Pecked to death by ducks (18 page)

With my diapers and carabiners in place, I could run a dou-bled-over climbing rope through the figure eight, step backward off the lip of a cliff, and slide safely down the rope. This is the fastest nonfatal way to get down off a mountain. Since most cliff faces are higher than the average climbing rope is long, numerous slides are required to reach flat land. Ropes are expensive, however, and in order to retrieve them after each slide, they are usually wrapped around an anchor—a tree, a horn of rock, a sling affixed to a chock—and dropped double down the face of rock below. The ends of the rope should at the very least dangle over a stand-up ledge. There the climber can pull on one end and bring the rope down after him. The process is called rappel, a French word meaning "recall."

I was out recalling over the side of a cliff this spring day be-

cause the summer was shaping up heavy on rope work. I'd been invited to help some people place a pair of peregrine falcons on a rocky ledge rising high over the Pacific Ocean. I'd also promised to join a caving expedition where we would be expected to slide down a rope in absolute darkness some four hundred feet. "You can rappel, can't you?" I was asked in both cases.

The last time I slid down a rope was six years ago. As I remember, it seemed a painless procedure after the first-time terror of trying to scale a 5.7 climb called the Grack in Yosemite. Slide down a rope? No problem. Rappel off a cliff while holding a delicate peregrine falcon in a sweatsock? Piece of cake. Drop off into the darkness of the earth's abysmal depths? I could handle it. But what the hell, a little practice with the rope wouldn't hurt.

My friend Paul Dix, a photographer, has been climbing for almost thirty years and owns all the requisite ropes and hardware. As it happened, Paul didn't mind taking an afternoon off for some rope work. In fact, he said, I would be the perfect subject for "some rappelling photos." Paul said he would be happy to supervise my practice sessions if he could shoot pictures of me.

Which is how I came to be hanging over the lip of a cliff in Yankee Jim Canyon, just above the rapids of the Yellowstone River. Other men have hung from the neck until dead: I was hanging from my diapers and dying of boredom. This is the curse of going anywhere with an outdoor photographer.

"Just hold it right there," Paul said, diddling with his Nikon. "Okay, now drop down about two feet. Good. Now turn your face out of the shadow. Lift your right foot about four inches. Perfect. Hold it. Look natural."

For me, a natural look would have been one of intense apprehension, but after hanging for some time in a position one sees only in East Indian sex manuals, a certain ennui takes hold of the soul.

"Can I go now?" I called. The diapers were beginning to chafe.

"Uh, wait just a minute, please. I'm changing film."

Using Paul's gear and relying, as I was, on his expertise, I was in no position to argue. I was in no position at all. I was hanging

by my diapers, thinking uncharitable thoughts about photographers.

"Oh my God," Paul called. "Could you hang for another few minutes? Five more minutes. There's a couple of kayakers upriver." Paul was in a lather of anticipation, scrambling up the side of the cliff, dragging thirty pounds of camera gear in a frenzied quest to find the perfect angle. "If I can just get you and the kayakers in the same shot . . ."

Someday Paul will be sitting at home, in his office, and his agent or some magazine art director will call and ask, "You wouldn't have a photo of a fat guy rappelling down a cliff with a couple of kayakers paddling by below, would you?"

And Paul Dix will say, "Of course," in a way that suggests all good photographers have that shot.

There was a nice little stretch of rapids upstream, and the kayakers had no idea that I was hanging in the wind, waiting for them to pass so that Paul could be nonchalant with art directors about his rappelling photographs. The kayakers were probably nice guys. I bet I'd like them if I met them at a bar. What I didn't like about them from this angle was the way they kept fooling around. Drop into a big hole and paddle furiously in order not to move. Anybody who would work that hard to go nowhere, I thought, twisting slowly in the wind, was an imbecile of heroic proportions.

"Can you drop below the overhang so you hang free?" Paul asked. So I hung there, working hard to go nowhere and feeling as vapid as a kayaker in a rapid. The diaper was cutting into my thighs, and paralysis had overtaken my legs. I mean, I was hurting. I began to think of Paul as a Kodachrome sadist.

Okay, I admit that photographers, as a rule, are probably wonderful people, as likable as the idiot kayakers no doubt were, but while at work the average outdoor photographer is not to be trusted. Once, in South America, I stood under a heavy waterfall wearing raingear made of a "new generation" fabric while photographer Nick Nichols took shots for a catalog, shots designed to show that this stuff was impervious to water. It was a cold day on the high plateau known as El Mundo Perdido, the Lost World,

and the fourth time I walked through the falls, I called up to Nick that I was soaking wet and cold.

"This stuff doesn't work," I screamed, "not even a little bit."

"Gimme one more walk-through," he shouted back. "I haven't got the shot."

"But the stuff doesn't work." A bit of logic and fine good sense howled into the empty space between a working photographer's ears. "It leaks like a sieve."

"I don't know that," Nick shouted. "Gimme one more walkthrough."

"This stuff is the fabric of betrayal. . . ."

"Looks great," Nick yelled, "real good. One more walkthrough."

Nick has actually asked people to give it one more walkthrough over a bed of coals. That was in Surinam, where he was working on a story about the people who live deep in that country's tangled jungle. Nick spent three weeks in one jungle village, long enough to count the people he met there as friends.

The villagers finally agreed to perform their fire dance for the camera. "I still don't know how they do it," Nick told me. "Whether they go into a trance or whether their feet are just so callused they can stomp the fire out. Anyway, the head dancer goes first, then his assistant comes out, then a trainee comes and stomps out the rest of the fire."

It was a difficult lighting situation—shooting into a fire at night —and Nick was worried about the shot. He asked his friends to give it one more walk-through the next night.

"I think," Nick recollected, "they thought I was disappointed in the size of the blaze, because this time they built a bonfire. The head dancer didn't stay in very long, and neither did his assistant. The magic wasn't there that night. Something. When the trainee came in to put the fire out, it was still blazing away, and I could tell he was definitely getting burned."

And so they learned in Surinam what it means to have a photographer as a friend.

Far and away the worst of the breed are underwater photographers. I've had enough scuba experience to know that, in any given group, the person with the camera is likely to be the best and most knowledgeable diver. Just don't get buddied up with him. The scuba photographer drops down the anchor line, swims ten yards, and finds something to engage his or her interest. As likely as not, the fascinating stuff involves a couple of tiny organisms the size of your thumbnail swimming around a coral knob no bigger than a coffee cup. The rest of your group is off hanging on the backs of manta rays or watching green turtles mate, but the inflexible rules of diving won't let you leave your buddy, the motionless photographer. No use even swimming over to see what the camera sees. You'll stir up the sand, frighten the organisms, and spoil the shot.

After the dive the photographer will be in a state of near sexual excitement. "A feeding phenomenon no one has," he'll mutter in ecstasy. "No one's ever seen it before."

"Especially not me," you point out.

"Hey," the photographer says, "I've got it on film," as if photography is somehow superior to experience. "I'll send you a copy." The shot, when you get it, will be beautiful, suitable for framing, a photo you could label "The Conservation of Underwater Experience."

I was thinking about the treachery of photographers when Paul said it was okay, I could go ahead with my practice rappels. When I was just about at the end of my rope, he called, "Hey, Tim, could you hurry back up here? There's a big raft coming down the river."

I clipped out of the rappel rig.

"They're coming pretty fast," Paul called. "Could you run, please?"

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I am sitting on hard snow and ice here at Cape Evans, on Ross Island, in the Ross Sea, and this Antarctic beach feels like the last beach on earth. I sense a prophecy: This beach will encompass the earth at the end of time when the sun is a feeble glow, without heat, and the world a ball of ice hurtling through infinite space.

There is a beauty here, at the edge of Antarctica, at the end of time. A high wind rips a line of wispy clouds into shreds that flutter under a cold silver sun. The white plain that backs the beach takes on the color of the sky. The snow is vaguely pink, like watermelon. Ahead, across gray waters littered with ice floes, looms a high headland of ice and snow. A brisk wind blows loose, dry snow over the lip of a two-hundred-foot-high cliff like a pale pink waterfall. More clouds mass under the sun, and the powdery snowfall in the distance has become a dark, vaguely purple curtain: falling snow like inky dusk.

Above, a royal albatross, a great white bird of good omen, soars past the purple snowfall and over the watermelon plain. Skuas, gull-like seabirds, shriek overhead. Fifty yards away, a fat gray seal basks on a seaside snowbank. It has the characteristic

upturned smiling mouth of a Weddell seal. The animal blinks once, flirtatiously. The black eyes are large and gentle, doelike, adapted for hunting in dark waters under the sea ice.

Not far behind me is the hut where Captain Robert Falcon Scott prepared for his ill-fated march to the South Pole, about 820 miles away. Everything inside is perfectly preserved in the perpetual deep freeze of the continent. I saw a table where scientific experiments were conducted; beakers and electrical wires littered the shelves nearby.

It had been dark and gloomy in the hut: Windows let heat escape. Reindeer sleeping bags lay on wooden bunk beds arranged around a metal stove. There were English magazines from the turn of the century, discarded gloves, and provisions stocked on the shelves: Colman's mustard, Fry's Pure Cocoa, Huntley &: Palmers biscuits, Belmont Stearine candles "made expressly for hot climates."

Antarctica is not tolerant of mistakes. In front of the hut, on a beach of icy volcanic rock, is a ship's anchor tailing a length of frayed rope. In 1915 Ernest Shackleton used the Scott hut to prepare depots for the first transcontinental overland crossing. Two parties in two ships were supposed to land on opposite sides of the continent and then trek until they met, but Shackleton's ship was crushed by ice and sank. His men survived. The other ship lost its mooring in a blizzard and drifted to sea, leaving ten men marooned ashore. Only six lived. The annals of polar exploration are filled with dozens of sagas like this.

Up the slope from the cabin is the mummified carcass of one of Scott's sled dogs, covered in drifting snow. Above, on a commanding hill, is a cross commemorating the death of three members of Shackleton's Ross Sea party.

It is a sobering scene, here on Cape Evans, the very edge of mortality. I have wandered off to sit between two hillocks of snow, on a small plateau that overlooks the sea. In the midst of all these symbols of death and hope and glory, I feel a need to savor the nobility of living things.

I have plunked myself down near a series of meandering tracks in the snow. I am waiting for the creatures that made them: Ade-lie penguins—stout, ill-tempered little birds about two feet high

and weighing perhaps eleven pounds. Soon enough, I hear a few Adelies calling to one another. They sound like indignant baritone crows. And here they come, over the top of the icy drift, five of the robust little birds with the distinctive and clownlike white Adelie circle around each eye. They flop onto their bellies and bodysurf down the slope, struggle to their tiny feet, and then waddle importantly up the near hill. One bird cuffs another with its flipper. All squawk and caw at each other.

These Adelies, so darling in documentary films, are, I see, lusty, powerful birds, very intent on survival. They surround me in a rough semicircle and stare. One lifts its head, beats its flippers, and croaks out a challenge to the sky: "Ahhhh, ahhhh, ahhhh, AHHHHH." The others follow suit. They seem to be saying, "I am a penguin, and what a hell of penguin I am!"

Having made their point, the Adelies waddle off toward the beach, presumably contemplating the dive that will take them out to sea for most of the coming winter. They tend to plunge in large groups. This disorients predators like killer whales. But these Adelies seem to hesitate, as if debating the matter: "After you, my dear fellow."

"Tim! Hey, Tim!"

It is Peter Carey, a penguin biologist currently employed as a lecturer aboard Salen Lindblad Cruising's newly built Frontier Spirit, a 365-foot passenger ship anchored a mile offshore. Dr. Carey says it's time to pile into a rubber Zodiac and head back to the Frontier Spirit to join the eighty other passengers for dinner. The ship is unusual—an iceworthy vessel that combines luxury and ecological sensitivity. It's filled with all sorts of antipollution gear, including an entire sewage-treatment plant, aimed at minimizing our effect on these waters.

I liked my fellow passengers. They were informed and enthusiastic people of all ages, ranging from those in their mid-thirties to one remarkable man in his early eighties. They included a number of medical doctors from the United States and Australia, a famous Japanese photographer, a pair of journalists from Chicago, bird fanciers from several countries, and one resilient woman in her late seventies who found the entire trip "magical."

They had come to discover, for themselves, the continent of