Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Brian believed that science in Antarctica meant adapting to the environment, not foisting tech-
niques on to it. He had worked out that using paper plates was ecologically more sensible than
burning fuel to melt water to wash plastic plates, so he had installed a trash compactor in the
Jamesway. He and Dale had fought not to have snowmobiles at their camp. Like all passionate
ecologists, they had made themselves unpopular. But they knew they were right.
'No amount of money', he told me as he pulled a lurid intestinal tube from the soupy water,
'could create an environment like this.'
The VXE-6 helicopter crews - the airborne squadron of the U.S. Navy - called in almost every
day. VXE-6 did most of the flying for the U.S. programme. They called themselves the Ice Pirates.
I called them Testosterone Airways. Sometimes they brought fresh food and they always brought
news from McMurdo, which was known as Porcelain Land. If they couldn't call by they would
buzz us, swooping low over camp, and they kept up a running competition to see who could drop
a roll of newspapers nearest the doormat, a gesture only rendered more touching by the fact that
the papers were weeks old and never read.
One day I climbed the lowest peak of the Asgaard range behind camp, and from the summit I
could see the top of the glaciers at either end of the lake. I could see Roland, too, squatting outside
the hut in the middle of the lake and spooling out cable. This was known as being the 'mule'. The
cable ran into the hut, where it was winched into the water by LD. I switched on my radio so I
could listen to them. Roland was the only team member who hadn't been south before, and he had
taken over from LD as general factotum, a role he accepted with equanimity, even when Brian
staked the use of him for two days in a bet with a project leader from a neighbouring camp. LD's
speciality was self-deprecatory humour accompanied by facial contortions. One of his typical an-
ecdotes featured an old man out walking with his small grandson. The man had spotted LD squat-
ting on the steps of the Woods Hole lab where he worked, smoking a cigarette, and as if delivering
a moral lesson of some import the old man told the child, 'See him? He's a bum.'
'That's enough cable now,' LD was saying to Roland. 'Stop! For Christ's sake, stop! What's
your problem?'
'I have stopped,' whined Roland.
'Why didn't you stop when I first asked? Got a wedgie or something?'
'What's a wedgie?' I interrupted, keen to learn a new scientific term.
'It's when your underwear rides up,' said LD.
Later, I hiked over to the face of the Canada. When I sat on the ground and ran a handful of soil
through my fingers, I half expected to find a flint arrowhead - some small sign of a human past.
What I heard there went beyond quietness. It was George Eliot's 'roar which lies on the other side
of silence'. In a famous passage in
Middlemarch
she wrote that it was like hearing the grass grow
or the squirrel's heart beat, but that our ears didn't pick it up because we walked about 'well-wad-
ded with stupidity'. She had never been south, of course. She didn't need to go.
The scorched Atacama Desert of northern Chile kept flashing into my mind. Two years before,
I had travelled through it for weeks, much of it in a jeep with a peripatetic Australian man I had
tripped over in the corridor of a doss-house. It was as hostile as Antarctica. Nothing lived there,
and just as it did now, the cone of a volcano always hovered on the periphery of our vision. Despite
