Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER TEN
Icebreaker
Men are not old here
Only the rocks are old, and the sheathing ice:
Only the restless sea, chafing the frozen land,
Ever moving, matched by the ceaselessly-circling sun . . .
Lighten our darkness, oh Lord;
And lettest thou thy servants depart in peace,
For peace is here, here in the quiet land.
Frank Debenham, geologist on Scott's last expedition
AN ALASKAN MOUNTAINEER
returned from the field with scabbed cheeks and duct tape stuck
round the metal frame of his glasses. He was very gloomy, for he had lost his snowmobile. I
said I thought losing a snowmobile was quite a feat.
'Well,' he said glumly, 'you have to tie the throttle down, otherwise over long distances your
hands freeze. So if you hit a sastrugi and fall off without your safety cord connected to kill the
motor, the thing just keeps going until it runs out of fuel - could be a hundred miles.'
I wondered what the occupants of another remote field camp would make of an unaccompanied
snowmobile careering across the ice sheet.
My office was permanently adrift with heaps of polypropylene underwear, a tangle of crampons,
rolls of film, ziplocks of trailmix, tents, tent pegs, insulated mugs, waterbottles, pee bottles and neo-
prene bottles of Jack Daniels. One day, I was kneeling on the floor repacking my survival bag when
the grey silence of the lab was shattered by an explosion of voices next door. Imre Friedmann and
his team had arrived. Hungarian by birth, Imre was a distinguished microbiologist and, at 73, an old
Antarctic warrior. He had a valley named after him. Shortly before coming south he had performed
500 squats in the office of some senior bureaucrat to prove that he was fit enough to join an ex-
pedition heading for the Siberian permafrost later in the year. Besides studying the cryptoendolithic
microbial communities of the Dry Valleys, he was a fertile source of Biolab lore.
'It was very cramped,' he said one day, '
but we all had space
. It was before the days of Walkman,
and my graduate students used to listen to loud rock music. I retaliated on the other side of the parti-
tion by playing classical music, and the volume wars would break out. When I was really desperate
I turned to Schoenberg.'
He was an endearing eccentric with a heavy East European accent and a big heart. He rang his
mother every day on the satellite line (she was 98) and fussed over the other members of his group
like a hen. One of them was a well-known Russian geocryologist called David who had spent much
of his life drilling into the Siberian permafrost. He was a colourful, chain-smoking character with
wild eyes and ink-black hair which hung over his eyes like that of a sheepdog. He referred dispar-
