The geologists said their farewells and took off around the other side of Lake Vashka. Wade and Val continued on down Barwick Valley together.
blue sky
brown valley
“Did you enjoy your visit?” Val asked when they were some way down the valley, and out of earshot of the scientists.
“It was very interesting.” So interesting that he could think of nothing further to say about it. He was still sorting out his impressions of the final conversation with Professor Michelson. Which was too bad, as he would have liked very much to say more to her. He didn’t want to seem to be holding his cards close to the vest, when he had no cards at all. “I don’t know quite what to make of them,” he confessed.
She nodded. “Beakers are funny people.”
“You must find it interesting, the way they look at mountains.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. The things they notice. And the time spans …”
“Only three hundred years! Blink of the eye!”
They laughed. She waved a hand at the abrupt ridges walling the valley on both sides: “As if rock were toothpaste, flowing from one position to the next.”
“Strange. Do any of them climb?”
“Oh sure. Bob, over in Taylor Valley, he climbs a lot. And vice versa—some of the mountaineers have degrees in geology. Misha back there is a geomorphologist, for instance.”
“I knew he was into it somehow.”
“Oh yeah, he tries to fit his research in when he can, although it’s hard to do—they’re never in the right place for him, and he has a lot of work to do just to take care of them.”
He looked at her. “You talk about it like it’s babysitting.”
“Well, you know. This place can kill you in a matter of hours if you blow it. And a mountaineer’s profession is keeping people from blowing it, and then also knowing how to stay alive even when you have blown it. You wait till your first storm, then you’ll be happy you have me along.”
“I’m already happy to have you along.”
“Thanks,” she said, dismissing the comment. “Anyway, a lot of these beakers are not thinking very much about survival, to say the least. The mountains are just data for their papers. For some of them, if they could get the data while sitting back home, they would be perfectly happy. I hiked with a group of them around a nunatak up on the ice, after a helo didn’t make skeds, and it was incredibly beautiful, the ice pouring around the rock, you know, and they complained the whole way home because the nunatak was nothing but dolerite. They hiked along singing ‘Dolerite, dolerite, dolerite, dolerite.’”
Wade grinned. “They were teasing you.”
“Sure. But the beauty of it, for them, it was only—whatever.”
“Data.”
“Yeah. And data can be beautiful, but still.”
“Beakers.”
“Right. Still, you gotta love ’em. For one thing they’re really what gets the rest of us down here.”
“The continent of science.”
“Right. Science, and some really incredible shits and giggles.” She shook her head, disgusted again at the phrase.
“Expensive.”
“You aren’t kidding. Once Bob told me he and a friend had calculated how much it costs to do science down here, just by taking the total Antarctic budget and dividing it by the number of scientist days—you know, it was the usual kind of beaker calculation—and it came out to something like ten thousand dollars a day per scientist.”
“You’re kidding!”
“That’s what he said. But hey, don’t tell your boss that. I don’t want to be responsible for NSF getting yanked out of here. I’m pretty much toast myself, but my friends would never forgive me.”
Wade laughed. “I promise not to tell.”
Much of the rest of the morning they hiked on in silence. Then Val called a lunch break, and they sat in the sunny lee of a boulder eating trail mix and drinking hot chocolate from thermoses.
“How did you get into guiding?” Wade asked.
“Just fell into it, ha ha.” She thought it over. “It was a long time ago now. A boyfriend, I guess. We climbed together and he was making money guiding, and that sounded good to me. At the time. I’ve actually tried to quit several times, because there’s a lot of things about it I don’t like, but one thing about it, it keeps you in the mountains, and making some money. So I keep getting back into it.”
“You’ve actually quit?”
“Not down here—that would be it—but a couple times before, yeah. I was guiding in the Tetons for a few seasons, and I had this client…. Well, have you heard the three rules of mountain guiding?”
“No.”
“First rule is, the client is trying to kill you. Second rule, the client is trying to kill himself. Third rule, the client is trying to kill the rest of the clients.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. I told you there were parts of the job I didn’t like, and one of them is that it makes you cynical about people.”
“Many jobs do.”
“I suppose so. Anyway, I was leading this guy up the Grand Teton, and we were on the ridge above the emergency hut, on a cloudy day, with a cloud smack against the east face, so that there was a slot of air there we could look down, like a crevasse five thousand feet deep. And I don’t know, he had a thing about the Grand Teton I guess, and suddenly rules one and two came into play both at once, literally.”
“He tried to kill you?”
“He tried to kill both of us. It was a suicide thing. We were roped together, and when we were climbing a section of the ridge overlooking the east face, he let out this kind of funny yelp and threw himself off the ridge and down the face.”
“On purpose!”
“Yeah.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I arrested us, obviously—threw myself the other way and got a hold, and luckily I was a lot heavier than him, and we held. Broke a couple of fingers,” she added, holding out her right hand for inspection.
“Ouch!”
“Oh, I’ve broken a lot of bones in the mountains, it’s not so bad.”
“But what then!”
“Well, I had to talk him out of it, or at least I tried to—but when I had him calmed down and got up, he tried it again! So after that I throttled him, basically, and hauled him back down the ridge to the emergency hut and had us medevacked out of there. I don’t know why I expected a suicide to be honest with me when he’d just tried to take me with him, but I did. That second try really shocked me. It made me mad.”
“I’ll bet!” Wade tried to imagine it, shaking his head. “So you quit.”
“Yeah. For a while. But—” she shrugged. “I like to be out in places like this. All the time, basically. So … guiding is the best way to finance it.”
“All jobs have their downside,” Wade said.
“Yeah?” She shifted to look at him easier. “Tell me about yours.”
“Well,” he said, and waved a hand. Actually, thinking it over, he realized he liked his job quite a lot. But he wanted to share her situation, her predicament one might even say, and so he said, “Well, I have to live in Washington.”
“Don’t you like it? I visited once and thought it was exciting.”
“It’s a great town to visit, but living there is crowded—muggy—I don’t know. There is no there there, you know.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Oakland,” he said, grinning at his little joke. “No, all over, really.”
“San Francisco is a great town too.”
“Yes. And so beautiful. After that, Washington is just a swamp.”
She nodded.
“And then I have to work with politicians all the time.”
“Are they bad?”