Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
brought the news that Britta had asked Hans to marry her. The Corner Bar revved up. Housing had
tried to close it down, but of course, they had not succeeded.
One day I heard a familiar Chicago accent booming along a corridor in the Crary. It was Nann,
the porcelain engineer from the Pole, her hair still looking as if it had been arranged by a blow-
torch.
'So you came back!' I said as we embraced.
'Couldn't stand another minute with that sucker,' she said, and I knew she meant her husband.
It was a relief, nonetheless, to get back to Wooville. Various science parties were heading out in-
to the field, which meant that the airwaves were busier, and as a result my accent was no longer the
source of apparently limitless hilarity. Soon after our return to Cape Evans, we heard that Wooville
was to be disrupted by the arrival of a diving project. I made a 'No Diving' sign and strapped it
to the '
Welcome To Wooville
' post we had erected. I had also purloined the plastic penguin with
the target on its chest from the Corner Bar, and this we positioned near Wooville, its back to the
Sound. We were able to observe visitors climb down from their vehicles, layer up, load film into
their cameras and stalk the bird.
I watched an enormous Reed drill, mounted on a tracked vehicle, lurching along the flagged
route, and soon Wooville was swarming with people and pitted with diving holes. The divers were
studying larval development in
Sterechinus neumayeri
sea urchins, and they were anxious to get
under the ice before the algae began to bloom. A hut had been dragged out to cover the main
hole, and it was heated, so when the floor hatch was open and the two divers had suited up, we all
crowded in. The hole resembled a giant glass of Alka-seltzer. Looking down at the fat white am-
phipods coiled like ropes on the seabed, Lucia and I were amazed to see what we had been living
over for so long.
'What temperature is the water?' I asked one of the divers as he peeled off his dry suit after half
an hour under the ice.
'Minus 1.8 degrees Celsius,' he said. The skin around his mouth was numb with cold, and he
was talking as if he had just been to the dentist.
'Look,' he went on, waving a bit of old leather. 'I found a shoe from Scott's expedition.'
'If the water temperature is below freezing,' I asked, feeling - and sounding - stupid, 'why
doesn't it freeze?'
'The salt lowers the freezing point,' said the diver, towelling his hair. 'The saltier the water, the
lower the temperature at which it freezes. That's why you spread salt on highways when it snows
- as the salt dissolves, it lowers the temperature at which the water on the road surface freezes.'
A helicopter arrived to whisk the urchins to the aquarium at McMurdo. The shoe went back in
someone's pocket.
∗
Day after day Erebus appeared without its swaddling clothes. The absence of wind seemed like a
miracle after what we had been through. We began taking the card table outside and eating lunch
on the ice. Occasionally the silence was broken by the snort of a seal coming through the grease
ice which had formed over the dive holes. It was between a gurgle and a squeal, and when the fe-
