Kim Robinson - Antarctica

No; the Birdie Bowerses of this world were only regarded as fools. And the world being what it was, Val supposed that there was some truth in it. Why be optimistic, how be optimistic, when there was so much wrong with so much? In a world coming apart it had to be a kind of stupidity. But still Val held to it, stubbornly, just barely. Without even thinking she would say the thing that took the most positive slant on the matter, and get laughed at, and grit her teeth and try to live up to that slant. Such an attitude was an asset for any mountain guide, of course, or should have been. But the way it was received was one of the things that were beginning to turn her into burnt toast. It took an effort to be optimistic, it was a moral position. But no one understood that.

“Those guys,” Arnold said, looking over her shoulder at the old photos. “They really were crazy.”

“Yes. They were.”

Then George was hustling them all around to their various stations, becoming more manic as time passed; for the sun was soon to come up, and they would not be able to film a second take of that. Happily the sky was clear, and the horizon to the northeast a straight line of startling clarity: shiny ice below, pale blue sky above.

With most of the group gathered in a little knot next to the rock hut, George began by reading the climactic passage from Cherry-Garrard’s book, when the storm had ripped away their tent and hut roof, and left them apparently with only a few more hours to live. Val, uneasy at hearing this passage that struck right to the heart of what she had been thinking, moved back up the ridge beyond the new structure, where she could just hear George’s voice, a reedy tenor wavering on the freshening wind: “‘Gradually the situation got more desperate…. There was more snow coming through the walls … our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks over the door.’” George read in a singsong like a preacher, and though Val could only catch a phrase here and there over the sound of the wind, Cherry’s King James cadences were obvious. “‘Bowers … up and out of his bag continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof … he was magnificent…. And then it went…. The uproar of it all was indescribable.’”

Val bent her head, trying to imagine the scene; the thunder of the wind lashing the canvas to shreds, the rocks falling in, the snow pouring onto them, the means of return blown away.

“‘The next I knew was Bowers’s head across Bill’s body. “We’re all right,” he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful.’”

Val turned away abruptly and walked up the ridge, feeling a sudden increase in her strange pain. Who were these men? The clients she guided were not like that; and she was not like that either. Could people change so much, century by century?

“‘Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and hymns,’” she heard George exclaim. This was the cue for the music, George going a bit over the top in his enthusiasm. But everyone there began to sing except for Val and the film crew, anchored by a quartet of professionals from Wellington. They sang a version of the Tallis Canon, adapted by Benjamin Britten to fit some hymn verses written by Joseph Addison. The sky overhead was now fully light, a pure transparent pale blue, shading to a bright white over the northeastern horizon, where the sun was about to make its reappearance. They could see for many miles over the white sea ice covering the Ross Sea, clotted with icebergs from the old shelf, so that in the growing light the plain turned pewter and shaved silver, a mirror jumble. The quartet took off in the parts of the canon, somehow weaving together the words of the old hymn, George conducting them with great sweeps of his hands:

And as they sang the last line the sun cracked the horizon to the northeast, the incredible shard of light fountaining over the sea ice and the immense bergs caught in it, illuminating the scene with a blinding glare, the great world itself turning all to light, in a space spacious beyond words. The little group around the rock hut cheered, they hugged each other, they hugged George, and shook his hand, and clapped him on the back, all cameras forgotten; but Elliot and Geena kept filming.

God knew what the three explorers would have made of it. They had lain there in the midwinter darkness exposed to the hurricane for two more days without food and with very little sleep, before the wind dropped and they could go out and look for the tent, and find it. “Our lives had been taken away and given back to us,” as Cherry wrote. So that this was not an inappropriate site for a spring celebration, now that Val thought of it; the return of the sun, the rebirth, the gift of life.

So she went down to the others less reluctantly than she might have, and got them all back off the ridge to the team tent, and joined the celebratory meal, and when a toast was offered to the old boys she said “Hear hear” gladly, and with feeling; with too much feeling, really. For those three men were her saints, in a way—the patron saints of all stupid pointless expeditions into the wilderness, the Three Silly Men to match the Three Wise Men, silly men who yet remained gracious in the face of death. Who had made it back to Cape Evans alive, and thus turned all the stupid false stories of their Victorian youth into one stupid true story, transforming Tennyson to steel. The Worst Journey in the World! And now this memorializing group had done a proper homage to that best journey in Antarctic history, and made a shrine to craziness and decency that was, in some way she didn’t fully understand, something Val could believe in. Her own brand of religion. She proposed another toast, throat tightening as she did: “To Birdie Bowers, the optimist!” And they cried “Hear hear,” and drank hot chocolate, and Elliot, of all people, teasing her she supposed, cried out, “We’re all right! We’re all right!”

And so they were, for the moment. Though of course the return home would be a pain in the ass.

Then later, when she was back up on the ridge cleaning the site of any stray debris (cannister top, foil paper, etc.) Val got a call from Randi on her little wrist radio. “Hey Val, this is the voice of the south coming to you again through the miracle of shaped and directed radio waves, do you read, over?”

“I read you, Randi. What’s going on?”

“Did you hear what happened to your sandwich?”

“Don’t call him that, what happened?”

“Your ex, then. He’s out with the SPOT train, you know, and he just called in a while ago—he’s been hijacked!”

“What?”

“He’s been hijacked. Someone locked him in the lead vehicle during a Condition One, and when he got out there were only nine vehicles instead of ten! Plundered by ice pirates!”

“Who the hell would do that!”

“Ice pirates!” Randi laughed. “Who the hell knows. But isn’t that funny it happened to X?”

“No! Why the hell would that be funny?”

“Well, because it’s okay! I mean he’s okay, and now he’s finally had the big adventure he came down here looking for!”