Antarctica (12 page)

Here in the town itself, the views are all
kao-yuan
, looking up; before anything else, therefore, I am going to walk up to the top of Observation Hill, the volcanic cone at the end of the peninsula, overlooking the town as you see.

Up here, as you see as I climb, the perspective changes to
p’ing-yan
, the level perspective from a nearby mountain which gives a view horizontally to distant mountains, shading into infinity. I like
p’ing-yan
very much.

The buildings below me comprise McMurdo Station, Ross Island. The town resembles one of the rusty mining towns of Mongolia. But this
shen-yuan
angle, looking down from above, is but one part of the picture. We will find soon enough that the seemingly haphazard and emptied village we look down on is actually inhabited by a civilization wielding all the latest in futuristic technology. It is a strange place, as you will see.

The peninsula, however; the island; the sea ice studded with icebergs; the distant mountain range, so far yet so clear: all beautiful.

As we descend to town, I want to remind you that this Ross Island is tangled deeply in the dragon arteries of
history. It is the island both Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton used as their base of operations. Therein lies a sad story. The first time they came down was in 1902, on the ship
Discovery
, in an expedition commanded by Scott. Shackleton was a junior officer, from the merchant marine rather than the navy, but a strong personality. Scott not so much so; withdrawn, and at first somewhat at a loss concerning what to do in this new land. People had stepped on the continent for the first time, as I said, only seven years before. In human terms, it was a blank slate. The geographical societies of imperial Europe had declared it the next great problem for their imperial-scientific study, and the geographical society in England convinced the British Admiralty that dedicating a ship to the exploration of this new continent would be a good thing strategically. Part of the normal course of the business of the empire. So in the same year that we in our country were fighting the Boxer Rebellion against the oppression of these British colonialists, other men in other offices in London, occupied with other arms of that world-spanning empire, agreed that a single badly built boat, a clunker, a lemon, could certainly be spared for such an unpromising venture. In the same spirit they agreed to send Captain Robert Scott, who had been recommended to them for unknown reasons by the head of the Royal Geographical Society. And so two years later Scott and his men landed on Ross Island, and built the hut that you can see on the point at the other end of town—that little square building in the center of the screen, badly exposed to the wind. We will visit it later.

Scott had not spent his two years of preparation very usefully, however, and once on Ross Island he had no very clear brief; just exploration and science, as far as his formal orders went. But geology and the other earth
sciences were in their infancy as well, this has to be understood. Without feng shui they had no way to read the inner shape of the landscape, and without plate tectonics they had no real understanding of why the Earth looked the way it did, or what might have happened to it in the past. They thought mountains were the result of the Earth shrinking, and the overlarge crust then buckling in lines; or alternatively, perhaps they were the result of the Earth expanding, and lava mountains leaping up out of the resulting cracks. Wegener would soon articulate every schoolchild’s notion that South America and Africa must once have been joined, but that idea was scoffed at for another half a century; the truth is they did not think there had been time for continental drift to have happened, for they were just beginning to come to grips with the tremendous age of the Earth. Lord Kelvin at that time maintained that the Earth, because it was still radioactive, could not be more than a few million years old. So all earth sciences in 1902 were a kind of taxonomy, gathering information in hopes it would help some later generation of scientists better to pierce the veil of the past.

This being the case, Scott’s scientists took weather data, kept records, gathered rock samples, surveyed the territory, and tested methods of travel to see how they would work. Never had men worked in weather quite so cold as this; it averaged thirty degrees Centigrade colder than the Arctic, and the storms could be brutal, even then.

So they wandered around in short sledging trips away from Ross Island. Their sledging worked, except in the Dry Valleys on the mainland immediately across from them, sledges being for travel over ice and snow. They did not know how to use the sledge dogs, however, to pull the sledges for them, and had brought
along no one who could teach them; they thought they had, but the man didn’t really know, and you cannot teach what you do not know. Nansen had learned from the Inuit how to do it, and crossed Greenland using the dogs, and Amundsen learned from Nansen. It was not so hard; the dogs like it. It is only a matter of training and the right harnesses, and off they will go as if it were their destiny to pull humans across the ice—their first act of partnership perhaps, long ago when the whole world was ice.

But Scott never learned that about dogs. What he learned instead was the dogs’ own pleasure in hauling. This is the critical point, my friends; this is the crux of the matter. Scott and his men discovered that even though manhauling wasn’t as efficient as other methods, efficiency was not the highest value. Much more important was the act’s own
sben-yun
, its divine resonance. And they found that it is a very satisfying thing to haul your home across the snow and ice of this world, setting camp after camp. It appeals to something very deep and fundamental in our collective unconscious. That there is a collective unconscious, my friends, never doubt; it may not be exactly as Carl Jung described it, but it exists most certainly, as the very structures of our brains. The human brain grew from about three hundred cubic millimeters to about fifteen hundred cubic millimeters during the time that we were living the lives of nomads, carrying our homes across the surface of this world; and much of that growth occurred in ice ages, my friends, ice ages when even China itself was a kind of Antarctica. And so the structure of our brain reflects that coevolution, and even now, in landscapes of snow and ice such as those we are looking at, our brains fairly hum with the fullness of their
complete structure, resonating under the impact of all the coevolutionary forces that blew it up like a balloon.

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.

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

or

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.

“I don’t think he was wearing his video glasses,” Alan reassured her.

Sylvia paged through his file. He was sixty-one years old. “Does it seem to any of you that the Woos have been getting stranger and stranger?”

“Compared to when?” Joyce said.

“Evolution of the arts,” Alan opined.

“Or they’re running out of candidates.”

“Remember the sound artist?”

They smiled. This Woo had come down and learned to do vocal impressions of all the seals, penguins, skuas, and whales in the McMurdo area, also the helicopters, ventilators, generators, and winds, all then mixed together in his compositions. His farewell performance in the galley had been quite amazing, actually, an Antarctic symphony that put Vaughan Williams’s to shame.