Antarctica

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 manhaul. 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!

Yet they hauled their sledge over the polar cap until they were only one more week’s walk away from the South Pole. After two months of hauling, and two years of preparation, only a week more to go.

But they had run too low on food. The amount they had been able to haul was not enough to sustain them at the pace they were keeping. They fell short by about five percent of what they needed. If they had started from the Bay of Whales; if they had learned to ski; who knows. But not on this trip.

Shackleton recognized this, up there on the polar cap; he did the calculations, and saw clearly what they meant. And yet he was wild for the Pole, he did not want to turn back. He knew Scott would get the next chance, with the route found, and a large group of men to make the try. He knew this would be his only chance.

But it became clear they could not reach the Pole and survive. As a consolation, in the last week Shackleton fixed on reaching to within a hundred miles of the Pole. The clever Marshall did what he had to as navigator to convince Shackleton that they had done this. But still, in the end it was Shackleton who decided to turn back, when he was ninety-seven miles away. His men’s lives were in his hands, as his life had been in Scott’s six years before. In the tent he wrote in his diary “I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me.”

And so they turned back. They took a final day trip to get as far south as they could before the return, then turned back. What latitude did they reach? I don’t remember.

But for sure the return journey was a close enough thing to prove that Shackleton had needed to turn back. A half-dozen times on that return they missed death by a hair, and in the end Wild and Shackleton had to make a dash for the Discovery Hut and a hasty return to save Marshall and Adams, an effort that lasted for Shackleton some hundred consecutive hours, this after suffering a complete collapse just two weeks before at the upper end of the Great Glacier. Marshall had saved them during that collapse, and Adams and Wild had carried on throughout, complaining vociferously in their coded diaries about all the others, but persisting, enduring all—growl and go, grin and bear it. And on one of their last desperate nights, as Huntford points out to us, the failing Wild wrote in his diary that Shackleton had that morning “privately forced upon me his one breakfast biscuit, and would have given me another tonight had I allowed him. I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realise how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this: I DO by GOD I shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.” And every word of the entry was underlined.

And in the end they lived. But they could not have added two more weeks to their trip, no, not two more days, not two hours! It was cut very fine indeed.

Shackleton returned to England a hero. Some people made note of the presence of mind and sense of values involved in turning back when so close to one’s goal, and they commended the shen-yun of such an act. Most applauded the achievement itself, of ascending the polar ice plateau and getting so far south. At that time it was the closest anyone had been to either of the Poles. As for Shackleton himself, when he got home he said to his wife, “Better a live donkey than a dead lion.” And she agreed.

Later, in his own final tent, it is possible that Scott reversed this formulation, and decided that it was better to be a dead lion than a live donkey. Certainly the world at large often seems to think so. Of course it is impossible to say for sure if Scott ever thought anything like this. The British mind is an inscrutable thing.

black white

rock ice

The Transantarctic Range is unique—not in its rock, which is the same sort of igneous array found in other mountains—but in its ice. In effect the entire range serves as a dam or a dike, holding back the polar cap. Flying over the range X could see this just as clearly as if looking down at a diorama designed to illustrate the situation. It was a Dutchman’s nightmare: against the south side of the range pressed a sea of white ice, submerging the range nearly to its full height; directly on the other side of the range lay the Ross Sea, ten thousand feet lower; and at every dip in the range the ice was pouring down to the sea, ripping away rock like water tearing open breaks in a levee, until some of the gaps in the range were huge floods of ice, rivers ten and twenty and thirty miles wide. The half-dozen biggest glaciers in the world were all down there one after the next, slicing through the shaved black rock walls and spires that remained above the flood. And as they flew farther south, X saw that sections of the range in the distance were entirely submerged, the ice pouring over and down in a smooth white drop that extended for scores of miles, the dike entirely overwhelmed. Ice Planet at its iciest.

Their little Twin Otter flew into the gap torn by one of the great ice rivers, and flew up it. This one was the Shackleton Glacier—not as big as the Byrd or the Beardmore or the Nimrod, but very substantial nevertheless. One of the dozen largest glaciers on Earth, and no doubt it would have torn its channel even wider and rivalled the Byrd and the Beardmore for size, were it not for the presence of a rock island blocking the head of the glacier, like a cork sucked into place by the flow and nearly plugging it entirely.

This rock island was Roberts Massif. As they flew over it X looked out his little side window, fascinated by the rusty bumpy wasteland, a pocked humpty-dumpty shatter of dolerite, dominated by a single transverse ridge that stood above the scraped red rock and smooth bluish ice surrounding it. The massif was about twenty kilometers wide and twenty kilometers long, and on its polar side the ice came rolling in like a high tide, creating several ice bays in the shoreline.

As their plane descended the smooth curves of the ice ravished X’s eye, as did its bluish tint, which glowed as if the sky’s color had seeped into the white ice and stained it all through. And as the plane landed on a narrow snowplowed airstrip like a long strip of carpet, he suddenly felt happy, for the first time in a long time. Aesthetics as ethics; that was X’s new motto. Whatever was beautiful had to be good.

From the airstrip the plane taxied bumpily toward an ice bay indenting the shore of the massif, under a fluted red-and-white peak named Fluted Peak. One side of the bay sported a small dock, standing on squat pylons. On the rock shore above this dock clustered a small settlement of solar habitats, like metallic-blue mobile homes—less than a dozen buildings all told. The settlement was no bigger than some of the beaker outposts X had helped to open during Winfly, which was a comfort to him. Surely such a small operation could not be doing any great harm.

The little Twin Otter stopped next to an oblong fuel bladder, lying on the ice at the end of the dock. When the props had stopped spinning X followed the pilot out the little door and down the steps. Out from under the wing he straightened up, and was greeted by a bearded man in a plaid shirt and Carhartt overalls, approaching hand out, smiling.

They shook hands. “I am Carlos,” the man said. “Welcome to Roberts Massif.”

“Thanks,” X said. It was frigid out, and breezy, but the man’s bare hands were warm. He led X to one of the buildings, and in through the meat-locker door. “Pretty windy to be out in shirtsleeves,” X remarked.

“Oh, yes, Roberts is a windy place. Even when it’s not windy it’s windy.”

“That’s too bad,” X said with feeling. Wind was the hard part of the cold.

“Yes, well, you know, the katabatic. Air is always falling off the polar cap just from its own weight, and we are right on the edge of the cap. So it can be perfectly still out on the ice, or down on Shackleton, but never here. We have entered it in the Windiest Town on Earth contest, but so far no reply.”

“That’s an environmentalist contest though, isn’t it?”

“Precisely. A great one to win when they finally admit we are the windiest.”

Carlos, as he told X while heating soup for their lunch, was Chilean. His father had been an officer in the Chilean Air Force, and during one of the periods when Chile and Argentina had been actively trying to substantiate their overlapping claims to the Antarctic, he had been stationed on the Antarctic Peninsula. So Carlos had spent the first ten years of his life as a resident of the Chilean stations Arturo Prat and General Bernardo O’Higgins, up in the Banana Belt as he put it, which was somewhat warmer than most of the continent, but notorious for storms.

“It was a wonderful childhood,” he told X cheerfully. “Wonderful! I can bicycle on ice, I can pilot a Zodiac through anything, I can talk to penguins and skuas. Not to mention the more usual skills. I’m a true Antarctican, one of the few. Most of them are Chileans like me, although there are some Argentinians as well, not as good at it of course. One of my first memories is of the time that their Almirante Brown station burned down, and the old Hero brought its people by on their way out. They were sad, and the commandante had fallen into a loco antartida. And of course now both countries have given up on the occupation program, so there are no Antarctic children growing up anymore, which is also sad, I think. Because it was a great, great childhood. The happiest time of my whole life.”

“And now you’re out on Roberts Massif.”

“Yes.” A quick glance from the stove, to see what X meant. “There is opposition to this project, admittedly. But from people ignorant of what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is a clean project, a very clean project, the latest in everything, you will see. Everything has been engineered with massive redundancies at the criticalities. Because of the latest advances in extraction technology, that means it is very safe indeed. A sure thing. Here, there is some of our new stuff out the window now, look.”

He pointed out the little building’s one window, and X saw a vehicle like a ferry glide down from the high horizon and float across the slope of blue ice into the bay, then slowly up to the dock.

“A hovercraft. The latest thing, a Hake 1500a.” Something in his grin made it clear he was joking, but X didn’t get it.

“Wow.”

Carlos stroked his black beard, which was as dense and fine as seal fur. “Okay, let’s eat quick and go load it, and then we can go out to the drilling site itself. Your work will take you back and forth, but mostly you will be out there, on the ice.”

The hovercraft was not quite as smooth to ride as it was to watch, but once the pilot and copilot got it up and running, it was at least as smooth as flying a plane; and faster than a boat; and not quite so loud as a helicopter. One set of fans blew air down into the space under the skirts of the craft, lifting the body of it, which they called the tub, off the ice and onto the air cushion; then a big fan set in a tall housing at the back of the craft propelled it forward, kind of like an Everglades boat. Little stripped-down snowmobiles had been attached to outrigger booms on each side of the craft, and usually these machines hung in the air from the booms, but they could be let down and the snowmobile treads run, in order to give the floating hovercraft some traction against a side wind, or a steeper undulation than usual on the ice. These outrigger booms, as they called them, were late additions to the craft, and the pilots were proud of them. It was an older vehicle than X had expected, functional on the inside, well-worn, even battered, which was perhaps the explanation for the joke Carlos had made back at Roberts. X inquired over the roar, and Carlos nodded. “A product of Corrosion Corner,” he replied loudly. “Miami Beach, Florida. Three Hakes cannibalized and rebuilt as one. With improvements.” He grinned.

The ice flowing past them on either side was a rolling white sea, broken by ferocious-looking shear zones, where for some reason the ice was broken to shards; perhaps a submerged rock reef, or a clash of two ice currents; Carlos shrugged when X asked him. Red flags flying on poles set at kilometer intervals marked their way, and at the base of the poles were round radio transponders, guiding the hovercraft’s automatic pilot; at this point the human pilot and copilot, Geraldo and German, were up and about, refilling their coffee mugs. Previous passes of the hovercraft had blown down the sastrugi en route, so that the craft traveled over a distinct road, dull white through bright white and vice versa, running from flag to flag. As the hovercraft floated along it tilted gently up and down, and sometimes side to side, as they hummed over the big shallow waves of the polar cap, its extremely slight hills and valleys, basins and mounds.

“There is our camp, straight ahead.”

A black dot on the sunburnt white horizon.

“Another ten kilometers, but we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“We’re going that fast?”

“Yes, look—a hundred kilometers an hour! It is the fastest vehicle on the ice, by a long way. Not quite so fast as helicopters, but it hauls a lot more. And helicopters, you know …”

“Yes,” X said. He had seen the wrecks on Erebus and in Wright Valley: burnt skeletons.

“The flying refrigerator, as they say. You talk about criticalities! But this thing, even if it fails you can get out and walk. No crash and burn. Now you can see the main building, just showing. It’s a very little camp, you see.”

Geraldo and German took over the controls and brought the hovercraft slower and slower into its parking lot, next to a fuel bladder and a warehouse. Carlos saw the look on X’s face, and laughed. “Ah good, I see you’re going to like this place, eh? Good man.”

The drilling station was even smaller than the supply depot on Roberts Massif. It was manned for the moment by Carlos, Geraldo and German, two Malaysians, a Namibian and a Zimbabwean. All of them greeted X in a friendly way, looking up at him from their seats in the station’s common room and grinning as one of the Malays said, “We can get you to do the work on the top of the derrick!”

After a ceremonial hot chocolate, Carlos took X around the facility to show him what they had. Carlos now wore a thick parka over his Carhartts, X noticed; it was really cold out here, even though the wind was not as stiff as at Roberts. As soon as they got back outside X asked, “Where’s Ron?”

“Oh,” Carlos said, looking at him. As always with people outdoors in Antarctica, sunglasses kept him basically expressionless. “You have not heard? Ron was let go.”

“Let go?”

“Yes. We had to fire him. I don’t know how well you knew Ron, but, well …” He shrugged. “He had ideas about how things would work out here that were not right.”

“Hmph. Well … I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Ron, the emperor of Antarctica. He had been so pleased to be quitting ASL and coming out here, and no doubt he had thought he would be secret boss of the system here as in Mac Town. X had no doubt he had done things that justified firing him. Still, to actually do it … It was hard to believe that anyone had had the guts. ASL had been trying to ignore Ron’s abuses for years, simply to avoid the confrontation that these folks had taken on within weeks of hiring him. Which must have made Ron even angrier. He’d burnt his bridges behind him to make this move, and now he was fired and presumably back home in Florida somewhere, stewing with rum and resentment. It was a creepy thought.

X turned his attention to Carlos again, who was leading him to the derrick and the drilling rig underneath it. Everything in the camp constellated around this derrick, a tall spindly structure much like the classic configuration of oil derricks from the very beginning, although this one had a substantial gantry standing next to it, a tall heated chamber, Carlos said, where the coupling of drills and pipeline units was accomplished. The technology incorporated powerful new ice borers with oil extraction techniques learned in the North Sea. Much of the work was automated, of course. X would be learning a variety of the jobs that remained for humans to do; not because he was to be a general field assistant, Carlos was quick to add, but because everyone on station was a generalist, by necessity. “It’s the best way—there are a lot of jobs to be done, and not very many people to do them.” This looked right to X; the station was very small, the galley a single stove and a sink without running water, in an old blue beaker box that also served as meeting room and coms center. A Jamesway next door was the dorm, and for those who disliked the dry heat and noise of its Preway heater there were some tents staked out on the hard snow. Those, and a few heated and unheated warehouses, and a yellow bulldozer and a crane, and some forklifts in a shed, and a machine and carpentry shop, and a dozen big solar and piezoelectric panels in an array to the north—and that was it.

“This is just an exploratory station, you understand,” Carlos said. He took X into one of the heated sheds while they were talking, and opened a small freezer and took out a chunk of ice. He flicked on a cigarette lighter taken from one of his inner pockets, and applied the flame to the chunk of ice; after a moment blue flames flickered off the top of it.

“Whoa,” X said.

“This is methane hydrate. There is a lot of it under us, at the bottom of the ice cap. If we find there is enough of it, then they may decide to expand, and drill for extraction. We are also evaluating the possibility of oil, of course, but that is secondary. The methane hydrates are the thing.”

“And what are they, again?”

“They are single molecules of methane—natural gas, you know—trapped in crystalline ice cages. They only form under high pressure, but when they do form there is a lot of gas there, as much as thirty liters of gas per liter of sediment. Of course there is a great deal of natural gas in the world, but for the southern countries that have no oil, and are crippled by debts to the North, if they could find even gas supplies of their own it would be very helpful.”

“But can gas be transported by tankers?”

“It isn’t how they do it. But there are new pipelines now, flexible and unbreakably strong, designed to lie under the surface of the ocean. It’s possible to run pipelines directly from here to South America and southern Africa. The materials are fantastic, they’re made of meshes like Kevlar, and include plastics grown in soy plants. The pipes have laser pigs, insulation, everything. Fantastic pipe. And so deep underwater nothing will disturb them. So these new technologies make methane a more useful fuel. And burning these methane hydrates could actually help the global climate situation. You see, if the polar caps melt, like we see them starting to, then this methane below us will be released into the atmosphere, and kick off a greenhouse warming that makes the one we have now look like nothing. We think now that some of the great rapid climate warmings of the past were caused by the release of methane hydrate deposits. So it’s possible we can capture this gas, and burn it for our own power, and reduce greenhouse gases at the same time. It’s very elegant in that way.”

X nodded, wandering the shop and looking at equipment. “What about the sliding of the ice?” He pointed in the direction of the derrick. “It must be moving a little, anyway. How do you deal with that?”

“The movement is not so big here as to be a problem,” Carlos said. “Here it moves only five meters a year, and does not seem to be speeding up, like so many places on the cap are. So we can simply add length to the pipe, and by the time the methane here is extracted the station will only be a few hundred meters to the north.”

“What about ice surges?”

“Don’t say that word! No such thing as ice surges on the polar cap!”

But ever since the Ross Ice Shelf had detached, and Ice Stream C had come unstuck from the position it had been frozen in for the last few centuries, surges had been common all over the place. The possibility couldn’t be denied that ice anywhere in Antarctica might move with startling speed, as Carlos now admitted: “If it surges, we are done here. But the hole will be capped by the surge, so that there would be no spill, even if we were pumping oil. Maybe the top part of the pipe, but we clean that up, and, I don’t know—go home, probably. We are underfunded as it is, as you probably have noticed. It would be hard to recover from the loss of that much pipe, and if there is one surge, there might be more. No, there can be no surges! They are forbidden here! Come on, let’s go in and get warm. It’s Geraldo’s turn to cook supper, and he is very good.”

Inside the steamy fragrant beaker box the others were talking about glaciology, and Punta Arenas, and laughing a lot; and X felt another glow of happiness. Carlos and Geraldo explained what X’s first jobs would entail; the ongoing exploratory efforts were still pretty wide-ranging, and though they were sure enough of this deposit to start drilling, they had not yet established the size of the deposit, or the location of others suspected to be nearby. So they were taking trips out from the station on snowmobiles, to do what they called “three-D seismics,” which involved setting out a grid of geophones, to record the shocks from explosions set off in the ice, and in the rock of nunataks to the north. Geologists working for the group would then look for “bright spots” in the record, and map the rock and the stratigraphy of the subsurface. Their well was therefore an early “cost well,” and just one in a giant X pattern of them out on this sector of the cap. Down their well they would send tools to measure the gamma radiation, and take actual looks around with fiber optics, among other new detection methods. “We’re definitely on top of a big methane hydrate deposit,” Carlos said, “and under that is a seal rock, which is a lithologic seal over sedimentary rock that often contains oil. The drill is cutting through the seal rock now, which is a very hard old lava field.”

X nodded over and over again, happy to hear the confident beakerspeak; and feeling more and more pleased at the growing conviction that no matter what happened here, he would not be contributing to the despoliation of the pure Antarctic. The Man Without a Name, yes, The Man Without a Country, sure; but not The Man Without Environmental Ethics. Which meant he could face Val in his mind. And he would be working, he saw, with people who were sort of a mix of beaker and ASL—something seldom if ever seen in McMurdo, where the two roles were so strictly separated for the sake of “efficiency”—even though the setup here was obviously the way it should be, everyone doing part of the support work, everyone participating also in the science involved, and benefiting from both. No, this was great. He would never run into Val and have the rest of his day ruined; he would spend his season out here under the vast low dark blue sky, with real work to do, surrounded by Spanish and African voices and laughter, with a tent of his own to sleep in. It was a GFA’s paradise. It was X heaven.

Beep beep. “Hey Wade, are you awake?”

“No.”

“Where are you.”

“… I’m not sure.”

“That happens to me sometimes too.”

“—oh yeah! Hotel California.”

“You’re in California?”

“Hotel California. McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Wow. I couldn’t remember there for a minute where I was.”

“That happens to me a lot.”

“What’s up?”

“I couldn’t sleep. You know Wade, sometimes I don’t see why half the people in America don’t just walk off their jobs and start up their own companies. I say that right on the floor of the Senate.”

“Yes, Phil. We read it in the Post and we gnash our teeth. We can’t believe our eyes. Only in California would you have even the slightest chance of getting elected.”

“I get elected by seventy percent majorities, Wade.”

“That shows what California can do.”

“I get almost a hundred percent of the Hispanic vote.”

“That’s because you’re a Democrat, plus you speak Spanish like a barrio textile worker.”

“That’s because I was a barrio textile worker. And those girls work hard let me tell you. My fingers are still all scarred from that.”

Phil had spent three months working in a legal sweatshop with legal aliens, part of his Ongoing Working Education as he called it, the OWE program (pronounced Ow in the office) that he had instituted for himself, in which he spent three months working full-time at a great number and variety of Californian occupations, so many that the list was beginning to look like the dust-jacket copy for a new novelist.

“I know,” Wade said. He got out of bed and went to the room’s sink and began to clean up. “It’s great what you’ve done. You’re very popular and you deserve it. But only in California. And even there you have high negatives.”

“How high can they be when I get seventy percent of the vote?”

“They can be thirty percent, and that’s what they are. A record high negative.”

“Any time you create a high positive you’re going to get a high negative. Even in California.”

“Especially in California.”

“God bless our state.”

“The most volatile in the nation. Pendulum swings that defy all laws of physics and political science. You’re one of the big left swings, up there with the Browns or Warren or Boxer, but shuffled in with you guys are people like Reagan and Nixon, with no rhyme or reason to it. You’re all the way off the charts anywhere else in America.”

“So now you’re comparing me to Richard Nixon. You’re waking me up in the middle of the night to compare me to Richard Nixon.”

“He was great at foreign policy.”

“Please, Wade. I get elected because people like what I stand for. It’s populism come back again. In California that’s important.”

“Used to be populism anyway. Now, Phil? A leader in the Democratic Party? Having changed your tune over the years from calling for the complete revamping of everything to advocating legislation to encourage cooperatives?”

“I’ve grown up in fifteen years, better have or else.”

“Everyone in the middle of the road says that, it must be like a chorale there on the painted line, you really sing well together.”

“Hey. Gorz is even worse than me, he went from demanding the impossible to suggesting a thirty-hour work week.”

“You’ve called for a thirty-hour work week too.”

“It’s a good idea. Reform by increments, Wade, it’s the only way. You demand the impossible you get nothing. In co-ops people own their work, that’s a very big step right there. After we get that, we can think about further steps.”

“If you can even get that far. Maybe these days asking for co-ops and a thirty-hour work week is demanding the impossible.”

“Maybe so. We’ll find out when we try for it, Wade. You can only learn useful lessons by trying things out. I like things you can try, rather than big systems that you can’t figure out how to move toward or test out.”

“You’re a true Democrat, Phil.”

“Yes, I am. So what’s next for you down there?”

“I’m flying to the South Pole today.” It was a sentence that felt odd in the mouth.

“You be careful. How was your trip to the Dry Valleys?”

“It was interesting. Good background.”

“How was your mountain guide?”

“She was very competent.”

“Ooh.”

“Please, Phil.”

“Well, you have fun out there Wade. I’ll be calling you again to get a report from the Pole.”

“Yes you will.”

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, especially if you shoot half your huskies and feed them to the rest. This had been the Amundsen expedition’s method of operation; they had started out with fifty-two dogs, and most of those had not only pulled the sledges but somewhere along the way been turned into food, for both dogs and men. Each dog eaten provided about fifty pounds of meat, and therefore saved that much from the sledge loads. It was a classic case of pulling your own weight, or of what the American weapons industry called “dual-use efficiency” when pointing out that their high-heat laser weapons would also make very nice ice borers (which they did). Amundsen however lost a lot of style points for this particular dual use; he was criticized for it ever afterward, especially in Britain.

Obviously Val’s “In the Footsteps of Amundsen” expedition, the thirteenth to trace Amundsen’s route to the Pole, was not going to be using the same methods the Norwegians had used. For one thing dogs were now banned from Antarctica; for another, the Ross Ice Shelf, the crossing of which had comprised about half of Amundsen’s trek, was no longer there. The ice shelf had been an amazing feature in its time: a stable floating cake of ice nearly a thousand feet thick, covering an area about the same size as California or France, and at its outer edge towering a couple hundred feet over the open sea. As it turned out, however, it had been highly sensitive to small changes in air and ocean temperatures, and the global warming had been enough to break most of it up and carry it off to sea. It had been replaced by a jumble of thinning annual sea ice, remnant iceberg chunks of the shelf, and enormous ice tongues pushing out from the Transantarctic glaciers and the West Antarctic ice streams; with the brake of the shelf gone these outpourings had greatly accelerated, and they slid out onto the sea and floated there, long white peninsulas that occasionally broke off and joined the iceberg armada.

As a result of all this the Ross Sea was no longer a viable proposition for foot travel. And Val was among those who considered this a great blessing, for to start a trek with three hundred miles of hauling over soft snow, entirely flat but frequently crevassed, was not really how modern wilderness adventure travelers wanted to spend their vacation time. In truth it had been the kind of miserable travel no one would do unless they had to. But of course there had been purists who had insisted on doing it because the early explorers had, and so their guides had had to oblige and lead them across it, bored out of their minds and working to keep the rapidly disillusioned clients from getting surly. Now that option was gone, and no one was happier about it than Val.

So this Footsteps of Amundsen expedition, like the twelve before it, was taking turns hauling a single ultralight sledge full of their gear, and therefore traveling more like Scott’s party than Amundsen’s. And they started their trip, as had become traditional, a day’s haul out from land, on the sea ice between the ice tongues from the Strom and Axel Heiberg glaciers. This gave everyone a taste of what it had been like to cross the level white waste of the ice shelf, and then without further ado they made landfall where Amundsen and his men had, on the gentle northern slopes of Mount Betty, named after Amundsen’s childhood nurse. After crossing the tidal cracks in the sea ice at the shoreline, and setting a camp a couple hundred meters up the slope, they were also able to visit the cairn that Amundsen and his men had built, on the exposed ridge of Mount Betty called Bigend Saddle. This cairn had marked the only depot Amundsen had made during his trek to the Pole, and now the chest-high stack of big flat stones was also the sole remaining object left by Amundsen’s team anywhere on the continent, their base camp having calved into the sea soon after their departure.

So this stack of stones was it. Nothing in the century since had disturbed it, for no wind was going to knock it over, and Antarctica had very little in the way of earthquakes. Val’s group stood around it reverently, almost afraid to touch it for fear of accidentally tipping it over. But it had been stacked with the kind of neat skill that marked all Amundsen’s operations, and it would not fall unless someone deliberately dismantled it. And no one who cared enough to visit the site would do that.

It had first been relocated, Val told her group, by members of Admiral Byrd’s expedition, in 1929. In a hollow in the stack of stones they had found a tiny can containing pages torn from Amundsen’s notebook, informing the world, in case they did not survive the return crossing of the ice shelf, that they had in fact reached the Pole.

The five clients shook their heads at this bit of information. Incredible that this little stack of stones, in all the empty thousands of square miles of ice and rock, had been relocated at all, much less by men flying around in a little Fokker aircraft just seventeen years after it had been built. The wreckage of the Fokker could still be visited as well, Val told them; it had been destroyed on the ground in a blizzard in March of 1929, and its crew rescued by men in the plane that a few weeks later made the first flight over the Pole.

All amazing. But it was cold on that exposed ridge, and after a few minutes standing around, the group was ready to get back into the dining tent and eat dinner. It had been a hard day’s haul. No one advocated visiting the wreckage of the Fokker, which was nearly ten kilometers away, and was, when all was said and done, still a plane wreck, never anyone’s favorite subject for archeological tours.

So they headed down for the tent. But as they were leaving the rock of the ridge and stepping onto the snowy slope of Mount Betty, Elspeth exclaimed, “Look there!”

She was pointing at another rock cairn, lower and smaller than Amundsen’s. The others followed her over to look at it. It was a little ring of rock, surrounding a snow-plastered black box and a satellite dish wired to it. Scientific instrumentation of some kind.

“One of the science teams must be doing an experiment of some kind,” Val said. “They’re probably using the Amundsen cairn as a locater.”

“That’s stupid,” Jim said. “I’m surprised they let them disturb a historical site like this.”

The others looked noncommittal. Presumably this ring of stones would be dismantled when the experiment was over; and given the vast view they had of the coastal range and the berg-choked frozen sea, it was hard to argue that the site was too disturbed. Still, Jim continued to complain as they hiked back down to their campsite, and Val promised to look into the matter and see whose experiment it was, and what they were doing so close to the Amundsen cairn.

Then they were at the camp. The big dining tent was still clear on its north side, maximizing its own little greenhouse effect; the fabric would go blue when the temperature inside got to about forty, so that the discrepancy of inner and outer temperatures didn’t get too large. The little sleeping tents were all colorful nylon domes, with snowblock walls protecting them from the possibility of strong downslope winds. The snow here was perfect Antarctic Styrofoam; they had cut it with a big saw into perfect blocks, and lifted them easily for stacking, as the snow was very light, and yet cohered perfectly.

Now they all took off their crampons and hustled into the dining tent, enthusiastically declaring their starvation. And Val followed them in, taking a last look over the jumbled sea ice, thinking So much for the Ross Ice Shelf. A day’s haul. Amundsen’s group had taken three weeks to get here from their base on the Bay of Whales. So nice to have an excuse to pass on that. The old guys had done stuff that was just too hard, no matter how into it you were. You had to tailor the past a little to make it bearable.

Not that she meant to be unfair to her clients. They were skiing or walking three hundred miles across Antarctica, after all, and taking turns hauling the sledge, and hauling it from sea level up to nine thousand feet as well, which was a big up. So a few hundred miles of ice shelf subtracted from the total was not that important, nor were the exact details of the route. It was the spirit that counted.

Except to some people, who came down with the idea of retracing the historic routes precisely. A particular character type, and one of Val’s least favorite. But even that type had to make allowances when it came to Amundsen’s trip. And really, no matter how closely they tried to reproduce the experience—some expeditions had tried wearing the same clothing and using the same gear, with spectacularly unhappy results—it could not truly be done. Because Amundsen and his group had approached a section of the Transantarctics that no one had ever seen before. It was an unknown mountain range that they had to cross somehow, with food supplies so tight that they had not had the luxury of scouting out alternative routes to find the easiest way to the polar cap, which they only knew was there because of Shackleton’s trek three years before. So as they approached the mountains in their crossing of the ice shelf, watching them rear up day after day into a range as big and ferocious as the Alps, Amundsen had not been amused. He made a sketch in his notebook naming the big peaks Mounts A, B, C, D, E and F. Between the peaks the big glaciers that characterized the range spilled down from the polar cap; but which one should they take? In the end Amundsen thought he saw a rampway next to one of the big glacial openings, a ramp that appeared to rise straight up and straight south to the foot of one of the biggest of the inland peaks, where he hoped he would be deposited on the polar cap with little trouble. There was no way of telling until they tried it; and so up the ramp they had climbed, ignoring the broad glacial opening just a few kilometers to their left.

The ramp, however, had turned out not to be a ramp. It had been a big shoulder, around which the broad glacier to the left had curved on its way down. So after intense efforts to climb the rugged shoulder and cross it, they had been left looking down onto the glacier they could have walked right up, and they had had to descend to this glacier and then restart their climb. It had been one of Amundsen’s biggest mistakes; it had cost them days, and a great deal of backbreaking effort; and in retrospect it seemed obvious that the broad curving glacier had been the way. In fact they had had to beat their dogs to get them to start up the shoulder, as the dogs had been all for taking the glacier road to the left. Even the dogs had known better.

But that was the kind of thing that happened when exploring unknown territory, when struggling through the mountains, of terra incognita for the first time. It was the kind of experience that humanity would never have again, not even on other planets. Of course there were wilderness adventure tours these days being dropped in Alaska or Mongolia or the Himalayas without maps or compasses or GPS or radio, to try to reproduce that experience. But no matter how they tried, Val did not believe what they were doing was really the same. It was impossible to regain that mental state, of wanting to know and not knowing.

In Amundsen’s case, the mistaken route had been only the beginning of their troubles. By an unhappy twist of fate, the glacier they had chosen to climb, the Axel Heiberg, turned out to be one of the steepest and most broken glacial ramps to the polar plateau in all the Transantarctics. Its upper section rose eight thousand feet in less than twenty miles, in a series of ice cataracts that fell across the glacier from sidewall to sidewall, making them unavoidable. Only the champion skiing of Amundsen’s lead skier Bjaaland—one of the best skiers alive at that time—and the generally superb ice skills of all the Norwegians, had gotten them (and their surefooted dogs!) up the thing.

So repeating the Amundsen route was hard enough even if you decided to pass on the mistake at the beginning, and stuck to the Axel Heiberg throughout. Most of the previous Footsteps expeditions had taken the glacier route, which had been the Amundsen descent route as well, and so still following in the footsteps (reversed) while saving strength for the difficulties that lay above. It made sense.

And Val’s group this time was not made up of Norwegian champion skiers and hardened polar explorers. On the contrary, it was a somewhat less skillful group than usual. Not that all five didn’t have many adventure expeditions under their belt; indeed as they wolfed down hors d’oeuvres and cooked their main meal, they were hearing story after story from Jack and Jim about climbing the Seven Summits (meaning the tallest one on each continent), kayaking down the Baltoro, completing the ice hat trick (meaning North Pole, Greenland and South Pole), and so forth. The adventures were endless. But the expertise still seemed thin to Val. The husband-and-wife team, Jorge and Elspeth Royce-Paulo, took photographs and wrote articles for the outdoor magazines and onlines; they were well-known. Jack Michaels and Jim McFeriss were friends from the Bay Area, both lawyers, and had climbed and gone on treks together a few times before. And Ta Shu, although he had spent many years wandering in the Himalayas, was around sixty. He was one of the Woos, a feng shui guru. During the days he wore heavy black sunglasses which contained fiberop cameras and a phone to transmit his narration and three-D video back to a facemask TV audience in China. While hiking his head swiveled about and he talked to this audience almost continuously, but in the tent he kept the glasses off, thankfully. Val’s impression of feng shui was that it was one of those ancient modes of knowledge that was so deep and profound that no one alive could actually explain it, and indeed when she asked him what he made of the landscapes Ta Shu had said very little, usually “This is a good place.” Although it could have been that his English kept him from offering the long version of his analyses; it was limited enough to make Val wonder why he didn’t just give up and use a computer translation program.

In any case, all these clients were taking on something a little bit harder than most of what they had done before. And so Val was not sure that they should be taking on the mistaken traverse.

But Jack was. “I think we should follow the original route,” he said as Jorge and Elspeth ladled beef stroganoff into their bowls. “Let’s do it just like they did it, I mean that’s what we came here for.”

“We already skipped the ice shelf,” Elspeth pointed out.

“That’s because it’s gone! If it were here we would do it. But this part of the route is just like it was when they came through, and so we should follow them, or else what’s the point?”

The others sat on their sleeping bags and ground pads, eating and looking at Jack or Val, as if this was going to turn into some kind of confrontation between them. That was the last thing Val wanted, however. She said to them, “It’s your trek. You can do what you want.”

Jack nodded, lips pursed, as if he had won an argument. Val ignored that and focused on the others. They looked uncertain to her, even Jim, and so she unfolded the USGS topo of the area and traced with a finger the two alternative routes, and then only ate her stroganoff, and listened to them debate the pros and cons. Slowly they began to come down on the side of following the exact route. Either they couldn’t conceptualize the amount of sheer work it would add to the trek, or else they were just into the idea of it. Or else Jack was intimidating them. Group dynamics were such a mess.

Jack and Jim argued for the mistake; the Royce-Paulos did not seem to care, or were perhaps not enthusiastic, but not willing to say so. Ta Shu was becoming a kind of tie-breaker, unless Val herself got involved. He looked at her, perhaps for guidance. She said, “It’s no worse than the icefalls above. I suppose doing it might get us tuned for the icefalls.”

He said, “We came to see what Amundsen saw.”

“Good man,” Jack said with a wink to Jim.

So the next morning they broke camp and loaded the sledge, and started up the shoulder of Mount Betty, onto the false ramp benching up the side of the Herbert Range.

Immediately the steepness of the slope began to give them trouble. It was windless, the sun right in their faces, and the snow on the slope pretty soft for Antarctica. Val had everyone switch from skis to snowshoes to gain traction, but even in the cold air it was hot work. And it did not help that the snow concealed frequent crevasses in the ice below. The air was on average ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in Amundsen’s time, and as a result all Antarctic ice was moving downhill a bit more quickly. For the most part this was noticeable only to beakers, but on steeper slopes one saw evidence of fresh ice spills much more often than when Val had first come down.

As here and now: a fan of blue shatter ice, splayed out over the smooth white tilt they were climbing, the broken ice still sharp-edged. The hyperarid winds would quickly round all exposed edges, and indeed blow away chunks this size in a year or two, so this was clearly a recent spill. Which meant they had to be extra careful when crossing snow bridges over crevasses, or moving under seracs. And on this day they were having to do a lot of both.

Val’s GPS gave her a detailed map of the slope, which pinpointed their location and all the crevasses out of sight above them. So she did not have to climb ahead of the rest to find a way, as Bjaaland had done continuously for Amundsen. Which meant she was available to help haul their sledge. This was the latest German lightweight wonder, built by the same firm that made the winning sleds and luges in the Olympics, and all the gear and food for all six of them fit into its sleek blue body, and yet it weighed less than three hundred pounds, most of that food; a miracle of all the latest in materials science; but still damned hard to pull up a slope this steep and soft.

So Val stayed in the lead harness and hauled the sledge, teamed with Jack, then Jim, then Elspeth, then Ta Shu, then Jorge. Up left, then right, then left, switchbacking up steep ramps of snow-covered ice, looking down into cobalt crevasses. Hard work indeed, which on Amundsen’s trek had been done mostly by the dogs. Really the problems for the two groups were almost reversed; Val’s group knew the way but had to pull their load, while the Norwegians had had their dogs to pull, but had not known where they were going. Val much preferred her group’s problem; it was hot work, but relatively safe. Heading into unmapped territory with limited food and no chance of rescue; that was a situation she did not envy. Now the problems were more mundane: “Try not to sweat,” Val reminded them after one especially aerobic stomp up a hard snow ramp. “Thermostat yourselves. Even your smartfabrics can’t do it all.”

“You’d have to be naked not to sweat on a pitch this hard,” Jack called up cheerfully. With a small smirk. His glacier glasses were a glossy gold color, which made him look like a bug. All their sunglasses were at full power, and their solar earbands were the usual prisming metallic blue. Aliens on ice.

“A naked head is usually enough,” Val advised.

The sun blazed off the snow. Even with sunglasses at full power, one’s pupils shrank so far down that the brilliant world appeared somehow dark underneath it all. A steepening blue-white hillside, rising shattered above them. They were traversing now across the great shoulder of the Herbert Range, so that their right boots always hit higher and dug deeper than their left boots, which quickly grew tiresome. Traverses were tough.

Val was enjoying herself. This was where the years of making her living as a professional beast of burden paid off. Oh of course she hadn’t been a pure beast of burden, like the porters in the Himalaya; but a good mountain guide usually ended up carrying a load as heavy as a porter’s, to try to make things easier on the clients. Just a Sherpa with software, as the guide saying went. So no matter how many trips these clients took in a year, or how much they worked out at home, they were still not on their feet humping loads as often as she was, not by miles and miles. Probably they spent an hour a day doing some Stairmasters and thinking that meant they were in good shape. But now, Val thought with a hard little grin, they were on the Stairmaster from hell. They had come up about the height of two World Trade Towers at this point, and had about two Empire State Buildings to go. And they were beginning to suffer. Even Jack was huffing and puffing. Which was one of the many reasons Val had not tried to talk him out of taking this route; she was hauling the sledge by herself now and still pulling ahead, waiting for them to catch up, then taking off again; not a bad lesson for Mr. Jack Michaels to contemplate, she tried not to think consciously. And meanwhile she was able to stomp uphill and look around as she did, relaxed, continuing to enjoy the views in a way that the tiring clients couldn’t.

And it was easy to take the icescapes down here for granted anyway, because they were so ubiquitous, and so spectacular everywhere, but in a fractal way, self-similar at all scales, so that one lost perspective. It was like becoming an ant and hiking through the ice tray in your refrigerator; there are scores of beautiful ice formations in every refrigerator, but how many people notice? You had to be a connoisseur of ice. And you had to be in good enough shape to be able to pay attention; for you did pay; work hard enough and you would stop paying attention, and it would get easier. It was a very physical aesthetics. But Val was more than up to it, and now she hauled the sledge up step after step, deep in her own rhythms, enjoying the dense cross-cut textures of the dry snow underfoot, and the ice dolmens rearing out of the snow to left and right, each wind-sculpted blue block a work of art, a pulsing and it seemed almost living thing. The squeak of her snowshoes and her breath in her ears were the only sounds, all in rhythm together, like music. She was a dromomaniac, in love with this walking uphill. It was movement as pleasure, movement as the rhythm of her thoughts, movement as meditation. Looking down at the bright microtextures of the snow underfoot, there was a lot of time to think; this kind of walking was measured in hours. Her mind wandered, out of her control. She thought of Steve again, touching each wind-rounded shard of memory without pain. She thought of her grandmother, for the first time without pain there either. They had lived together in her off-seasons for the last five years of her grandmother’s life, from ninety to ninety-five, in the old family house in Wyoming. Annie Kenning, a tough woman with a bright laugh. I was a wild one, Val, you better believe it. I was taller than you before I shrivelled up like this! That strength of yours didn’t come from nowhere! One morning in what turned out to be their last summer together Val had walked out of the old house and found Annie standing on the top step of a stepladder, reaching up into one of the old apple trees to pick a high apple—this just three months after a broken hip sustained in a fall off the front porch, and Annie still unsteady on stairs or even on level ground. Frightened, Val had run over yelling at her, almost scaring her off the ladder, and had helped her down scolding her, what could you be thinking, you could kill yourself, and her lower lip had stuck out and suddenly at the bottom of the ladder she said Shut up! Shut up! I used to climb all over these trees! Don’t you tell me what to do! Once when I was fifteen I jumped from one tree to the next one over! And that was just a couple weeks ago. She had sat down on the grass and Val had sat next to her, an arm around her. Just a couple weeks ago, she insisted. And now I’m ninety-four.

Beep beep beep! A break in the bright dark snow ahead. Val came back to the present with a start, looked around. The others were behind and below. Val inspected the slope above, whistled, checked her GPS. They had reached a section where knowing the location of the crevasses was no great help, as they were everywhere. That meant crossing snowbridges, which was always chancy, and never more so than in an icefall, where the ice forming the two sides of the crevasse were offset vertically—in this case, the uphill side about ten meters higher than the side she now stood on. And the only snowbridge filling the crevasse had a gap at its upper end. Crouched on the snowbridge, looking down into the depths of the crack, Val sighed. It would be an operation to get up and over it, and there wasn’t a good alternative as far as she could see, by eye or on her GPS. Well, that was ascending an icefall for you. Endless delay, hassle, precaution, despite which a gnawing sensation of danger, as the deep icy cracks underfoot could not be ignored. Also, there was too little to do for those not dealing with the problem directly. So she worked as fast as she could to set a deadman belay, digging the anchor deep in the snow while being sure not to degrade the structural integrity of the bridge. By the time all the others had caught up she was prepared mentally, and she got Jack and Ta Shu to belay her.

She jumped across the narrow gap and hit the wall of ice with crampon tips and two ice axes, and stuck like a fly. Like Spiderwoman, yes! Then up, one move at a time, always three points stuck in the ice, axe axe, toe toe, axe axe, and quickly up and over the top, onto thin hard snow. Quickly she pounded in a long snow stake, which left her free to walk about and pound in a couple more. Despite her admonitions to the clients, she was sweating. She unzipped her parka and took it off, and as she was now standing in a windless bowl of ice like a big reflecting solar cooker, she took off her sweater and shirt as well, right down to a sky-blue jogging top. The insectile stares of the clients below seemed to convey notions that she was indulging in some Antarctic cold macho; no doubt they were still cold; but they wouldlearn. Now Jack was clipped to the line and jumping across and climbing up, making it look like a lark—as indeed it was, with the rope top-belaying him.

Against her bare sweaty skin the air was frigid, but she didn’t stay wet for long. She could actually feel the sweat wafting away. Against that evaporative cooling the radiant heat of the sun was a palpable hit, as from an open fire, so distinct that she turned to get the sunlight on her back as well, doing a little rotisserie. The side of her exposed to the sun was hot, the side in the shade of her own body was cold; it felt like there was about sixty degrees difference between the two.

She got the clients up and over the wall one by one. Then they all pulled the sledge up to them through a jumar, which allowed the rope up but would not let it slip back down—“one, two, three, haul!” After that they sat beside the sledge; everyone was now following Val’s example with the thermostatting, and it looked like beach blanket south, for a few minutes anyway. But they were only ten meters higher, and twenty farther on, with several crevasses to go before they could simply slog uphill again. “It’s going to take all day to go the next hundred yards!” Jorge exclaimed.

“Oh it shouldn’t take quite that long,” Val said cheerfully. “But I guess we’d better get to it.”

“Oh God.”

“Not again.”

“You slavedriver.”

“Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.” Val put on the sledge harness, then her sungloves. “Come on, let’s go.”

So they did. Up here the ice proved to be broken in a series of broad ledges, like a giant’s steps. The crevasses were frequent, and the tortured ice gleamed in the wild shear zones walling them in on left and right. The work was unrelenting, and it took careful thermostatting to keep from sweating, then to keep from getting over-chilled after the hot spots. The view changed slowly. While waiting for the others Val looked back and down and out—two thousand feet down, thirty or forty miles out—over the jumbled frozen surface of the Ross Sea, in this month all white all the way to the horizon, the big icebergs scattered like a great fleet of torpedoed aircraft carriers. Mount Betty was now below them; the rest of the Herbert Range still loomed to their right, with a spur running off the range blocking the way ahead of them. To get to that spur they had to cross the bowl at the head of the Sargent Glacier, a little glacier high in its own basin, falling down to the Axel Heiberg on their left.

On they climbed. The sun wheeled around in the blue-black sky, until when Val looked back the glare off the sea ice was blinding. She checked her watch: though it was still sunny midafternoon, it was nine P.M. She had wanted to reach the saddle in the spur ahead of them, to give them a view of the Axel Heiberg below, but it was too late to continue. “Time to camp.”

So they pitched the dining tent and their little sleeping domes, and then in the nylon blue incandescence of the diner they got three pots of ice on the stove. In the violent blue light of the team tent everyone tended to look like morgue photos of themselves, but Jack did not seem to mind this effect, as he kept glancing at Val while they wolfed down the hors d’oeuvres: taste of smoked oysters, sip of tea, glance at Val, three little taste treats, repeated over and over. And a bit of a come-on too. But Val had had a lifetime’s experience ignoring such looks, she could ignore men across a whole broadband of registers, from outrageous flirtation to demure appreciation to neutral obliviousness to cold warning to gross insult. Back in the world she would have ignored him in a really dismissive way, the back of her hand to him; but as he was a client, she kept it oblivious.

Besides, it was hers and Ta Shu’s night to cook, and cooking made one generous. The two of them sat by the stove tending the rehydrating spaghetti sauce, cooking the pasta, frying hard bread in garlic butter, and passing out cup after cup of hot tea. Val did not always enjoy cooking for even as small a group as this, but Ta Shu with his fractured English and his unusual ideas about food (he wanted to put ginger in the spaghetti sauce) made it entertaining. It was a pleasant couple of hours, one of the unsung attractions of mountain expeditions: getting off one’s tired feet, getting warmed up, getting food in the stomach, food which because of the extreme states of hunger involved often tasted wildly delicious even if it was very plain fare; and all the while lounging around on soft sleeping bags in colorful silky clothes like Oriental pashas, and talking a mile a minute. In these conditions cooking for others was a solicitous, avuncular activity; taking care of people; which meant that the cooks got a little taste of how the guide felt all the time. Even Jack was not as much of a jerk on the nights when he and Jim cooked.

On this night, however, he was not cooking, and so free to look, and to talk. And the day’s exertions had made all of them talkative, to tell the truth.

“That was so hard!”

“I can’t believe they got fifty-two dogs up that!”

“Three thousand vertical feet, and a lot of it gnarly indeed.”

“And then to find out it was all wasted effort!”

“And with the big icefalls still to come!”

But the Norwegians hadn’t known that, Val thought. Perhaps not knowing what lay ahead had made them less apprehensive rather than more. Ignorance was bliss. At least sometimes. “It’s a good thing we came this way,” she said. “It’s nice to see what they saw.”

Jack nodded complacently. “That’s what it’s all about.”

After more food intake Jorge said, “You know, it gives you an interesting new angle on the myth of Scott as total bungler and Amundsen as hyperefficient genius. I mean unless you’ve done today you don’t realize what huge risks Amundsen took. There were sections today that were worse than when we went up the Khumbu Icefall.”

To the same kind of goal, Val thought—Everest, the South Pole—the tallest, the bottommost; something only had to be the mostest and suddenly it was the holy grail, worth taking fatal risks for. For a certain type of person.

“But the Norwegians were good on ice,” Jack told Jorge. “They were experienced polar travelers.”

“Yes,” Jorge said, “but that wouldn’t have helped if a snowbridge had collapsed at the wrong time, or if a serac had fallen on them. That easily could have happened.”

“You can imagine them disappearing without a trace,” Elspeth added. “Then Scott’s group would have gotten there first, and had the extra psychological push to make it back home, and the whole story would have been reversed.”

“The rash presumptuous Norwegians,” Jorge declaimed, “and the amateur but tough steady Brits. It’s the story everyone wants, really.”

“Not me,” Jack said. “Scott was an idiot. If it had turned out that way it would be the genius punished and the idiot rewarded.”

“Very realistic,” Val murmured, but no one heard her, as Elspeth was crying “Oh come on!” and waving a finger at Jack. “Scott was not an idiot!”

“But he was!” Jim said. “He did everything wrong!”

“Everything,” Jack said, with a knowing smile at Val.

And then he and Jim were off and running, playing riffs they had obviously played many times before, variations on the theme “Scott and His Stupidities.” He had become a torpedo lieutenant in the late Victorian Royal Navy, a ridiculously dead-end post in a ridiculously moribund service. He had gotten the polar assignment through personal connections even though he had no knowledge of polar regions. He had not bothered to learn a thing from previous polar explorers, nor had he bothered to study the Arctic indigenous peoples—perish the thought. In fact he took exactly the wrong lessons from those who had gone before, disdaining Eskimo furs in favor of naval canvas clothing, disdaining dogsled travel in favor of manhauling. Actually he tried to use dogs, as well as ponies, motor tractors, and skis; but as he and his men could not manage to master any of these modes of transport over snow, they had had to fall back on walking as a last resort. Only at that point had Scott proclaimed to the world that manhauling was really the only honest and noble way to go.

“It wasn’t a matter of style,” Jim said, “or consideration for animals. They killed their ponies and dogs too, only without ever admitting they were going to have to do it, so that sometimes they didn’t have pistols there for the job. Wilson had to knife some of them to death, while Scott sat in the tent wringing his hands about how bad he felt. It was sheer incompetence.”

He had also been a bad judge of character, Jack added. He had been the sycophantic disciple of bad men; he had chosen bad men to work for him; he had led them badly. He had had bad friends.

“Oh come on,” Elspeth objected. “Wilson cannot be called a bad friend. He was a wonderful man.”

“He was too good to be good,” Jack said, which cracked Jim up. “A passive Christlike martyr in the making. And the rest of them were buffoons.”

Except for the ones who had ripped Scott privately in their diaries, of course, who all turned out to have been wise men. But the rest—buffoons.

“He also seems to have gotten in trouble with a girl in America,” Jack said, with another suggestive glance at Val. “And his marriage …”

He had married a woman too beautiful for him, it seemed, too ambitious and smart. An Edwardian Lady Macbeth, who had pushed him south “and then had an affair with Nansen at the very same time Scott was dying on the ice,” Jack said, shaking his head woefully.

He had been a scientific dilettante as well, Jim went on, only using the sciences as a cover for his desire to get to the Pole. He had had sulks and depressions lasting up to a month. He had sent Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard into needless danger and exhaustion on the Winter Journey, while the rest of his men sat around the hut writing a newspaper and putting on skits, rather than learning to ski or control their dogs. As for ponies, he had obtained glue-factory nags from Siberia in the first place, then killed half of them during pointless excursions during the winter, little trips which read like rehearsals for a Keystone Kops Ice Capades.

Then during the trek south he had overworked his men, demanding that they keep up with his unhealthily strong strength. He had gotten into a race mentality with the second sledge team, thus breaking Lieutenant Evans. He had seriously underestimated the provisions needed to feed four people to the Pole and back; then at the last depot he had decided to take five people instead of four, sealing their fate.

“Now that was a mistake,” Val admitted in her murmur at the stove. She had heard all this before, of course. It was a frequent topic of conversation on these expeditions, naturally. Everyone who joined a Footsteps expedition was an expert; it only took a half-dozen books to fill you in on the entire history of Antarctica, and after that everyone had an opinion. Including her. But she had learned to stay out of the discussions, having become tired of the faintly condescending responses she got if she joined, responses all the more irritating because even though these were outdoor people, they still seemed to share the desk-jockey notion that anyone doing physical work for a living must have had all thoughts fly forever out of their head. She knew this was only the defensiveness of the couch potato, but it still bugged her. And it was always the same discussion anyway.

Jim and Jack were by no means finished with the litany of Scott’s mistakes. Jim focused on technical errors of competence, Val noted, Jack on moral turpitude. Jim pointed out that Scott had failed to notice that the cannisters they were using allowed their stove fuel to evaporate out of the cap screws. He had also ignored all signs of scurvy. He had hiked facing into the sun on the return from the Pole, when they could just as well have reversed their schedule and hiked with the sun to their backs, as Amundsen had done. Jack took over and insinuated that Scott had probably pressured Oates into committing suicide, and then probably invented Oates’s famous last words, “I am just stepping outside and may be some time.” It was certain that he had altered other diary entries when publishing them in his books. (“Oh heaven forbid,” Elspeth interjected.) In general he had been too good a writer; and in the end he had written his way out of responsibility for the fiasco—out of responsibility and into legend. In fact, Jack said, he had probably preferred to die heroically, rather than return to England as the second man to the Pole. And so he had no doubt coerced Bowers and Wilson into staying in their final campsite, rather than brave a storm to try to reach their next supply cache only ten miles away, a storm that Amundsen would have waltzed through with barely a note for it in his journal, except perhaps “some wind today.”

No. Scott was an idiot. He had read Tennyson; he had believed Tennyson; he had been the disastrous end product of a decaying empire, whose subjects had told themselves any number of comforting delusional stories about amateurs muddling through to glory, as at Waterloo or in the Crimea. This was the crux, even Jim maintained it: Scott had believed in bad stories. J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, had been one of his best friends. And so he and his men had never grown up. They had been Peter Pans, they had been Slaves to Duty like Frederick in The Pirates of Penzance; they had not had the sense to notice that The Pirates of Penzance was a satire. No, it was Browning and Tennyson and G. A. Henty and the Boy’s Own Weekly for them, all the stupidities of the Victorian age turned into cast-iron virtues by the stories the boys were told. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred; onto the plateau of death manhauled the five.

“P. G. Wodehouse made fun of that stuff all the time,” Jim mentioned as they started dessert, which consisted of immense chocolate bars and brandy. “That’s why he was so funny.”

“They were Woosters!” Jack exclaimed. “They were a bunch of Bertie Woosters on ice, without their Jeeves along to help them out.”

“It’s worse than that,” Jim said. “The Jeeveses were right there at hand being ignored—men like Bowers, or Crean, or Lashly—the able seamen from the working classes. Those guys were very very tough, and they almost managed to haul the toffs out of there despite everything. In fact that’s what Crean and Lashly did with Lieutenant Evans, on their retreat from the last depot.”

After Scott had taken five men to the Pole, as Jim now reminded them, there had only been three to return from the last depot, and for these three it had been a very close thing indeed. Lieutenant Evans had collapsed, a victim of scurvy, and seamen Crean and Lashly had had to haul him on their sledge five hundred miles back to Cape Evans, an ordeal that included emotional moments such as sticking the lieutenant’s frozen feet onto their exposed stomachs, right through clothing and the membrane of class itself, to save him from a fatal frostbite. Finally Crean, at the end of four months of a manhauling regime so intense that it killed everyone else who tried it except Lashly, hurried ahead for help, covering forty miles of the ice shelf and getting down its edge to Hut Point, in a push of thirty-four straight hours of walking.

“And in the end Bowers almost managed to do the same for Wilson and Scott,” Jim added, “like he did for Wilson and Cherry-Garrard on the Winter Journey.”

Little Birdie Bowers, Val thought, remembering the spring trip to Cape Crozier. Henry Robert Bowers—never cold, never tired, never discouraged. But even he hadn’t been able to Jeeves his way out of that last trip. Worked into the ground like the poor knackered ponies, until he had died in his traces.

“No,” Jim insisted. “Bertie Woosters. And Scott the worst of them—the one who killed them. He’s the one who had the authority. He could have studied the problem, and figured out solutions. It’s not like the solutions weren’t there, because they were. But he couldn’t be bothered. And so he tipped the balance, from life to death.”

All through this conversation, this dissing duet, everyone had been eating, powering their spaghetti down and enjoying the rant for the tent entertainment it was, laughing even when they were waving chunks of garlic bread or shaking heads to mark their objections. And when Jack and Jim were done, and into their second mugs of brandy, Elspeth wiped their whole case away with a single sweep of a chocolate bar. “This is all just Huntford,” she said firmly. “You can’t take him seriously.”

Ta Shu looked interested in this; he had been following the whole conversation as if watching a sport he didn’t know, head swiveling this way and that, entertained but mystified. “What do you mean?” he asked Elspeth.

“All this anti-Scott stuff they’ve been giving us. It all comes from the Roland Huntford biography of Scott and Amundsen. It’s a good book in some ways, but it should really have been called Scott Was an Idiot. It’s a five-hundred-page list of stupidities. But a lot of them are crazy.”

“What do you mean?” Jack challenged.

“I mean Huntford went overboard,” Elspeth said, with a steady look at Jack. Val saw that she didn’t like him either. “Sometimes he was right, but other times he was just making a case. He was the first writer to debunk the Scott myth, and he got so into it he turned into a prosecutor rather than a judge. Complaining that Scott had ambitions to be more than a torpedo lieutenant! I mean really. Or pretending it was Scott’s fault that he was given a bad ship. Or pretending that his men weren’t loyal to him. Or that England was so bad, and Norway such a virtuous little country, when at that time the Norwegians were out slaughtering the world’s whales to make their fortune and build their pretty towns.” She shook her head. “Huntford made everything black and white, and that’s not the way it was.”

Jim gulped a mouthful of brandy and choked a little, waving a hand at her. “Even if you discount Huntford—and I take your point about his book being extreme—you still have to admit that Scott was pretty comprehensively incompetent. That part is simply true.”

“Nothing is simply true,” Elspeth said. She liked Jim better than Jack, Val saw. “Cherry-Garrard didn’t think Scott was incompetent, and Cherry-Garrard was there.”

“He was biased.”

“So was Huntford.”

“But Cherry-Garrard was an apologist. He tied himself in knots to try to tell the truth and still protect Scott’s memory.”

Elspeth nodded. “His is a complicated book that way. It has some of the grays in it, you see. That’s what makes it a great book. He tried to be honest. And all his best friends died in it, remember. And he was in the group that found their bodies the following spring. They were only eleven miles from the next depot, and it was Cherry-Garrard who had laid that depot the previous fall. He had had orders from Atkinson to lay it in that spot and turn back, and he was wrecked himself by then, so he obeyed the orders. But if he had gone on a little farther, and set the depot another fifteen miles farther out, the return party might have found it and gotten home okay. It was a possibility that haunted him all the rest of his life. He was a haunted man. The night they found the bodies he wrote in his journal, ‘I am afraid to go to sleep.’ And when he got back to England he was sent right into the trenches of World War I. He drove an ambulance and he saw it all. And then he got colitis and was sent home. And after that he wrote his book, and it took him years and years. It was the book of his life. And struggling with mental illness a lot of the time.”

Val, remembering the Ponting photo encased in the new display at Cape Crozier, said, “You can see that in the picture of the three of them after the Winter Journey.”

“Yes you can, can’t you? He looks quite mad. And in his later years, when he looked back on his time in the Antarctic, it was like looking back into another age. Into the time before the fall.”

Back when your friends were alive, Val thought. Back when your big brothers were alive. Bowers had been 28, Wilson 45; Cherry had been 22.

“But even he says Scott was moody,” Jim pointed out, “and a bad judge of character. Even when he was idealizing the whole experience, he had to say that.”

“That’s right. And I believe him when he says it, because he was there. But he was still intensely loyal to Scott, he still admired him despite the mistakes. And even more did he admire Wilson and Bowers, and they were Scott loyalists as well. You can’t take that away from Scott, no matter what Huntford said.”

Ta Shu turned from the stove, where he had started washing the dishes in a basin of steaming water. “Like Huxley,” he said.

They looked at him, nonplussed.

“Thomas Huxley?” Jim ventured.

“Al-dous Huxley. English explorer. Explorer of higher states of consciousness. Mescaline, LSD. He take LSD in last hours of his life, to see what would happen. Very brave! One of your great British explorers, like Scott or Shackleton. And in one of his books there is very profound scene. A man and a woman are in a hotel room, making love. Out their window there is a neon sign that changes colors, from red to green to red to green. Over and over. And that light comes in their window and falls on them. And when the red light is shining on them, all is rosy. Full of life. Mysterious and beautiful. And then the light change, and the green light shine on them, and all becomes ghastly and pale. Mechanical. Like a nightmare of insects. And the lights keep changing, back and forth, back and forth. Red to green to red. Lovers don’t know what to think.”

“Like Huntford and Cherry-Garrard,” Val said.

Ta Shu nodded.

Jack yukked: “Cherry red and Hunt green!”

“But it isn’t just a matter of interpretation,” Jim objected. “Some things happened and some things didn’t. And the point of history is first to try to determine what really happened, and not just tell lies about it. The heroic Scott is a lie, for the most part. When you really look at what really happened—that’s when you get away from black and whites and into the grays. And then when you find something admirable, as Huntford did with Amundsen, and later with Shackleton, then it’s really worth your admiration. It’s a real accomplishment, rather than just lies and wishes.”

“Yes,” Elspeth said, “but Huntford went too far. I mean, to say that Scott made up Oates’s last words—how could he possibly know? He wasn’t in the tent.”

“No, but we have Oates’s diary. He was totally disgusted with Scott.”

“So? Do you think Scott would have lied about something like that? Say that Oates got up and said, ‘You bloody fool, you’ve doomed us all with your stupidity, and now I’m going to go out and kill myself because it’s obvious you want me out of the way’—Would Scott then have written down in his diary, ‘Oates said, “I am just going out and may be some time”’? What if the three men remaining had made it back, what then? Wilson and Bowers would have known it was a lie!”

“Neither of them mentioned the incident in their diaries,” Jim pointed out.

“That proves nothing. Wilson wasn’t even keeping his diary anymore at that point, as I recall. No, I’m sure Oates said something just like that—probably those precise words. These were men at the end of their tethers, you have to remember. They were starving and frostbitten and gangrenous. They were in desperate straits. Oates was only the worst of them. Scott would probably have lost his feet as well, if they had gotten home. In times like that it’s the old stories you were talking about that kick in more than ever, the public-school ethos and the military code. You don’t break down and shout accusations at each other—you live out the deepest scripts in you.”

“Maybe,” Val said, remembering South Georgia Island.

“No, you see it time after time,” Elspeth insisted. “Men going to their deaths for some idea or other. Following a script, living out an ideology—there are a lot of ways of putting it.”

“Some people break under stress,” Val said despite herself.

“Yes they do. But that’s another story—that’s Lord Jim, a story that all these men knew very well. It was a cautionary tale to them—break down once, and your honor is lost forever. That’s why so many of them died in the trenches, going to certain death to make sure that they didn’t look like a shirker.”

Jim shook his head. “World War I killed that story for good.”

“I know what you mean by that,” Elspeth said. “But I’m not so sure it did.”

Ta Shu spoke again. “All stories are still alive,” he said. “All stories have colors in them.” He looked around at them, an older man from a different culture, weathered and strange, incongruous in his red parka. “This present moment—this is clear.” Although actually the light in the tent was its usual virulent blue; but they took his point. “The past—all stories. Nothing but stories. All colored. So we choose our colors. We choose what colors we see.”

Soon after that the big loads of food in them and the exhaustion of the day’s climb both hit at once, and they groaned through the icy brilliant air to their tents, to fall in their bags and sleep deeply, no matter the incandescent brightness lasting through the night. And the next morning they got up and ate breakfast in silence, contemplating no doubt the day ahead of them. They broke camp and got it stuffed into its bags and into the sledge, and then they were off again. Val hauled the sledge by herself, starting slow so that people could get warmed up gradually. The hard field of firn covering the head of the Sargent Glacier was pretty easy going.

Then they had to climb into the saddle between Bell Peak and the high ridge of the Herbert Range to their right, and this proved to be a mean little wall; it took three hours of hard hauling to get the sled up it.

Finally they made it, however, and Val took the sledge and pulled it across the saddle until she reached the far side, where they had a full view of the Axel Heiberg. It would make a dramatic lunch spot.

She pulled up the final slope to a little snow-covered knob she had camped on during a previous expedition, and gestured to the others as they straggled up after her, waving at the view ahead. “Lunch time!” she cried.

While she waited for them she goggled at the view. A good two thousand feet below them, down the steep snow-blanketed slope of the glacier’s sidewall, lay the great ice river itself, the Axel Heiberg, pouring down from the polar cap in a truly frightening icefall, like an immense waterfall that had frozen to stillness and broken to shards. Then below them it flattened out and curved around the shoulder they stood on. It was easy to see that they could have taken the flat, broad, curving road of the lower Heiberg glacier in from where it poured onto the Ross Sea, and avoided every difficulty they had overcome in the previous two days, also the tricky work of successfully descending the slope leading back down to the glacier.

What also became suddenly clear to the understanding was just how huge and strange the Transantarctic Mountains were. This stupendous ice stream had torn a trench in the range so clean in its lines that it was hard to grasp how big it was; but it was almost as deep as the Grand Canyon, and considerably wider, and when one’s sense of scale came into focus, so to speak, it was hard not to feel a bit frightened, like a speck on the side of the abyss. It was clear also from this vantage point that the mountain range was a dam holding back the polar ice, the ice pouring down these giant spillways ten thousand feet to the sea. There was nothing like it anywhere else in the world, and standing there it was easy to feel the truth of that.

Ta Shu, the first one to join Val on the knob, needed no time to make his feng shui analysis. “This a very big place,” he declared, puffing and grinning at Val.

Jorge and Elspeth arrived and just stared at the scene, looking appalled. Jim arrived and was stunned. Jack arrived and said “God damn!” and hooted a few times. “Wow! Will you look at that!”

“God damn is right,” Jim said, checking out the precipitous slope they now had to descend. “Why didn’t Amundsen just follow the dogs!”