In fact, Val decided as she stomped along, most of the people who came to Antarctica to seek adventure and do something hard, came precisely because it was so much easier than staying at home and facing whatever they had to face there. Compared to life in the world it took no courage at all to walk across the polar cap; it was simple, it was safe, it was exhilarating. No, what took courage was staying at home and facing things, things like talking your grandma out of a tree, or reading the want ads when you know nothing is there, or running around the corner of the house when you hear the crash. Or waiting for test results to come back from the hospital. Or taking a dog to the vet to have it put down. Or taking a bunch of leukemic kids to a ball game. Or waiting to see if your partner will come home drunk that night or not. Or helping a fallen parent off the bathroom floor at four in the morning. Or telling a couple that their kid has been killed. Or just sitting on the floor and playing a board game through the whole of a long afternoon. No, on the list could go, endlessly: the world was stuffed with things harder than walking in Antarctica. And compared to those kinds of things, walking for your life’s sake across the polar ice cap was nothing. It was fun. It could kill you and it would still be fun, it would be a fun death. There were scores of ways to die that were immeasurably worse than getting killed by exposure to cold; in fact freezing was one of the easiest ways to go. No, the whole game of adventure travel was essentially an escape from the hard things. Not necessarily bad because of that; a coping mechanism that Val herself had used heavily all her life; but not something that should ever be mistaken for being hard or heroic. It was daily life that was hard, and sticking it out that was heroic.
Val shuddered at this dark train of thought, stopped in her tracks. She looked back; she had been going too fast, and the people she was caring for had fallen far behind. “Come on, God damn it!” she said at them. “You are so fucking slow. This is fun! This is your adventure! Are we having fun yet?” Almost shouting at them. But they were so far back there was no chance they would hear her.
They had too little energy and she had too much. And one thing about walking for hours and hours like this; it gave one an awful lot of time to think. Sometimes that was good, sometimes bad. When it was bad, it took a bit of an effort to remain the cheerful optimistic person that one was.
She checked her watch, and found that half an hour had passed; her arm flask was almost melted. She walked back to the others, pulling herself together to do the cheerleader thing, very hard now. My God, was she toast! No one could have been less in guide mode than she was at that moment, feeling parched but strong, well into her long-haul groove, and immensely irritated that these people had no long-haul groove to fall into. The back of her throat was so dry that it hurt to talk; but if she was that thirsty, then it was certain the clients were in worse shape; in need of her help; and in this situation that meant her words, as there was little else she could do. So she pulled up her ski mask so they could see her smile, and said, “Roberts Massif, coming over the horizon any minute now! We’re almost there!” Which, as they were still at least twenty-five kilometers from the oil camp, no doubt took the long-distance record for saying We’re almost there even in her own notorious career of misuse of the phrase. But it needed to be said, she judged; and so she said it. And it helped them to keep moving.
Except it wasn’t working for Jack. When he dragged up to the rest he only stared at Val and her good news, and after they started off he quickly fell behind again.
Then Val looked back and saw him squatting on his haunches, a terrible position for rest, as it trapped so much blood below the knees. It looked as if he had gone faint. Jim was hurrying forward, trying to get her attention.
She met Jim on the way back to Jack, and gave him the crevasse detector and told him to keep walking with the others. It might very well have come time to do the fascist guide number on Jack, she judged, and drive him on by snapping him with the whip of his own machismo, for his own sake and the sake of the whole group; and serve him right. But she didn’t want any witnesses.
She reached Jack and stood over him. He glanced up, looked back down.
“Well,” she said, “how’s it going?”
He waved a hand: go away. Leave me alone.
“Come on,” she said sharply. “We can’t go away. We can’t leave you behind. We’re with you, and you’re with us, so let’s get together. Otherwise everyone’s in trouble. Tell me what you need to feel better. Are you hurt?”
He looked down and away. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay in a while. I just need to rest.”
“Did you hit very hard when we fell in the crevasse? Do you think you’re concussed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you remember the fall?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel nauseous?”
No reply.
“Do you think you’re concussed, or in shock?”
“I don’t know! Just let me rest, will you? You’re always pushing us. I just need some rest.”
“Okay, we’ll rest.” She sat down.
“No, no! Get going. You’ve got the radar, you should be out there, what are you doing?”
“I’m waiting for you. I gave the radar to Jim. We can’t go on any farther without you, or else we’ll get separated.”
“I’ll follow your tracks,” he said. “Leave me alone.”
Val stared at him, irritated but also worried. He sounded pretty irrational to her. But something was needed to get him going. “Oh come on,” she said again, standing. “We can’t go on without you! You’re endangering everyone right now, do you understand? God damn it—why is it always the macho guys that wimp out first.”
“You’re the macho guy here!” he cried. “Always pushing it! Always making us look bad!”
“Right,” she said. “Like insisting on taking Amundsen’s route even though the ice had changed. Come on! And for God’s sake either stand up or sit down, Jesus, you’re only trapping a bunch of blood below your knees by squatting like that. You don’t have to be stupid along with everything else.”
He sat heavily. “Just go on. I’ll catch up.”
“We can’t go on. What is wrong with you! You lost blood, you took a hit, okay! You sound kind of in shock to me, and you certainly have hit the wall somehow or other. But we need for you to walk. Just stand up and put one foot in front of the other. Give it a try at least! We can’t carry you, and we can’t go on without you. So you just have to do it. Reach down and show some guts for once.”
And she turned and walked off a few meters, mouth pursed into a tight line of disgust. High-school-coach bullshit, no doubt about it; but she could remember going into a berserker state as the result of her high-school volleyball coach’s ballistic exhortations, and Jack was certainly the type if anyone was to still fall for that routine.
She turned around and looked back. He was struggling to his feet. Something was definitely wrong; concussed, perhaps? He was like Seaman Evans, she thought uneasily, the first member of Scott’s team to die on their march back from the Pole—a big man who took a fall and afterward just fell apart. Big men didn’t do well down here. Macho men often did, she had to admit; but machismo itself was a weakness and could be stripped away in such a situation as this, where you had to pace yourself for the long haul. Maybe that was all it was; he preferred the blaze of the adrenaline rush and had burnt out fast, and then looked for someone or something else to blame.