Maybe some of that got across to her in his look. She pursed her mouth and looked off to the side unhappily. Unhappy cheerleader; it was a sorry sight. But she was too stubborn to apologize, and by God he deserved an apology. They had been partners, they had been sleeping together, making love; they had been in love. Or so he had thought. Then they had gone off to do their business in the world and come back here, just a couple of months apart, and as usual on her return (just three days before him!) there had been a bunch of guys coming on to her—big deal, it was no excuse, when had it been any different for a woman who looked like her? No, McMurdo was no excuse. They had been an ice romance only—she had wanted to break it off for reasons of her own, and the great number of men in McMurdo was just an excuse and a damned lame excuse at that.
And she wasn’t going to apologize.
“I’ve got to pack,” X said, struggling to keep his voice level. He turned and walked away before he started to shout at her, or cry.
And the next day he was out at the little air station that the private tour companies had established in the Windless Bight—nothing more than two Jamesways and a fuel bladder next to the snowplowed landing strip, one of the smallest barest camps X had ever seen. The plane didn’t show, and he spent the night in a Jamesway named “The Random House,” sleeping uneasily on an ancient dead mattress, listening to the Preway roar like the ghost boos of a ghost audience, watching his life movie from inside his head: a remake of The Man Without a Country, starring The Man With No Name.
5
A Site of Special Scientific Interest
Hello again my friends. As you can see, I am now out on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, a few kilometers south of Ross Island. I have come out here to spend a day at the Americans’ Happy Camper Camp, where visitors are trained in ice skills to better prepare themselves for their time in Antarctica. The camp is well-named; I am happy indeed. The mountaineers have shown us how to light the stoves, to put up the tents, and to use the radios. I have learned how to tie several knots. I know now that if you need to get a badly injured person inside a tent but are afraid to move them for fear of injuring them more, you are to slit the bottom of the tent open and erect the tent directly over the unfortunate person. Antarctica is a dangerous place. It is easy, looking around as we are now, to think that I stand on a broad snowy plain; in fact I am standing on cracked ice, with deep fissures all around, and the Antarctic Ocean below me.
Captain Cook, one of the greatest feng shui masters of all time, sailed the circumference of this Antarctic Ocean in the 1770s, trying to get as far south as he could. His wooden sailing ships ran into the pack ice at seventy degrees south, and as far as they could see to the south was only more ice. With the technology of his time they could go no farther. Later Cook wrote “I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”
This sounds odd to us, shortsighted and even a bit foolish. But we must remember that the man who said it was extremely intelligent and capable, accomplishing much more in his life than any of us have. His shortsightedness as exhibited in this remark has to be understood then not as a personal attribute, but as one of his age generally. For Cook lived just before the great accelerations of the industrial age; his time was as it were the foothills of a mountain range so precipitous that the heights could not be guessed. Thus the radical foreshortening of the kao-yuan perspective. Cook sailed in wooden ships, which in their materials much resembled those used in ships for the previous two thousand years; only improvements in design had made them more seaworthy, and Cook rightly judged that these improvements, wrested slowly over the centuries out of human experience, had gone about as far with the materials as they could go. Thus he could not foresee the immense changes that would come so rapidly in the industrial decades to follow.
We, however, have no such excuse as Cook. We live on the heights of that mountain range, in a culture changing so rapidly that it is hard to gauge it. We look back on two centuries of continuous acceleration into this unstable moment, so we should be able to foresee that much the same will occur in the time after us. Who can deny that the future will quickly become something very different than our time, quickly become one of any number of possible worlds?
And yet by and large I think we still do no better than Captain Cook. We assume that the conditions that exist now will be permanent. And yet every year the laws are amended, and even the ice shelf I am standing on now, that has been here for three million years, is melting away. Even the rocks melt away in time. This moment is like a dragonfly, hovering over a peach blossom; then off and gone.
Look then at this ocean I am camped on in this moment. A white immensity; nothing to say about it. Erebus stands in the air like a powerful deity. Before you can read a landscape, it has to become a part of your inmost heart. When I came before to Antarctica, as a proud young man, I saw the land and it baffled me, and I could not paint it in my poems. Nothing came to me. As the British explorer Cherry-Garrard said, “This journey had beggared our language.”
Only later, as I dreamed of it, did I grow to love it. What words I could find were the oldest words, in their simplest combinations. Blue sky; white snow. That is all language can say of this place; all else is footnotes, and the human stories.
Now I am back, and those of you who care to share my voyage, watching and listening in China, or wherever else you may be; I welcome you, because I feel now, all these years later, with the love of these stories in me, that I am ready to film the land I see, and talk to you my friends about it; not to reproduce the effects of light, but to tap this light at its source.
For Scott’s party in their first stay here, in 1902, this edge of this ice shelf was as far south as anyone had ever been, and no one knew what lay farther over the horizon. Except of course they knew for sure that that way lay the South Pole, the axis of the Earth’s rotation. On Ross Island they were still twelve hundred kilometers away, as they knew by geometrical calculation; but they had no idea what the land in between would look like; whether these Western Mountains across the bay would extend all the way south, as a great wall blocking them, or whether there would be an easy ramp up to the great plateau of ice, which short trips through the nearest Western Mountains suggested might guard the Pole. They could only tell by trying to walk there. It resembled the attempts on the North Pole, and the search for the Northwest Passage, which had been a major feature of British culture since Elizabethan times. As long as England had been a maritime power, as long as it had been an empire, it had been sending out brave men to explore the polar ends of the Earth, first the northern one, and now, with the invention of canned food and metal-reinforced steam-powered ships, they had been able to penetrate the pack ice surrounding the southern one—the ice that Captain Cook said would never be penetrated—and been able to establish a good base of supplies as close as they had, here on Ross Island. Directly south lay this broad featureless white plain of an ice shelf. And so they had to give it a try.
On their first trip south, Scott took along his friend and confidant, Edward “Bill” Wilson, and Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton was chosen for his physical strength and for his drive, his will, his spirit to achieve and to cross this land.