Antarctica (61 page)

She felt utterly drained. Hollow. McMurdo looked terrible. Her trekking group had dispersed with barely a word, off to dorm or hotel, no plans for a final dinner together that night, nothing. She had got them all home after losing the sledge in the crevasse, but it hadn’t really been her doing. If it weren’t for the ferals Jack very possibly would have died on Shackleton Glacier, and none of them could be sure they would have survived that storm; weather said it was still going strong out there. Besides,
back home without anyone dead
wasn’t exactly how you wanted to characterize a trip,
given that it had been an expedition undertaken for pleasure. There needed to be more than “Got home alive.”

Better luck next time, she always said to herself after the bad trips. There were bad ones and good ones. There had been good trips too. And there would be more of them in the future. No doubt about it.

Still she couldn’t shake the low feeling. Postexpedition blues, sleep deprivation, polar T-3 syndrome, whatever; she felt bad. Right on the edge of tears. It was a mood she hated. Whenever she saw it coming she fought it tooth and claw, she would not allow it. The antidote was action. She stood up and left the room, which at this moment seemed a black trap. She pulled on her parka and stumped back down the metal stairs at the end of the dorm, went back outside into the bitter wind.

Funky old Mac Town. There was nowhere to go. She was weary to the bone, her muscles stiff and sore—a feeling she usually liked, but not now. It had gone beyond that. She was hungry but the galley was closed. She went by the Chalet but it was after hours, and Sylvia and Wade had already left. There would be friends to talk to at the BFC, although they would no doubt still be busy sorting out the mess caused by the ecoteurs.

But by now the Erebus View would be open. She walked past the Holiday Inn and up the stairs to the private restaurant, stomach growling, almost faint with hunger. She walked through the door, into an ambrosia of food smells. Looked around for an empty table.

And there were Jim and Jack and Jorge and Elspeth, having dinner. Jack saw her and quickly looked away, scowling. Elspeth saw him turn his head, and glanced over her shoulder: “Oh hi Val,” riding over any awkwardness, “come join us.”

But Jack was glowering still, and after glancing at him, Jim would not meet her eye. Elspeth and Jorge, necks craned to look at Val over their booth back, didn’t see the other two.

Val waved a hand: “I’m looking for Joyce right now, I’ve got to talk to her. I’ll come back and catch you for dessert maybe.” And she retreated out of the restaurant.

Standing outside in the chill of McMurdo. Cloud shadows flitting through town. Blindly she stumped down the street behind the docks, helplessly thinking of all the bad expeditions she had ever been on, the ones people had walked away from furious or ashamed or sick at heart. It happened, oh yes it happened; under the stress of some of these radical endeavors people cracked, and the truth came out. And sometimes it was ugly. That ugly scowl on Jack’s face—Val had seen it before. One time she had been on the receiving end of that look for a whole week, on the ship returning them to the Falklands from South Georgia Island. After the one and only “In the Wake of Shackleton” expedition.

It had been one of the groups that had worn period clothing, a particularly crazy idea when repeating the boat journey, as the stuff the old guys had worn was ridiculously inadequate, and they could not have been more soaked, cold, and miserable. If they had been in a boat like the
James Caird
they would have died many times over; and even though their twenty-two-foot ultramodern boat had resembled a floating submarine more than Shackleton’s little lifeboat of the same length, and thus kept them afloat even in horrifying seas, it had still been a complete nightmare: everyone seasick, always lost unless they turned on the emergency GPS, cold and wet in the terrible gear, hurting
with an accumulation of injuries as the result of being hammered relentlessly by huge waves. By the time they made their GPS-aided landfall on South Georgia Island, they were all wasted.

With the hardest part yet to go. For Shackleton and his men had been forced to land on the west side of the island, when all the Norwegian whaling stations were on the east side. And the island was a mountain range sticking up out of the South Atlantic.

Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had made it over, however, and Val’s three clients were stubbornly determined to do the same. So they had set off from King Haakon Bay to make the thirty-six-mile crossing of the island’s spine in a single push. It was a long way given the shape they were in, and over a steep range five thousand feet high, no small height when both ends of the trip were at sea level, and the island right in the Furious Fifties storm track. And they were minimally equipped for the hike, carrying only what Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had carried in 1916. It was a radical trip; a real test.

As they ascended and began to cross the island’s high empty glaciers, however, struggling through the deep snow, Eve had begun to tire fast. She had been the most seasick on the boat journey, and it became clear that she just didn’t have any gas left in the tank. The two men were almost as weak, and even Val was not feeling the usual dynamo effect that a hard hike had on her; it really hurt to give it her usual push. So they were in bad shape as they approached the crux of the journey, a ridge called The Trident directly blocking their way. There were four high passes to choose from, between the five tines so to speak. Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had started at the right and climbed up to each of the passes in turn, looking down the other side of each
and finding them cliffs too steep to descend; then traversing under the towers to the next pass, each time with a terrible effort.

Without discussion Val’s group gave up on following this precise route and went straight for the fourth pass, the one Shackleton and his men had finally forced their way over. By the time they got close, the weather was degenerating. They had no tent or sleeping bags with them, and little food or clothing. And darkness was coming on fast, with the strong possibility of losing the moonlight to cloud cover, and perhaps even being stormed in. And then on the final approach to the pass, very steep even on that side, Eve had slipped and had to be arrested by Val, and in the jolt Eve somehow twisted her ankle pretty badly.

So when they finally reached the fourth pass, it had been a horrible shock to look over the other side and find that the slope there was insanely steep. The drop fell away so sharply that there was a big section in the middle they couldn’t see at all, which could have been a sheer cliff for all they could tell. The precipice only levelled off a full two thousand feet below them.

Shackleton, a careful man, had only decided to risk descending this slope because at that point they had no other choice. The three had therefore sat down in a line on their rope, legs around the man in front, and fired down the slope on their bottoms; two thousand feet in a matter of seconds, a drop that certainly could have killed them, as they had no idea what the hidden section below them would bring. Worsley said later he had never been more scared in his life, and he had done a lot of scary things. But they had lived.

Now, looking down this cliff, Eve had lost it. She refused to try the jump. This is crazy, she cried, this is
crazy
. Snow conditions might be different now, it might
be icier! This must not be the right pass, we must have read the map wrong! We’ll be killed going down this!

Entirely possible. But this was the right pass, and it was getting dark, and a storm was coming. And they had gone so far that the only way out was forward—an all-too-common mountaineers’ dilemma. And Eve was shivering as well as crying, going into shock perhaps from her fall and the twisted ankle. And they had no tent, nor much food—yes, they were in the same fix as Shackleton—this was the plan after all, to put themselves in the same fix! They had engineered it this way! They too had no choice.

But Eve refused. Her boyfriend Mike begged her to try, he yelled at her; she yelled back at him, crying harder; their friend Brett tried to reason with her, but got nowhere. Whimpering in straightforward animal fear of death, she refused to make the leap. And while they sat there arguing it got darker and darker, and they were chilling down in a truly dangerous way.

Finally Val had snapped. She said “Look we’ve
got
to do this,” and grabbed up Eve, who kicked and screamed like a child in a tantrum, and pulled her around in front of her and jumped over the cornice, shouting back at Mike and Brett to do the same.

The slide quickly accelerated to something like free fall. Val crushed Eve to her hard, and they skidded down on Val’s backside, airborne at times, going faster and faster until Val was sure they were doomed; it would only take one rock in their path. But they never caught on a rock, never lost balance and tumbled into a bone-shattered bloody mass…. And some timeless interval later, probably less than a minute, they skidded out onto flat thick snow at the bottom of the slope and came to a halt. Mike and Brett arrived seconds later. Val’s pants were shredded, her legs and butt bloodied.

After that they had had to help Eve, who was crying helplessly all the while; one on each side of her taking turns, though mostly it was Mike and Brett who did that, while Val found the way in the dark, through most of that night. And they reached Stromness just before a giant storm hammered the island.

Great adventure. But Eve never spoke to her again.

Now Val looked around McMurdo, remembering Jack’s quick look away at the restaurant table, his scowl. Or that wounded look, when he was hunched out on the ice. She had done it again.

“I am not a good guide,” she told the empty town. “I am toast.”

Even though she was very near tears, the word toast reminded her of how hungry she still was. She moved off shakily toward the BFC. She could break into a box of camp crackers there, and hear stories of the other SARs of the last week, and huddle over the space heater to try to get herself warm. “I am the coldest burnt toast in town,” she said, and stopped and let herself cry for a minute before going on.

“Hello, Phil?”

“Yeah, who is it? Wade is that you? Where are you?”

“It’s me, Phil. I’m in Antarctica.”

“Where?
Oh yeah. I was asleep, Wade.”

“Good.”

“What’s that you say?”

“Were you dreaming, Phil? What were you dreaming about?”

“What? What’s this, you call me up to wake me to ask me what I’m dreaming about?”

“You’ve had me do that a lot, remember?”

“Yes—no—I’m not having you do that now, am I?”

“You don’t remember what you were dreaming about?”

“Well, let’s see. Let me think. No, I guess it’s gone. Wait, something about bicycling. No, it was a unicycle. I was riding a unicycle down the Capitol steps, that was it—no, the Lincoln Memorial, because I could see the Capitol down the Mall. People were there like I was giving a speech, a big crowd, giant, but actually I
wasn’t giving a speech, I was unicycling up and down the steps, making the hops in both directions and getting a lot of applause. It was great. No one could figure out how I was hopping back up the steps, and I couldn’t either. It was mystifying but fun. All the Republicans I like were there going Shit, Phil, how are we gonna beat that when you can hop up steps on a unicycle.”

“Mark and Colin?”

“Yeah, they were pissed. Then all the Republicans I hate were down there getting tossed in the reflecting pools.”

“A crowd scene.”

“Like the guppy tank at the pet store. I was planning to ride the unicycle right across their backs once they were all in, keeping my balance no matter what they did. Then you woke me up, bummer, that was going to be fun.”

“You enjoy your dreams, don’t you Phil.”

“I do, yeah. Unless I don’t. But most dreams are wish-fulfillment fantasies, I think you’ll find.”

“Maybe for you. Mine are usually terribly complex problems I can’t possibly solve.”

“That’s too bad, Wade. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks. So where are you now?”

“I’m in Kirghiz, I think. Yes. I’m seeing the Kirghiz light.”

“Very nice. Well. I should let you go back to sleep.”

“I’d like that Wade.”

“All right. Thanks for calling, Phil.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Oh, and by the way, just one thing?”

“… yeah?”

“I’m going to make some suggestions and the like down here in your name in the next day or two, Phil,
I’m just going to go into ambassador mode because things are moving so fast here and I’m not sure I’m going to have time to check with you but I want to use your name as if everything I suggest is coming from you okay? Is that okay?”

“How is this different from the way we usually operate?”

“It isn’t, I just wanted to confirm.”

“Confirmed. Night night.”

“Night, Phil.”

The Antarctic Treaty had always been a fragile thing, a complex of gossamer and blown glass which had spun in the light of history like a beautiful mobile—a utopian project actually enacted in the real world, a model for how people ought to be treating the land everywhere—until it got caught in the pressures of the new century, and at the first good torque shattered into a thousand pieces.

Now Sylvia presided over the wreckage, hoping still to patch it back together. She was operating on as big a sleep deficit as anyone in town, perhaps even the largest of all; she had spent almost every hour of the crisis in her office or up at Search and Rescue, trying to deal with the multiple emergencies. It had been a trouble-shooter’s nightmare. But at the same time, a part of her began to think (no doubt the part most affected by sleep deprivation) that it was also the ultimate trouble-shooter’s challenge, or even an opportunity: not just to keep plugging away at the succession of little stopgaps
that formed her ordinary work, but actually to consider the rehaul of everything.

She stood at the front of the big central room of the Chalet, watching people file in. A lot of people wanted to talk to her, and she had told them all to come on over to the Chalet. She was curious to hear them, in part to help her to clarify her own thinking about the situation. What would happen next, what should happen next? Without laws, without sovereignty, without a military, without police, without economy, without autonomy, without sufficiency—without any of the properties needed in the world to make life real … It was as if they were a small group of travelers in space, marooned on Ice Planet and now forced to invent everything from scratch.