Antarctica (47 page)

She slowed down to hike with each of the others in turn, inquiring after them. Except for Ta Shu, and perhaps Jim, they were hurting; nearly on their last legs, it appeared, with more than thirty kilometers to go. Well, she would shepherd them there. Bring them on home. Give them her water, give them her mental energy. There was something about taking care of clients in such a way that felt so good. Others before self. The Sherpas’ business Buddhism, their ethic of service. Being a shepherd, or a sheepdog. Husbanding them along.

At the next stop, however, she tried again to give Jack her water, and suggested that he eat, and he refused the water and yanked the power bar out of his belt and tore off a piece savagely, muttering “Lay off, for Christ’s sake. We’re doing the best we can.”

Jim and Elspeth and Jorge all nodded. “This is hard for us,” Elspeth said to Val wearily.

“Of course,” Val said. “I know. Hard for anyone. You’re doing great. We’re making a very long walk, in excellent time. No problem. Let’s just keep taking it easy, we’ll get there.”

And as soon as possible she had them moving again, despite Elspeth’s suggestion that they take a longer break. That would only allow muscles to stiffen up; besides, the sheer impact of the cold made it impossible. They had to move to stay warm.

So she took off, trying to tread the fine line between going too fast and tiring them or going too slow and freezing them. She lost the glow she had felt during the previous march about the ethic of service and all that; in fact another part of her was taking over, and getting angry at these people for getting so tired so fast. Sure, she should have kept anything like this from happening. But they had no business coming down here to trek if they were not in shape. Even these so-called outdoor-speople were still very little more than brains in bottles—weekend warriors at best, exercising nothing but their fingertips in their work hours, the rest of their bodies turning as soft as couch cushions. Watching computer screens, sitting in cars, watching TV, it was all the same thing—watching. Big-eyed brains in bottles. These clients of hers were actually among the fittest of the lot, they were the best the world had to offer! The best of the affluent Western world, anyway. And even they were falling apart after walking a mere seventy
kilometers. And thinking they were doing something really hard.

But in their spacesuit gear the level of raw suffering was not that great, if they could just learn to thermostat properly. Indeed the whole idea of Antarctic travel as terrible suffering which required tremendous courage to attempt struck Val as bullshit, now more than ever. It was all wrapped up with this Footsteps phenomenon—people going out ill-prepared to repeat the earlier expeditions of people who had gone out ill-prepared, and thinking therefore that you were doing something difficult and courageous, when it was simply stupid, that was all. Dangerous, yes; courageous, no. Because there was no correlation between doing something dangerous and being courageous, just as there was no correlation between suffering and virtue. Of course if you went at it with Boy Scout equipment like Scott had, then you suffered. But that wasn’t virtue, nor was it courage.

In fact, Val decided as she stomped along, most of the people who came to Antarctica to seek adventure and do something hard, came precisely because it was so much
easier
than staying at home and facing whatever they had to face there. Compared to life in the world it took no courage at all to walk across the polar cap; it was simple, it was safe, it was exhilarating. No, what took courage was staying at home and facing things, things like talking your grandma out of a tree, or reading the want ads when you know nothing is there, or running around the corner of the house when you hear the crash. Or waiting for test results to come back from the hospital. Or taking a dog to the vet to have it put down. Or taking a bunch of leukemic kids to a ball game. Or waiting to see if your partner will come home drunk that night or not. Or helping a fallen parent off the bathroom floor at four in the morning.
Or telling a couple that their kid has been killed. Or just sitting on the floor and playing a board game through the whole of a long afternoon. No, on the list could go, endlessly: the world was stuffed with things harder than walking in Antarctica. And compared to those kinds of things, walking for your life’s sake across the polar ice cap was nothing. It was
fun
. It could kill you and it would
still be fun
, it would be a
fun death
. There were scores of ways to die that were immeasurably worse than getting killed by exposure to cold; in fact freezing was one of the easiest ways to go. No, the whole game of adventure travel was essentially an escape from the hard things. Not necessarily bad because of that; a coping mechanism that Val herself had used heavily all her life; but not something that should ever be mistaken for being hard or heroic. It was daily life that was hard, and sticking it out that was heroic.

Val shuddered at this dark train of thought, stopped in her tracks. She looked back; she had been going too fast, and the people she was caring for had fallen far behind. “Come on, God damn it!” she said at them. “You are
so
fucking slow. This is fun! This is your adventure! Are we having fun yet?” Almost shouting at them. But they were so far back there was no chance they would hear her.

They had too little energy and she had too much. And one thing about walking for hours and hours like this; it gave one an awful lot of time to think. Sometimes that was good, sometimes bad. When it was bad, it took a bit of an effort to remain the cheerful optimistic person that one was.

She checked her watch, and found that half an hour had passed; her arm flask was almost melted. She
walked back to the others, pulling herself together to do the cheerleader thing, very hard now. My God, was she toast! No one could have been less in guide mode than she was at that moment, feeling parched but strong, well into her long-haul groove, and immensely irritated that these people had no long-haul groove to fall into. The back of her throat was so dry that it hurt to talk; but if she was that thirsty, then it was certain the clients were in worse shape; in need of her help; and in this situation that meant her words, as there was little else she could do. So she pulled up her ski mask so they could see her smile, and said, “Roberts Massif, coming over the horizon any minute now! We’re almost there!” Which, as they were still at least twenty-five kilometers from the oil camp, no doubt took the long-distance record for saying
We’re almost there
even in her own notorious career of misuse of the phrase. But it needed to be said, she judged; and so she said it. And it helped them to keep moving.

Except it wasn’t working for Jack. When he dragged up to the rest he only stared at Val and her good news, and after they started off he quickly fell behind again.

Then Val looked back and saw him squatting on his haunches, a terrible position for rest, as it trapped so much blood below the knees. It looked as if he had gone faint. Jim was hurrying forward, trying to get her attention.

She met Jim on the way back to Jack, and gave him the crevasse detector and told him to keep walking with the others. It might very well have come time to do the fascist guide number on Jack, she judged, and drive him on by snapping him with the whip of his own machismo, for his own sake and the sake of the whole group; and serve him right. But she didn’t want any witnesses.

She reached Jack and stood over him. He glanced up, looked back down.

“Well,” she said, “how’s it going?”

He waved a hand: go away. Leave me alone.

“Come on,” she said sharply. “We can’t go away. We can’t leave you behind. We’re with you, and you’re with us, so let’s get together. Otherwise everyone’s in trouble. Tell me what you need to feel better. Are you hurt?”

He looked down and away. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay in a while. I just need to rest.”

“Did you hit very hard when we fell in the crevasse? Do you think you’re concussed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember the fall?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel nauseous?”

No reply.

“Do you think you’re concussed, or in shock?”

“I don’t know! Just let me rest, will you? You’re always pushing us. I just need some rest.”

“Okay, we’ll rest.” She sat down.

“No, no! Get going. You’ve got the radar, you should be out there, what are you doing?”

“I’m waiting for you. I gave the radar to Jim. We can’t go on any farther without you, or else we’ll get separated.”

“I’ll follow your tracks,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

Val stared at him, irritated but also worried. He sounded pretty irrational to her. But something was needed to get him going. “Oh come on,” she said again, standing. “We can’t go on without you! You’re endangering everyone right now, do you understand? God
damn it—why is it always the macho guys that wimp out first.”

“You’re the macho guy here!” he cried. “Always pushing it! Always making us look bad!”

“Right,” she said. “Like insisting on taking Amundsen’s route even though the ice had changed. Come on! And for God’s sake either stand up or sit down, Jesus, you’re only trapping a bunch of blood below your knees by squatting like that. You don’t have to be stupid along with everything else.”

He sat heavily. “Just go on. I’ll catch up.”

“We can’t
go on
. What is wrong with you! You lost blood, you took a hit, okay! You sound kind of in shock to me, and you certainly have hit the wall somehow or other. But we need for you to walk. Just stand up and put one foot in front of the other. Give it a try at least! We can’t carry you, and we can’t go on without you. So you just have to do it. Reach down and show some guts for once.”

And she turned and walked off a few meters, mouth pursed into a tight line of disgust. High-school-coach bullshit, no doubt about it; but she could remember going into a berserker state as the result of her high-school volleyball coach’s ballistic exhortations, and Jack was certainly the type if anyone was to still fall for that routine.

She turned around and looked back. He was struggling to his feet. Something was definitely wrong; concussed, perhaps? He was like Seaman Evans, she thought uneasily, the first member of Scott’s team to die on their march back from the Pole—a big man who took a fall and afterward just fell apart. Big men didn’t do well down here. Macho men often did, she had to admit; but machismo itself was a weakness and could be stripped away in such a situation as this, where you
had to pace yourself for the long haul. Maybe that was all it was; he preferred the blaze of the adrenaline rush and had burnt out fast, and then looked for someone or something else to blame.

She caught up to Jim, who was waiting for the two of them. The others were strung out ahead, struggling along, well in front of the crevasse detector, which was not good even if they were on the Big Ice Cube. It was cloudier than ever, and bitterly, bitterly cold.

“You’re supposed to be out front.”

“Hey look, he’s hurt,” Jim said angrily. “He’s lost blood.”

“I know. He still has to walk. We can’t carry him.”

Jim stared at her, clearly angry, balked, frustrated. Mask to mask in the whistling wind.

Val looked back. Jack was coming on now, slowly but steadily, using his ski poles to push forward. He was favoring his cut hand. “Here he comes. Do what you can to help him keep going. Give me the radar.”

She took back the crevasse detector and walked ahead of them, trying to keep herself down to their pace, though she needed to be out front with the radar, safe ice or not. As she plodded on she felt worse and worse. There had been a certain amount of pleasure in tongue-lashing Jack into action, of course, after biting back so many remarks in the previous week. Perhaps too much pleasure. In any case it left a bad taste in her mouth. Shackleton would have done it better. Although once after the
Endurance
had sunk, McNeish had refused to haul the boats over the ice any farther, and Shackleton had taken him aside and given him a choice; go on hauling or Shackleton would shoot him dead. McNeish had gone on.