Antarctica - Life on the Ice
Sample Chapter: In This Dream
by Joe Mastroianni
The Dry Valleys of Antarctica lie just across McMurdo Sound from Ross Island. It is in these valleys that many scientists conduct their work—search for nematodes, or measure the levels of the many small lakes and ponds that dot the valley. It’s an impressive landscape, and in the Taylor Valley, where Joe Mastroianni is walking, sand and gravel meet the impressive Commonwealth, Canada, then Suess glaciers. They are called the Dry Valleys for a reason—they have almost never seen any precipitation, but there is plenty of wind, which has carved the rocks into ventifacts and shaved the fur off of seals that lie, freeze-dried, almost fifty miles inland.
It is amidst this surreal landscape that Joe finds himself with another contributor to this anthology, William Fox (whose own story “Leaving the Ice” appears on page 264 of this book). Their rambling conversation reveals the way the mind and the emotions move in such a landscape.
Joe has worked in Silicon Valley as a high-level engineering executive for twenty years. He’s also a novelist, screenwriter, poet, musician, entrepreneur, programmer, engineer, technologist, father, and friend. He has tried almost everything once, and always winds up home.
There are places in Antarctica where your footprints will outlive you.
On a long walk in the Taylor Valley, you can hear every grain of scratching dust compressed beneath your boot.
You can stand on a hilltop paved with red stones that extend to the mesa’s edge, and see to one side the Kukri Hills, to the other the Matterhorn and the 7,000-foot-tall crags of Hill 1882, dripping glacier ice. At the center of the red mesa stands a house-sized boulder, wind-carved with swirls and patterns. Nature’s hieroglyphics.
When confronted with something infinite, the mind invents stories to frame everything in well-bounded familiarity. Even a man of science and numbers, trained to ignore the nagging influence of imagination, must remind himself this place is not strewn with the ruins of a temple built by an extinct race. But rather, that non-linear equations and physics of laminar flow explain the spirals and serpentine shapes on the ground and in stone. That the depressions and passageways through the rock do not lead to chambers of worship, but are only regions of erosion where vortices spawned by the katabatics collected sand grains with regularity. That the wonder that has filled his chest has not killed him, but rather, in one blow has destroyed the intricate construction of pedestrian, suburban logic upon which he has based his self-image.
When men returned to this place in the 1950s they saw footprints and campsites they presumed were the remnants of recent explorations. Then in the detritus at the campsites they found the cast-offs from Scott’s party, all appearing as if Scott and his men had left only a short while before. And they knew that time meant something different here.
The mind invents stories.
You walk through the valley as a mouse in a giant’s house. Occasionally one of you mutters something absolutely trite, how gorgeous it is, how there are no words. The way the glaciers fall over the mountains like the head on an overfull glass of beer. The way the frost heave cracks in the ground in straight-sided polygonal structures. You point out the way millions of years of wind-blown sand turns boulders to pentagonal pyramids. You wonder at the age of the mummified seal carcasses. How a creature with no arms or legs could have traveled so many miles inland, crawling on its belly like a giant slug.
In awe of titanic beauty, you know why the ancients told stories. And now you need one, too.
I’m trying to keep my mind on the hike. My job—insinuating technology into this most holy geography. Putting up wireless networks so scientists studying the dry valleys can e-mail their home institutions, send instant messages, and order replacement hats and gloves online from the farthest place on earth. I’m trying to keep my mind on the twelve miles I was elected to traverse with the camp’s professional writer. The perk people back in town would give up body parts for. Guide the writer between camps, on foot. Experience in-your-face Antarctica. Towering blue ice and an ozone-free atmosphere guaranteed to cause cancer and cataracts. Trying to keep my mind on the landscape, and away from a simple human problem people bring with them wherever they go. What would Scott think? What would Nansen do in this situation?
I say—“Annie Haslan is mad at me,” after one long stretch of nothing going by but the scribbles and doodles God left on a mountainside during a particularly boring hour of creation.
My travel companion, Bill Fox, stops in his tracks and stares at me as if I’ve just burst into flames.
“Say what?”
“The singer. She was online answering e-mails on a fan site and I posted a note about how I thought Renaissance had shown up drunk for a performance in Miami in 1977. Her producer assured me no such thing had happened. She sent me an email and chewed me out. They never drank before a performance.”
It comes out and I have no idea why, or how I can control it.
Bill furrows his brow, considers what I’ve said, and looks back at the glaciers. “I see.”
“You don’t know who she is,” I say. “I’m getting punchy.”
We’re walking between Lake Bonney camp and Lake Hoare camp. It’s a trip of roughly eight miles across reasonably level ground. On the way we’ll pass three glaciers and two frozen lakes. Lots of seal carcasses, freeze-dried and mummified by the atmosphere. Though they’re hard as rock, some look like they died a few weeks ago. One of the biologists told us they’re only between nine hundred and a couple thousand years old. Eternity to us is a mere eye-blink to the ice.
“How do you think these seals got here?” Bill asks. He’s writing a book about the way humans interact with infinitely remote landscapes. Will my answer wind up on his pages? I need to set the record straight, then. Something else is in my mind besides the sundogs and rocks that seem to have been carved by the very mythical beings UFO-aficionados believe built the temples at Machu Picchu.
“I didn’t sleep with her last night.”
“Annie Haslan?” Bill says.
“No. The biology lady. I didn’t. I swear, when I didn’t expect it, she kissed me and threw me into severe, life-threatening cognitive dissonance.”
“Life-threatening cognitive dissonance,” Bill says, seeming as convinced as if I was trying to sell him a purple sky. “An unexpected kiss. I’ve heard that can happen.”
“Totally, I mean, I’m married, O.K.?”
“So are a lot of other people down here. What do they say? ‘What happens on the Ice stays on the Ice?’”
“Puts Antarctica on the same plane as Mardi Gras. There’s something fundamentally sick about that. Like on a religious level.”
Bill starts walking and I follow, but my mind keeps rolling back to the night before at the Bonney camp. In the Jamesway.
Last night there was a circle around the sun. A half-dreamed halo. The air turned translucent with ice fog. The clouds muffled the thumps to nothing when the final helicopter crossed the Commonwealth glacier. The radio chirped in the background one last time, then squelched dead for the weekend. She and I maneuvered in the Korean-war era tent like submariners. Always touching and bumping. Smiling.
On the Ice the territory is nearly infinite. In this landscape humans are nearly as rare as unicorns. But where there is one of us, there is almost certainly another. For safety. The buddy system. Or because habitation is sparse and so we must huddle for warmth. So there is no privacy on the Ice.
Until it finds you, unexpectedly.
The mind needs a story.
She and I in Bonney camp, alone. Bone and blood, imbued with the infinite mystery of biological chemistry that causes inanimate molecules to animate flesh. She did not know how to define the force that became locked within carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen at the Big Bang, and demands certain molecules reproduce and give rise to sentience.
“Nobody knows that,” she said, handing me a mason jar filled with a greenish liquid.
She turned her back, resuming to her preparation at the counter. Outside a mild wind began. It rattled the sides of the Jamesway, raising in me questions about the fragility of the half cylinder upon the ground. A bubble of warmth that seemed it would collapse in the next big gust.
We could have been astronauts on an alien planet. We were surrounded by 10,000-foot-high peaks and blue-ice glaciers. Standing on land that hadn’t changed since DNA emerged from the primordial soup, and would remember every step we took. The only sound for miles was the wind and our breath.
Then she started bashing blue lake ice with a hammer. And I wondered if somewhere, the great cosmic whomever who had decided to grant me consciousness was laughing and heading to the fridge for another beer.
The mind tells a story.
She decanted the last lime juice that existed for thousands of miles, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the boulder we walked to, sides inscribed with the wind’s handwriting, the plane of red and the Paleolithic swirls in the mountain’s flesh.
“What’s written on those rocks?” I asked her.
“What rocks?” She capped the Nalgene bottle and shook it.
“The ones up there, the red mesa.”
“Oh, you mean up at the Rock Garden. They’re ventifacts. The wind wears them down like that.”
“I know. I’ve seen the ventifacts up by the Hughes Glacier. They’re just smooth rocks with holes. Those ones up there are different though. It’s like—what the hell is that plane of red rock? It’s like being on Mars.”
“Wild, isn’t it?” she said. Poured herself a margarita. Set it down on a folding table that could have been borrowed from the thrift shop of the nearest Catholic Church, 6,000 miles to the north somewhere. She turned backward a beat up folding chair and sat, knees wide and almost touching mine. She rested her elbows on the chair back, chin on her forearms.
“So, what do you think?” she asked, and I sipped my margarita.
“Not bad,” I said, tipping my jar toward her. “Good job.”
“Not the drink. About the rocks.”
There was a lot going on in my head. Stories rumbling through the gyri of my cortex. She’d think I was crazy if I told them. Maybe I was.
I said, “Did you know that half the people on the Ice are left-handed or blue-eyed? Statistically that’s…”
“Cut the bullshit.”
“O.K., then. You really want to know?”
“You worried someone’s going to hear? You can trust me. I won’t tell.” She kicked my boot. Smiled. Sipped without breaking eye contact. “It stays on the Ice.”
I knew that back home this would be something. Was it the same out here in Antarctica? What would Shackleton do in this situation?
Then I noticed. Couldn’t help. Her eyes were blue-gray. Her hair was blonde with streaks of strawberry. She held her jar in her left hand. She took a gulp. Wiped at her mouth with the back of a hand then rested her chin in the palm, elbow on the chair back and I could hear the words in my mind that one of us would have to say.
What are we going to do now?
She took another sip of her drink.
I said, “Thomas says the ice in these margaritas is as old as Jesus,” figuring I could obscure the facts with more facts.
Outside the wind kicked up. Outside, the same sun that burned the Sahara flared impotently above the fruitless land. All that existed was the motion of the inanimate and prehistoric germs she’d come to study in the frozen lakes.
And us. All the other scientists were out at the west lobe drilling holes in the ice to take samples. They wouldn’t be back for hours. Infinite solitude flooded two souls. Mine was drowning.
Find anything. Yesterday the camp manager took me to the Rock Garden.
“What’s the deal with pictures up there?” I asked, fumbling, sorry I left my camera in my tent when the others in the camp requested I record nothing of the hike up the mountainside. Looking for any subject to take the place of the one she was pushing toward.
“Because it’s our place. It’s special. It’s private. It belongs to the people who come here. There’s no reason for anyone else to see it.”
She took the jar out of my hand and put it on the table behind her.
“It’s so beautiful,” I said, something warm stirring in my chest, thinking if I said enough quickly enough we could just think about something else. Let’s just think about something else. Tell her the story. I said, “It’s like a fairy tale. If you told me it was a movie set, I’d believe you. It looked like—it made me feel things. Like…”
Her chair squeaked against the plywood floor as she skootched closer.
I said, “Like it was—like it was built by somebody for a reason. Like you could turn around and see the spirit of the ice, the Lady of the Frozen Lakes, rise from the ice and hand you Excalibur. Like we’re blessed. Right on top of that hill is Shangri La and only we have ever seen it.”
I remember her lips were cold from the blue ice; her tongue tasted of tequila and lime that used to be, and I never perceived her crossing the distance between us, but only saw her drifting from me, back into her chair, eyes closed, like someone who drowned and was carried away by the current.
“What happens now?” she said without opening her eyes.
I was trying to understand. Why. Couple things to consider. Workload. Lack of sleep. Incoherence. How to erase a memory that lived beside a geographic miracle.
Seconds, maybe a minute later I found my voice and said, “The rest of our lives, I suppose.”
By the time I finish the story Bill and I reach Mummy Pond. We strap our stabilicers onto our boots. They’re modified beach sandals with machine screws protruding from the soles that bite into the ice. We venture out onto the deep blue ice and despite everything the experts have said to me about the ice thickness, the insecure child in my mind assures me I’m going to fall through.
I’m staring at my feet waiting for the ice to break when Bill says, “It’s thirty feet thick, you know.” Strolling casually, turning occasionally to observe me. “They land airplanes on ice thinner than this.”
I heard myself say, “I really mean it, I didn’t sleep with her,” as if that was as important as the fact the ground we were traversing had been crossed by a hand-counted number of people. Everyone who had ever been in this spot had their name in a ledger somewhere, either logged in the NSF’s helo records, or Robert F. Scott’s diary. It’s a historic, isolated area, one of the most unattainable and gorgeous on earth.
But I feel as if Antarctica has taken a sandblaster to my mind and abraded years of learning and expectation. Nothing was the way I thought it would be. It was all bigger, colder, more beautiful, and more intense than I expected. And it was changing me. I could feel it. It was as if I’d sold my soul for a glimpse of Atlantis, and when I returned to the real world everyone would see me as a madman, babbling about imaginary cities of blue ice, about having touched the hand of a newly discovered god, about being damned forever for the arrogance of the deal.
I say, “She told me she slept in the Scott tent. I knew that was an invitation, but I just ignored it. I came back to the polar haven. Didn’t you hear me come in?”
“O.K.,” Bill says. “Enough.” I follow him to the shore of the frozen lake. He pulls off his pack and I do the same. Snap a few photos. He takes out some food I didn’t see him pack in the Jamesway at Bonney. We sit next to a large ventifact and he hands me a piece of cheese and a Cadbury bar.
We munch our snacks in silence. And after a good long time, when the cold has had the chance to still my mind, Bill says, “This is pretty wonderful, isn’t it?”
At last, words don’t come to me.
“You O.K.?” he asks, and I nod automatically. Bill says, “You gotta take it slowly. Integrate. Get some perspective. You’re not the first person to be blown away by the ice.”
“This isn’t hell, then?”
Bill laughs. Sighs. Stares out toward the Suess Glacier. He says, “When you get home, read some of the stuff you’ve written in your blog. You don’t realize how important it is to you. You can’t until you get back and you come back to yourself.”
“Come back to myself?”
“You started to tell me but you never finished—how did it feel, the moment you stepped on the ice?”
How do I feel? I’d just spent a lifetime worrying about where I had been and where I would go. Was I positioned well for the next career move? Had all the bills been paid? Did I have enough insurance so I could die responsibly? Could I be forgiven for tossing away so many precious heartbeats that way? And from whom would I ask forgiveness?
The sun streams upon us from an ozone-free sky that’s almost black. Ice clouds high above divide the light into rainbows of yellow, magenta, and cyan. The glacier creaks. A chunk of blue-green ice calves from its face. It sounds like a case of drinking glasses falling from a warehouse shelf.
I say, “There’s the one thing that defines you to yourself in your own head. You can tell other people, ‘Well, I’m an engineer, or a plumber, or a mechanic.’ But this is it for me. No matter what I ever told anyone else, I have always been in my mind someone who lives on the Ice. I can remember being a kid in the grammar school library reading about Scott and Shackleton and wishing as hard as I could to go. I have had no greater wish in my life.”
Bill crumples his candy bar wrapper, careful not to get the slightest crumb on the ground.
I say, “It feels like being in love.”
He smiles and I see myself reflected small and abstract in his dark glacier glasses. Bill says, “Rae Spain, the camp manager for the Taylor Valley told me she thought our life here was as close to a utopian society as you could get on earth. We’re clothed, fed, kept healthy, surrounded by nature; we work on interesting things and are continuously accompanied by interesting people. We just have to realize how lucky we are, and be appropriately thankful.”
When he stops speaking, and there is no voice to fill my ears, my heart is as loud as the wind.
“Strange things happen to people in your state of mind,” he says, gathering his backpack, reseating his stabilicers. “But I think—well what I think is that if it feels like love, it probably is.”
We get back onto the ice and make our way toward the Suess Glacier defile, and Lake Hoare camp beyond.
And as we walk I wonder how I will explain it to my family at home. What story I can invent to make them accept that I have betrayed the normal, everyday life of which they have been a part these many years, and fallen in love with a dream.
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