Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the candent heat and throbbing air and the dust that settled on us and our possessions like fur, it
was a curiously agreeable trip, as if our minds had flattened out like the baked plain. Sometimes,
after hundreds of miles of caramel pampa, we came across geoglyphs on the desiccated hillsides,
crude drawings by an unknown and long-gone tribe. Although they had been crushed like a sea-
shell under the hoof of a
conquistador
's horse, the tribe had left their imprint, and it was as if the
desert still belonged to them. Here in Antarctica there was no concept of ownership. I was travel-
ling to the sound of a different drumbeat. If Antarctica had something to teach me that was more
important than nitrate data, it was not about humanity. The landscape drew my thoughts away from
worldly things, away from the thousand mechanical details of my outward life. I had found the
place where, loosed from my cultural moorings, I could find the space to look for the higher power,
whatever it was, that loomed over the snowfields.
∗
I had a secret plan not to return to McMurdo immediately, but instead to hop up the Taylor Valley
from camp to camp. With some help from Dale and a few conversations over the radio, I arranged
to hitch a ride up to Lake Hoare. LD and Roland had been asking me for something English, so the
night before I left I whipped up a bread-and-butter pudding. The seditious effects of a heavy meal
resulted in three of them falling asleep at the table.
'Wake up!' shouted Brian at two o'clock in the morning. 'Time for the after-dinner entertain-
ment.'
They had to retrieve a cassette sampler which had been lying under the ice all winter, its eighty
hydraulically-fired syringes busily collecting water samples. It was the big event of the season and
the only time that I saw all seven of them on the ice at the same time. At four o'clock, after a short
burst of intensive activity, most of it under a space blanket, the instrument emerged like a newborn
baby. It was a prototype instrument which cost in the region of $18,000.
'What happens if I slip?' drawled LD as he grasped one end of the instrument and negotiated a
sharp overhang of ice.
'Well,' said Brian, 'it would be like tossing your BMW off a bridge. Oh - and you wouldn't
have a job any more.'
∗
The camp at Lake Hoare was at the near end of the lake itself, in the lee of the Canada Glacier.
When I arrived, the residents were hovering around outside the outhouse, as the toilet had just ex-
ploded. It was a propane-fuelled piece of equipment known in the valleys as a rocket shitter, and
on this occasion it had backfired, causing a loud explosion which it was feared could interfere with
seismic data.
An early model of the rocket shitter once caused the Heavy Shop at McMurdo to burn to the
ground. There were no fatalities, but the new fire engine, which was inside the Shop at the time,
was lost. Even the rocket convenience, however, had not acquired the notoriety of a high-tech eco-
toilet introduced, and swiftly phased out, in the eighties. It was known as the Stealth Bomber.
