Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

There is something ludicrous about a man shovelling snow in the Arctic. Wyndham had a photograph tacked above his desk of him and me doing just that. We were out there day and night, along with one or two of the others, sometimes with shovels, other times on our knees poking about with implements smaller than kitchen spatulas.

Snow cover on T-6 averaged about three feet. And yet the polar ice cap is a desert. Most areas receive less than eight inches of precipitation a year, but whatever comes stays. Snowstorms are most often a matter of blowing snow, not falling snow, but they can play havoc with a runway. Keeping the huts and equipment in running order fell to old Arctic hand Murray Washburn, but keeping our landing strip clear was the responsibility of Hunter Oklaga, an Inuit and former Army Ranger who was possibly the only man alive—and certainly the only man among us—who had parachuted into both the Antarctic and the Arctic, feats none of us yearned to duplicate. If anyone voiced discomfort with the environment, he would say, You’re crazy, man. You should try Laurie Island. Antarctica? Now, that’s cold. This is Miami we’re in here.

We were less than eight hundred miles from the Pole.

“Hunter” was a translation of a nine-syllable name no English-speaking person could even remember, let alone pronounce. Hunter told me it actually meant “hunter with impressive penis” but he hadn’t liked to adopt the second noun for everyday use. He was a cheery, chatty sort, always showing me photographs from the Antarctic and other expeditions he’d been on. I think it was because he knew I was a former bush pilot and was under the mistaken impression that I was cut from the same rough-and-ready cloth. All his photos had been taken on sunny days.

There aren’t that many photographs from Arcosaur, and most of the ones I’ve seen look black-and-white. But they are not’ it’s simply a reflection of the weather, which was so often overcast. The tallest object in every shot is the sixty-foot radio mast, barnacled with instruments. One becomes inured to the crudeness of an ice station. I don’t notice it in memory, only in photographs. Empty fuel drums. We made no effort to corral them. They got blown from place to place like so much tumbleweed until they got snowed into place, some canted on end, others lengthwise.

We set boards on top of spent drums weighted with sea water, creating an elevated walkway between the radio shack and the lab and the sleeping quarters. Even so, we sometimes had to clear away high drifts. I remember a shot of Rebecca—it must have been a warm day—sitting on the walkway, the antenna rising like an ugly Eiffel Tower in the background. She is eating an apple and mostly has her back to the camera. Her red down vest the only colour in the picture. Dark hair lifting in a slight breeze.

There’s another one of Ray Deville, looking shaggy and unshaven in front of one of the AARI buoys. He’s going down on one knee, arms spread wide in the classic posture of the big Broadway number, huge grin on his face. Next to the buoy sits a Nansen sled loaded with crates of dynamite destined for the seismic ridge and a series of reflection experiments. The picture is the only instance I can think of where Ray is smiling.

Somewhere online there is a shot of the supply plane landing. Sky pale grey at the zenith, deeper grey at the horizon. The snow and ice scalloped and torn into strips of grey on grey, almost white in the foreground. The whitest object is a cloud hugging the NE horizon. It isn’t a cloud at all, of course, but a windstorm. Wyndham stands in the middle of the shot cradling a twelve-gauge. We were having a lot of trouble with bears at the time.

Rebecca. Seated in the pale wash of light from one of the porthole windows. It’s not a photograph—I was never a photographer and have frankly never understood shutterbugs—but the image is as fixed in my mind as a studio portrait: Rebecca in jeans and that ivory turtleneck, reading a volume of poems. I’m noodling calculations in my notebook. I’ve been growing increasingly alarmed at some of the findings, and I’m trying, not very hard at this moment, to find the errors.

I don’t know anyone who reads poems, I say.

She doesn’t respond. The place is silent except for the thrum of the generator. It’s early in a new six-week rotation and everyone is somewhere else, perhaps watching a video of a ball game that took place weeks ago. Perhaps working. People fall into odd patterns when there is no night. The first day there is a kind of exhilaration at the unlooked-for escape from the dark. Many stay up until fatigue finally drives them to bed and a fitful sleep. Scientists go out at all hours.

I put aside the notebook and stand before her and slip my hand into the masses of curls. The warmth of her face against my wrist. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t look up.

Do you always just take what you want?

I can’t, in this case. That would be your heart.

It’s taken.

That’s not how it looks.

Lots of things are more complicated than they look.

She has her finger under the next page, ready to turn. The paper trembling. There are pencil marks next to a couple of lines of verse: Let me break/Let me make/something ragged, something raw/Something difficult to take.

I remove my hand from her hair and lean down. So close I can smell her hair, her skin, the ghost of cedar from her sweater. I know she can feel my breath on her ear as I whisper one word.

Vostok.