Terra Incognita (19 page)

Smoking is a leitmotif of polar expeditions. Shackleton understood the hardship of tobacco famine, and when he arrived at Elephant Island to rescue his men he threw bags of it ashore before he landed. The stranded men had been smoking penguin feathers, and one of them, the proud possessor of two pipes, had tried to smoke the wood of one in the bowl of another. Viktor Ignatov, the geophysicist in command of Vostok from 1959 to 1960, recorded that at the beginning of the year four smokers signed the pledge and gave up. Not only did these men soon crumble under pressure – the non-smokers took up the habit as well. During the bitter periods between resupplies they smoked tea.

In the modern era the shortage of tobacco is rarely an issue. It is the restrictions on smoking that annoy the nicotine addicts. All round the continent men and women huddle outside huts and tents inhaling furiously like office workers on the streets of Manhattan. When finished, they can't throw their butts on the ice. They have to put them in their pockets, if there isn't a receptacle to hand. We were always finding butts in our pockets, and once, in the field, I saw a scientist's parka catch fire.

∗

Dave Grisez kicked six barrels of fuel out of a C-124 fifty feet over the Pole in 1956. He was a construction worker in the Navy, and he spent fourteen months on the ice putting up what was to become McMurdo. If the public has only a vague awareness of Antarctica now, in the fifties the continent existed only in the realm of fantasy. Before leaving his small town in Indiana Dave wrote in his black vinyl diary, ‘Auntie Doris thinks it's hot at the South Pole.' On 26 October 1956, his twenty-first birthday, Dave wrote in the same diary in a cold tent on Ross Island, ‘A C-124 took off to fly over the Pole this afternoon. They are afraid that Russia is at or near the Pole.' He had been working all winter flattening ice for a runway. On 4 September he recorded, ‘Sky was pink, blue, green, turquoise, gold, yellow and lime. Would trade it all for a moonlit night with a farm girl in Indiana.'

One day, forty years after this was written, I walked into the Heavy Shop at McMurdo to get a litre of transmission fluid. Dave Grisez was standing in the corridor wiping oil from his hands. He had just taken a job as a machinist in the Heavy Shop. He had got the girl in Indiana, but he had come back. ‘Call of the quiet land,' he said.

∗

I met a man who had been assessing the long-term build-up of global pollutants in the atmosphere. He was trying to get home for Christmas, but the incoming plane from McMurdo had been delayed, one painful hour at a time, for the past two days, and all he could do was hover close to his suitcases like a wasp around a jamjar. He had been travelling for thirty years.

‘I want to sit at home and think about it now,' he said. ‘I want to ask myself why I went to all those places.'

I, too, often ask myself why. A small, white worm of doubt wriggled away in the dungeons of consciousness, fidgeting over the unanswerable question about escape or pursuit. Travel represented either a journey of discovery concerned with pushing forward all kinds of boundaries, or an easy-access escape hatch to a primrose path. It was a treacherously familiar stretch of the psychic landscape.

I had never understood the appeal of remaining within earshot of the tinkling bells of the parish church –
campanilismo
, they call it in Italy. Travelling gave me and all the other compulsive travellers a new identity away from that place called home; at least, ostensibly it did. As everyone who has done it has discovered, and as many writers have written since Horace (though no one has ever done it better than him),
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt
– You can run away as far as you like but you'll never get away from yourself. Knowing that was no reason to stop, even if it could be a little disappointing to find oneself lurking in the corner of the Taklamakan Desert after all the effort it took to get there. For me, it meant I was still trying. That was how I saw it.

Somehow, somewhere in a dark, voiceless place in my heart, I sensed that one day I would find something more important than myself lying in wait – something that would put all those other places I had tramped through in perspective. It was not that the other places had disappointed me. I had fallen passionately in love with many landscapes. If you don't know what you're looking for, it's difficult to be disappointed.

I began travelling at the age of sixteen when I took a train to Paris with a friend. I had just sat for my O-Levels, and had been working in a clothes shop to raise the cash for the trip. My friend had been an usherette in a cinema. We camped for a week at a site in the Bois de Boulogne, strolled aimlessly along Hausmann's wide boulevards, discovered Impressionism,
Livre de Poche
existential novels and
pains au chocolat
, met some Finns and drank a lot of vodka. Before that, holidays had been taken in Cornwall, Devon or south Wales with my brother, mother, father and sometimes a pair of grandparents bringing up the rear. Two features of these holidays have taken up residence in my memory. First of all, the sun was always shining, a phenomenon I can only explain as a trick played by my retrospective imagination. Second, I clearly recall that our daily collective aim was always to
get away from everyone else
. We were, at that stage, a reasonably happy family; or so I remember it. My brother, eighteen months younger than I am and similar in temperament and looks (though thinner, damn him), has been brain-damaged since before his first birthday, probably as the result of a vaccination against whooping cough. We spent most of the time steering him away from other children's elaborate sandcastles, upon which he enjoyed descending in an impressive flying leap, or from the pointed mountains of buns on café counters which tended to come crashing to the floor when he appeared in front of them.

So I had no role models – I didn't know any travellers. I followed my instinct. On the last day of the camping holiday in Paris I woke up in our small tent, in which we had inexplicably been joined by a pair of stertorous Finns, and I didn't feel sorry that it was over. I felt as if it had only just begun.

Seventeen years on, when I reached the South Pole, I had got as far, geographically, as anyone can go on this earth. In retrospect, it seems like a natural conclusion to all the places that preceded it. It was as if one great long journey was coming to an end, and I looked over my shoulder at the miles that had unravelled since the tent in Paris. There were none I wished I hadn't covered. Yet there was a payback; the attrition of which climbers are so aware. I wanted freedom more than I wanted a partner or children, and on the road I was free. Back at home, increasingly, it seemed a tough choice to have to make.

In Antarctica I met many people who were struggling with this dilemma. The pressures of separation had always been present on the ice. During the first Operation Deep Freeze in the fifties the enlisted men used to hold Dear John parties when the mail arrived. At the Pole now, letters were strange and obsolete artefacts of the past, replaced by electronic mail. Email was as much a part of life there as food and drink. The problem of long-distance relationships, however, could not be solved by technology. One individual told me his girlfriend had just dumped him by email. On station anxiety was concealed behind a mask of humorous resignation and encapsulated in the apocryphal email message they had pinned on the wall of the computer room: ‘Yours is bigger, but his is here.'

I was thinking about this as I stepped out of the science building and was accosted by my new friend Nann. She was a large woman from Chicago who looked as though her hair had been arranged with a blowtorch, and she had her own reason for making the journey. She had come to the Pole to get away from her husband. Her responsibilities as general factotum on station included cleaning the toilets, and she called herself a porcelain engineer.

‘I'm going to see a balloon go up,' she said. ‘Come along, why don't you?' With that, she took my arm and pulled me along.

The balloons released each day by a meteorologist called Kathy captured atmospheric data which could then be used to compile weather records. It happened to be the summer solstice, but it was hard to celebrate the longest day at a place where day never ended. In the inflation room at the top of the balloon tower Kathy spread the translucent fabric over a large table and began pumping it with helium.

‘What happens to them when they're up there?' I asked.

‘Sooner or later – depending on the type of balloon – they expand so they can't hold the pressure within them any more, then they burst and come tumbling back to earth.'

‘Which is your favourite type of balloon?' I asked, shouting over the loud hiss of helium.

‘Well, size matters,' she said.

‘As in all things,' interrupted Nann.

‘The bigger balloons take more preparation, go up more slowly and gracefully, and you feel you've accomplished something. Could you give me a hand getting this out?'

The balloon was now ten feet in diameter, and as I held the small styrofoam box attached to the bottom, Kathy opened a pair of metal doors and stepped on to a platform.

‘I give you life!' she shouted as she flung her balloon away, and we watched it float peacefully off into the blue, like an Ascension.

‘It looks like a condom,' said Nann.

At that moment, a voice crackled over the loudspeaker.

‘We have seen black dots on the horizon, assumed to be the Japanese,' it seemed to be saying.

‘God!' I said, imagining that the Second World War was about to be re-enacted on the ice sheet. ‘What the hell's that about?'

‘It's an expedition coming in!' said Nann gleefully, pulling on her parka. ‘Let's get out there, to see 'em come in.'

On the way she told me that a Japanese called Susumu Nakamura had skied from Hercules Inlet on the Ronne Ice Shelf. He had covered 775 miles, and it had taken him thirty-nine days, four of which were rest days. He was accompanied by a navigator and three television crewmen on snowmobiles.

Japan had first involved itself with Antarctica in 1910 when Nobu Shirase set out from Tokyo in the
Kainan-Maru
(Southern Pioneer). He reached the Ross Ice Shelf, which he thought looked like ‘a series of pure white folding screens', and marched 160 miles inland before sailing over to the Bay of Whales. There his team stumbled upon the
Fram
, which they thought was a pirate ship. The Norwegians, in turn, were horrified by the wanton slaughter of seals perpetrated by the Japanese, and when they were invited aboard the
Kainan-Maru
to drink tea and eat slices of cake they said in hushed tones that they wouldn't have got halfway to Antarctica in such a crummy ship. While in the Bay of Whales Shirase and his men unloaded their stores from ship to shore wearing traditional Japanese straw boots. ‘We wound our way upwards', said the expedition report, ‘like a string of pilgrims ascending Mount Fuji. It was without doubt the worst of all our trials and tribulations since the moment when we had left our mothers' wombs.'

It was difficult, as a Japanese in those days, to venture on to the world stage. When the
Kainan-Maru
stopped in Wellington the
New Zealand Times
referred to the men as ‘a crew of gorillas'. Japan none the less went on to launch scientific expeditions to Antarctica and was an original signatory of the Antarctic Treaty, the international agreement protecting Antarctica from exploitation. The second Asian country to sign it was India, which in 1983 became the first developing nation in Asia to become a full Treaty member. India's involvement in Antarctica had emerged largely as a result of prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of his country's global position several decades previously.

Susumu skied up to the Ceremonial Pole, his cheeks ‘burnt as black as lacquer', as the
Kainan-Maru
expedition reported theirs had been. A single tear froze as it emerged from a corner of his eye. After handshakes all round (anyone would think they were English), the party began unfurling corporate flags for the inevitable sponsorship photographs, and later we saw all their small yellow tents pitched in the distance.

The frostnipped faces and frozen beards reminded me of other images of exhausted men at the end of punishing journeys across Antarctica. The point of these treks appeared to be to see how dead you can get. Well,
chacun á son góut
. I could understand the appeal of answering the question, ‘Can it be done?' If you did it, no one could ever ask the question again. It was yours. All the journeys made by the almost-deads were treks through monomania. They were undertakings of the mind. Yet writing a book was like that, so perhaps we were doing the same thing, only in different ways.

∗

The Race around the World was the most enduring Christmas tradition at the South Pole, and it began at four o'clock in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. The two-mile course involved three circuits around the Pole. They had rigged up a starting line and engaged a couple of timekeepers, and participants could complete the course however they liked. One skied, one sat on a sledge towed by a snowmobile, someone else rode a hobby horse and a bunch of committed drinkers were driven round on the back of a dozer. The most imaginative competitor had taken the rowing machine from the weights room, loaded it on to a sledge and was towed round the course, rowing all the way.

I jogged around and developed a violent headache which, aggravated by the altitude, slid seamlessly into migraine. I was obliged to sneak off to the medical facility under the dome and lie down. The doctor was a descendant of Otto Sverdrup, the distinguished Arctic explorer and the captain of Nansen's
Fram
on the
Farthest North
journey. Her name was Eileen, and she put me on oxygen for two hours.