McMurdo turned out to be a lively dump of a place, roaring with heavy machinery and boasting three bars, a Wells Fargo ATM, and an excellent library. Scott Base’s library was desultory – old rubbish like Death is Late to Lunch by someone called Theodore DuBois, new rubbish such as the biography of a newsreader, Angela D’Audney. McMurdo’s library was generously stocked with titles by Haruki Murakami and Robert Fisk; it had a complete set of Granta. It also had a librarian, a beautiful girl with dark hair and glasses, who looked like Lisa Loeb. The quietness in the library had a softer, lovelier quality than Antarctica’s white silence. The rooms were dark. There was a couch. Outside, friendly and enormous Americans waddled the dusty streets. The first guy I met was smoking a cigarette as he crossed the road. I told him that smoking was permissible at Scott Base only on a narrow smoking deck. He smiled and said, ‘Welcome to the land of the free.’
I spent a lot of time at McMurdo. It had a smoking room. It had a very big cafeteria that did chicken pie, chicken and lentil stew, and barbecued chicken, but the South Polar skuas tore down on anyone foolish enough to attempt a takeaway chicken. Other main food groups such as popcorn marshmallows were on offer. But protein was in short supply: no one had solved the audacious Christmas theft of 250 kilograms of steak.
There was so much of everything else. McMurdo had more people than Scott Base, and there was more of them, with their big American necks and their big American bottoms, taking up room with their big American confidence. Returning home to Scott Base was a reminder of modest and droll New Zealandness. The buffet trays in the dining room at lunch one day were marked SAUSAGES, SAUSAGE PIE, SAUSAGE PASTA and CHICKEN CURRY WITH SAUSAGES. The salad selection was marked NO SAUSAGES.
Craig Cary, an American professor of biological science at Waikato University, greeted his overnight guests at his camp in the Dry Valleys on the mainland of Antarctica and immediately asked, ‘Where are the frozens?’ He meant the box of frozen meat, bread and cheese. The helicopter had left without delivering it.
‘This is third time it’s happened,’ Cary said. He recounted the history of the two previous failures, then said, ‘I mean, shoot! We had three chillibins of beer came in from McMurdo. One of the guys asked and in it dropped. No problem. But what do we have to do to get frozens out of Scott Base? They keep promising and nothing happens. Nothing. It’s bad for morale. It ain’t right.’ And so on, a litany of complaint about another Antarctic absence – no frozen food in a frozen continent.
Cary talked a lot, about everything. As well as giving detailed impromptu lectures on his project in the Dry Valleys, he delivered a dissertation on Germany’s military advance on Russia in the Second World War. I can’t remember whether this subject occupied his thoughts during the trek past a frozen lake to locate a mummified seal, or whether it was on the five-hour round journey to the top of a steep ridge to inspect the fabulous and grotesque shapes caused by the wind in rocks known as ventifacts.
‘I think you’ve got a pretty good handle on what it is we’re doing here,’ he said to me. I didn’t. I’d lost the plot of his ‘important study’. Meaning had got buried beneath his load of words. All I knew was that it was international, led by Waikato, and had something to do with a great many cross-discipline Earth scientists studying microscopic life in the arid desert of the Dry Valleys.
Cary took samples of earth beneath the seal. There were another 500 sites where his team scratched around in the soil. Walking inside a large blue tent, I found scientists from universities in South Africa, England, Australia and New Zealand quietly sorting through ten-centimetre bottles of collected soil samples while listening to The Dark Side of the Moon. As well as lichens, algae and various assorted bacteria, the organisms under inspection were springtails, the largest terrestrial animals in Antarctica. They are two millimetres in length and lie dormant 300 days of the year.
I couldn’t wait to leave the Dry Valleys but it was heartbreaking to leave Cape Bird. I went there with Kerry Barton of Landcare Research, who was monitoring a colony of Adélie penguins. A helicopter flew around Erebus and touched down on a rocky beach. A lot of steps led up a cliff to a two-bedroom hut.
I came to look on the hut as a luxury resort. It was built in 1966 by carpenters Ray Greeks of Lower Hutt and Roger Bartlett of Warrington, Otago, who survived an Antarctic storm there and wrote in the logbook, ‘The roar of the wind and rattle of stones on the walls…’ Later, back in New Zealand, I got an email from Greeks, who now lives in the Far North; he wrote as though the Antarctic storm were still howling around his ears.
‘We flew all the gear up in three loads and as the chopper departed for the final time we could see bad weather brewing to the south. We worked furiously for many hours, levelling the site, erecting the walls in order to get the tie-downs in place before the storm hit.
‘We had a pile of plywood sheets for interior lining, all nicely pre-cut and painted; we stood two full 44-gallon drums of kerosene on top of these to stop them blowing away. By the time we had the tie-downs drilled into the rock it was nearly impossible to stand up outside, so we grabbed a box of tucker and hunkered down inside.
‘We were looking out the window as one shrieking gust came through to see our full fuel drums picked up like
