Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
When everyone had finished eating I moved around the table and met Liv. She was sitting next
to Ironman Tony, who was plying her with technical questions about the trip. She had begun with
a load of 222 pounds, 132 of which was food, and her radio had failed.
'God,' said Tony. 'That must have been a disaster.'
'Actually, it wasn't,' she said guiltily. 'I was so happy not being able to communicate!'
Liv was forty-one years old. She spoke excellent English with the quiet, vibrant confidence of
someone who has attained their goal and thereby dislodged all their anxieties in a stroke. Unlike
Susumu, who had spent his thirty-nine days arguing with the television crew, she had developed
an inner peace during the long weeks of solitude.
'Were you ever lonely?' asked Tony.
'Once. At the beginning of the last week I awoke one night in the tent, and thought. “What is
wrong? I feel like I am in a dream.” Then I realised the wind had dropped. I had been in this wind
for six weeks, and you know, it had been a companion.'
'It must have been odd walking straight into Christmas lunch here.'
'Amazing . . .'
'What was your first impression?'
'I go into a bathroom for the first time in fifty days and see myself in the mirror. I see my grand-
mother's face. It is a shock - how much I am aged by this trip.'
'What made you do it?'
'When I was twelve years old my father was working in Nansen's house in Norway. The care-
taker showed me round one day - and that was the start of it. I began reading all the explorers, and
it became a dream to reach the South Pole. I grew up on skis, so I knew I could make the trip. The
worst was raising the money. I think that comes more easily to Americans, don't you?' She looked
at me conspiratorially.
'What does your husband think?' asked Tony.
She bristled amiably.
'Did anybody ask Susumu about his wife?'
'Did you read at all in the tent?' I asked.
'I read Ibsen's
Peer Gynt
, and skied to its rhythm in my head. And I had a volume of Norwegian
poetry with me. One line echoed in my mind as I crossed the plateau - how shall I translate it? “A
country in my heart that no one can take from me.”'
After dinner, we read out passages from the journals of the early explorers. There was a Swede
on station, near enough to a Norwegian, we thought, and he had been pressganged into playing
Amundsen. Ironman Tony did Scott with gusto, though it was difficult to imagine anyone less
suited to an American accent than Scott. During the march to the Pole, Bowers was cooking on
their last Christmas Day, and he scraped together two spoons of raisins for each man's tea, five
sticks of chocolate, and 'a good fat hoosh, two-and-a-half inches of plum duff, four caramels each
and four squares of crystallised ginger.' For once, snug in the tent, they ate until they were sated.
'We shall sleep well tonight,' Scott wrote, 'no dreams, no tightening of the belt.' On an earlier
occasion, in the Cape Evans hut, Bowers had rigged up a Christmas tree from a ski pole and skua
