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Authors: Barry Lopez

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During the brief summer, it is warm enough for a few days or weeks to create meltwater; a few, inconsequential streams tumble down from the glaciers above the valleys. The sparkling surface of the water is aberrant, a false promise, the land’s irony. The only really animate force here is the wind. It blows, always, from the interior, from the west—often, in the spring, at well over sixty knots. It wallops and scours the mountains, eroding and fracturing, sweeping clear the debris. It is this beast that has, too, made these huge, empty valleys the driest ground on Earth.

Uplifting in the Transantarctic Mountains took place so quickly here, apparently, that the mountains formed in this place alone a rampart against the East Antarctic ice sheet (which is the size of the United States). Cut off, the ice cannot flow down these
valleys to the sea. Since then, each year’s scant snowfall has been shattered and evaporated by the dry, incessant wind before it can accumulate. Only here (and at two other less spectacular sites on the Antarctic mainland, in the Bunger and Vestfold Hills in East Antarctica) is the land open to the sky, not buried under ice and snow.

The wind, a katabatic or gravity-driven wind, enters the valleys after falling vertically nearly two miles from the summit of the East Antarctic ice sheet; it comes into the valleys with a discernible hunger, and its effect on the land, which it abrades and lacerates with bits of sand and ice, is often peculiar.

In the Olympus Range on the north side of the Wright Valley, high up on the slope near a place called Bull Pass, I found a thin vein of dolerite, a drab, coarse, gray-black igneous rock similar to basalt. At this outcrop it had broken into pieces, and each piece, sitting on a sand base like a stone on a jeweler’s dop, had been polished by the wind to the smoothness and luster, if not the density, of marble. Yet it was not this, really, that gave them their character; it was how the wind had cut them. They had the faceting, the angularity and curve, the impervious façades, of modern buildings. Even at this scale—hand-size—what lay before me was an imposing field of dark monoliths.

They are called, after the wind, ventifacts.

Insofar as the dry valleys of Victoria Land are known to the outer world, they are known for four things: for these rocks, the essence, in their form, of modern sculpture; for a mineral, antarcticite (calcium chloride hexahydrate), discovered in local ponds so heavily laden with salt they do not freeze in winter, when the temperature rests at -60 degrees and -70 degrees Fahrenheit; for their similarity, it is widely believed, to the rainless deserts of Mars (the Viking lander would have found no life on this ground either); and for a scattering of mummified creatures on the valley floors, mostly young crabeater seals and, rarely, a penguin or skua.

No one is certain why the seals come up here. A good guess is that they are inexperienced. They wander up from the coast,
sometimes traveling as far as forty miles inland, hunching their way over the gravel fields with—to judge from the few, fresh trails that have been found—intractable determination. But it is travel utterly in the wrong direction.

They succumb eventually to starvation on these errant journeys; but an animal dead for a decade may be so well preserved that it looks, as one approaches, as if it might move off. A seal more exposed to the wind might over several years arch up in a curve like half an automobile tire, head and rear flippers high in the air, its eye sockets bored out, its mouth agape, a goblin.

The taut skin of these desiccated animals feels smooth under the hand and hard, like water-polished stone. The wind freeze-dries their flesh. No predator bothers them. The faces, if they can be said to have an expression, are distraught, catatonic with a sudden, horrible misunderstanding of geography. (It seems reckless to insist that only endocrine secretions and neural structures are here, that naught else abides.) The peculiar cheek teeth, ornate with tiny, interlocking cusps, stand out boldly in their highly evolved but useless efficiency.

Whenever I encountered these animals I found it difficult to leave them. And when I left, often as not, I turned back. They were inconsolable. They had made an error. Their lips parted in some final, incoherent noise. They had, most of them, died alone. Some lay with the clouded eyes of the blind, preserved for years in abject disbelief.

I
N A WEEK
of ambling, of looking among mountain boulders hoodooed by the wind, of sitting in windless bights amid glacial debris, of lining out like a Dinka on the heels of my hands and one knee to taste the salt ponds, I found the dry valleys unfetchable. Whatever one might impute to this landscape, of beauty or horror, seemed hardly to take hold; my entreaties for conversation met almost always with monumental indifference. I have never felt so strongly that unsettling aloofness of the adult that a small child knows, and fears. It is hard to locate the reassurance of
affection in these circumstances. And yet this land informs, some would say teaches, for all its indifference. I can easily imagine some anchorite here, meditating in his room of stone, or pausing before a seal shipwrecked in this polar desert.

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want not to forget.

If you returned it would be to pay your respects, for not being welcomed.

5
FLIGHT

O
NE FOGGY
January morning in 1977, a few hours before dawn, a DC-8 freighter crashed on takeoff at Anchorage International Airport, killing all five people aboard and fifty-six head of cattle bound for Tokyo. Rescuers found the whitefaced Herefords flung in heaps through the thick, snowy woods, their bone-punctured bodies, dimly lit by kerosene fires, steaming in the chill air.

A few days after the accident I happened to land in Anchorage on a flight from Seattle, en route to Fairbanks. The grisly sight of the wreck and the long scar ripped through birch trees off the end of the runway made me philosophical about flying. Beyond the violent loss of human life, it was some element of innocence in the cattle I kept coming back to. Were they just standing there calmly in large metal pens when the plane crashed? And why
were they needed in Tokyo? At 35,000 feet over the winter Pacific, cruising that frigid altitude at 400 knots, did their lowing and jostle seem as bucolic?

Like many people who fly often, I have watched dozens of windowless air freighters lumbering by on taxiways and wondered at their cargos. In the years after that accident I puzzled over them everywhere—in Quito, in Beijing, in Nairobi, in Frankfurt, in Edmonton. What could warrant a fleet of machines so sophisticated and expensive to operate? It must be more than plasma and vaccines they haul, materials desperately needed; more than cut flowers, gold, and fruit, things highly valued or perishable. Would it be simply the objects people most desire? A fresh strawberry on a winter morning in Toronto?

Watching pallets go aboard on monotonously similar tarmacs around the world, I became more and more curious. I wanted to know what the world craved. I wanted a clarifying annotation for the rag-doll scatter of cattle.

At two a.m. one December night I climbed aboard a 747 freighter in Chicago to begin a series of flights around the world with freight.
*
I would fly in and out of cities like Taipei, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles with drill pipe, pistol targets, frozen ostrich meat, lace teddies, dog food, digital tape machines, pythons, and ball caps; with tangerines from Johannesburg, gold bullion from Argentina, and orchid clusters from Bangkok. During the hourless penetration of space between continents, I would sidle among the eighty or more tons of airborne freight on the main deck, examining disparate labels like an inquiring bird. Out cockpit windows on the flight deck, I would become absorbed in the strange untapering stillness of the Earth seen from that altitude.

Before I boarded the first flight, however, I wanted to learn about the plane.

II

T
HE ASSEMBLY BUILDING
at Boeing’s aircraft plant at Everett, Washington, is so large—ninety-eight acres under a single roof more than a hundred feet off the ground—that it has its own weather. Sometimes low clouds form in steelwork near the ceiling, where gantry cranes carrying subassembled sections of 747s, 767s, and 777s maneuver toward sites of final assembly. Over a single November night I watched swing-shift and third-shift crews at the plant complete the assembly of a 747–400 freighter, nearly the largest plane ever to fly. I studied it, and listened and touched, as its 68,000-pound wings were joined to a fuselage section, the six fuselage sections slid together and landing gear attached beneath, leaving it to tower above workers, empty as a cathedral, aloof as the moon.

As a boy I raised tumbler pigeons, a breed that at some height above the ground will destroy its aerodynamic lift and come plummeting down like a feathered stone, only to pull out at the very last moment, a terrifying demonstration of power and grace. Model airplanes—P-47, P-38, F-86, B-29—hung from the ceiling of my bedroom on black thread; I was mesmerized by the wind seething in eucalyptus trees around the house. Once I leaped hopefully from our roof with an open umbrella.

At seventeen I entered college as an aeronautical engineer, only to discover it was the metaphors of flight, not its mechanics, that moved me. I was less interested in engineering than in the imagination of an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote of the “tender muslin of the meadows, the rich tweed of the woods,” who climbed into the open cockpit of his Sahara-bound mail plane with heavy clothes and a tool bag, like a deep-sea diver, and who died in a crash in the Mediterranean in a P-38, a plane my mother’s first husband helped design.

I switched to liberal arts, but the marvel of airborne flight never diminished for me. And the exotic allure of the Earth continued to tug. I saw the sky as an airscape of winds—West Africa’s
harmattan
, Greece’s damp
Apeloites
, California’s Santa Ana, Japan’s
daiboufu
(“the wind that knocks horses down”).

I admired what I saw come tangibly together that night in the Boeing assembly building: a staggering achievement in engineering, in metallurgy, in economy of design. The assembly of a 747–400 freighter—232 feet long, 165 tons poised over eighteen tires like a barefoot gymnast on a balance beam, a six-story drop from the apex of its tail to the ground—suggests the assembly of a chronometer by tweezer, a sculptor’s meaning with a jeweler’s fastidiousness. Standing on a scaffold inside a wheel well, I marveled at a set of brass-colored steel screws securing six hydraulic lines in a pattern neat as a musical staff. Not a tool mark, not a misstep was to be seen. (Elsewhere, workers were buffing the airplane’s aluminum skin to remove scratches I couldn’t find with the pads of my fingers.) Fuselage sections came together smooth as a cap sliding onto a French fountain pen.

For twelve or thirteen hours that night I watched, wandering off to sift through a box of button-head rivets (three million of the plane’s six million parts were rivets); or to observe agile men disappearing into the labyrinthine recesses of another 747’s unfinished wing; or to heft “nuclear hardened” cable—flexible, shielded conduit that carries thick bundles of color-coded wire from controls on the flight deck to each engine. Then I circled back to the freighter—this particular one being built for Singapore Airlines—with another bit of understanding, a new appreciation of its elegance. People who saw the 747’s first flight, in 1969, were impressed that something so huge could fly. What surprised the pilots were its nimbleness, its fluid response to their foot and hand pressures, the easy way the aircraft absorbed turbulence. Designing a plane to fly this well is exceedingly difficult. The engineering task, the working out of that single genetic code, proves to be beyond the reach of formulas. It’s as intuitive and mysterious a process—and as prone to catastrophe—as developing and holding on to the financial market for such things.

The Boeing 747 is the one airplane every national airline strives to include in its fleet, to confirm its place in modern commerce,
and it’s tempting to see it as the ultimate embodiment of what our age stands for. Superficially, it represents an apotheosis in structural engineering and in the applied use of exotic metals and plastics. Its avionics and electronics systems incorporate all the speed and design efficiency of modern communications, and in terms both of manufacturing and of large-scale corporate organization, the swift assembly of its millions of parts is a model of streamlining and integration. In the air, the object itself is a virtuoso solution to flight, to Icarus’s dream of escape and freedom. It operates with as little regard for geography, weather, political boundaries, intimidating physical distance, and time as anything humans have ever devised.

If subtleties in the plane’s engineering were beyond my understanding, the spare grace of its long lines was not, nor its utilitarian perfection. The only thing that disturbed it, I was told, were rogue winds, the inevitable riptides and flash floods of the troposphere.

When I measured off the freighter’s nearly completed main deck that night—sixty-eight paces down the bare interior—I was thinking of the quintessential symbol of another era, the Gothic cathedral of twelfth-century Europe, and of its emptiness, which we once filled with religious belief. Standing on the main deck, above the boxlike stub that joins the wing roots, standing where “nave” meets “transept” and looking up toward the pilots’ “chancel,” I recalled the intention behind Lúcio Costa’s Brasília, a fresh city, aligned east and west like a cathedral but laid out in the shape of an airplane. But there on the assembly line the issue of spirituality, as serious a consideration as blood in the veins of a people, remained vague. The machine was magnificent, beautiful as staggered light on water, complex as an insoluble murmur of quadratic equations. But what placed within it could compare with religious faith?

BOOK: About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
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