Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
they fell silent and stared as if I had been wearing no parka, no jeans, no layers of thermals, no
boots nor socks and no underwear. It was as if I had walked in stark naked.
'I guess it was like waking up to find a total stranger in the bedroom,' one of them said later.
The winterers stood alone, as they always had. I envied them. Charles Laseron, Mawson's as-
sistant biologist, put it like this. 'As the first rounding of the Horn is to the sailor, so a winter in
the ice is to a polar explorer. It puts the hallmark on his experience. Having successfully emerged
from the embryonic stage, he is now fully fledged, and can take his place in the select fraternity.'
Frozen-Sausage Bill was back, his eyes still the colour of cornflower hearts. He was preparing
to whip pork products out of boots at safety lectures. Just as the same names cropped up in the his-
tory books, so I saw the same faces back on the ice. J. M. Barrie, who only travelled south vicari-
ously, noted from his leather armchair that everyone who went to Antarctica came back vowing
that nothing in heaven or earth would tempt them to go near polar regions again - and at the end
of six months they were on their knees in front of whoever might be able to get them there.
It was certainly cold; typically about thirty below, and in those first few days the sun didn't rise
until shortly before midday, and it set two hours later. When a storm came in, ropes were strung
up between the dorms and the galley, so we had something to cling to. But when it was clear, the
skies were diaphanous, frosting the Transantarctics in pastel pinks and blues, the slopes of each
peak as sharply defined as the faces of a diamond. Each morning was lighter than its predecessor.
It seemed as if summer were rushing in at unnaturally high speed, like one of those long exposure
natural history films of a flower opening.
∗
I was installed once more in the same office in the Crary. I could see the ghostly outline of words
I had written on the board the previous summer. My identity this time was manifest in the label
W-006; I had been demoted from W-002. The lab was inhabited only by three groups of atmo-
spheric scientists busily making the most of the period of ozone depletion, and some hardy in-
dividuals heading for the Dry Valleys. These included John Priscu and his S-025 entourage, en
route to their home on Lake Bonney, and the contents of their large lab exploded into the other-
wise pristine corridors. Cristina of the flying condoms was back, and so was Ed, the physicist and
mountaineer with whom I had hiked to Lake Bonney the previous summer.
'Another pilgrimage!' he shouted down the corridor when he saw me. We sat up late in the lab,
once the radioactivity work station, and Ed sipped bourbon from a 250-millilitre glass beaker while
two of the graduate students sang karaoke into a Geiger counter.
I continued talking to the Polies by email. Their season hadn't ended yet - winter at the Pole
lasted eight and a half months, and planes couldn't go in until the end of October. I received enthu-
siastic reports about the Three Hundred Club. Admission to this exclusive outfit involved enjoying
a sauna at 210 degrees Fahrenheit and then running out of the dome into a temperature of minus
101 wearing only a pair of tennis shoes. Such excitements notwithstanding, the Polies were ready
to leave. One of them was still banging on about Airdrop. His job had been to drive a snocat out to
the drop zone after the pilot radioed an all-clear. 'I tell you,' he wrote, 'some of those packages I
