Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Although McMurdo had two bars, as well as a Coffee Shop where temperate people sipped cap-
puccino, the best place to go drinking was an unofficial nightspot on the gloomy top floor of a
dorm. It was known as the Corner Bar, and any reprobate who arrived on the ice was ineluctably
drawn towards it like an iron filing to a magnet. It was not advertised, it was not even spoken of
very often, and some people spent whole seasons on base without knowing of its existence. Yet
anyone with lowlife inclinations appeared at the Corner Bar within forty-eight hours of arrival.
The Corner Bar was the creation of four enterprising support staff who had turned their two-
bedroom-plus-connecting-shared-bathroom configuration of rooms into a communal lounge bar
and four-bed bedroom. No money ever changed hands there. The bar, presided over by a hyper-
active carpenter called Mike, ran on goodwill, and customers contributed bottles, or cash, or sent
care parcels from New Zealand at the end of their tour. As the curtains were never drawn back the
room was as Stygian and smoky as a shooting gallery. The Corner Bar kept erratic hours, but its
schedule was simple: if the door was shut, then so was the bar. It was equipped with a large, low,
smoked-plexiglass table and bar paraphernalia ranging from a huge Budweiser clock to a lifesized
model penguin with the concentric circles of a shooting target painted on its chest. There was con-
stant through-traffic, and new faces would loom out of the smoke among the hard-core movers and
shakers. It was a great place.
I met a seismic geologist from Texas in the Corner Bar. He had blond hair, come-to-bed eyes and
been-to-bed clothes, and one night he said to me, 'Being in McMurdo, I feel I've come halfway
round the world to find the outskirts of Austin.' I often heard people expressing disappointment
at finding modern conveniences on Antarctic stations. I never felt sorry or guilty or upset about
it; I perceived bases as the tiniest fragments of human life on a vast, unspoiled white continent. It
would be like getting upset about a couple of specks of dust on the Bayeux tapestry or one inhar-
monious note in a Mozart sonata.
Before moving out of McMurdo and into a field camp I was required to attend Survival School,
a training course which would equip me to handle tents, stoves and radios, and enable me to swing
nimbly out of a crevasse or come to a halt should I slide uncontrollably down an ice hill. 'Survival
School' sounded more like a group therapy class you might come across on the Upper East Side
or in Islington. People called it Happy Camper School, and as Americans are not strong on irony I
thought the nickname was promising.
First, I was obliged to attend a snowcraft lecture. It took place in the Crary lounge, and the
teacher, a field leader called Bill with eyes the colour of cornflower hearts, produced a fistful of
frozen sausages from a glove to illustrate the danger of frostbitten fingers.
The Berg Field Center managed the practical aspects of life off base, and in it tents languished
in various states of undress, stoves lay dismantled and sleeping bags were stacked in neat rows and
categorised according to temperature requirements, the ones at the bottom marked '
Snowy Owl.
Minus Fifty
.' Ice axes stood menacingly in close-ranked battalions between small armies of har-
nesses, ropes, thermarests, neoprene waterbottles and first aid kits. A large poster hijacked from
colleagues in the Arctic warned of the dangers of polar bears. It was at the Berg Field Center one
mild, sunny morning, the ambient temperature minus twelve degrees Celsius, that fourteen of us
loaded up a tracked vehicle in preparation for Survival School. There were two instructors, one of
