Terra Incognita (12 page)

∗

I had a secret plan not to return to McMurdo immediately, but instead to hop up the Taylor Valley from camp to camp. With some help from Dale and a few conversations over the radio, I arranged to hitch a ride up to Lake Hoare. LD and Roland had been asking me for something English, so the night before I left I whipped up a bread-and-butter pudding. The seditious effects of a heavy meal resulted in three of them falling asleep at the table.

‘Wake up!' shouted Brian at two o'clock in the morning. ‘Time for the after-dinner entertainment.'

They had to retrieve a cassette sampler which had been lying under the ice all winter, its eighty hydraulically-fired syringes busily collecting water samples. It was the big event of the season and the only time that I saw all seven of them on the ice at the same time. At four o'clock, after a short burst of intensive activity, most of it under a space blanket, the instrument emerged like a newborn baby. It was a prototype instrument which cost in the region of $18,000.

‘What happens if I slip?' drawled LD as he grasped one end of the instrument and negotiated a sharp overhang of ice.

‘Well,' said Brian, ‘it would be like tossing your BMW off a bridge. Oh – and you wouldn't have a job any more.'

∗

The camp at Lake Hoare was at the near end of the lake itself, in the lee of the Canada Glacier. When I arrived, the residents were hovering around outside the outhouse, as the toilet had just exploded. It was a propane-fuelled piece of equipment known in the valleys as a rocket shitter, and on this occasion it had backfired, causing a loud explosion which it was feared could interfere with seismic data.

An early model of the rocket shitter once caused the Heavy Shop at McMurdo to burn to the ground. There were no fatalities, but the new fire engine, which was inside the Shop at the time, was lost. Even the rocket convenience, however, had not acquired the notoriety of a high-tech eco-toilet introduced, and swiftly phased out, in the eighties. It was known as the Stealth Bomber.

The camp at Lake Hoare was the most sophisticated in the Taylor Valley, with a smart new hut fitted with a kitchen, and, predictably enough, it was devoid of character. It did have solar panels, however, which powered the laptops, and it meant that a generator rarely blighted the silence. The eight residents of the Hoare House (as they themselves inevitably called it) were graduate students working with the Long Term Ecological Research programme, a National Science Foundation global project.

I put up my tent near the others and walked out on to the lake. It was named after Ray Hoare, a member of a team from Victoria University of Wellington who had worked in the Dry Valleys in the 1960s. There were some photographs of them in the hut, and even bundled up in all their gear they looked like Hermann's Hermits. Some of the pictures showed them pulling each other stark naked over the lake in sledges. It was frontier territory then, the days of mapless land and nameless places.

The hut was divided down the middle, one half containing the kitchen and a long table, and the other a set of bunks and a couple of desks. The kitchen window looked straight at the cliff of the glacier, fissured with slits like the walls of a medieval castle. Although chunks of ice (which they called glacier berries) regularly fell off the ice cliff and were used to make water, everyone was never the less acutely aware that water was a precious commodity. When I began washing the dishes after dinner someone piped up, ‘Hey, how come you get to wash your hands?'

In the evening, people drifted off to their tents or lay in the bunks in the hut. The camp was more a collection of individuals than a team; you could feel it straight away. I went to bed early, and when I opened my bag I found a cloth ration pouch inscribed with my name and the words ‘from all your friends at Lake Fryxell'. Inside they had put a sweatshirt from their institution, a sew-on patch, bars of chocolate and other treats.

Everyone seemed to be feeling better in the morning; they talked to each other in polysyllables, anyway. A helicopter arrived with the post, and it took away the charred rocket toilet. One of the students received an advent calendar in the post. It was already 9 December and most of the windows had popped open in transit, causing the chocolate animals lurking underneath to slip to the bottom, disintegrate and turn magnolia white on their passage through multitudinous temperature changes.

Two scientists appeared with the helicopter, and one, a snow and ice physicist and mountaineer called Ed, was planning to hike up the valley to his camp at Lake Bonney later that afternoon. When he asked me if I wanted to go with him, I leapt at the chance as I was longing to travel overland. It turned out to be one of the best walks of my life – and of his.

I left my tent and sleeping gear behind, and someone agreed to put it on the next helicopter to McMurdo. We strode off up Lake Hoare, the sky smeared with cloud like a lazily cleaned pane of glass and Ed delivering diatribes on ice formation. At the far end Hoare blended imperceptibly into Lake Chad. One of the early explorers got diarrhoea there, and the story goes that the lake was named after the brand of toilet paper favoured by the expedition. Chad in turn petered out into moraine. The bank of black debris, pushed along by the Suess Glacier, blocked our way up the valley. Ed, who had climbed Denali and in the Himalaya and had spent half his life in the wilderness, told stories about falling into crevasses. His words bounced back at us from the wall of the Suess, like voices calling in a dream. We passed a mummified young seal on the moraine, its adolescent form coated with a mossy green fur.

‘You are now', said Ed slowly and dramatically, ‘in a place which knows no degradation.'

I know a good metaphor when it leaps out at me and this was the perfect illustration of the timelessness so often associated with Antarctica. As an American journalist who came south with the U.S. programme in the fifties wrote, ‘Antarctica knows no dying.'

Propped up in my sleeping bag the previous night, I had written a letter to Jeremy Lewis, the Patron of my expedition. We had often talked about the symbolic properties of Antarctica. ‘Can't help thinking I'm in Never-Never Land,' I wrote. The absence of decay, such a salient characteristic of my surroundings, reinforced my perception of the continent as a kind of Shangri-La (the residents of which enjoyed perpetual youth – also a key element in the legend of the dead Antarctic explorers), or an Eden shorn, by its absence of an indigenous population, of the pain of the human condition. Jeremy had steadfastly refused to accept that the notion of Antarctica as Arcadia was anything but bizarre, definitive proof (as if further evidence were required) that I was ‘an odd fish'.

‘An Eden has to be lush,' he would protest as we downed glasses of wine at crowded literary parties to which we may or may not have been invited. ‘Comfort and the abundance of nature and warmth are its intrinsic properties. Think of the centuries of visual representations – all verdant and pastoral. Have you ever seen an Arcadia strewn with blocks of ice and peopled by indistinguishable characters with iced-up beards and swaddled in thermals?' Then he would extend his glass-holding hand in the direction of a passing waiter.

When I got there, I knew I was right. Everything was a symbol, in the context of Eden, and it made no difference whether the setting consisted of rolling green fields or thousands of miles of ice. The discomfort inevitably caused by a hostile environment like Antarctica was irrelevant. I did see it as paradise. When he received my letter, Jeremy wrote back with the grudging concession, ‘I suppose James Hilton's original Shangri-La was reached via near-Antarctic extremities of cold.' It seemed like a small victory.

Ed led the way up an ice slope to the defile on one side of the Suess and we hiked along a narrow path next to walls of beaten ice which led to a rocky escarpment and down to Mummy Pond. Ed wanted to ‘get a feel for the ice', and he knelt down on the pond as if he were bowing to Mecca. He had told me earlier that for anyone who studies ice, coming to Antarctica was like making the hajj. ‘The history of the planet is calibrated in the ice,' he said. He had been an English graduate before turning to science, and tried to persuade me that mathematics was a language like any other language, even stopping, when it got complicated, to draw equations in the sugar snow with his ice axe.

The skyline of the Transantarctics was now straight ahead of us, and over to the right loomed the Matterhorn, marked on Ed's map in pencil as the Doesn't Matterhorn. As we continued over rippling plateaux of coarse alluvial sand between vast sculpted, triangular, wind-formed rocks Ed said, ‘Not many people have seen this.' He turned to me with a broad smile, hand extended. ‘Here's to it!'

Then we began the approach to Lake Bonney, the twin peaks ahead the only thing between us and the polar plateau. These triumphal gateways of promise were backlit against a pearly blue sky, and the dimpled Taylor Glacier at the end of the lake was lit up above the dark, brooding opacity of the moraine. In front of this scene shimmered the lake, sheets of cracked and rippled frosted blue, and ribboned crystals imprisoned in the ice glimmered like glowworms. It was swathed in light pale as an unripe lemon. The scene said to me, ‘Do not be afraid.' It was like the moment when I pass back the chalice after holy communion.

It had taken five-and-a-quarter hours, though we had stopped regularly for ice-inspections, and by 9.30 we were picking our way along the soft mud on the edge of the lake towards the camp, diminutive in the distance.

When we arrived, a tall figure carrying a case of beer stopped and leant against the door frame of the Jamesway. ‘Here come the explorers!' he shouted, and Ed called back, ‘I found a writer!' The man was the project leader at Lake Bonney, and his name was John Priscu. I had met him at the conference in Virginia, and he had immediately invited me up to see his camp. It was his eleventh season at Bonney, and he said that when he got out of the helicopter, it was like coming home. He had officially named a number of the topographical features after colleagues who had worked with him there, ‘so they're still here'.

We all shook hands, and he ushered us inside. Four people were sitting around a large table, and the sound of taped jazz and peals of laughter filled the Jamesway. If it had been in an advertisement, a log fire would have been roaring in a grate and a large sheepdog snoozing on a rug.

John was a veteran Antarctic microbiologist, and he was studying the plankton in the lakes.

‘These lakes are unique all the way from the ice on the top to the plankton at the bottom,' he said, handing me a beer. ‘I can't figure out what's going on down there. Some of these lakes are frozen all the way to the bottom, for God's sake, and we don't know why. I'm going to keep coming back until I understand it.' He paused, and slurped at his own beer. ‘We probably never will understand it – but we're learning.'

He was forty-two, had gone to school at Our Lady of Las Vegas, and played guitar in a rock band. I found out later that he also plied a trade as an Antarctic tattoo artist and ear piercer. He had tattooed three people at Bonney using a needle for repairing Scott tents, and pierced four ears.

‘So, what's it like being a Fingee?' he asked me when I sat down.

‘What's a fingee?' I asked suspiciously.

‘Fucking New Guy!' said John. ‘Like Ed here.'

‘I'm not a guy, to start with,' I said.

‘Everyone's a guy here!'

He had chosen the site for the camp himself, in 1989. His Jamesway had been used in the Korean War, and he claimed that the holes in the canvas at one end had been made by bullets. A notice over the door said, ‘Good morning scientists! It's a good day for science!', and next to a dartboard beneath it someone had duct-taped the label from a tin of California Girl peaches. All over Antarctica people stuck up images of heat, sunshine and tropical landscapes. They reminded me of the call of whales for a lost world. The debris of human occupation had spread all over the Jamesway like creepers in a greenhouse – postcards with curling edges, bits of rope on old hooks, broken mobiles, Larson cartoons (indigenous to the American academic community), baseball caps, foot powder containers filled with plastic flowers, an inflatable sheep called a Lov Ewe and Christmas cards strung along the arched ceiling, their messages long since forgotten. The gas fridge was full of water samples and food was stored on the floor.

Two Kiwi scientists had arrived that day from Lake Vanda in the Wright Valley, which was next along from the Taylor. Clive ran a quasi-governmental environmental hydrology institute in Christchurch. He was acute and articulate with very clear eyes, and his colleague Mark was amiable and quiet. The pair of them had known John for more than a decade, and it was a great reunion.

‘I wish I still had my old hut,' Clive said, looking round the Jamesway. The original Lake Vanda hut had been pulled down, and in its place Clive had been given a freezer-box style modern version from which any trace of personality was erased like a palimpsest at the beginning of each new season.

We ate a pot of bean stew, drank a case of beer, and then a bottle of bourbon appeared. Two women graduate students were working at Bonney at that time. One of them, a tall, feline individual called Cristina, was the target of a good deal of teasing, to which she retaliated in kind. John's favourite story was that on her regular trips down to base Cristina had begun stockpiling free condoms from the McMurdo medical centre. It wasn't that she needed them in Antarctica, she said, but that she never knew when they might come in handy at home, and as they were free – hey, she was a grad student. Arriving back at Bonney one day she had stepped out of the helicopter, dug her hand in her pocket to retrieve a glove and inadvertently brought out a handful of condoms which sprayed all over the helipad, whipped into the air by the blades and settling gently over her shoulders like confetti.