The Ice Lovers

THE
ICE LOVERS

THE
ICE LOVERS

Jean McNeil

McArthur & Company
Toronto

First published in Canada in 2009 by
McArthur & Company
322 King Street West, Suite 402
Toronto, Ontario
M5V 1J2
www.mcarthur-co.com

Copyright © 2009 Jean McNeil

All rights reserved.

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed
written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McNeil, Jean, 1968-
The ice lovers / Jean McNeil.

ISBN 978-1-55278-884-4

I. Title.

PS8575.N433I24 2010       C813'.54       C2010-903988-2

eISBN 978-1-77087-115-1

The publisher would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for our publishing activities. The publisher further wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council and the OMDC for our publishing program.

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arts Council of England in the writing of this book.

Design and composition by Tania Craan
Cover photographs: landscape © Cliff Leight/Getty Images; glacier © Veer
Author photograph by Diego Ferrari
Text images: photo © Jean McNeil; map © British Antarctic Survey

Contents

Acknowledgements

Bluefields

PART I :The Crystal River

1

2

3

PART II: Land of Ice and Fire

1

2

3

4

PART III: Running Out of Night

1

2

3

4

5

PART IV :The Known World

1

2

PART V: Wintering

1

2

3

PART VI: Glimmer

1

2

3

4

5

PART VII: Vanishing Point

1

2

3

4

PART VIII: Iceblink

1

2

3

4

Fennoscandia

Short Glossary of Antarctic Terms

Questions for Discussion

Acknowledgements

The research for this novel was facilitated by a residency in the Antarctic, supported by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Arts Council of England's (ACE) International Fellowships programme. During the three and a half months I spent in the Antarctic in the austral summer of 2005–6 the fellowship allowed me access to BAS' Antarctic scientific programme, its personnel, ships, planes and remote field camps.

I remain deeply grateful to both BAS and the ACE for this unusual and life-changing experience, and for their programme, which has given many writers and artists access to a continent usually off-limits to all but scientists and officials. In particular I would like to thank David Walton and John Shears at BAS, John Hampson and Charles Beckett at the Arts Council of England's National and London offices respectively, and Natasha Messenger and Tim Eastop, formerly of the International Fellowships programme at the ACE. Thanks are also due to the Arts Council of England's Grants to Individuals fund for a follow-up grant to support the writing of this book.

I would also like to thank the Royal Literary Fund and Newnham College, Cambridge University, for their support. My fellowship at the University of Cambridge allowed me time and peace of mind during the final stages of working on The Ice Lovers. The Scott Polar Research Institute and the British Library were very helpful with research, as were the many scientists and Antarctic workers who shared their knowledge and experience of life South. Special thanks are due to Layla Curtis and Diego Ferrari for friendship during the research and writing of this book, to Kim McArthur for her unflagging support, to Francine Brody for her helpful editing, and to Maggie McKernan for her good counsel.

A note on place-names
: Thanks to the Mapping and Geographic Information Centre at the British Antarctic Survey, who kindly produced the map of Antarctica in the front matter of this book. Those who know the Antarctic well, on reading this novel, may suspect me of spatial confusion with regard to some place-names. While set in the Antarctic, this book is a piece of imaginative literature. The novel refers to actual geographical place-names in the Antarctic (some of which are shown on the map), but also makes reference to places which either do not exist or are extant, but correspond to different geographical features than the ones indicated in the novel. Names for all ships and scientific bases, certain official bodies (such as The Polar Research Council) are fictional, as are all the characters in this novel.

The extracts that appear in this novel are credited as follows:

From
South: The
Endurance
Expedition
by Ernest Shackleton, originally published by William Heinemann, 1919, reprinted by Penguin Books (UK), © 2002. ‘The Winter Night' by Fridtjof Nansen, reprinted in
The Arctic
by Elizabeth Kolbert (ed), published by Granta books, © 2007.

THE
ICE LOVERS

Bluefields

The ice shelf looms in the windscreen. Behind him, seasmoke is rolling in. He loves its ermine swirl, even if it impedes his visibility. He fixes his approach. It is one of those albino days, the light bleached into a pigmentless colour; not white nor silver, but some new hue projected by the giant skeletal thrust of the ice sheet.

Underneath the plane the ice in the Weddell Sea is finally breaking up; from the air it looks like muslin – the thin, lacy frazil ice, ice flowers sprouting on the perimeter of meltwater.

It is an absolutely dingle day in December 2016. This is his favourite moment in the Antarctic calendar, early in the brief summer, watching the ice loosen its grip on the continent.

The sun is out so the contrast is good, he can see the sastrugi and the fractures drawn on the surface by crevasses. He will get it down on the deck without a bump. He has been doing this for twelve seasons now. As a pilot, he subsists on a volatile diet of experience and luck; these days it's the latter that preoccupies him, he goes over and over the chances he has taken and which so nearly went wrong: flying through too-narrow cols, brushing nunataks so that a geologist returning from the field can get some good photos of the strata. Once or twice in a season he has these ‘moments' as he calls them; dips into air pockets, can't get the power he needs to climb, the stern grey face of the mountains loom in the windscreen and seem out to teach him a lesson. He likes to take risks, of course, he would be bored otherwise. He is counting on luck. But he has been doing this for so long now and he has a theory about luck: it runs out. Eventually.

His co-pilot is a nervy field assistant (what is his name? They are all called Andy or Mark; he's not particularly good at names, and keeps these two in reserve as guesses). Nervy Andy/Mark relaxes his shoulders. Little does he suspect how much worse it could have been, no vis, poor contrast, him deciding to land anyway on nerves, on instinct. Only inches above the deck thinking, now, now, now – he can feel it coming, sometimes, the land, he can feel it reaching up to grasp him.

He and the field assistant will spend two or three days flying aviation fuel from the ship further inland, replenishing stocks for the coming summer field season. The ship has just been in to relieve Midas IV, the new ice sheet station nearly five hundred miles to the east. He will fly there too, eventually, drop off the field assistant and take a shower, his first in a week. He will sit on the platform station, which hums all night with the vibration of the generator, watching the sun hover above the icefield. This time of year it never sets, only skirts the horizon, tantalizing it with the possibility of night.

First he has to blank down the aircraft. He clambers up onto the wings, releases the guy wires, and climbs down. It is just like tying a tent to the ground – he kicks the ice screws in, ties off the tension cord. The plane secured, he surveys the landscape: a white plain, unfiltered blue sky occupying equal vectors of his vision, the horizon smudged with seasmoke to the north, and feels a slight constriction in his heart. The emptiness fails to captivate him as it once did. Now he sees it as vortical and scrawny; immense, yes, awesome in its simplicity, but it does not grip and impassion him with that strange vacant frenzy, as it did in the beginning.

The diminishing of his enchantment had begun just before he met Nara, and he wondered now if this was not an accident; it had something to do with her, as if he had been waiting for someone to pass on the baton to. He never told her, but when they went to Berkner nearly four years ago, he had stood on the ice sheet with her and for the first time had seen the Antarctic for what it was, despite the tungsten light, the tangerine sunsets: a cold place.

Four years ago on their way to Berkner, he and Nara had taken off from this very white plain, blue-less and field-less, although the precise piece of ice they had used as a runway had long been dissolved into the sea. These days, parts of the Ronne Ice Shelf were only lightly soldered to the continent.

They had stood here together, four years before, unaware of what awaited them within hours, scouring the snowfields – fields of such deep, pulsating blankness they passed through an invisible colour barrier to become indigo, turquoise.

Since that day he had avoided coming here, he even avoided the name. Like so many places in the Antarctic, Bluefields was not even a place, just a fuel depot that moved with the shifting ice, marked by a line of bamboo flags. That the Antarctic had few place-names was one consequence of having the thinnest of histories. There were the Dead Men places: Charcot, Latady, Ross, d'Urville; the names derived from explorer mishap: Hope Bay, Cape Disappointment, Deception Island, and (his favourite) Exasperation Inlet; then the made-up names: Site 8, Base K, RABID camp – the kind of names they'd used when he was in the military, itinerant designations made to be folded into boxes when they'd outlived their purpose.