Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  I want to remember this. The sheets of sea ice beneath us, the cold gold light of the midnight sun on the snow, my pilot friend beside me, an exhausted vigilance in his eyes. But just as quickly as impressions formed, they slid from whatever had produced them — neurons, synapses — before I could capture them.

  Then we were on the ground, buzzing to a stop amid flying gravel. But nothing was ever over that Antarctic summer because there was no night, and everything was day, and thrill, and promise.

  I attended the British Library symposium in part because I was preparing for another expedition. It had taken two years to put together, but in early February I was to return to the Antarctic.

  In the meantime I had been to the Arctic, to Svalbard, where I undertook a writer-in-residency at the art gallery in Longyearbyen. How alive the Arctic is, when compared to the Antarctic! I couldn’t stop walking around town taking notes, bending down to snap photographs of the tiny snowdrops and the meltwater coursing down the road.

  At 79° N there were flowers, reindeer, Arctic fox, Arctic hare, running water, birds, polar bears. The air had the familiar cold sting of the polar regions, but the sun was blistering — warmer than a similar latitude in Antarctica. I told my Norwegian friend, Silje, that at 79° S in the Antarctic, the latitude of Ice Blue, nothing grows. There are no animals, not even birds. It is clinically dead.

  Silje and I stood in the middle of Longyearbyen’s main street at two in the morning. Most people were asleep, cocooned in rooms with tin foil taped to the windows to banish the perpetual light. Sun streamed down from the vertical coal hills that surrounded the settlement. At last I stood under the ellipsis sun again.

  During the day I interviewed people in town about climate change and tourism. More and more people were coming to the Arctic “to see it before it melts,” and Svalbard is the most accessible place in the entire high Arctic, serviced by daily flights from Tromsø and Oslo.

  In the never-ending evenings, Silje and I would take a steep walk up an abandoned coal mine, or have a midnight barbecue at a rustic cabin outside town. We had to carry a .308 rifle with us everywhere: 1,500 people live on the Svalbard archipelago, but so do five thousand polar bears. Before we were allowed to stay in the settlement we had to put in time on the shooting range and demonstrate that we could shoot a bear target accurately.

  In the summers the archipelago is increasingly ice-free, especially on the warmer western coast, and famished polar bears come into town to forage for rubbish, a reindeer, or humans. Two years earlier two teenaged girls went snowmobiling on top of the western ridge that towers over the town. One was killed by a young female bear; the other threw herself over the cliff to save herself and broke nearly every bone in her body, but she survived.

  The Arctic sea ice summer extent was at its lowest in recorded history. I had finished the novel I had been despatched to the Antarctic to write. It would be published the following year. In Svalbard that summer, I began to write another book about ice, not a novel, but an exploration of ice in its more metaphorical meanings as well as an account of my travels in the polar regions. I realized I needed more time on the continent. I began to feel a hunger to return — although whether to the real Antarctic, or to the idea of it, I was not certain.

  Back in London on an afternoon in late August, I began to square myself up to this project. The country was flooded. A few days before, London had experienced a tropical deluge. At a party I talked to a friend, Maxine, about this book I was thinking of writing, with the working title of Ice Diaries.

  Maxine had read Jenny Diski’s memoir Skating to Antarctica. “What struck me about that book was how much of it was about death — dead places, her suicide attempts, her wanting to die,” she said. “How is yours different?”

  “Mine is about not wanting to die. Or wanting not to die.”

  I tried to explain to Maxine that for a while I had needed to live a comfortless life. It was the only way to repair myself. The Antarctic had given me a searing white salve. Now, two years later, it seemed the discomfort, boredom, the panic and claustrophobia I had felt had been a necessary test. I felt sure it wouldn’t happen again. I was ready to return.

  When I left the party it was late and the streets were slicked with the most recent bout of rain. That summer it would rain and rain. The El Niño effect, a stalling of the North Atlantic oscillation, an unusually positioned jet stream — weather presenters came on television every night, smiling gamely among the little cloud graphics that carpeted the map of the United Kingdom behind them, trying to explain.

  My grandfather is driving home at four thirty in the morning. He has been at the Legion in town for hours, possibly for days, playing cards, drinking. But he is an excellent drunk driver, and he can get himself home. He lives in a tiny trailer now, on the land of a woman who had been the wife of a friend of his, and who is now a widow. These days it’s this woman he terrorizes.

  The Trans-Canada swings upward onto the long hill that is the spine of the island. On either side of the road are two dark slabs of spruce. No one lives here anymore; an abandoned farmhouse stands to the left, slowly being eaten by trees.

  There is no moon, so he does not see the patch of black ice. He is travelling fast, gathering speed for the hill, driving with one hand. In his other hand is a cigarette, despite the lung cancer, throat cancer, cancer of the kidney and the pancreas that have failed to kill him.

  Black ice is invisible unless a light or the moon reveals it. The car disappears over the side of the road. It is late, and no other drivers see him leave the highway. The way the car falls, it can not be seen from the road. It is not until the following day, when the widow raises the alarm, that they go looking for him. Still there is no sign. Maybe he stayed the night with friends, the police say to the widow, but she does not buy it.

  The next day, a farmer out in his fields spots the car, half covered by snow. For once, he had been wearing his seatbelt. But his neck was broken. He died from this, or from hypothermia, or both; the coroner said he couldn’t tell. At the wake, I hardly recognize him. His body is deflated and torqued into a strange position. He has shrunk to half his size.

  After the funeral, my mother and I go for a drive. The island is on fire with the colours of late autumn: carmine, amber. Trees so red they are purple.

  “He would haul her out of bed in the middle of the night, grabbing her by the hair.” My mother demonstrates by taking a bunch of my own hair in her fist. “And he would make her cook dinner for him and his drunken buddies. This at three in the morning, remember, and her pregnant, or with a child to feed.”

  My mother looks off into the distance, into that peculiar denim blue of the island’s inland sea. “He was evil, evil, evil.”

  She herself left home at fifteen to attend college in the city. “I never wanted to see him again,” she says. “But all the time, I worried for her. What would become of her there, in that house, alone with him. Now that I was gone.”

  What indeed? By the time I went to live with them, only five days after I was born, it was still happening, over and over: the booze, the violence, the guns and the killing — of animals, those were the real deaths. But also the mock executions in the living room, the gun cocked.

  “I would never — never, ever put someone in the situation I was in,” my mother says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Having to go through that. His … madness. His violence.”

  “Why did you put your child in that position then?”

  She stares at me — an empty, flat stare. “Who?”

  She really doesn’t know who I am talking about.

  I remember something Denise the visionary said on the phone, when I telephoned her to tell her that her augury of me going to the polar regions had become truth. “You imagined it first,” she said. “You must have, for me to have seen it. Everything is made up
of thought. Even after we die. This is the basis of the whole of existence.”

  But if everything is made of thought, then I do not exist, because my mother does not know who I am referring to, when I ask her the question. Who? I do not even have the density of an idea, for her.

  When I tell her it was me, and point to my chest — as if that would clarify things. A small light switches on, somewhere deep inside her eyes. She shrugs. “I had no choice. I had no one else to turn to.”

  I am sure this is true. It dawns on me that I don’t know my mother. She had never spoken about her violent and unpredictable upbringing with our shared father, my grandfather. She dealt with it differently. She might be unsentimental by temperament, while I have a romantic nature given to idealizing people, to a belief that love is the paramount force in life.

  I left the town in the woods the day I turned eighteen. I had no birthday celebration; I didn’t need it. I felt as if I had begun a new life.

  I never heard from my father again, just as after a certain period after leaving the Antarctic I had no more news of Tom or Max.

  When I was twenty-one I moved to Britain. In the twenty-five years that have passed I have returned to Canada a handful of times, but only once in the winter. In the meantime I have lived and worked for long periods in Brazil, Central America, South Africa, Kenya, Namibia — tropical or subtropical countries, far away from eastern Canada and its glacier-gouged perimeter. My only real experience of winter in this tranche of my life has been the Antarctic; even my four trips to the Arctic have all been in summer, when the sun shines twenty-four hours a day and reindeer and polar bears patrol the streets at three a.m.

  Everything is made of thought. Denise told me this once again, the last time I spoke with her. I picked up the phone one day to call to say hello and no sooner had I touched the receiver than the thought flurried in to land like a bird: Denise is dead. I said to this thought, No, she is only in her mid-fifties, why would she be dead? I dialled the number with dread. A message in a man’s voice told me that she had died a month ago, and that if I wanted I could donate to a certain charity in her memory.

  I found the obituary online; also two small articles. She had died after an illness. I had no idea she’d been sick.

  I can still hear her voice: educated, caustic but not unkind, sympathetic yet mildly impatient. She was practical and level-headed, so it was hard to believe that she spoke to entities she largely refused to call spirits. Yet she did know many things that were beyond intuition.

  Everything is made of thought. In the Antarctic, when I could no longer control my thoughts, I had never, even on those gunshot nights in the trailer, been so frightened. I had realized it was not the Antarctic itself but the thrill of collective endeavour I found there, as well as human warmth, that returned me to my original enchantment with cold. But once that warmth was gone, I found myself back in the place I had been born.

  I have shuttled between frigid and burning climates, only grudgingly living in the in-between places. I have known heat in my life, and cold, but sometimes not much warmth. In extreme climates we are sharpened by our vulnerability. We could die of cold, we could die of thirst. But the truth is most people die of neglect.

  A fiction writer might well believe this, that thought creates our reality. After all we make up entire books, we write them into being on the power of the projection of our thoughts. All writers, perhaps, insist on making too much of things, of seeing life as a metaphor to be employed in literature, rather than lived experience. We are prey to fanciful notions: for example, that the Antarctic is not really part of the world, that it is more akin to living in the deep ocean, or on the moon.

  But I know it is true: the Antarctic is completely unlike anywhere else on earth. In leaving civilized life behind and willingly entering into the Antarctic’s charisma, exposed to its lethality, we can know who we are. What it means to be human. Whether we are human. Whether we can survive on a planet we are destroying. What we are destroying.

  It is also a landscape, a physical terrain in the world. I should probably stop projecting onto it. I see the Antarctic for what it is now: somewhere separate from my consciousness and my origins. A cold place.

  6.

  FLARES

  glimmer ice

  Newly formed ice within cracks or holes of older ice.

  Cape Town in February. Two years after I left Base R, I arrived in the southernmost city in Africa to join another Antarctic expedition. It took me nearly a year of applications and presentations to be allowed to accompany a multinational ship-based scientific project. My project this time was to write the ice book I’d conceived in Svalbard.

  We boarded the ship on a Tuesday; that night we were scheduled to set sail. But the ship, the Southern Cross, was delayed by high winds. On the Cape in summer the Southeaster blows — a powerful seaborne wind. The day we were supposed to depart it was gusting to forty-five knots and the container vessel carrying the scientific instruments could not come alongside the docks to be unloaded. In that much wind, the cranes that winch cargo from the ship to shore are unreliable, and the last thing you want is a container swinging wildly in the wind.

  The chief scientist told me that delays aboard the Southern Cross were rare. Every day spent in port meant a day of lost science. “You can imagine, my head is full of red crosses right now — stations we’ll have to skip. Moorings we won’t have time to recover.”

  Once we were on our way, there would be no way off the ship for ten weeks. Southern Cross cruises are long because of the steaming distance from Cape Town to the ice shelf base — about ten days — and because of the multidisciplinary nature of the science done on board. On the way back, the ship would call at King George Island on the Antarctic Peninsula, then make its way up and across the Drake Passage on roughly the same route we took down to the Antarctic on the JCR. We would end up in Punta Arenas in mid-April. From there it was a short hop across to the Falklands, where I had arranged to do six weeks of scholarship-funded work.

  As we waited in harbour for the weather to change, I talked to one of the helicopter pilots, Marcus, and a Dutch engineer, Pieter. I met my cabinmate Anneliese, a young Frenchwoman, and other young researchers. Everyone was friendly and excited about the cruise. The Southern Cross is one of the world’s foremost polar oceanographic research ships, a well-appointed science platform, efficiently and safely run by the organization that owns it. A trip aboard it is manna in the polar oceanographic research community, and everyone was suffused with that heady Antarctic combination of thrill, enthusiasm, and conviction.

  Marcus the helicopter pilot and I decided to go shopping at the V&A Waterfront. At thirty-seven, Marcus was one of the most experienced helicopter pilots in the Antarctic. He had just done a stint in Saudi Arabia flying for an oil company. He was well-spoken, gentle, but also military in bearing with aviator shades. His face had that sandblasted quality of white men who have spent a long time under the desert sun.

  We talked about Base R, which he knew well. “Such a beautiful place,” he said. “When I was there I took a walk around that peninsula, what do you call it? The point. I couldn’t believe the facilities there. It’s so much better than being aboard the ship.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I like the ship, but only when I’m working. There’s too much downtime. At Base R, you have so many activities: you can go skiing, you can go for a walk. Here, we are stuck.”

  The Southeaster blew and blew. The meteorologist on the ship told us we would not get a respite until Saturday.

  It was on Thursday I first felt it. As when I was on Base R, it did not build, but pounced at intervals. In the nearly two years since I had returned from Base R I’d had no episodes of anxiety. Those months had been ones of calm productivity; I had written much of the novel I’d been sent to the Antarctic to write.

  But on that Thursday and Friday
, I became aware that what I was feeling was not anxiety, or not exactly. It had in common the Dash 7 takeoff run speed of the attacks I had felt at Base R, but it was composed of a different substance, thick and viscous. After a while I recognized it: dread. Dread is distinct from fear in that it has an object, a sense of knowing what is coming. It felt heavier, more metallic than fear. I knew somehow that my dread was linked to an actual occurrence, not something I was imagining. It was as if I could feel the outlines of a solid block, like a building or a house, being built, somewhere beyond the perimeter of visibility.

  I ran through possible disasters in my mind. The ship was even larger than the JCR and had weathered many Southern Ocean storms. Surely it wasn’t to do with the ship. Each time I dismissed my fears, they returned, stronger. There was a dimension to them I had never experienced before: behind them was a voice, or a force. It came from very far away and pressed against me, like a plank. It said, Get off this ship.

  I told myself to wait, that it would pass. I wanted so much to stay. With my rational brain, I mustered all my arguments about professionalism and responsibility. Yet as I walked around the ship I could not escape a sense of unhappiness, even despair. I had a vision of myself in the cabin I shared with Anneliese, anxious and frightened.

  The news came that the wind would abate at last, and we would sail on Sunday morning.

  All Friday night I could not sleep. My heart pounded and my brain shrieked. I had never spent such an awful night, even during my lowest moments at Base R.

  In the morning, I got up and without thinking went straight to the bridge. There I found the captain and the chief scientist and made an excuse about a family situation. I left the ship the day before she sailed. It was a mess: immigration formalities, excuses, awkwardness with shipmates, people I might have called friends.