Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER THREE
Landscapes of the Mind
. . . people are trying to fathom themselves in this antarctic context, to imagine their coordin-
ates, how they are fixed in time and space.
Barry Lopez, Crary Lab dedication talk, McMurdo, 1991
A FRENCHMAN
appeared in my office shortly after I returned to McMurdo: someone had told him
I spoke French. He was an ice-corer en route to Vostok, the Russian base in the empty heart of
East Antarctica. Vostok was a potent name in the history of the continent. There they had recorded
the coldest temperature in the world, minus 129.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is minus 89.2 Celsius.
The annual mean temperature at Vostok was minus 55 Celsius - five degrees colder than at the
South Pole. They had also drilled deeper than anyone else, so they had the world's oldest ice. The
harsh conditions at the base had earned it a reputation as a gulag of the south. The French corer knew
it well.
'It's not unusual to wake up to fist fights outside the bedroom door,' he said airily. And to think
that in the sixties, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviets used Vostok as a behavioural testbed
for the Salyut space programme,
I had read a book by the geophysicist who was station chief at Vostok in 1959. Despite dabs of
Russian colour, such as frequent references to cabbage pie and the October Revolution, the text was
painfully guarded. Besides the temperature, they had to cope with the problems of living at an alti-
tude of 4000 metres, and Viktor Ignatov, the author of the topic, reports grimly that potatoes boiled
at 88 degrees Celsius and took three hours to cook. Being so high and so remote, Vostok cannot be
adequately supplied by air, and therefore each summer a convoy of Kherkovchenka tractors heav-
ily laden with food, fuel and other essential goods sets out from Mirny, the Russian station on the
east coast. I once saw a film of this traverse, shot in the late sixties. The Amsterdam Film Museum
found the spools languishing in their dungeons, restored them, put them on video and sent me a
copy. It told a story of polished llyushins, white huskies, a solitary grave (well-tended), grubby cal-
endars with days crossed-off and men sunbathing in pneumatic bathing trunks on the deck of a vast
icebreaker and polishing stiff lace-up shoes when they saw land. It ended with a little girl's face,
eyes tightly closed and thin arms clutching her weeping father's neck. The sombre military music
played over the footage of the traverse itself made it seem as if they were marching across the steppe
into the Siberian permafrost to defend the motherland against a marauding barbarian horde. When
the tractors arrived at Vostok it was to bearhugs and a tray of vodka. The fact that I couldn't under-
stand a word of the narration only made the film seem more exotic.
The Frenchman eventually left for Vostok, and on the same day Seismic Man and his group fi-
nally took off for their deep-field destination. They had been delayed by both weather and planes
for two weeks, and some of them had checked in for their flight fifteen times. Most of them hadn't
