Antarctica (45 page)

A white ocean. In the far distance a dragon’s back, buried in ice. We walk in a straight line, yet it is a movement that simultaneously turns on itself and opens to the infinite. Spiral development. We have come into a strange situation, as you will learn when this transmission reaches you. In many ways it is a clarification of our purpose. We have to reach a refuge and food, or we will die. All other tasks are set aside, as this one of survival takes precedence.

It is a situation strangely like that reached by
Shackleton’s
Endurance
expedition, begun in 1914 after Amundsen and Scott had finished their fateful race to the Pole. The Pole having been reached, subsequent expeditions had to find different rationales for going, and at that time this was not so easy. Shackleton called his voyage the British Imperial Transantarctic Expedition, but this grand title only partly concealed the fact that the trip had no real point. Crossing the continent was merely a goal invented to replace reaching the Pole; no one had thought of it before. It was the excuse of someone who wanted to be down there just for the sake of being there. Exploration, science, neither really mattered to Shackleton; what mattered was living in Antarctica. There he had first experienced that being-in-the-world which is our fundamental reality, our one true home; and rather than try to find that experience also in the wilderness that is England, he kept returning south.

So he and his men embarked on a new kind of enterprise, similar in many ways to the wilderness adventure trips we see today. Like the trip we are sharing at this, moment.

Each expedition has a different character, you see, fulfilling different karmic fates. In fact many expeditions encompass entire karmic lifetimes all in themselves. For karmic lives are shorter than human lives, and each of us passes through many different karmic existences during the course of a single biological span. This is a fact that is not well known in the West, I have found, even though the demonstration of it is there for all to see in the history of their own lives.

In any case, Shackleton and his men sailed the
Endurance
into the Weddell Sea, on the side of Antarctica opposite the Ross Sea. The Weddell Sea is covered with pack ice far more than the Ross Sea, and Shackleton’s
ship was caught in this ice, and they were forced to live on the ship for ten months while the ship was carried in the ice’s slow dance around the great bay; and then the ice crushed their ship and sank it, and they lived in camps on the ice for five more months, still drifting north and west.

The trip Shackleton had planned to make was gone for good. They could only camp on the ice as it drifted out to sea, waiting for the ice to break up, when they could try to sail in three very small lifeboats to some solid land. At that point they would be cast into one of the greatest voyages in history. But the waiting, for month after month; this was a very difficult thing. Other expeditions were driven to madness by such enforced inactivity.

Yet all Shackleton’s men attest to the fact that he was calm in waiting, even jovial, and that his unfailing good spirits, and the close regard he had for his men, helped them to endure the wait. He created a community of trust. In spiritual terms it may be that these months of waiting were the greatest achievement of that group—an extraordinary experience of being-in-the-world, which changed them fundamentally and forever: living on ice, using the collective unconscious of their paleolithic minds. “We realized that our present existence was only a phase,” as Worsley put it. And as this is always true, everywhere, they had realized a very valuable thing. And it was Shackleton who made it possible. He never faltered.

But we need not wonder at Shackleton’s ability to keep his spirits high during this time. Marooned though they were, he was just where he wanted to be. He was living in Antarctica, having a difficult adventure—it was just what he wanted! So he was able to keep his men cheered up because the joy of life was in him. He
was in his place. This is a big part of the greatness of Shackleton: he found his place, he went there, he enjoyed it. He shared that joy in a way others could feel.

This is particularly important for us to remember now. We started in the footsteps of Amundsen, but we must end in the mind of Shackleton. So far our leader Valerie has exhibited that Shackletonian optimism which will be so important to the success of our endeavor, and I trust completely that she will stay that way and see us through. How I admire her calm happy spirit, her strength in leading us. And we are lucky; walking across the ice is not as hard as living on it and waiting. We have a goal to travel toward, just beyond the horizon.

We live an hour and it is always the same. No distractions to the spirit. A white plain to infinity. Not sensory deprivation exactly, but rather a kind of sensory overload, within just a very few massive elements: sun, sky, ice, light, cold; all intense to the point of overwhelming the mind. But then time passes and here we are still. On we walk. The microforms of snow under my feet are a true infinity of worlds. The sky is several different tints of blue. The sun is a star.

Everything is so clear in this moment. No past, no future. Messner’s mantra: We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.

Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were in an exotic new
place that is not my home. They will all be the same as this place. Here the experience of existing comes clear. This world is our body.

Now we must walk over it a certain distance. We, like Shackleton’s men, have had our supplies crushed in the ice. And though our hour’s wait was nothing like their fifteen months, in the long run we end up in the same boat. We have to cross this white immensity now. We have to make our way to food and refuge. We make our brush stroke on the empty paper. We are like they were once the ice under them broke up, and the truly dangerous part of their adventure began.

At first they walked over firn, which took their weight like a sidewalk. There were sastrugi of course, but they could easily step over them, and the different angles of hardpack that their boots landed on actually gave their feet and ankles and legs some variety in their work, so that no one set of muscles and ligaments got tired, as when pounding the pavement in cities or in the endless corridors of a museum. So in these sections it was good walking.

They spread out in little clumps: Jack and Jim up with Val, Jack going very strong, even pushing the pace a bit; Jorge and Elspeth behind them; Ta Shu back farther still, rubbernecking just as he had before their accident. Val set the pace and did not allow Jack to rush them. “Save it,” she said to him once a little sharply, when she felt him right in her tracks. “Pace yourself for the long haul.”

“I
am.”

But he dropped back a little, and on they walked. They were doing fine. As she always did on long hikes, Val stopped the group to rest for about fifteen minutes after every ninety of walking, in a system somewhat similar to Shackleton’s. In ninety minutes their arm flasks had melted the snow and ice chips stuffed into them, and so everybody had two big cups of water to drink. They could also eat a few inches of their belts, as Elspeth put it; their suits’ emergency food supplies were sewed into an inner pocket wrapped all the way around the waist. The food was something like a triathlete’s power bar, flattened and stretched into something very like a wide belt, in fact. It was good food for their situation. At some stops they chewed ravenously; during others their appetites seemed to Val suppressed, by altitude or exertion no doubt. She made sure they didn’t force it. In truth it was water that was crucial to this walk; they were breathing away gallons of it in the frigid hyperarid air, and they were sweating off a little bit as well. Two flasks every ninety minutes was by no means enough, but it certainly staved off the worst of the dehydration effects, which could devastate a person faster even than the cold, and made one more susceptible to the cold as well.

So between the walks and the breaks they made steady progress. But after several of these had passed, they came upon swales of softer snow, which had been pushed by the winds into sastrugi like crosshatched dunefields. These snowdrifts were new, the result of unusually heavy snowfalls on the edges of the polar cap in recent years, generally assumed to be an effect of the global warming generally, and of the shorter sea ice season in particular. Climatologists were still arguing what caused all the different kinds of superstorms,
aside from the overall increase in the atmosphere’s thermal energy. In any case the snow was here, one more manifestation of the changes in weather.

Val stopped for a meeting. “Follow me and step right in my footsteps, folks, and it will be a lot easier.”

“We should trade the lead, so everyone saves the same amount of energy,” Jack said.

“No no, I’ll lead.”

“Come on. I know we’ve got a long walk, but there’s no reason to get macho on us.”

Val looked at him a while, counting on her ski mask and shades to keep her expression hidden. When her teeth had unclenched she said, “I’ve got the crevasse detector.”

“We could all carry that when it was our turn.”

“I want to be the one using it, thanks. I know all its little quirks. It wouldn’t do to have any falls now.”

“You having the radar didn’t keep it from happening last time.”

They stood there under the low dark sky.

“Go second, and make her steps better for us,” Ta Shu suggested to Jack.

“We shouldn’t have anyone lose more energy than anyone else.”

“I have more energy than anyone else to start with,” Val said. “Everyone except maybe you, but you’re hurt. You cut your hand. You hit the wall of the crevasse. Let’s not waste any more energy arguing about it. It’ll work out.”

It was very hard to be civil to him. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, and so took off before she said something unpleasant.

He stayed right on her heels, like some kind of stalker. She could hear his breathing, and the dry
squeak of his boots on the snow. Untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, unkind …

They followed her through the soft snow dunes in single file. She kept the pace easy, resisting the pressure from Jack. Never was the snow as soft as Rockies’ powder, of course, but it was extremely dry, and already had been tumbled by the winds until it was on its way to firn. It was more like loose sand than any snow back in the world, loose sand that gave underfoot, thus much more work than the firn. Then in the areas where it adhered, she had to pull her boots out of their holes after every step, and lift higher for the next one, which was also hard work. But she had put in her trail time—a lifetime’s worth—and it would take many many hours of such walking to tire her. No, she would be fine; she could walk forever. It was the clients she was worried about. She was responsible for them, and she had gotten them into trouble, as Jack had pointed out; but she couldn’t carry them, they had to walk on their own. So it had to be made as easy for them as possible.

So she did what she could. But as they walked on, and hour after hour passed, under the sun that wheeled around them in a perpetual midafternoon slant, they began to lose speed and trail behind. Jack no longer trod in her bootprints the second she left them unoccupied, nor during the breaks did he again mention leading the way. In fact he spent the rest periods in silence now, a mute figure under his parka hood, behind his ski mask and shades. He wasn’t eating much of his belt, either. That worried Val, and she tried to inquire about it by asking the group generally how they were feeling, and getting a status report from everyone; Elspeth was developing blisters on her heels, she thought; Jorge’s bad knee was tweaking; Jim and Ta Shu reported no problems in particular, but like everyone said they were
tired, their quads in particular getting a little rubbery with all the loose soft snow. Jack, however, only said, “Doing fine. ‘Pacing myself for the long haul.’”

So, okay. End of that break. On they walked.

Her GPS was still out of commission, but occasionally when she turned it on it flickered and gave a reading, then blinked out again. The last one that had come through indicated that they were averaging about three kilometers an hour, which was normal on the plateau; a bit slower in the soft snow no doubt, hopefully a bit faster on the hardpack.

Then they came to a patch of blue ice, and Val groaned to herself. They had to stop and put on crampons, then scritch cautiously across the ice, which here was pocked and dimpled by big polished suncups. The nobbly surface gave their ankles a hard workout indeed, as their crampon points forced them to step flush on the terrain underfoot no matter its angle. It was best to step right on the cusps and ridges between the little hollows, crampons sticking into the slopes on both sides and keeping the foot level; but that took a lot of attention and precise footwork. So
scritch, scritch, scritch
, they stepped along, making perhaps two kilometers an hour at best. Val headed directly for the nearest stretch of snow in the distance, so that as soon as possible they reached the far side of the blue ice, groaning with relief, and could sit down and take the crampons back off, and drink what water had melted at the bottom of their flasks, then restuff the flasks with hacked chips of the blue ice, which would yield more water when melted than snow. Then they were up and off again, on what felt like land, after a precarious crossing over water.