Antarctica Read online

  Then another crew member came down the hatch, and gestured for them to belt up. Wade could not tell by his expression whether he was worried or not.

  So Wade sat for a long time, in the roar which was like a kind of silence, waiting, trying to figure out how a plane could not need flaps. He had seen them curve out and down on a hundred landings, perhaps a thousand. It was like a duck landing. They were definitely part of the descent mechanism.

  Finally the plane appeared to slow down. The pitch of the roar lowered; then abruptly it cut back to nearly nothing. Oh my God, Wade thought, his heart beginning to race—they’ve cut the engines. The crew members were rushing around the interior. One of them went to the door at the front and began to open it. Opening the door? Were they bailing out? The other passengers were standing up, and with fumbling fingers Wade unhooked his seatbelt and leaped to his feet.

  The door opened. Brilliant white light poured into the plane, and a man in a T-shirt appeared in the doorway. Wade jumped at the sight, severely startled.

  They were on the ground. He had felt no tilt forward in the plane, no touchdown on a runway. Actually they appeared to be on snow. A skiway. Apparently a landing made on skis, and without operating flaps, was a very gentle thing indeed.

  Mildly stunned, Wade made his way to the open door. White snow everywhere. The airport consisted of four Hercs in a row, and a few lines of red buildings on wheels, with giant hitches at their front ends, like immense U-Haul trailers. It was intensely bright, and very cold; the man in the T-shirt was seriously underdressed. He waved Wade down the steps. “Welcome to Antarctica!”

  Hello my friends. Thank you for joining me on this voyage across the bottom of the Earth. As you can see, I have nearly completed the flight south from New Zealand. Soon we will arrive on the frozen continent. As we approach our landing, we see that deep in the big notch in the continent called the Ross Sea, a magnificent volcano has risen from the sea floor. This volcano makes a triangular island seventy kilometers across, and it rises around four or five thousand meters from the sea floor. Every measurement of this volcano’s height comes up with a different figure, a fact that confirms what the eye sees immediately, that the inner line of Erebus’s form creates a knot of lung-mai or dragon arteries that is precisely contiguous with its outward form, so that we see it in all five dimensions at once. This sometimes makes ordinary calculations of its height difficult.

  Now we have landed, my friends, and are being driven across the sea ice to McMurdo. The little town, as you see, is placed in a scooped-out hollow on the tip of a long peninsula of the volcano island, an arm of lava that surged down off Erebus to the west not so very long ago, leaving a final lava cone at the very tip. How strong the dragon arteries of this island!

  As we approach the tip of the peninsula and our landfall, let me recall for you the story of the first human landfall on Antarctica, which happened on January 24th of 1895. When Borchgrevink’s expedition approached the Antarctic Peninsula, they were aware that all previous landings had been on islands offshore, and that no one had ever stepped on the actual land of the continent before. Borchgrevink and his ship’s captain were rowed toward the rocky beach by a sailor, and as they approached they saw their chance at history. Borchgrevink began to move to the bow of the boat to climb out, and the ship’s captain began to wrestle with him, claiming for some reason that he had the right to go first. The two men were wrestling still as the boat coasted up to the rocky beach, and seeing it the seaman rowing them leaped over the side into waist-deep water, and ran up to the shore ahead of the entangled officers. Thus he was the first human ever to step on Antarctica. What was his name? I can’t remember.

  On the slope of the town, now, we look back toward the airport on ice, and beyond it, across some fifty kilometers of the Ross Sea, to the mainland of the continent. It is a superb prospect. Over there mountains jump immediately out of the ocean: peaks taller than Fuji and Mont Blanc stand within twelve kilometers of the ocean, and the whole range, as you can see, is complex, multifaceted, and deeply riven by glacial valleys, down which slanting beams of yellow sunlight glow. On certain days optical effects in the air create fata morganas in which the mountains appear five times as tall as they do now. Oh my, yes. This view from McMurdo is very strong, bringing into play simultaneously all the landscape’s oppositions: hsü-shih or empty-full, yin-hsien or invisible-visible, chin-yuan or near-far, also finite-infinite. Thus naturally the fifth dimension, li, the emptiness before all spacetime, is strongly evoked as well; and also that value of a landscape that goes beyond all notions of beauty, its i-ching or density of soul, and its shen-yun or divine resonance.

  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 onc
e 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.

  4

  Observation Hill

  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

  blue sky

  white snow

  or

  white cloud

  black rock.

  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.