Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

Before relating exactly what happened to the Arcosaur project, I should say a little about the terrain.

Drift Station Arcosaur (Arctic Ocean Synoptic Automatic Resource) was located on an ice island designated T-6, the T being short for “target”—a taxonomic legacy of the Cold War. We were living on what used to be part of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf until it snapped off from Ellesmere Island in the mid-fifties and itself became an island. For more than three thousand years it had been attached to Canada, but by 1986 it had circled the polar cap many times, drifting aimlessly—but always clockwise—with the Arctic gyre. It was well to the east of its starting point when we first pitched camp on it, but the grooves and furrows of the surface left no doubt as to its origin: they all ran in the same direction, what used to be east–west when the island was stationary.

Twenty kilometres long and riding ten to fifteen metres higher than the surrounding ice pack, our ice island was selected by the Polar Research Institute because it was big enough to land planes on. Every now and again we would get lodged in the ice pack, only to become mobile with the first change in wind or current, or the first hard knock from another floe. But our radio beacon made us easy to find.

(Point of history: It was thought that Robert Peary mistook an ice island like ours for actual land, which he named Crocker’s Land and put on the map. Some have hypothesized that Peary was misled by an Arctic mirage, but such mirages are commonplace and he was far too seasoned an explorer to make that mistake. Just as paleontologists like to discover species, explorers need to discover land. Crocker was Peary’s patron. In any case, some years later an exploration party perished as a result of finding nothing at his coordinates but open water.)

Three of us—Wyndham, Vanderbyl and I—had been here since April, along with a few support staff. The others joined us in July. Elongated freshwater lakes—called leads—had formed in the island’s grooves, some as long as ten kilometres, and these were a subject of intense biological research. Their blue colour is of a specific tone and brilliance I have seen nowhere else. The eyes of certain Nordic movie stars come to mind.

People who hear about Arctic research—that is, winter research—for the first time express wonder that anyone can stand the isolation, let alone the extreme temperatures. And the prospect of spending months on end in twenty-four-hour darkness they find terribly depressing. But it’s actually the Arctic summers that test one’s inner resources, at least on an ice island. Even though the temperature may never rise much above freezing, the twenty-four-hour sun turns the surface to slush, sometimes as deep as two feet, making all outdoor activity much harder. Supply planes can no longer land, dramatically increasing the isolation factor, and then there is the sun itself. If an Arctic researcher is going to snap, it will most likely occur on a summer day of blinding light, when he is exhausted from struggling to move equipment even a short distance, when he is wet (and as a result far colder than he ever was in winter) and when restful sleep is a receding memory.

But summer was still months away when Rebecca arrived. The surface was still firm’ one could still believe in solidity. I had no reason to be thrown by her simply entering the same room.

Sitting around with Wyndham after dinner one evening, I said, Before I die, I would like to taste Shackleton’s whisky. (A crate of it had been discovered beneath the floorboards of his shack.)

They won’t allow it, Wyndham said. It’ll be preserved for posterity.

He would have wanted us to have a drink.

Wrong pole. Anyway, doesn’t enter into it, what Shackleton might have wanted. Didn’t realize you were such a lush, he added with a smile.

No human being could dislike Wyndham. Even in the academic/scientific community, so rife with competition—for jobs, for grants, for recognition—so awash with rivers of bad blood, you never heard a bad word about Gord Wyndham, nor did he ever speak harshly of another human being. For that alone he was remarkable, but he was also a first-rate scientist, open-minded yet skeptical, precise, conscientious, generous.

About his family life I knew nothing first-hand, but he was always telling us about his wife, whom he found humorously, delightfully unscientific, and his two young boys, about whom he related stories as if they were anecdotes from the field. I told him he should write a monograph in the style of the old Geographical Society: Some Observations on the Curious Behaviour of Prepubescent Males in the Ottawa Valley. He spoke of them with such a charming combination of love and awe that even I, a person bored to petrifaction by people’s families, remember his stories of Phil and Milo—even those names!—with pleasure and affection.

Eleven bottles wrapped in straw and paper dating back to 1907, I said. The Nimrod expedition. A brand no longer in existence. Mackinlay’s, if I remember right.

Shame the poor guy never got to drink them himself.

And then:

The smell of Rebecca’s hair when she sits in the chair next to mine. Mint and rosemary? Thyme? Some herb or other. She ignores me, as she has been doing the whole first week of her rotation. She has been perfectly friendly to everybody else, and especially to Wyndham, but with me it’s been strict radio silence.

I lean toward her, and when she finally registers this invasion of her space and turns to face me, I look her in the eye and call her, ever so quietly, Vostok.

Vostok? She addresses the question not to me but to Wyndham, who is scribbling equations of some kind beside the remains of his scrambled eggs. Why is he calling me Vostok?

Wyndham flips his pencil around to make an erasure and recalculates some figure. Pens tend to be useless up here’ ink turns to sludge. He looks up with a startled expression and says, Vostok? Coldest place on Earth, Vostok.

I thought that was Oimyakon in Siberia.

Vostok’s the coldest uninhabited.

Rebecca looks at me again. She’s wearing a big Irish wool sweater, dark curls spilling over her shoulders. The ivory turtleneck gives her a nunlike air.

Minus 128 degrees F, I tell her. Without the wind chill.

Makes this place seem positively sweltering, Wyndham adds, chasing the last of his eggs round his plate, but Rebecca has left the room.