Call of the White (20 page)

With the last tent pole extracted we simply rolled up the tent with all the equipment still inside and, placing the oversized bundle of material on two sledges, heaved our dilapidated shelter to the nearest of the camp's store tents. These well-anchored shelters, although only a dozen metres long, were tall enough for a person to be able to stand upright inside and were, thankfully, mostly empty this early in the season. We coaxed the rolled tent through the narrow door and followed in behind it, all eight of us standing around the pathetic remains of our broken tent, breathing hard. We stood in silence for a moment, our goggles steamed up from the exertion and each of us dusted in ice which had collected in clumps on our hair, clothes and faces. Kylie spoke first, ‘What an awesome team!' There was subdued celebration but most of all a feeling of relief. My mind reeled. I had seen the damage to the tent, particularly the poles, and knew it was going to be a big job to fix, but first we had to get through the night.

The wind was still furious outside and rattled the store tent alarmingly despite the fact that it was securely strapped to the ground. Kylie, Helen, Kim and Reena needed to get back to our second tent to make sure nothing happened to our only remaining shelter. The rest of us would stay in the store tent overnight and the whole team would meet again in the morning to assess the damage properly. Steph and Sophia pulled our sleeping bags out of the rolled tent while Era helped me pile all the equipment into one end of the store tent to give us enough space to sleep and the four of us eventually lay side by side in one end, our ice-wet jackets hanging above our feet. I was lying down but I was about as far from sleep as it was possible to be. I watched our jackets dance with the vibration of the wind and listened to the primeval growl of the blizzard outside. Several times it felt as if the store tent was in danger of tipping over and I began to wonder if I should check its anchors.

The rip of Velcro interrupted my thoughts. The door of the store tent flew open and as I sat up in my sleeping bag, Steve's head appeared, framed with an ice-encrusted fur hood. ‘Your second tent is being shredded!' he bellowed. Without a word the others were up with me, all of us scrabbling to get dressed in our outside gear as quickly as possible. I was first out of the door and was half blown towards Camp Kaspersky. I scrambled up the side of our protective wall of snow to see several figures desperately shoving equipment into the tent through a gaping tear in its side. I fell to my knees in what had previously been the porch of the tent and madly scooped up pots, mugs, stoves and fuel bottles into bags and boxes as quickly as possible to stop them flying away or being buried in the drifting snow. Together we rolled what remained of the tent and carried it to our requisitioned store tent. With another tight squeeze we forced the second tent through the narrow door. Steve grabbed my arm and tilted his hood-covered head close to mine. ‘Come to the ALE tent for some tea,' he yelled. We closed the store tent and hobbled in groups of two or three across the base camp, hanging onto each other as we fought against gusts strong enough to knock our legs from under us.

We weren't the only refugees taking shelter in the ALE tent. There were several members of staff whose small geodesic tents had been destroyed in the wind. Even the doctor was there; he'd been woken by a rigid door from an old storage building on the runway being blown into the back of his tent. Luckily he was unhurt, but the door could have killed him and it had destroyed his tent. It made me feel slightly better that we weren't the only ones who had been evicted by the blizzard but it didn't lessen the severity of our situation. Without reliable tents, we couldn't start our expedition. I didn't know the precise extent of the damage but it had looked severe.

My mind ran through potential solutions. It was possible we could borrow a tent from someone at base camp or perhaps get spare tents flown into Antarctica on the next cargo flight in a week or two but neither option was ideal. We were a large team whose routines and systems revolved around the tents we had trained and practised with. To change such a large element of the expedition now would cause chaos. The only workable solution would be to mend the tents we had and at the moment, that looked very unlikely. As I slurped down warm tea and listened to the girls describing their experiences in the storm I felt hollow. I knew that, as the expedition leader, this was when I was most needed but suddenly the entire project seemed completely without appeal. I had been fighting for this team for so long that I didn't think I had any fight left. I felt as if I could have walked away at that very moment and never given the South Pole another thought.

I decided to focus on the immediate. For now what the team needed was some sleep – it had been an eventful and frightening night. We stumbled back to the store tent and feasted on a breakfast of biscuits before clearing as much space as possible so that we could all lie down. I found myself a small niche, perched upright by the door, my head leaning on the side of the tent. Despite the awkward position I fell asleep immediately for an hour or two, still fully clothed.

A particularly violent gust jolted me awake and I sat for a while listening to the wind outside the tent and watching the others sleep as I thought through our limited options. I needed a plan of action, something that would show there was a way forward, that we were not beaten yet. So far the girls had been remarkably calm. They were all a bit shocked but there had been no tears, no frightened questions about what the consequences of this blizzard would have been if we had been on our own, already on our way to the South Pole. They were calm because they all confidently expected a solution to be found and it was up to me to find it.

Absently I started picking through the equipment piled at the far end of the tent, putting like for like into separate piles to establish what had been lost. By the time I reached the back of the tent most of our kit had, miraculously, been accounted for. We had lost one of our stove boxes but none of the contents, the lid of a communications box, a few gloves and a windproof jacket. Our most serious loss was three skis. As the team woke up one by one I sent out a search party to Camp Kaspersky to probe the snow and see if the missing skis had been buried in the drift.

The rest of the team gathered in a second empty store tent to take a better look at the damaged tents. The poles were a mangled heap of metal bent into alarming angles. Kim made herself comfortable cross-legged on the floor of the tent and set about straightening what she could with nothing but the pliers of a penknife while Steph patiently unthreaded the elastic from inside the hollow poles to break them down into their shorter sections. The poles had snapped in more than a dozen places and at least a dozen more sections were bent beyond use. Kim and Steph re-threaded new poles from the sections they had salvaged but we were left with only four complete poles – enough for only one tent.

Meanwhile, Helen and Kylie had spread out the shredded tent material. One tent had numerous minor tears all over the inner and outer sections which, although messy, would be relatively straightforward to fix without greatly lessening the strength and reliability of the tent. The second tent was more serious. It had been almost torn in half lengthways, with a tear that crossed the bottom groundsheet and continued up through the doors at both ends of the inner tent. Even if we could repair the tear, the quality of those repairs would determine the durability of the tent. If we were to experience a similar blizzard such major repairs might see our tent once again literally ripped apart. As well as the damage to the tent fabric both tents had busted zips and had lost numerous tabs that kept the inner and outer parts of the tent together.

I sat quietly as Helen and Kylie pointed out all the damage to me. It was a huge job and we had very few resources. Our own repair kit consisted of tape to repair modest tears in the fabric, some superglue, strong thread and curved needles, but it was not enough to repair all the damage. Furthermore, if we used up all our supplies we would have nothing left for the expedition. Tentatively we scattered through the camp to beg and borrow materials from the mechanics, air crew and support staff working at Patriot Hills. Everyone was incredibly kind and soon we had amassed some reinforced thread, extra needles, several types of glue and some ripstop material scraps to start our repairs. In the cramped store tent, only six of us could work at any one time, and the sewing was both frustrating and time consuming. The work was too intricate for wearing gloves so we were forced to use bare fingers, which regularly became so cold that we would have to stop to re-warm our hands. The storm outside was still ferocious enough that the store tent we were working in vibrated constantly and no surface was ever totally motionless. The limited working space caused frequent mistakes, from sewing the wrong parts of the tent together, to finishing a repair to find it was inside out or even finding that it has been inadvertently sewn to a neighbour's trouser leg. The glue repairs were no easier. The mechanics recommended a particular type of glue known for its strength but the glue needed to set at room temperature. The store tent was significantly below zero, even inside, so we carried the fragile repairs to a garage building that was artificially heated. It wasn't quite room temperature but it was the best we could do.

Walking back across camp to our requisitioned store tent I spotted a dark figure coming towards me. He was being blown with the wind and so we practically collided. It was Steve. Shouting over the wind, which was still strong enough to make walking difficult, was impossible, so we ducked into the shelter of a nearby truck. He pulled down his face-covering so that we could talk and I saw the concern in his face. ‘How are you?' he asked. He put a hand on my shoulder and shook it gently in encouragement. I gave him a brief synopsis of our situation: the ongoing repairs to the tents and the three lost skis. He nodded sympathetically and promised to look in on us later, before we both plunged back into the abating blizzard, him skidding with the wind, me fighting into it.

Later a member of staff from ALE called into the store tent. He had a present from Steve; eight complete tent poles. They were spare poles from a make and model of tent different to ours and so were slightly shorter and thinner than those we had lost but by putting two poles through each pole sleeve they would be strong enough.

We were soon helped by another act of generosity. Reena and Sophia called me out of the store tent in time to see a figure walking towards us, emerging from the blowing snow like a rock star making an entrance through dry ice. As he got closer some sunlight seemed to break through the cloud cover and even the wind seemed to die down a little. Laid across his outstretched arms were our three missing skis. As the figure reached us we all cheered in amazement, hardly daring to believe our good fortune. Like all good heroes, our saviour didn't loiter but handed us the skis and left with a wave, quickly disappearing back into the haze of the blizzard. It wasn't until much later we heard that he was one of the ALE staff members who had gone out into the storm to search for our missing equipment and had miraculously found the skis snagged on some sastrugi almost a mile out of Patriot Hills – so it seems chivalry isn't dead, even in Antarctica.

One day later than planned we headed away from Patriot Hills on a two-day training expedition around the local area. The wind had died down a little – enough for the loose powder snow to snake along the ground rather than be hurled through the air, and for the sky to have turned from white to blue. I led the group away from Patriot Hills in single file, each of us towing a sledge. We skied in a direction slightly out of the wind so that the gusts blew into our shoulders rather than into our faces. Kylie, Reena and Kim had sewed late into the previous night to finish the repairs to our tents and although our main priority during the next two days would be to test the repairs, it was also an important chance to prove to ALE that we were a safe and competent team. The light felt golden, like a summer's afternoon back home, and threw into breathtaking relief all the delicate sastrugi that had been worn into hundreds of overlapping concentric circles like the inverted tiers of a wedding cake. As I concentrated on the rhythmic squeaking of my skis on the hardened snow, my mind emptied and I felt a wave of relief. Breathing in the freedom of being on the move and away from the pressures of Patriot Hills, I felt something new and powerful. It dawned on me that this unfamiliar emotion was enjoyment. I was finally enjoying myself.

We skied haltingly for a few hours before setting up our camp just a couple of nautical miles from Patriot Hills. (Nautical miles are a little longer than statute miles and are easier to use when navigating in latitude and longitude.) Everyone had a fitful sleep as the wind remained gusty throughout the night. More than once I sat up in my sleeping bag nervously watching the tent, looking for any signs of weakness or imminent collapse, and several times I heard my tent-mates doing the same thing. Our anxiety was unnecessary: by morning the tent was as sturdy as it had been when we pitched it. I took a close look at the repairs around the tent. They still looked robust. I was proud of us; in less than 24 hours we had patched our tents back together again and saved ourselves from what had seemed to be a hopeless situation.

The sun of the previous evening had disappeared. It was still windy but the cloud had drawn in, wrapping everything in a uniform whiteness. The horizon was visible as a gloomy grey smudge but the surface of the snow had no shading to it, no contrast, so that all the sastrugi that had been visible the day before seemed to have disappeared. Such weather is known as ‘flat light' because the ground seems even but the obstacles are still there, it's just impossible to see them.

We set off slow and steady, skiing for an hour before stopping for a break and taking it in turns to navigate. The cold, windy conditions meant that every scrap of exposed skin needed to be covered, but wearing face protection and goggles feels very claustrophobic. All the warm air that is breathed out through mouth and nose needs to be able to escape otherwise the inside lenses of goggles steam up. That steam turns to ice and suddenly vision is reduced to the tiny spaces in between patches of condensation. It's incredibly frustrating. Finding an arrangement that provides complete protection but also allows hot air to escape is a process of continual adjustments and something that even the most experienced find difficult.