Call of the White

by Aston, Felicity

  The concerns I’d had in New Zealand refused to go away. The bottom line was that she didn’t agree with the way I was running the expedition and I suspected that she thought she could do a better job. Her frustration seemed to be vented, consciously or not, by being increasingly awkward. In just the previous week Charmaine had informed me that she would arrive a week late at our departure point for Antarctica and had complained about several critical arrangements. I had visions of making tough decisions on the ice, only to have my actions questioned by Charmaine. The last thing I wanted was to have to deal with a confrontation in the middle of a crisis. I remembered Robert Swan’s book and the trouble he’d had with a team member who wanted to run everything his own way. I didn’t want to have the same experience.

  It would be easy to ignore the situation with Charmaine and tell myself that it would all sort itself out once we got to Antarctica – but in my heart I knew it wouldn’t go away. If the team isn’t right before you leave, it’s never going to be right once you are on the ice and under pressure.

  I thought about ways to improve the situation. I considered talking to her about the problem but felt that I had already tried this in New Zealand with little effect. With only a month to go until departure, there wasn’t enough time to mend the faulty dynamics between us. That left me with only one option: to ask Charmaine to leave the team. The thought scared me a little. Without Charmaine, I would need to find an alternative New Zealand team member. It would be a risk to involve someone new so late in our preparations, but it seemed to be a greater risk going to Antarctica knowing that there was a problem. Already the issue was draining my energy and taking my focus away from other aspects of the expedition.

  I couldn’t take the gamble: I had to ask her to step down.

  I thought ruefully about the question I had been asked at the dinner party in Singapore, ‘Have you ever had to sack a team member?’ It had seemed like such an impossible scenario back then, but now it was very real.

  Charmaine would be devastated. I also wondered how the rest of the team would take the news, particularly Kim. It was going to be awful for everyone, including myself. How could I begin to tell someone that I was taking away their dream? I resolutely packed away my budding reluctance: however hard it was, it had to be done. This is when being the leader really counts, I told myself, when there are tough, unpleasant and possibly unpopular decisions to be made. I would not allow myself to hide from them.

  Despite my resolve it still felt slightly unreal as I dialled Charmaine’s number at the arranged time. She had been reluctant to talk but I had told her it was urgent. I was sure that what I had to say would be a shock.

  ‘Charmaine, this isn’t a happy phone call,’ I paused, taking a long breath. ‘I need to talk to you about your involvement in the expedition and your place on the team.’

  ‘All right,’ she replied. She sounded intrigued but nothing more. She clearly had no idea what was coming.

  ‘I’m ringing to ask you to step down from the team.’

  There was silence on the line.

  ‘When you joined the team I hoped you’d be a confidante, a kind of second-in-command, because of your experience, but it doesn’t seem to have worked out like that. There isn’t the trust between us that I think is necessary and I know that it’s going to cause problems when we are in Antarctica. It may seem dramatic but I have seen situations like this that have been ignored and caused serious problems. I just can’t take that risk.’

  I stopped talking and waited for a response. There was a long pause.

  ‘If you have issues with me we can work them out. I honestly don’t have a problem with you being the leader, I’m fine with that. Everything will be fine when we get to Antarctica, just give me a chance.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Charmaine, but we don’t have the time to work this out. We tried in New Zealand and it didn’t work. I can’t just cross my fingers and hope everything will be OK in Antarctica. I can’t take the risk.’

  ‘But you didn’t mention anything in New Zealand. You could have at least given me the opportunity to put things right.’

  I thought about the conversations we’d had during the training expedition and couldn’t see how she could have missed my concerns. The fact that she seemed oblivious to any problem just confirmed all my worries that talking wouldn’t make any difference – not in the time that we had left before the expedition.

  I stared out of my office window at the greenery of the trees being buffeted by the wind. I felt slightly dreamlike, as if I was acting in a film and none of this was real. In a way I was acting – I had to be more obstinate and unkind than I’d ever had to be in my life.

  ‘Charmaine, I’ve made up my mind and I’m afraid my decision is final.’

  I pressed on with the practical details, letting her know when and how the team would be told. As the phone call came to an end she said simply, ‘Please, Felicity. Don’t do this.’

  She sounded wretched and as I rang off the sound of her voice wrung all my resolve. This was not the reason I had started this project and this was not where I had ever expected to be. Despite my guilt, I didn’t regret the decision. I knew that it had been the right thing to do.

  Hello everyone,

  I’m afraid I have some unhappy news.

  I have just spoken to Charmaine and asked her to leave the expedition team.

  This may come as a shock to some of you but there have been several issues, particularly since New Zealand, that I have been unable to resolve and so, after much consideration and careful thought, this was my decision.

  We are travelling to a place that is dangerous. In the event of a crisis I need to have confidence and trust in the people around me and that is the reason that I have taken this action.

  I am available over the next few days to speak directly to anyone who would like to talk this through – but my decision is final.

  The intention is to find a new team member from New Zealand.

  I know that this will hit some of you hard but the important thing now is to focus on what is ahead and to pull together as a team.

  I have faith in you all.

  Felicity

  I needn’t have been worried about the team reaction. They had sympathy for Charmaine but were strangely quiet. Perhaps they wrote to each other privately, or maybe there was simply too much going on at the time for them to share their thoughts on the matter.

  My own thoughts turned to finding a new team member. I had received some 200 applications from women in New Zealand to join the expedition and the vast majority of them had been experienced skiers or mountaineers, many of whom had already spent a season or two in Antarctica. I needed someone who not only already had the training and experience to take on the expedition with minimal training, and who was available immediately, but also someone who would fit into our team quickly and effortlessly. I looked through my shortlist of New Zealand candidates that I had prepared almost exactly a year previously; one name stood out. I had met Kylie Wakelin in 2001 when she had spent a summer working at the same Antarctic research base I had been posted to. As two women in a very male environment we had become friends and had stayed vaguely in touch ever since, even though we hadn’t met again since Kylie had left Antarctica.

  During the original selection the fact that I knew Kylie personally had counted against her as I worried that the objectivity of the interview process would be questioned. Now, that same concern had turned into a positive bonus. With very little time available to get to know a complete stranger and very aware of the risk of inviting someone who could turn out to be unsuitable, I could ask Kylie to join the team safe in the knowledge that she was reliable, fun and used to fitting in. As an avid climber and skier, she was experienced in the outdoors and, having been to Antarctica, she at least knew what to expect. For ten years Kylie had run her own company in the Mount Cook National Park, offering tourist boat tours around the glacial, ice-filled lakes but had recently sold the company to
start a career as a pilot. She had just gained a Commercial Pilot License and was due to start her first job when my email arrived.

  We spoke on the phone and I talked about the team she would be joining and what we were up against. She was keen to accept right away but I urged her to think about it and to send me an email when she had made her decision. I received her reply the very next morning. ‘I feel like I am waiting for the camera crew and presenter to walk through the door and say, “Ha ha, only kidding, had you going!” I am writing to let you know that I am still as keen as mustard.’

  As I ran through the details with Kylie, sending her paperwork and schedules and flight information, my thoughts turned to Helen. As the team reserve, she still held onto the hope that she would be asked to join the expedition as a team member and yet I had denied her an opportunity by replacing Charmaine with another New Zealander. However, I didn’t want to use up my reserve because there was still another unresolved situation developing within the team. Barbara hadn’t made it to the training in New Zealand, leaving me with the challenge of finding a way to get her some additional training before Antarctica. I had lots of ideas but had been stumped by complete silence from Barbara since we’d returned. No one had heard anything from her for a fortnight despite a barrage of emails and messages from increasingly concerned teammates. I had tried her mobile phone a few times but there was no connection. When an email finally arrived from Barbara, it wasn’t good news. She had spent the last three weeks in bed battling malaria. ‘I can’t say for sure whether I’ll be fit enough to prepare for, let alone participate in, the upcoming expedition.’ She wrote. ‘I’m sorry for disappointing you and the team, but I will be praying for you and watching every step you ladies take to and from the South Pole.’ She signed off, ‘Thank you for everything. I love you all and God bless you.’

  I was devastated but surprisingly calm. This wasn’t a situation that I could do anything about. This time it wasn’t a matter of making frantic phone calls and pulling off a miracle. There was nothing Barbara, or anyone else, could do. Malaria is an incredibly debilitating illness and, even though she would eventually make a full recovery, it would take her weeks to recover full fitness. Even if she did manage to get fit in time to travel to Antarctica, driving her body to the edge by skiing to the South Pole might provoke a dangerous slide into exhaustion. I was sorry for Barbara and sorry that the expedition wouldn’t now have an African representative but unlike New Zealand, I didn’t feel finding an alternative Ghanaian at this late stage would be possible.

  I wrote to Helen to ask if she would take up Barbara’s place on the team. Having given up hope of being asked to join the expedition she had accepted a place on a month-long expedition to walk along a stretch of the skeleton coast in Namibia. She would finish the trek over a week before the expedition was due to depart but wouldn’t be able to return to the UK until just the day before. I had been worried when she had told me her plans a few months previously, but without a place to offer her on the team at the time I didn’t feel that I had any right to advise her against it. Now, as I wrote Helen an email, I trusted her own judgement and experience to tell me whether she felt fit and able to come to Antarctica so soon after returning from Namibia. The response was emphatic, she accepted without hesitation.

  Although I was crushed that Barbara couldn’t come with us, I was pleased that Helen would be on the team. Knowing that Helen would now be in the second tent gave me some extra reassurance; I hoped that she would be able to keep an eye on things when I wasn’t there.

  I was worried that the last-minute team turmoil might make our sponsors nervous but was relieved (and grateful) that Suk Ling was willing to trust me without concern as I explained events to her. For Kaspersky Lab the new expedition website was a more pressing issue. The website would be the team’s main platform for communicating our experiences to a global audience while in Antarctica. We didn’t have a limitless budget but I was determined to use exciting and economical technology to make the most of what we had. We would be carrying two satellite telephones with us on the expedition, which would enable us to call anywhere in the world, just like a mobile, but we discovered we could do much more with them than that. By ringing a voicemail number we could record podcasts that could be uploaded onto our website so that anyone could listen to us talking to them direct from Antarctica; we could write SMS messages from the satellite phone to a Twitter account that would display our microblogs on our website in real time (quite literally tweeting to the South Pole, which, as far as we are aware, hadn’t been tried before); and most exciting of all, I was sure that we could give a live lecture to an audience in London while sitting in a tent in Antarctica (which certainly hadn’t been done before). By sharing our experience so immediately and vividly, we could engage more people and have a greater opportunity to spread our message, to motivate and inspire, and to provoke thought.

  By the end of October, I was waiting for the team to arrive in the UK. The plan was for the team to be together for three or four days before we all travelled to Punta Arenas in Chile, where we would spend a week preparing and checking our equipment in readiness for our scheduled flight to Antarctica on 12 November. Kylie was the first to arrive. It had been six years since I’d last seen her but the time vanished in an instant. She hadn’t changed at all but I felt like a completely different person to the young, idealistic girl she had known in Antarctica. As we hugged I wondered if she would notice the difference in me.

  My modest flat wasn’t big enough to accommodate the entire team plus all our kit. Instead, my parents had offered to host us at Crofton, my childhood home in West Kent. A few months before I was born, my parents and grandparents moved into this big house with large bay windows and they have lived there ever since. It was an idyllic place to grow up. Surrounded by 9 acres of woodland I spent endless summers building camps in the trees and bossing around my younger sister. Crofton has always been a busy place: my parents are natural hosts, so the house is usually full of friends and extended family. I drove there with Kylie and began sorting through the growing mountain of boxes and parcels that had been arriving all through the previous week and which were quickly filling my parents’ front room to capacity. We burrowed our way in, ripping open boxes to check what was inside.

  Reena and Sophia arrived early the next morning, quickly followed by Era and Steph. I introduced them all to Kylie and left them to get to know each other as I went to greet a lorry that had arrived with a delivery of enormous boxes – it was the branded clothing from Montane. I pulled out a jacket from one of the boxes and felt a wave of pride. The bright red insulated smocks were stamped with the expedition logo which stood out in prominent white and green. Kaspersky Lab logos ran along the sleeves and the hood was framed with thick wolverine trim. It looked like a jacket that real polar explorers would wear, the kind of jacket imagined in childish daydreams of adventure. Now I knew we were going on an expedition and the scale of what we had achieved in getting this far finally sank in. Two years ago the expedition had been just a dream; now it had a uniform.

  Crofton was full to bursting. As well as the team, Rob the photographer had arrived, and a constant stream of local media, from TV crews to radio cars with extendable masts, came and went. My good friend Guy arrived to give us some last-minute first aid training. He showed the team how to look after a blister and ensure it didn’t get infected; how to strap up a sprain with gaffer tape; how to look after a broken bone; and how to stop major bleeding. Going through all the drugs in our first aid kits he asked each of us if we had any allergies. Sophia thought that she might be allergic to ibuprofen but wasn’t sure.

  ‘Well, there’s only one way to find out,’ said Guy, holding out a small white pill in the flat of his palm. Sophia looked uncertain.

  ‘Is this a good idea?’ I asked Guy. The last thing I needed was the hospitalisation of a team member the day before our departure.

  Guy looked at me seriously, ‘If it goes wrong here, So
phia can get immediate medical help. Would you rather she found out she was allergic in the middle of Antarctica?’ He had a point.

  Sophia took the pill and her eye promptly swelled up with a nasty blister just beneath her lower lashes. ‘Well, at least now I know,’ she said shrugging it off. Within hours her eye was back to normal.

  Guy taught us the recovery position but didn’t bother with CPR. ‘If your heart stops you are going to need serious medical help very quickly,’ he explained. ‘In Antarctica you are not going to get that help so, I hate to say it, but if your heart stops, you are dead and nothing I can teach you will change that.’ He was right but it was a sobering thought.

  His words made me think of a conversation I’d had with Kylie the day before. She had asked about the risk of crevasses during the expedition. Crevasses are deep cracks in the ice that can occur anywhere in Antarctica. Often covered by a layer of snow, and therefore invisible on the surface, they can be wide enough for a person to fall into and deep enough for that person to never be seen again. The thought of them made me cold with fear and I had discussed the risks exhaustively with those that had skied to the South Pole before. Crevasses usually occur where the ice is disturbed by a sudden change in topography, such as a mountain range or an ice stream. By avoiding features like this, the risk of coming across crevasse fields is reduced. We would be on skis which spread our weight, making it less likely that we would fall through any snow covered crevasses, and we were going early in the season when the snow layer over the crevasses would be strongest. We could have opted to wear harnesses and rope ourselves together so that if someone fell, the rest could, theoretically, stop them but it was impractical to ski roped together. Our only protection was to ski in single file and to be extremely observant so that if we spotted anything suspicious we could take action to avoid it.