Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
one corner of discarded items of clothing and pressed them on the iced-up walls of the Clinic,
where they instantly froze into position. Despite frequent total cloud cover and limited sunlight,
the HF radio continued to run off its solar panel, which we had taped to a window of the Dining
Wing.
We made mistakes, but we made them only once. Frozen food brought in a cardboard box was
stowed under the front step of the Dining Wing. After the first storm the box had blown right un-
derneath the hut, and we were obliged to lie on our bellies on the ice, prodding with an ice drill
to recover our freezer. Forgetting to weigh down the toilet lid with a block of ice resulted in us
having to chase it halfway back to McMurdo. The huts were positioned far enough apart to pre-
vent a fire spreading from one to the other - and then we parked the fuel sledge between them. In
addition, the sleeping arrangements caused difficulties. On the first night, Lucia slept on the top
bunk. I woke up in the early hours to perceive her, through the gloom, climbing down the ladder
and dragging her sleeping bag after her.
'What's the matter?' I asked.
'It's like the tropics up there,' she said. 'I'm sleeping on the floor.' The concept of the tropics in
our hut was too difficult to contemplate in the middle of the night, so I went back to sleep.
When I woke in the morning, she was already painting.
'I've worked it out,' she said. 'The temperature differential between outside and inside is so
acute that above head height the air in the hut is like the Arizona desert.'
'What was it like on the floor?' I asked.
'Glacial,' she said. 'I moved on to the long table after an hour.' Thereafter, I remained on the
bottom bunk, where the air remained stable at a pleasant temperature, and Lucia slept on the table.
If there were no jobs to be done at camp, and we needed a break from painting and writing, we
would get into the Woomobile - altogether a more successful machine than its infernal predecessor
- and drill a few more flags into the ice to mark our route. First, we had to get the small generator
going, as the vehicle was always far too cold to start without having a current run through it for an
hour. Lifting this object out of the hut and on to the ice was an awkward, two-woman job.
'I bet our arms aren't strong enough to get this started,' I said as we prepared to pull the handle.
'We did it on the dry run at McMurdo, didn't we?' Lucia said.
'Yes, but it started first time then. If it doesn't now, and we have to keep pulling, our arm
muscles will get tired.'
'Wow,' she said. 'You think we can't do anything.'
There was an element of truth in this, and it made me flush with shame. Lucia was quieter than
I was, and smaller, and although she lived alone and had travelled extensively, she had not spent
months hanging about in the wilderness, as I had. Yet I was the one who approached every prac-
tical task with the attitude that we almost certainly weren't going to accomplish it.
When the generator fired up, we both did a little dance on the ice.
The drill, which was three feet in length, resembled an oversized corkscrew, and after many
hours of struggle we established our own system for using it effectively. This involved one person
standing on the track of the vehicle and leaning down upon the top of the drill, thereby anchoring
it in position, while the other grasped the drill handle and turned it furiously, like an egg whisk,
