Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
eorologist arriving at an Antarctic base in the fifties, just as winter ended. Nobody came out of the
hut to greet him and his party, and they slowly realised that the group had collapsed during the long
months of darkness. 'We discovered, in the different rooms', the meteorologist wrote, 'little animal
dens where, as base life had broken down and they had become no longer on speaking terms with
one another, each man had retired to make himself a little corner in the wreck of his personality.'
Academics had had a field day with the psychology of the Antarctic winter. Papers had been
presented to a conference on 'The Human Experience in Antarctica: Applications to Life in Space',
and, using winter bases as laboratories for human behaviour, one academic said, 'Lessons learned
in the Antarctic and other extreme settings should facilitate interplanetary exploration and the es-
tablishment of permanent settlements in space.' The U.S. Navy recognised 'a winter-over syn-
drome' in which seventy-two per cent of the sample reported severe depression and sixty-five per
cent had problems with hostility and anger. A condition called Big Eye had entered the textbooks,
a result of insomnia caused by total darkness. References were made to the incident in 1955 when
one member of the team sent in to prepare for International Geophysical Year developed such acute
schizophrenia that a special room lined with mattresses had to be built next to the infirmary.
The Eskimos could have saved them the trouble of their research - they know all about the de-
pression of the long night. They call it
perlerorneq
, which means 'to feel the weight of life'.
Just as 'the long, dark night of the soul' is a popular literary metaphor for spiritual turmoil, so
the polar winter perfectly mirrors the inner darkness which seems to have fallen so often. Freder-
ick Cook, one of the first to overwinter in the pack ice, wrote in his diary in 1898, 'The curtain
of blackness which has fallen over the outer world of icy desolation has also descended upon the
inner world of our souls . . . The night soaks hourly a little more colour from our blood.'
A cart grated past my seat, followed by a cheery stewardess propelling it down the narrow aisle.
She laid trays on the fold-down tables above our knees as the sun spilled through the pebble win-
dow. I carried on with Cook. 'The grayness of the first days of the night', he wrote, 'has given
way to a soul-despairing darkness, broken only at noon by a feeble yellow haze on the northern
sky. I can think of nothing more disheartening, more destructive to human energy, than this dense,
unbroken blackness of the long polar night.'
I wondered what in the world I was going to find.
∗
Camilla, my old friend, flew down from Wellington to join me in Christchurch, and I smuggled
her into the clothing-issue session. It was nine months since I had gone through the same routine
in the same room, only this time the piles were higher. Winter temperatures required even more
layers. I left Christchurch for McMurdo at three in the morning, on the same turbo-prop that had
conveyed me there before, and as we cruised over the Southern Ocean the temperature jumped up
and down while people jammed their elbows through the red webbing. I enjoyed a peanut butter
and jelly sandwich.
The sky was streaked with angry apricot flashes when we landed, and the ice had absorbed a
gloomy purple light. A mist was hanging at the feet of the Transantarctics so that the peaks ap-
peared to be suspended between ice and sky. Once again, I felt as if I had come home. That no
