Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Want to see my Antarctic girl?'
We climbed up over the tracks to pat the padded ceiling in the cab and admire the monster blade.
There were fewer than six other stretch D-8s in the world, and three lived at Willy Field, an out-
post of McMurdo about a mile from the station. The next day an Antarctic veteran called Gerald,
Colleen's swain, drove me out to meet them.
The enormous canary yellow machines, made by Caterpillar in the fifties, had seen forty years
of Antarctic service and were engraved on the hearts of all who had worked upon them. They had
walked themselves to the Pole, and they had flown there dismantled (this took four flights). One
of them, at Byrd Surface Camp on the West Antarctic ice sheet, was back in use after spending
seventeen years buried under the snow. The catwalk platforms, once fixed above the tread, had re-
grettably been removed by some philistine of the past. Veterans could remember seeing operators
sunbathing on the platforms while the machine was moving along.
When we arrived at Willy Field, Gerald leapt out of our truck and up on to the tread of a D-8 in
one movement.
'A gasoline engine gets the diesel engine started,' he shouted as he fired it up. 'Which is why
it's suitable for these temperatures.' He jumped down, crunching the snow. 'This is Becky, by the
way.'
We contemplated the steaming beast.
'They could almost be living creatures,' I said.
Gerald stared at me blankly. Then he blurted out, 'But they are living creatures.'
Fetching a chair from a nearby hut, he positioned it in the cab, next to the driver's seat. We
climbed in, I sat on the chair and Gerald began dozing a pile of snow the size of a minor English
county.
'I could tell which of these I was driving with a blindfold on,' Gerald shouted as we dozed
along, rocking gently to the rhythm of the enormous tracks. Suddenly he yelled, 'You try,' and
whipped back the brakes until they screeched like a freight train. We shifted places, and I drove
Becky down the skiway. On the way back, in the limpid light of Windless Byte, we stopped.
'You see, Sara,' said Gerald, taking off his glasses, 'I can't paint, or write, or hold a rhythm.
I express myself by making perfect flat surfaces on ice.' He came from a German Baptist back-
ground and an Amish community, but he had left it and moved to Wyoming with his wife.
'What was leaving like?' I asked. Having spent some time in an Amish community myself, I
knew how they felt about members leaving the fold. I admired the Amish very much - that was
why I had gone to Lancaster County to live with them - but the way they shunned men and women
who could not be as they were was one aspect of their faith that I found hard to swallow.
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Gerald thought about this for a while. Then he said, 'It was like going to Antarctica.'
∗
A helicopter put down at Wooville at nine o'clock one morning to take Lucia and me over to Lake
Hoare in the Taylor Valley. We had been invited by the residents of one of the only other field
peratures and being neighbourly.
