Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The crewmen began rolling pallets off the back of the plane. We walked down after them, and
the wind stung our faces. The engines roared behind us as we struggled to pull our balaclavas down
around our goggles.
In the sepulchral light ahead I could see a scattering of Jamesways, a row of sledges, half
a dozen tents, and Lars, the shaggy-haired Norwegian-American from Survival School. He was
looking even shaggier, and proffering a mug of cocoa. We hugged one another. Lars led the way
into the first Jamesway, where half a dozen weatherbeaten individuals were slumped around fold-
ing formica tables.
'Welcome, Woo!' somebody shouted. I had brought them cookies and a stack of magazines, and
as I handed these over we all talked at once; a lot seemed to have happened in two months.
'Guess what?' said Lars. 'We saw a bird.'
The CWA field camp was probably the largest on the continent. Fifty people were based here
for most of the summer season, working on four separate geological projects. Often small groups
temporarily left camp, travelled over the ice sheet on snowmobiles or tracked vehicles, pitched
their tents for a few days and tried to find out what the earth looked like under that particular bit of
ice. They were creating a relief map of Antarctica without its white blanket.
Seeing Seismic Man's lightweight parka hanging on a hook in the Jamesway, I suspected he
was away working at one of these small satellite camps. I was thinking about this, just as Lars
produced another round of cocoa, when a familiar figure flew through the door of, the Jamesway
and clattered to a standstill beside me. It was José, the diminutive Mexican-American biker who
grinned like a satyr and with whom I had failed to get to CWA on my first attempt. He had made
it here a week before me. In one long exhalation of breath he said that he had heard I'd come, that
he and two others were about to set off to strike a satellite camp thirty miles away, that it would
take about twenty-four hours and they wouldn't be sleeping, that I could go too if I wanted . . . and
then he trailed off, like his bike running out of fuel.
Having trekked halfway across the continent to find Seismic Man, I left immediately without
seeing him at all. It was the idea of the quest that had appealed to me. Feeling vaguely irritated
about this, as if the whole expedition had been someone else's idea, I climbed into the back of a
tracked vehicle and shook hands with a tall loose-limbed Alaskan in the driver's seat.
'They call me Too-Tall Dave,' he said as he pumped my hand, crushing a few unimportant
bones. 'Pleased to meet you.'
The man next to him - a medical corpsman on loan from the Navy - looked as if he had just
got up. His name was Chuck, and apparently he had forgotten the American president's name one
day and asked Too-Tall Dave to remind him. José and I spread out over the two bench seats in the
back of the vehicle. It was a temperamental Tucker which only liked travelling between eight and
ten miles an hour, and we were towing a flat, open trailer and a sledge loaded with survival gear.
As we were following a flagged route to the small camp you couldn't really call what Too Tall was
doing driving: it was more a question of stabilising the steering wheel with his elbow and looking
at the dash every so often to make sure he was maintaining the correct rpm to keep the water and
oil at a stable temperature. It was very warm in the Tucker. The ice was dappled with watery sun-
light, and the sky pale, streaky blue.
