Most of their time together in that period they played a board game he had liked when they were younger. She couldn’t recall the details of the rules, but the board was a map of the world, and the game had to do with weather, and your piece was on a clear square that was a quadrant of the world map, and if you rolled a twelve the clear square had to be shifted to another quadrant of the map. Something like that. They had played it for hours, in near silence. Val had the impression that Steve had grown up very rapidly in Houston, and was a kind of grown-up now because of what was happening to him. He looked at her as from a great distance away. Once he rolled boxcars twice in a row, then three times; four times; five times. Moving the quadrant around the world every time. Then six times in a row, double sixes every time. They had stared at each other across the board, then looked down at the dice again, acutely uncomfortable, aware together that something very strange was happening. “Guess I’m going on a trip,” he said, and Val had interrupted his turn and picked up the dice and rolled them herself.
That little memory was all she had, for hours and hours of time—that and a few more fragments, like him walking slowly down the hall, bowlegged, to put the game away. Or when he left for Houston for the last time, and said to her, “See you later,” and she had said “See you later.”
Then horsing around in history class and Mr. Sanders coming in near the end of the period and taking her outside, very serious, to tell her her brother had died, he was very sorry, she had to go home. She remembered looking down from the second-story balcony at the parking lot, the scatter of teachers’ cars, the tennis courts in their line off to the left.
So her brother Steve had died. He had been bigger than her, and stronger than her, and more full of life; he had taught her to love the outdoors, and had taken her along when a lot of older brothers wouldn’t have. He had been trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, etc. Her hero.
And after that no one else had seemed quite as good. She had in him a standard for behavior that was no doubt very high. She had also a fuse that was no doubt very short. No doubt a lot of what had happened to her since then had followed from those characteristics. It is eerie sometimes to contemplate how much we create our own reality. The life of the mind is an imaginary relationship to a real situation; but then the real situation keeps happening, event after event, and many of those events are out of our control, but many others are the direct result of the imagination’s take on things. So she was aware that her problems were not just because men were so often screwed up; because sometimes they weren’t, and still she botched her relationships with them, sometimes with men she had liked a lot. But they hadn’t been as good as her Steve. Sooner or later they let her down, and she blew up. And on she went, getting more and more skittish. The shorter her fuse got, the shorter it got. She was a case of walking burnt toast; mountain guiding was the last thing she should have been trying. It was like trying to be an open-air therapist when she was the one that needed the therapy. She needed a big time-out from people in general. She needed to find a man she really and truly liked. But the goods were odd, and the odds were not good. And not just in Mac Town.
6
In the Footsteps of Amundsen
Flying over the Ross Sea in a helicopter, I cannot help remembering Shackleton’s expedition of 1908, one of the greatest in Antarctic history, though little remembered now. The sea ice below us is now filled with the broken fragments of the old ice shelf, the big white islands all cliff-sided and atilt; no language can speak them, I am happy you have these images to see so that I do not have to try. We fly at a hundred kilometers per hour, perhaps two hundred meters over the bergs: like gods we flit over the surface of this world! But for Shackleton and his companions it was not so easy.
When Shackleton decided to try to return to the Antarctic after Scott had sent him home, he did not have any very enthusiastic backing from either the British Navy or the Royal Geographical Society. He managed to raise the money through his own efforts, gaining grants from rich patrons in English society; and he returned south with a private crew, in 1908. Now Scott at that time was himself organizing a return to the south, through official naval and Royal Society channels, and he was outraged at the existence of Shackleton’s expedition. He felt that even the very chance to try for the Pole was his, as if he were St. George, and had all rights to the dragon until it or he be dead. Anyone who challenged that idea was betraying him.
Shackleton wrote to him, however, and asked him if he could use the Discovery Hut that we recently visited in McMurdo. Scott refused this permission! Moreover, he claimed explicitly that all attempts on the Pole from Ross Island were his to make, and that Shackleton must stay east of a certain longitude line which put him far on the other side of the Ross Sea.
And Shackleton agreed to this arrangement! These British are so strange. They were playing a game left over from the Middle Ages. But we should not be too surprised at this, because all stories are immortal and alive at all times, and these men had been told all their lives the tales of medieval chivalry. And we should consider also how many times we ourselves have jousted with a rival for love or honor.
So Shackleton gave Scott his word not to go to Ross Island, unless it was necessary for survival. Scott understood this to mean “survival of their lives,” of course.
But Shackleton could not find a suitable base on the other side of the Ross Sea. Over there, where I am looking now, there are no islands like Ross Island—for there are no mountains like mighty Erebus anywhere else on Earth—it is a singularity, a bolide of dense ch’i. Over there on the other side of the bay the coastline is drowned in ice, and only the edge of the Great Ice Barrier, as Ross so accurately named it, presented itself to those who arrived by sea in tiny ships. And Shackleton did not trust the edge of the Ice Barrier, the way Amundsen later did. Amundsen climbed onto the ice shelf at what seemed a permanent indentation, and he read the snowscape to the south, and postulated the existence of a very low island, much later confirmed and named Roosevelt Island; a fine bit of feng shui that. And it caused Amundsen to trust that the ice at this Bay of Whales would hold for the six months he would live on it. It was a risk, for even stable ice calves from time to time into the sea; but a calculated risk. Shackleton, however, did not know enough to make the calculation. And yet at the same time he was a cautious man, a good planner. Only this allowed him to get so far south with so little snowcraft.
And so he returned to Ross Island! Unhappy man! To break his promise to Scott racked him; he did not sleep for a week, writing an anguished letter to his wife in which he explained that he was going to twist his promise to Scott to mean that he would not visit Ross Island unless it was necessary for survival of the expedition. But he was not really satisfied with this formulation. And neither was Scott.
Shackleton built a new hut of his own, twenty miles down the coast of Ross Island from Scott’s hut. He did not use the Discovery Hut except under duress, and generally even then slept in tents outside it, claiming that it was colder inside than outside, an uncanny phenomenon that many others have noted since. In time he forgot about his medieval promise, and carried on with his expedition. And in the Antarctic spring of October 1908, he and his group took off for the Pole.
And he was a better leader of men than Scott had been, and had learned some things about sledging. He failed to use skis at all, a strange lapse in equipment even if you are determined to manhaul. But he did take along ponies, which they marched to depots and shot and deposited as food, just as Amundsen would do later with his dogs.