Antarctica (24 page)

If anything, the darkness is easier to deal with than the cold. When dark stops defining night-time and becomes omnipresent it can almost be comforting. People call it enveloping, like a benign blanket. And if you're an astronomer, chances are you're going to be excited to see the night sky, the Southern Cross almost stationary overhead, and the other constellations seeming bigger and brighter than they do farther north. Whatever you do, don't get into the habit of using a headlamp. They just give you tunnel vision, blinding you to anything that's not in your immediate field of view. Instead, let your eyes adjust. The starlight is enough to help you feel your way; you get to recognise the landmarks, the dim outlines of the buildings, the shapes of the snowdrifts that redefine the landscape after every big storm. And when the moon is full, it lights up the snow like quicksilver. It's almost dazzling. You could read a newspaper outside.

If you're lucky on your daily commute you will see the other great reward for braving the darkness and cold: Antarctica's glorious light show. Just as in the far north, the south polar skies are periodically filled with the dancing colours of the southern lights, the
aurora australis.
Auroras can come and go at whim, but after a while you start to get a feel for it, like farmers looking at the sky and saying how the weather will be. Perhaps there will be a slight streak of green, a patch that will deepen and then grow. Then another patch on the horizon, like a green searchlight. And then shivering curtains of light can fill the sky, or looping spirals, or flickering flames of green and purple, and candy-apple red. It feels as if they should be accompanied by dramatic sounds, the bangs of fireworks or the roar of rockets. But these are utterly silent, almost solemn in their dancing. And yet they can be comforting in their own way; as if in this remote and frozen wilderness there's something else out there that is alive.

Inside MAPO and the other Dark Sector buildings the biggest problem, stupid as it sounds, is cooling. To enable the telescope dishes to sweep their eyes around the sky with pinpoint accuracy requires banks and banks of electronics racks, their rears sporting a mad tangle of multi-coloured spaghetti wires. These pump out massive amounts of heat, which the dry air of the polar plateau is very poor at soaking up.

The next thing you have to worry about is sparking static. Thin, dry, cold air is also a very poor conductor of electricity and as you shuffle along the carpeted floors you will be building up static charge that leaps from your fingers in a shocking blue arc, like a bolt from Harry Potter's wand, as soon as you touch anything metallic. This is a perennial problem throughout the station, and some parts are particularly prone to it. The metal doorknob on the library in the Dome was a particularly sore spot. It got me every time.

But here in MAPO you'll get more than just a jolt. The sparks are strong enough to break delicate electronic equipment. They can wipe out a laptop with one touch. You need to get into the habit of discharging yourself constantly by touching anything metal that you see. This can quickly become so ingrained that you find yourself doing it back home, obsessively touching anything metal that you pass, while your friends cast odd glances behind your back.

It's easy to forget the dramas behind the star-bursting, cosmic-scale science when you settle into your daily telescope routines. The first thing to do is probably to download data and check that everything is working. Usually something will have broken and need to be fixed. If you're lucky, whatever's broken will be inside. But you'll still have to pull your gear back on and head outside, to brush blown snow off the detectors and check that everything is intact.

For that, the hardest part is keeping your hands warm, especially if you are working on some delicate task for which clumsy mittens are hopeless. Robert calls himself a ‘soldering iron and wrench physicist' and for the sort of mechanical fixes he needs to do on equipment and cables he wears three layers of thin gloves; but even so after less than a minute his hands start feeling painfully cold. And below -67°F soldering irons don't get hot enough, and cables become rigid and brittle, and can snap beneath your hands. Something that indoors would take a few minutes to mend can end up taking hours.

But still, you mustn't stay out too long, and above all never lose sight of the flag line. Nick Tothill was telescope nanny for AST/RO last winter and he has no patience with complacency: ‘We are here on sufferance. Sure we can heat things, we can create our little environments and we can make stuff work, but . . . you don't even need stupidity or carelessness to die here. You can just be unlucky and it can still kill you. It's a really hostile environment. Most of the time we do a good job of ignoring that. Scott would have made it back if he'd just had a bit more luck.

‘I'd be uncomfortable thinking that somehow I had matched myself against the power of Antarctica and emerged victorious. It's more like I came down here for a year, and Antarctica never quite got round to swatting me like a bug, because it could. There were about three times over the winter when I got turned around out there in the dark; I made it back but it's not that difficult to imagine how I could have missed my way entirely and died of exposure. One time I got turned around 180 degrees and ended up at the station when I thought I was heading towards the Dark Sector. It took me about three hours to go back outside again because, while I was sitting there telling people about it and laughing, part of me was thinking: “it wouldn't have been that difficult for me to be dead right now”. You can't fight Antarctica, you can only hope that it doesn't try to kill you.'

In all the fifty-plus years that people have spent winters at the Pole, nobody has yet died of the cold; but one person's death in the winter there has cast a pall over all subsequent crews. Rodney Marks was an Australian astronomer, working out in the Dark Sector with the other telescope nannies in the winter of 2000. He was taken ill very suddenly; nobody knew why. The doctor put out a call for the trauma team; they tried to resuscitate him but he just . . . died. Was it food poisoning? Some strange illness? The doctor had to take samples for an eventual autopsy. Rodney's body lay out under one of the frozen arches on a banana sled, until the carpenters made him a coffin and some of the guys buried him in the snow near the Pole, and planted an Australian flag to mark the spot.
¹⁷

This much is easy to glean from the official reports that came out afterwards. The cause of death is also a matter of record: he had died from methanol poisoning. Rodney used methanol all the time in his lab. But he was smart enough to know that methanol was poisonous, he had plenty of access to normal alcohol if he wanted it and he wasn't behaving remotely like someone who had tried to commit suicide. The death remains a mystery. His parents have given up hope of finding out what happened. The only thing that's really clear is that it had a profound effect on the winterers that year. Nick Tothill, who wasn't present, advised me not to probe any deeper about Rodney. ‘Nobody will talk to you about it,' he said.

 

However foolish it might be to imagine that you are pitting yourself against the continent, it seems at first as if machismo is a fundamental part of what draws people, especially support workers, south.You don't have to be on the ice long to discover that there is a strict pecking order according to how much ‘ice time' you have put in. It's not just a question of how many months, or how many seasons. It also matters exactly where you did your ice time. Palmer Station, off on the balmy Antarctic Peninsula, is considered to be a holiday camp. McMurdo is better, but the Pole is best, and winters at the Pole are best of all.

In his book
Big Dead Place,
Nicholas Johnson has this to say about the implicit hierarchy among support workers in the US Antarctic Program: ‘Though Polies probably do have the most lucrative bragging rights, swaggering one-upmanship is common at every level of The Program. If you've only done one summer, you are a fingee [which stands for ‘fucking new guy/girl']. If you do multiple summers you haven't done a winter. When you do a winter . . . then you haven't done multiple winters. If you've done multiple winters, you haven't been to Pole. If you've done a summer at Pole, you haven't done a winter at Pole. If you've done a winter at Pole, you haven't done multiple winters at Pole. And, finally, once you've done multiple winters at Pole, you are afraid to leave Antarctica because you'll have to pay for food and look both ways when crossing the street.'
¹⁸

By these criteria it was evident from the moment I touched down at the Pole who was the real king of the ice. Forget the current station leader, the biggest baddest man in town was one Jake Speed. I'd had him pointed out to me with a nudge as he crossed the galley surrounded, usually, by a gaggle of acolytes. Other people stepped respectfully aside to let him pass. He was tall and strong looking, in his mid-thirties but with a boyish face, a neat brown Jesus beard and long pony tail. He had spent five winters at the South Pole. And not just that, he had done his five winters
in a row
¹⁹
.
Ten months at the Pole, a hasty couple of months back in the north, and then back again for another long dark stint. Five times over, without ever taking a single one off. Jake Speed was The Man. And to prove it, I noticed with irritation, he chose to wear battered old Carhartts, which he no doubt stored each year to retrieve the following winter. ‘Your clothes are new and shiny', this seemed to say, ‘because you are not an old hand here. But I am a rugged and experienced Antarctic explorer. Look and see how old my gear is. And weep.'

I'd have to talk to him, I knew. But I kept putting it off. Eventually, a previous station leader, Bill Henrickson, caught me on my way somewhere and pulled me aside. ‘Talk to Jake,' he urged. ‘He'll play the clown, but if you can get him to open up to you, I think you'll find something important. He's a very deep thinker.' I thought of the pretentious Carhartts and had my doubts. But that evening I went up to where he was sitting on a bar stool and politely asked if I could interview him. To my surprise (and, it later turned out, to his), he agreed. I was about to discover that in my initial hasty judgements of him I couldn't have got him more wrong.

I met Jake later that night in his shack, an insulated cabin a short walk from the Dome. It was full of bits of half-mended equipment, nuts, bolts and cables. A notice board was crammed with postcards from far-off places and scraps of paper bearing legends that I couldn't quite read; the only one that stood out enough to catch my eye as I sat down said this: ‘All you've gotta do is . . . be excellent to your fellow man.' Jake poured us each a whisky and lit a cigarette. He was nervous. We both were.

We started with the easy stuff. Jake Speed wasn't his real name—he was born Joseph Gibbons, but acquired this nickname along the way. He grew up near Taho in California in a vaguely hippy family, and as soon as he was old enough to leave home he found spectacular ways to exhibit an almost pathological restlessness. After six years of roaming the world with the US Merchant Marine, he then walked the entire length of Australia; he walked across China; travelled from Panama up to the north of Canada, all under his own steam. By the time he reached the Pole he had travelled to thirty countries, and it was years since he had spent more than six weeks in any one spot.

And yet, when he stepped on to the ice, he was thunderstruck: ‘I fell in love as soon as I got off the fucking plane,' he said. ‘I came down through the entrance to the Dome, I was looking at the arches and all the crystals there and some snow cat was driving by and I thought oh my God this is it! This is so, so cool. It's dynamic, it's beautiful, it's frontier, it's all the things that really turn me on.'

OK, I got that. It was a striking place and from the little I knew about Jake I could see why it would appeal. But why then spend so many winters here? For someone this restless, why would he choose to spend one winter trapped at the Pole, let alone five? ‘Wintering is just really enticing,' he replied. ‘It's a relief to be in a place where you don't have any other options. There are very few times in anybody's life when they are really that locked into a situation that they can't get out of. A lot of people haven't taken a good hard look at themselves before, and there in the middle of winter, that's what they're faced with. There is no place to go here. You have to deal. You do deal.'

So perhaps if you had been running from one place to another all your adult life, the attraction of this place was that you had to stop. For those months when the planes weren't flying, you had no choice, and maybe that helped you find peace. But it also meant you were forced to put the rest of your life on hold, with no chance to change your mind. Most people couldn't do that. ‘It's hard to carve ten months out of your life to spend a winter here,' I suggested, carefully. He paused. ‘That's an interesting perspective but it's not one that I share,' he said. ‘I'm not carving ten months out of my life to be here during the winter, I'm carving out two months to be away every year when they kick me out.'

That was plain perverse. After wandering the planet for years, he had chosen for his home one of the few places on Earth where he wasn't allowed to stay. Everyone has to leave for at least two months every summer; if you don't, they're afraid that you will go crazy. I didn't say a word, but my face obviously showed what I was thinking. Jake burst out laughing, acknowledging an unspoken hit. ‘Yes, I know,' he said. ‘It's ironic that after travelling so hard for so long I've found the one place where I want to stay, and they won't let me.'