And so Scott said damn the dogs, and damn the motor tractors, and damn the hot-air balloon, and the Siberian ponies, which alas could not endure the cold; and even the skis, which in those days were like long planks, and which at first the British tried to use with only a single ski pole, so far out of touch were they with snow and their own bodies. None of that mattered; they had discovered the pleasure of hauling their homes with their own power alone, on foot. Quickly they learned to use two ski poles, and they stomped along on the skis as if they were on two long snowshoes, but only to float themselves better in their walking. It was walking on this Earth they had fallen in love with.
4
Observation Hill
McMurdo’s Chalet was in effect the Government House of Antarctica, but the Americans didn’t have Government Houses, so only Sylvia Johnston thought of it that way. Sylvia was an American citizen by way of a brief but useful marriage many years before; otherwise she was English to the core, English in the way that only long-term expats became.
She arrived at the Chalet (in fact a little American prefab “chalet” from the 1960s, and one of the oldest buildings in town) at 7 A.M., as she did every day of the week except Sundays. She poured a cup of tea and went into her office. First up on the day’s schedule was the orientation meeting for W-003, the latest participant in the Artists and Writers’ Program, this one a Chinese man named Ta Shu, writer and journalist, with no equipment or office needs, which was a relief. Sylvia had come to the NSF as a biologist, having spent many seasons studying skuas and petrels; she was not much interested in the Woos.
Alan and Debbie and Joyce and Tom and Jan all filed in and sat where they usually sat in these meetings. Soon thereafter they were joined by Ta Shu, a short, wiry man with a gray goatee, and long gray hair pulled into a ponytail; his face however only lightly lined, so that Sylvia couldn’t guess his age. She would check his file after the meeting.
He sat in the single empty chair at the table and nodded to them. Sylvia asked them all to introduce themselves.
“I’m Debbie, from helicopter operations. I’ll be scheduling all your helo flights out of McMurdo.”
“I’m Joyce, from the Berg Field Center, where you’ll get all the gear you need that you didn’t bring along.”
“I’m Alan, head of the Crary Lab this year. I can show you the lab, and help you work with the scientists based there, if you need to.”
“I’m Tom and I work with Alan.”
“I’m Jan, NSF’s contact to the private contractors working down here.”
Sylvia went last: “I’m Sylvia Johnston, the NSF representative this year. You’ve been allotted ten helo hours for your time down here, I see. You share hours with other people on your flight, so you may be able to be in the air a lot longer than ten hours, if you work it right. You’ll need to go through the snowcraft course given by Search and Rescue before you’re authorized to go out in the field. I see you’re scheduled to join T-023, the ‘In the Footsteps of Amundsen’ expedition, which leaves a week from today. That’s a good one, I’ve heard. Joyce will help get you outfitted for-that, so you need to make an appointment with her office. Please feel free to use the map center and the library all you want, and come to any of us with any questions you may have.” She went through a short stack of documents they needed him to fill out, describing each as she gave them to him. He nodded, eyes watching her brightly.
She concluded with the usual warning, delivered with a serious look and a raised finger: “Now you must know that we are very pleased to host our artists and writers down here, but you have to understand that you will not be allowed to go off and meditate on your own.”
Ta Shu looked puzzled. “This is what I do.”
“Pardon me?”
“I am a geomancer. A practitioner of feng shui. I often must sit alone. I come to meditate in several sacred Antarctic places, tell people what I observe. As I said in proposal to U.S. Antarctic Program,” with a gesture at the pile of documents.
“I see. Well. In any case—nevertheless—you have to understand that you may have to do your meditation with someone else around, because we operate by the buddy system when in the field. Antarctica is a dangerous place.”
“Very true,” Ta Shu said, nodding deeply, as if there was more to it than she knew. “I will accommodate myself. With many thanks for your help.”
After Ta Shu had left the office they sat in silence for a while, looking down at their papers. Somewhat irritably Sylvia said, “All right, I didn’t read all of his file. But what in the world are they doing sending down a geomancer.”
“Giving him a chance to meditate on his own,” Alan suggested.
Sylvia stared at him, and he raised both hands in defense:
“This guy’s famous, really. He’s broadcasting this trip back to a big audience in China. And he’s been down here before in the Woo program, about fifteen years ago. His name was Wu Li then. He’s the one that wrote that book of really short poems?”
“That’s this same man?” Sylvia had seen the book, one of those volumes that lay on the Crary lounge’s coffee table for years at a time. People said the book’s author had come down as a very long-winded poet, a kind of Chinese Walt Whitman, but after his visit to the ice he had gone silent, and this little chapbook published many years later had been the only poetry ever published by him again. About forty pages of poems, if you could call them that, all of them four words long; things like
blue sky
white snow
or
white cloud
black rock.
Sylvia, swamped by her massive daily influx of NSF paperwork, had always liked the brevity of these things.
“After that book he took up feng shui,” Alan said. “He travels around the world and meditates in places to, you know, grasp their essence. He uses all the old Chinese methods, but apparently he’s into modern science as well. A kind of quantum mechanical feng shui. We at Crary are very interested.”
“Oh come on.”
“No, he’s very big, I’m telling you. He’s feng shuied half the skyscrapers in east Asia. His fibervideo audience for this trip will be huge.”
“So I suppose millions of people just saw me tell him not to go off and meditate in the field when that is the essence of his art.”
“In three-D,” Joyce added.
Sylvia pursed her lips. She had tried on a TV facemask for the first time just the previous year, and she had found the three-dimensional effect quite distinct, although somewhat shimmery and planar—quite beautiful, actually. Apparently people were trying various computer enhancements to render the images crystalline or kaleidoscoped or van Goghed or Rembrandted, whatever. No doubt many of Ta Shu’s audience would be surfing these effects, trying a little of everything. Antarctica as Cézanne or Seurat or Maxfield Parrish, with Ta Shu’s voice-over narration.