Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

Her attention wandered to her classmates. Michael from Crary Lab was there but was studiously taking notes, so she checked out various young men in the class. None particularly grabbed her interest, so she got to examining the visual aids, such as a mock-up of a helicopter seat and harness, which they were expected to learn how to exit in a hurry. Her gaze came to rest on a second dry-mark board toward the back of the room. The lecture from a previous class had not been erased. The subject was altitude sickness. Symptoms. Triage. Treatment. Valena wanted to get up and examine it more closely but, again, did not wish to attract attention to herself. Over the next two days, she wanted to be just another face in the crowd, not that poor kid whose professor got hauled off in handcuffs.

Back at the front of the room, Manny was discussing how to recognize hypothermia (“Pay attention if your partner develops the ‘umbles’—fumble, mumble, grumble, stumble”) and the early stages of frostbite (“You’ll get pink and numb, then next comes a white patch. After that, it goes stiff and sounds wooden when you hit it. If it goes beyond that, we’re talking blisters and blackening”), how to keep warm (“You are the furnace, and you need fuel—eat, eat, eat”) but not too warm (“If your goggles steam up, your core temperature is too high: take off a layer”), and so on. The three mechanisms of heat gain were metabolic (eat more than you burn), exercise (both voluntary and involuntary… such as shivering), and radiation (cuddle up to something warm; the old saw about getting naked with somebody warm was apparently no longer as popular a solution).

Finally, they were told to exit through the back of the building and load into the Delta.

What’s a Delta? Valena wondered, until she stepped out through the doorway and got her first view of their over-the-snow transportation. It was another mammoth vehicle with fat rubber tires that loomed taller than she was. This one had a cab that was cantilevered out in front of the front tires, which in turn sat in front of a huge pivot point; the front wheels did not swivel, but instead the whole front end swung to make the vehicle turn. Mounted on the after end of the frame was a big, rear-entry passenger box with a chain ladder hanging below the door to permit awkward entry. They clambered up the ladder and packed in together tightly, Manny cheering the twenty students on with, “Come on, you can cuddle in tighter than that!”

Valena felt a hard shove in her ribs. She turned to recognize Doris, the computer person, trying to cram in closer to her. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

Doris gave her an exasperated look. “I managed to escape this last year, but they’ve finally caught up with me,” she said. “And don’t ask me why I’m in Antarctica if I don’t like the out-of-doors, okay?”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

Manny had the last few firemen hoist in cardboard boxes full of flight lunches. “Hold those on your laps. Okay, now when we get there, don’t go opening this door from the inside. We’ll be opening it from outside, and you could take our heads off with it. But if something goes wrong, like we crash or something, there’s an emergency exit in the roof.” He pointed. “Okay, everybody happy?”

Several Happy Campers gave a thumbs-up.

Manny slammed the door.

Suddenly they were twenty people packed as tight as sardines in conditions that were brand new to each of them. Gazes turned inward, and all conversation stopped. Valena heard the muffled sounds of Manny and Dustin climbing into the cab and starting the engine, and a moment later, the whole rig lurched into motion, bouncing and rolling on its giant tires.

They wallowed off toward the east, up around Observation Hill, and down toward Scott Base, the New Zealand research station that lay three miles by road from McMurdo. Valena craned her neck to look through the battered windows, anxious to see whatever she could of this fantastical environment. Ob Hill was formed of more of the black volcanic rock, with bands of reddish scoria. As they came around the far side of the divide that lay between the two research stations, she caught a new view across the ice, looking south toward Minna Bluff. She noted with some dismay that it appeared to be clouding up. We’ve got two hours to find cover , thought Valena. Or create it, out of snow and ice.

Valena listened to discussions that sprang up around her. There were several firefighters aboard, a raft of scientists, and miscellaneous office personnel from McMurdo, all wound up and excited to be getting their basic training in Antarctic survival. The firefighters were all men and looked like they needed a fire to fight. They were twitchy and restive and talked only to each other but immediately proved their worth. “Damn!” one of them cussed. “We’re filling up with fumes.” He pounded on the front of the box for a moment, trying to get the driver’s attention, but soon gave up.

“They can’t hear us,” said another. “They’re in a separate compartment, and they’re probably listening to tunes.”

“Damned surplus equipment,” muttered the first firefighter. He got up and popped the emergency hatch in the roof. The same cold monster that had sucked the warm, humid air out of the C-17 worked its same magic on the fumes.

Valena dug a chocolate bar out of one of the flight lunches. Eat, eat, eat , she told herself, peeling away its wrapper.

HAPPY CAMP WAS NOT AS GREAT A CHALLENGE FOR Valena as it was for the few participants who had never braved wilderness camping before. She already knew how to use the tiny stoves and pitch the dome tents, and while she had never camped on snow she had backpacked in the Rocky Mountains and had done her share of skiing. She had wondered why Vanderzee had asked her how many pairs of skis she owned. She had answered three (one pair downhill, one mountaineering, one skating). He had thought that quiver small, and now, as she shoveled snow to build a crude survival igloo, she understood. He had wanted to gage her level of experience with and enthusiasm for snow.

Antarctic snow was a species apart from any of the broad variation of the white stuff she had experienced before, affording a different range of uses. They built their shelter, or “quinzy,” in the style of the inland Inuit of Canada, by shoveling snow into a heap, packing it until it reset into a lightweight version of concrete, and then hollowing it out. To expedite construction, Manny had them make a heap of all the duffels containing their sleeping bags and mats and shovel the snow on top of them. “We’ll punch a hole in the side and pull them out once we’ve got a good shell,” he said.

Valena took the first shift standing on top of the mound and jumping up and down on it to pack the snow tight. To no one in particular, she called out, “I can’t believe that this is going to create a structure that will stand.”

“The snow here is a lot colder and drier than you may be accustomed to,” said Dustin. “It’s strange stuff. It packs hard.”

Getting the first duffel back out from under the heap was an immense challenge, considering that it was weighted down by four other layers of duffels and a tightly packed shell of snow, but a couple of the firefighters took it as a challenge. When the structure had been emptied, Valena crawled in with a shovel and carved away all excess thickness, smoothing the walls and leaving a flat floor about eight feet in diameter. Then she poked a small air hole through the roof and began to close the hole made to remove the duffels by making a patch out of the snow she had scraped off the inside. It was quiet and snug inside the little arch of snow. The walls were thinner than she had expected, letting light shine right through, which offered a blue glow.