Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER SEVEN
Feasting in the Tropics
We came to probe the Antarctic's mystery, to reduce this land in terms of science, but there is
always the indefinable which holds aloof yet which rivets our souls.
Douglas Mawson
SEISMIC MAN
had sent me a letter on a resupply plane returning from the deep field. In it, he asked
when I was going to visit. He even wrote in a Texan drawl. I also received a letter from my
grandmother in the west of England. She commented, 'I suppose even you are beginning to feel that
youth has passed you by.'
The day after I arrived back at McMurdo it was snowing, so nobody could go anywhere. Scotty,
the Scott Base cook, invited me to the Kiwis for dinner. They put on an Italian night, and even pro-
duced
ciabatta
. An Andrés Segovia tape was unearthed; they admitted he was Spanish, but Antarc-
tica taught you to improvise. Afterwards we took the flexikites out behind the pressure ridges, an
area out of bounds to McMurdo residents. As a red parka betrayed a trespasser for miles, I had bor-
rowed yellow and blue Kiwi kit.
'You'll have to pretend you're not American,' Scotty said.
With two or three kites on one cord we could sit down and ski on our bottoms. The kites twisted
in arcs, whirls and vertiginous turns, confounding the salt-encrusted pupils of a Weddell seal. The
clouds melted into shifting layers of gauzy gold, and between them glimpses of the Royal Society
range appeared, like the suggestions of heaven shimmering behind the trees in a painting by Bot-
ticelli. The Royal Society was the sponsor of the
Discovery
expedition, and these mountains were
cursed with its name. It reminded me of Fitzroy Maclean crossing the Oxus in a boat called
Seven-
teenth Party Congress
.
I wanted to get out to Seismic Man's camp for New Year's Eve. He was working at a remote deep
field site on the ice sheet called Central West Antarctica, a place so notoriously difficult of access
that its acronym had been elongated into Continually Waiting for Airplanes. Either the weather had
closed in at CWA, or a system was about to descend upon Ross Island, or the planes were broken.
The camp was regularly resupplied - at least in theory. I went to the skiway four times to hitch a
ride on one of these resupply flights, only to languish for hours on the padded blue plastic chairs
and scuff my feet on the sky-blue lino smudged with dirty snow. I even took off once, but the Her-
cules, which was older than I, had problems with its landing apparatus and boomeranged after five
minutes in the air. On base I had said goodbye so many times that people began laughing when I
reappeared. I developed an intimate relationship with the two other prospective passengers, both
support staff assigned to relief work at CWA. Evelyn was a woman in her forties with biscuit-col-
oured hair and José, also in his forties, was a diminutive Mexican-American biker who grinned like
a satyr and called me Kid.
