It was time to get on the plane. Kim turned away and headed back to the medical tent to wait for her flight out of Antarctica in a day or two. Steve came to say goodbye. ‘Remember to enjoy yourself,’ he called as I got on the plane. I smiled and waved, ‘Thanks Steve, thanks for everything.’
The engines coughed into life and as we bounced down the rough snow runway we sat strapped to our seats, staring out of the windows or grinning madly to each other. It was too noisy to talk but the big smiles said it all. The plane banked sharply and Patriot Hills was reduced to a series of dots on an endless sheet of white. We levelled out and could see the vastness of what would be our world for the next six weeks. The ground below was a greyish silver, streaked with pastel purples and dusky blues where the wind had scored its icy surface, like the scuffs on an old leather shoe. Sophia sat alone on the opposite side of the plane and stared downwards. I watched her expression for some clue as to what was going on in her mind. I wondered if she was thinking about her family or simply about the days ahead – it was impossible to tell – but something about the seriousness of her look made me feel sombre. I felt so confident in this team, so confident in our abilities, but what if I was wrong? We had already lost one team member but the consequences of anyone else getting injured now that we had left the security of Patriot Hills would be far, far worse.
Chapter Nine
Louis Poo-uitton
‘This is it!’ I shouted through my balaclava. ‘We’re on our way to the South Pole!’ The team shook their ski poles in the air and I heard a muffled cheer from within their layers of face-covering. I turned away from the cluster of well-clad figures and faced the horizon. Glancing at the compass strung round my neck, my eyes followed the direction of the needle to pick out a prominent patch of shade cast by a lump of ice in the distance. As long as I headed for that patch of shade, I would be heading in the right direction.
I slid forward on my skis, feeling the tug of the sledge attached to the harness around my hips, and peered over my shoulder to check that the rest of the team were following. It was a momentous occasion, the first steps of our 900-kilometre journey from the coast of Antarctica to the Geographic South Pole and yet, despite my enthusiastic battle cry, at that very moment it all seemed very ordinary, as if we were starting out on just another training run.
Considering our tumultuous first week in Antarctica, the girls had all been extremely calm as we waved goodbye to the plane the night before. After it had dropped us off at our designated starting point, we had stood together in a huddle around our newly pitched tents and waved madly above our heads as the plane diminished into a tiny black blob in the sky and finally disappeared altogether. For the first time our unconventional team was completely alone. The nearest human being was hundreds of kilometres away and although we had a satellite phone we knew that if we called for help it was likely to be days, not hours, before a plane could reach us. The consequences of getting injured out here were severe. At best it would mean the end of our expedition and at worst, it could be fatal. To make sure the team had absolutely no misconception about what we were doing I had hammered home the precarious nature of our safety during our last team meeting in Patriot Hills. ‘Think about the consequences of your actions every second of every day. If you are ever tempted to take a shortcut remember how sorry you would feel if your actions brought about the end of the expedition. We need sorry before; not sorry after.’ Kim’s injury sat fresh in everyone’s mind and I think it was the memory of her face as she had said goodbye, rather than my lecture, that had made everyone noticeably more conscientious as we struck camp on our first morning.
As we moved off across the snow in single file, the world ahead of us seemed to be split into two equal halves. Above was the sky and below was the snow, the horizon separating the two like the divide on a domino. Back home, the sky seems almost incidental, dwarfed by buildings and trees that encroach around its edges, but in Antarctica the sky became half of our entire universe. As we slid toward first one patch of shade then another, the sky was the main focus of our attention and we became intimately acquainted with its nuances of character. The vibrancy of its colours seemed almost supernatural. Close to the horizon the sky was a turquoise blue, blanched by the glare of the sun reflected from the snow; but if I tilted my head to look directly above, the sky became the deepest blue-black, like the pictures taken by astronauts of the very edges of the atmosphere, where our planet’s benevolent sky meets the blackness of outer space. Meanwhile, the other half of our world had the texture of a badly plastered wall, the snow pitted with small hollows and contoured with shallow sastrugi. The surface reflected the sun like wet sand, so that in places it looked silver and shone so brightly that the rest looked almost grey, like over-washed white laundry. It was impossible to look at this flame-bright world without squinting and even then the image of it was burnt onto your retina as if staring at the sun for too long. Without goggles we would have soon been snow-blind.
Above all, the most impressive aspect of this wilderness was its devastating emptiness. There was not one track, glint of metal or smudge of habitation in the distance; not a mountain or a tree or a single lichen-splotched rock; not a fly or a bird or even the vapour trail of a plane overhead. In every direction there was nothing. ‘It’s the same,’ Reena had marvelled soon after the plane had left us. She turned on the spot, scanning the horizon with her eyes. ‘Every direction; it’s the same.’ I smiled at her amazement and waited for her to finish her rotation. ‘I love it,’ she announced in summary. I was pleased. I’d wondered what this lady from the Himalaya would make of such a relentlessly flat universe and was relieved that she clearly found it special; they all did.
We were setting out from the ‘coast’ of Antarctica but there was no open water or rocky shores to be seen. The ice that covers Antarctica is constantly flowing outwards towards the sea. At the edge of the continent the ice flows seamlessly from rock onto the ocean and forms huge floating ice shelves. From the surface there is no way of telling the difference between ice over land and ice over ocean. The exact position of the coast has been inexactly mapped by geologists, so we knew we had been deposited at the very edge of Antarctica, but from where we stood, all directions looked equally solid. We weren’t heading immediately south from the coast, instead we were travelling in a slightly westerly direction in order to avoid the Pensacola Mountains that lay unseen somewhere to our left. We needed to circumvent the mountains, not just because crossing them would be pointlessly difficult, but also because they tended to be surrounded by crevasse fields – so we were giving them a wide berth. It would be some 300 kilometres before we would be able to turn southward and head directly for the pole. Shortly afterwards we would come across our one and only resupply. Although our sledges bulged with food and fuel as we left the coast, they only contained enough supplies for 21 days. The three large red duffle bags that formed our resupply contained all the food and fuel we would need to complete our journey. They had been dropped on the ice by a plane heading for the South Pole, at a point roughly halfway along our route. We had been given the exact coordinates of the depot so that we would be able to find it.
As we skied the first few kilometres of our journey, the South Pole seemed impossibly far away and the distances hopelessly long; our progress sounded ridiculously small when compared to the number of kilometres we needed to travel. To think of Day 40 during Day 1 was enough to make the bravest heart sink. The challenge was too big to comprehend when taken as a whole and so I concentrated on just the first stage, on reaching our resupply, and this made it more manageable. I had calculated that we should reach the resupply in 16 or 17 days. This was a time period that was easier to compute and so in my mind it became the whole expedition; I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, let my mind dwell on anything more.
After our first 90 minutes I stopped in my tracks and crossed my ski poles above my head to let the rest of the team know it was break time. We relied on hand signals while
skiing because verbal communication was so difficult. If the skier leading the line held out their pole to one side, it meant ‘Are you OK?’ where ‘OK’ covered a variety of possibilities but usually translated as ‘Is this pace OK?’ If you were fine you mimicked the same signal. If something was wrong, we had alternative replies, the most usual being a waggle of the arm which meant ‘slow down’.
Our only opportunity to actually talk to each other was during our short breaks but with only seven minutes to spare, there was a lot to get done. Everyone’s top priority was usually going to the toilet. Our bodies hadn’t yet adjusted to the increased fluids we were drinking every day to prevent dehydration and so having to hold in a pee for 90 minutes was a challenge, especially in the early days. Quite often someone or other would barely have stopped skiing before they were pulling down their trousers with a sigh of relief. Despite everyone’s initial nervousness about going to the toilet in front of each other, in practice all modesty vanished almost instantly and we very quickly banished any hint of embarrassment about bodily functions. Harnessed to a heavy sledge, attached to two skis and wearing several layers of clothing made going to the toilet extremely difficult without adding the extra burden of wandering a few hundred feet away from the group where there would be no cover anyway (you’d have to wait a long time to find a handy boulder or tree to hide behind in Antarctica). Instead, we all just got on with what we had to do – and quickly. We weren’t at risk of frostbite while going to the loo as long as we didn’t leave ourselves exposed for too long and remembered to turn ourselves out of the wind.
Eating and drinking during the breaks was no less difficult. We had a snack bag of high-calorie food to eat during the day, broken into bite-sized pieces, but the difficulty was getting the food into our mouths. While skiing the moisture in every breath we exhaled froze onto the material covering our faces so that even the softest fleecy fabrics would become as solid as a plaster death mask. We’d have to chip narrow openings in our masks to post food through to our mouths. It was a messy business often resulting in a liberal coverage of peanut husks and popcorn fragments stuck to our masks and faces. Drinking was even more perilous. Using our insulated wide-mouthed water bottles was next to impossible without half the contents being spilt down the inside of our balaclavas. Anything spilt or dribbled would quickly turn to ice and, being right next to skin, could cause frostbite. Luckily, we also had narrow-necked bottles which could be wedged through the front of our balaclavas and held in place by our teeth as we gulped but it was never a comfortable process and there were frequent accidents.
Helen had volunteered to be the timekeeper during our breaks. She’d start the clock as soon as the last in line had pulled up their sledge next to the group and would give us warnings as we neared seven minutes. I would be last to leave, hurrying up anyone who was running late. Unless it was my turn to navigate, I usually chose to ski at the back of the line. I felt more comfortable being able to see everyone and check at a glance that we were all still together. I knew immediately if someone was falling behind the person in front of them, meaning that the pace was too quick, or if someone was carrying a strain and therefore skiing with a limp and, later on, I was even able to tell from body language alone if someone was simply having a bad day emotionally.
Each member of the team had a skiing style as unique as a fingerprint. Despite the fact that we couldn’t see each other’s faces and were all wearing identical clothing we could tell, even from a distance, who was who. Helen was by far the neatest skier. Her legs only seemed to move from below the knee, with her arms making perfectly matched swings but only from below her elbows. Sophia was also a tidy skier, making tiny, purposeful steps that looked more like marching than skiing. Kylie had more of a swagger. She put her shoulders into each glide in a way that reminded me of John Wayne in American cowboy films. Reena looked permanently exhausted on her skis, seeming to lean heavily on her ski poles as if they were the only thing keeping her upright. Steph lacked any kind of rhythm or consistency as she skied. She was usually staggering along, too busy adjusting her clothing or equipment to pay much attention to an efficient skiing style. Every second we were on the move she spent searching through pockets, changing gloves, adjusting her hat or altering the volume of her music player. After my tough criticism in Patriot Hills of her lack of organisation she had spent several hours attaching lengths of elastic to every piece of kit she owned so that she could physically fasten everything together in an effort to avoid losing it. The result was a constant battle with metres of tangled elastic that continually wrapped itself around ski poles, compasses, other people’s legs and even her own head. It’s a testament to her skill that she was able to keep up with the rest of the team despite this self-imposed handicap. Era had the most memorable skiing style of all; it was more sashay than glide. Each step forward would be accompanied by a genteel waggle of the hips and a dainty tap of the snow with her ski poles. With every forward movement her foot and ski would lift clear off the snow, a most inefficient way to ski. I tried encouraging her to glide more until finally she announced, ‘I’ve tried skiing other ways but they are not comfortable. This is the way I prefer to ski.’ I had to admit that she kept up with the group well enough – her chosen style obviously wasn’t holding her up in any way or causing her injury so I left her alone.
Despite our unconventional skiing, watching from the back I was impressed with the way we were moving as a team. We stuck together and had eliminated a lot of the faffing that had become frustrating during our training expeditions. I noticed that if someone needed to make a quick adjustment to clothing or equipment they stepped out of the tracks to allow the team to pass as they did what they needed to do, before joining the end of the line. We hadn’t practised this or even talked about it – it just happened naturally and was extremely slick.
In all we were making great progress, so good in fact that by the end of our third leg we had already reached the 8-nautical-mile target I had set for our first day. I’d noticed that each leg had been slightly faster than the last until I had been practically running on my skis. ‘We can afford to dawdle,’ I told the team. ‘We don’t want to wear ourselves out too soon.’ I had seen too many teams make that exact mistake; going out too hard and too fast only to crash and burn before the end. This was an untried team and none of us knew exactly where the breaking point for us as a group would be. It seemed prudent to take it slow and steady. To keep a consistent pace sounds like a straightforward task but it was to become one of the most contentious issues of the entire expedition.
As we stopped for the fourth break of the day Steph announced that she would need some extra time. She had started her period the day before and needed to sort herself out. Menstruating during an expedition isn’t the greatest experience in the world but neither is it impossible as long as you are well prepared and get yourself organised. Unfortunately, it takes a bit of experience before you can perfect a system that works for you. I announced to the team that we would have a 15-minute break and had them put on their down jackets while we stopped. Even so, as we moved off a quarter of an hour later, several people were complaining of cold hands and feet and Era refused to take off her big down jacket. It was clear that we were not going to be able to stop for longer than seven minutes again, regardless of the problem. By the time we stopped for our next break, Era and Sophia were still cold so I decided we would stop for the day. We had only managed to ski for six hours rather than the intended eight but we had exceeded our mileage target for our first day, so the compromise seemed reasonable.
It was a perfect evening, clear and cold with a slight breeze, but the sun was still strong enough for us to feel its warmth through our clothing as we pitched the tents. Steph and I were the ‘outside men’ for our tent. After the tent was up our job was to stay outside to anchor the guy ropes and pile snow on the valences, while Era and Sophia got inside and started with the inside jobs. As we worked it was such a relief to be away from the near con
stant wind we had experienced in Patriot Hills. We were still careful to secure our equipment when unpacking the sledges (after all, the consequences of a sudden gust snatching a sleeping mat or an abandoned jacket were serious) but the calmer conditions allowed us to relax a little bit and focus on something other than fighting the wind.
Still slightly nervous about the reliability of our patched-up tents, we were very diligent about making sure the tent was well anchored, but Steph took our caution to a new level. Part of her job was to build a small protective wall around the windward end of the tent but when I glanced up from my own shovelling I saw that she had built a barricade worthy of the Bastille. It was quite a feat of engineering, involving carefully shaped blocks of snow arranged aerodynamically to protect not just the front of the tent but our narrow side entrance as well. Inside the tent Era and Sophia had named themselves the ‘homemakers’ and they had taken the term seriously. Era had not only sorted our belongings into our designated corners but had hung any damp equipment on the washing line and actually folded our jackets into neat little piles. It was spectacular.
I made myself comfortable in my corner by the door. I was by far the largest in the tent and made a particular effort to try to constrain my oversized arms and legs as much as possible, but I still took up far more space than anyone else. Sophia handed me my dinner. After a long search I had found a supplier of halal expedition meals but we hadn’t had an opportunity to try them all. ‘Kung Po Chicken’ boasted the label on my packet. I opened it up, the steam burning my fingers, and gasped in surprise. There, lying on the top of a bed of noodles, were genuine chunks of real, crispy vegetables. I made the others look and we all whooped in delight. To have real vegetables in an expedition meal was unheard of and yet here they were. Unable to resist, I tried a long green bean while it was still too hot, breathing out the hot air as I chewed but with a huge, ecstatic grin on my face. Better than the taste was the texture – to have something that went ‘crunch’ when you bit into it was such a novelty; everything else we ate was the soft, mulchy product of chemical processes but this was genuine food. Less successful was the protein powder that we were to drink each evening to help our muscles recover for the following day. It didn’t dissolve as normal in our water bottles but formed granulated lumps that had to be chewed before they could be swallowed. Helen pronounced her revulsion when she joined us after dinner, ‘It was like floating dandruff. Disgusting!’
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