Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I talked to my friends on the ice by electronic mail. I lived, vicariously, through the emotional
rollercoaster of Airdrop at the Pole, when a C-141 took off from Christchurch, refuelled twice in
the air and tossed out boxes the size of upright pianos to twenty-eight people waiting in darkness
on the polar plateau in an ambient temperature of minus seventy Celsius. (This, surely, was a testa-
ment to what the human spirit can achieve.) The Polies had talked of little else for weeks. When it
was over and the parcels had been torn open and the bruised fruit digested, they realised they were
only halfway through the winter of perpetual night. One of them wrote about 'a terrible void'.
It started to seem so distant. Nansen had said that when he returned from the Arctic the months
on the ice were like 'a far-off dream from another world'. Often, at my desk with the window
open on long summer nights, I strained my ears to hear the still, small voice beyond the honking
horns, the inebriated shouts and the blasts of music from passing cars. Sometimes I went down-
stairs, switched on the slide projector standing ready on the dining table where no one ever dined,
turned off the lights and watched Mount Erebus appear on the cracked white wall. I would soon
let go of my worries about tax bills, broken washing machines, the recalcitrant boyfriend or the
vexing queue of newspaper articles waiting to be written. If it was one of the bad days when more
pressing anxieties weighed down upon me, and I was haunted by the old familiar ghosts, I could
almost always send them away too - though I generally had to persevere with the slides on the
cracked wall to do that, and travel beyond the Transantarctics and over the luminous plateau.
In the early days of Antarctic travel, many men got married as soon as they reached home. Both
Scott and Byrd noted a stampede to the altar. In the case of Scott's men a double phenomenon oc-
curred - they started marrying each other's relatives, to keep it in the family, as it were. Wright
and Griffith Taylor, who now have adjacent valleys named after them, married Priestley's sisters,
and Priestley retaliated by marrying one of Debenham's relatives. In desperation I considered this
option, but a lack of suitable candidates soon forced me to reject it.
One night, when I couldn't sleep, I went out and lay in the hammock. It was easier to take myself
south when it was dark, as by then it was dark there all the time. As I looked up, suddenly I real-
ised what I had to do. I had seen the door close on Antarctica as darkness crept over the peninsula.
I had to see it open again. This time I didn't need to travel around when I got back there. I wanted
to sit still and take it all in.
Only God knows what made me think I could do it. The American programme alone sends
people to Antarctica in August, so I asked them if they would take me. They chewed it over for a
while, and rang me up a few times. It was a hot summer in England. Then one Friday night in June,
while I was sitting at my desk with the window open, trying to describe the underwater call of
the Weddell seal, Guy Guthridge called from the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science
Foundation.
'Pack your bags,' he said.
∗
On the plane to Christchurch I began to read a book by a clinical psychologist called Glin Bennet.
It was called
Beyond Endurance
, and one chapter was about 'the intellectual inertia' of wintering
in Antarctica. To demonstrate the way groups can disintegrate, Bennet quoted the story of a met-
