Terra Incognita (11 page)

He wrote every day, and once a week he sent a present, too, a commitment which must have tested his imagination as there weren't any shops except the navy store, and that offered a limited range of out-of-date film, tampax and Y-fronts.

‘I am an all or nothing man,' he said seriously, zipping himself into his vermilion parka and setting off to write another instalment.

CHAPTER FOUR

. . . A thousand visages

Then mark'd I, which the keen and eager cold

Had shaped into a doggish grin; whence creeps

A shivering horror o'er me, at the thought

Of those frore shallows. While we journey'd on

Toward the middle, at whose point unites

All heavy substance, and I trembling went

Through that eternal chillness . . .

Dante, from
The Divine Comedy

A
SERIES
of arid valleys run off the Antarctic continent opposite Ross Island, created by the advances and retreats of glaciers through the Transantarctic mountains. These dry valleys, free of ice for about four million years, are dotted with partially frozen saltwater basins and form one of the most extreme deserts in the world. NASA wanted to test robotic probes there before sending them on interplanetary missions.

‘It's as close to Mars as we can get,' one of the engineers said.

At the orientation conference in Virginia I had met Brian Howes and Dale Goehringer, coastal ecologists working at Lake Fryxell, the first of the three frozen lakes in the Taylor Valley. They had invited me to stay at their camp, so three weeks after I arrived in Antarctica I checked out a set of equipment at the Berg Field Center, sorting through tents, thermarests and crampons and painting my initials on a shiny blue ice axe, and one morning I hitched a lift in a helicopter resupplying a camp farther up the valley.

Less than an hour after leaving McMurdo, the pilot put down on a rocky strip of land between a parched mountain and a large frozen lake. He signalled for me to get out. It had not rained here for two million years.

A hundred yards from the edge of the lake a figure darted out of an arched rigid-frame tent known as a Jamesway. I had heard a good deal about Jamesways. They were ubiquitous in long-term American field camps and constituted the heart of camp, too, like the kitchen in a farmhouse. An invention of the military, Jamesways are portable insulated tents of standard width and height but variable length – to make them longer, you add more arches. They have board floors and a proper door, and in Antarctica are heated by drip-oil Preway burners.

The figure trotting towards me from the Fryxell Jamesway had long straight hair the colour of cinnamon sticks, and she was waving. It was Dale. At home she ran a lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

‘Welcome to Fryxell!' she said. ‘We've been looking forward to seeing you. I washed my hair specially.' Taking my arm, she propelled me towards the Jamesway.

Inside, a man was slumped over a mug at a long table next to an inflated plastic palm tree. He was short, with a cloud of tangled black hair and a hat like a thermal doughnut.

‘This is LD,' said Dale. ‘It stands for Little Dave, and he's a grad student in marine biology. He's been up for thirty hours.' LD raised his head to flash me a Mephistophelean smile before resuming the slumped position. On the back of the door they had hung an Annoy-o-meter with an arrow which could be swivelled from Vaguely Irritating through to Murderously Provocative.

‘Who's the baby?' I asked, pointing at a large chubby face smiling down from the canvas wall of the Jamesway.

‘That's Mary,' said Dale. ‘She's one year old. I planned the birth so that I only missed one field season – this is my eighth. Season, I mean.' She put two insulated mugs of coffee on the table. ‘Before I forget – all waste from the dry valleys is retrograded to McMurdo, and that includes grey water and human waste.'

‘What's grey water?' I asked.

‘Dishwashing water,' she said. ‘We empty it into a drum out the back. As far as going to the bathroom is concerned, there's an outhouse we use behind here' – she gestured to the back of the Jamesway – ‘and in it a funnel connects to a drum. There's a shit can for solids. And you need to take a pee bottle with you when you go for a walk, too.'

‘So you can't just pee on the ground?' I asked. ‘Even when you're miles from camp?'

‘Nope. We're trying to maintain a pristine environment.' There was a pause. ‘Listen,' she said in a low voice, as if she were about to breach the Official Secrets Act. ‘Take my advice. When you want to go to the bathroom in camp, use a pee bottle and decant the contents, rather than struggling to pee into the funnel. A tall man fixed the funnel in position to suit his own aim.' She sat back in her chair. ‘God,' she said, ‘it's good to have another woman here.'

Going to the bathroom
: I wondered if there was any lavatorial situation Americans deemed too primitive for this dignified term. I had even seen a translation of the Bible in which King Saul entered a cave ‘to go to the bathroom'.

Later, I put up my tent among a sprinkling of others behind four small laboratory huts (it was typical of their attitude to their work that the labs were more luxurious than the accommodation). At the far end of the lake the Canada Glacier, grubby with dust, blocked the northern horizon. Much of Antarctica is officially classified as a desert, and nothing proved it more effectively than the salt efflorescences on the shoreline of Lake Fryxell, thin white crusts like the salt pans of northern Chile. Some ponds in the Dry Valleys are so saline that they won't freeze at minus sixty degrees Celsius, and the water is like molasses. On others the ice crusts, like lenses, concentrate so much solar energy that the bottom layers can reach temperatures of twenty-five degrees Celsius (or 77 degrees Fahrenheit).

In the afternoon I strapped on my crampons and walked out over the ice with LD and a hydrologist called Roland (LD said, ‘I do mud, he does water'). The lake was surrounded by a thin layer of ‘moat ice' which, as it was still early December, was frozen solid. By late January the moat ice would be gone. The fifteen-foot ice lid which covered the rest of the lake never melted. It was filled with tiny white bubbles and twisted into apocalyptic configurations – a fall might land you face down on a sword reminiscent of Excalibur. We did fall, though not on our faces. A wrong foot would not send us crashing into the glacial water, just down a foot or so through a pocket of blue neon air and on to the next layer of ice.

In the small hut in the middle of the lake, LD and Roland fiddled with their instruments.

‘The lake was formed about 1,200 years ago by meltwater from the Canada Glacier,' LD explained. ‘It's the forty-eight feet of water underneath the ice which interests us. The permanent ice lid facilitates a uniquely stable water column.' When they shut the door of the hut, natural fluorescent light shone up through the hole in the board floor. They had eighteen instruments in the lake at that time, and when they brought water up from the bottom it was so full of sulphides that it smelt of rotten eggs. While they pumped, they stowed the tubes inside their shirts. Like a lot of Antarctic scientists, they were engaged in a constant battle against the big freeze. LD showed me his mud; he called it ‘very young rock'.

‘What I'm into', he drawled, ‘is phytoplankton on their long journey to oil and rock.'

As the light never changed, they were tied to the clock only by their daily radio schedule with McMurdo. Although they always ate dinner together, it had to be convened well in advance by radio and might be at four in the morning.
¹
After a day and a half without sleep their eyes grew dull, like old mirrors. Brian, the team leader, said that his body clock had died years ago.

It was an easy rhythm to follow. If I wasn't out on the lake with one of them I sat outside the Jamesway listening to the moat ice crackling and watching the tobacco-yellow plumes of Mount Erebus in the distance staining the cobalt sky. I took my turn to make water, dragging a cart over to the frozen moat and chipping ice into pans. The salts had been frozen out, and the water tasted delicious.

I spent a whole day out on the lake with Steve, an oceanographic consultant, and George, a benthic biologist in his fifties.

‘I'm happiest in the first ten inches of sediment,' said George. The pair dived together off Nantucket, and they both enjoyed
getting away
to Antarctica.

‘It's like stepping out of your life for a few months,' said Steve. The seventh member of the team was Craig, a bacteriologist studying photosynthesis cycles.

‘Looking under these lakes is literally like going back in time,' he said, ‘It's a microbial wonderland.'

Brian was a marsh and coastal ecologist and a bio-geochemist. He was much revered by the team, but I only ever saw him exerting authority when he stood outside the back door of the Jamesway beating a large frying pan against an even larger saucepan in order to wake up LD and Roland. Brian had his finger on the pulse of camp dynamics, and if he got tired, the whole camp began to deteriorate. The fact that it was a harmonious, well-oiled camp with its own distinct culture was in large measure a tribute to him.

One afternoon I crouched next to Brian in the hut in the middle of the lake.

‘Nitrates are the single biggest cause of coastal erosion and pollution,' he said. ‘That's why we're here, finding out more about them. Oceans do have an assimilative capacity for nitrates, but they shouldn't be introduced beyond that capacity. Many areas of the world are already way beyond their limit, and they're in big trouble.'

Brian believed that science in Antarctica meant adapting to the environment, not foisting techniques on to it. He had worked out that using paper plates was ecologically more sensible than burning fuel to melt water to wash plastic plates, so he had installed a trash compactor in the Jamesway. He and Dale had fought not to have snowmobiles at their camp. Like all passionate ecologists, they had made themselves unpopular. But they knew they were right.

‘No amount of money', he told me as he pulled a lurid intestinal tube from the soupy water, ‘could create an environment like this.'

The VXE-6 helicopter crews – the airborne squadron of the U.S. Navy – called in almost every day. VXE-6 did most of the flying for the U.S. programme. They called themselves the Ice Pirates. I called them Testosterone Airways. Sometimes they brought fresh food and they always brought news from McMurdo, which was known as Porcelain Land. If they couldn't call by they would buzz us, swooping low over camp, and they kept up a running competition to see who could drop a roll of newspapers nearest the doormat, a gesture only rendered more touching by the fact that the papers were weeks old and never read.

One day I climbed the lowest peak of the Asgaard range behind camp, and from the summit I could see the top of the glaciers at either end of the lake. I could see Roland, too, squatting outside the hut in the middle of the lake and spooling out cable. This was known as being the ‘mule'. The cable ran into the hut, where it was winched into the water by LD. I switched on my radio so I could listen to them. Roland was the only team member who hadn't been south before, and he had taken over from LD as general factotum, a role he accepted with equanimity, even when Brian staked the use of him for two days in a bet with a project leader from a neighbouring camp. LD's speciality was self-deprecatory humour accompanied by facial contortions. One of his typical anecdotes featured an old man out walking with his small grandson. The man had spotted LD squatting on the steps of the Woods Hole lab where he worked, smoking a cigarette, and as if delivering a moral lesson of some import the old man told the child, ‘See him? He's a bum.'

‘That's enough cable now,' LD was saying to Roland. ‘Stop! For Christ's sake, stop! What's your problem?'

‘I have stopped,' whined Roland.

‘Why didn't you stop when I first asked? Got a wedgie or something?'

‘What's a wedgie?' I interrupted, keen to learn a new scientific term.

‘It's when your underwear rides up,' said LD.

Later, I hiked over to the face of the Canada. When I sat on the ground and ran a handful of soil through my fingers, I half expected to find a flint arrowhead – some small sign of a human past. What I heard there went beyond quietness. It was George Eliot's ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence'. In a famous passage in
Middlemarch
she wrote that it was like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, but that our ears didn't pick it up because we walked about ‘well-wadded with stupidity'. She had never been south, of course. She didn't need to go.

The scorched Atacama Desert of northern Chile kept flashing into my mind. Two years before, I had travelled through it for weeks, much of it in a jeep with a peripatetic Australian man I had tripped over in the corridor of a doss-house. It was as hostile as Antarctica. Nothing lived there, and just as it did now, the cone of a volcano always hovered on the periphery of our vision. Despite the candent heat and throbbing air and the dust that settled on us and our possessions like fur, it was a curiously agreeable trip, as if our minds had flattened out like the baked plain. Sometimes, after hundreds of miles of caramel pampa, we came across geoglyphs on the desiccated hillsides, crude drawings by an unknown and long-gone tribe. Although they had been crushed like a sea-shell under the hoof of a
conquistador
's horse, the tribe had left their imprint, and it was as if the desert still belonged to them. Here in Antarctica there was no concept of ownership. I was travelling to the sound of a different drumbeat. If Antarctica had something to teach me that was more important than nitrate data, it was not about humanity. The landscape drew my thoughts away from worldly things, away from the thousand mechanical details of my outward life. I had found the place where, loosed from my cultural moorings, I could find the space to look for the higher power, whatever it was, that loomed over the snowfields.