Know the Night (5 page)

U
nder the circle of light from my bedside lamp, I take up Byrd’s book:

His expedition has been on the Antarctic ice for only two months when he decides to make his senior scientist, Thomas Poulter, his second-in-command and leave his fifty-five men at their base, Little America; he will stay by himself in a hut 123 miles to the south on the Ross Ice Shelf, or what he calls the Ross Ice Barrier. Few people have known about his plans—not even his wife, Marie, back in Boston with their four children, knows about the hut that was constructed in Massachusetts and then dismantled for shipping south, or of his intention to stay in it for six months to record meteorological data. (Later, various factions will assert that what he was really after was more acclaim for doing what had not been done.) When the news is delivered to Marie, and then to the audience that tunes into the weekly CBS radio program,
^*
led by his friend Charles Murphy, for tales of the expedition, there is a stream of telegrams to Little America advising him not to go, but he doesn’t get the messages. He is already on his way.

His men shore his hut, which will be called Advance Base, with materials that have crossed oceans and ice. Everything he could need, including
Grey’s Anatomy
, a fur flying suit, a phonograph,
canned figs, and two of his mother’s Virginia hams. The Barrier where they cut into ice and snow with saws and shovels to submerge his hut is a crystalline blank in a cold that can lift skin from a body. The Ice implies the infinite, and yet he finds himself in a room of 800 cubic feet with thirteen men, including two who will eventually become crucial for him, Pete Demas and Bud Waite. Some of the men arrived before him, hauling supplies with tractors, and have been constructing what he will come to see, in one of his lighter moods, as something like a child’s fort. He thinks this before he knows the force of his enemy. Before he finds his own, particular Antarctic.

When they sleep, the men snore so ferociously he opens the lid of his hut and goes topside to regard the night. Peeks in at three of his men in a tent, and walks to the dogs that are tethered to a line, curled tight as pearls against the drift. The Barrier opens up with the sounds of their collective howls. They are ready to leave him.

He, too, has been impatient for his men to go. On March 28, when it finally happens and they lurch off in groaning tractors that have to be coaxed into movement over the ice, he wants his solitude. The machines are poorly lubricated by oil that coagulates and freezes, causing the men to retreat, and he is unhappy when he hears the tractors making a return. When the men leave for a second, and final, time, he is caught by his emotions and rushes up the ladder to watch the diminishing forms.

The next time he hears Murphy’s voice, and that of radio operator John Dyer, the sounds are transmitted by radio wave. The antenna is two hundred feet long, and is supported by four fifteen-foot bamboo poles. Because sending voice communications from his hut would require too much power, he telegraphs with a
crude knowledge of Morse code. Part of his first transmission to them reads:

His plan is to fill each day with data collection from eight instruments, among them thermographs, a barograph, a hygrometer (using a human hair to assess humidity), and a minimum thermometer with a heart of grain alcohol instead of mercury, because mercury freezes. The average temperature is -60° Fahrenheit.

The snow on the ground moves with such momentum that he will soon have to dig another tunnel from his hut to form an escape route, in case his other tunnels are sealed over by the drift. The aptness, then, of the word
drift
: its shifting nature, its shiftiness; a movement that could be leisurely or dangerous, but either way is in the possession of some other force.

Not all snow is the same, or the same kind of white. He writes that Antarctic snow lacks the transparency of ice, but the build-up on the ground is so hard that a shovel is almost useless against it. He has to carve it out with a two-foot handsaw. Once new snow has been hardened to the surface, it gives no sign that it has been walked upon. He calls it
the whitest white you ever saw
.

He discovers that two vital items he brought have gone missing in his hut: his cookbook and his alarm clock. He thinks, then, that waking at the correct time is something he can will himself to do through a natural internal sense of the hour.

But night is elastic, and he consistently gets it wrong. He records that it is his checking of the weather instruments that eventually gives him a rhythm. Two pens of the wind register, corresponding
to velocity and direction, translate the air currents from the anemometer pole outside his hut. Other pens scratch out temperature readings, and he stands outside and writes his own observations of clouds, mist, and drift.

He says the barrier ice looks like platinum.

He was born in 1888 into a Virginia family that his biographer Lisle Rose writes was
avid to regain lost status
. He was a driven navy man, physically small and handsome, a daredevil who played football and led the gymnastics team at Annapolis. He hadn’t yet flown an airplane, but in a premonitory way would hurl his body through the air on the rings. At a practice for an intercollegiate championship, he decided to perform a new manoeuvre in front of a crowd, which involved relinquishing the rings to create a complex turn in midair before catching them again on the way down. He missed, and when he landed on his feet, his ankle snapped and he fell back (he would break these same bones two more times and eventually surgeons would have to nail them together). He wrote in his book
Exploring with Byrd
that he had been aware of silence as he spun, and I’ve wondered if perhaps this was what cued the fall, if silence, opening suddenly, had beguiled or distracted him.

When his repeated injuries stalled his naval career, he campaigned to learn to fly, finally getting his chance at Pensacola in 1918. Eventually understanding that aviation would be useful to polar exploration, he wanted to be the first to fly to the North Pole, which attempt in 1926 would end up mired in controversy over whether or not he actually reached it. In 1927, he made a nonstop transatlantic flight to Paris (after Charles Lindbergh), all the while
allegedly nursing a fear of flying. He decided next on the South Pole and led his first private expedition to Antarctica from 1928 to 1930, and his second in 1933.

Funding for his first two expeditions to the Ice required him, through political and social finesse, to win over wealthy individuals and corporations (Edsel Ford and John D. Rockefeller among them). And though he was an admired figure, being the recipient of not one but three tickertape parades in his lifetime, his second trip generated hate letters (and also, according to Byrd, twenty thousand potential volunteers) because he was going in the midst of the Depression. Once he was on the Ice and had made the journey to his hut, there was more fallout. Some of his men were unhappy with his decision, which they took to be a kind of abandonment, and surreptitiously criticized his mediocre survival skills and lack of proficiency at Morse code. He got the notion to build a fort and despite the antipathy, he did it anyway.

He chased isolation as if it were something to be prized, as if that’s really the territory he wanted to see, while dragging along with him tractor loads of weather instruments, batteries, books, telegraph machines, and those Virginia hams; hauling, essentially, an essence of people without the people themselves. He seemed to want to know how far his idea could go. Even he would admit in
Alone
that he was seeking a certain experience, one that we might conclude involves the spirit or enlightenment or some kind of contemplation, though he would say that first he was there to collect data on the weather.

When he and his men of the second expedition arrived to the Barrier in two ships, the
Bear
and the
Ruppert
, they found the frozen buildings of the original Little America, which he had last seen in 1930. At the time, he and his men had left in a bit of a rush and
doubtless were not terribly tidy to begin with, and so in 1933, Byrd found their frozen belongings.

Also the pages of a calendar from 1929 with the days marked off. Someone went into one of the other buildings, found the old telephone, and rang them, so that Byrd would write,
If the Lion of Judah had crawled out from under one of the bunks, we couldn’t have been more taken aback
. Somebody else flipped a switch and the lights glowed a little. They found pans on the stove with frozen food in them and coal in the scuttle, so they warmed the food and ate it, finding it to be the same as when they had left three years earlier. This is merely the illusion of permanence, however, a way that the Ice will convey constancy even as it perpetuates change, the way that it will obscure the provisional nature of provisions and calm the human presence that is unsettled by the way that everything of substance will eventually disappear.

Gabriel
, I say to him after I’ve been lured back to his room by his sounds.
Gabriel
. He scrunches his eyes at me as he’s shrieking, as if he’s trying to bring me into focus, but I still don’t think he sees me. Not really. He bounces, waving his hands back and forth by his sides, vibrating the wood floor. I imagine the reverberations through each of the rooms, the joists of the house accustomed to the nightly rumbling.
Gabriel
, and the sound is swallowed by his so that when
my lips move, there is nothing but his high-pitched squeal. Gabriel: the name that arrived long before he was born. When I was about six months’ pregnant with him, I had a list of names, most of which I’ve forgotten, that I’d been mulling when the
Gabriel
arrived. The problem with knowing what his name should be was explaining that to R. Perhaps he didn’t want to challenge me when I seemed so certain, or maybe he’d already figured his chance would come next time, but either way, he acquiesced. When I became pregnant with Gabriel’s little brother, R would be the one to decide his name.

Anyway, Gabriel: the shifting, volatile one. We are both lost at the moment, and there is nothing to do but retreat. I pull his door shut as I go into the hall, walk through the chilly air back to bed. R is warm, and undisturbed by the commotion; he, too, has decided, somewhere in the black of sleep, there is nothing to be done. I shut my eyes and try to find something like solace and the passage back into unconsciousness.

Some people count things; I prefer lists, the most mundane kind, the tallies of things left to be done, the groceries and errands, because they are not really mundane. They’re about survival. Not only that, but if the most disconnected ideas (compassion, Walmarts, kumquats) are ordered into a list, there is alignment and a semblance of stability, or a chance at them anyway. I think of the polar explorers. I’m fascinated by the lists of what they took with them (in the 1700s, James Cook’s expedition brought fearnought jackets—imagine having one of those) for living, for hunting, for finding their way—and what they ate. Especially what they ate. Like the lists of Gabriel’s words, the intention says something, though the idea is to gather things rather than lose them.

I have read over and again Byrd’s lists of provisions, what he
stores in the snow tunnels that lead out from his hut. They hold, in their ordinary arrangements of ordinary objects, the secrets of preparation and daily rhythms. They say nothing exactly about the impossible weather conditions and the unpredictability and danger of the Ice, and yet they are only about these things, with superstitions and desires thrown in, and the suggestion that the dangers can be mitigated if only a person has certain
stuff
in his possession. When I encounter the lists in the right frame of mind, they are transporting. One of my favourites contains, laid against the crystalline blank of the land Byrd inhabits, the incendiary:

along with kerosene and gasoline pressure lanterns, fire bombs, and luckily, a Pyrene fire extinguisher. Add also a five-gallon can stuffed with toilet paper, writing paper, decks of cards, oilcloth, pieces of asbestos, and toothpicks.

The means, Byrd says, of a
secure and profound existence
.

I’m not sure the irony is intended. I can imagine him taking stock of what he’s managed to bring with him, illuminated by the suspended flashlight that he says makes his possessions seem bigger. Leaving the house with Gabriel requires similar assessment; it requires lists. And clutching the bag full of diapers, wipes, clothing, juice, snacks, picture symbols, storybooks, the spoon with the fat handle, and the stuffed bear with the green hat, I have felt, for a moment or even two, invincible.