Antarctica (24 page)

And after that no one else had seemed quite as good. She had in him a standard for behavior that was no doubt very high. She had also a fuse that was no doubt very short. No doubt a lot of what had happened to her since then had followed from those characteristics. It is eerie sometimes to contemplate how much we create our own reality. The life of the mind is an imaginary relationship to a real situation; but then the real situation keeps happening, event after event, and many of those events are out of our control, but many others are the direct result of the imagination’s take on things. So she was aware that her problems were not just because men were so often screwed up; because sometimes they weren’t, and still she botched her relationships with them, sometimes with men she had liked a lot. But they hadn’t been as good as her Steve. Sooner or later they let her down, and she blew up. And on she went, getting more and more skittish. The shorter her fuse got, the shorter it got. She was a case of walking burnt toast; mountain guiding was the last thing she should have been trying. It was like trying to be an open-air therapist when she was the one that needed the therapy. She needed a big time-out from people in general. She needed to find a man she really and truly liked. But the goods were odd, and the odds were not good. And not just in Mac Town.

Flying over the Ross Sea in a helicopter, I cannot help remembering Shackleton’s expedition of 1908, one of the greatest in Antarctic history, though little remembered now. The sea ice below us is now filled with the broken fragments of the old ice shelf, the big white islands all cliff-sided and atilt; no language can speak them, I am happy you have these images to see so that I do not have to try. We fly at a hundred kilometers per hour, perhaps two hundred meters over the bergs: like gods we flit over the surface of this world! But for Shackleton and his companions it was not so easy.

When Shackleton decided to try to return to the Antarctic after Scott had sent him home, he did not have any very enthusiastic backing from either the British Navy or the Royal Geographical Society. He managed to raise the money through his own efforts, gaining grants from rich patrons in English society; and he returned south with a private crew, in 1908. Now Scott at that time was himself organizing a return to the south, through official naval and Royal Society channels,
and he was outraged at the existence of Shackleton’s expedition. He felt that even the very chance to try for the Pole was his, as if he were St. George, and had all rights to the dragon until it or he be dead. Anyone who challenged that idea was betraying him.

Shackleton wrote to him, however, and asked him if he could use the Discovery Hut that we recently visited in McMurdo. Scott refused this permission! Moreover, he claimed explicitly that all attempts on the Pole from Ross Island were his to make, and that Shackleton must stay east of a certain longitude line which put him far on the other side of the Ross Sea.

And Shackleton agreed to this arrangement! These British are so strange. They were playing a game left over from the Middle Ages. But we should not be too surprised at this, because all stories are immortal and alive at all times, and these men had been told all their lives the tales of medieval chivalry. And we should consider also how many times we ourselves have jousted with a rival for love or honor.

So Shackleton gave Scott his word not to go to Ross Island, unless it was necessary for survival. Scott understood this to mean “survival of their lives,” of course.

But Shackleton could not find a suitable base on the other side of the Ross Sea. Over there, where I am looking now, there are no islands like Ross Island—for there are no mountains like mighty Erebus anywhere else on Earth—it is a singularity, a bolide of dense
ch’i
. Over there on the other side of the bay the coastline is drowned in ice, and only the edge of the Great Ice Barrier, as Ross so accurately named it, presented itself to those who arrived by sea in tiny ships. And Shackleton did not trust the edge of the Ice Barrier, the way Amundsen later did. Amundsen climbed onto the ice
shelf at what seemed a permanent indentation, and he read the snowscape to the south, and postulated the existence of a very low island, much later confirmed and named Roosevelt Island; a fine bit of feng shui that. And it caused Amundsen to trust that the ice at this Bay of Whales would hold for the six months he would live on it. It was a risk, for even stable ice calves from time to time into the sea; but a calculated risk. Shackleton, however, did not know enough to make the calculation. And yet at the same time he was a cautious man, a good planner. Only this allowed him to get so far south with so little snowcraft.

And so he returned to Ross Island! Unhappy man! To break his promise to Scott racked him; he did not sleep for a week, writing an anguished letter to his wife in which he explained that he was going to twist his promise to Scott to mean that he would not visit Ross Island unless it was necessary for survival of the expedition. But he was not really satisfied with this formulation. And neither was Scott.

Shackleton built a new hut of his own, twenty miles down the coast of Ross Island from Scott’s hut. He did not use the Discovery Hut except under duress, and generally even then slept in tents outside it, claiming that it was colder inside than outside, an uncanny phenomenon that many others have noted since. In time he forgot about his medieval promise, and carried on with his expedition. And in the Antarctic spring of October 1908, he and his group took off for the Pole.

And he was a better leader of men than Scott had been, and had learned some things about sledging. He failed to use skis at all, a strange lapse in equipment even if you are determined to manhaul. But he did take along ponies, which they marched to depots and shot
and deposited as food, just as Amundsen would do later with his dogs.

So Shackleton and his men and the ponies pulled a sledge across the ice you see below us now, much thicker then of course, and uniform, and flat. But we have been flying at a hundred kilometers an hour now for nearly an hour, and there is no end in sight; even the tall Transantarctics are still under the horizon ahead of us, and will not appear for a couple hours more. It took those men weeks to haul their sledges across this space below us, as you can imagine.

Then when they made their landfall they discovered the Beardmore Glacier, the Great Glacier as they first called it so much more finely, pouring out of the mountains for as far uphill as they could see. Up the Great Glacier the four men hauled their sledge, going tremendously better than Scott and Wilson and Shackleton had gone in 1902.

But they were cutting every aspect of things right to the bone. And up on the high polar plateau they began to break down. They were starving to the point of illness, and to save weight they had left behind a great deal of their clothes, so that they were wearing only long underwear, overpants, sweaters, and jackets; this left them so cold that when Marshall the doctor tried to take their temperatures, no one but him registered higher than the thermometer’s minimum of 94.2 Fahrenheit. They were cold!

Yet they hauled their sledge over the polar cap until they were only one more week’s walk away from the South Pole. After two months of hauling, and two years of preparation, only a week more to go.

But they had run too low on food. The amount they had been able to haul was not enough to sustain them at the pace they were keeping. They fell short by about
five percent of what they needed. If they had started from the Bay of Whales; if they had learned to ski; who knows. But not on this trip.

Shackleton recognized this, up there on the polar cap; he did the calculations, and saw clearly what they meant. And yet he was wild for the Pole, he did not want to turn back. He knew Scott would get the next chance, with the route found, and a large group of men to make the try. He knew this would be his only chance.

But it became clear they could not reach the Pole and survive. As a consolation, in the last week Shackleton fixed on reaching to within a hundred miles of the Pole. The clever Marshall did what he had to as navigator to convince Shackleton that they had done this. But still, in the end it was Shackleton who decided to turn back, when he was ninety-seven miles away. His men’s lives were in his hands, as his life had been in Scott’s six years before. In the tent he wrote in his diary “I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me.”

And so they turned back. They took a final day trip to get as far south as they could before the return, then turned back. What latitude did they reach? I don’t remember.

But for sure the return journey was a close enough thing to prove that Shackleton had needed to turn back. A half-dozen times on that return they missed death by a hair, and in the end Wild and Shackleton had to make a dash for the Discovery Hut and a hasty return to save Marshall and Adams, an effort that lasted for Shackleton some hundred consecutive hours, this after suffering a complete collapse just two weeks before at the upper end of the Great Glacier. Marshall had saved them during that collapse, and Adams and Wild had
carried on throughout, complaining vociferously in their coded diaries about all the others, but persisting, enduring all—growl and go, grin and bear it. And on one of their last desperate nights, as Huntford points out to us, the failing Wild wrote in his diary that Shackleton had that morning “privately forced upon me his one breakfast biscuit, and would have given me another tonight had I allowed him. I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realise how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this: I DO by GOD I shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.” And every word of the entry was underlined.

And in the end they lived. But they could not have added two more weeks to their trip, no, not two more days, not two hours! It was cut very fine indeed.

Shackleton returned to England a hero. Some people made note of the presence of mind and sense of values involved in turning back when so close to one’s goal, and they commended the
shen-yun
of such an act. Most applauded the achievement itself, of ascending the polar ice plateau and getting so far south. At that time it was the closest anyone had been to either of the Poles. As for Shackleton himself, when he got home he said to his wife, “Better a live donkey than a dead lion.” And she agreed.

Later, in his own final tent, it is possible that Scott reversed this formulation, and decided that it was better to be a dead lion than a live donkey. Certainly the world at large often seems to think so. Of course it is impossible to say for sure if Scott ever thought anything like this. The British mind is an inscrutable thing.

The Transantarctic Range is unique—not in its rock, which is the same sort of igneous array found in other mountains—but in its ice. In effect the entire range serves as a dam or a dike, holding back the polar cap. Flying over the range X could see this just as clearly as if looking down at a diorama designed to illustrate the situation. It was a Dutchman’s nightmare: against the south side of the range pressed a sea of white ice, submerging the range nearly to its full height; directly on the other side of the range lay the Ross Sea, ten thousand feet lower; and at every dip in the range the ice was pouring down to the sea, ripping away rock like water tearing open breaks in a levee, until some of the gaps in the range were huge floods of ice, rivers ten and twenty and thirty miles wide. The half-dozen biggest glaciers in the world were all down there one after the next, slicing through the shaved black rock walls and
spires that remained above the flood. And as they flew farther south, X saw that sections of the range in the distance were entirely submerged, the ice pouring over and down in a smooth white drop that extended for scores of miles, the dike entirely overwhelmed. Ice Planet at its iciest.

Their little Twin Otter flew into the gap torn by one of the great ice rivers, and flew up it. This one was the Shackleton Glacier—not as big as the Byrd or the Beardmore or the Nimrod, but very substantial nevertheless. One of the dozen largest glaciers on Earth, and no doubt it would have torn its channel even wider and rivalled the Byrd and the Beardmore for size, were it not for the presence of a rock island blocking the head of the glacier, like a cork sucked into place by the flow and nearly plugging it entirely.

This rock island was Roberts Massif. As they flew over it X looked out his little side window, fascinated by the rusty bumpy wasteland, a pocked humpty-dumpty shatter of dolerite, dominated by a single transverse ridge that stood above the scraped red rock and smooth bluish ice surrounding it. The massif was about twenty kilometers wide and twenty kilometers long, and on its polar side the ice came rolling in like a high tide, creating several ice bays in the shoreline.

As their plane descended the smooth curves of the ice ravished X’s eye, as did its bluish tint, which glowed as if the sky’s color had seeped into the white ice and stained it all through. And as the plane landed on a narrow snowplowed airstrip like a long strip of carpet, he suddenly felt happy, for the first time in a long time. Aesthetics as ethics; that was X’s new motto. Whatever was beautiful had to be good.

From the airstrip the plane taxied bumpily toward an ice bay indenting the shore of the massif, under a
fluted red-and-white peak named Fluted Peak. One side of the bay sported a small dock, standing on squat pylons. On the rock shore above this dock clustered a small settlement of solar habitats, like metallic-blue mobile homes—less than a dozen buildings all told. The settlement was no bigger than some of the beaker outposts X had helped to open during Winfly, which was a comfort to him. Surely such a small operation could not be doing any great harm.

The little Twin Otter stopped next to an oblong fuel bladder, lying on the ice at the end of the dock. When the props had stopped spinning X followed the pilot out the little door and down the steps. Out from under the wing he straightened up, and was greeted by a bearded man in a plaid shirt and Carhartt overalls, approaching hand out, smiling.