Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
When the seal pups were about ten days old, it was time for their first swim. In an attempt to
lure their progeny, the mothers plunged enthusiastically into the holes, bellowing loudly. As the re-
luctant pups remained doggedly on the ice, their mothers began to sound increasingly exasperated
- but they always won in the end. At about this time we had a cold snap. The ambient temperature
reached minus thirty, and with windchill we had minus sixty. The antenna broke in eight places,
and I got a metal burn on my hand from a wrench. It was like old times.
All too soon, the terrible day came when a Caterpillar arrived to tow away the Clinic. A group
of seal physiologists had returned for another season, and they needed their hut. We moved all our
gear into the Dining Wing and, cramped as it was, continued to live there. After a week we steeled
ourselves to visit the Sealheads. There were four of them, all men, and the Clininic resembled a
refugee camp on the war-torn border of an African country.
'Does it seem different?' they asked as a stack of beer cans toppled over, ripping another animal
from the Woo Zoo we had stuck on the wall, beast by beast, throughout our tenure.
'Yes!' we both said, simultaneously.
'How?' one of them asked.
'Well,' I said, 'you're in it.'
∗
During most of October the sunsets had consisted of a display of shifting colours which lasted for
hours. Each night it lingered a little longer over the Transantarctics, and from the window next to
the long table we could see, all night, a flaming band of light in the west. On 25 October, for the
first time, the sun stayed with us. I no longer needed the Coleman lantern to be able to read at night,
and our candlelit dinners were a distant memory. I watched the female seals shrink until their hip
bones showed. The poignant beauty of the last weeks was almost unbearable. I knew that I would
never live in such splendour again in my life; not if I had a hundred lives. But it was time to go
home. The Solarbarn was a small place in which to live and work, and one night I found a napalm
tablet for lighting the Preway nestling up against my toothbrush. I was fed up with having willy
slits in my longjohns, pee bottles in my pocket and a VHF antenna up my nose. I wanted Cox's
apples, the hammock on my roof and a bathroom without a seal in it. I wanted to hear the Whit-
manesque roll call of the shipping forecast before I went to sleep: Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger,
Gale Force Nine, Showers, Good.
