Blazing Ice (44 page)

“Twenty miles to
Quadzilla
!” I radioed. We'd drop another thousand feet to get there. The fleet picked up speed to seven miles per hour.

The Leverett opened up, no longer constrained by the narrows at Mount Beazley. The glazed surface that a month before had borne our year-old tracks we now found covered with blistered snow, flaked into icy slabs half a foot thick. There was no glaze and no sign of our tracks. There had been heat here while we were on the Plateau. A quick freeze had raised the blisters. It looked like scablands. And frost rime was everywhere. Today's fog had brought that.

Such heat! One of these days we might really find a lake at the bottom
.

The fog blanket overhead hid the distant crags familiar to us. We spotted a dark dot afloat in the gray where the horizon should be. We arrived minutes later.
Quadzilla
's left front rested on a stack of wooden blocks. We'd left it standing straight up. Now it precariously tipped left, no doubt settling under the same heat that blistered the surface.

A month-old camp circle surrounded
Quadzilla
. Though we couldn't see the tracks marking that perimeter, we knew the circle was still safe. Russ wanted the energy module parked within an extension cord length of the disabled tractor, so Greg pulled past it while Brad moved in. Brad unhitched and cleared away the drift snow around
Quadzilla
with
Red Rider
's blade.

“Interesting day,” I remarked to Greg. “Good job, bringing us through that fog.”

Before turning in, I wrote Jerry Marty and B. K. that we'd completed the Plateau crossing in good time and without incident. We had plenty of fuel and camped this night within forty miles of our depot at the Leverett base. I thanked them especially for topping our tractors' tanks before we left. That got us fifty miles down the trail for free. And I thanked them once again for their hospitality.

Under a cloudless sky in the morning, Russ and Greg went to work on
Quadzilla
's drive track. John V. saw to oil changes and maintenance on the
other tractors. Stretch and Judy looked after our sleds. Brad, Tom, and I filled in where we could.

By late afternoon, Russ fired up
Quadzilla
and paced her around the camp like a high-spirited pony. His grinning thumbs-up through the tractor's tinted windows proclaimed all was well. We finished the afternoon rearranging our sled trains, allowing now for the resurrected tractor.

At the evening meal, I remarked, “Thank you all for your good work today. Tomorrow's an easy day to the depot. But tomorrow is a special day for another reason: It's Russ's sixtieth birthday! Last year we celebrated it at the top of this glacier. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate it at the bottom … on our way
back
from Pole! That's a good excuse to sleep in. Breakfast at 0900. Engines on at 1000.”

But next morning's weather wouldn't celebrate with us. Blue skies gave way again to fog and a moody, gray overcast. Our late breakfast satisfied our hunger cravings, but we'd have no sun-basking, and no spectacular views to incite our wonder. It was a day for leaning forward and getting down the trail.

We covered the downhill in good time, never losing quarter-mile visibility. The foot of the glacier held no lake, not even a puddle. Not this year, anyway. An hour's stop to gather the depot, then five more miles through the flat light footed us firmly on the Ross Ice Shelf once again. I grilled steaks that evening, John V. prepared shrimp and horseradish sauce, and Judy baked a chocolate birthday cake.

The Transantarctic Mountains vanished. We knew they were near, but we saw no horizon, and rarely a shadow. Only our green flags, ghosting about in flat light, gave us direction. Days dragged on as if we moved through a dream of uncertain consequence: neither good nor bad, neither joyful nor foreboding. The fog simply existed, and we drifted through it in straight lines.

Occasionally we passed a post that told us we had come to a turning, yet once we turned onto the new course, we faced again that same pervading white, dotted by dark green flags leading to a vanishing point. Our instruments informed us of record mileages: seventy-five to ninety miles a day. We were closing on McMurdo, fast. But it didn't feel like it.

We stopped at a post labeled ASTER 2. There, we quickly reassembled the radar to probe for a shortcut to FORK. If we could cutoff CAMP 20, the
shortcut could shave fifteen miles off the whole route. Tom, Stretch, Greg, and I departed the main fleet and prospected the first ten of the shortcut's miles. We found eight crevasses. The time invested in drilling and certifying them for crossing would cost us two days. I thought that a bad trade for the four hours, two going and two returning, we might shave off the future route. Plus, we had no certainty those eight would prove safe, and there was a high probability of finding more crevasses beyond them.

I ran the radar on this foray. At ten miles I called it off. The easy shortcut wasn't there. We returned to the idled fleet at ASTER 2, resumed advance on our proven route, and still posted fifty miles that day.

January 9 we recovered our last depot of tank sleds where the Pole tractor had broken down, and we moved on through the flat light. By this time the
Elephant Man
towed the PistenBully behind its train, riding a pair of plastic recovery skis.

Tom developed what he believed were kidney stones, a painful medical condition. Tom, John V., and I raised the resident doctor in McMurdo by Iridium phone. His remote diagnosis confirmed Tom did have kidney stones, but he advised we make no extraordinary preparations for a medevac. The doctor prescribed medications that we had on hand, urging Tom drink plenty of fluids and get lots of rest.

The doctor's reluctance to standby a medevac surprised me. The USAP flew medevacs frequently. But that was a doctor's call. A medevac, in any event, would be difficult now. No day of the previous six offered weather when a fixed-wing aircraft could make a safe landing at our position. Overcast, low ceilings, total loss of horizon and surface definition … until that changed, an airborne medevac was not possible. We were then fifty miles north of RIS-1, Year Two's farthest south.

“We could have Tom back in McMurdo in seventy-two hours,” Stretch offered.

He was right. Our road was giving us unimagined mobility. We might find the physical reserve to put three days back-to-back and get Tom to the doctor's care. But no matter how nobly intended, that kind of push heightened risk of injury or accident to the rest of us from shear fatigue. I offered the
hurry-up option to the doctor, keeping my concerns for the crew to myself. We could
still
do it, no matter what.

“Not necessary. Just keep him as comfortable as possible, and let me know of any change in his condition,” the doctor said.

“You okay with that?” I asked Tom, who'd overheard the doctor's advice.

“Oh yeah. I've had them before. You can't do anything with these stones except wait for them to pass. I can ride in my bunk, or here in the energy module. It won't be great, but it wouldn't be any better in McMurdo, either,” Tom explained.

“John V., you are now our first medical caregiver. Are you okay with traversing?” I asked, thankful to have discovered his emergency medical expertise long after I hired him as mechanic.

“They both say it's okay, so I'm okay with it. But like the Doc says,” John V. added, “notify him of any change in condition.”

Our eyes strained through the flat light, mile after mile. I visited Tom midday and evenings. He suffered stoically.

On January 11, the weather cleared. A long line of low clouds lay off our southern horizon. That's where the fog went. Before us to the north, the brilliant blue sky bore a blazing yellow sun. Tom woke that morning, relieved from passing three stones during the night. Color had returned to his face. He smiled delicately at the breakfast table.

“Tom! You look better!”

He brightened. “I do feel a little better! I'm sore and I've lost a lot of sleep. But better. I still want to ride in my bunk today, though. I don't feel perfect.”

“No problem. John V., that is a change in condition. Will you please call the Doc tonight?”

That evening we passed SOUTH and made camp a hundred miles from the Shear Zone. Tom took a turn for the worse during the day. Different kidney, more stones.

“John V., let me know what the Doc says. Tell him we're now in helicopter range from McMurdo. We've plenty of aviation-grade fuel with us if he wants to reconsider a medevac.”

Then I took Greg and Brad, along with
Fritzy
and
Red Rider
, a quarter mile back to SOUTH. We dug out the cache of twenty-four fuel drums lashed
atop the old navy sled I'd “stolen” from McMurdo last year. The cache insured our five tractors could get to the Shear Zone if we needed the fuel.

But Tom was ailing. If a medevac had come, here was aviation fuel at the limits of helicopter range. If we'd been another fifty or sixty miles south, a chopper could have refueled here, made the distance, come back and refueled again, and still got back to McMurdo. This depot was going to stay.

Red Rider
pushed up a platform of snow three feet above the natural surface. Tomorrow morning, after that platform had set up and hardened, we'd park the sled on top of Brad's work. For now, Greg headed back to camp with Brad. I stayed behind for a solitary remembrance of reaching SOUTH that first year, and our wretched sojourn there the second. After a last look at the post, I climbed into
Fritzy
, turned my back on SOUTH, and gave it not another thought.

John V. met me outside the living module while I was plugging in. “Tom and I talked to the Doc,” he said, “and we went over the changes … first better, then bad again. The Doc still says we should just bring him in. No medevac.”

“All right, John. Thank you. How's Tom doing?”

“He hurts, but he's okay and understands.”

Friday, January 13, was a good day. Tom was still ailing, but we crossed the dorniks and camped within striking distance of McMurdo. Unless something drastic happened, we'd be going in tomorrow. That evening, we off-loaded the PistenBully and rigged it for radar. It would run the last twenty miles to the Shear Zone under its own power.

The evening's e-mail brought a personal note from Rebecca Hooper. She expected our arrival and asked if I could give an ETA. She said that the director of the contractor's company “and others would like to meet you … if you don't mind.”

I remembered the solitary laborer who cheered us from the cargo lines at Williams Field a year ago. I remembered the pickup truck passing us on Scott Base hill, its driver absently lifting his hand an inch or two above the steering wheel. Rebecca's note suggested a more generous reception. As for our crew, each was deeply tired, all were happy to finish, half were eager to get back, others less thrilled, and one of us who was in pain needed to get back.

“Becky,” I wrote, “if all goes well, we'll pull into Williams Field mid to late afternoon. My first concern is getting the fleet safely back across the Shear Zone. Once we do that, we'll be three hours from Willy. I'll call you from the McMurdo side of the Shear Zone when we're clear and heading in. One among us needs to get to the doctor without lollygagging. Of the others who might be there, please keep their numbers smallish. But among them … we'd all be pleased to see you there, Becky!”

And I wrote, “If George Blaisdell and Dave Bresnahan are on hand, it would be nice to see them at the finish line. Those guys have stood by us from the beginning, through thick and thin … And if you could arrange for Carol to be there as a surprise for Stretch, that would be something special.”

January 14 brought crystalline clear weather. Featureless horizons floating before us for days now washed onto the shores of familiar land. Yesterday brought us to the margins of the Ross Ice Shelf. We passed the rocky Minna Bluff to the west. Snow-covered Mount Discovery rose behind it, then Black Island and White Island. As we neared the Shear Zone, those landmarks do-si-do-ed into their McMurdo-bound perspectives. Mount Erebus to the north glistened in the bright sun, showing off every crevasse on its glaciered slopes. A plume of white steam rose vertically from its summit against the polar blue sky.

We gathered in our galley for one last briefing. The small space felt unusually crowded with half of us standing, half of us seated, and all fully dressed and ready to go.

“Indulge me please; I have some things to say. And I have been waiting, even hoping, for this moment to say them. I want to say them while it is still just us, before we get back to McMurdo and all those people.”

They graciously, if reluctantly, gave me their patience.

“One day last summer, I enjoyed a cup of morning coffee with my wife. We talked about me going away one more time to finish this job. The strangest thought came to me as I gazed out our bay window, overlooking Memorial Park. I asked my wife: ‘Do you suppose anyone has ever done this before? I mean, who has ever traversed from McMurdo to Pole and back?'”

The question hung for a moment. In our galley, the expressions were the same as my wife's:
Surely yes
.
Someone has done it
.

“We went through the list as best we knew, all the great ones: Amundsen, 1912? Started at Bay of Whales, not McMurdo. Shackleton, 1909? Started from McMurdo but turned back a degree and a half short of 90 degrees South. Lack of food. Survived, though. Scott, 1912? A McMurdo start, got to Pole. Died on the return with a couple hundred miles to go. Lack of food again. And cold.”

Stretch sat at his customary end of the galley table. He interjected with a touch of cynicism, born of enduring yet one more briefing: “Hillary drove his tractor to Pole.”

“That's right, Stretch. And my hat's off to him. But according to the New Zealand press, he doesn't think much of what we're doing now, though his particular gripe with us is not clear. Yep, he had a McMurdo start, Scott Base if you want. Got the first tractor to Pole with little gasoline to spare. But he
flew
back to McMurdo. Didn't bring his tractor home. We, meaning the United States Navy, flew it out for him a couple years later. Now it sits in a museum in Christchurch.”