She passed through the dark vestibule. The inner door was opened onto the dim main room; the others already inside. This hallway was their version of a lock. Also a storeroom: slabs of seal blubber stacked on the floor. Butchered sheep hanging in a nook. Horse harnesses on the wall.
Into the big room. The nearer half of it was walled with stacks of boxes, supplies for that fateful expedition of 1911, never used. The farther half narrowed, as wooden bunkbeds stuck out from the walls on both sides. Beyond the big central table were workbenches under the southern window, and on the other side, in the far corner, Scott and Wilson’s nook. Against the far wall, the black closet of Ponting’s darkroom. All dim in the gray light.
Jack and Jim and Carlos had sat down wearily at the far end of the big table, and seeing them Val was reminded sharply of Ponting’s photo of Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard after their return from the Worst Journey. They had been seated in the same places, at this very same table. After thirty-six days out, in midwinter. Val shivered. It was cold in here, as cold as outside, or colder. They had judged in ignorance.
“Anyone for some Heinz catsup?” Jorge asked, standing before one of the stacks of boxes.
Wade joined him. “So strange,” he said, touching one of the bottles arrayed on top of the highest box. “I saw the same catsup bottles at old Pole Station, and the old old station too. The only difference is this one has a cork instead of a screw top.” He left a finger touching the bottle, bemused. These things of ours that carry on, Val thought. Small objects we use. And so the people to come will know we were real too. Because we used Heinz catsup.
“I’ll radio McMurdo,” she said. She went out into the hall; Ta Shu was coming in, and she waved him past her. Then she tried her wrist phone. “McMurdo, this is T-023, this is T-023, do you read, over.”
To her surprise an answer came quick and clear. “T-023, this is McMurdo, once again in touch with all the world. Hey Val, where are you?”
“Hi Randi. We’re at the Cape Evans hut.”
“Cape Evans! How you’d get there?”
“We had some help.”
“Oh I see! Well you’re not the only ones, let me tell you. You got a lift from our back-country residents?”
“Yeah. Listen, can you send a boat over to collect us? I’m not sure we can walk home.”
“Oh sure, sure, no problem there. How many of you are there now?”
“Nine.”
“How’s that collarbone?”
“He’s okay.”
“Good. Okay, I’ll get them to send a Zodiac over right away.”
Back in the hut Jim was holding a bottle of marmalade up to the light. “I read that once the Kiwis at Scott Base ran out of jam and one of them got on a snowmobile and rode over here and took some of this marmalade back with him. They ate it on their scones.” He smiled at Ta Shu, standing next to him. “Frozen for fifty years or so.”
“Very tasty.”
“I don’t suppose it’s any different now.”
Nevertheless they left the food alone. Jim went on telling Ta Shu and the others about the place: how Scott had had a wall of boxes set across the hut to divide officers from able seamen; how they had had a player piano on which to make music; how the hut had been plundered for souvenirs during the IGY years, and been filled to the roof with drift snow and ice before its restoration.
Val wandered around restlessly, only half listening. The bench under the south window looked like an alchemist’s laboratory. Little dark bottles, white powders, retorts, all the proud paraphernalia of Victorian science; antique, primitive, handmade. It was the same on the shelf above Wilson’s cot, and in the darkroom. All kinds of things. And everything immaculate; no spiderwebs, no dust. Scott’s bookshelves, actually the framing of the wall over his bed, were empty. There was a dead Emperor penguin lying on its back across his desk table. The space looked like Scott’s, somehow. Blank, private, austere; an empty stuffed shirt; but something more than that.
Around the corner the bunkbeds seemed to her much more human. Here one over the other had slept her favorites, Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Their magazine pin-ups were still stuck to the wooden wall over their beds: Cherry’s were portraits of Edwardian young ladies, dreamy, impeccably dressed, lace at the throat; not people who were ever going to come to Antarctica. Bowers’s pin-ups were of dogs.
In the dim light it began to seem to Val as if she had never woken up, but was walking in the dim spacetime of dreams, so that these men might stamp into the outer hallway at any second. But they had died out there. Scott had taken five men on the last leg instead of four, and they had died. If he had sent Seaman Evans back with Lieutenant Evans, all might have been well. That close to survival; one decision; eleven miles out of sixteen hundred. And yet they scorned Scott for his incompetence, they made fun of him. He who had hauled a sledge all that way, and almost made it. One bad call was all it took. No one to fly in to the rescue.
Now her group sat or stood wandering the room, chilling down in the gray light. The matted reindeer hair of the sleeping bags looked woefully inadequate. Val went back around the corner and sat on Wilson’s cot. She stared at Scott’s empty bed. She had misjudged these men; she had taken other people’s casual superior judgments and accepted them. As if the people who had lived before them in time were somehow smaller because they had lived earlier. Looking through the wrong end of a telescope and saying But they’re all so small. Following their footsteps and then thinking that what they had done was as pointless as following in people’s footsteps. As if they had not been as intelligent and cultured as any living human, and in many ways far more capable. Walk sixteen hundred miles in Antarctica and then judge them, she thought drowsily, head resting back against the wooden wall. She heard the voices of her group as the conversation of those odd Brits, those straightlaced young men, strong animals, complex simplicities, running away from Edwardian reality to create their own. Say it was an escape, say it was Peter Pan; why not? Why not? Why conform to Edwardian reality, why march into the trenches to die without a whimper? In this little room they had made their world. The first Antarctic chapter of the Why Be Normal Club. Happy at the return of some distant party which had been out of touch for weeks or months, out there on one crazed journey after another, pointless and absurd—the pure existentialism of Antarctica, where they made reality, or at least its very meaning. The pathetic fallacy of the Edwardians or the pathetic accuracy of the postmoderns; nothing much to choose between them; certainly no priority, either of heroic precedence or omniscient subsequence. Just people down here, doing things. Flinging themselves out into the spaces they breathed, to live, to really live, in this their one brief life in the world. They had been in no one’s footsteps.
13
The McMurdo Convergence
blue sky
black water
The clouds broke up and blew off to the north. Between the last low white stragglers the sun shone brightly, burnishing the gray interior of the hut. Wade followed the others outdoors into the sun, and blinked up at Erebus. Offshore the sea ice was gone, and waves lined the water. Hungrily Wade gazed at the open sea, at movement in the landscape, such a relief after all the days of snow and ice. The ocean here was black even though the sky overhead was blue; he had never seen anything like it.
A while later a fast fat-rimmed rubber motorboat came slushing out of the sun-blasted water to the south, and beached below them in a surge of floating ice chunks. The three-person crew of the boat did not appear surprised at Val’s group; their manner made it clear that in the last week they had picked up so many groups in trouble around the shores of the Ross Sea that search and rescue was nothing to them anymore; they were worldly now, and jaded. No one had died, they said, as far as they knew. But there had been a lot of close calls.