Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice Read online

  *

  ‘My feeling of this part of Antarctica,’ says Greg, ‘is usually much more gentle. But this time it showed itself in a really raw way. We got a faceful.’

  *

  The next evening we go ashore at Half Moon Island, to inspect a penguin rookery. While we’re beaching the first zodiac, a sudden wind springs up and slashes across the bay, making the water bristle. The stones underfoot, as we scramble out of the boats and up the steep beach, are grey and clanking, big as bread-and-butter plates. Camera mania flourishes at once, obliterating all social contact: I mooch about on my own, crabby and left out.

  A lone penguin, separated from its fellows, stumps along beside me on its damp pink feet. We cast an ill-tempered glance at each other. It’s a companionship of sorts, I suppose. I am just starting to appreciate the pearly sheen of its dress shirt when it loses interest and staggers away behind a beautiful old clinker-built rowboat which has sagged and half collapsed on the stones.

  I slog on by myself up to the saddle, where I am rewarded by a splendid vista: white peaks all crumbling down on the other side of a narrow channel, in which mad dark water is bumping with frozen lumps. The wind up here (‘the cleanest air in the world’) nearly bowls me over. Breathe it, Misery Guts, and let that be enough.

  Way down behind me, there’s a commotion at the water’s edge. A bunch of tiny people is struggling to drag the second zodiac, then the third, up on to the beach. The l ight is weakening and the wind is growing stronger by the minute. On the crest I’m having to crouch and claw at the ground so as not to be blown off my feet. Professor Molchanov looks very small, out there in the bay, and awfully far away.

  I scramble crab-wise down to the shore. Seven people are battling to hold the third zodiac steady. Waves are slopping over its stern, crashing and dragging at it; it’s filling with water, we can’t pull it up. Night’s coming, there’s a harsh side-on swell, and why should the wind drop?

  It doesn’t help that only a metre away from our struggles a single penguin is frolicking in the dark water, as carefree as if the sun were beaming down at noon. While the humans shout and haul and groan, it loops and dives and twirls, merry as an otter.

  The sky is so pure it hurts to look at it. The wind whips fine grit off the stones and slashes it into our streaming eyes. My stomach knots in animal dread, a horror of cold. What if we can’t launch our zodiacs?

  How will we get through this night? Has Molchanov got another boat to save us?

  At the far end of the beach we can see a clump of small huts on bare, dark scree. No lights, no sign of life – only the blue and white Argentine flag painted on the roof: Camara base. Oh God. I picture the whole gang of us having to break in, and shuddering all night in a pile on the floor of the biggest hut.

  Over the wind Greg shouts at us: ‘Walk around the shore to the base! We’ll bring the boats across! It’s calmer there!’

  I set out to trudge a kilometre on the big shifting stones, my head seething with thoughts of the pathetic will I hastily scrawled the night before I left home, of bequests I made to certain people which I now suddenly and savagely regret.

  Someone shouts to me and points to a dark thing squirming among the rocks two metres away – a seal, the size of a terrier. I give it one look before the photographers descend on it with their ravening lenses. I keep stumping along in my brand-new gumboots, leaning forward and stabbing my toes among the stones, the only way to make progress against the cold wall of wind. My eyes pour liquid. I keep overtaking older couples struggling along in the same bent posture. They look up as I steam past, but in our scarves and sunglasses and headgear we don’t recognise each other. We drive onwards, toes first, leaning into the wind.

  Molchanov S ue h as s omehow g ot to Camara beach before us, and is talking with a big, moustachio’d Argentinian scientist in polar gear. She shouts, ‘There’s room for all of us to sleep here if we have to!’ Straggling in, people jockey for position out of the wind behind a tiny orange hut right near the water’s edge. We huddle there in a clump, giggling feebly. Here come our zodiacs, bounding across the fierce, darkening bay.

  Greg has got soaked to the groin. His gumboots are full of water. He upends them, wrings out his sopping socks and stoically puts them back on to his blue feet.

  A woman says to him, ‘You must be freezing.’

  He shrugs manfully: ‘Oh – not specially …’

  ‘I mean your feet must b e f reezing,’ she insists.

  ‘Well …’ he says, looking away as if embarrassed; then, in a rush: ‘Oh, none of that stuff – yes! They are!’

  He gives a sudden laugh and throws both arms round her in a quick hug. This guy has climbed to the roof of the world? and he mocks his own tendency to macho posturing? No wonder we all – women and men – adore him.

  On the strength of his self-awareness I fight a powerful temptation to break the rules and pocket an orange pebble. I win; but my righteousness will never quite comfort me for the fact that I have not got that small bright stone, which signalled to me from among the big grey ones, and which that night I so badly wanted, and still do.

  The captain has brought the ship closer in, to give us a lee. We zip splashily home. On deck, scrubbing off the penguin shit, we are already heroes to ourselves, staring-eyed, laughing a bit too wildly, half hysterical with relief and foolishness.

  *

  A woman asks Greg, ‘Tell me the truth – were you scared?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No. I knew the worst that could happen was we’d get a bit wet. It’s the wind that makes people panic. It’s like standing under a helicopter, when everybody’s shouting.’

  *

  ‘Of course we’re exploiting the penguins,’ says an earnest woman from Canberra. ‘A bunch of ignorant tourists staring at them as they go about their business.’

  ‘I don’t think they feel exploited, though,’ says Greg with a straight face. ‘Beautiful as they are, it’s a pretty small brain.’

  *

  Forgive me, but I’m not here for the wild life. Of course I crane to see the seals, dumb and smooth as slugs, trailing blood-coloured shit as they slither off floes at our approach. Of course I gasp at the soaring of the giant petrels. Of course I race up on deck at the shout, ‘Sperm whale! Port side!’ and hang over the rail, excited by the grand dark thing heaving just below the surface and blowing with a hollow rush. And when only the rind of a whale can be seen from a following zodiac, when with a casual flip of the tail it’s gone – of course with the others I groan in disappointment, and sit gripping the zodiac side in the keen wind, shrunken and shuddering with cold, heart in mouth, nose running, eyes watering, scanning scanning scanning …

  But in my heart all I want to do is go out in the boats and look at ice. Seals, penguins and whales, to me, are only distractions from the bliss of this.

  Where to find a language for these miraculous frozen forms? Couldn’t there be poetry in the ship’s library alongside the glossy photo books? Doesn’t someone in Shakespeare wake from a dream about regions of thick-ribbed ice? Would Gerard Manley Hopkins have found words for these teeming variations on surface?

  On outings to Paradise Bay and to the ‘city of bergs’ off Pleneau Island, we learn calm from Greg, who never calls for silence but simply manifests it, sitting beside the outboard with his handbacks resting on his thighs, his eyes squinting. The minute people stop ripping and adjusting velcro, or tearing open film packets, we start to hear the sound the brash ice is making. It’s whispering all around us, chinking, rustling on the gentle swell. We sit. We stare.

  The colour of an iceberg, or of a glacier wall, is impossible to name. You call it white, but when you swing your eyes away and back, you see it’s the most delicate, the palest and yet the greyest green. Mint? The Nile? A no-colour. Water colour. Cloud colour. Again and again the eye returns to feast on the crumpled mystery of ice. One plumbs the word-well. The bucket comes up empty.

  People whisper helpless clichés: ‘
magic’, ‘wonderland’. Not good enough. The forms are inhuman, but to name them we need the vocabulary of the body, of carpentry, dressmaking, masonry – all the beautiful crafts of people’s hands. Pocked. Dimpled. Chiselled. Chamfered. Bevelled. Ruched. Frilled. Saw-toothed. Cloven. Striated, stippled, puckered, fringed, trimmed, carved, scrolled – or simply folded and scratched.

  Always this urge to anthropomorphise grips us, as if the awe – or panic, or even, deep down, rage – provoked in us by a landscape without human meaning were too great to bear.

  On the way back from Paradise Bay, at nightfall, sitting in a silent row along the rim of the zodiac, we pass a toppled, majestic thing – an iceberg like an immense coroneted head. Wagnerian? Arthurian? Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. A monarch brought low, shamed, blinded, submerged to the temples. Resting his cold cheek among the ripples.

  *

  Fiercely I wish I had no prior inkling of this place, that everything I’m looking at were completely new to me. I hate movies and TV and videos. People with cameras are busybodies, writers are control freaks, spoiling things for everyone else, colonising, taming, matching their egos against the unshowable, the unsayable. I long to have come down here in a state of infantile ignorance. Is this a rebirth fantasy? Or perhaps it’s what Greg means when he says, ‘The power of this place quietens and humbles even the dickheads.’

  *

  The morning we go in the boats to Hydrurga Rocks (penguins, seals, and a particular bird which hovers, head into the ferocious wind, right next to my shoulder as I stand wobbling on the ridge, crazy with the brightness of the world and the faraway satin peaks, wanting to yell with joy), a photographer loses his grip on a white plastic bag. The wind whisks it out of his hand and away it soars, inflated, skimming the surface of the water like a big white bubble of poison. We all stand transfixed, mouths gaping with horror. Later I hear that one of the blokes has chased it in a zodiac and managed to pick it up; but the distress I felt at the sight of its escape still astonishes me.

  *

  On Molchanov’s deck after an outing, I see two men, half in jest, point their cameras at each other. Like two tired cowboys in their penguin-shit-stained wet-weather gear and boots, they thrust their lenses right into each other’s faces. Stand-off.

  ‘Go on – take it!’ says one.

  ‘I’m not taking a shot!’ cries the other. ‘I only want to stop you from taking one!’

  What is this thing about cameras? Around them seem to constellate such deep anxieties. In spite of my bravado about going lensless, I’ve actually got a secret throw-away camera in my cabin, having cracked in Ushuaia ten minutes before we boarded the ship. I want to leave it hidden in a drawer because I am engaged in a battle with the terror of forgetting, which drives people to raise a camera between themselves and everything they encounter – as if direct experience were unbearable and they had to shield themselves from it, filter it through a machine, store up a silent, odourless version of it for later, rather than endure it now.

  But doesn’t my wretched notebook (which the wind tore out of my pocket on Hydrurga Rocks; which would have followed the airborne plastic bag if I hadn’t stamped on it with my heavy boot in the nick of time) – doesn’t a notebook perform the same function? Why can’t we let experiences lay themselves down in us like compost, or fall into us like seeds which may put forth a shoot one day, spontaneously, as childhood memories do, in answer to the stimulus of ordinary life?

  ‘Take it home,’ says Greg, ‘and plant it somewhere.’

  ‘The morning star was over the mountain,’ says a man to his wife at dawn on our last day, as Molchanov slides back up the flushed glass floor of the Beagle Channel, ‘but I didn’t photograph it.’

  He is apologising to her for having missed something – but I want to kiss him, I want to shake his hand!

  *

  We disembark at Ushuaia in bright morning sun. There’s a beech forest high up there behind the town: Greg and another mountaineer jump into a ratty old taxi and make a dash for the trees, to touch and smell foliage briefly before they set out, the same afternoon, back to the Peninsula on the last voyage of the season.

  So this is the end. But towards four in the afternoon I get the strangest feeling that I have to go back to the wharf. What nonsense! How sentimental! – yet I can’t stay away. I drift down there, furtive in my Patagonia jacket with its penguin motif, and to my surprise I find half a dozen shipmates rambling down to the water as well – only casually strolling, mind you, to get their land legs – merely chancing to be wandering in that direction.

  We stand looking up at Molchanov’s clean side, a bunch of sad dags clustering on the dock. We’ve said goodbye to everyone in sight but we need to stay right to the end. I can’t believe the way my chest muscles are being squeezed by an emotion I don’t have a name for. Even hulking Dave the diver owns up to it: we hardly dare look at each other. To see strangers on board our ship, leaning over the rail in a proprietary manner as she edges out and turns to face the glistening channel, is painful – enraging. She was our ship, and we’ve already been replaced.

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