And of course the ones who had laid her and left her, as they said, had made her frightened and uncertain as well as mad. Some of those guys she had really loved, or thought she had; they hadn’t come on in the usual idiot way, and she had thought they were different; and still it hadn’t worked out. How could that be, if she was so attractive? Was she too much of a bitch to live with? Or too boring? She didn’t think so. But then again she had always had trouble articulating her thoughts; somehow what she said aloud was always a platitude approximating the original thought, which had been far more interesting. She had never learned the trick of catching those hard thoughts on the fly, and indeed when she had caught them and expressed them properly, those were often the times that got her into biggest trouble, convincing people (men) that she was mean, or just weird. So it was either vanilla or bile, or staying silent. Or going climbing, free solo, the best way.
Or later, to make a living, leading tour groups of strangers and spending the whole time on automatic pilot, playing the role of the Happy Mountain Woman, earth mother, nature spirit, athlete philosopher, wild woman—which role actually seeped back into her, to an extent, as she became what she was playing at, like during her cheerleader days; inflicting a role, like spiking a volleyball right in their face; and this one felt good; a relief from the usual cynicism and distrust. Clients could very legitimately be held at a proper client distance, a professional relationship, and from there some fairly decent interactions could be had, with some nice men willing to treat her as the guide and no more. It was enough anyway, the client/guide relationship—it had a certain student/teacher or even child/parent aspect to it, depending on how the people in the roles played them. Taking care of people. So, many fairly pleasant human interactions. But the big man/woman thing; no luck. Lots of bummers, enough to disturb the whole thing. She wanted a big time-out.
Unfortunately Antarctica was not the place for that. The man-to-woman ratio was still about 70 to 30, and that made a lot of them even crazier than they were in the world. The women too sometimes went hectic with glee, women in some cases who had never had enough attention in the world and so revelled in it now, trolling around and having some hard fun, breaking hearts like gutting little fish they’d caught. She’d done a bit of that herself. Bit of revenge in it, no doubt. Other women went catatonic under the testosterone assault, or burst out laughing and said No to the whole fool lot. Others tried to keep their eyes open and their wits about them, to see if they could find a man they liked. After all, there were a lot of men there. As the Mac women said, The odds were good, but the goods were odd. So that took a little sorting out, usually—trying a few men to find the one you liked. Which could look like trolling. And this caused problems. In fact when it came to their love lives most of the women on the ice were like walking soap operas. Many went through one ice romance after another. Some did seasonal contracts, like ASL. Certainly nine out of ten ice romances ended badly.
Among them, unfortunately, her relationship with X. He was a lot of the things she liked, too—he was big, gentle, smart; as Steve had used to say, teasing her even in his last year, just her type: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. As Steve had been. No, not really. Anyway X had been many good things, but also overidealistic and moody, overintellectual, naive, indoorsy, inactive, unathletic, curiously passive; and even though she was sick of men’s aggressiveness, she had to admit that she did like a certain dash in a man, a certain fire and style, which X had lacked. He railed against the system all the time, and yet slouched around without doing much physical out in the world, which was her usual solution to frustration. He was just too mellow. And he was younger than Val too, four years younger, so that he often seemed like a kid to her, a sophomoric college kid, even though strictly speaking he was older than that.
So she had chafed a bit during their vacation in New Zealand. And it hadn’t helped to have him break into the I’m-being-tortured-by-a-Nazi-mountain-guide routine as they hiked up the utterly easy Bealey Spur, a routine that she had gotten so sick of that she could not even express it. Every time someone said anything to that effect, or even suggested it with a look, it made her so mad that it ruined the whole trip for her. And it happened every trip. Even walking up a green escalator into alpine mountain glory.
So they had said good-bye and she had flown back to the States, and gotten there with no plan, and just kind of wandered that whole off-season, from one climbing hole to the next. In the past she had spent her offseasons with her grandmother on the old family farm, taking care of the old woman and being taken care of by her, and that had been pleasant, a real anchor in her life; but Annie had died two years before while Val was in Antarctica, and now Val had no pattern to fall into when back in the world. It had been a strange few months. And by the time she went back down to the ice for the new season, she had lost any interest she had had in X. The on-ice/off-ice format of the McMurdo lifestyle was hard on even the good relationships, and if one was troubled, the big breaks made it very easy to end them. So when she got back to Mac Town she had had her eye out for an excuse to disengage from X, as she realized consciously only later. And a new mountaineer named Mike had served as about the perfect excuse, or so she had thought at first; she had been smitten, she had to admit it. Now it was clear that Mike had a bad case of what Val called climber’s syndrome, consisting of a self-absorption so deep that it could not be plumbed; compared to it the usual male blubber was no more than the subcutaneous layer with which everyone had to cope. Mike had been quite happy to sleep with her, of course, but in a month he had not learned a thing about her; it would probably be dangerous to ask him to recall her last name. In only two days this Wade Norton had learned a thousand times more about her. So it was bye-bye to Mike; and now X was gone from Mac Town, and she hadn’t even apologized. So it was back to trolling. Or not. In any case, yet another bad experience to add to all the rest. She had been the one to screw up this time, she had to admit it.
On the helicopter ride back to Mac Town, Wade sat next to her in one of the side compartments of the Huey, where they were alone together in their own sonic space; they were just barely able to hear each other, but could if they spoke directly in each other’s ears. Looking down at the sea ice flashing under them, they traded comments. When she thought about how nice he had been on this trip, it made her wince; to go from this smart, polite, interesting, somehow subtle, even withdrawn man, to Jack and Jim and the rest of the clients on the Amundsen! It was painful. She liked this man a lot; he had just the mellowness that she liked, but that extra dash she admired as well—a Washington operator—a sly sense of humor; paying attention to those beakers with what seemed his total interest; and then to her too, but as a guide, a person with career problems, an equal in the world; not to be instructed in Washington politics or the global situation or whatever, but just talked with, in mutual interest. Now of course leaving, and soon no doubt. It always happened that way.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” he exclaimed in her ear, surprising her.
“No,” she said in his.
“Only child?” Sounding surprised.
He was looking down at the trash ice. “No,” she said in his ear, surprising herself. She never talked about this. “No, I had a brother. But he died.”
He nodded; looked at her briefly. Looked back down at the ice. All the way back to Mac Town he sat beside her, looking down at the ice, his arm pressed against hers, his hip against hers, his leg against hers. The pressure was saying, I’m sorry. It was saying, There’s nothing can be said about that. Which was true. This was how Steve himself had comforted her in his last year, sitting beside her with an arm over her shoulder, not saying anything. At sixteen and twelve, neither of them had been able to figure out much to say about it. Val stared down at the trash ice flowing underneath them. She liked this man who was leaving.
Back in Mac. She walked up to her room, lost in her thoughts
.
She had been eleven when she first learned something was wrong. They told her that Steve was sick, that he had mononucleosis and it would take him a while to recover. He was in the hospital, and then in Houston, to go to a special hospital. That’s when they told her it was leukemia. He was gone for months, but came home for visits. In later years she didn’t remember much about those visits; but she did remember being shocked at how much thinner he was, and that he moved so slowly. All his muscles seemed stiff, including eventually his lips, so that it was hard for him to talk the same.
Most of their time together in that period they played a board game he had liked when they were younger. She couldn’t recall the details of the rules, but the board was a map of the world, and the game had to do with weather, and your piece was on a clear square that was a quadrant of the world map, and if you rolled a twelve the clear square had to be shifted to another quadrant of the map. Something like that. They had played it for hours, in near silence. Val had the impression that Steve had grown up very rapidly in Houston, and was a kind of grown-up now because of what was happening to him. He looked at her as from a great distance away. Once he rolled boxcars twice in a row, then three times; four times; five times. Moving the quadrant around the world every time. Then six times in a row, double sixes every time. They had stared at each other across the board, then looked down at the dice again, acutely uncomfortable, aware together that something very strange was happening. “Guess I’m going on a trip,” he said, and Val had interrupted his turn and picked up the dice and rolled them herself.
That little memory was all she had, for hours and hours of time—that and a few more fragments, like him walking slowly down the hall, bowlegged, to put the game away. Or when he left for Houston for the last time, and said to her, “See you later,” and she had said “See you later.”
Then horsing around in history class and Mr. Sanders coming in near the end of the period and taking her outside, very serious, to tell her her brother had died, he was very sorry, she had to go home. She remembered looking down from the second-story balcony at the parking lot, the scatter of teachers’ cars, the tennis courts in their line off to the left.
So her brother Steve had died. He had been bigger than her, and stronger than her, and more full of life; he had taught her to love the outdoors, and had taken her along when a lot of older brothers wouldn’t have. He had been trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, etc. Her hero.
And after that no one else had seemed quite as good. She had in him a standard for behavior that was no doubt very high. She had also a fuse that was no doubt very short. No doubt a lot of what had happened to her since then had followed from those characteristics. It is eerie sometimes to contemplate how much we create our own reality. The life of the mind is an imaginary relationship to a real situation; but then the real situation keeps happening, event after event, and many of those events are out of our control, but many others are the direct result of the imagination’s take on things. So she was aware that her problems were not just because men were so often screwed up; because sometimes they weren’t, and still she botched her relationships with them, sometimes with men she had liked a lot. But they hadn’t been as good as her Steve. Sooner or later they let her down, and she blew up. And on she went, getting more and more skittish. The shorter her fuse got, the shorter it got. She was a case of walking burnt toast; mountain guiding was the last thing she should have been trying. It was like trying to be an open-air therapist when she was the one that needed the therapy. She needed a big time-out from people in general. She needed to find a man she really and truly liked. But the goods were odd, and the odds were not good. And not just in Mac Town.
6
In the Footsteps of Amundsen
Flying over the Ross Sea in a helicopter, I cannot help remembering Shackleton’s expedition of 1908, one of the greatest in Antarctic history, though little remembered now. The sea ice below us is now filled with the broken fragments of the old ice shelf, the big white islands all cliff-sided and atilt; no language can speak them, I am happy you have these images to see so that I do not have to try. We fly at a hundred kilometers per hour, perhaps two hundred meters over the bergs: like gods we flit over the surface of this world! But for Shackleton and his companions it was not so easy.
When Shackleton decided to try to return to the Antarctic after Scott had sent him home, he did not have any very enthusiastic backing from either the British Navy or the Royal Geographical Society. He managed to raise the money through his own efforts, gaining grants from rich patrons in English society; and he returned south with a private crew, in 1908. Now Scott at that time was himself organizing a return to the south, through official naval and Royal Society channels, and he was outraged at the existence of Shackleton’s expedition. He felt that even the very chance to try for the Pole was his, as if he were St. George, and had all rights to the dragon until it or he be dead. Anyone who challenged that idea was betraying him.
Shackleton wrote to him, however, and asked him if he could use the Discovery Hut that we recently visited in McMurdo. Scott refused this permission! Moreover, he claimed explicitly that all attempts on the Pole from Ross Island were his to make, and that Shackleton must stay east of a certain longitude line which put him far on the other side of the Ross Sea.
And Shackleton agreed to this arrangement! These British are so strange. They were playing a game left over from the Middle Ages. But we should not be too surprised at this, because all stories are immortal and alive at all times, and these men had been told all their lives the tales of medieval chivalry. And we should consider also how many times we ourselves have jousted with a rival for love or honor.
So Shackleton gave Scott his word not to go to Ross Island, unless it was necessary for survival. Scott understood this to mean “survival of their lives,” of course.
But Shackleton could not find a suitable base on the other side of the Ross Sea. Over there, where I am looking now, there are no islands like Ross Island—for there are no mountains like mighty Erebus anywhere else on Earth—it is a singularity, a bolide of dense ch’i. Over there on the other side of the bay the coastline is drowned in ice, and only the edge of the Great Ice Barrier, as Ross so accurately named it, presented itself to those who arrived by sea in tiny ships. And Shackleton did not trust the edge of the Ice Barrier, the way Amundsen later did. Amundsen climbed onto the ice shelf at what seemed a permanent indentation, and he read the snowscape to the south, and postulated the existence of a very low island, much later confirmed and named Roosevelt Island; a fine bit of feng shui that. And it caused Amundsen to trust that the ice at this Bay of Whales would hold for the six months he would live on it. It was a risk, for even stable ice calves from time to time into the sea; but a calculated risk. Shackleton, however, did not know enough to make the calculation. And yet at the same time he was a cautious man, a good planner. Only this allowed him to get so far south with so little snowcraft.
And so he returned to Ross Island! Unhappy man! To break his promise to Scott racked him; he did not sleep for a week, writing an anguished letter to his wife in which he explained that he was going to twist his promise to Scott to mean that he would not visit Ross Island unless it was necessary for survival of the expedition. But he was not really satisfied with this formulation. And neither was Scott.
Shackleton built a new hut of his own, twenty miles down the coast of Ross Island from Scott’s hut. He did not use the Discovery Hut except under duress, and generally even then slept in tents outside it, claiming that it was colder inside than outside, an uncanny phenomenon that many others have noted since. In time he forgot about his medieval promise, and carried on with his expedition. And in the Antarctic spring of October 1908, he and his group took off for the Pole.
And he was a better leader of men than Scott had been, and had learned some things about sledging. He failed to use skis at all, a strange lapse in equipment even if you are determined to manh
aul. But he did take along ponies, which they marched to depots and shot and deposited as food, just as Amundsen would do later with his dogs.
So Shackleton and his men and the ponies pulled a sledge across the ice you see below us now, much thicker then of course, and uniform, and flat. But we have been flying at a hundred kilometers an hour now for nearly an hour, and there is no end in sight; even the tall Transantarctics are still under the horizon ahead of us, and will not appear for a couple hours more. It took those men weeks to haul their sledges across this space below us, as you can imagine.
Then when they made their landfall they discovered the Beardmore Glacier, the Great Glacier as they first called it so much more finely, pouring out of the mountains for as far uphill as they could see. Up the Great Glacier the four men hauled their sledge, going tremendously better than Scott and Wilson and Shackleton had gone in 1902.
But they were cutting every aspect of things right to the bone. And up on the high polar plateau they began to break down. They were starving to the point of illness, and to save weight they had left behind a great deal of their clothes, so that they were wearing only long underwear, overpants, sweaters, and jackets; this left them so cold that when Marshall the doctor tried to take their temperatures, no one but him registered higher than the thermometer’s minimum of 94.2 Fahrenheit. They were cold!