Call of the White

by Aston, Felicity

  That evening in the tent I pored over the laminated map we carried with us. Era had conscientiously marked the location of each of our camps with a small cross in neat black pen. There were now ten crosses forming a slightly wonky line from our starting point on the coast, stretching out boldly across the white expanses of the map. Our advance looked impressive until I folded out the map to show our entire route to the South Pole. In contrast to the ground yet to cover, we had barely taken our first steps. ‘In four days’ time we will reach the eighty-fifth degree of latitude,’ predicted Era confidently. Era had been a mathematics teacher and she loved any kind of mathematical problem or puzzle. Each evening, after carefully plotting our position on the map, she would cover our tiny communal notebook in her calculations of mileage covered and distances to go.

  We were now skiing six 90-minute legs in a day and had increased our daily mileage from just over 8 nautical miles to nearly 14 nautical miles. I was pleased with our pace: we had built up gradually and the team looked really strong. However, Helen was still anxious. ‘We’ve just got to keep plodding, we don’t want to go too fast,’ she said. I didn’t think we were in any danger of going too fast and suspected it was her feet, not the pace, that were the real problem. The nails on her big toes, which had been damaged in Namibia, were coming loose and moving around painfully as she skied. ‘They throb at night and keep me awake,’ she admitted as we sat together in the tent surveying the damaged skin.

  ‘Take some painkillers, Helen – at least overnight so that you can get some decent sleep,’ I cajoled. Eventually she was persuaded to take some paracetamol and ibuprofen.

  Her tent-mates were also nursing their feet. Reena, who had been using Kylie’s skis, had developed a pain in her left ankle. They were both now convinced that there was something wrong with the ski and neither wanted to use it. This was a problem as walking was still not a viable option in the soft snow and if the problem really was with the ski, passing it on to someone else would just spread the injury around. Kylie reluctantly took back her ‘evil’ ski. ‘I just need to make sure that with every step my heel hits the ski right,’ she decided (with more optimism than I suspect she felt). ‘At least it will be something to occupy my mind,’ she added. Concentrating on every step sounded exhausting. It was clear that we needed to find another solution.

  In the second tent a few metres away the issue was not injuries but hygiene. ‘Women shouldn’t smell like this,’ complained Steph. We had now been wearing the same clothes for at least 11 days and our last shower, back in Punta, was a distant memory. We each did our best with our daily ration of a single baby wipe, scrubbing at our face and hands first before attempting armpits and finally feet, but it made little difference. Every now and again we’d catch a whiff of ourselves and it was shocking. Thankfully, even though we were living very close together, I can honestly say that it was very rare I’d notice the stink of anyone but myself. Steph decided it was time for positive action and devised a plan for doing some laundry. We didn’t have fuel to waste on melting snow to make water for washing clothes but, undaunted, she tried a dry wash. Taking her underwear outside (held in front of her at arm’s length like a diseased rat) she dug a shallow pit in some powdery snow and rubbed ice into the fabric until it was damp. Adding a dash of antibacterial handwash she scrubbed at the laundry for a while before coming back inside the tent looking very pleased with herself. ‘I don’t know how clean they actually are,’ she admitted. ‘But at least they will feel clean.’ I didn’t share her enthusiasm when, later that evening, I sat up in my sleeping bag to be slapped in the face by a pair of drip-drying knickers hanging on the washing line in the middle of the tent.

  The next morning we woke to a particularly cold, windy day. We all opted to wear our warm fleece-lined smocks and pulled our fur-lined hoods close around our faces to keep out the worst of the icy gusts. The mountains we had seen the day before had disappeared into the cloud-covered sky and so, heads down, we set off in our long line, watching the back of the sledge in front, occasionally looking up to scan the horizon, before resuming our fixed, downward gaze. The rhythmic motion of the skis and their sibilance as they cut through the snow lulled me into a kind of meditation. My mind wandered away from Antarctica and took me home. I thought about what Peter would be doing at that exact moment. I worked out that he would be on his way home from work and tried to remember in exact detail his route along the sea to our tiny flat near Epple Bay with its whitewashed walls and ‘sea glimpses’. I imagined him gratefully shutting our front door against the winter weather and dropping his bags in our kitchen, turning on the central heating and the radio on his way into the bathroom for a shower, then cooking a meal to eat on the sofa. At that very moment, the simple comfort of sitting with him in the warmth of our front room seemed to be the greatest gift the world could bestow.

  A jolt sent me back to Antarctica. My sledge had caught on a lump of ice. I leaned forward in my harness without looking back. The sledges got caught a million times over in a single day but it was usually just a matter of pulling harder to free them. This time, there was no movement as I tugged at it. I turned around to find that my sledge had tipped over onto its side, the lip of the plastic sledge firmly wedged under a wave-shaped sastrugi. I glanced up at the team who, unaware I had stopped, were now a long way ahead. I called out to Era who was next in line. ‘Era! Stop!’ Seeing there was no response I called again, pulling down my balaclava so that my mouth was clear of material. My shoulders heaved with the effort as I yelled. The team marched on oblivious, my shouts carried away on the wind blowing in the opposite direction. Part of the travelling routine we had practised was that the person navigating at the front of the line regularly looked back to make sure that the team was OK – and still there.

  I watched the line for a while as it marched away from me, confident that at any moment Reena at the front of the line would look behind her. Seconds passed. Nothing. It was incredible how much ground had been covered in the few minutes since I had been stopped. The team of six individuals had now shrunk in size to become a single indistinguishable mass with numerous flailing limbs, like an oversized millipede. Sometimes the legs worked in perfect time with each other, at others it was random but all the while mitts jangled from elastic tied to harnesses or sleeves, webbing flapped from waist belts and ski poles jabbed at the ground leaving a spray of bullet holes in the snow either side of our parallel tracks. As the team continued to move further away from me, I realised no one was going to look around. I unhitched myself from my harness and, working quickly, moved around the sledge, moving the sledge bag so that I could disentangle it from the ice formation still stubbornly holding firm. It took me a number of minutes to right the sledge and reattach myself to my harness so I was shocked to look up and see that the team still hadn’t noticed that they’d left someone behind. I was angry: they knew better than this. I set off at a fast pace to try to catch up.

  Even though I was sweating with the effort, the distance between me and the receding millipede didn’t seem to be lessening. I had been marching for a good five minutes before finally I noticed Reena’s hand outstretched at her side making our hand signal for, ‘Are you OK?’ I watched as she looked round at the team behind her and then did a double take as she noticed there was one missing. Era swung around on her skis in shock to find that I wasn’t behind her, then looked up to spot me in the distance. Reena raised her ski pole towards me to check if I was OK. I paused in relief, crossing my poles above my head in reply so that they would all stop and wait for me. I ploughed on towards them as fast as I could but felt a little easier now that I knew that I would catch up. Pulling up behind Era I panted with the effort. ‘You’ve all got to look behind you,’ I gasped. ‘I could have been in real trouble and none of you would have known. You could have left me behind.’

  The girls all looked sheepish, shuffling on their skis. ‘Are you OK?’ asked Reena, concerned.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I puffed. ‘Just r
emember to look behind you.’

  I was genuinely annoyed but when we continued I found myself laughing quietly as I noticed Reena checking behind her after every few paces. In fact, for the rest of the day the team looked as if they’d developed a serious twitch, each of them glancing over their shoulder every few minutes. I was glad. We were approaching the section of our route that skimmed a large area of known crevassing. Planes flying to the South Pole from Patriot Hills had been able to see extensive holes and fissures in the ice from the air and recorded the coordinates. We were heading for a navigation marker that would lead us around the northern fringes of this crevasse field before we turned southwards. The dog-leg added a day, perhaps more, to our journey and I wondered if there was any room to cut the corner. ‘Good question,’ Steve had responded when I’d asked him during our regular call with Patriot Hills. ‘And a really bad idea.’ As he described the size and extent of the crevassing that had been seen from the air, I felt a chill crawl down my spine and clasp my stomach. Our only protection from crevasses was vigilance.

  I briefed the team to keep an eye open for any suspicious slumps in the snow, linear features or anything unusual and as we set off the next day, I could see that the girls were all periodically scanning the surface ahead and around us. Privately, I held little hope of us being able to detect anything until we were literally upon it. The snow around us was streaked with sastrugi which had been getting more pronounced over the last few days. Looking to my right or left as we skied, the ground seemed to be corrugated into delicate ripples so that it looked like the sea on a calm day. Each rise reflected a different shade of light so that the ground was no longer a uniform white but a collage of muted tones like the brush-strokes of a watercolour. Larger sastrugi protruded from the ripples, forming ice-sculptures that kept us amused. To me the porpoise-like curve of these larger waves were motionless sea monsters slipping through the frozen sea of ice; to Kylie they were groups of turtles crawling on each other’s backs, as if scrabbling to escape the snow beneath, and to Steph they were surrealist artworks worthy of Gaudí. When we passed close to one of these bigger sastrugi Reena would prod it with her ski pole, as if checking it was dead. ‘I see them as fish,’ she explained later. ‘So I make an eye with the end of my ski pole.’ Kylie was delighted with the idea and followed behind Reena drawing a smile on the ice fish beneath their new eyes. I watched all this from my place at the back of the line, amused by the thought of our route across Antarctica marked out by these animated imaginings.

  ‘Whooooohmp.’

  The sound of a muted thump rose from the snow beneath my ski and rolled away from us like the crash of thunder. I felt the snowpack move under my feet, as if the whole section I stood on had sunk. A surge of adrenalin shot through me like an electric shock, so sudden that it was physically painful. My mind silently yelled, ‘Crevasse!’ and I scuttled forward on my skis half expecting the ground to be falling away behind me. I turned and studied the snow – it all looked exactly as it had before, unchanged. I breathed deeply to calm my racing heart. This was not a crevasse opening up beneath me but the snowpack settling under the addition of our weight as we passed over it. Steph was in front of me in the line and had heard the same noise. She looked down at the snow beneath our skis before turning to me, ‘What was that?’ I could hear the panic in her voice.

  ‘It’s just the snow settling,’ I said casually, deliberately hiding my own fright. I had warned the team that we might hear this sort of thing but I expected that experiencing it for real would be unnerving for everyone, including me. Twenty minutes later the same thing happened again. I noticed Steph suddenly speed forward on her skis, moving closer to the person in front. She looked round at me in fear but didn’t say anything this time. I kept my head down as if I hadn’t heard it. Over the next three days we experienced the same sensation repeatedly. Each time my brain calmed my instinct with logic but there was still a quiet voice of fear wondering why we had only experienced the snowpack settling now, along the very section of our route that we knew was so close to a crevasse field. No logic in the world could stem the surge of adrenalin that flooded through me each time I set foot on some snow and heard the same sickening thump. I was amazed at the calmness of the rest of the team. ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ I asked Era at a break.

  ‘You’ve told us not to worry about it, so I don’t,’ she replied simply.

  I didn’t know whether to be flattered or alarmed at the faith she put in my assessment.

  As the noises from the snow continued, the sastrugi got bigger and the weather closed in. We were close now to the navigation marker and I could feel the expectation within the team. It wasn’t that there would be anything to see at the navigation point but after 13 days of simply travelling it was a novelty to feel that we would be arriving somewhere, even if it was just an arbitrary point on the map. The cloud had muted the light so that there was no definition or contrast in the snow. It was difficult to pick out the sastrugi if they cast no shadow so we found ourselves tripping over unseen obstacles of ice. Steph was the first to fall. Her right ski slid suddenly away from her, slipping down the back of an invisible sastrugi and she fell heavily, trailing her left ski through the air in an impressive arc. Those behind and in front of her in the line tried to shuffle forward to help but were hampered by their own skis as well as their sledges. Era was the next to fall. I happened to be looking across the top of our line when I saw two ski-tips, still parallel, flash in the space where Era’s head had been. Era was leading so the line stopped immediately but she was quick to get back on her feet, brushing the snow from her hat as she let everyone know she was unhurt.

  Not long after, Era stopped again. I peered down the line, assuming she had fallen, then saw the crossed poles above her head. I stepped out of our tracks and skied towards the front of the line to see what was wrong. Kylie was bouncing on her skis, arms above her head in triumph, ‘We’ve arrived!’ she whooped. Era had disconnected from her sledge and was shuffling about on her skis, hunched over her GPS unit. She stopped and looked up, ‘The navigation marker is right here,’ she announced, pointing down at the spot where she stood. I skied over and marked a cross in the snow with a gloved finger, ‘X marks the spot.’

  Now we had something to look at. As the team laughed and patted each other on the back, I gazed southward at the grey, smudged horizon and for a rare instant allowed myself to think of the South Pole. Our goal was still more than 600 kilometres away but in that instant as we turned to face the south, head on, for the first time, the pole felt closer than ever.

  Chapter Ten

  Pointing Fingers

  I squinted into the glare and tried to concentrate on the small black square that danced and flickered in the distance. I could see it clearly from the corner of my eye only to have it disappear if I looked at it directly. Frustration rose in my chest. We should have been able to see our resupply by now; could this be it? I glanced down at the GPS unit in my hand. Usually we navigated by compass because the batteries in the GPS ran down too quickly in the cold but this was a special occasion. We were within a nautical mile of our resupply. Somewhere out on the ice were three large red duffle bags and the GPS, unlike a compass, would be able to guide us straight to them. ‘There’s a big cairn of snow marked with flags,’ the operator at Patriot Hills had told me over the satellite phone the night before. ‘You will be able to see it from at least a kilometre away,’ he reported. The display on the GPS told me that we were now only 800 metres away. Why couldn’t we see the resupply yet?

  A feeling of dread rolled itself into a fist in my gut as my mind blazed through worst case scenarios. It was all too conceivable that we had made some terrible navigational error; that we were actually miles away from where we thought we were; that some sub-space magnetic storm had thrown our satellite-fixed positions into disarray and we had unwittingly already passed our vital resupply depot. Locating three bags in the vastness of Antarctica suddenly seemed ridiculous and our
failure to find them, inevitable. But then there was that slight flicker of black from the corner of my eye. Could it be a flag? I felt myself speeding up, lengthening my strides in my eagerness to find out.

  I glanced behind me at the team. A gap was opening up in front of Helen and I knew she’d be angry at me for increasing the pace but I ignored the concern. If this was the depot then we had only 300 metres to go. I felt myself racing now, a flood of energy surging through my muscles, a wave of joy rising at the sudden feeling of freedom. Glancing over my shoulder I noticed Steph and Reena had broken out of our habitual single file and were pulling up beside me – they had seen the flag, too. I grinned at them from behind my balaclava and we pushed forward together. With 100 metres to go there was no mistaking that the black dot was indeed a flag. This had to be our resupply, what else would be out here? We charged, flat out, over the remaining ground as the girls whooped congratulations to each other, the words smothered by the wind and our face-coverings, but jubilant nonetheless.

  The depot was no more than a pair of crossed flags above a heap of red bags partially covered in snow and ice. The flags sat just a few feet above the ground and I marvelled at the fact that I had seen their flickering forms from so far away – two tiny black dots in this universe of white. Era and Steph had kicked off their skis and were hugging each other. Steph was quick to pull the hated face mask away from her skin so that it hung to one side and revealed the coating of ice that had built up on the inside. Reena too had ripped her balaclava away so that it framed her face with a fringe of thick icicles. Usually we were careful not to disturb our painstakingly arranged face-coverings but arriving at the resupply we pushed them aside, knowing that we’d promised ourselves a rest day once we reached the depot. After 15 days of skiing, a full 36 hours of blissful lassitude stretched ahead of us.