by Dawn Garisch
Antarctica is a mountainous continent; the highest peak, the Vinson Massif, is over five thousand meters above sea level. I have learnt too that the South Pole is actually nine meters below sea level, but the ice above it is nearly three kilometres thick; newcomers to the area have to deal with both the cold and with altitude sickness. It is also very dry as any humidity precipitates as snow.
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A disappointment: the Germans who have chartered the ship at R100 000 a day to fetch them from the ice, have ordered that no-one is to leave the ship when we arrive at the shelf. They worry that we might be in the way and take up precious time, or that we might wander off and fall into a crevasse. It will take them two days to load their cores of ice, also their waste, as according to the Antarctic Treaty nothing may remain behind.
So I am reminded that it's the journey that's important, not the destination. Each day I spend time contemplating the waves; like a mantra they roll by, like a rosary, a pilgrimage, a trance. This morning their refrain contained scudding reaches over an almost black and dancing sea, and a tiny vivid rainbow repeatedly caught in spray.
5 March
Ten days out, and the plot of the collective journey is emerging (all stories need a Protagonist who has a Problem, often in the form of an Antagonist). Our Protagonist is Inga Rautenbach, head of the scientific team, who is working together with the Americans, Germans and French, to investigate the effect our southern oceans have on climate change over a ten year period. This involves deploying floats of various kinds into the sea at certain points of latitude and longitude to measure temperature, salinity and current down to levels of two thousand metres.
Our setting for the drama is the SA Agulhas, hired by the Germans at Antarctica to get them out before the ice gets too thick, and back to South Africa before their plane leaves on 19th March. The Germans had agreed that the Agulhas could be used by the scientists for research purposes on the way south as the investigation is important to the international community, and that an extra day would be granted at the Germans' expense. Now, due to bad weather, it looks as though we are to arrive at the shelf two days late, and the head of the German expedition (the Antagonist) is hopping mad, having assumed that the delay is due to the selfish arrogance of our scientists. For the past two days the air about the ship has been thick and hot with waves as emails and phone calls fly to and fro between the various parties in various continents with accusations and counter-accusations.
The Germans have insisted that any extra days be for Inga's account, so she has told the purser to put it on her bar tab (approximately R300 000). There was a suggestion that she use her married name and sunglasses when the Germans board, and that we tell them that Dr Rautenbach is no longer on the ship, that she threw herself overboard in a fit of remorse. Alternatively there is a cabin on the crew deck reserved for criminals to which she could retire. Apparently there was a murder on the maiden trip – the Bosun was stabbed to death. All the present story needs now is a love triangle and a murder to up the stakes.
Meanwhile the poor Frenchman has sunk into a huge depression. After deploying one of the expensive research floats today, he discovered he had dropped it over the only sea mount (mountain peak under the sea) we cross during the whole trip, and it therefore could not descend to the necessary depths.
We are about to cross the Antarctic Circle, whereupon it is customary for all crew and passengers who have not crossed it previously to be initiated to Neptune's mighty rule which includes, I hear, flour and eggs and very cold water as well as a slating of one's character. Having just read Endurance I will keep Shackleton's ordeal in mind to get me through. It all ends in a braai on deck if the weather allows.
The government pirate tells me the technical support at Antarctica must prepare a site for the off- and on-loading of supplies and people from the ship. This involves grading a ramp down through the ice shelf, which is like a cliff face, until it is low enough for the ship to dock. This is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world as the edge of the ice can give way and the grader could fall into the water. When the ship arrives, it noses into the cliff face of ice, then keeps the engines running so as to stabilise the ship while on- and off-loading using the large crane on the foredeck.
The seas are much calmer today; the night before last hardly anyone slept as the sea was so turbulent, although the purser says it can get a lot rougher. Twelve years ago a storm caused the ship to roll so much that a window on the bridge six floors up was smashed by a wave.
7 March
We are in the thick of the ice and a very surreal landscape it is, as though we have sailed somehow into a science fiction novel, with ice scraping alarmingly down the side of the ship. I have succumbed to wearing my Antarctic gear, a laborious business. I spend ages dressing and undressing. My outfit consists of thermal underwear, a layer of my own clothes, balaclava, thick woollen socks, padded and waterproofed overalls, and hooded jacket which Velcro's closed over my mouth and nose, rendering me practically blind as my glasses fog up instantly. These disabilities, together with the regulation boots, which are stiff and huge and relatively heavy, mean that I have had to learn to walk all over again, as there are many stairs (the ones outside adorned with invisible ice) that invite a fall. I discover that the first mate omitted to include gloves when I was fitted out on shore, and a young cadet, the only black person above crew level, is assigned to trawl through the stock room for an extra pair. He tells me he is from KwaZulu-Natal and rarely gets to see his family; also that he wanted to be an architect but could not afford the fees, so ended up at sea. He observes there is no ring on my finger, and admonishes me that at my age I should be married. He is further mortified to discover that the only gloves available are huge dirty leather ones, but I am immensely grateful. It is even cold indoors as the air conditioning is malfunctioning.
Last year they found a stowaway blue and shivering in a container when they were half way to Antarctica; the poor man thought he had boarded a ship headed for New York.
8 March
It was all true. We were subjected to three dunkings in a bath of water fresh from the literally icy sea, followed by an egg on the head from Neptune, then flour from Mrs Neptune who brandished the most enormous false breasts, then a shot of antidote from the ‘doctor’ who dressed as though he had just emerged from a horror movie – a syringeful of Tabasco sauce.
After showering – with the water pressure hopeless thanks to all the other miscreants trying to get egg out of their hair and restore circulation to the limbs – we had a braai with the crew on the helideck; most bizarre, braaing in intermittent snow surrounded by icebergs. We made gluhwein, and I got stuck in. It was very good and warming, and I am sorry to say that I have disproved the theory that any alcohol in gluhwein boils off, and was forced to retire to my bunk.
We arrive at the ice shelf this afternoon. I'm loving this strange adventure.
9 March
Day fourteen, and we are at the shelf after crushing a path through the crust of frozen ocean, for the entire sea is encased in ice. So strange to see these thick blue/white slabs crack and shift, sliding over each other to make way for the ship, or crumbling into a trail we leave churned up behind us, a dark blue road marking this pale wilderness that soon closes over again as though we were never here. Two emperor penguins standing on the ice flapped at us as we approached, their golden heads turning this way and that to inspect the peculiarity that we are. Other penguins, their bellies streaking white beneath the freezing waters, go after fish. They hunt in packs, driving them out from under the ice into their comrades' beaks. They are living out their lives as though humans are not necessary on the planet.
The shelf is all we'll see of this strange land. The containers we must bring aboard stand around in snow like baleful cows in a British field in winter. The ship is nosed into the ice, and all crew on deck assist in loading the Germans and their cargo. We will not be allowed ashore. The Captain offers consolation: a block of Anta
rctic ice is stored in the freezer for me to take home on our return.
All about are icebergs run aground on the continental shelf; they hold their whiteness against the shifting colours of the sky as the sun approaches the horizon in a long gentle descent. The sunsets here last for hours, and the night is not completely dark, but bleeds a rim of red towards the south. The sky reminds us that there are colours other than the grey-scale and shades of blue in this wilderness; the algae do so too: beige or green, seen occasionally through thin plates of ice.
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The scientists aboard and those returning from the ice have a common mission: to plot climate change historically and prospectively in order to understand better the crisis we face upon the earth. The fire of our industrial processes is accelerating the earth's tendency to change, and the polar caps are melting. Headlines received via Internet are pinned to the notice board daily; we read that in the Arctic the ice plate cracked, sending half a research base to the bottom of the sea.
***
We are fortunate in that while we have been here, watching the on- and offloading of containers and fuel, the sun has shone and the wind has been mild; nevertheless the air temperature is minus thirteen degrees. I would not last long as an Antarctic explorer; after half an hour outside in what they call the monkey house on top of the bridge, even with gloves on, my fingers are in such pain I want to shriek. Fortunately there is also a sheltered and heated lookout intended for birdwatchers, but it does very well for Inga and me as we rate the Germans working on the shore through her binoculars. She has booked one with a moustache; I am forced to remind her that she's a married woman. Besides, I doubt they have forgiven her.
Last night the weatherman recorded temperatures of minus thirty-three with wind chill factored in. Even my mattress felt cold, and I wore two layers of clothing and slept under three duvets.
We leave this afternoon with conditions looking good. The sea ice does not appear too thick; with heavy snowfall in the night, the ice can rapidly thicken to over seventy centimetres and we would be in trouble. It would then require wild seas and winds to break a passage through, or a Russian icebreaker ship working nearby to get us out. The Germans have begun to board; already the atmosphere is changing, and we will have to see what this addition brings.
11 March
Day sixteen and the ship has turned back, back to the shifting sea, our mission complete, our homes once more our destination. A slash of red embedded in the ice cliff revealed itself as the thrusters pulled the bow away from the shelf. It looked like blood, like fire. The hull is repainted every year; every year it leaves this scab where the motion of the ship rubs its nose against the shelf.
In bed last night, I felt a shift that has to do with sailing to the end of the earth. It is not for nothing that we undertake these journeys. For over a hundred years humankind has sailed into these frozen lands as into a dream to find a keyhole through which we snatch a glimpse of how the gods might live; this extremity, this journey into death where life, different from the one we know, flourishes. Hardship has been integrated here until it is a substance that you walk on, as any other thing.
Throughout my life, certain writers have spoken to my core. Mindell salvaged the connection between a first dream and chronic illness; Helen Luke suggests the task of life is to discover what story you are living and to recover the images that underpin and transform that story, starting with the first remembered dream. My body dreams of inflammation, of flames that slowly smoulder patches in my vision, that crackle down my spine, inflammation raging against indifference, the icy intransigence of my body to therapies and medication. It holds fast to a course unfathomable, and I have come at last to relinquish ideas of cure, that mastiff grip on outcomes, and find myself wondering what lies beyond the blind horizon, if I allow myself to venture there, in pain and with damaged sight, accepting that I might have been looking all my life in the wrong place with inapposite tools.
Kafka said: a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within; I read this years ago with shock and recognition, for that is what they were – the books that saved my life did so by breaking me open so that mystery might enter and thereby break me open further. Not only books, but the seeds from which they spring: the words and images emerging from the salt dark, this trail of bubbles that hints of life within.
So I sit daily at my desk trying to write my way into why I am here, chipping at the keyboard until my inner ice gives way.
***
We are out of the frozen sea, barring the band of icebergs still to come, and making good time. It has been snowing, and the cadets have built a snowman on the helideck. The marine biologist and I felt it needed a response, so I earned my lunch today shovelling and moulding snow into a Godzilla, poised and about to chomp the snowman. Sadly, we couldn't find the technical support person to install flashing red eyes into the monster's head, so we made do with the red caps of cheap wine bottles salvaged from the bin.
This afternoon after my nap, I stepped out of my bunk onto a soggy carpet. Pipes are bursting throughout the ship as water frozen in them thaws. In addition, in contravention to the large notice displayed on a weather door, someone left it open and a wave washed through our level. The purser is furious, the hospital floor is under water and it is raining in the dining room. The Bosun and his right-hand man are singing as they repair the pipes. For them it is just another day at sea. I don my boots and wade into the pond sloshing around the hospital floor and help move some equipment to higher ground. The water supply is switched off for a while and some researchers resort to drinking beer. Fortunately nothing is damaged. The passages and cabin floors become adorned with towels, and after the mop up, the carpet in my cabin looks several shades cleaner.
The Germans are largely keeping to themselves. Initially we thought that they were sulking, but it transpires that most do not speak English. Inga is the only one amongst us who speaks German; she reserves this for eavesdropping to discover how much trouble she is in. Thus far the pickings are disappointing; the Germans talk to each other about technicalities, weather and movies. One young man who speaks English is eager to befriend us and sits with us at table, abandoning his compatriots altogether. He is doing his doctoral thesis on surveying the area for the new German base and reports he had a hard time both outdoors (in blizzards he had difficulty distinguishing up from down) and indoors (he did not get on with his close-range colleagues). An older man who has been to the Antarctic for five months a year for the past twenty years has been cordial; from these two we have learnt a lot:
• The present German base – one of three – is built on the ice shelf and is sinking. It is now ten metres below the surface, and moving northwards at half a metre a day, hence the need to build a new base.
• The ice cores they drill out down to two and a half kilometres deep are cut into metre lengths and transported in refrigerated containers for analysis in Germany. Once there, they are cut in half lengthwise and half are stored so that when improved methods are developed to analyse the samples, they don't have to go back and drill more out again. They have found a layer of volcanic ash of the same age spread over a quarter of Antarctica, pointing to a massive volcanic eruption some one hundred thousand years ago, probably in New Zealand.
• The interface of the ice with bedrock is at zero degrees due to the pressure of ice above and the radiant heat from earth, so the whole of the ice covering Antarctica is floating on a thin layer of water.
• Penguins contaminate the water supply as they poo everywhere, and the ice and snow must be melted and strained through expensive filters to render it fit for human consumption. The areas where the penguins are most concentrated can be seen on satellite images by the extensive hue caused by the guano.
• Build-up of static electricity due to strong winds can cause electronic equipment to fail in the bases; those bases that have sunk below the ice do not have this problem.
The German doctor is reclusive; we have only occas
ional sightings of her at mealtimes. For the remainder she inhabits her cabin – my abandoned, smelly one; I am convinced she is olfactorily impaired. I managed to corner her on the helideck on the first day the sun offered something more than light. The deck was suddenly full of thawing Germans, the legs of their shorts rolled up, their pale flesh inviting sunburn. She sat apart, chewing gum, focussed entirely on the heavy novel on her lap, but emerged briefly at my approach, reporting that Antarctica is a very hostile place and that humans should not go there. She believes the research interest in the continent is really to allow countries to maintain their stakes in the continent should it become feasible to mine the natural resources. She said for the first time in her life she is glad to be going back to Germany.
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The other night I was awed by hundreds of large phosphorescent jellyfish disturbed by the wake of the ship, swirling away like underwater lights. It made me wonder about images – the signposts protruding from the expansive sea of dreams: do they persist throughout a life, constant reference points to the journey of the soul, or do they themselves transform, metamorphosing into beacons and cairns appropriate to one's developmental stage? As a child, I believed the miracle depicted in my dream that a cold wasteland would not put out my light.
I have recently emerged from fire, walking over the ice horizon of my greatest fears, the foundation of my marriage breaking up beneath me, the pain on my children's faces as I betrayed their belief that their parents would never part. I abandoned base camp which had become a pack of lies, walking on into those truths like an Antarctic blizzard tearing off my face. And still I walked, trusting that my home fire resided within me and that my sons would survive, for there must be a better way to live, a heartfelt home to return to, prodigal, having risked all to find another ending to my story.