Chapter 12
Beardmore Glacier Camp
Trans-Antarctic Mountain Range
After having received further assurances from Jake, promises extorted under threats unimaginable to an unafflicted mind, Susan found Connie and Walt and departed for the work site on the mountain. The Lieutenant followed with studied nonchalance to carry on with the work he was engaged in the day before. Jake remained behind with Alistair Adams and Dr. Atkinson, as they had planned to inventory the cargo line as the first step toward planning the final portion of the expedition. Jake was looking at them without speaking, a list of materials in his hand.
“Which one of you geniuses came up with this?” he finally asked.
Dr. Atkinson was offended.
“I did. Is there a problem?” he asked stiffly.
“Not at all, as long as you don’t mind becoming a permanent feature of the landscape,” Jake said.
“That is ridiculous,” Dr. Atkinson retorted. “I have been doing this since before you were able to crawl.”
“This is right. What we are going to be doing is something that hasn’t been done since the IGY, and it has never been done with light equipment. You can’t take all of this,” Jake said, spinning the paper through the air so it made a soft landing in front of Dr. Atkinson, who considered the action insulting.
“What specifically do you find to be the matter?” Alistair asked.
“You guys may be really smart about some things, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them,” Jake told the two Ph.D.s' who looked at each other and grinned.
“Very well then, old chappie,” Alistair said, patting him on the shoulder. “Since you seem to have the proper handle on things, we’ll leave you to go about your business. Cheerio. Call us when you have it all done. Carry on.”
The two scientists left him looking very smug, having pulled off the oldest trick in the book. If someone insists they can do a better job of something, let him. Not that he minded, really. He’d just been given the task of planning his own expedition across the Transantarctic Mountains. It was a first for the NSF, to allow a field party to return to McMurdo from the polar plateau by descending one of the longest glaciers. The science was invaluable, but the story that it would tell would be even more precious to an agency that survived on funding from a skeptical congress.
Who cared that it would be done with light equipment? How many people could say that they have traversed that country with light equipment? None. As far as he knew, only Sir Edmund Hillary had gone up any of those glaciers aided by any mechanical device, and that was with a very large tractor. If mechanized travel was good enough for the first man to top Everest, and the first man to traverse the Antarctic continent, it would have to be good enough for him.
Outside it had begun to blow. It was pleasant to be in the hut, though when the wind blew, it sucked the heat out through the many cracks in the plywood. The shelter wasn’t constructed to be of permanent quality, and it was equally stifling when the wind did not blow and the sun baked on the walls. The spindrift swirled outside of the clear plastic window, the sun making it brilliant; a kaleidoscopic vortex of countless prisms in motion.
The journey would take them from the glacier camp back to McMurdo through the mountains not traveled since Robert Scott’s ill-fated, successful, though fatal, achievement of the Pole. As guide, Jake would manage the route, the equipment, and the consumables. He relished the thought of it. Keeping students from falling off ledges was fine work for the journeyman, but this was what he was born to do. Epic adventures untried in the annals of human endeavor. Rather than diving into the work at hand, he contemplated the satisfaction that would be afforded him from its successful outcome. His peers would be beside themselves with envy. He would assure them that it had been nothing, while feeding out tidbits of heroic descriptions of the trials managed along the way.
Snapping out of the reverie for a moment, he realized that if he didn’t get some work done, there would be no successful conclusion, and dedicated himself to paring down the list provided by Dr. Atkinson.
“’Kitchen sink,’” he read aloud in disbelief. “There actually is an honest-to-God kitchen sink. Priceless.”
He tore through the item with a red pen and continued on.
“Let’s see. There’s me, Alistair, and Atkinson. That’s three. Susan is four, and four is a good number. Two tents, two Alpines. But now we have the Lieutenant. That ought to be good. So now we have three tents, three Alpines, and two people who, if things go one way, will be happily having a marvelous time of it in their own private little heaven. If it goes the other way, they make everyone else’s life miserable. Actually, it’s miserable for everyone else no matter how it goes. Shit. This is going to suck.”
He threw the pen onto the table and rubbed the stubble on his chin. Blossoming romance was always irritating, he thought, but it was doubly so in a small group when everyone else was forced to witness it whether they wanted to or not. It usually was not, unless they owned a sadistic streak that thrived on watching other people’s tender agonies. That happened sometimes on expeditions. This was exactly the kind of scenario which he had been taking such pains to avoid with Susan all along. If she were going to pull something like this anyway, it might as well have been with him, he thought. He’d worked hard enough for it, or against it, whatever. It didn’t matter. It was the principle.
Jake decided at that point to give the whole thing a rest and headed for the mountain to catch up with Susan’s group. He found them on an open face.
“Try not to step on that,” Walt told him. There was a string line laid out on the rock that he hadn’t seen.
“What is it?” Jake asked.
“Bones. We radioed our Paleo guy that we found something. He’s on his way.”
Jake stooped to look. It was difficult to see at first. He was sure he would have missed them if someone hadn’t pointed them out. They were small pieces imbedded in the sedimentary rock. They looked like they might have been birds. Jake asked him if that was what they were.
“No. At least not yet. These things are old. Before dinosaurs as we know them. If they are what I think they are, they are small mammals. Because of how they appear, people thought they were reptile for a long time, but later they were shown to be mammal. Or maybe it’s the other way around. They do look like birds. The whole thing has a lot of people all confused.”
“I guess I can join that group,” Jake said.
“It’s a pretty good group,” Walt said.
“What’s that thing?” Jake asked. There was a round rock with orange markers all around it. Obviously, no one wanted to miss that piece. There was nothing especially interesting about it at first glance. It was, in fact, remarkably unattractive, as far as rocks went.
“Possibly the most important thing we find this season. Those are fossilized critters from the dawn of time. The dawn of life, at any rate. These are what emerged out of the famous primordial soup. See these things here? They look like small invertebrates packed in with algae. This stuff is as old as it gets. You measure the age of these things in the billions of years.” Jake tried to feel the passing of billions of years by looking at the rock, but it didn’t do any good.
“How did it get here?” he asked.
“Probably came loose from the highest part of the mountain and was deposited here by glacier movement.”
“Where’s the Doc?” Jake then asked the student.
“Up there,” Walt said, pointing toward a small outcropping above.
He began to climb straight up the mountain, bounding from ledge to ledge. It felt good to be ascending and he would have just kept going except that he soon met the pair on the higher ledge. The lieutenant was making notations while Dr. Engen was taking the angles.
“Hi, Jake,” the lieutenant called as he approached. He seemed to have forgiven Jake his tirade from the recent party, in recognition that it was partly thanks to Jake’s self-induced derangement that he was abl
e to open the door to Susan’s heart.
“Greetings, fellow thrill seekers,” Jake hailed them as he approached. “Having fun?”
Susan eyed him suspiciously, as if she were concerned that the question portended some mischief that he always seemed to have at the ready.
“We’re making progress,” she answered, leaving the ambiguity as to what her meaning was lingering in the air as a warning.
“So I see,” he replied, throwing the tactic right back at her, but without pressing the advantage. He nodded toward the florescent tape on the rock. “What are you marking?”
“More fossils. The place is loaded with them.” She couldn’t help flashing an accusatory glance at the lieutenant who dodged her gaze. Even Jake knew that the more signs of fossil deposits they found, the more credence that would be given to the theory that fossil fuels lay somewhere below.
“So I hear,” Jake said.
“What are you doing?” Susan asked him.
“Just out for a stroll. Was working on the trip back to McMurdo, but then I needed to try and get some air,” he told them.
“Any luck with that?” Susan asked. She was still angry at him for enjoying her suffering.
“A little bit.”
The three of them just looked at each other, waiting for someone to say something, so Jake took the hint and went on his way. He carried his skis on his pack with the plan that when he got to the top of the spur, he would descend the slope that fell off the other side of the mountain where he knew it was relatively crevasse free.
He shook his head as he walked. Why does everything always have to get weird? he wondered.
“Jake knows,” Susan told Lt. Richards.
“About us?” he asked.
“Yes about us,” she snapped. “Is there something else he ought to know about?”
When he didn’t respond and only looked to her with a questioning look, she relented.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You didn’t deserve that.”
He nodded.
“I understand your frustration,” he said.
“Do you?” she asked, with an attempt at a laugh that succeeded only in making her voice waver for an instant. “Can you?”
“I can try. If you tell me how, I can try.”
“Yes, you can try,” she admitted. “But can I tell you how? That is a much more difficult thing.”
“Is it so hard?” he asked her. “What you hope for, what you want for your work, your life…that’s what makes you who you are. How can I not love that?”
“Love?” she asked, the surprise in her voice unfeigned. “It’s been one day and you’re using the ‘L’ word on me already?”
“It hasn’t been one day for me,” he said. “I think it started for me that first morning when you jumped up and fought so passionately about my project here, and my working with you. You were mad as hell, but I loved your spirit.”
“What, are you some kind of masochist or something? I could have scratched your eyes out right then,” she said, but with a half smile and with her eyes flashing blue from beneath eyebrows crinkled in amusement. Even with the wind blowing on the sunny side of the mountain, the rocks radiated enough heat that she could wear her goggles over her forehead on the outside of her wool hat. Stray strands of blond hair escaped their confinement like sparks that lit up her now bronzed face, darkened from the wind and sun. In the stark bleakness that made up all of the landscape, she stood in relief, impossibly beautiful.
“It isn’t my eyes that have scratches on them right now,” he said, rolling his shoulders under his parka. “My back is sore.”
Now she couldn’t hold back a laugh from deep inside.
“Oh, my,” she said in pretended embarrassment. “Was that me?”
“It certainly was, unless I am very much mistaken,” he said, wanting to build on this moment of lightness from her.
“Don’t be so sure,” she said contemplatively, the moment already slipping away. “That may have been somebody else who thought they were me.”
And that gave voice to the fear that he knew was lurking beneath the surface for him; that the one who dug her nails into his back to keep from screaming into the silence for all to hear was a different Susan. The Susan who would lose the battle for supremacy within her; the Susan whose ambitions and passion for her cause would supersede all other considerations. The fear that his hopes were doomed from the start; that he could not triumph against such powerful forces aligned against him.
But he had to try. And he knew that expressions passionate in their fervor would only give strength to the voice that whispered into her consciousness, telling her that this was wrong. So he fought within himself, restraining from giving into the compulsion to go to her, to hold her, to tell her how much he needed and wanted and had to have. His weapons were few, and limited in their strength, and had to be deployed carefully and sparingly.
He chided himself for having said what he did. It was an error in judgment and not only did it weaken his cause, it was insensitive; for he knew the confusion of feelings that she must be experiencing. He determined not to make the same mistake again.
“Well, if she happens to show up later, I won’t complain,” he said, knowing that this was his only option, to avoid meeting the other voice within her in open conflict where some conclusive decision might be made. Evade and skirmish was his tactical plan, the only one available to him.
“She might,” she said. “She just might.”
In the evening, when the shadows were on the other sides of whatever created them from where they were in the morning, the light seemed to become diffuse and it washed over the sustrugi. The camp was just far enough north of the Pole that the sun took an ever so slightly elliptical orbit through the heavens and dipped closer to the mountainous horizon just enough to extend its rays to where it gave the minutest impression that twilight was on its way. In the weeks to come, the sun would eventually succumb to the forces that dictated its course and it would slip ever further below the ridge until winter came to the continent and darkness would again descend upon the ice.
It was, however, just enough of a change to give the inhabitants of the camp the sense that there really was an evening, even though the sun still blinded from the reflection off the snow.
It was into this not quite evening that the expedition members, weary from their toils of the day, found their way to the tents to bed down for the night. Susan, rolling up her maps and stowing them in their case, left the hut where she found Lt. Richards hovering by the entrance to his tent.
“What are you doing?” she asked him. He seemed to vacillate, unsure of himself in a way she had not experienced before.
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth,” he said.
“Why not?” she asked him. She had an impish manner that came out when she was feeling playful.
“Because I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“About what?”
“You, to be exact,” he said. “I didn’t want you to think that I was assuming too much by just coming to your tent. I didn’t want to just go into mine because I was afraid you would think I didn’t want to be with you. Standing out here and waiting is stupid, because I look like an idiot. So, I repeat, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Well, that’s pretty much what it looks like, too,” she said, teasing him, but grabbing the lapels of his parka and pulling him close anyway.
He looked around anxiously.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“What?”
“See who’s watching. I don’t want to do that. Everyone’s going to know anyway, if Jake hasn’t told already them, and I don’t want to pretend they don’t.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice suggesting that there were many questions, not to mention hopes, implied in the answer.
“Yes,” she said, smiling without any mitigating shadows fleeting across her eyes, a look of peaceful satisfaction he hadn’t seen from her be
fore.
“Good,” he said. “Me too.”
Susan unzipped her tent flap and lowered her head to slip through the opening, having sent the Lieutenant to his tent to get his floor pad and sleeping bag. While he was retrieving them she pushed her things to one side to make room for him. She chuckled to herself at the thought of it. She was still wearing her mountaineering boots and all of the outer clothing. She would wait for his return to make up the bed and then carefully sweep out the snow that was inevitably dragged inside before even thinking of exposing socks to the risk of getting wet, a serious issue that could lead to frostbite. It was not exactly the setting for a steamy romantic adventure. Yet when she thought of last night, she shook her head and whistled. It had been incredible.
She couldn’t remember ever losing herself in the moment like that before. He really did have scratches on his back. Deep ones. But he didn’t flinch when her hands tore into his flesh, not at all. Rather, he slipped his hands under her arms and around her back so that his palms cupped her shoulders from behind, and the more she dug in her nails, the harder he pulled back on her shoulders, driving her closer to him until she relaxed her grip. Only then, and only after crushing her tightly as if he would never let go, did he begin to loosen his hold. He bent down and brushed his lips to where his fingers had clasped the tiny shoulders as if he feared he had hurt them and wanted to show that this was not his intent. Her lips had crossed his fingers that were now free to show that she understood.
The flap opened and he passed the voluminous sleeping bag through to her and waited for her to get it zipped together with hers. When was all in order, she gave the go-ahead to pull off his boots and to knock the snow off before coming in, which he did carefully, leaving his boots by the opening of the tent. She took off hers and placed them by his.
“Take off your clothes,” she demanded. “Now. Quickly.”
“Well,” he replied, deadpan: “That’s about as enticing an invitation as I’ve had all day.”
“Dummy,” she said, stopping to kiss him. “I meant so you won’t get cold. Get in the sack.”
“Keeps getting better all the time,” he said, but he followed her direction and in short order, he was inside the bag with her facing him, her body shivering from the cold nylon on bare skin. She clung tightly to him, trying to force the warmth of the two of them to multiply as only two bodies together can. Her breasts were firm against his chest, the cold making them rigid. She slipped gently closer, her abdomen finding his, wrapping her legs around his waist. There she stayed, waiting for the down feathers of the bags to accumulate the heat that was radiating from their bodies, waiting for the tenseness of the cold to relax and then to be able to breathe easier.
When her shivering stopped, she let out a long breath, and where her chin had been forcing itself into his collarbone, she now turned softly and laid her cheek against his breast. His lips moved slowly over her silken hair, making her sigh contentedly. That he could be so strong and firm and at the same time so gentle was something that gave her contentment, a feeling of she had not previously been well-acquainted with. She found herself sinking into that place where she had been the night before, but with the voice in her head still being listened to.
Contentment. How could that have found its way into her heart, here and now? It was something she had never been challenged with before, so distant a threat did it seem. It was the one thing that could derail her ambitions; people who were content were not driven. Why should they be - they were content? Was that his purpose for coming into her life, to make her content and to thereby steal away from her the one thing that was most precious?
She forced herself to abandon such thoughts and drove them away by suddenly reaching up and taking him by the nape she kissed him passionately, almost desperately, as if her life depended on not letting anything be more than that kiss. Her breath became a sigh, and the sigh became a whimper, and with the whimper came a tear that moistened the skin of his breast.
“Are you sad?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “I’m happy. I’ve never been happier.”
“I knew that,” he said, though it was clear that he didn’t. “I just wanted to make sure.”
“Thank you,” she said, knowing that he was lying and grateful for it.
She kissed him again, though not with such terrible need. This time it was with want, wanting to go back to that place she had found the night before. Wanting him to take her there again, asking him, imploring with her lips and hands that now held both sides of his head.
He seemed to understand what she was asking. He gently slipped his arm around her waist, lifted her from his side, and lowered her down beneath him. The hand that had raised her now stroked the curve of her arched back and down to her one bent leg. She moved her lips from his to the lobe of his ear, where she nibbled at it like a rabbit’s soft nuzzling, an affirmation that he was taking her to where she wanted to go.
“Now,” she whispered into his ear and without hesitation, he moved his hand to the small of her back and adjusted himself to her, gently, so that their togetherness was accomplished with barely a movement.
“Yes,” she said, a general statement that covered all that needed to be said, and to which he need not reply. As they moved together, she sensed the swaying of the ocean waves though she was barely half an inch from the surface of the ice; the rocking that one feels after being at sea. It added to the vertigo that lifted her away into that distant place where dreams and senses became a single thing of colors and images swirling together.
At the moment when all became one, she clasped his back as she had before, only this time, he couldn’t refrain from allowing a gasp to escape. The sound brought her back enough to realize what she was doing to his already wounded flesh and she let him go, laughing as she watched him struggle between the awareness of the pain of his back and his awareness of her that he held in his arms.
“Sorry,” she said when he came to rest in her arms.
“That is something we are seriously going to have to work on,” he said.
“I know,” she said apologetically, but then added, “If you didn’t make me feel like this, then that wouldn’t happen.”
He sighed. “I’ll try next time and make sure that I don’t.”
She took his head in both his hands and looked him in the eyes.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Okay.”
She turned away from him now, tired from the day and joyfully spent from the night and tucked herself against him in the conjoined sleeping bags. As she closed her eyes, the contentment began to spread over her consciousness once again, but this time, she embraced it and allowed it to lull her to sleep.