Dark Winter
by William Dietrich
About the
book
Chapter One
Sometimes you have to go into
nothing to get what you want.
That was the Jed Lewis theory,
anyway. West Texas oil patch, Saudi, the North Slope. Hadn't worked
for him yet but one kind of extreme had led to another, one kind of
quest to its polar opposite. Sometimes life patterns like that, when
you keep changing your mind about what it is you do want. So
now he'd come to the very end of the world and was peering over its
edge, too late to turn back, hoping that in a place no sane person
would ever come to he'd finally fit in. Atone to himself for his own
confusion of purpose. Belong.
Maybe.
"The Pole!" Jim Sparco had seduced
him. "Feels closer to the stars than any place on Earth. It's high
desert, a desert of ice, and the air's so dry that it feels like you
can eat the stars. Bites of candy." The climatologist had gripped
his arm. "The South Pole, Lewis. It's there you realize how cold the
Universe really is."
The money had almost been
secondary. They'd understood each other, Sparco and he, this longing
for the desolate places. A place uncomplicated. Pure.
Except for their rock, of course.
That raised questions. It was their pebble, their tumor, their
apple.
***********
The world is round but it has an
edge. A cold crustal wrinkle called the Trans-Antarctic Range runs
for more than a thousand miles and divides Antarctica in two. On the
north side of the mountains is a haunting but recognizable landscape
of glacier and mountain and frozen ocean: an Ice Age world, yes, but
still a world - our world. To its south, towards the Pole, is an ice
cap so deep and vast and empty as to seem unformed and unimagined. A
vacuum, a blank. The white clay of God.
Lewis crossed in the sinking light
of Antarctic autumn. He was exhausted from thirty hours of flying,
constricted by thirty-five pounds of polar clothing, and weary of
the noisy dimness of the LC-130 military transport plane, its webbed
seats pinching circulation and its schizophrenic ventilation blowing
hot and cold.
He was also entranced by the
beauty. The sun was slowly dipping toward six-month night and the
aqua crevasses and sugared crags below were melodramatic with blaze
and shadow. Golden photons, bouncing off virginal snow, created a
hazed fire. Frozen seas looked like cracked porcelain. Unnamed peaks
reared out of fogs thick as frosting, and glaciers grinned with
splintery teeth attached to blue gums. It was all quite primeval,
untrodden and unspoiled, a white board to redraw yourself. The kind
of place where he could be whatever he made himself, whatever he
announced himself, to be.
The Trans-Antarctic Range is like a
dam, however, holding behind it a plateau of two-mile thick polar
ice like a police line braced against a pressing crowd. A hundred
thousand years of accumulated snowfall! A few peaks at the edge of
the ice plateau bravely poke their snouts up as if to tread water
but then, farther south, relief disappears altogether. The glaciers
vanish. So do ridges, crevasses, and theatrical light. What follows
is utter flatness, a frozen mesa as big as the contiguous United
States. When the airplane crossed the mountains it entered something
fundamentally different, Lewis realized. It was then that his
excitement began to turn to disquiet.
Imagine an infinite sheet of paper.
No, not infinite, because the curve of the earth provides a kind of
boundary. Except that the horizon itself is foggy and indistinct
with floating ice crystals, suspended like diamond dust, so that the
snow merges without definition into pale sky. There was nothing to
see from the tiny scratched windows of the National Guard transport:
no relief, no reference point, no imperfection. When he thought he
saw undulations in the snow the load master informed him he was
merely looking at the shadow of cirrus clouds far overhead. When he
thought he saw a track across the snow - left by a tractor or
snowmobile, perhaps - the load master pointed to a contrail being
left by an outgoing transport. His track was the shadow of that
dissipating streak across the sky.
Lewis moved among the pallets of
cargo from window to window, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did. The plane lumbered on, cold slithering along its
fuselage.
He checked his watch, as if it
still meant anything in a place where the sun went haywire, and
looked out again.
Nothing.
He looked out a different window.
No movie would start on the blank screen below. No progress could be
discerned. He searched a sky and plateau that seemed blank mirrors
of each other, vainly searching for some rip, some imperfection,
some reassurance that he was someplace in space and time.
Nothing.
He sat on his web seat and chewed a
cold lunch.
After a drag of time the Guardsman
cuffed his shoulder and Lewis stood again, looking where the
sergeant pointed. Far away there was a pimple on the vastness. A
tiny bug, a freckle, a period with a white runway attached to make a
kind of exclamation mark. Amundsen-Scott base! Named by Americans
for the Norwegian who got there first in 1912, and the hard-luck
Brit who froze to death weeks later after seconding at point zero.
Lewis made out a bottle-cap of a dome which sheltered the South
Pole's central buildings and an orbit of smaller structures like
specks of sand. From the air the human settlement was remarkable
only for its insignificance.
"The buildings fit in a circle
about a mile wide, all-together!" the load master shouted to him
over the roar of the engines. "Doesn't look like much, does it?"
Lewis didn't reply.
"You staying the winter?"
He shrugged.
"Glad it's you and not me!"
They buckled in, the snow seeming
to swell up to meet them, his heart accelerating during that
disquieting gap between air and ground, and then with a thump and a
bang they were down, swerving slightly as the skis skidded on the
ice. The plane shuddered as it taxied, continuing to vibrate when it
stopped because the pilots didn't dare shut the engines down.
Lewis stood, stiff and
apprehensive. He was the only passenger, the last arrival of the
season. An anti-migrant, swimming against the tide of humans fleeing
north. Well, his timing had never been the best. The cargo ramp
opened to a shriek of white and the cold hit him like a slap. It was
palpable, like a force you waded into.
"We had a fly stowaway from New
Zealand one time!" the load master shouted, his military mustache
almost brushing Lewis' ear. The propellers were still whirling so
the hubs wouldn't freeze and the National Guard sergeant needed this
intimacy to be heard. "Buzzed like a bastard for three thousand
miles! When we opened the doors it flew to the light and made it
three feet! Three feet! Then the fucker dropped like a stone!" The
man laughed.
Dizzy, Lewis walked out. He
couldn't get a proper breath. There was a crowd of orange-parka
people at the edge of the runway, waving but fidgety, anxious to get
away. The last of the summer crew, going home. Snow from the prop
wash blew over them, hazing them as if they were already being
erased. Awkward from his duffel and enormous white plastic polar
boots, Lewis staggered toward the group in seeming supplication. A
figure detached from the crowd to meet him. The man's hood was up
and all Jed could see were goggles and frosted beard, framed by a
ruff of fur. Lewis had been issued the same government-issue parka.
He'd been told it cost seven hundred dollars and a sacrificial fox.
"Jed Lewis?"
A nod, his own goggles giving the
Pole a piss-yellow tint.
The man reached, not to shake hands
but to shoulder the duffel. He turned to the others. "Let's get this
cargo off so you can all go home! Where's Tyson?"
There was a long moment of silence,
people glancing around, uneasy and amused. In their cold weather
gear everyone looked alike except for strips on their coats with
block-letter name tags.
"Sulking!" someone finally called.
Jed's greeter stiffened. "Oh
really?" He took an unhappy breath and there was another silence,
except for the drum of the engines. "Well, someone go the hell and
find him and tell him to get the damn sled up here so we can get
this plane off. He's got eight fucking months to sulk!" The others
shifted uncomfortably.
The man turned back to Lewis, not
waiting to see if anyone followed his command. "This way!" They set
off toward the central aluminum geodesic dome, half-buried now by
drifting snow, their pace briskly impatient. Lewis had read the
dimensions: fifty-five feet high, a hundred and sixty-four feet in
diameter. An American flag snapped at the top, its edge ragged, its
gunshot stutter audible now above the idle of the plane. Streaks of
snow dust curved across the top of the dome in neatly drawn
parabolas.
Jed's nose hairs had already
frozen. The cold ached in his lungs. His goggles were fogging up and
his cheeks felt numb. He'd only been outside a few minutes. It was
worse than he expected.
They descended a snowy ramp to a
dark, garage-sized entrance at the base of the dome, Lewis mincing
in his Frankenstein-sized boots so he wouldn't fall and slide on his
butt. His guide paused to wait for him and let their eyes adjust to
the dimness inside the door. Two cave-like corrugated steel arches
extended into gloom to his left and right. "BioMed and the fuel arch
that way, generators and garage over here." Jed had a shadowy
impression of walls and doors of plywood and steel, unpainted and
utilitarian. Before he could peek into the arched tunnels he was led
straight ahead. "The dome where we live is this way."
The overturned bowl shielded the
core of the South Pole base like a military helmet, keeping
warmth-sucking wind and blowing snow off the metal boxes where
people lived. Three of these boxcar-shaped structures, colored
orange, sat on short stilts under its shelter. Since the base was
built on snow the powder didn't stop at the entrance but formed the
dome floor, drifting over wooden crates and mounding against the
orange housing units. Dirt and grease had colored the snow tan, like
sand.
"It never melts," his guide said,
scuffing at it. "The ambient temperature in here is fifty-one
below."
Lewis tilted his head back. There
was a hole at the top of the dome that let in pale light from a
remote sky. The entire underside of the uninsulated structure was
covered with steel-gray icicles, pointing downward like a roof of
nails. It was beautiful and forbidding at the same time.
"You didn't finish the roof."
"Ventilation."
Someone bumped Lewis and he
staggered to one side. It was another winter-over, rushing a crate
of fresh fruit to the galley before it could freeze. "Sorry!
Freshies are like gold!" They followed the hurrying man to a
freezer-like door and opened it for him. To get inside you pulled a
metal rod sideways and tugged at a slab like a wall. Jed realized
that the freezer wasn't inside here, it was the Outside: anything
not carried into the orange housing modules would turn hard as a
brick. They followed the fruit bearer. There was a vestibule hung
with parkas and beyond it a galley of bright fluorescent light,
warmth, and the excited chatter of more people saying goodbye. Their
duffels were heaped like sandbags. People were packed to go.
His guide let Lewis' gear drop with
a thud and pushed back his goggles and hood. "Rod Cameron. Station
manager."
"Hi." Lewis tried to fix the face
but the men in their parkas looked alike. He had an impression of
beard, chapped skin, and red raccoon lines where the goggles cut.
Lewis was wondering about the absentee at the plane. "Someone not
show up for work?"
Cameron frowned. He had a look of
rugged self-confidence that came from coping with cold and
administration, and a hint of strain for the same reason. The Pole
wore on you. "Egos in kindergarten." He shook his head. "My job is
to herd cats. And I'm having a bad day. We had a little alarm last
night."
"Alarm?"
"The heat went off."
"Oh."
"We got it back on."
"Oh."
The station manager studied the
newcomer. Jed still looked smooth, sandy-haired and tanned, with the
easy tautness of the recreational athlete.
It would pass.
"You got your file?"
Lewis dug in his duffel and fished
out a worn manila envelope with employment forms, medical records,
dental X-rays and the a list of the personal belongings he'd shipped
to the Pole in advance of his own arrival. His new boss glanced
inside, as if to confirm Jed's presence, and then put it under his
arm. "I've got to go back outside to see this last plane off,"
Cameron said. "I'll show you around later but right now it's best to
just sit and drink water, because of the altitude. You feel lousy,
right? It's okay. Fingies are supposed to."
"Fingie?"
"F-N-G-I. Fucking New Guy on the
Ice. That's you."
Lewis failed at a grin.
"Latecomer."
"Just new. Everybody's a fingie at
first. We know we're lucky to get you last minute like this. Jim
Sparco e-mailed about you like the Second Coming."
"I needed a job."
"Yeah, he explained that. I think
it's cool that you quit Big Oil." Cameron gave a nod of approval.
"That's me, man of principle."
Lewis had a headache from the altitude.
"Course we need their shit to keep
from freezing down here."
"Not from a wildlife refuge, you
don't."
"And you just walked out."
"They weren't about to give me a
helicopter ride."
"That took some guts."
"It had to be done."
Cameron tried to assess the new
man. Lewis looked tired, disoriented, chest rising and falling, half
excited and half afraid. They all started like that. The station
manager turned back to the door, impatient to get away, and
considered whether to say anything else. "I've got to go get the
plane off," he finally said again. "You know what that means, don't
you?"
"What?"
"That you can't quit, down here."
***********
A stream of people followed Cameron
out, some looking at Lewis curiously and others ignoring him: the
winter-overs going to off-load the supplies and the last from summer
flying home. The Pole had a brief four-month window when weather
permitted incoming flights and then in February the last plane left,
fleeing north like a migrating bird. In winter it was too dark to
see, too windy to keep the ice runway clear, and too cold to risk a
landing: struts could snap, hydraulics fail, doors fail to open or
close. The sun set on March 21, the equinox, and wouldn't rise again
until Sept. 21. From February to October the base was as remote as
the moon. There were twenty-six winter-overs who retreated under the
dome to maintain its functions and take astronomical and weather
readings: eight women and eighteen men this year. It was like being
on a submarine or space station. You had to commit.
The galley had emptied and Lewis
took a place at a Formica table. The room was low-ceilinged, bright
and warm. A bulletin board was thick with paper, a juice dispenser
burbled, and in the corner a television monitor displayed outside
temperatures. It was fifty-eight below zero near the runway, the
breeze lowering the wind-chill to minus eighty-one. The reading was
an abstraction except for the freezer door he'd come through. That
was old, and cold leaked around its edges to rime its inner face
with frost. The frost reached all the way across it in stripes, like
fingers. The pattern reminded Lewis of a giant hand, trying to yank
the door away.
"Drink as much as you can. Best
cure for the altitude."
Lewis looked up. It was the cook,
bald except for a topknot that hung from the back of his head. His
skull looked knobby, as if knocked around more than once, and he had
a gray mustache and forearms tattooed with a bear and eagle. Here
was somebody easy to remember.
"It doesn't look high."
"That's because it's flat. You're
sitting on ice almost two miles thick. Our elevation is ninety-three
hundred, and the thinning of the atmosphere at the Poles makes the
effective altitude closer to eleven thousand. Walking out of that
transport is like being dumped on the crest of the Rockies. Your
body will adjust in a few days."
"I feel hammered." The short walk
from the plane had made him ill.
"You'll be racing around the world
before you know it."
"Around the world?"
"Around the stake that marks the
Pole." He sat down. "Wade Pulaski. Chief cook and bottle washer.
Best chef for nine hundred miles. I can't claim any farther because
Cathy Costello back at McMurdo is pretty good too." McMurdo was the
main American base in Antarctica, located on the coast.
"Jedediah Lewis, polar weatherman."
He shook.
"Jedediah? Your parents must have
been religious."
"More like hippies, I think. When
it was a fad."
"But it's Biblical, right? You're a
prophet?"
"Oracle of climate change by
temporary opportunity. Rock hound by training. And it's actually
just another name for Solomon. �Beloved of the Lord.'"
"So you're wise."
His head was pounding. "I take my
name as God's little joke."
"What do you mean by rock hound?"
"Geologist. That's my real job."
"So you come to the one place on
earth where there aren't any rocks? Doctor Bob will have a field day
with that one."
"Who's Doctor Bob?"
"Our new shrink. NASA sent him down
to do a head job on us before they plant too many people on the
space station. He's wintering over to write us up while we fuck with
each other's minds. He thinks we're all escapists."
Lewis smiled. "Rod Cameron just
told me we can't quit."
"That's what I told Doctor Bob!
It's like being paid to go to prison!"
"And yet we volunteered."
"I'm on my third season." Pulaski
stretched out his arms in mock enthusiasm, as if to claim ownership.
"I can't stay away. If the generators stop like they did last night
we've got maybe a few hours, but we always get them running again."
"Why'd they stop?"
"Some moron turned the wrong valve.
Rod went ballistic, which meant nobody was in a mood to confess this
morning. But it was a stupid annoyance, not a threat. And you're
going to learn that as long as you don't freeze to death things are
really good down here, especially now that the last of summer camp
is leaving and the bureaucrats are ten thousand miles away. I give
you better food than you'd get back home and there's no bullshit at
the Pole. There's no clock to punch, no bills, no taxes, no traffic,
no newspapers, no nothing. After today everything calms down and
this becomes the sanest place on earth. Cozier than most families.
And after eight toasty months you come out with your head straight
and your money saved. It's paradise, man."
Lewis reserved agreement. "You got
any aspirin?"
"Sure." The cook got a bottle from
the kitchen and brought it back. "You feel like shit right now, but
you'll get better."
"I know."
"You even acclimate to the cold. A
little."
"I know."
Pulaski went to the counter where
food was passed. He bent under it to get a commissary-sized soup
can, its label stripped and its inside cleaned to a bright copper.
"Here, your arrival present."
"What's this for?" Lewis realized
he felt stupid from the altitude.
"You'll drink all day and pee all
night, this first night. It's your body adjusting to the cold and
altitude. This can saves you about three hundred trips to the real
can."
"A chamber pot?"
"Welcome to Planet Cueball, fingie."
Copyright �
2001 William Dietrich |
