Antarctica (11 page)

“I will. Good night, Phil.”

“Night night.”

Then he was waking up again under the light touch of a stewardess, and an hour later off the plane and through the airport and onto a smaller plane, and flying south to Christchurch, over the green hills of New Zealand’s two islands. Then down onto a small-town airport, and out waiting for luggage, in the late afternoon. His wrist phone told him it was three days after Phil’s call about Antarctica; but he had lost a day crossing the international date line. His internal clock appeared to be at about 4
A.M
.

He pushed his luggage on a cart through the parking lot, out to the roundabout at the airport entrance, where his hotel was located. Just around the corner, he was told, was the U.S. Antarctic Centre. So after checking in and taking his luggage to his room, he walked around to the Centre in a dreamlike state, to make his appointment for clothing issue.

Inside a big low building he sat on a long wooden bench with some other men checking in, and tried on an entire L.L. Bean catalog of winter clothing, pouring cornucopiastically out of two big orange canvas bags packed specifically for him. The array of solar and piezoelectric gloves and mittens was particularly impressive, and he commented on it to one of the Kiwi helpers in the room. The man looked at his manifest and shrugged: “You’re going a lot of places.”

“Am I?”

“That’s what it says.”

So Wade hefted his bags and shambled back to the hotel, then had dinner in the hotel restaurant. Every face there came straight out of
Masterpiece Theatre
, New Zealand now being considerably more British than the British. Back in his room he slept deeply, barely woke to his alarm; stared at his face in the bathroom mirror; good-bye to that world. He lugged his
bags back to the Centre. It was dawn, and he and several other men changed into their extreme weather clothing. “We’ll cook in the plane,” an American commented, “and if we go down this stuff won’t keep us alive a single second longer.”

“Propitiating the gods,” a Kiwi official suggested.

The official herded them into a larger room, like an ultrafunctional airport lounge, where they and their orange bags were sniffed eagerly by a big black dog on a leash. Then they were led out to an old bus, and driven across the airport tarmac to the side of a big green four-engined prop plane with the number “04” painted in white behind its nose. Wade followed the other passengers up tall steps and through a small oval door, into a dim interior.

He shuffled back into a big poorly lit cylindrical space, which was almost filled by the bladeless fuselage of a khaki helicopter. The walls were covered with things; on the floor against the walls, aluminum tubing supported red nylon webbing seats. The other passengers sat here and there, and Wade realized there were only going to be a dozen of them—half in black overalls and big red parkas, half in khaki pants and leather flyers’ jackets. These latter were the Kiwi crew of the helicopter. Wade sat down next to them.

Overhead the space was filled by scores of pipes, lines, struts and cannisters, many of them encased in gray canvas-covered insulation tubing, laced into place with what looked like very long shoelaces, and marked everywhere by stencilled numbers, acronyms, cryptic instructions and so forth; and all covered with a layer of dust. If it had been a movie set the art director would have been accused of shamelessly camping it up: a flying machine of the previous century, how quaint! Except
this one had to fly them for eight hours across an islandless stormy sea.

Uneasily Wade jammed the foam earplugs he had been given into his ears, and got his webbing seatbelt fastened. Then the engines started, and even with the earplugs the roar was deafening. The dozen passengers were cast into a speechless world, a world of sign language, smiles, nods, thumbs-up, and so on. A crew member wearing a jacket that proclaimed him part of the New York Air Guard checked them over, then climbed up a hatchway to the cockpit. They were moving; perhaps they were taking off. The other red-parkaed passengers drifted into books, or reverie; the Kiwi helicopter crew members got up and wandered about, finding flat places to lie down and go to sleep. This left the webbing seats around Wade empty, and he lay down as well. Hot air alternated with frigid blasts.

He managed to sleep for a while. When he woke up he stood and made his way forward, and established by hand signals with one of the crew that it was okay to go up the steps and into the cockpit. Up there it was a scene out of a World War II movie; two pilots up front, under a bank of small windows, in bright light; two officers behind them; a flight engineer to one side. Here it was just quiet enough to talk, and they chatted over the dull wash of the engines as they ate lunches out of brown paper bags, like school kids. They didn’t look much older than school kids either.

“When was this plane built?” Wade asked the engineer.

“1960.”

“Metal fatigue?”

“All the moving parts get replaced. The fuselage itself is thick as a sewer main. These Hercs are tough. This one here spent fifteen years under the snow after it
lost an engine and crashed. Then they dug it out and put on a new engine, and here it is.”

“Amazing.”

“Yeah. Although the Herc bringing in the new engine crashed and was totalled, so it was no net gain.”

“Oh.”

Wade returned to his seat. So these planes really were antiques. Technology from the previous century. Which sometimes crashed. He forced himself to go back to sleep.

When he woke again the interior of the plane was distinctly brighter. He pulled himself up and looked out the porthole. White light blasted his eyes and he fell back, eyes running, and fumbled on sunglasses before looking out again.

Mountains; white mountains. Here and there the sheer face of a black cliff, but everything else covered in what looked like a coat of whipped cream, overspilling all the landscape. The creamy pure white of the snow was unlike anything he had ever seen—as if while he had slept the old Herc had skipped through hyperspace, and was now flying over another planet entirely. Ice World. A white waste of creamy snow, stretching out to fisheye horizons, with a blue-black sky above. Wade knelt on the webbing and pressed his nose to the cold glass, staring as the white mountains flowed under them, the speed of their passage not as great as the usual jet’s passover, so that there was a kind of fluid slow-motion quality to the changing angles of the black cliffs, all sliding by in the white noise of the Herc. Wow, Wade thought. Maybe it really will be different.

When he turned and sat down again, he noticed that one of the young New York Air Guardsmen was wandering around the plane with a flashlight in hand, pointing it up into the dim network of pipes and wires
overhead, then going to the porthole in the rear door to look out intently at the left wing. He did this for a while, back and forth, back and forth. He wiped his brow; he was sweating. In fact he looked terrified. He was like a mime doing Deep Fear.

Wade looked around and saw that the New Zealander helicopter crew had also noticed the Air Guardsman. He leaned over to shout in the nearest Kiwi’s ear.

“What’s up?”

“—flaps aren’t working,” in a very strong Kiwi accent. Fleps ahnt wuh-keen.

“A flap isn’t working?”

“None of the flaps are working!”

Wade pulled back to stare, feeling his stomach shrink. The Kiwi pilot was grinning, and he nodded to show that Wade had heard right. Then he leaned toward Wade to add more.

“Wash them in Cheech—water freezes in there—won’t move after that.”

“And so?” Wade shouted.

“—don’t need flaps to land.”

“You don’t?”

The man shook his head, then grinned at the Guardsman and shouted to Wade, “I don’t think he knows that!”

“No!”

Obviously he didn’t. But Wade did. Or so a Kiwi helicopter pilot had told him. Not need flaps to land a plane? Wasn’t that exactly what they were for? Certainly the Kiwis did not look worried. In fact they were watching the Air Guardsman sweat it out, and glancing at each other and grinning, then trying to look dead serious when the Guardsman walked by, then laughing hilariously—all this in pantomime, in the white noise of the howling engines. The Air Guardsman was oblivious
of them, however, and he pinballed around the plane, tracing the big hydraulic lines that ran along the ceiling from the cockpit to the wings. Wade saw with a sinking heart that this was a machine run by the force of liquids pushed around in tubes. And the Air Guardsman was sweating bullets, he was literally wiping his brow, though it was freezing in their compartment. The Kiwis could barely contain their mirth when he turned their way. Wade watched it all with his mouth hanging open, wondering who to believe. He preferred to believe the helicopter crew, of course, but they were Kiwis, and who knew what they would do? Not need flaps to land?

Then another crew member came down the hatch, and gestured for them to belt up. Wade could not tell by his expression whether he was worried or not.

So Wade sat for a long time, in the roar which was like a kind of silence, waiting, trying to figure out how a plane could not need flaps. He had seen them curve out and down on a hundred landings, perhaps a thousand. It was like a duck landing. They were definitely part of the descent mechanism.

Finally the plane appeared to slow down. The pitch of the roar lowered; then abruptly it cut back to nearly nothing. Oh my God, Wade thought, his heart beginning to race—they’ve cut the engines. The crew members were rushing around the interior. One of them went to the door at the front and began to open it.
Opening the door?
Were they bailing out? The other passengers were standing up, and with fumbling fingers Wade unhooked his seatbelt and leaped to his feet.

The door opened. Brilliant white light poured into the plane, and a man in a T-shirt appeared in the doorway. Wade jumped at the sight, severely startled.

They were on the ground. He had felt no tilt forward in the plane, no touchdown on a runway. Actually they
appeared to be on snow. A skiway. Apparently a landing made on skis, and without operating flaps, was a very gentle thing indeed.

Mildly stunned, Wade made his way to the open door. White snow everywhere. The airport consisted of four Hercs in a row, and a few lines of red buildings on wheels, with giant hitches at their front ends, like immense U-Haul trailers. It was intensely bright, and very cold; the man in the T-shirt was seriously underdressed. He waved Wade down the steps. “Welcome to Antarctica!”

Hello my friends. Thank you for joining me on this voyage across the bottom of the Earth. As you can see, I have nearly completed the flight south from New Zealand. Soon we will arrive on the frozen continent. As we approach our landing, we see that deep in the big notch in the continent called the Ross Sea, a magnificent volcano has risen from the sea floor. This volcano makes a triangular island seventy kilometers across, and it rises around four or five thousand meters from the sea floor. Every measurement of this volcano’s height comes up with a different figure, a fact that confirms what the eye sees immediately, that the inner line of Erebus’s form creates a knot of
lung-mai
or dragon arteries that is precisely contiguous with its outward form, so that we see it in all five dimensions at once. This sometimes makes ordinary calculations of its height difficult.

Now we have landed, my friends, and are being driven across the sea ice to McMurdo. The little town, as you see, is placed in a scooped-out hollow on the tip
of a long peninsula of the volcano island, an arm of lava that surged down off Erebus to the west not so very long ago, leaving a final lava cone at the very tip. How strong the dragon arteries of this island!

As we approach the tip of the peninsula and our landfall, let me recall for you the story of the first human landfall on Antarctica, which happened on January 24th of 1895. When Borchgrevink’s expedition approached the Antarctic Peninsula, they were aware that all previous landings had been on islands offshore, and that no one had ever stepped on the actual land of the continent before. Borchgrevink and his ship’s captain were rowed toward the rocky beach by a sailor, and as they approached they saw their chance at history. Borchgrevink began to move to the bow of the boat to climb out, and the ship’s captain began to wrestle with him, claiming for some reason that he had the right to go first. The two men were wrestling still as the boat coasted up to the rocky beach, and seeing it the seaman rowing them leaped over the side into waist-deep water, and ran up to the shore ahead of the entangled officers. Thus he was the first human ever to step on Antarctica. What was his name? I can’t remember.

On the slope of the town, now, we look back toward the airport on ice, and beyond it, across some fifty kilometers of the Ross Sea, to the mainland of the continent. It is a superb prospect. Over there mountains jump immediately out of the ocean: peaks taller than Fuji and Mont Blanc stand within twelve kilometers of the ocean, and the whole range, as you can see, is complex, multifaceted, and deeply riven by glacial valleys, down which slanting beams of yellow sunlight glow. On certain days optical effects in the air create fata
morganas in which the mountains appear five times as tall as they do now. Oh my, yes. This view from McMurdo is very strong, bringing into play simultaneously all the landscape’s oppositions:
hsü-shih
or empty-full,
yin-hsien
or invisible-visible,
chin-yuan
or near-far, also finite-infinite. Thus naturally the fifth dimension,
li
, the emptiness before all spacetime, is strongly evoked as well; and also that value of a landscape that goes beyond all notions of beauty, its
i-ching
or density of soul, and its
shen-yun
or divine resonance.