Antarctica (5 page)

When they were done Val walked over with the rest to have a look. It was a nice display. Most of the items had been left unlabelled, as they were self-explanatory. The spindly wooden sledge they had left on the rock hut, stripped to the grain and bleached by its first stay out here, was now placed next to the shelter in a kind of cradle of rock. Then under the roof and behind the
glass of the shelter itself, were a pick-axe, a blubber stove, a tin of salt, a hurricane lamp with a spare glass, a tea towel, a canvas bag, a thermos flask, several little corked bottles of chemicals, a bulb atomizer, a magnifying glass, several microscope slides, seven thermometers (three Fahrenheit, one Celsius, one minimum reading, two oral); a lead weight on a string, five eye droppers, a pair of tweezers, thirty-five sample tubes, all corked; a skewer, a bottle of alcohol, two enamel dishes, four pencils, a glass syringe, four envelopes with “
TERRA NOVA
” printed on them; six plain envelopes, some perforated stickers, three rolls of Kodak film marked “
TO BE DEVELOPED BEFORE MAY 1ST, 1911
,” two tubes of magnesium powder for an Agfa camera flash; and then, along with the letters from Cherry-Garrard and Hillary concerning the disposition of the artifacts, reproductions of the two photographs that had been taken of the three explorers by Herbert Ponting, one before they took off, and the famous one after they got back, in which they were sitting at the big table inside the Cape Evans hut. Lastly, in George’s finest coup of all, they had the shells of the three penguin eggs that Cherry-Garrard had donated to the uncaring keepers at the South Kensington Museum of Natural History in England; George had tracked them down in a specimen drawer in Edinburgh University, and now they were in the display too.

The camera pros were checking out the old film and flash powder, oohing and aahing. It certainly did seem that these objects served to make the three travelers more real to the imagination. There was so much of it—and this was just the stuff they had left behind!

“They sure traveled heavy, didn’t they?”

“Wilson was interested in a lot of things.”

“And back when there was such a thing as amateur science.”

“Hey, unpack your bag and tack it up and it’d look just like this.”

“I don’t know—a tea towel? Seven thermometers? A chemistry set?”

George was now wandering around the ridge, looking at the new structure from all the angles he could. Mercifully the wind had died for the moment, so that people could pull up their ski masks. Val saw that George was stuffed with a contentment beyond happiness; serious, as in the midst of a religious ritual. This was his moment, and it had actually come off. Elliot and some other camerapeople were still filming, but everyone had forgotten them. As George passed by, Arnold said, “It’s beautiful, George! It’s a great idea! The people who make it here will really appreciate this.”

The little smile on George’s face was angelic.

Then he was busy organizing the start of the dedication ceremony he had worked up. While they did that, Val took a closer look at the two photos of the three explorers. After they had survived the hurricane on this ridge, and were given back their lives by the miraculous recovery of their tent, their struggle home had been a nightmare beyond anything a Footsteps expedition could reproduce, thank God. But they had made it back. And Ponting had taken this photo within an hour of their return, after they had cut their frozen outer clothing off of them and thawed them a bit over the stove. Wilson looked straight out at posterity, grim, shattered, knowing full well that he had escaped leading his friends to death by sheer luck alone. That he would just months later walk south with Scott to the Pole was amazing.

Cherry-Garrard also looked into the camera. He had suffered from depression much of the rest of his life,
and in this photo he appeared crazed already, driven out of his mind by the extremities of the journey. Although possibly that was just his near-sightedness. But no; such naked looks, from both him and Wilson; that was not just astigmatism. Ponting had caught their souls on film, caught their souls in the act of slipping back into their bodies, abashed at having taken off prematurely for the afterworld.

And then there between them was Birdie Bowers, knocking back a mug as if just back from a walk down to the corner store—looking if anything more refreshed and rested than he had in the departure photo. Bowers! Henry Robert Bowers, God bless him, his beak of a nose profiled like a parrot’s; Birdie Bowers of the Antarctic, who never got cold, never got tired, never got discouraged; Bowers the Optimist, whose only fault appeared to have been an optimism so extreme that it sometimes made his companions want to strangle him. After the hurricane had relented, for instance, he had wanted to make one last visit to the penguins before retreating. And back at Cape Evans he had given a lecture explaining how perfect their Boy Scout equipment was, so perfect that it could not possibly be improved upon in any regard; this from a man wearing a canvas jacket and hat rather than a parka. And when he had been caught with some of their ponies on an ice floe that broke away from the ice shelf, he had refused to save himself until he could save the nags as well. And on the fatal trek to the Pole he had pulled the hardest of all, even deprived of his skis, and had cheerfully done most of the camp work as the other men slowly lost strength and died around him. And never a word of complaint, not right to his death; rather the opposite.

It must have taken a lot, Val thought darkly as she
looked at the photo, to kill Birdie Bowers off. She felt a lot for that little man, she treasured his memory in particular, of all the old boys; because Val was an optimist herself. Or at least people often accused her of it. And indeed she did try to make the best of things. It seemed to her that that was the way one should behave—it was how her mother and grandmother, both dead now, had taught her to behave, by precept and example. And on adult reflection, she approved of the lesson fully. Making the best of things was what courage meant, in her opinion; that was right action in the face of life. And how hard it was, given how dark her thoughts had become, and how dismal everything sometimes appeared to her; how against the grain of her temperament it had become. But she kept at it anyway, as an act of the will. And all it did was get her laughed at, and most of what she said continually discounted or put down, as if being optimistic was a matter of a somewhat obtuse intelligence, or at best the luck of biochemistry, rather than a policy that had to be maintained, sometimes in the midst of the blackest moods imaginable.

No; the Birdie Bowerses of this world were only regarded as fools. And the world being what it was, Val supposed that there was some truth in it. Why be optimistic, how be optimistic, when there was so much wrong with so much? In a world coming apart it had to be a kind of stupidity. But still Val held to it, stubbornly, just barely. Without even thinking she would say the thing that took the most positive slant on the matter, and get laughed at, and grit her teeth and try to live up to that slant. Such an attitude was an asset for any mountain guide, of course, or should have been. But the way it was received was one of the things that were beginning to turn her into burnt toast. It took an
effort to be optimistic, it was a moral position. But no one understood that.

“Those guys,” Arnold said, looking over her shoulder at the old photos. “They really were crazy.”

“Yes. They were.”

Then George was hustling them all around to their various stations, becoming more manic as time passed; for the sun was soon to come up, and they would not be able to film a second take of that. Happily the sky was clear, and the horizon to the northeast a straight line of startling clarity: shiny ice below, pale blue sky above.

With most of the group gathered in a little knot next to the rock hut, George began by reading the climactic passage from Cherry-Garrard’s book, when the storm had ripped away their tent and hut roof, and left them apparently with only a few more hours to live. Val, uneasy at hearing this passage that struck right to the heart of what she had been thinking, moved back up the ridge beyond the new structure, where she could just hear George’s voice, a reedy tenor wavering on the freshening wind: “‘Gradually the situation got more desperate…. There was more snow coming through the walls … our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks over the door.’” George read in a singsong like a preacher, and though Val could only catch a phrase here and there over the sound of the wind, Cherry’s King James cadences were obvious. “‘Bowers … up and out of his bag continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof … he was magnificent…. And then it went…. The uproar of it all was indescribable.’”

Val bent her head, trying to imagine the scene; the thunder of the wind lashing the canvas to shreds, the
rocks falling in, the snow pouring onto them, the means of return blown away.

“‘The next I knew was Bowers’s head across Bill’s body. “We’re all right,” he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful.’”

Val turned away abruptly and walked up the ridge, feeling a sudden increase in her strange pain. Who
were
these men? The clients she guided were not like that; and she was not like that either. Could people change so much, century by century?

“‘Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and hymns,’” she heard George exclaim. This was the cue for the music, George going a bit over the top in his enthusiasm. But everyone there began to sing except for Val and the film crew, anchored by a quartet of professionals from Wellington. They sang a version of the Tallis Canon, adapted by Benjamin Britten to fit some hymn verses written by Joseph Addison. The sky overhead was now fully light, a pure transparent pale blue, shading to a bright white over the northeastern horizon, where the sun was about to make its reappearance. They could see for many miles over the white sea ice covering the Ross Sea, clotted with icebergs from the old shelf, so that in the growing light the plain turned pewter and shaved silver, a mirror jumble. The quartet took off in the parts of the canon, somehow weaving together the words of the old hymn, George conducting them with great sweeps of his hands:

And as they sang the last line the sun cracked the horizon to the northeast, the incredible shard of light fountaining over the sea ice and the immense bergs caught in it, illuminating the scene with a blinding glare, the great world itself turning all to light, in a space spacious beyond words. The little group around the rock hut cheered, they hugged each other, they hugged George, and shook his hand, and clapped him on the back, all cameras forgotten; but Elliot and Geena kept filming.

God knew what the three explorers would have made of it. They had lain there in the midwinter darkness exposed to the hurricane for two more days without food and with very little sleep, before the wind dropped and they could go out and look for the tent, and find it. “Our lives had been taken away and given back to us,” as Cherry wrote. So that this was not an inappropriate site for a spring celebration, now that Val thought of it; the return of the sun, the rebirth, the gift of life.

So she went down to the others less reluctantly than she might have, and got them all back off the ridge to the team tent, and joined the celebratory meal, and when a toast was offered to the old boys she said “Hear hear” gladly, and with feeling; with too much feeling,
really. For those three men were her saints, in a way—the patron saints of all stupid pointless expeditions into the wilderness, the Three Silly Men to match the Three Wise Men, silly men who yet remained gracious in the face of death. Who had made it back to Cape Evans alive, and thus turned all the stupid false stories of their Victorian youth into one stupid true story, transforming Tennyson to steel. The Worst Journey in the World! And now this memorializing group had done a proper homage to that best journey in Antarctic history, and made a shrine to craziness and decency that was, in some way she didn’t fully understand, something Val could believe in. Her own brand of religion. She proposed another toast, throat tightening as she did: “To Birdie Bowers, the optimist!” And they cried “Hear hear,” and drank hot chocolate, and Elliot, of all people, teasing her she supposed, cried out, “We’re all right! We’re all right!”

And so they were, for the moment. Though of course the return home would be a pain in the ass.

Then later, when she was back up on the ridge cleaning the site of any stray debris (cannister top, foil paper, etc.) Val got a call from Randi on her little wrist radio. “Hey Val, this is the voice of the south coming to you again through the miracle of shaped and directed radio waves, do you read, over?”

“I read you, Randi. What’s going on?”

“Did you hear what happened to your sandwich?”

“Don’t call him that, what happened?”

“Your ex, then. He’s out with the SPOT train, you know, and he just called in a while ago—he’s been hijacked!”

“What?”

“He’s been hijacked. Someone locked him in the lead vehicle during a Condition One, and when he got out there were only nine vehicles instead of ten! Plundered by ice pirates!”

“Who the hell would do that!”

“Ice pirates!” Randi laughed. “Who the hell knows. But isn’t that funny it happened to X?”

“No! Why the hell would that be funny?”

“Well, because it’s okay! I mean he’s okay, and now he’s finally had the big adventure he came down here looking for!”