“Ah, Val,” he protested. “I wouldn’t know what to do out there. I barely know what to do here. And I’m—I’m interested in what’s happening here now.” He waved around—muddy old Mac Town, raw cold under a lowering sky, and the usual wind through the Gap—it was a hard place to make a case for even at the best of times. And this morning was not the best of times.
They looked at each other. Wistfuclass="underline" full of wishes.
“I’ll stay here,” he said finally. “But, you know. Maybe you’ll come in from time to time. If the ferals—” He saw it—“If Sylvia makes a deal that includes the ferals, and if the ferals tell her that they would prefer to deal with a co-op here rather than ASL, then maybe it’ll help us win a bid, and we’ll be here, and we’ll need to have a liaison with the ferals, at least, to discuss what they’re doing out there. And so …”
She nodded. She smiled; there even seemed to be tears in her eyes, though that could have been the wind ripping by. She stepped into him, hugged him hard. Then they were kissing, just like they had on the Bealey Spur, the only woman he had ever kissed where he did not have to do his hunchback routine or lift her up bodily from the ground. Someone his size.
“I’ll talk to Mai-lis,” she said when they broke it off. “Oh X—it’ll work. It’ll work somehow.”
He nodded, too full for speech. They would make it work, they would take back the world from the overlords, they would make a decent permaculture from the bottom up. Well; or at least work on their moment, here, now, in McMurdo.
With a few more incoherencies they parted.
X walked away. He had forgotten where he had been going, if indeed he had had a destination. He was on another plane now, wasted but exhilarated. Mac Town was not enough at a moment like this. He could walk out to Discovery Point and sit in the old hut, as he had many times before, but that would not be right either. Those old ghosts and their Keystone Kops routines were not what this was about. To strive, to seek, to yield … something like that. But not now. He could see why Val wanted out of that whole Footsteps game, out and back onto the land as it had been before Scott arrived, Antarctica itself all bare of history, ready for a new start.
So. Wasted, happy, nowhere to go. His room was not his room, and this town was not his town. He tried to see what it might be if they did it right, all Hut Point inhabited by some new aesthetic, so that it mattered what it looked like and how they lived there. Not just recycling their junk, but making a place that looked like a home. Those towns in Greenland and Lapland were like little works of art, the houses painted bright primary colors, lined out in rows and diagonals…. Make the town itself a work of art. NSF might be receptive. They had changed before as a result of activists, as for instance after Greenpeace dumped McMurdo’s trash on the floor of the Chalet. NSF was a reasonable outfit; a bunch of scientists, bureaucrats, technocrats, whatever; reasonable people, committed to reason, trying to make a community of trust in the universal chaos. The scientific project; ethics, politics, all embedded in the very enterprise. Who knew what they might do next?
But meanwhile, in this very moment, here he was. And he wanted out somehow—to fly, to celebrate! Perhaps a trip up the coast. A trip to Cape Royds, to see how Val’s hero Shackleton had done it. Snug little cabin up the coast—
Suddenly he saw it. A vision: he could do it too, like Shackleton or Val, only his own way. A McMurdo feral. An indigenous Ross Islander. With a job making things work for the beakers, sure, but living in his own place, just as clean and neat and low-impact as anyone could ask; a tent house somewhere, something really snug and small. Nothing but footprints. It would have to be closer to Mac than Cape Royds, for sure, closer to town and work. Perhaps around the corner of Hut Point, facing the north and thus the sun. Val could visit sometime. Or he could go out with the ferals on vacations. Live like them, but help reorganize McMurdo as well.
He went to the BFC and said to Joyce, “Can I take a Zodiac around to the Dellbridges?”
“No way, X. The penguin cowboys are using them. Why do you want to go?”
Then the phone rang, and she gestured at him to wait and picked it up. “Oh hi, Ta Shu. Uh huh …” She glanced at X. “Well, yeah, now that you mention it. I think we can do that. Sure, no problem. X will take you. He’ll meet you down at the dock.”
She hung up. “You’re in luck. Ta Shu is in short-timer mode, and he wants to see Cape Evans and Cape Royds one more time before he leaves.”
“Great!”
“Must be meant to be.”
“Yes yes yes.”
black
rock black water
Meant to be. X grabbed his parka and boots and went down to the docks, downed another cup of terrible coffee, got a Zodiac ready. Ta Shu showed up, and X called weather and got clearance, and they took off.
Over the puttering of the engine, and the slap of the windchopped black waves, X told Ta Shu about his plan, and Ta Shu listened impassively.
Finally Ta Shu said, “Good idea. Let us look for a place for you now, shall we?”
“You really want to?”
Ta Shu squinted at him. “My job, you know.”
“Of course.”
So now he had a world-famous geomancer situating his house according to ancient feng shui principles. Meant to be!
They turned the corner of Discovery Point, and began slowly to run down the long straight northern coast of the Hut Point Peninsula, toward the stub of the Erebus Ice Tongue. The entire peninsula jumped out of the water pretty steeply; the black peaks sticking out of the snow along its top were a couple hundred meters above sea level. Looking back as they puttered along, they could see a shiny new radio sphere on top of the last peak, which overlooked McMurdo on its other side. The slopes dropping into the sea were about half black rock, half crusted snowfields.
They motored slowly past Arrival Heights, then Danger Slopes, where Scott’s seaman Vince had slipped to his death during one of the icecapades in the first year there. Then they passed a rocky knob called Knob Point; beyond it there was a mostly rocky section of the peninsula, smoothbacked, its side like a giant berm sloping into the ice-fringed water. There appeared to be a couple of indented ledges halfway up this section of the slope, like raised beaches from ages when sea level had been higher, though X had no idea if that was really what had formed them. From the water they appeared to be very narrow, lines only, but Ta Shu was pointing at them; and indeed, they looked to be the only flat land on this whole side of the peninsula.
So they puttered in to the icy shore, and landed on a steep black pebble strand. “You could keep boat here,” Ta Shu said as they got out over the bow. “Row to town when it is water. Bicycle on ice when it is frozen. Or ski. Or walk.”
“True,” X said.
They climbed. The black rubble was steep and loose, but an inconspicuous path of stabilized steps in the rubble could eventually be tromped out.
When they reached the first ledge they found that it was much wider than it had looked from below; perhaps fifty yards wide; a long and level terrace in the steep slope; one could have fit several big houses on it, in fact. And something little and snug could be tucked at the back of the terrace and not even be visible from the water below. And out of the wind.
Looking over the sea to the north, they saw the ridgy little Dellbridge Islands, and beyond them the dark points of Cape Evans and Cape Royds. “That was another volcanic cone,” Ta Shu said, pointing at the Dellbridges. “See how the islands make the pieces of a circle?”
“Ah,” X said. “Yeah.”
He wandered around, looking at the ground. Under the layer of rubble was cracked volcanic basalt, as solid as could be. Bedrock. He stood with his back to the slope and looked north again. To his left he could see over the black water of McMurdo Sound to the mountains of the Dry Valleys. To his right Erebus rose like a white castle, steaming from its top as usual. Behind him, if he went up onto the crest of the peninsula, he would be near Castle Peak, in the area called the Japanese rock garden. There was a flagged cross-country ski trail running from Castle Peak to McMurdo.