Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
known each other before they came south, and during the fraught waiting period they had knit-
ted together as a team. I was terribly jealous of that, especially as I had got to know them as they
lounged over the sofas on the top floor of the Crary and wandered the corridors like nomads. I was
sorry to see them go, though they had invited me out to their camp, an invitation which wouldn't,
in theory, be difficult to take up as their project was being supported with a large number of fixed-
wing resupply flights. They called me Woo after my W-002 label, and as we waved goodbye they
shouted that when I arrived they would have a Welcome Woo party on the West Antarctic ice sheet.
It was seven o'clock on Saturday night, and I felt depressed. I sat in my office, listening to
people next door arguing about fish bait. When this group were out of their office, which was most
of the time, they put a sign on their door saying 'Gone fishin''. Going fishing involved drilling
holes in the sea ice and hauling up primeval creatures which survived the depths of the Southern
Ocean by producing their own anti-freeze. The project leader was an Antarctic soldier who first
came to the ice the year I was born. His name was Art DeVries, and he appeared in my doorway
brandishing a small, dead fish.
'Come fishing tonight!' he said imperiously. I kept a set of cold-weather clothes under my desk,
so I put them all on and walked out of the door. A tracked vehicle with DR COOL stencilled on the
fender was warming up outside, and various members of the team were fiddling with equipment
in the back. Art had a knack of assembling a disparate bunch of research scientists and graduate
students, from ex-janitors to an antifreeze specialist he had met at an airport. They were all good
fun, and they all smelt of fish.
We drove to a small wooden fish hut on the sea ice in which a battery-operated winch positioned
over a hole in the floor was lowering bait 1,500 feet into the spectral depths of the Sound. The
bait consisted of fish brought in from New Zealand. Much winching later, the fish which emerged
weighed 125 pounds and looked as ancient as the slime from which we all crawled.
'
Dissostichus mawsoni
- Antarctic cod to you,' said Art as he heaved it off the scales. 'Phenom-
enally small brain.'
'Can you eat them?' I asked.
'Sure you can. Sashimi cut from the cheeks is kind of nice. But it's the antifreeze everyone's
after. Aircraft manufacturers want it to develop a product to prevent airplane wings from freezing.'
When a row of specimens were lying on the floor, the biologists started arguing again, this
time about which to keep, talking about 'nice shaped throats' as if they were judging a beauty
contest. Most of their fish were named after explorers:
mawsoni, bernacchii
,
borchgrevinki
. Art
had his own - a deep-water bottom dweller called
Paraliparis devriesi
. The Channichthyidae 'ice
fish' which live in slightly warmer Antarctic waters have no haemoglobin at all, and their blood is
white.
∗
The Chapel of the Snows was a pink and confectionary-blue Alpine chalet with a stained-glass
penguin at the end looking out over the Transantarctic mountains. It was serviced by a Catholic
priest and a protestant minister, and on Sunday morning I went to mass. The priest called us the
Frozen Chosen. It was after this service that I met Ann Hawthorne, a photographer in her early
