Antarctica (16 page)

So he was in no shape to talk to anybody, much less Val herself, and when she came out of the galley door and saw him and approached, he groaned. This town was just too damn small. And yet there was that little hummingbird whirring around inside him now, trying to flit out one of his pupils with his look at her—a very close inspection indeed—trying to judge the possible truth of what Joyce had told him, looking for signs of regret, or friendliness, or anything but the dismissive nonlooks he had gotten from her since she ended their friendship.

And indeed she had such a look on her face, and no sunglasses to hide it; there was no mistaking it, she was distressed. Or else mad at him. “Are you really going?” she said.

“Yes. I just finished resigning.”

“Oh X,” she said. “God damn it, those folks are breaking the Treaty, you don’t know what’s going to happen down here if the Treaty doesn’t hold, they’ll wreck everything!”

Of course he wouldn’t be doing this if they had stayed a couple. They both knew it, but they wouldn’t talk about it. And here she was ragging on him while they were standing alone out in the wasteland of pipelines and telephone wires; but up on Ob Hill she had pretended not to care in the slightest, unwilling to show anything in front of the DV, that politico with his fancy haircut and his parka worn like a camel-hair overcoat, talking on the wrist to Washington and to wherever his roving senator was now, a handsome guy with
money
and prospects and a career, onto whom Val had immediately glommed. Women were drawn to power like iron to a magnet; it was sociobiology in action, the gals
looking to protect their little babies no doubt; but still it made X sick to see it.

So he glared at her and did not reply. He could not think what to say when he was so mad at her and yet at the same time that hummingbird was zipping around in him like an attack of angina.

“People have been breaking the Treaty for years,” he said finally. “Your tour groups are breaking the Treaty as they used to interpret it. The southern countries doing this exploration are using really safe technology. And it’s exploration only. It won’t be a problem. I’m looking forward to doing some real work for a change.”

She waved a hand angrily, swatting him without actually swatting him. “You’ll end up doing the same kind of thing you do here.”

“They’re going to train me to do more.”

“Right.”

He looked down at her. Not very far down, it was true; this was one of the things he had loved about her, she was a woman his size. And not just physically, but in her mind and spirit. He had loved her, and sure, he loved her still. But this was too much. If she wanted to ask him to stay, or berate him for not staying for personal reasons having to do with them, if she wanted to apologize for dumping him so brutally after their arrival, she could do it; here he was, this was her chance, her last chance for months at least, maybe her last chance ever; and here she was nattering on about the goddamned Antarctic Treaty, as if that mattered any more or was the real point between them.

Maybe some of that got across to her in his look. She pursed her mouth and looked off to the side unhappily. Unhappy cheerleader; it was a sorry sight. But she was too stubborn to apologize, and by God he deserved an
apology. They had been partners, they had been sleeping together, making love; they had been in love. Or so he had thought. Then they had gone off to do their business in the world and come back here, just a couple of months apart, and as usual on her return (just three days before him!) there had been a bunch of guys coming on to her—big deal, it was no excuse, when had it been any different for a woman who looked like her? No, McMurdo was no excuse. They had been an ice romance only—she had wanted to break it off for reasons of her own, and the great number of men in McMurdo was just an excuse and a damned lame excuse at that.

And she wasn’t going to apologize.

“I’ve got to pack,” X said, struggling to keep his voice level. He turned and walked away before he started to shout at her, or cry.

And the next day he was out at the little air station that the private tour companies had established in the Windless Bight—nothing more than two Jamesways and a fuel bladder next to the snowplowed landing strip, one of the smallest barest camps X had ever seen. The plane didn’t show, and he spent the night in a Jamesway named “The Random House,” sleeping uneasily on an ancient dead mattress, listening to the Preway roar like the ghost boos of a ghost audience, watching his life movie from inside his head: a remake of
The Man Without a Country
, starring The Man With No Name.

Hello again my friends. As you can see, I am now out on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, a few kilometers south of Ross Island. I have come out here to spend a day at the Americans’ Happy Camper Camp, where visitors are trained in ice skills to better prepare themselves for their time in Antarctica. The camp is well-named; I am happy indeed. The mountaineers have shown us how to light the stoves, to put up the tents, and to use the radios. I have learned how to tie several knots. I know now that if you need to get a badly injured person inside a tent but are afraid to move them for fear of injuring them more, you are to slit the bottom of the tent open and erect the tent directly over the unfortunate person. Antarctica is a dangerous place. It is easy, looking around as we are now, to think that I stand on a broad snowy plain; in fact I am standing on cracked ice, with deep fissures all around, and the Antarctic Ocean below me.

Captain Cook, one of the greatest feng shui masters of all time, sailed the circumference of this Antarctic
Ocean in the 1770s, trying to get as far south as he could. His wooden sailing ships ran into the pack ice at seventy degrees south, and as far as they could see to the south was only more ice. With the technology of his time they could go no farther. Later Cook wrote “I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”

This sounds odd to us, shortsighted and even a bit foolish. But we must remember that the man who said it was extremely intelligent and capable, accomplishing much more in his life than any of us have. His shortsightedness as exhibited in this remark has to be understood then not as a personal attribute, but as one of his age generally. For Cook lived just before the great accelerations of the industrial age; his time was as it were the foothills of a mountain range so precipitous that the heights could not be guessed. Thus the radical foreshortening of the
kao-yuan
perspective. Cook sailed in wooden ships, which in their materials much resembled those used in ships for the previous two thousand years; only improvements in design had made them more seaworthy, and Cook rightly judged that these improvements, wrested slowly over the centuries out of human experience, had gone about as far with the materials as they could go. Thus he could not foresee the immense changes that would come so rapidly in the industrial decades to follow.

We, however, have no such excuse as Cook. We live on the heights of that mountain range, in a culture changing so rapidly that it is hard to gauge it. We look back on two centuries of continuous acceleration into this unstable moment, so we should be able to foresee that much the same will occur in the time after us. Who can deny that the future will quickly become something
very different than our time, quickly become one of any number of possible worlds?

And yet by and large I think we still do no better than Captain Cook. We assume that the conditions that exist now will be permanent. And yet every year the laws are amended, and even the ice shelf I am standing on now, that has been here for three million years, is melting away. Even the rocks melt away in time. This moment is like a dragonfly, hovering over a peach blossom; then off and gone.

Look then at this ocean I am camped on in this moment. A white immensity; nothing to say about it. Erebus stands in the air like a powerful deity. Before you can read a landscape, it has to become a part of your inmost heart. When I came before to Antarctica, as a proud young man, I saw the land and it baffled me, and I could not paint it in my poems. Nothing came to me. As the British explorer Cherry-Garrard said, “This journey had beggared our language.”

Only later, as I dreamed of it, did I grow to love it. What words I could find were the oldest words, in their simplest combinations. Blue sky; white snow. That is all language can say of this place; all else is footnotes, and the human stories.

Now I am back, and those of you who care to share my voyage, watching and listening in China, or wherever else you may be; I welcome you, because I feel now, all these years later, with the love of these stories in me, that I am ready to film the land I see, and talk to you my friends about it; not to reproduce the effects of light, but to tap this light at its source.

For Scott’s party in their first stay here, in 1902, this edge of this ice shelf was as far south as anyone had
ever been, and no one knew what lay farther over the horizon. Except of course they knew for sure that that way lay the South Pole, the axis of the Earth’s rotation. On Ross Island they were still twelve hundred kilometers away, as they knew by geometrical calculation; but they had no idea what the land in between would look like; whether these Western Mountains across the bay would extend all the way south, as a great wall blocking them, or whether there would be an easy ramp up to the great plateau of ice, which short trips through the nearest Western Mountains suggested might guard the Pole. They could only tell by trying to walk there. It resembled the attempts on the North Pole, and the search for the Northwest Passage, which had been a major feature of British culture since Elizabethan times. As long as England had been a maritime power, as long as it had been an empire, it had been sending out brave men to explore the polar ends of the Earth, first the northern one, and now, with the invention of canned food and metal-reinforced steam-powered ships, they had been able to penetrate the pack ice surrounding the southern one—the ice that Captain Cook said would never be penetrated—and been able to establish a good base of supplies as close as they had, here on Ross Island. Directly south lay this broad featureless white plain of an ice shelf. And so they had to give it a try.

On their first trip south, Scott took along his friend and confidant, Edward “Bill” Wilson, and Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton was chosen for his physical strength and for his drive, his will, his spirit to achieve and to cross this land.

But the snow of the ice shelf was soft, and pulling a sledge through it proved difficult, like pulling it through sand; very slow, and very strenuous. Shackleton had a
heart defect that he hid from others all his life, and in the rigor of this forced march south, making five miles a day only after fourteen hours of badly designed manhauling, he succumbed to scurvy faster than the other two.

Within days of starting they could see by the slowness of their progress that they were not going to make it to the Pole, so the push south continued to no very great purpose, even though they were killing themselves to do it. This made them irritable. They never even got off the ice shelf, but only managed to make it to the tidal cracks separating the ice from the shore. They confirmed that the Western Mountains extended far enough south that they stood across any very direct route from Ross Island to the Pole; a rather ominous and discouraging discovery, and yet the only one they had made when they had to turn back.

And even so Scott had almost left it too late. The moment of return was his call to make, and despite warnings from Wilson in early December that Shackleton was developing scurvy, and the other two were not far behind, Scott pushed on until the day after New Year’s. At that point they had a desperate struggle to get back to Ross Island alive. On the return Shackleton collapsed from the scurvy, and could no longer help haul the sledge; at the most he could ski along freely next to the other two, at what cost to the will we cannot well imagine, as sick as he was—so sick that on some days he was forced to lie on the sledge and let the other two haul him.

And Scott, not knowing about the heart defect, had no sympathy for Shackleton. Here was a younger man, who had been so much more dynamic back on Ross Island; his breakdown Scott regarded as a moral defect,
and as it endangered all three of their lives, and therefore Scott’s own reputation for competence, he grew angry at Shackleton. He made contemptuous comments about “the baggage” within Shackleton’s hearing, often enough that Wilson had to pull him aside and tell him to stop.

And in the end Scott and Shackleton fought. Shackleton and Wilson were packing the sledges when Scott shouted at them, “Come here, you bloody fool!” Wilson said, “Were you speaking to me?” And Scott said “No.” Shackleton then said, “Then it must have been me. But you’re the worst bloody fool of the lot, and every time you dare to speak to me like that, you’ll get it back.”

Shackleton was an officer junior to Scott, on a British Navy expedition. This statement was therefore very like mutiny. It took Wilson to patch things up and insist that the two men calm down and continue. The incident was so traumatic that not one of the three men wrote about it in the journals they were keeping on the trek; it was too dangerous to mention. How then do we know about it? Because Wilson, who was the father confessor figure for everyone on the expedition, finally felt the need to speak himself, and at some point afterward told the geologist Armitage what had happened. Later still Armitage wrote down what he had heard. How accurate Armitage’s account was, and Wilson’s too for that matter, we have no way to tell. But certainly by the time they staggered back across this ice to the Discovery Hut at McMurdo, Scott and Shackleton were enemies for life. They could not stand each other, Scott used his command to invalid Shackleton out of Antarctica, sending him home on the supply ship that visited after their first year there, while the rest of them
stayed on for another year and made more sledge journeys, testing routes to the polar cap and looking around.