Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Later that day we drove over the sea ice to Cape Royds, taking a circuitous route to avoid the
cracks that by then were fanning out from the bergs and the shore. Joe came along.
'Look!' he said suddenly, pointing up into the sky. Lucia and I squinted into the glare.
'I can't see anything,' I said.
'That black dot,' said Joe. 'It's the first plane of the season, heading for McMurdo from Christ-
church.'
We carried on in silence. For Lucia and me, the start of the season marked the beginning of the
end. The female seals were getting fatter, and we had been seeing ice blink in the sky - reflections
of open water in the lower cloud layer which appeared as a heavy purple black blanket above the
bright band of light on the horizon - so we knew what we would find at Cape Royds. As we cres-
ted the hill beyond Shackleton's hut, there it was below us. Water.
On our return to Mactown in the second week of October, it was as if we were witnessing a pop-
ulation exchange: in the first six days of the summer season 300 people had changed places. The
parties were fun, but it was hard to socialise after the seclusion of Wooville. Besides that, since my
last visit south, and to wide-spread incredulity, I had given up alcohol. For some years I had been
living near the edge, and I had decided to make a trip to the unknown territory of the interior. I do
not believe it was a coincidence that this change occurred after my long Antarctic journey.
Drinking large quantities of wine had always seemed like part of the big picture - an essential
ingredient in the creative process and a harmless method of making the lights brighter, keeping
the demons at bay and enjoying temporary respite from the treachery of the Nomadic Thoughts.
It
was what people like me did
. Only most people did it rather less excessively than the small group
I called 'people like me'. A curious thing had happened by the time I got back from Antarctica.
I
didn't need it any more
. I knew that the peace I had experienced in the south would always come
back to me, even if I had to sit out more bleak times waiting for it, and that meant I needn't be
frightened of what my vagabond thoughts might uncover. The demons hadn't disappeared, but they
had shrunk. Many things changed. Living without a glass of wine in my hand was another voyage
of discovery. Like all the best journeys, it had its long moments of agony, too. But I couldn't jump
ship now. It was too thrilling.
A psychologist had come in to interview the winterers before they disappeared.
'The lore has it that Antarctica fosters insanity,' he said, 'but the facts don't support the theory.
The reality is that the opposite shows up. In other words, it shows how valiant and intrepid the
human spirit can be in adversity.'
An influx of new people swarmed over the station, and in the galley we had to wait in queues.
Those of us who had come in on Winfly said that we now knew how the winterers must have felt
when we pitched up. The Winfly experience glued us together - even Ron, the dispenser of the
Spryte vehicles, came to seem like an old friend.
At the same time, it was good to see some old friends back at McMurdo. David appeared, the
chainsmoking Russian geocryologist with the ink-black hair which hung over his eyes like a sheep-
dog, and he gave me a pair of earrings made out of mammoth tusk to match the ring. The Kiwi
pilots who had taken me to Terra Nova Bay were back, and we had a great reunion. A fish biologist
