Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
79
ThE SILENCE
During my first Antarctic field season (1970-1971), I worked from a remote field
camp on McGregor Glacier, a tributary to Shackleton Glacier midway along
its east side. I arrived on a ski-fitted hercules C-130 aircraft that set down on
McGregor Glacier. When I got off the plane, I was ending a long series of flights
that had begun three weeks earlier in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, on the other
side of the world.
Three navy helicopters arrived the next day. They would serve the camp,
tasked with putting out field parties in the morning and then picking them up at
the end of the day to bring us back to base camp, where we would sleep and eat.
Two days after I arrived I was flying out to my first day in the field. My excite-
ment was acute. I had picked a site about eight miles north of camp, a small
island of rock on the eastern side of Shackleton Glacier named Taylor Nunatak.
The helicopter dropped Phil Colbert and me, along with our survival gear, and
flew away. Its rotor faded and then was no more.
For the first time in weeks, I was without the audible vibe of engines,
whether screaming from aircraft or just humming to themselves somewhere
in the background, quietly unnoticed. It wasn't apparent at first, for as Phil and
I scurried over to the margin of the glacier, we generated sounds of our own—
footsteps, the click of our ice axes, the swish of our clothes. We stopped on a
terrace of rock and looked out at Shackleton Glacier across a spectacular icefall
that gave the appearance of rapids in a wild river, except that it was motionless.
Standing there, I suddenly became aware of the silence. It was behind me
just at my shoulder. It went beyond the icefall as far as I could see. It was out
there everywhere. The stillness was profound. The soft rustling of my parka
seemed amplified. I held stone still. The sound of breath issuing through my
nostrils filled my ears. I held my breath. The silence pressed in on all sides. It was
palpable (Fig. S.6).
In my state of auditory suspension the icefall before me was all the more
dramatic. It occurred at a point where a small ridge of rock projected from Taylor
Nunatak into Shackleton Glacier. The glacier margin first reared up over this
obstacle, broke into a jumble of blue seracs (ice blocks), then plunged chaotically
down a steep, two hundred-foot scoop at the margin of the glacier, before mold-
ing smoothly back into the flow. In
human time
the icefall was a static sculpture
of Nature's grand design, in
glacier time
(moving about five feet per day) it was a
rapids in a smoothly flowing river.
As Phil and I stood there savoring our solitude, a sudden thwack broke the
silence, like the shot of a .22-caliber rifle. We jumped and looked around, but
there was no apparent source of the sound. A couple of minutes later another
shot rang out. This time we were sure that it had come from the direction of the
