Dispatch from Mt. Boreas 04

October 31st
Dear Deany:

One hates to start two posts in a row with hackneyed observations, but after just over a week out here, as trite as it might sound, I must remark that our ability as humans to adapt really is remarkable. Yes, we live in tents and drink snow and consider four degrees F as the balmy tropical height of a sun-filled day, but things have achieved a certain normalcy. We have a routine going. We are eating well, and sleeping well. We film, we cook, we eat. All in subzero temperatures on this remote mountain saddle perched high above one of the dry valleys.

Between takes, as it were, I have even managed a couple of sublime hikes, one across a large empty depression presumably abandoned many millenia ago by one of the local glaciers, and a more ambitious walk yesterday when I descended to the floor of the McElvey valley, which stretches towards the sea some seven hundred meters below us. Walking west across rocky scree around the sort of apron of Mt. Boreas on which we are camped I found after an hour or so a channel, perhaps the path of some ancient glacial flow, sloping in comparative gentleness down to the valley before. It was nonetheless a toe-jamming descent requiring an hour of zig-zagging back and forth across an infinity of gravel.

I saw rocks. Many, many, rocks. Mt. Boreas has been shedding chunks of rock for millions of years, like dandruff. As I worked my way downhill I became convinced that our government spends so much time, effort and money in Antarctica largely in order to safeguard the Dry Valleys as a future fieldstone quarry, should this important natural resource one day grow scarce.

I saw rocks, small rocks, rocks perhaps the size of your fist, which have sat undisturbed and in the same orientation for thousands, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions of years. Never, or perhaps almost never, does any water flow here; there are no aqueous erosive processes of any kind. You may ask how it is that I know these small fist-sized rocks have not moved in all this time. You might ask why this would be interesting were it true. The answer to both your queries is the same; many of the rocks I saw were drilled full of minute holes and had the appearance of a chunk of swiss cheese, but only on the uppermost surface. Over the millennia endless grains of sand and grit drilled these holes with an inconceivable, insensate patience. After first catching in a tiny depression or hospitable corner of the rock, in a spot just friendly enough to entice, over thousands of years, more grains into swirling there than on the adjacent surfaces, blowing sand makes its mark, until the resulting excavatory activity becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. A small tunnel fills with grit and the mouth of the hole invites more grains to the party, the whole swirling about like margaritas in a blender, accelerating the drilling. Imagine that countless grains of sand, blowing across a chunk of basalt, might require the entire length of recorded human history to make so much as the finest microscopic indentation on it and the mind boggles. Walking across such rocks, inevitably dislodging and disturbing some, one feels guilty of some monumental environmental crime; I understood Jainists and their refusal to so much as get out of bed lest in the process they crush to death some insignificant insect.

But enough focus on the minutiae; stretched out below me was the McElvey valley, subdivided into a panoramic vista of polygonal cracking, like a former pond drying in the African sun at the start of the dry season. Here the earth cracks in much larger polygons, presumably as the surface layer above the permafrost warms in the sun and shrinks. The cracks fill with snow, outlining their geometric shapes. Most are pentagons, some squarish, and others sextagonal; the bits of land pull on one another and subsurface frictions seem to determine the final shape. The polygons are generally fifteen to twenty feet across, and upon arriving at the bottom I walked over a large field of them. The cracks are ancient, and are not really crevasses. Filled with sand and blown gravel and topped with hard snow, they can safely be walked on.

I had expected the valley to slope gently down towards the Ross Sea, but in fact I found myself in a bowl-like depression in the midst of gentle undulations. The sun was strong. I sat on a boulder and ate gorp and thought how lovely it would be to have a cup of tea. It was then that I discovered I had forgotten to bring any teabags, and so i had to make do with a refreshing cup of hot water. Neither this minor disappointment, nor the mighty toil of the subsequent marathon spent climbing back up, up, and further up home to tent and stove, did anything in the least to diminish the wonderful experience of hours spent tramping across the stark and pristine landscape.

Cheers,
Rich

Dispatch from Mt. Boreas 03

"Our hearth and home was the living-hut and its focus was the stove. Kitchen and stove were indissolubly linked, and beyond their pale was a wilderness of hanging clothes, boots, finnesko, mitts and what-not..."
--Douglas Mawson HOME OF THE BLIZZARD

October 29th:
Dear Deany

You know the old cliche, "be careful what you wish for." After spending the last two months in McMurdo ridiculing the idea that any romantic vision of Antarctic adventure lives on, given the contrasts between the comfortable modern lifestyle of MacTown and the inhuman sufferings experienced by the great Antarctic explorers of old, I now feel fully planted in my own survival adventure. And we have only been here for six days. The great trial, as I knew it would be, is how difficult it is almost never to be fully and truly warm. I say almost because after an hour or so of hiking uphill with the sound gear strapped to my back the other day my internal engine was burning properly and I was warm from fingertip to toenail. But this is not a level of activity that one can sustain for long. Inside the sleeping bag at night, after burning two Coleman burners in the center of my Scott tent for half and hour or so, one also feels almost humanly warm, but within seconds of extinguishing the burners to avoid asphyxiation when actually going to sleep, fingers of frigid air reach out to grasp one around the face and throat. I have never been a junkie, but I imagine my relationship to my Coleman stove already to approach the level of intimacy, panic, desire and concern of the addict's with his works.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time filling fuel bottles, melting snow, drinking tea, hanging socks above stoves, preparing to prepare to cook tomorrow's evening meal, and sitting around imagining being warm, until the day has utterly passed us by. It is difficult to imagine how much useful filming we will accomplish under such circumstances, although we have managed to capture a scene or two each day. Yesterday, for instance, we filmed the geologists digging a hole with a jackhammer. So far, to my astonishment, the sound gear has fired up each time without giving any problems, but the batteries are difficult to charge; a couple seem to have given up the ghost completely.

So far it has been almost windless, but the other night there were a few shifting gusts and Adam Lewis, one of the geologists we are camped with, opined that this augured the imminent arrival of the katabatic winds, which here at the foot of Mt. Boreas deliver fearsome doses of frozen air from the polar plateau. At speeds of very many knots. "Make sure when you go to bed you tie your boots and your Big Red parka to your cot," he said. The Scott tents have no floor, just a separate heavy tarpaulin unattached to the walls of the tent. "That way if the winds get really bad and your tent blows away, at least you still have your boots and coat." The image this conjured of myself, lying in a cot in the open air watching all of my worldly possessions blow away in a hurricane, was fearsome, but my tent is attached to a variety of eighteen inch steel tent stakes driven into the permafrost, has many guylines tied to boulders, and stands tall with several hundred pounds of rocks weighing down its external apron, so I thought his suggestion that it might blow away rather histrionic. However, upon turning in I experienced a sheepish moment when, having discounted the need to do so, I nonetheless found myself lashing the boot laces through an opening in the cot. I was reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now when a fingee soldier climbs aboard a helicopter and asks the veterans why on earth they are all uncomfortably seated on the crowns of their helmets. "So we don't get our balls shot off," one of them says. At which point the fingee laughs at the silliness of it all. Moments later, the laughter having given out, he nervously removes his own helmet and slides it between his legs. However, no wind materialized that night, and my boots and teabags were safe.

Lying there I remembered also the horrifying episode in which Bowers, Wilson and Cherry-Garrard watched, from on their backs in their sleeping bags, as the tarpaulin roof of their shelter shredded to threads before their eyes, only hours after their own tent had been swept away in a blizzard. I apologize for not finishing off that saga before leaving McMurdo. I was rather miffed that I had not a single email from New York begging for the next installment, and rather let that thread slide. But to make a long story short, when that storm of one hundred odd years ago had subsided, Bowers, by some miracle, discovered their silk tent some quarter of a mile downwind, barely damaged. Without it we can be quite certain that the trio would have perished not far from the Emperor Penguin colony at Cape Crozier. As it was they barely limped back to Cape Evans, frostbitten and on the point of death.

Instead of contrasting the wireless internet, saunas, and abundant hot food of today's McMurdo with the bubbling seal blubber and frozen hard tack biscuits of the golden age of exploration, I finally compare my obsessions and experiences here at the edge of extremity, if not to the near-insane hardships of the Winter Journey, at least to the daily life and concerns of those men who first arrived here at the turn of the last century. Only forty-six days to go.

Yours,
Rich

Dispatch from Mt. Boreas 02

October 25th:
Dear Deany

They got us pooping in barrels up here, my man. No terlet, nothin'. Happy to do it sitting on top of a plywood box or not, though, after forty-eight hours of total blockage. Runs in the family. Sorry to share that, but I've already realized a camping trip of this magnitude and extremity gets you all kinds of in touch with your bodily functions. Anyway, your cheeks get a bit cold, but the view from the box is spectacular. This is a totally dry camp we're running. We didn't bring any water in, and we aren't taking any out, and none goes on the ground, ever. All pee goes in the pee barrel. Spill your tea up here and it's like a glycol hemorrhage down in MacTown. Fly in the emergency tea-leaf removal squad, pronto.

What makes this little patch at the bottom of Mt. Boreas so geologically spectacular is that just behind a little glacial moraine up back of our camp lie the remnants of an ancient pond. Ancient, dude. Original, very old-school silt and sediment and layers of moss just lying out on the surface, or only inches below it. We're surrounded by undisturbed surfaces thirteen to fifteen million years old. The geologists we are with are scraping up thirteen million year old mosses from the lakebed. So we're trying to leave not so much as a moustache hair behind. I'm sure you agree it would be most embarrassing if in five hundred years or so some future generation of scientists were down here having a peek: "What you got?" "Oh, looks to me like some fourteen million year old single-celled organisms, fossilized, and some idiot's five hundred year old frozen earwax...."

I've had a cold, which is not much fun at twenty below, but the tents start to get liveable once you run a Coleman stove in them for awhile. You can't do that while you sleep, of course. Last night I lay down and wrote a fakesimile of Scott's final chronicles in my diary. "Sleepy, very, very sleepy,...time to... turn off the stove...." Even when awake one starts to feel a little oxygen deprived and loopy and has to remember to vent. Today I'm feeling much better and getting to that level of cold and lumpy cot-induced sleep deprivation where I know I will start to sleep well in my Scott tent.

Defrosted a couple of Speight's by dropping the frozen solid cans in a pot of boiling water. Left one just too long, only a few minutes, and therefore enjoyed hot beer with the feijoada dinner. (There would be a link here to some deep back-country Sao Paulo recipe, but I don't have the technology). I cooked kidney beans with Canadian bacon, Italian sweet sausage, and shredded peppered beef jerky and farofa-ed it off at the end with a box of cornmeal and it was about as good as if we had stopped on a Friday at a roadside cafe in the pantanal. So far it is pretty much iron-chef of the backcountry around here. Anne made pork loin with perfectly crisped rehydrated tomatoes and herbes de provence last night and I stepped up with the feijoada, shredding the chunks of jerky with such dedication that Sylvestre finally said "C'est un travail de moine, ce que tu fais la." (That's monk's work you're doing over there). He has to cook tomorrow and is pretty much running scared at this point. We're inviting one geologist over to dinner each night, from their tent all of twenty yards away, as a kind of getting to know you gesture (their idea, and a good one, they don't want to feel as if they are living amongst strangers). They generally cook stuff like pre-breaded deep fryable chicken patties and "chile con carne," so they are in awe of the culinary excesses going on over here at the writers and artists.

We're going to turn off the generator, get rid of the dieseling and go back to sublime, total, infinite and glorious silence (I am able to record usable dialog for film here from fifty yards, something unheard of almost anywhere else in the world). So that's all for now.

Yours,
Rich