Antarctica (55 page)

“Which is?” Wade asked, in a serious silence; this was the first some of the ferals had heard about the decision, Val could see.

“Exile from Antarctica.”

Mai-lis looked around at all the members of her group, as if to defy any challenge to this judgment.

“About time,” Addie opined. “They’ll kick us all out if we don’t get rid of these jokers soon.”

Mai-lis nodded. “We have been listening to McMurdo, and from what we have heard, we know the U.S. Navy is coming. We want them and the NSF to be clear about what has happened up here. That we are not the ecoteurs nor the thieves. And that the thieves among us are gone.”

“Who do you think the ecoteurs are?” Val asked.

Mai-lis shrugged. “I suppose some radical environmentalist group from the north. People who have gone beyond Greenpeace-style protests to direct resistance, like Earth First! or Sea Shepherds. People who think Antarctica should be a pure wilderness, with no people at all. Many world park advocates don’t even like scientists down here.”

“So your group would not be something these people approve of,” Val said.

“Not at all. We have very little in common with them.”

“Deep ecologists,” Lars said scornfully. “Very deep! And we are so shallow!”

Mai-lis shrugged. “Their philosophy is good. There should be fewer humans on Earth, using fewer resources. We try to do that ourselves. But to make some parts of the Earth precious wilderness, while the parts we live on can be trashed as usual—no. There is not
sacred land and profane land. It is all just land. All equally valuable.”

Ta Shu, watching Mai-lis closely (to Val they looked like cousins) nodded at this. “All sacred,” he said.

Mai-lis shrugged. “We try to find a different way here,” looking at Ta Shu. “We say the land is sacred, yes. Then we live on that sacred land. And theft is no part of that.”

Lars shook his head vehemently. “To glorify property like this, to kick people off the ice just because of property—”

“Their thieving will get us all kicked off the ice,” Mai-lis said sharply.

Lars got up and stalked away, which drew some supporters in his wake.

“And the Antarctic Treaty?” Wade said.

“Yes?”

“Aren’t you breaking it by being here?”

Some rude noises from the ferals still listening.

Mai-lis shrugged again. “Aren’t you too breaking it by being here?” She stood up. “We don’t bother anyone, and we live very lightly on the land. We don’t change Antarctica even one-tenth as much as McMurdo Station alone. So we will argue the particulars of the Treaty before the World Court, if you like. But now we have to clean our own house.” She glanced after Lars: “Because I am a pragmatical, and I want to be allowed to stay here.” She scowled. “So I want you to witness this.”

Sometimes life gives us such opportunities. In moments of pressure things flow quickly in a new direction. Through a mountain opening, and here we are in a new land. Source of the peach blossom stream, green valley in an ice world, like our pale blue dot in space. My friends, I hope I am reaching you now, but cannot be sure. I am saving often just in case. If you are with me, note please how quickly we leave this little refuge notched in the rock, where people were making a home in the ice. It seemed to me a cave from the paleolithic. The minds in there were fully engaged. They were no longer sleepwalking. I could have stayed there a long time, and never wanted for anything else. And yet my companions have agreed to leave, and I am going with them. Perhaps there was no other choice.

Cloud-mountains, mountain-clouds. It is the gift of the world to offer such winds, it is a gift to travel in such a storm. How the blood races! How the mind awakes! Sometimes it seems that only in storms am I
truly alive, as if the winds indeed carried my spirit, and filled my body with joy.

Onward we move, cast on the wind. How eerily this voyage resembles the experience of the
Endurance
expedition. I think of those men so often now. Like them we have had a leader who has held true through all. Like them we have been lucky; taken all in all, circumstances have been kind to us. They have allowed us our opportunity!

For Shackleton’s men, when the pack ice under their camp finally began to break up, they were forced into their three boats, as we into three blimps. But they were in seas crowded with ice, sailing in narrow leads, and hauling the boats back onto floes when it seemed they would be crushed between colliding bergs. Frantic days of insane effort, with never a moment’s sleep; inspired seamanship, and always do or die. Sometimes life is like that!

And at the end of that week’s sail, they landed on Elephant Island. Better than drowning, for sure; but it was an uninhabited ice-covered rock at the end of the Antarctic Peninsula, rarely visited by anyone. No one would look for them there, and in the winter they would likely die of starvation. So after some time to rest, and do carpentry on their biggest boat, Shackleton and Worsley and four other men sailed for South Georgia Island, where the Norwegians manned a year-round whaling station. It was twelve hundred kilometers away, roughly downwind, and in the direction of the prevailing currents—but across the ocean in the high fifties of southern latitude, where there is only water the whole world round, and the great rollers of the perpetual
groundswell are gnawed and chopped by the windiest storms on the planet.

Their boat journey across this sea was a superb achievement of being-in-the-world. The man whose skill at sea made it possible was Frank Arthur Worsley. Shackleton had never made a small boat journey of any length. On the second day out he said to Worsley, “Do you know I know nothing about boat sailing?” And Worsley said, “All right, Boss. I do, this is my third boat journey.” And Shackleton was ruffled and said, “I’m telling you that I don’t.” He was saying that even though he was the boss, it was Worsley who was now responsible for their success or failure; Shackleton was now the student, Worsley the teacher, and Shackleton wanted Worsley to know that he knew it.

And Worsley rose to the challenge. He navigated them across twelve hundred kilometers of empty ocean to a small solitary island less than a hundred kilometers long: British feng shui in its highest manifestation.

Not because of the technical aspects of navigation, you understand, which involve mathematical formulas that can be mastered by anyone; a child’s first wristwatch could do the calculations now. But before the calculations have to come the data, and this involves taking a reading with a sextant to determine how far above the horizon the sun is at a particular time of day. With that knowledge one can then calculate one’s latitude and longitude. But the calculations rely crucially on getting accurate data in the first place. The sextant has to be level with the circle of the horizon; tangent to a point on a giant sphere. One has to see and feel the world, and one’s body in it, with exquisite accuracy! And Worsley had nowhere to make his readings but on his knees, on the bucking canvas deck of their wave-tossed boat, held upright in the grasp of his companions,
as both his hands were needed for the sextant. All this in the very few moments of the journey when the sun was shining through the clouds, and in continuously wild seas. What is level when dancing on a cork that is shooting up and down such a violent sea? I might as well be asked to do it here, spinning about in the clouds like a bird! This is the aspect of Worsley’s navigation that is so astonishing and beautiful. He had to feel his place on the planet, he had to make himself sensitive to the gravitational pull to the point where he could tell, with only a bucketing horizon to help him, when he was upright and the sextant level. At that moment he “shot a reading” as they put it, with a quick glance at the device’s curved scale. This number then went through the elementary formulas, along with the precise time of day—note that their clock was a life-or-death item for them, essential for locating themselves in the flow of timespace—and the figures were matched with a book of tables to produce a latitude and longitude. All this in mist and fog and cloud and rain and sleet, flying up and down on the coiled surface of the water.

And yet they made landfall. Worsley wrote, “Wonderful to say, the landfall was quite correct, though we were a little astern through imperfect rating of my chronometer at Elephant Island.” Ha! Because of the chronometer! But happily we must grant him this one touch of pride, so well-earned. Wonderful to say “wonderful to say” in these circumstances, where the achievement saved their lives. Sometimes we are given opportunities, and we take them and make something fine, and the story of that will live forever; and so we have our boddhisattva moment.

After their wonderful landfall, then, and the incredible crossing of South Georgia Island, the Norwegians
there took the six men to the Falklands, and Shackleton went into a rage of negotiations, there in the middle of the First World War when few people cared what happened to twenty men; he obtained the aid of no less than four ships before one was finally able to penetrate the pack ice, and save the marooned men before winter came down on them. And so the greatest engagement with Antarctica in all of history came to a close.

And then these men returned to a world tearing itself apart. They never made it back to their lost paradise. Where we go next we never know; plans are only plans. I remember vaguely a story I seem always to have known, encountered perhaps in the heavy colored pages of some old children’s book—about a party of travelers lost in polar regions, who after struggling over icy passes stumble on a valley green amid glaciers, warmed by a hot springs; and they find the oasis is home to people descended from Eskimo and Norse, living in peace cut off from the world; and they leave the valley, why I can’t recall, perhaps to bring back family and friends—but can never afterward retrace their lost steps. And only the story survives.

Now we in this moment are off through space, whirled by the wind to our next landfall, so soon having left that bubble of peace; so sure that a path thus traversed would never be lost to us. But glaciers and peaks are never the same glaciers and peaks. Even if we look and look all the rest of our lives, bubble of peace, how to tell? Where to find?

“Wade! Are you there Wade!”

“I’m here, Phil. Speak up if you can, it’s kind of loud here.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in a blimp.”

“A blimp! Whose blimp?”

“Addie’s blimp. We’re in a cloud right now, Phil, it’s kind of windy. You’ll have to really speak up if you want me to hear you.”

“What’s that?”

“Speak up!”

“Where are you, Wade? Where is this blimp?”

“We’re somewhere in Antarctica, Phil. More than that I can’t say. We tried to take the hovercraft down to Shackleton Camp, but it fell into a crevasse. Then we tried to walk to Shackleton Camp, but we were overtaken by a storm. A very windy storm. You can hear what that’s like. Then we took refuge in a rubble line, and after that we got rescued by some people who are
living out here in the Transantarctic Mountains, living on their own.”

“Jesus, Wade, it sounds great! Are these the people who did the ecotage and took all the stuff that’s been missing?”

“They say not. Apparently there are factions out here—”

“Not there too!”

“—yes, inevitably, and the group that rescued us claims another faction has been stealing stuff, and they claim ignorance of the ecotage, though apparently the other faction helped the ecoteurs somehow. We still don’t know what’s really happened.”

“Well you’re big news, Wade, let me tell you that. I’ve been calling you every five minutes for the past day!”

“Sorry I’ve been out of touch.”

“Not your fault! So where are you headed now? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know where we’re headed, but I think we are being taken to witness the exiling of this rogue faction from Antarctica.”

“Uh oh. That sounds like it could be trouble, Wade. You watch out.”

“I will.”

“Tell me what you’re seeing now, then, if you don’t know where you are.”

“Well, we’re in Addie’s blimp, and right now we’re above the clouds. It’s very sunny up here. We’re looking down on cloudtops that cover the land as far as I can see. It’s windy. There are some peaks sticking out of the clouds to our right.”

“All right!” Addie said over the intercom. “Let’s go get ’em.”

Wade stuck his wrist phone under the right side of
his headset. “How are you going to kick people out of Antarctica?” he asked Addie.

“Oh we have our ways.”

“Which are?”

“We find them and ambush them.”

“Is this going to be dangerous?” Val asked from beside Addie, sounding surprised.

“Dangerous? Oh no, not dangerous at all!” Again Addie’s sweet laugh. “Nothing we do down here is dangerous, oh my no!”

Val said sharply, “I don’t want my group taken into a fight.”

“No no. It’ll all be over by the time we get there. Mai-lis just wants you to see the results, so you can be her witnesses if it comes to that in McMurdo. She’s a very practical lady that way.”

“She seems to be an authority,” Wade ventured.

“Yeah, she’s the local chief, no matter what she says about democracy. Lars is pretty much right about that.”

“How did she reach that status?”

“Well, she’s been down here the longest, and she knows how to do more things than anyone else. She knows how to survive down here. The Sami know about snow and weather. And she’s very up-to-date technically. She’s good with the photovoltaics and the batteries and the hydroponics. All of it. Better than most of us, anyway. We all have our specialties, but you know, it’s a work-in-progress sort of thing. An experiment, like she said. So nobody’s all that good at everything. It can be a little dangerous, actually.”

Wade said, “Like flying these blimps in a storm?”

“Oh no. No danger there at all.” She grinned. “Actually it’s not bad. These things float really well, it’s
hard to drive them down. So it’s almost the opposite of a helo in that respect.”

“What about getting blown into mountainsides?”