Call of the White (22 page)

Kim nodded in silence. She wiped away her soundless tears with her bandage-free wrists but they kept coming. I gave her another hug. There was nothing I could say. I felt wretched not just for Kim but for the rest of the team, too. Despite the fact that we were from all corners of the globe and had got to know each other through emails and Skype, we had all become incredibly close and felt strongly bound together. Kim was a huge part of the spirit of our team and to lose her would be a huge blow. First Barbara, now Kim. It seemed bitterly unfair.

I walked slowly back across camp, breathing deeply. Kim had paid for her carelessness by sacrificing her place on the expedition but she wasn't the only one who had made sloppy and unnecessary mistakes since we had arrived in Antarctica. Perhaps I
had
overestimated the women's abilities after all. I wondered if I should have prevented Kim from coming south but, if I applied that criteria to the whole team, I also had concerns about Steph and Reena – something I pointed out as I gathered the team in one of our tents for a meeting. ‘It's not that you are not capable,' I explained. ‘It's just a general lack of self-discipline that you cannot afford out here. Steph, I am still picking up your kit which you scatter everywhere you go and Reena, several times I've had to stop you for such basic things as layers being untucked so that your skin is exposed. I am responsible for you guys but I need you all to take responsibility for yourselves, too.' The team looked shocked that I would single out individual members for criticism but it was time for brutal honesty. Something had to change within the team otherwise we wouldn't be going anywhere.

Having outlined my frustrations I left the team in the tent so that they could discuss it between themselves. I walked across the camp to a store tent where all our resupply bags of food and fuel were being kept. It was quiet and out of the way. All the bags needed resorting so I busied myself but really it was an excuse to be alone. Gradually, the tears came. I wiped them away angrily but they wouldn't stop. I felt like I had let everybody down, most of all myself. I had promised ALE and Steve that the team was prepared despite their scant credentials on paper. Now, after failing to cover more than half a dozen nautical miles I had brought a team member back with serious injuries. We looked like a joke and I knew it.

Reena found me eventually. She came into the store tent to collect some equipment and we worked silently together for a while. I knew I had upset her by singling her out in front of the team but it had been necessary. Eventually she spoke. ‘Felicity I just wanted to tell you that I look after myself, I know when I am cold and I will tell you if I am.'

‘That's good to know,' I replied. I looked at her face. She was close to tears and I felt a pang of remorse. ‘I'm just worried about you,' I added. We turned back to the equipment, working in silence again for a minute before she spoke again.

‘Felicity. We all love and respect you.'

Her words made me choke with tears. Reena saw it and put her arm around me. I didn't feel that I deserved her trust and regard. Kim had trusted me too and now she was going home. What was done was done and I had to find a way to move forward but it felt like the end. I wanted to slink away in shame but I knew I had to stay and somehow muster the gumption to prove that we were better than this, that despite appearances we could make it to the South Pole.

I met with Steve and the doctor in the medical tent. A heater blazed fiercely in one corner so that I was soon sweating in my full polar gear. Steve placed a chair for me in the middle of the tent. ‘You can relax,' he said. I smiled but I was not relaxed. It felt like being pulled up in front of a headmaster or being invited into the boss's office to be given the sack.

‘How are you?' he began.

‘Awful,' I answered honestly. ‘I'm mortified. I've led lots of people through cold environments and never has anyone in my care ever had any kind of cold injury. Now I bring someone back with six frostbitten fingers.'

It was the first time I'd summarised my thoughts out loud and the harshness of it brought tears to my eyes. I had sworn to myself I would not let myself cry but I couldn't help it. The tears came and wouldn't stop. I apologised, turning away. I hated myself for crying, it felt weak.

Steve was very fair. He asked about the team's training, what they knew about frostbite and how to avoid it, if they knew not to have wet clothing. Even though I understood that Steve needed to ask all these questions, I still found it hard to bear. As the leader of this team, it was my competence that was being questioned and it was hard not to find the pounding of my credibility acutely painful.

‘I know this sounds ridiculous in light of what has just happened but the team is capable and competent,' I pleaded. ‘This one incident is not representative of the rest of the team. They are well trained and they know how to look after themselves.'

Despite Kim's injury my instinct was that we just needed to get out of Patriot Hills. ‘I know that I am asking you to take my word on this when our performance hasn't demonstrated it, but we are ready to go. We're just stagnating here, we need to get started.'

I looked at Steve. He and the doctor both looked unconvinced.

As I left Steve put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Learn to relax again,' he said. ‘And sleep.' I smiled half-heartedly and stepped out of the tent. The sun was out and there wasn't a breath of wind. As I crawled gratefully into my sleeping bag I noticed that the tent was completely motionless for the first time in a week. It was blissfully silent and my sleep was deep and dark.

We had been in Antarctica for seven days when, on 21 November, we were ready to go. I got up early to walk over to the communications box in the centre of the camp and heard the news that we were going to be able to fly to our start point on the coast that day. The plane had already been loaded so all that was left to do was gather the team and say our goodbyes. I walked across camp with Kim to where the team loitered beside the small twin-engined plane. She had sunglasses on to cover her tears and was listening to music on her MP3 player. ‘We'll fly the Jamaican flag for you,' I told her as we joined the team and she was engulfed in hugs. As I said goodbye I could hear the music she was listening to. ‘I still haven't found what I'm looking for,' sang the vocals.

It was time to get on the plane. Kim turned away and headed back to the medical tent to wait for her flight out of Antarctica in a day or two. Steve came to say goodbye. ‘Remember to enjoy yourself,' he called as I got on the plane. I smiled and waved, ‘Thanks Steve, thanks for everything.'

The engines coughed into life and as we bounced down the rough snow runway we sat strapped to our seats, staring out of the windows or grinning madly to each other. It was too noisy to talk but the big smiles said it all. The plane banked sharply and Patriot Hills was reduced to a series of dots on an endless sheet of white. We levelled out and could see the vastness of what would be our world for the next six weeks. The ground below was a greyish silver, streaked with pastel purples and dusky blues where the wind had scored its icy surface, like the scuffs on an old leather shoe. Sophia sat alone on the opposite side of the plane and stared downwards. I watched her expression for some clue as to what was going on in her mind. I wondered if she was thinking about her family or simply about the days ahead – it was impossible to tell – but something about the seriousness of her look made me feel sombre. I felt so confident in this team, so confident in our abilities, but what if I was wrong? We had already lost one team member but the consequences of anyone else getting injured now that we had left the security of Patriot Hills would be far, far worse.

Louis Poo-uitton

‘This is it!' I shouted through my balaclava. ‘We're on our way to the South Pole!' The team shook their ski poles in the air and I heard a muffled cheer from within their layers of face-covering. I turned away from the cluster of well-clad figures and faced the horizon. Glancing at the compass strung round my neck, my eyes followed the direction of the needle to pick out a prominent patch of shade cast by a lump of ice in the distance. As long as I headed for that patch of shade, I would be heading in the right direction.

I slid forward on my skis, feeling the tug of the sledge attached to the harness around my hips, and peered over my shoulder to check that the rest of the team were following. It was a momentous occasion, the first steps of our 900-kilometre journey from the coast of Antarctica to the Geographic South Pole and yet, despite my enthusiastic battle cry, at that very moment it all seemed very ordinary, as if we were starting out on just another training run.

Considering our tumultuous first week in Antarctica, the girls had all been extremely calm as we waved goodbye to the plane the night before. After it had dropped us off at our designated starting point, we had stood together in a huddle around our newly pitched tents and waved madly above our heads as the plane diminished into a tiny black blob in the sky and finally disappeared altogether. For the first time our unconventional team was completely alone. The nearest human being was hundreds of kilometres away and although we had a satellite phone we knew that if we called for help it was likely to be days, not hours, before a plane could reach us. The consequences of getting injured out here were severe. At best it would mean the end of our expedition and at worst, it could be fatal. To make sure the team had absolutely no misconception about what we were doing I had hammered home the precarious nature of our safety during our last team meeting in Patriot Hills. ‘Think about the consequences of your actions every second of every day. If you are ever tempted to take a shortcut remember how sorry you would feel if your actions brought about the end of the expedition. We need sorry before; not sorry after.' Kim's injury sat fresh in everyone's mind and I think it was the memory of her face as she had said goodbye, rather than my lecture, that had made everyone noticeably more conscientious as we struck camp on our first morning.

As we moved off across the snow in single file, the world ahead of us seemed to be split into two equal halves. Above was the sky and below was the snow, the horizon separating the two like the divide on a domino. Back home, the sky seems almost incidental, dwarfed by buildings and trees that encroach around its edges, but in Antarctica the sky became half of our entire universe. As we slid toward first one patch of shade then another, the sky was the main focus of our attention and we became intimately acquainted with its nuances of character. The vibrancy of its colours seemed almost supernatural. Close to the horizon the sky was a turquoise blue, blanched by the glare of the sun reflected from the snow; but if I tilted my head to look directly above, the sky became the deepest blue-black, like the pictures taken by astronauts of the very edges of the atmosphere, where our planet's benevolent sky meets the blackness of outer space. Meanwhile, the other half of our world had the texture of a badly plastered wall, the snow pitted with small hollows and contoured with shallow sastrugi. The surface reflected the sun like wet sand, so that in places it looked silver and shone so brightly that the rest looked almost grey, like over-washed white laundry. It was impossible to look at this flame-bright world without squinting and even then the image of it was burnt onto your retina as if staring at the sun for too long. Without goggles we would have soon been snow-blind.

Above all, the most impressive aspect of this wilderness was its devastating emptiness. There was not one track, glint of metal or smudge of habitation in the distance; not a mountain or a tree or a single lichen-splotched rock; not a fly or a bird or even the vapour trail of a plane overhead. In every direction there was nothing. ‘It's the same,' Reena had marvelled soon after the plane had left us. She turned on the spot, scanning the horizon with her eyes. ‘Every direction; it's the same.' I smiled at her amazement and waited for her to finish her rotation. ‘I love it,' she announced in summary. I was pleased. I'd wondered what this lady from the Himalaya would make of such a relentlessly flat universe and was relieved that she clearly found it special; they all did.

We were setting out from the ‘coast' of Antarctica but there was no open water or rocky shores to be seen. The ice that covers Antarctica is constantly flowing outwards towards the sea. At the edge of the continent the ice flows seamlessly from rock onto the ocean and forms huge floating ice shelves. From the surface there is no way of telling the difference between ice over land and ice over ocean. The exact position of the coast has been inexactly mapped by geologists, so we knew we had been deposited at the very edge of Antarctica, but from where we stood, all directions looked equally solid. We weren't heading immediately south from the coast, instead we were travelling in a slightly westerly direction in order to avoid the Pensacola Mountains that lay unseen somewhere to our left. We needed to circumvent the mountains, not just because crossing them would be pointlessly difficult, but also because they tended to be surrounded by crevasse fields – so we were giving them a wide berth. It would be some 300 kilometres before we would be able to turn southward and head directly for the pole. Shortly afterwards we would come across our one and only resupply. Although our sledges bulged with food and fuel as we left the coast, they only contained enough supplies for 21 days. The three large red duffle bags that formed our resupply contained all the food and fuel we would need to complete our journey. They had been dropped on the ice by a plane heading for the South Pole, at a point roughly halfway along our route. We had been given the exact coordinates of the depot so that we would be able to find it.

As we skied the first few kilometres of our journey, the South Pole seemed impossibly far away and the distances hopelessly long; our progress sounded ridiculously small when compared to the number of kilometres we needed to travel. To think of Day 40 during Day 1 was enough to make the bravest heart sink. The challenge was too big to comprehend when taken as a whole and so I concentrated on just the first stage, on reaching our resupply, and this made it more manageable. I had calculated that we should reach the resupply in 16 or 17 days. This was a time period that was easier to compute and so in my mind it became the whole expedition; I couldn't, and wouldn't, let my mind dwell on anything more.

After our first 90 minutes I stopped in my tracks and crossed my ski poles above my head to let the rest of the team know it was break time. We relied on hand signals while skiing because verbal communication was so difficult. If the skier leading the line held out their pole to one side, it meant ‘Are you OK?' where ‘OK' covered a variety of possibilities but usually translated as ‘Is this pace OK?' If you were fine you mimicked the same signal. If something was wrong, we had alternative replies, the most usual being a waggle of the arm which meant ‘slow down'.

Our only opportunity to actually talk to each other was during our short breaks but with only seven minutes to spare, there was a lot to get done. Everyone's top priority was usually going to the toilet. Our bodies hadn't yet adjusted to the increased fluids we were drinking every day to prevent dehydration and so having to hold in a pee for 90 minutes was a challenge, especially in the early days. Quite often someone or other would barely have stopped skiing before they were pulling down their trousers with a sigh of relief. Despite everyone's initial nervousness about going to the toilet in front of each other, in practice all modesty vanished almost instantly and we very quickly banished any hint of embarrassment about bodily functions. Harnessed to a heavy sledge, attached to two skis and wearing several layers of clothing made going to the toilet extremely difficult without adding the extra burden of wandering a few hundred feet away from the group where there would be no cover anyway (you'd have to wait a long time to find a handy boulder or tree to hide behind in Antarctica). Instead, we all just got on with what we had to do – and quickly. We weren't at risk of frostbite while going to the loo as long as we didn't leave ourselves exposed for too long and remembered to turn ourselves out of the wind.

Eating and drinking during the breaks was no less difficult. We had a snack bag of high-calorie food to eat during the day, broken into bite-sized pieces, but the difficulty was getting the food into our mouths. While skiing the moisture in every breath we exhaled froze onto the material covering our faces so that even the softest fleecy fabrics would become as solid as a plaster death mask. We'd have to chip narrow openings in our masks to post food through to our mouths. It was a messy business often resulting in a liberal coverage of peanut husks and popcorn fragments stuck to our masks and faces. Drinking was even more perilous. Using our insulated wide-mouthed water bottles was next to impossible without half the contents being spilt down the inside of our balaclavas. Anything spilt or dribbled would quickly turn to ice and, being right next to skin, could cause frostbite. Luckily, we also had narrow-necked bottles which could be wedged through the front of our balaclavas and held in place by our teeth as we gulped but it was never a comfortable process and there were frequent accidents.

Helen had volunteered to be the timekeeper during our breaks. She'd start the clock as soon as the last in line had pulled up their sledge next to the group and would give us warnings as we neared seven minutes. I would be last to leave, hurrying up anyone who was running late. Unless it was my turn to navigate, I usually chose to ski at the back of the line. I felt more comfortable being able to see everyone and check at a glance that we were all still together. I knew immediately if someone was falling behind the person in front of them, meaning that the pace was too quick, or if someone was carrying a strain and therefore skiing with a limp and, later on, I was even able to tell from body language alone if someone was simply having a bad day emotionally.

Each member of the team had a skiing style as unique as a fingerprint. Despite the fact that we couldn't see each other's faces and were all wearing identical clothing we could tell, even from a distance, who was who. Helen was by far the neatest skier. Her legs only seemed to move from below the knee, with her arms making perfectly matched swings but only from below her elbows. Sophia was also a tidy skier, making tiny, purposeful steps that looked more like marching than skiing. Kylie had more of a swagger. She put her shoulders into each glide in a way that reminded me of John Wayne in American cowboy films. Reena looked permanently exhausted on her skis, seeming to lean heavily on her ski poles as if they were the only thing keeping her upright. Steph lacked any kind of rhythm or consistency as she skied. She was usually staggering along, too busy adjusting her clothing or equipment to pay much attention to an efficient skiing style. Every second we were on the move she spent searching through pockets, changing gloves, adjusting her hat or altering the volume of her music player. After my tough criticism in Patriot Hills of her lack of organisation she had spent several hours attaching lengths of elastic to every piece of kit she owned so that she could physically fasten everything together in an effort to avoid losing it. The result was a constant battle with metres of tangled elastic that continually wrapped itself around ski poles, compasses, other people's legs and even her own head. It's a testament to her skill that she was able to keep up with the rest of the team despite this self-imposed handicap. Era had the most memorable skiing style of all; it was more sashay than glide. Each step forward would be accompanied by a genteel waggle of the hips and a dainty tap of the snow with her ski poles. With every forward movement her foot and ski would lift clear off the snow, a most inefficient way to ski. I tried encouraging her to glide more until finally she announced, ‘I've tried skiing other ways but they are not comfortable. This is the way I prefer to ski.' I had to admit that she kept up with the group well enough – her chosen style obviously wasn't holding her up in any way or causing her injury so I left her alone.

Despite our unconventional skiing, watching from the back I was impressed with the way we were moving as a team. We stuck together and had eliminated a lot of the faffing that had become frustrating during our training expeditions. I noticed that if someone needed to make a quick adjustment to clothing or equipment they stepped out of the tracks to allow the team to pass as they did what they needed to do, before joining the end of the line. We hadn't practised this or even talked about it – it just happened naturally and was extremely slick.

In all we were making great progress, so good in fact that by the end of our third leg we had already reached the 8-nautical-mile target I had set for our first day. I'd noticed that each leg had been slightly faster than the last until I had been practically running on my skis. ‘We can afford to dawdle,' I told the team. ‘We don't want to wear ourselves out too soon.' I had seen too many teams make that exact mistake; going out too hard and too fast only to crash and burn before the end. This was an untried team and none of us knew exactly where the breaking point for us as a group would be. It seemed prudent to take it slow and steady. To keep a consistent pace sounds like a straightforward task but it was to become one of the most contentious issues of the entire expedition.

As we stopped for the fourth break of the day Steph announced that she would need some extra time. She had started her period the day before and needed to sort herself out. Menstruating during an expedition isn't the greatest experience in the world but neither is it impossible as long as you are well prepared and get yourself organised. Unfortunately, it takes a bit of experience before you can perfect a system that works for you. I announced to the team that we would have a 15-minute break and had them put on their down jackets while we stopped. Even so, as we moved off a quarter of an hour later, several people were complaining of cold hands and feet and Era refused to take off her big down jacket. It was clear that we were not going to be able to stop for longer than seven minutes again, regardless of the problem. By the time we stopped for our next break, Era and Sophia were still cold so I decided we would stop for the day. We had only managed to ski for six hours rather than the intended eight but we had exceeded our mileage target for our first day, so the compromise seemed reasonable.