother, or rather I tell her that he left town, finally, but that we said goodbye.
“Good,” she says, her voice hard and swift, like a book rapidly shut.
I have only four weeks more in that town. In early September I will be on a train to a city sixteen hours away. There I will attend university and start my real life. My future careens toward me, and in the meantime I distract myself by drinking with Donna and her friends. We drink a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and go driving. I am at the wheel, accompanied by a boy I don’t know well. I lose control of the truck, and we are both thrown into a tree.
“You should be dead,” the nurses tell me, diplomatically, at the hospital. They are fed up of course —with battered women, murdered women, with drunken teenagers certain they are immortal.
Despite not wearing a seatbelt and sustaining extensive bruising, I have not broken a single bone. My companion is similarly unscathed, bar a bruise and a cut. My face smashed into the dashboard so hard it left an impression, a face-sized dent. “It’s not possible,” they say at the wrecking yard, when I go to identify the car. “It’s not natural,” the police say. The police are so stunned by my feat, they ring the local newspaper. In a week’s time an article will appear on my escape, calling it “miraculous.” Still, I look like a grey squirrel with my expanded cheeks and two soot eyes.
When I tell my mother, I hear her familiar casual, filigree laugh. “Like grandfather like granddaughter,” she says, that musical note in her voice so like the dangling wind chimes Elin sells in Shades of Light.
The premonition I had that afternoon a few days before I went to see my father and found him gone without explanation, that I would die that summer, was not quite misplaced. You should be dead — this is the mantra of the police, the doctors, my friends. How delighted they all sound to know it could be true.
That is when I first learn to listen to myself carefully for that hum of alarm, for the sense of a distant hand nudging me, trying to communicate across a vast and gelid realm. I won’t hear it again for many years.
As for the murderer and attacker of women in that town of backwoods capitalists and Loyalist mavens, he is never caught. After the tae kwon do woman in June, there were no more attacks. I see Michael and Paul in their patrol car, driving up and down woodlot roads, looking for a car with blacked-out windows. Or for a girl in jeans and a neon green halter top, trawling the side of the road for wild strawberries.
But before I leave at the end of that summer I have my first seizure of anxiety — this is how I will refer to them — since childhood, since the last year I lived with my grandmother and grandfather. I begin to believe — not to fear, or fancy, or imagine, but really believe — I am narrating my life from the dead, or beyond the grave. I believe I am alive, but am already in the next life. This life is the dream, and the dream I had about my father and the river is real.
My father let me drown, or drowned me, out of shame. Shame because he had wanted something from me. He did not kill me, but let me die. There is a difference.
In the dream, just like the two young women who fell victim to the murderer, my body was found, but not right away. I drifted downriver, into the stanchions of the bridge. My hair became tangled there, snagging like the long resinous river grass where the ducks hide their young.
Sometimes, at the end of my shift, at five in the morning, I restock the bar from the grumbling ice machines that stand sentinel on each floor of the Executive motel. I leave my cart and walk out the back door and go down to the shore. There I watch dawn soak the horizon, the early morning sorties of seagulls and kingfishers.
The river stands still. I will have to learn to impersonate it, to take its stillness into myself. This is what men expect women to be — a static dimension. For men, I think, whether it is this woman or that hardly matters, they are all the same fluid substance. They need to drink you, to move through you, but they are on their way somewhere else.
A heron stands in the sludgy water between the reeds up to its stick-knees. I remember the island, those years in the woods with my grandparents, the small animals, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, that looked at me with moist eyes from the perimeter of night. Also the more fierce and volatile animals who live just beyond the edge of darkness in the forest where Donna and I take refuge, their eyes boring a red hole in our backs as we walk to our drinking spot. Yes, they are definitely there, watching.
5.
THE SYMPOSIUM
polynya
A stable ice-free water space in or at the boundary of fast ice.
November, a year and a half since I left the Antarctic. The earth is warming faster than ever. In the summer, the Arctic sea ice extent crashed, melting to a summer minimum nearly half the average of the 1960s and twenty-four percent below the previous minimum set in 2005. The melt opened a navigable route through the Northwest Passage, the sea through Canada’s 36,000-island Arctic archipelago, for the first time in human history.
That year I attended many conferences, talks, seminars on climate change and the polar regions. One was an ice symposium at the British Library. The symposium blended cultural and scientific approaches to the Antarctic. One theme was about how ice cores, glaciers, and field stations could be thought of as archives, spaces of knowledge that inform how we imagine and shape our collective futures.
Another panel tackled the human rights of climate change: Inuit activists have bee
n protesting that the right to be cold is a basic human right, one which is being threatened by global warming caused by pollution emanating from other parts of the world. The speakers also evoke the plights of the inhabitants of Pacific Island states and low-elevation Indian Ocean archipelagos. What are our responsibilities — moral and legal — to those people whose lives are being changed forever by our actions?
Eric Wolff is a glaciologist and climatologist. He does not work out of Base R, which is one reason why I had not met him, but rather drills from Dome C in east Antarctica.
Wolff is speaking on a panel which aims to put the science of climate change across to non-specialists. “We talk about climate change, but how do we know which climate is the optimal one?” he asked the audience, which was mostly made up of artists, geographers, historians, and journalists. “We think it is ours now. Or is the optimal climate the one of five years ago, or fifty, or two thousand? The fact is, climate is relative and changing. What we mean is the optimal climate for our way of life. And that way of life may no longer be tenable. That way of life may have to change.”
Anthropogenic, forcings, parameters: we soaked in the cold bath of those rinsing, clarifying words, the language of modelling and climate change. “We don’t know what the outcome will be,” Wolff said from the podium. “But we are on that road already, with 350 parts per million CO2 already in the atmosphere. Even if all carbon dioxide were turned off tomorrow, the planet would continue warming by at least 1.5 degrees.”