Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'I wish we had a windometer,' said Lucia one day, 'rather than a weirdometer.' Windspeeds of
up to 200 mph have been recorded in Antarctica, but when the wind got really serious every anem-
ometer invented broke down on the job. The McMurdo weather department had rows of broken an-
emometer impellers mounted on plaques. An inscription underneath each plaque read, '
Damaged
by wind
', followed by the particulars, such as '
95 knots, 25 October 1987
'. The last in the long line
said, '
Dropped by Bill Sutcliffe, 23 March 1990. Winds calm
.'
When one system came in we were ensconced for five days, with only a three-hour window
in the middle when the storm dropped and we ran around on the ice like small children. By the
end we were beginning to study the backs of cereal packets and conduct comparisons on the three
different recipes for bran muffins printed on our foodstuffs. We ran out of coffee. I grew tired of
writing about ice and wind, so for a change I tried my hand at steamy love sonnets (this experiment
was not a success). When I turned around to see what Lucia was up to, I saw that she had begun to
paint green glaciers.
'I'm fed up with doing blue ones,' she said defiantly when she noticed me looking.
The next day she made a batch of muffins over the Coleman stove, undeterred by the fact that
all three recipes indisputably called for an oven. They were very good, and very flat. That night
the wind was so strong that it kept us both awake. If we dropped off, a particularly violent blast
would shake the Clinic and jolt us upright, hearts beating, like a volley of artillery fire. Then it
might drop quite suddenly into silence, as if it had been turned off. 'At last!' we would murmur,
and settle back into the bags. But it was just building up its strength for a fresh attack. If I had
heard it at home, I would have expected to see garage roofs flying through the air. It seemed as if
the hut would take off over the Sound and that we would wake up looking out on the ventifacts of
the Wright Valley.
This did not happen. The door was always frozen shut on those mornings though, and we were
obliged to set to with an elongated s-shaped metal tool extracted from one of our tool kits. What its
official purpose was, we never knew. We draped a blanket over the door jamb, but the snowdrifts
crept past it while we slept. Strange to say, this did not greatly affect the temperature indoors at
Wooville - it was always cosy. Sometimes crystals formed on the outside of the window, and when
the wind blew really hard, they moved. It was like looking down a kaleidoscope. We watched snow
grow up the antenna poles, and as for the Woomobile and the defunct Antispryte, in the moonlight
they resembled vehicles abandoned by Fuchs and Hillary on their continental traverse in the 1950s.
When the storm ended, the world seemed new, and the huts shed their extra cladding of ice like
the ark dripping water. The snow had been blown from the foothills of Erebus, revealing polished
blue ice stuck fast to the rock which, here and there, protruded like an elbow below the treacher-
ously seductive crevasse fields. A thin band of apricot and petrol blue hung over the Transantarc-
tics, and the pallid sun shed a watery light over thousands of miles of ice. The frozen Sound could
have been the silent corner of the African savannah where man first stood upright.
The storm seemed to have blanched our interior landscapes too. We sat outside in the evening
about ten miles up, actually, far higher than the fluffy white clouds at home that send down rain.
There might be twenty-five of them, in twenty-five variations of opalescent lemons, rich reds and
