Scott Base
Smoking in Antarctica
The first sign of life I encountered when I got inside the low long tunnel of Scott Base was a mohawk. It was attached to a Scotsman. It took me a while to put the two together.
Outside was the frozen white nightmare of Antarctica, with all its incredible geologies and absolute detachment from civilisation. On the day I arrived it was minus five degrees, which the natives considered benign. The sky was entirely blue. The sun glared on two mountains. There was Erebus – in Greek mythology, the god of Darkness and son of Chaos. The other, smaller mountain went by the less threatening name of Terror.
New Zealand clings to Scott Base as its presence in Antarctica, and Scott Base clings to the hard black edge of Ross Island. The base operates as a fridge in reverse: the cold is trapped on the other side of the door. Once inside, you feel as though you are in an underground tunnel. It feels subversive and exciting, but after a while the walls seem to close in. I estimated it took about seventeen seconds.
Fortunately, I located the door that led to the smoking deck. It offered a view of the frozen sea. Currents form a pressure ridge close to the shore, forcing up the ice in spectacular and mesmerising shapes, as though a surf wave is about to crash with a hiss and a roar but remains suspended. The sea under a thick lid of ice, the wind and the cold and the silence – awe is compulsory, but I opted out. The standard line about Antarctica is that it’s beautiful. I have no idea how that standard line came about. Antarctica was as awesome as death. Antarctica looks as though it’s in a state of shock. It looks like Hell has frozen over. Day after day, it looks like a cold day in Hell. In short, it’s hell.
It may be the case that I had misgivings about Antarctica. A few days before I left – flights operate from Christchurch, on fat, rumbling Hercules aircraft – I’d said to a friend, ‘I’m worried that I might fall into a deep–’
‘Crevasse?’
‘No, depression.’
It was the thought of all that wide white waste. It was worse than I thought. Antarctica obliterated signs of life, annihilated it; the whole stupid, merciless place was a vacant lot. The very best description of the sullen planet was recorded in December 1773. Cook’s second voyage took him south in search of the Unknown Southern Continent; his passengers included Hitihiti, a young aristocratic islander from Ra’iatea who hitched a ride on the Resolution. He toured New Zealand. He didn’t like it much. He was in for worse as Cook left Queen Charlotte Sound and crossed the Antarctic Circle.
Historian Anne Salmond provides a wonderful account of Hitihiti’s polar exploration in her book Aphrodite’s Island. ‘On December 12 at 62 degrees south,’ she writes, ‘Hitihiti saw his first iceberg. During his visit to New Zealand he had gathered a bundle of little sticks, one for each island they had visited since leaving Ra’iatea. … Now he added another stick for this “bright star”, which he described as “white, evil, useless”.’
Among the happiest sights I saw in my fortnight was morning tea at Scott Base. About a dozen men steamed up a small room with their mugs of tea and coffee, and crowded around a magnificent plate of freshly made sausage rolls. You can take New Zealanders out of New Zealand, but we had arrived at the ends of the Earth and immediately colonised it. We were domestic, suburban, worshippers of tea leaf and pastry, happy to while away the hours at indoor pastimes – all that fortnight, person or persons unknown worked in silence in the library, patiently piecing together a thousand-piece jigsaw of hot-air balloons floating in summer skies.
There was a social divide between the university scientists and the ground staff of carpenters and electricians. In summer the population at Scott Base hovers around 85 when academics arrive to measure, monitor, sift, sample, prod and poke the continent. I rarely saw them have anything to do with the working guys. They spoke a different language and kept their hair on. As well as Alan Williamson, the mohawked engineer from Dundee who now lives in Dunedin, four other ground staff had taken a razor to their heads. Chris Knight, a mechanic from Palmerston North, had chosen to scalp the back of his.
A core of ten ground staff would stay on after the last flight of the season left at the end of February. Their tour of duty would last for thirteen months. ‘Wintering over is the reward for summer,’ Alan said. The working week goes down from six days to five; when the last plane leaves, the roller doors on the bar go up and stay up. Sixteen more staff would soon be arriving to winter over, and Alan wondered whether it would create a split camp of two tribes – the core who all knew each other, and the fresh faces. ‘It could be a bit like Survivor.’
Chris Knight would notch up one thousand nights on the ice. ‘It’s my third winter and my last,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get institutionalised.’ He talked about the drag of routines. ‘Breakfast served at the same time, lunch at the same time. The trick is to keep your own pace, otherwise it can be a long winter. I’ve seen people walking around the base at two a.m. looking like zombies. They just couldn’t cope with it.’
In summer, the Antarctic observes an exaggerated version of daylight saving. The sun sets in February. After it creaks below the horizon in April, the continent experiences weeks of midnight black. Chris Knight was auditioning for the great New Zealand understatement when he said, ‘June
