So he put his signature on the form, powerfully tempted to sign it “X.” But he signed his full name, to make sure everything was legal, and gave the form back to Paxman.
“What are you going to do?” Paxman asked.
“Work for the African oil people.”
“I’ve been thinking of doing that myself. Good luck out there.”
“Thanks.”
Then he turned, and there was Sylvia in the doorway, looking at him with a calm hard evaluative expression. She was NSF of course, and what an ASL employee did was in theory not her concern. But it was all connected down here. And the oil-exploration camps were the most visible sign that the Antarctic Treaty was in limbo, and in danger of falling apart forever. So X tried not to cringe under her sharp eye.
“Didn’t like general field assistance, I see,” she said.
“No.” He met her look and held it. “ASL doesn’t do right by its employees. We’re treated like it’s such a privilege to be in Antarctica that we can always be replaced. The hours are longer than is legal back in the world, there’s no security season to season, no retirement, no benefits beyond the bare minimum. Nothing that real jobs have, or used to have. And NSF sets the conditions, you let them do it. You could tell them what they can do and can’t do, and create better working conditions down here.” He kept his voice soft and calm; no fits here, just stating the facts.
Sylvia said, “There are legal limits to how much NSF can interfere with the contractors they hire.” She shook her head, turned toward her office. “Good luck, X.”
Back out into the wind, dismissed. He trudged up the torn snow and mud to the Berg Field Center warehouse. Ob Hill loomed behind the old building. There were things about Mac Town that he was going to miss. Joyce was in the BFC lounge, an area of the upper floor which had a few couches, a magazine rack, a table and a coffee machine.
“I came to say good-bye,” X said. “I’m off to one of the oil camps.”
“Oh X,” Joyce said, looking annoyed. “Not really.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
She didn’t believe him. He wasn’t sure he did either.
“Anyway I’m off,” he said.
“Does Val know?”
“Yeah. I ran into her up on Ob Hill.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh X. She misses you, you know.”
“Right.”
“No, really. I think she’s done her trolling, you know, and found out that she made a mistake. That guy Mike was a jerk. She likes you better than the rest of the guys down here.”
X shrugged. “Too late now,” he said, trying to squash a tiny little hummingbird of hope that was now zooming around in his chest. Irritated, he held a poker face. Joyce stood up awkwardly, and came around her desk to give him a hug, her head just higher than his belly button. He accepted the hug gratefully, feeling like a beggar.
“What a mess,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She pulled back to look up at him. “You shouldn’t go, X. Not just because of Val. We’re working on trying to improve things here.”
“Uh huh.”
“No, really. Listen X, the service contract comes up for renewal at the end of this season, and ASL very well might lose it.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“No, really!”
But Joyce had educated X on the history of the companies hired by NSF to run its Antarctic bases, so she was in large part responsible for X’s skepticism. The first company, Holmes and Narver, had won its bid during the height of the Cold War, and was rumored to have been a CIA front company. The second server, ITT, had just finished helping the CIA overthrow the Allende government in Chile, so there was no question about its CIA connection; and it had close ties with oil companies too.
The third company, Antarctic Support Associates, had been a great improvement over the previous two, Joyce had said. An ordinary and even good company—certainly the good people in it had made it as much of a home as they could, and they had been in the majority. Joyce and many other office heads still in McMurdo had started with ASA and still remembered it fondly. Its contract had been the usual ten-year deal, however, and NSF had required it to give potential competitors some subcontracts so that the competitors could learn enough to make truly competitive bids at contract time. ASA had dutifully done this, and in its third ten-year stint given a subcontract to a subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate, one of the most hardball in the new global economy. There were rumors that this subcontractor had conducted some cuckoo-in-the-nest type activities, subtly messing up ASA where it could; but in truth its aggressive downsizing had resulted in such low labor costs that it was able to make a very low bid simply by sweatshopping its McMurdo labor force, and counting on the attractions of the place and the tough times up north to keep positions filled. And as NSF was constrained by Congress to accept the lowest bid without judging labor practices for anything more than legal compliance, the new company had won easily, and ASA was gone. As they took over McMurdo the owners of the new company had rechristened it Antarctic Supply and Logistics, either because they had not looked closely at the resulting acronym or because they had and wanted to make it clear right away just what kind of tough lean no-nonsense 21st-century corporation they really were.
This of course had been a disaster for all the old ASA hands who wanted to stay on, who had had to reapply for the same jobs at a fraction of the old salary and benefits package, with all their seniority lost. And it had been a déjà vu disaster for Joyce, who had seen it all before in her first profession, nursing; there she had been downsized to “census-dependent full-time employment” early on, meaning that she was full time unless not enough beds in the hospital were filled, when she would be called and told to stay home without pay. She had gotten pissed off and decided that if taking care of sick people was going to be sweatshopped like everything else then she was going to quit and light out for the territory, in her case the white south.
So X’s skepticism concerning her hope for change only reflected what she had taught him. But now she held off all that bad history with an outstretched hand: “No, listen,” she said seriously. “We’ve got some plans, we’re really working on it. And you’d fit right in.”
“I’ve already resigned.”
“Shit.” She shook her head, disgusted. “Damn it, X, you should have talked to me first!”
“I want to go.”
She gave him a very hard look. He was taking things too far, the look said; he was being oversensitive, romanticizing the whole Val thing. Miserably he stared back at her, refusing to concede the point.
She shrugged, dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Okay. But you remember what I said. It’s the truth you know! We’re going to change things!”
He nodded and clumped down the stairs. There at the turn in the stairwell was the big photo of Thomas Berg in the middle of a polar dip, grinning and wet, chest-deep in the subzero water of McMurdo Sound, in a hole hacked in the sea ice like a seal hole, the man like a big seal. It had always struck X as a poignant memorial, as Berg had soon after that died in a helicopter crash in the Dry Valleys. Now it struck him harder than ever, as some sort of general comment on what one’s happy moments really meant, on how long they lasted. He walked out into the slap of the wind feeling worse than ever.
So he was in no shape to talk to anybody, much less Val herself, and when she came out of the galley door and saw him and approached, he groaned. This town was just too damn small. And yet there was that little hummingbird whirring around inside him now, trying to flit out one of his pupils with his look at her—a very close inspection indeed—trying to judge the possible truth of what Joyce had told him, looking for signs of regret, or friendliness, or anything but the dismissive nonlooks he had gotten from her since she ended their friendship.
And indeed she had such a look on her face, and no
sunglasses to hide it; there was no mistaking it, she was distressed. Or else mad at him. “Are you really going?” she said.
“Yes. I just finished resigning.”
“Oh X,” she said. “God damn it, those folks are breaking the Treaty, you don’t know what’s going to happen down here if the Treaty doesn’t hold, they’ll wreck everything!”
Of course he wouldn’t be doing this if they had stayed a couple. They both knew it, but they wouldn’t talk about it. And here she was ragging on him while they were standing alone out in the wasteland of pipelines and telephone wires; but up on Ob Hill she had pretended not to care in the slightest, unwilling to show anything in front of the DV, that politico with his fancy haircut and his parka worn like a camel-hair overcoat, talking on the wrist to Washington and to wherever his roving senator was now, a handsome guy with money and prospects and a career, onto whom Val had immediately glommed. Women were drawn to power like iron to a magnet; it was sociobiology in action, the gals looking to protect their little babies no doubt; but still it made X sick to see it.
So he glared at her and did not reply. He could not think what to say when he was so mad at her and yet at the same time that hummingbird was zipping around in him like an attack of angina.
“People have been breaking the Treaty for years,” he said finally. “Your tour groups are breaking the Treaty as they used to interpret it. The southern countries doing this exploration are using really safe technology. And it’s exploration only. It won’t be a problem. I’m looking forward to doing some real work for a change.”
She waved a hand angrily, swatting him without actually swatting him. “You’ll end up doing the same kind of thing you do here.”
“They’re going to train me to do more.”
“Right.”
He looked down at her. Not very far down, it was true; this was one of the things he had loved about her, she was a woman his size. And not just physically, but in her mind and spirit. He had loved her, and sure, he loved her still. But this was too much. If she wanted to ask him to stay, or berate him for not staying for personal reasons having to do with them, if she wanted to apologize for dumping him so brutally after their arrival, she could do it; here he was, this was her chance, her last chance for months at least, maybe her last chance ever; and here she was nattering on about the goddamned Antarctic Treaty, as if that mattered any more or was the real point between them.
Maybe some of that got across to her in his look. She pursed her mouth and looked off to the side unhappily. Unhappy cheerleader; it was a sorry sight. But she was too stubborn to apologize, and by God he deserved an apology. They had been partners, they had been sleeping together, making love; they had been in love. Or so he had thought. Then they had gone off to do their business in the world and come back here, just a couple of months apart, and as usual on her return (just three days before him!) there had been a bunch of guys coming on to her—big deal, it was no excuse, when had it been any different for a woman who looked like her? No, McMurdo was no excuse. They had been an ice romance only—she had wanted to break it off for reasons of her own, and the great number of men in McMurdo was just an excuse and a damned lame excuse at that.
And she wasn’t going to apologize.
“I’ve got to pack,” X said, struggling to keep his voice level. He turned and walked away before he started to shout at her, or cry.
And the next day he was out at the little air station that the private tour companies had established in the Windless Bight—nothing more than two Jamesways and a fuel bladder next to the snowplowed landing strip, one of the smallest barest camps X had ever seen. The plane didn’t show, and he spent the night in a Jamesway named “The Random House,” sleeping uneasily on an ancient dead mattress, listening to the Preway roar like the ghost boos of a ghost audience, watching his life movie from inside his head: a remake of The Man Without a Country, starring The Man With No Name.
5
A Site of Special Scientific Interest
Hello again my friends. As you can see, I am now out on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, a few kilometers south of Ross Island. I have come out here to spend a day at the Americans’ Happy Camper Camp, where visitors are trained in ice skills to better prepare themselves for their time in Antarctica. The camp is well-named; I am happy indeed. The mountaineers have shown us how to light the stoves, to put up the tents, and to use the radios. I have learned how to tie several knots. I know now that if you need to get a badly injured person inside a tent but are afraid to move them for fear of injuring them more, you are to slit the bottom of the tent open and erect the tent directly over the unfortunate person. Antarctica is a dangerous place. It is easy, looking around as we are now, to think that I stand on a broad snowy plain; in fact I am standing on cracked ice, with deep fissures all around, and the Antarctic Ocean below me.
Captain Cook, one of the greatest feng shui masters of all time, sailed the circumference of this Antarctic Ocean in the 1770s, trying to get as far south as he could. His wooden sailing ships ran into the pack ice at seventy degrees south, and as far as they could see to the south was only more ice. With the technology of his time they could go no farther. Later Cook wrote “I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”
This sounds odd to us, shortsighted and even a bit foolish. But we must remember that the man who said it was extremely intelligent and capable, accomplishing much more in his life than any of us have. His shortsightedness as exhibited in this remark has to be understood then not as a personal attribute, but as one of his age generally. For Cook lived just before the great accelerations of the industrial age; his time was as it were the foothills of a mountain range so precipitous that the heights could not be guessed. Thus the radical foreshortening of the kao-yuan perspective. Cook sailed in wooden ships, which in their materials much resembled those used in ships for the previous two thousand years; only improvements in design had made them more seaworthy, and Cook rightly judged that these improvements, wrested slowly over the centuries out of human experience, had gone about as far with the materials as they could go. Thus he could not foresee the immense changes that would come so rapidly in the industrial decades to follow.
We, however, have no such excuse as Cook. We live on the heights of that mountain range, in a culture changing so rapidly that it is hard to gauge it. We look back on two centuries of continuous acceleration into this unstable moment, so we should be able to foresee that much the same will occur in the time after us. Who can deny that the future will quickly become something very different than our time, quickly become one of any number of possible worlds?
And yet by and large I think we still do no better than Captain Cook. We assume that the conditions that exist now will be permanent. And yet every year the laws are amended, and even the ice shelf I am standing on now, that has been here for three million years, is melting away. Even the rocks melt away in time. This moment is like a dragonfly, hovering over a peach blossom; then off and gone.
Look then at this ocean I am camped on in this moment. A white immensity; nothing to say about it. Erebus stands in the air like a powerful deity. Before you can read a landscape, it has to become a part of your inmost heart. When I came before to Antarctica, as a proud young man, I saw the land and it baffled me, and I could not paint it in my poems. Nothing came to me. As the British explorer Cherry-Garrard said, “This journey had beggared our language.”
Only later, as I dreamed of it, did I grow to love it. What words I could find were the oldest words, in their simplest combinations. Blue sky; white snow. That is all language can say of this place; all else is footnotes, and the human stories.
Now I am back, and those of you who care to share my voyage, watching and listening in China, or wherever else you may be; I welcome you, because I feel now, all these years later, with the love of these stories in me, that I am ready to film the land I s
ee, and talk to you my friends about it; not to reproduce the effects of light, but to tap this light at its source.
For Scott’s party in their first stay here, in 1902, this edge of this ice shelf was as far south as anyone had ever been, and no one knew what lay farther over the horizon. Except of course they knew for sure that that way lay the South Pole, the axis of the Earth’s rotation. On Ross Island they were still twelve hundred kilometers away, as they knew by geometrical calculation; but they had no idea what the land in between would look like; whether these Western Mountains across the bay would extend all the way south, as a great wall blocking them, or whether there would be an easy ramp up to the great plateau of ice, which short trips through the nearest Western Mountains suggested might guard the Pole. They could only tell by trying to walk there. It resembled the attempts on the North Pole, and the search for the Northwest Passage, which had been a major feature of British culture since Elizabethan times. As long as England had been a maritime power, as long as it had been an empire, it had been sending out brave men to explore the polar ends of the Earth, first the northern one, and now, with the invention of canned food and metal-reinforced steam-powered ships, they had been able to penetrate the pack ice surrounding the southern one—the ice that Captain Cook said would never be penetrated—and been able to establish a good base of supplies as close as they had, here on Ross Island. Directly south lay this broad featureless white plain of an ice shelf. And so they had to give it a try.
On their first trip south, Scott took along his friend and confidant, Edward “Bill” Wilson, and Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton was chosen for his physical strength and for his drive, his will, his spirit to achieve and to cross this land.
But the snow of the ice shelf was soft, and pulling a sledge through it proved difficult, like pulling it through sand; very slow, and very strenuous. Shackleton had a heart defect that he hid from others all his life, and in the rigor of this forced march south, making five miles a day only after fourteen hours of badly designed manhauling, he succumbed to scurvy faster than the other two.
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