CHAPTER ONE
The Big White
Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, from Ulysses
Each day was hotter than the last, and I soaked up the Novembersunshine like a lizard. Two Sundays after landing in New Zealand Ihad to present myself at nine in the morning at the headquarters ofthe U.S. Antarctic Program in Christchurch in order to be issued myExtreme Cold Weather clothing. I borrowed a mountain bike andcycled along deserted roads to the snoozing outskirts of the city.The bike had a matching helmet with a tiny rearview mirror protrudingfrom the side. I swung up to the entrance of the institutionalsnow-white building where a sprinkling of fellow travelershad settled on the low walls and warm grass. I couldn't unstrap thehelmet and was obliged to solicit the help of a vulpine Russianglaciologist.
At nine sharp we were ushered inside to take our places in awindowless room festooned with posters of icescapes, and therewe waited for the last arrivals in the silence of strangers while aman ticked off our names on a clipboard and scowled likeBeethoven. I felt very alone at that moment, in a strange countrybound for a stranger continent.
The safety video began, optimistically, with Scott's "Great God,this is an awful place" delivered in a sonorous thespian voice and accompanyingfootage of well-clad individuals crashing into crevasses.When it was over we trooped through to the changing rooms. Therewere three other women, and our room was bare except for fourpairs of tagged, overstuffed orange fabric bags the size of mediumsuitcases.
The bags yielded a bewildering array of footwear, underwear,headwear, handwear, eyewear and perplexing, unidentifiable items.At the bottom of one of my bags, underneath an enormous vermilionparka, lay a coiled chain and a pair of metal dog tags engravedwith my name and a long number. I arranged my clothes in neatpiles on the carpet and eyed the others. They were beginning to trythings on, so I tackled a pair of thermal long johns with a willy-slitat the front. At one end of the room a curtain shielded us from a longcounter to which we returned ill-fitting items to a blue-overalledclothing assistant who would scuttle away to pluck a different-sizepair of wind pants or polypropylene glove liners from unseenmountain ranges of gear lurking in the hinterland.
As we pulled, zipped, laced and unrolled, my companions beganto talk. One was a cook, another a senior ice corer and the third aNASA technician. The ice corer had six seasons of "ice time," andshe showed me how to switch on the white rubber bunny boots.They were insulated by air and had a valve on the side that you hadto open and close on aircraft.
When we had satisfied ourselves that no part of our extensivenew wardrobe would chafe or pinch or expose our soft flesh tofrostbite, we packed up our bags and the scowler dispatched usinto the sunshine, marking our names down and issuing threatsabout the consequences of arriving late for the plane.
The sun made me squint as I cycled back along the straightartery into town. I groped around in my addled mind for the dreamthat had brought me here to the other side of the planet, but itseemed to have evaporated in the heat.
I was a guest in Christchurch of Roger Sutton and Jo Malcolm,who lived in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of the city. Roger'ssister Camilla was an old friend of mine from her wild London days.The entire clan had embraced me as one of their own, and I enjoyedtheir company enormously. Jo was a news reporter on New Zealandtelevision and Roger bought energy for SouthPower. He was obsessivelycommitted to the outdoors and flung off his suit to go runningor bicycling or climbing at the first opportunity. That evening theydrove me to Lyttelton, a potent toponym in the history of Antarcticexploration and the last stop for most voyages early in the century.We went, on the way, to Kinsey Terrace and the clifftop house whereScott had stayed with his New Zealand agent, signing his nameabove the fireplace, and emerged from the high passes overlookingQuail Island, where he grazed his second-rate mules. In Lyttelton Isaw hollow-eyed Russian seamen and tired brothels. The town wasquiet, and old-fashioned even by New Zealand standards. Itseemed to dwell in another age. In one bar, the table soccer wasequipped with small wooden teams of Jews and Nazis.
The crews of the first ships to drop anchor off the unknownsouthern continent reported pleasing success with the women ofLyttelton, noting in their journals that mention of imminent departurefor Antarctic exploration was the most effective chat-up linethey had ever deployed. "No mere ship's officer had a chanceagainst a polar explorer, even if only in the making," one of themwrote. Roger suggested keenly that I should test the contemporaryapplication of this theory, and stopped the car outside several bars,urging me inside and saying that he would pick me up later. Apparentlyit still works, at least for men. I read in a textbook onAntarctic psychology published recently by Victoria University ofWellington that when two men placed a personal ad in a magazineasking for "active female companionship for a week for fit menabout to go to the Antarctic," they were inundated with offers.
When we got home I called my friend Cindy in London; Ineeded to speak to her before I left. She said she was glad I'd rungas she wanted the recipe for pisco sours, which they were planningto have before lunch. I was furious that they were going to drinkpisco sours without me, as I had discovered them in Chile and introducedthem to my friends. Still, I told her how to make them,and at the end of the conversation, as we said good-bye, she saidshe felt as if I were disappearing into a black hole.
*
The taxi arrived at four, and Roger struggled out of bed to say goodbye.It had rained in the night, and the tarmac glistened in the desertedroads, the only trace of life a cat rubbing its ear in a pool oflight from a sodium streetlamp. At the airport I found my orangebags in the changing room, layered up in my new cold-weathergarments and slipped the dog tags around my neck so that in theevent of a crash my charred remains could be air-mailed to my parents.Then I joined 30 other dim-eyed people in the lobby, andwe all shifted from foot to foot while the pilot of our LC-130turboprop, a ski-equipped Hercules, barked out the drill for theeight-hour flight.
"The toilet facilities on board," he said, "are primitive at best.They consist of a urinal and a honey bucket. I advise y'all to go forthe major purge before departure, to avoid the honey bucket."
As the first creeping glow of dawn hesitated above the easternskyline, we carried our gear through to the customs building observedby a handful of saturnine U.S. Navy personnel. Then we eddiedaround a machine that dispensed plastic cups and squirtedout an inch or two of weak Nescafe until we were marshaled intoline in front of our baggage by short-haired men in combat fatiguesaccompanied by a sniffer dog.
At this point we were dispatched into the watery dawn light andacross the grass to have breakfast in the mess canteen. I was desperatefor real coffee, but the shadowy form of a honey bucketloomed between me and the pot. In the strip-lit dining room, anAmerican football game screaming from the television, we sweatedin our thermals and ate eggs and hash browns while a biochemistrygraduate from North Dakota who had recently learned the rules ofcricket discoursed upon them at length. It took the rest of the tablesome time to grasp the basic principles. I dealt confidently with allappeals, as custodian of this British rite; it didn't matter that I, too,had never understood the rules. Those elysian Sunday afternoonson the edge of sunlit village pitches never seemed to have much todo with cricket.
Two hours later we boarded the plane, a line of bulky vermilionparkas differentiated only by Velcro strips on the breast pocket emblazonedwith our names. As I stepped inside the belly of the plane,someone handed me a brown paper lunch bag and pointed to theend of a row. I strapped myself into a red webbing seat, wedged upagainst a stack of cargo crates, and looked around, like Jonah.
The man next to me was an astrophysicist involved in the studyof supernova explosions. He planned to send a balloon up overAntarctica to record the spectral properties of gamma rays. Wepushed in our earplugs and the plane rushed down the runway andinto the morning sky, and then it was too noisy to hear any moreabout his balloon. I couldn't see a window either, so I hurtledtoward Antarctica in my own private capsule. I slept fitfully,squashed between the astrophysicist and the cargo. None of uscould find space for our enormous feet, and our legs crossed in theaisles at our ankles like upside-down guards of honor.
After an hour the temperature rose swiftly from glacial depths totropical heights, and we struggled out of our parkas and balaclavasand neck gaiters just in time to feel it plummet again. The Russianglaciologist sat with his head in his hands for most of the journey,staring at the floor, while the astrophysicist gazed benignly into themiddle distance, serene and untroubled, floating along like one ofhis balloons. At a certain point he smiled beatifically and shoutedin my ear that we had passed the PSR. Months later I found outthat this stood for Point of Safe Return, which means over half thefuel has gone. It used to be called Point of No Return, but it frightenedpeople, so they changed it.
We picked at our sandwiches and muffins and long-life chocolatepuddings in plastic pots.
When we landed and a crewman opened the door, it was as if hehad lifted the lid of a deep freeze. Bloodless icefields stretched awayto mountains below softly furred cumulus clouds, and ice crystalscame skittering toward us through the blistering air. The Herculeshad landed on the frozen sea between Ross Island and the Antarcticcontinent, and along the wiggly island coast land met solid sea in atangle of blue-shadowed pressure ridges or the pleated cliffs of aglacier. I began to readjust my perception of "land" and "sea." Notfar off, a tabular iceberg was damped into the ice, its steep and crinkledwalls reflecting the creamy saffron sun. The sky was a rich royalblue, marbled up ahead by the volcanic plumes of Mount Erebus, anda paler blue sheen lay over the wrinkled sea ice like a filmy opalescentblanket. A spur reached from the island toward the continent, and ona hump at the end I saw a wooden cross, man's tiny mark. It wasVince's cross, erected in 1904 by Scott's men in memory of a seamanwho fell down an ice cliff during a blizzard. When I looked, it gave mean almost Proustian rush: I had been here so often in my dreams.
Tucked into a hollow between the spur and an arc of hills, and atfirst obscured, a hundred buildings huddled on the ice-streakedvolcanic rock of Ross Island.
I was prepared for McMurdo, the largest of the three Americanbases in Antarctica. It did not shock me to find what looked like asmall Alaskan mining town with roads, three-story buildings, theill-matched architecture of a utilitarian institution and a summerpopulation of more than a thousand people. The lower echelons ofother Antarctic communities, none of whom had been anywherenear the place, are fond of parroting diatribes against McMurdo becauseof its size and sophistication, by implication asserting thesuperiority of their experience of "the real Antarctica." I liked Mactownfrom the beginning, as one is drawn to certain anomalouscharacters in films, and my affection for it never faltered.
After a hundred introductions I was allotted a bedroom in achocolate-brown dormitory block. It was a pleasant room with twobeds, two wardrobes, two desks and several sets of drawers, and itshared a shower and toilet with the room next door. I obviously hada roommate, but she was nowhere in evidence.
I duly layered up in my multiplicity of cold-weather garments,but when the wind dropped, the ambient temperature on Ross Islandwas no colder than a particularly bitter winter's day in London.Although the mean annual temperature at McMurdo isminus 17.7 degrees Celsius, in summer it can rocket to plus eight(it plunges as low as minus 50 in the winter). In those balmy daysof summer when I first arrived the temperature hovered aroundminus five. It is true that if the mercury touches minus five inLondon the weather is headline news and the trains grind to astandstill--and one doesn't stroll around swaddled in three layersof polypropylene, two layers of fleece and an industrial-strengthparka--but for many of the Americans on station, winters athome are a good deal colder than summers on the edge ofAntarctica.
What no one ever quite gets used to is the brutalizing effect ofthe wind. The average wind speed at McMurdo is ten miles perhour (12 knots). Extremely high winds, common all over Antarcticaand terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds.That, effectively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a highlydangerous injury but one that can soon become fatal if untreated. Awind racing along at 35 miles per hour (56 knots), for example,which is fairly usual, reduces an ambient temperature of minus sixdegrees Celsius to a windchill factor of minus 28.
The Crary Lab was a long, wet-cement-colored building on stilts,the showpiece of American science in Antarctica. It consisted ofmysterious enclaves of petri dishes and microcentrifuge tubes, well-heatedoffices, antiseptic conference rooms, and a lounge presidedover by a scrofulous penguin in a glass case. Each lab door borea number corresponding to the project number of its occupants.These Science or S-numbers were the key to many things inMcMurdo. The small and unfunded Artists' and Writers' Program,in which I was a participant, dispensed W-numbers (for Writer), andmy number was W-002; a textbook writer from the Midwest had gotW-001. On some doors, a metal sign had been stuck under the projectnumbers. Most of these signs were self-explanatory, such asPenguin Cowboys or Sealheads, but some were more gnomic: theBottom Pickers, I found out later, were investigating the seabed.
The best thing about the Crary was the view from the windowthat ran the length of the lounge. It looked directly over McMurdoSound at the Transantarctic Mountains. They stuck up like thebones of the planet.
I had been given an office, and its door sign said W-002: WHEELER.It was a windowless room about eight feet square with two moderndesks, a set of bookshelves and a blackboard. Around the corner, inthe wide corridor, a collection of startlingly ugly antarctic fish leeredout from glass cases under bell jars labeled with Latin names.Among them a bright blue plastic fish with yellow protrusions andgoggle eyes glared out of its own jar of formaldehyde.
Later that day I was inducted into the intricacies of the WasteManagement Program. I learned that there were 18 different kindsof waste, ranging from Light Metal to Cooking Oil, though for complicatedreasons a broken glass did not belong in "Glass" norshould a cereal box be thrown in "Cardboard." This explained thebehavior of people I had seen standing in front of a row of binsclutching a small item in one hand and scratching their heads withthe other. Hazardous Waste constituted an entirely separate departmentof even more byzantine complexity. The sprawling piles ofrubbish once photographed by Greenpeace were a distant memory.Only veterans could remember the barrel that had been roped offbetween McMurdo and Scott Base after it allegedly fell off the endof the Geiger counter. The 413-ton nuclear reactor brought to thestation in 1961 was long forgotten, as were the noxious brownclouds that used to billow from the high-temperature incineratorevery Saturday. Two decades ago, waste was simply left on thefrozen sea until the ice melted. This practice was outlawed by theU.S. Antarctic Program in 1980, however, before Greenpeace enteredthe fray. Burning, too, had subsequently been outlawed, andwaste was now retrograded to the United States to be burned there,or used as landfill, or recycled. The reactor was removed in 1972.
The American presence in Antarctica, financed and managed bythe National Science Foundation, a government agency, and maintainedby a private contractor based in Colorado, has outgrown itsNaval origins. With a budget hovering just below $200 million, theAntarctic program represents 6 percent of the NSF budget. As theU.S. Department of Defense has contracted, so the U.S. Navy(more properly, a joint military force) has been withdrawing fromAntarctic operations, a process that seems set to continue.
At breakfast one day I sat next to a man with a chipped toothand a ponytail who was fortifying himself with boiled eggs beforesetting off to collect meteors from the polar plateau. He had alreadydiscovered meteors from the moon, and he reckoned he had somefrom Mars, too. He told me this quietly over his yolky toast, explaininghow he could identify whence the rocks came as someoneelse might tell the story of a film he had watched on television theprevious night.
*
It happened that the elderly Oscar Pinochet de la Barra, the distinguishedhead of the Chilean Antarctic Institute, was then at the endof a short honorary visit to McMurdo. He had published widely onAntarctica and, like any self-respecting Chilean, had written poetryabout his experiences. I sought him out, and we sat in a hut overlookingthe frozen sound, talking about Chile. He was an enthusiasticcharacter who seemed grateful to speak Spanish. The morefamous Pinochet was his cousin, and he muttered uncomfortably,"We are not friends." In the midst of my grand passion for Antarctica,I occasionally looked over my shoulder at Chile, guiltily, as if ata lover I had betrayed. As I got up to go, Oscar touched my arm,and with his fingers resting in the crook of my elbow he said gently,"Chile is Chile, my dear. But Antarctica is about much morethan ice."
*
Many images of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration haveburned themselves into our imagination, but the wind-blasted hutsare its most potent symbol, frozen set pieces of old socks and tinsof Fry's cocoa. I was longing to see the huts. I wanted to payhomage, and I hoped it would help me understand the most highlycharged chapter of the continent's history.
The Heroic Age began at the Sixth International GeographicalCongress at London's Imperial Institute in 1895. On August 3 thosepresent passed a resolution "that this Congress record its opinionthat the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece ofgeographical exploration still to be undertaken," and went on tourge scientific societies throughout the world to start planning. Sixyears later, on a balmy summer's day in 1901 in the middle of a glitteringhigh-society yacht week off the south coast of England, asmiling King Edward VII stepped aboard Discovery and pinned theinsignia of Member of the Victorian Order on the chest of herbarely known young captain, Robert Falcon Scott, wishing himGodspeed on his journey to the ice. The period drew to a close littlemore than two decades later, on January 5, 1922, when SirErnest Shackleton clutched his heart and died in the cramped cabinof his last ship, Quest, off the lonely island of South Georgia.
Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen andDouglas Mawson: the Big Four. These were the heroes of a generationof children who pored over images of bergs towering abovewooden ships and men and dogs straining in front of sledges.Queen Victoria had been dead only six months when Discoverysteamed away from the Isle of Wight, and the twentieth centuryhadn't yet gathered momentum; when it did, it would steamrollerthese and many other dreams.
Scott, as English as overcooked cabbage, led two expeditions,setting out first in 1901 in the specially commissioned Discoveryand ten years later in the spartan converted whaler Terra Nova.During the second expedition he reached the South Pole a monthafter Amundsen. When he saw the Norwegian flag flapping in thedistance Scott wrote in his journal, "The worst has happened." Twomen died during the march home, and Scott and his two remainingcompanions perished in their tent, holed up in a blizzard elevenmiles from a supply depot.
Shackleton was an Anglo-Irishman who first went south aboardDiscovery, under Scott's command. On that expedition he sledgedto the 81st parallel with Scott, but was eventually invalided homewith scurvy. In 1907 Shackleton set out aboard Nimrod as leader, atlast, of his own expedition, and on that journey he reached within97 nautical miles of the South Pole. It was, at the time, the farthestsouth any man had ever gone. In 1914 he went again, leading anambitious expedition in which two ships, the Endurance and theAurora, deposited parties of men on opposite sides of the continent.The plan was for one party, led by Shackleton, to sledgeacross Antarctica while the other laid depots on the opposite side.It didn't work out quite like that. Endurance was crushed by pack icein the Weddell Sea, and Shackleton was obliged to embark on anepic struggle to save himself and his men. It was an exceptionallydifficult ice year, and on the other side the Ross Sea party also encounteredsevere difficulties. After the First World War, Shackletontook off again, this time aboard Quest, with the aim of mapping anunknown sector of Antarctic coastline. On the journey out, he died.
Together with Ibsen and Grieg, Roald Amundsen brought hisyoung country out of the shadowy realm of northern mists. He hadhad extensive experience in the north, made the first transit in onevessel of the Northwest Passage, and traveled with Fridtjof Nansen,the greatest polar explorer of all. Amundsen was planning to reachthe North Pole, but when he heard that Frederick Cook claimed tohave got there, he decided to go south and set out in 1910 aboardFram, though he didn't tell the crew or the rest of the world his truedestination until he reached Madeira, off the North African coast.Until then, only his brother knew. Amundsen and four companionsreached 90 degrees south on December 14, 1911, and raised a Norwegianflag on the brick-hard ice at the South Pole.
Mawson was a scientist. A British-born Australian, he first wentsouth with Shackleton, aboard Nimrod. Mawson was one of threemen to reach the South Magnetic Pole, the south pole of the earth'smagnetic field (as opposed to the geographic South Pole, which isthe southern point of the earth's rotation). In 1911 he led the AustralasianAntarctic Expedition, also aboard Aurora, and made a legendaryone-man journey, walking hundreds of miles back to baseafter his two companions had died, one of them disappearing downa crevasse with almost all the food and the other going mad fromfood poisoning. Sixteen years later Mawson led a joint British, Australianand New Zealand expedition to Antarctica. He ended his careeras professor of geology and mineralogy at Adelaide University.
On the Discovery expedition Scott's men built a hut on the spurprotruding into McMurdo Sound. The spur became known as HutPoint, and the hut was primarily used for storage, though they alsoperformed plays in it--larky rituals being de rigueur. It was subsequentlyused as an advance base by other sledging parties.
*
McMurdo had risen up less than a mile from the point. The windwas blowing steadily at about 25 miles an hour when I first walkeddown to the hut, and the exposed flesh between my goggles andbalaclava immediately began to feel as if it were burning. I quicklycovered every square inch. I was already used to subzero temperatures,but I only had to take off my gloves and glove liners for fiveseconds to feel what would happen to me in a high wind if I failedto dress properly. Trying to take a photograph without my gloveliners in hard-blowing wind, however speedily I went about settingup the shot, I almost invariably lost sensation in one or two fingers.I couldn't begin to imagine what the old explorers had sufferedwhen they pushed farther south, month after crucifying month. Isaw them with fresh eyes then.
When I entered the hut, the stillness came upon me like a benediction.There was a mummified seal, a frozen mutton carcass, andstacked tins of Huntley & Palmer biscuits. It was colder than asepulchre. They used to light a blubber stove, but the heating wasalways inadequate, according to the diaries. Shackleton wrote laterthat "the discomfort of the hut was a byword of the expedition,"and when he was back there in 1908 he reported that some menpreferred to sleep outside in their tents, as it was warmer. In the sixties a New Zealander stepped on a mousetrap that had beenbrought down by Scott's men to protect the food stores. I wouldn'thave fancied a mouse's chances in those temperatures.
*
Of course, the Heroic Age didn't suddenly appear on the globallandscape like a meteor. It grew out of what had gone before. Nineteenth-century explorers had been gobbled up by Victorians hungryfor role models embodying the aspirations of the age. As PeterFleming wrote in Bayonets to Lhasa, his book about the 1904 Britishinvasion of Tibet, "By the end of the nineteenth century there werefew major enigmas left on the African continent. Save for Antarctica,whose austere secrets were already arousing the competitiveinstincts of explorers, Tibet was the only region of the world towhich access was all but impossible for white men ..." But Tibetwas small fry. Press attention shifted from the Dark Continent tothe Arctic and thence to Antarctica, and the conquest of the lastwhite spaces became a metaphor for the triumph of imperialism.The cultural vacuum of Antarctica provided the perfect tabula rasaon which to play out a vision. At Scott's farewell dinner LeonardDarwin, president of the Royal Geographical Society, said in hisspeech: "Scott is going to prove once again that the manhood ofour nation is not dead and that the characteristics of our ancestorswho won the Empire still flourish among us."
*
Twenty-four-hour daylight was desynchronizing, and watchingMount Discovery glittering away busily in the small hours felt likestealing a march on time.
Although McMurdo had two bars, as well as a coffee shop wheretemperate people sipped cappuccino, the best place to go drinkingwas an unofficial nightspot on the gloomy top floor of a dorm. Itwas known as the Corner Bar, and any reprobate who arrived onthe ice was drawn toward it like iron to a magnet. It was not advertised,it was not even spoken of very often, and some people spentwhole seasons on base without knowing of its existence. Yet anyonewith lowlife inclinations appeared at the Comer Bar within 48hours of arrival.
The Comer Bar was the creation of four enterprising supportstaffers who had fumed their two-bedroom-plus-connecting-bathroomconfiguration into a communal lounge bar and four-bedbedroom. No money ever changed hands there. The bar, presidedover by a hyperactive carpenter called Mike, ran on goodwill, andcustomers contributed bottles or cash or sent care parcels from NewZealand at the end of their tour. As the curtains were never drawnback, the room was as Stygian and smoky as a shooting gallery. TheComer Bar kept erratic hours, but its schedule was simple: if thedoor was shut, then so was the bar. It was equipped with a large,low, smoked-Plexiglas table and bar paraphernalia ranging from ahuge Budweiser clock to a life-size model penguin with the concentriccircles of a shooting target painted on its chest. There was constantthrough traffic, and new faces would loom out of the smokeamong the hard-core movers and shakers. It was a great place.
I met a seismic geologist from Texas in the Comer Bar. He hadblond hair, come-to-bed eyes and been-to-bed clothes, and onenight he said to me, "Being in McMurdo, I feel I've come halfwayround the world to find the outskirts of Austin." I often heard peopleexpressing disappointment at finding modern conveniences onAntarctic stations. I never felt sorry or guilty or upset about it; basesare the tiniest fragments of human life on a vast, unspoiled whitecontinent. It was like complaining about a couple of specks of duston the Bayeux tapestry or one inharmonious note in a Mozart sonata.
*
Before moving out of McMurdo and into a field camp, I was requiredto attend Survival School, a training course that would equipme to handle tents, stoves and radios and enable me to swing nimblyout of a crevasse or come to a halt should I slide uncontrollablydown an ice hill. "Survival School" sounded more like a grouptherapy class you might come across on the Upper East Side, orin Islington. People called it Happy Camper School, and as Americansare often not strong on irony I thought the nickname waspromising.
First was a snowcraft lecture. It took place in the Crary loungeand the teacher, a field leader called Bill with eyes the color of cornflower hearts, produced a fistful of frozen sausages from a glove toillustrate the danger of frostbitten fingers.
The Berg Field Center managed the practical aspects of life offbase, and in it tents languished in various states of undress, stoveslay dismantled and sleeping bags were stacked in neat rows andcategorized according to temperature requirements, the ones at thebottom marked "Snowy Owl. Minus Fifty." Ice axes stood menacinglyin close-ranked battalions among small armies of harnesses,ropes, thermarests, neoprene water bottles and first aid kits. A largeposter hijacked from colleagues in the Arctic warned of the dangersof polar bears. It was at the Berg Field Center one mild, sunnymorning, the ambient temperature minus 12 degrees Celsius, that14 of us loaded up a tracked vehicle in preparation for SurvivalSchool. There were two instructors, one of whom was FrozenSausage Bill, and eleven pupils besides me--three Navy personneland eight scientists. Everyone was in high spirits.
We headed out a few miles onto the ice shelf. By the time weembarked on the first session, at the foot of a snow hill, a band ofclouds had descended and visibility had shrunk to 30 feet. Themorning culminated in techniques for self-arrest while slidingdown a snow hill on your back and upside down. You plunge yourice ax into the snow at your side with the blade pointing toward thesky, twist your legs over, and roll and pivot yourself around the axuntil you are lying facedown, head at the top, with the weight ofyour body over the ax, knees in and bum up.
Afterward, we trooped off for lunch. in a small hut on the ice, Billdiscoursed on the niceties of stoves as the rest of us concentrated ontrail mix, expedition cheese, crackers and chocolate and sucked oncartons of cranberry juice. Between bouts of eating we masteredpumping and priming and nodded gravely about the dangers of carbonmonoxide poisoning. When we had finished, we walked acrossthe ice shelf toward Mount Erebus to learn how to build igloos.
Continues...
Excerpted from Terra Incognitaby Sara Wheeler Copyright © 1999 by Sara Wheeler. Excerpted by permission.
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