Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
a small country, that he had chosen to give us the one vehicle famed for its unreliability, only he
knew.
The Woovillian huts were ten feet apart, but we roped them together. 'People have been lost
in whiteouts in less space than that,' Buck had warned. One was a small high-tech affair called a
Solarbarn which offered the luxury of a small solar light, and the other was a regular red wooden
box hut twenty feet by twelve equipped with a set of built-in bunks. A small dead cockroach lay
supine between two panes of plexiglass in one of the Solarbarn windows. Lucia had a sideline in
the administration of acupuncture, and when she laid out her needles on the body-sized table bolted
to one wall, the red hut quickly became known as the Clinic. We planned to cook in the Solarbarn,
so this was named the Dining Wing.
The bathroom facilities consisted of a small metal drum with a lid which lived outside next to
the one wall of the Clinic that didn't have a window. It was lined with both plastic and burlap sacks
which we removed when full and took back to McMurdo. The contents were frozen, at least. We
also established a pee flag by drilling a bamboo pole into the ice fifty yards from the huts. Peeing
on the sea ice was allowed, but it was sensible always to do it in the same place, so the ice around
our home did not begin to resemble a Jackson Pollock painting.
Now we were alone in our own camp for the first time. Before we set out, Joe in the McMurdo
communications hut had dispensed lengthy instruction in radio operation, and we were then ob-
liged to check in with base every day at an appointed time. The call sign of the communications
hut was Mac Ops.
'Mac Ops, Mac Ops, this is Whiskey Zero Zero Six, how copy?' I said, loudly and clearly, as
instructed. Joe's voice flashed back.
'We're sorry, no one is home at Mac Ops. If you leave your name and number after the beep,
we'll get back to you as soon as we can.'
Nothing happened. 'I didn't hear the beep,' I said.
'Beep,' said Joe.
∗
The weather was good, at first. We had a fine view of the Transantarctics shredding the horizon
across the Sound. The landscape was dominated by Mount Erebus, the volcano named by James
Clark Ross when he arrived on 28 January 1841 at what was to become Wooville on 2 September
1995. It reached right down to us, as a tongue extending from one of its glaciers extended as far
as Wooville. There, the sea ice had frozen around it. One day, when I was poking around at the
base of the tongue, a beam of sunlight on a cluster of ice blocks caught my eye. If it had been at
home, the beam would have captured spirals of dust motes, and if it had been in the hills, clouds
of midges. The blocks were gleaming in this light like rocks at the edge of the sea made slippery
by the rush of a rising tide. In effect, that is what they were.
The temperature leapt capriciously up and down. One day I threw a mug of boiling water into
the air, and it froze in mid-flight. When the mercury hit minus forty, our eyes froze shut if we
blinked for too long. After a long session outside we would come in and cling to the Preway like
cats. When the wind abated, and we grew hot digging or engaged in other work outside, we licked
