Antarctica (22 page)

“You’ve actually quit?”

“Not down here—that would be it—but a couple times before, yeah. I was guiding in the Tetons for a few seasons, and I had this client…. Well, have you heard the three rules of mountain guiding?”

“No.”

“First rule is, the client is trying to kill you. Second rule, the client is trying to kill himself. Third rule, the client is trying to kill the rest of the clients.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. I told you there were parts of the job I didn’t like, and one of them is that it makes you cynical about people.”

“Many jobs do.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, I was leading this guy up the Grand Teton, and we were on the ridge above the emergency hut, on a cloudy day, with a cloud smack against the east face, so that there was a slot of air there we could look down, like a crevasse five thousand feet deep. And I don’t know, he had a thing about the Grand Teton I guess, and suddenly rules one and two came into play both at once, literally.”

“He tried to kill you?”

“He tried to kill both of us. It was a suicide thing. We were roped together, and when we were climbing a section of the ridge overlooking the east face, he let out this kind of funny yelp and threw himself off the ridge and down the face.”

“On purpose!”

“Yeah.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, I arrested us, obviously—threw myself the other way and got a hold, and luckily I was a lot heavier than him, and we held. Broke a couple of fingers,” she added, holding out her right hand for inspection.

“Ouch!”

“Oh, I’ve broken a lot of bones in the mountains, it’s not so bad.”

“But what then!”

“Well, I had to talk him out of it, or at least I tried
to—but when I had him calmed down and got up, he tried it again! So after that I throttled him, basically, and hauled him back down the ridge to the emergency hut and had us medevacked out of there. I don’t know why I expected a suicide to be honest with me when he’d just tried to take me with him, but I did. That second try really shocked me. It made me mad.”

“I’ll bet!” Wade tried to imagine it, shaking his head. “So you quit.”

“Yeah. For a while. But—” she shrugged. “I like to be out in places like this. All the time, basically. So … guiding is the best way to finance it.”

“All jobs have their downside,” Wade said.

“Yeah?” She shifted to look at him easier. “Tell me about yours.”

“Well,” he said, and waved a hand. Actually, thinking it over, he realized he liked his job quite a lot. But he wanted to share her situation, her predicament one might even say, and so he said, “Well, I have to live in Washington.”

“Don’t you like it? I visited once and thought it was exciting.”

“It’s a great town to visit, but living there is crowded—muggy—I don’t know. There is no there there, you know.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Oakland,” he said, grinning at his little joke. “No, all over, really.”

“San Francisco is a great town too.”

“Yes. And so beautiful. After that, Washington is just a swamp.”

She nodded.

“And then I have to work with politicians all the time.”

“Are they bad?”

He laughed. “Like your clients, I suppose. They think they’re professionals, but a lot of them aren’t.”

“Ah yeah. That can be hard.”

“Yeah.” But actually he liked it, and did not want to sound like a complainer; and so he said, “Well, it’s interesting anyway. A lot of the time I like it. I like Senator Chase. No, I like my job.”

She nodded her approval. “It’s like you said.”

“What.”

“All jobs have their downside.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Although right now I must admit mine doesn’t seem so bad.” And she smiled at him. He suddenly remembered waking in the night, and his heart did a little tympani roll inside him. He smiled back, offered her a chunk of his chocolate bar. She took it from him and their gloved fingers touched.

“Salty chocolate?”

“Very.”

The rest of the afternoon he followed her across the great silent rock valley, watching her. Which was wonderful; like watching one of Chagall’s long dancers come to life, flowing down the rock in her boulder ballet, total grace over the shattered fractal surface underfoot, and without looking at it at all, as far as he could tell. And she had such a tall muscular body. Again he remembered lying next to her in their tent, and that impression he had had, of being next to a bigger animal; that had been a thrill, a deep ravished erotic-thrill, just in the idea of it. He was six foot tall almost exactly, and had not spent enough time with women distinctly taller than him to know for sure that he had this—this predilection. He supposed there was some bit of a reversal
in that, something feminine perhaps; but not enough to frighten him; one component of the thrill, perhaps. He liked her. He had figured her for a jock, but clearly there was a lot of thinking going on in there; an intellectual. He had heard that climbing included an intellectual element, that it was the intellectual’s sport, a kind of physical chess played against nature. Whatever; he liked her; he was attracted to her; and not just in that simple attraction that no doubt most men felt on seeing her, but more than that; her specifically, the thinker inside the amazon body. And what a body. In that yellow tent—oh what could have been—fantasy images of her on top of him, inside a single sleeping bag—

Then he was surprised to find that they were dropping down the final scree to the flat white surface of Lake Vida. There was a cluster of bright mountain tents at one end of the lake, and Val headed for that. As they approached she turned to Wade with a smile. “Well,” she said, “back to work.” And his heart melted a little; and he felt the kind of smile that was on his face, and knew it was giving him away, if she was watching.

Then they were in the camp. It was, Val pointed out, the NSF-regulated campsite for Lake Vida, occupied by every group that came through, on a bench just above the lake, under the broken face of Schist Peak, marked by cairns and another stacked-rock outhouse; all very unobtrusive in the grand landscape, there in the intersection of the Victoria and McKelvey Valleys, where everything seemed so vast. The few rock markers were as nothing to the vibrant neon colors of the tents. There were half a dozen dome tents for sleeping, and then a green walk-in dining tent, very much larger than the Scott tents at the scientific camp. Like everywhere else Wade had been, the campsite looked deserted as they
approached. An incongruous collection of colorful children’s blocks, scattered in the immensity of rock. Val walked up to the communal tent, and calling out a hello stuck her head in the door.

They were welcomed inside without delay, to meet another guide named Karl, and his group of ten trekkers. They were backpacking around the Dry Valleys from camp to camp, and had already been out for ten days, with just a few more to go: a whiskery bunch, for the most part—only three women in this group—and with the slick oily hair Wade had noted in the scientists, and more and more in himself. Over hot drinks and salty hors d’oeuvres they enthusiastically described their trip: dropped in by helicopter on Wright Upper Glacier just below Airdevronsix Icefalls, then on foot down through the Labyrinth, past the Dais and Lake Vanda and up the course of the Onyx River to Lake Brownworth; then up and over the Clark Glacier, wearing crampons, and past Clark Lake, over the Saharan dunes of Victoria Valley, to their current camp. From here they were going to hike down the McKelvey Valley on the edge of the forbidden zone, through Bull Pass and down to Vanda again. Longer treks would then cross the Asgaard Range, a difficult crossing no matter what route one took, and then descend the Taylor Valley to the Lake Hoare camp, or even New Harbor for a snowmobile or hovercraft trip across the sound to McMurdo, depending on the season; but this was a shorter expedition, and would be heloed out from Lake Vanda.

Most of this was explained to them by two men pointing here and there on a big well-used map, with the guide and the others sitting back and letting them at it. The larger of the two men was a dark blond, handsome American, who was directing his description to
Val, who had to know these treks all too well, Wade judged. And all in an ironic style that was charming in a way, but had little true wit in it. Val listened politely, and smiled in the designated places, but Wade could see she wasn’t interested in the same way she had been in the scientists’ conversation back in the Barwick.

“And that will be the end of the Great Dry Valley Circle,” the man said.

“I’ll be ready,” one of the other trekkers said. “I’m going to take my next trip in New Guinea.”

“No, Tahiti.”

They laughed.

“It’s so cold,” one of them said.

“And the same everywhere,” another added.

“And so much bigger than it looks—you hike along a valley expecting it to take an hour and it takes all day. It’s like the reverse of the Himalayas. Wright Valley goes on forever.”

“It’s the lack of haze.”

“It’s the cold.”

“The lack of trees.”

“The fact that we flew over it in ten minutes on the way in.”

“Whatever. Anyway this is it for me. Been there, done that.”

Others pooh-poohed this sentiment. “It’s beautiful!” “It’s so big.” “And beautiful!”

Which it wasn’t, not by any definition of beauty Wade had ever heard. But this was what one said when impressed by a landscape, this was how attenuated the language had become for some people. Depauperate, as Forbes had said to Michelson yesterday about some section of the rock. But if Wade had spoken up and said It’s not beautiful, it’s sublime, the distinction would not be understood. So he kept his mouth shut and listened
to these stock responses, back in the soup of American speech, in all its basic talkshow mindlessness—

“It’s boring is what it is.”

And perhaps, Wade thought, without the science, without the politics, just walking around out here—maybe it was boring. Nothing but shits and giggles.

The other guide was smiling dutifully at all these criticisms, which were stated cheerfully, and in part just to tease him. These people would rave about the trek when they got back home, no doubt about that. So the guide nodded and shrugged as if he had heard it all before, and had already made his best attempt to counter them. It was all banter for the new folks.

“So, Val,” he said when he got a chance. “Where next for you?”

“Amundsen,” she said.

“Hey, that’s where we’re going too!” the tall handsome man exclaimed, with a quick glance at Val and then at his friend. “You must be Valerie Kenning?”

“That’s me,” Val said, showing nothing one way or another. “Yeah, it should be a good expedition.”

The other guide said, “I’ve heard the Axel Heiberg has become quite a challenge.”

Val shrugged. “There’s a steep section at the headwall, yeah. But if it’s bad this year,” with a lightning glance at the other guide that Wade took to refer to the
it
, “we’ll take the descent route and save some energy for it.”

“Oh we’ll manage the real route,” the tall client said confidently.

“Uh huh,” Val said, with an encouraging smile at him. Wade remembered the three rules of mountain guiding and winced inside. Happy chance that he had met her not as a trekking client, but in some slightly different capacity! Although Distinguished Visitor,
ouch; but still, better than this. He watched her continue to converse cheerfully with the group, and it occurred to him that in a couple of hours their helo would arrive and take them back to McMurdo, and that might very well be the last he ever saw of Valerie Kenning. And then he winced in earnest.

Val sat in the trekkers’ dining tent, doing her best to conceal her irritation with the men who were going to be joining her Amundsen trip. Or man, to be specific; the other one, Jim McFeriss, was your typical sidekick and enabler; it was the main talker, Jack Michaels, who was going to be the real bummer. The way he looked at her, the way he talked to the others, complacent and assured and oh so certain he was the star of the movie: Val hated that manner with a fine passion. She had become so sick of the stink of bad testosterone that even the slightest whiff of it made her want to heave. And so she sat in one of the ultralight but unstable camp chairs at the end of the camp table, and became more bright and cheery than ever, an old technique she had picked up in high school when dealing with tremendous amounts of anger, anger often mysterious in origin but sometimes perfectly clear; and as it was inappropriate to scream at people, she had found that she could satisfy her need to lash out at them simply by lying to them so grossly, with the happy cheerleader routine. Hiding
her real self and bearing down on people with a very aggressive happy face had always worked strangely well, in several different ways.

So now she was fine among this group of trekkers, though they looked to be a pretty lame bunch, as Karl’s private glance confirmed. And the prospect of leading a reproduction of Amundsen’s difficult
direttìssima
, with this Jack and Jim among other no doubt problematical clients, was in fact pretty dismal. There Jack sat, ostensibly telling a couple of his comrades from this trip about kayaking down the Dudh Khosi—oh no, now it was climbing the Matterhorn—and by their looks they had heard it before, and also they could see as well as Val could that he was not really telling the story to them but to her, looking left at them then right at her, pulling her into his audience. Men like him were seals, encased in a thick blubber of their own self-regard. Interested in her, however; looking at her, charming her, impressing her with his wilderness adventure credentials, which sounded extensive. They always did. Evaluating her as well; deciding that she was a simple cheerleader jock, a straightforward proposition, not as well-informed as he, but interested in learning more about the big wide world of which he had seen so much.

All so much crap. And all because of the way she looked. If she had been short and plain and unobtrusive, the wattage of his attention would have been so much lower that she might have had a chance to see something of him; as it was the dazzle had reduced her pupils to pinpoints, and she stared out at a chiaroscuro shadow tent, inflicting the cheerleader routine on its occupants full force, until soon they would be pinned to the floor by it and admitting that they too wished they all could be California girls, in four-part harmony.