Terra Incognita (36 page)

As for the inner weather, once again I was struggling to cope with the pressures of being an outsider. The refreshing interlude at the Bluff notwithstanding, the background hostility I was experiencing on the peninsula was grinding me down, and, more seriously, it was getting in the way of my response to the continent. It wasn't quite the dark night of the soul at Ski Hi – but it was damned crepuscular.

They were desperate for co-pilots on the radar project. Everyone else had done the job many times and said it was boring. It was obviously my turn. I set my alarm for 5.30, now a time of bleak half-light, and stumbled over to the aircraft, where the technician was warming up the hard disk of his laptop with a hairdrier.

‘All you have to do', said the pilot as he cleaned his teeth in the cockpit, ‘is keep looking at that dial there' – he pointed – ‘and tell me when the needle goes beyond that figure there.' He stabbed with his finger. ‘And don't talk to me apart from that, as I have to concentrate.' I could see why this was not a popular job.

It was a sunny morning, and when I dared glance up from the dial, I noticed that around the nunataks the patterns in the snow were as regular as a carpet. Further south, the blue glacier ice was glassy and cusped. The pilot glanced darkly at me looking out, and I sank back into my seat, eyes glued to the dial. At least I was warm, once we got going. I ended up doing this job several times – being comfortable gave it a purpose, and anyway, there was nothing else to do. I was cold all the time at Ski Hi. Sometimes, in the tent or the weatherhaven, I would think myself back to a warm place, just to try to deceive the cold for a few moments. I used to imagine swimming in the Aegean Sea and diving through pellucid green waves to the ridged and sandy bottom. It is difficult now to remember why I kept doing this for it never worked.

∗

I was at Ski Hi for a week, and during this time the weatherhaven became increasingly derelict. Everyone was expecting to be gone in a few days, so there wasn't much point in clearing it up. We all crowded in for the evenings, and took it in turns to cook. One day I found Vasco stirring a pan of tomato soup.

‘There's this field assistant and his beaker holed up in a tent for days in a blizzard, right?' he began, addressing no one in particular. ‘The beaker goes out regularly to piss, but never the field assistant. Eventually the beaker says, “Look, how do you do this? It's incredible”, and the field assistant replies, “Easy. Every time you go out, I piss under your airbed.”'

Apart from these bursts of pyrotechnic wit, conversation meandered through the same familiar topics (the arrival of the ship, the condition of the Dash-7 plane, the mental health of BAS management and where they were all going to travel when they left the ice), eventually reaching the end only to start again at the beginning. At about that time we heard on the radio that a piece of ice the size of a minor English county had broken off the Larsen Ice Shelf and was heading purposefully for the Falklands. This newly-created iceberg inevitably propelled the press into a feeding frenzy of catastrophe stories about London and New York being flooded by the tide of melted glacier water pouring off Antarctica. The formation of a berg, however – even a particularly huge one – is part of the natural cycle of renewal, and not therefore necessarily indicative of imminent global disaster. It is the gradual disintegration of the ice shelves year on year which is a new phenomenon, and one which is gripping glaciologists. Since 1990, for instance, the ice which formerly occupied Prince Gustav Channel and connected James Ross Island to the Antarctic Peninsula has crumbled away, and not long before that the Wordie Ice Shelf on the west coast broke up. The regional climate on the peninsula, always the warmest part of Antarctica, has heated up by 2.5 degrees Celsius since the 1940s, and this has weakened the ice shelves. In fifty years, more than 3,000 square miles of them have disappeared without being renewed.

Even the gradual disintegration of the ice shelves won't necessarily raise sea levels. According to the Archimedes Principle, floating ice displaces its own mass of water. If, however, the crumbling of the ice shelves causes the ice sheet lying over Antarctica to discharge more ice, then sea levels will rise. Even in that situation, the extra discharge would have to take place off large areas of the coast, not just the peninsula, before the rest of the planet were to be significanthy affected.

Although the new berg was enormous, it was an infant compared with a 3,000-square-mile predecessor named Trolltunga which snapped off Antarctica in 1967 at about twelve o'clock on the map. The record holder measured over 12,000 square miles, inevitably leading to comparisons with Belgium, a country which seems to function almost exclusively as a measuring device for natural disasters.

Neil rushed into the weatherhaven one evening and flung himself on to a crate, hair flopping into his eyes. He had been reading
Anna Karenina
.

‘I just can't stand the way Tolstoy is always absolutely completely right about everything! He's so incredible! He knows everything! Every nuance is the right one! Every insight makes me think Yes! It
is
like that!'

We all thought about this for a while.

‘Ah yes, Neil, but was he happy?' asked somebody, stirring the ice in a pan on the primus.

‘No,' said Neil, ‘he was all fucked up.'

‘But he had a great beard,' said somebody else, ‘and that's what counts.'

∗

Back at Rothera, the field assistants were hunched gloomily over formica tables in the labs or the sledge store, writing the reviled end-of-season reports before the ship arrived in three weeks. At least once an hour someone would come to find me on the spurious grounds of a spelling enquiry – either that or they would engage themselves in any other displacement activity which came to hand. I occupied myself agreeably enough, and it was thrilling to be warm again. On Shrove Tuesday, a week after I returned from Ski Hi, I tossed seventy-five pancakes. I had also been assigned the taxing job of skua monitoring. In Cambridge they were collecting data on skua distribution in order to tackle the aeronautical problem of birdstrikes, and I had to stroll around the point intermittently, counting the birds.

March was an odd time. Summer had ended, yet winter hadn't begun. One day the base commander announced the name of his winter replacement, drawn from the ranks of the fifteen winterers. Bits of paper were posted to the doors of the emptying labs staking out room claims. Twenty or so people were going out on the Dash, and eighteen of us were waiting three weeks for the ship. Men who had been on the ice for two-and-a-half years began discussing what they were going to do first, in Stanley and in the U.K. There was talk of trees, and fruit, and pubs, and handing over money and getting something back.

The weather veered between savage snowstorms and sunshine, crisp air and clear skies. Time dripped away slowly in the bad weather, and the field assistants prowled around like caged animals. I worked my way through a pile of Antarctic films stored in dented tins in the tiny windowless archive. Life took on an agreeably even rhythm, bleached of highs and lows. The days grew shorter.

The easy equilibrium was hijacked one day by the arrival of mail. I was sitting in the library, with one eye on a pair of Adélies outside the window, when someone tossed a pile of letters secured by an elastic band on to the desk in front of me. I forgot about the penguins and began ripping envelopes open. The first one, forwarded from my home, unleashed a wave of regret. It contained a stiff, embossed invitation to my publisher's Christmas party two months previously. The Jonathan Cape bash was acknowledged to be the best on the literary circuit – drunken, Stygian, overheated, late and a hotbed of incestuous gossip. The previous year it had been the scene of disgracefully bad behaviour, perpetrated not least by the Patron of my expedition and me. It was all very well to relish the absence of clutter and the spiritual opportunities of the Antarctic wilderness, but I missed the debris of urban lowlife. The invitation threw me off balance, and I spent the remains of the day kicking up snow disconsolately around the point and glaring murderously at the seals.

In the second week of March, Ben, Vasco and Steve Rumble were going on a recreational three-day trip to Lagoon Island. It was an end-of-season treat.

‘Why don't you come?' said Ben.

‘Won't I be taking someone else's place?' I asked. I had become absurdly over-sensitised to my superfluity.

‘Of course not. Nobody else wants to come. I've asked the other two, and they'd be pleased if you joined us. Go on.'

We fitted crampons, stole bread from the kitchen and filled a manfood box with supplies, struggled into red inflation suits, winched two Humber inflatables into the bay and nudged our way through the pancake ice. It was a perfect day, without a cloud in the sky.

Lagoon was the northernmost of the Leonie islands, in Ryder Bay. It was charted in 1936, and formed a lagoon with the island on its west side. When we arrived, it was five degrees above zero and the sun was beating down. Vasco, the dark, flaming-eyed field assistant named after Vasco da Gama, put on a pair of shorts and took off his t-shirt. I was especially aware of the date – 10 March – as it was a friend's birthday. The previous year we had driven up to the Peak District for the weekend to celebrate at a twee hotel nestling in a dale. An unexpectedly harsh frost had fallen on Saturday night, and when we woke on Sunday the temperature outside was minus five Celsius – the perfect excuse to stay in bed all morning. I made a note to write to my friend to tell him that on the same day a year on it was ten degrees warmer in Antarctica than it had been in the north of England.

Steve set about hoisting the flag. He was the former winter base commander and electrician whom I had met at the Bluff. Ben went off to doze behind a rock, and I joined Vasco to do nothing on the veranda. The wind soon began whipping up small white horses on the lagoon, and Vasco lit the paraffin heaters in the hut and went to sleep inside. I was so cold that I put my inflation suit back on and walked up to a large area of shingle above the tide line. There were many of these raised beaches on the island, formed when the glaciers retreated after the last ice age.

We were struck on the head by skuas dozens of times each day on Lagoon Island. They came at us with open beaks and extended talons. The hut diary was bristling with anti-skua advice and designs for combat gear, but nothing worked except holding a broom aloft and waving it vigorously as you walked. The hut had been built several years previously, purely as a holiday cottage. It was twenty feet square, on stilts, and the walls and ceiling had been painted canary yellow. Besides an unplumbed sink, it had two primus stoves, four wooden bunk beds, three windows and, in the middle, a formica table. The shelves around the sink were jumbled with rusty tins of peaches and jars of separated mayonnaise. Two tilley lamps hung from the ceiling, as well as a coil of wire and a collection of fraying teacloths. A single shelf was stacked with a dozen novels and a chess set.

The evenings were drawing in, and we were obliged to light the tilleys at eight o'clock. After that, on the first night we drank rum and ate scones from a plastic bag shoved into our arms as we left base by Al, the cook, who never forgot field-party care parcels. Nobody had anything particular to do. Steve was at the end of a two-and-a-half year tour of duty, and inside his head he hadn't really been in Antarctica for some months. At the Bluff he had spent most of the time lying on his bunk with his Walkman clamped to his ears, but at Lagoon, in a smaller group, he opened up. He was far less concerned with being gnarly than most of the men at Rothera, and for that reason he wasn't very popular. This alone would have been enough to endear him to me, but he had also gone out of his way to be friendly. As he was unpacking the contents of his bag on to his bunk at Lagoon, he held out a folded t-shirt.

‘I thought you'd like this,' he said. ‘I bought two when the consignment arrived from Cambridge last year and, well, you'll appreciate it.' I unfolded the gift. It had been produced to commemorate the departure of the huskies.

After the sun had finally struggled over the horizon on our first morning at Lagoon we sat on the veranda for breakfast, an event made memorable by the fact that I had mistaken egg powder for milk powder and put it in everyone's tea. There had been much discussion about climbing a mountain, and we had brought plastic boots and a frightening array of harnesses. Like all field assistants, Vasco was a passionate rock and mountain climber and raced up a peak at the drop of a hat. I couldn't tell one end of a harness from another, and I had never worn plastic boots before, but I hadn't dared to raise any objections. God smiled on me that day, as He sent a thick cloud down over the mountains.

‘We'll have to go for a walk instead,' said Vasco over breakfast as he scanned the horizon.

‘What a shame,' I said.

We took the boats to Anchorage Island, another of the Leonies. It was reported by members of the French 1908–10 Antarctic Expedition as possibly providing anchorage for a small ship, and charted by the British Graham Land Expedition in February 1936. As we climbed, the lichens on the shingle beaches got thicker. Above them we spied a vein of brassy yellow pyrite, fool's gold.

‘Look at this,' said Ben when we got to the top. ‘I've found a splinter of whale bone.' He strode ahead, fiddling around looking for treasure. He was in his element off base. In the sixties, when he was driving dogs, he had spent almost all his time in the field. He accepted that BAS wanted him on base now because of his advanced age – but it wasn't the same.

I awoke the next day to a sound like sizzling bacon, the noise made by ice melting in a pan on a primus. In the months after Antarctica I often heard it in the boneless moments between sleep and consciousness; then memories ached like an old wound. Sunshine was pouring through the window. Steve brought tea to our bunks, and some of the ice must have been brackish, as it was salty. I made up a jug of milk for our breakfast cereal, and that was salty too. I wasn't having much luck with breakfasts. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. We basked on our veranda, and a flock of Antarctic terns flew by, their high-pitched chirp exotically foreign after the coarse squawk of the skuas. Later we took out the boats and followed a minke whale around the bergs, sailing through Daliesque arches and poking the Humbers' noses into cold blue grottoes. The sun was low, and the honeyed air was so still that the growlers and bergy bits
¹
were barely moving. It was a golden evening. A day like that made everything worthwhile.