Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Inside, a man was slumped over a mug at a long table next to an inflated plastic palm tree. He
was short, with a cloud of tangled black hair and a hat like a thermal doughnut.
'This is LD,' said Dale. 'It stands for Little Dave, and he's a grad student in marine biology.
He's been up for thirty hours.' LD raised his head to flash me a Mephistophelean smile before re-
suming the slumped position. On the back of the door they had hung an Annoy-o-meter with an
arrow which could be swivelled from Vaguely Irritating through to Murderously Provocative.
'Who's the baby?' I asked, pointing at a large chubby face smiling down from the canvas wall
of the Jamesway.
'That's Mary,' said Dale. 'She's one year old. I planned the birth so that I only missed one field
season - this is my eighth. Season, I mean.' She put two insulated mugs of coffee on the table.
'Before I forget - all waste from the dry valleys is retrograded to McMurdo, and that includes grey
water and human waste.'
'What's grey water?' I asked.
'Dishwashing water,' she said. 'We empty it into a drum out the back. As far as going to the
bathroom is concerned, there's an outhouse we use behind here' - she gestured to the back of the
Jamesway - 'and in it a funnel connects to a drum. There's a shit can for solids. And you need to
take a pee bottle with you when you go for a walk, too.'
'So you can't just pee on the ground?' I asked. 'Even when you're miles from camp?'
'Nope. We're trying to maintain a pristine environment.' There was a pause. 'Listen,' she said
in a low voice, as if she were about to breach the Official Secrets Act. 'Take my advice. When you
want to go to the bathroom in camp, use a pee bottle and decant the contents, rather than struggling
to pee into the funnel. A tall man fixed the funnel in position to suit his own aim.' She sat back in
her chair. 'God,' she said, 'it's good to have another woman here.'
Going to the bathroom
: I wondered if there was any lavatorial situation Americans deemed too
primitive for this dignified term. I had even seen a translation of the Bible in which King Saul
entered a cave 'to go to the bathroom'.
Later, I put up my tent among a sprinkling of others behind four small laboratory huts (it was
typical of their attitude to their work that the labs were more luxurious than the accommodation).
At the far end of the lake the Canada Glacier, grubby with dust, blocked the northern horizon.
Much of Antarctica is officially classified as a desert, and nothing proved it more effectively than
the salt efflorescences on the shoreline of Lake Fryxell, thin white crusts like the salt pans of north-
ern Chile. Some ponds in the Dry Valleys are so saline that they won't freeze at minus sixty de-
grees Celsius, and the water is like molasses. On others the ice crusts, like lenses, concentrate so
much solar energy that the bottom layers can reach temperatures of twenty-five degrees Celsius
(or 77 degrees Fahrenheit).
In the afternoon I strapped on my crampons and walked out over the ice with LD and a hydro-
logist called Roland (LD said, 'I do mud, he does water'). The lake was surrounded by a thin layer
of 'moat ice' which, as it was still early December, was frozen solid. By late January the moat
ice would be gone. The fifteen-foot ice lid which covered the rest of the lake never melted. It was
filled with tiny white bubbles and twisted into apocalyptic configurations - a fall might land you
face down on a sword reminiscent of Excalibur. We did fall, though not on our faces. A wrong foot
