But by now the Erebus View would be open. She walked past the Holiday Inn and up the stairs to the private restaurant, stomach growling, almost faint with hunger. She walked through the door, into an ambrosia of food smells. Looked around for an empty table.
And there were Jim and Jack and Jorge and Elspeth, having dinner. Jack saw her and quickly looked away, scowling. Elspeth saw him turn his head, and glanced over her shoulder: “Oh hi Val,” riding over any awkwardness, “come join us.”
But Jack was glowering still, and after glancing at him, Jim would not meet her eye. Elspeth and Jorge, necks craned to look at Val over their booth back, didn’t see the other two.
Val waved a hand: “I’m looking for Joyce right now, I’ve got to talk to her. I’ll come back and catch you for dessert maybe.” And she retreated out of the restaurant.
Standing outside in the chill of McMurdo. Cloud shadows flitting through town. Blindly she stumped down the street behind the docks, helplessly thinking of all the bad expeditions she had ever been on, the ones people had walked away from furious or ashamed or sick at heart. It happened, oh yes it happened; under the stress of some of these radical endeavors people cracked, and the truth came out. And sometimes it was ugly. That ugly scowl on Jack’s face—Val had seen it before. One time she had been on the receiving end of that look for a whole week, on the ship returning them to the Falklands from South Georgia Island. After the one and only “In the Wake of Shackleton” expedition.
It had been one of the groups that had worn period clothing, a particularly crazy idea when repeating the boat journey, as the stuff the old guys had worn was ridiculously inadequate, and they could not have been more soaked, cold, and miserable. If they had been in a boat like the James Caird they would have died many times over; and even though their twenty-two-foot ultramodern boat had resembled a floating submarine more than Shackleton’s little lifeboat of the same length, and thus kept them afloat even in horrifying seas, it had still been a complete nightmare: everyone seasick, always lost unless they turned on the emergency GPS, cold and wet in the terrible gear, hurting with an accumulation of injuries as the result of being hammered relentlessly by huge waves. By the time they made their GPS-aided landfall on South Georgia Island, they were all wasted.
With the hardest part yet to go. For Shackleton and his men had been forced to land on the west side of the island, when all the Norwegian whaling stations were on the east side. And the island was a mountain range sticking up out of the South Atlantic.
Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had made it over, however, and Val’s three clients were stubbornly determined to do the same. So they had set off from King Haakon Bay to make the thirty-six-mile crossing of the island’s spine in a single push. It was a long way given the shape they were in, and over a steep range five thousand feet high, no small height when both ends of the trip were at sea level, and the island right in the Furious Fifties storm track. And they were minimally equipped for the hike, carrying only what Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had carried in 1916. It was a radical trip; a real test.
As they ascended and began to cross the island’s high empty glaciers, however, struggling through the deep snow, Eve had begun to tire fast. She had been the most seasick on the boat journey, and it became clear that she just didn’t have any gas left in the tank. The two men were almost as weak, and even Val was not feeling the usual dynamo effect that a hard hike had on her; it really hurt to give it her usual push. So they were in bad shape as they approached the crux of the journey, a ridge called The Trident directly blocking their way. There were four high passes to choose from, between the five tines so to speak. Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had started at the right and climbed up to each of the passes in turn, looking down the other side of each and finding them cliffs too steep to descend; then traversing under the towers to the next pass, each time with a terrible effort.
Without discussion Val’s group gave up on following this precise route and went straight for the fourth pass, the one Shackleton and his men had finally forced their way over. By the time they got close, the weather was degenerating. They had no tent or sleeping bags with them, and little food or clothing. And darkness was coming on fast, with the strong possibility of losing the moonlight to cloud cover, and perhaps even being stormed in. And then on the final approach to the pass, very steep even on that side, Eve had slipped and had to be arrested by Val, and in the jolt Eve somehow twisted her ankle pretty badly.
So when they finally reached the fourth pass, it had been a horrible shock to look over the other side and find that the slope there was insanely steep. The drop fell away so sharply that there was a big section in the middle they couldn’t see at all, which could have been a sheer cliff for all they could tell. The precipice only levelled off a full two thousand feet below them.
Shackleton, a careful man, had only decided to risk descending this slope because at that point they had no other choice. The three had therefore sat down in a line on their rope, legs around the man in front, and fired down the slope on their bottoms; two thousand feet in a matter of seconds, a drop that certainly could have killed them, as they had no idea what the hidden section below them would bring. Worsley said later he had never been more scared in his life, and he had done a lot of scary things. But they had lived.
Now, looking down this cliff, Eve had lost it. She refused to try the jump. This is crazy, she cried, this is crazy. Snow conditions might be different now, it might be icier! This must not be the right pass, we must have read the map wrong! We’ll be killed going down this!
Entirely possible. But this was the right pass, and it was getting dark, and a storm was coming. And they had gone so far that the only way out was forward—an all-too-common mountaineers’ dilemma. And Eve was shivering as well as crying, going into shock perhaps from her fall and the twisted ankle. And they had no tent, nor much food—yes, they were in the same fix as Shackleton—this was the plan after all, to put themselves in the same fix! They had engineered it this way! They too had no choice.
But Eve refused. Her boyfriend Mike begged her to try, he yelled at her; she yelled back at him, crying harder; their friend Brett tried to reason with her, but got nowhere. Whimpering in straightforward animal fear of death, she refused to make the leap. And while they sat there arguing it got darker and darker, and they were chilling down in a truly dangerous way.
Finally Val had snapped. She said “Look we’ve got to do this,” and grabbed up Eve, who kicked and screamed like a child in a tantrum, and pulled her around in front of her and jumped over the cornice, shouting back at Mike and Brett to do the same.
The slide quickly accelerated to something like free fall. Val crushed Eve to her hard, and they skidded down on Val’s backside, airborne at times, going faster and faster until Val was sure they were doomed; it would only take one rock in their path. But they never caught on a rock, never lost balance and tumbled into a bone-shattered bloody mass…. And some timeless interval later, probably less than a minute, they skidded out onto flat thick snow at the bottom of the slope and came to a halt. Mike and Brett arrived seconds later. Val’s pants were shredded, her legs and butt bloodied.
After that they had had to help Eve, who was crying helplessly all the while; one on each side of her taking turns, though mostly it was Mike and Brett who did that, while Val found the way in the dark, through most of that night. And they reached Stromness just before a giant storm hammered the island.
Great adventure. But Eve never spoke to her again.