THE TREES OF ANTARCTICA
I can sing a true song about myself,
tell of my travels, how in days of tribulation
I often endured a time of hardship,
how I have harboured bitter sorrow in my heart
and often learned that ships were homes of sadness.
From The Seafarer, an Anglo Saxon poem translated
by Kevin Crossley-Holland (author unknown, c900).
It was late in the afternoon when we finally left Hobart. After only a couple
of hours we were well and truly out to sea. Nothing but sea and sky, and the
occasional bird. It was close to the longest day of the year. The sun set late.
I spent as long as I could on the deck. I didn't want to meet my cabin mates
– I resented having to share with anyone.
This is what I longed for – emptiness.
I tell Sue that my strongest memory of that trip is the sense of lightness,
of evaporating, while standing on the deck, staring at the sea. She is
visiting me in Hobart twelve years later.
We sit close together on my lounge, looking at photos, or watching slides projected
on the living room wall.
Sue made a film with her super 8 camera – called The Trees of Antarctica
– of the mosses and lichen beds near Casey Station. I remember when
she showed me the film about a year after the trip, I felt like I was flying
over a forest. Sue says that she had forgotten about the film. It's been
sitting in a box at her place in Melbourne.
She tells me that her strongest memory is of coming into the cabin a couple
of days into the voyage and finding me sobbing on my bunk. And of me telling
her about Rory. He'd died about eighteen months before,WILDCARE TASMANIA
NATURE WRITING PRIZE
on a bushwalking trip in the Adirondack mountains, New York State, in the snow.
I was with him.
Sue had told me then that her friend Tibb died of cancer not long before the
trip. His death was expected; she had spent a lot of time with him while he
was sick, and dying.
I got to know every inch of the Icebird's outer deck, the parts
where we
were allowed to be. The green painted floor, the crisp walls, the top
half white, the bottom part grey, the orange lifebuoys and boats, the huge ropes
all became very familiar. It was all so clean, so bright, so comforting in a
steely kind of way. I even loved the smell of the paint. The greasy mix of diesel
and cooking fumes at the back of the ship didn't put me off. I felt at
home.
The sea was calm – it was the calmest trip the Icebird's crew
had ever had, they said. I was grateful. I get seasick on the Derwent. Some
people wished we had some stormy weather, but not me. I wandered around the
deck and gazed at the sea.
Sue tells me that a huge albatross followed the ship for much of the trip south.
It used to hover in the wake of the ship. She says she got to know it quite
well, as it was often there when she went out the back to smoke a joint.
I vaguely remember a white bird, but I can't remember an albatross following
the ship.
I had been cocooned by my friends' love and support since Rory's
death, friends who I had not known for long. I'd even had a visit from
my mother, a big effort for her. Recently, the gloss of my grief had worn off,
at least for others – I felt that they were growing weary of my need.
I'd bought a house not long before the voyage, and was trying to cope
by myself. It wasn't working.
The first iceberg was sighted about three days into the trip; fairly far north,
someone said. It was a momentous occasion – much clicking and whirring
of cameras by those of us who hadn't been south before. Of course those
who had gave us knowing looks and told us that we would see much more impressive
icebergs later. We were excited and took the photos anyway.
After the first iceberg sighting we were given our iceberg-watching duties.
We had two-hour shifts. Sue and I were on together. We laughed hysterically
during our efforts to work out how to use the iceberg measuring instrument –
sextant? – and hoped that the records weren't being relied on for
serious research.
Sue has a picture of her holding the implement – upside-down, she now
knows. She says that we chose a late iceberg watch – 10.00pm to midnight
– in the hope that we would see an aurora. We didn't. Maybe there
was too much light. She tells me about the intense blues and greens of the ice
and the sea at sunset.
The word went out – whales! – and everyone raced to the side of the
ship to look at them. A pod of sleek dark creatures, too large for dolphins,
swam close to the ship. There were quite a few of them, pilot whales we were
told. I was a bit disappointed that the first whales I had ever seen were so
small.
The days were getting longer. There was less and less night, more and more
light. The engines thrummed beneath me, the sea gently rocked me, but I couldn't
sleep. I'd been sleeping badly since long before we left Hobart. Now it
was even worse. Sue's snoring didn't help.
Sue and her colleague Ted were on the trip doing research for a multimedia
education project they were working on. It made no sense to me, what they were
doing, but then I was completely uninterested in anything generated by a computer,
other than words. I was even having trouble stringing those together on this
trip.
We took to lying on our bunks, Sue and I, sipping port bought from the ship's
shop, watching icebergs drift by. We were accompanied by Bob Marley, on Sue's
portable CD player. Ted joined us sometimes. We were on a south seas cruise.
There was nothing else but the sea, with its mushy ice and icebergs of all shapes
and sizes, and the sky, and the ship. Bergy bits, which had broken off decaying
icebergs, scraped the sides of the ship. The icebergs had an intense blue at
their core.
We travelled further south, the days drifted into each other. There was no
division between night and day any more, only a few minutes of twilight as the
sun dipped below the horizon. At 'night' there were videos in the
mess, and there was the bar, 'the Freezer', which was on the lower
deck. I spent most of my time out on the deck, unless there was a special occasion.
We had the captain's birthday party. We danced to recorded music, mostly
sixties and seventies, someone played their guitar, some people sang. People
got very drunk. I danced with Ted.
After our iceberg watch, Sue tells me, she would stay up until four or five
in the morning and sleep in until lunchtime. Our body clocks stopped working.
I remember lying on my bunk, a top one, only half asleep. I was usually up for
breakfast, with not many others.
Sue says I was in a daze during that trip. Maybe that's why my memories
are so sketchy. She reminds me that we shared the voyage with some glaciologists.
One of them, she says, had a beautiful image of an ice crystal on his T-shirt.
I can't remember it.
The glaciologists were studying ice cores taken from deep in the ice cap. They
studied the composition of ancient ice to detect signs of climate change, including
changes to the vegetation that covered the Antarctic landmass aeons ago.
As we neared the continent we reached the pack ice. Huge clunking noises resounded
throughout the ship. I spent hours at the front of the ship watching the ice,
dark fractures forming as the ship forced its way through. Occasionally we saw
crabeater seals resting on the ice. There were more birds as well; we even saw
a couple of emperor penguins, standing in their stately fashion on ice floes.
On Christmas day we had reindeer races in the bar, organised by the army contingent.
The reindeer were perfectly formed little black cardboard cut-outs that stood
up on a hexagonal 'track' marked out on the floor with black tape.
We formed teams; each team owned a reindeer. The reindeer raced around the track
according to dice throw; our reindeer was knocked out early on.
There was more drinking, and more dancing. I hadn't danced like this
since the parties Rory and I used to have in Hobart.
On Boxing Day we were close to Casey. We were in the pack ice, and there were
icebergs everywhere. It was overpoweringly beautiful.
Arriving at Casey was a shock. After a week at sea, in our own dimension, surrounded
by sea, sky and ice, we stared in disbelief at its ugliness. It was what I imagined
a mining camp to be: dirt roads, vehicles and box-like metal buildings. The
shipping container seemed to be the design model. There were patches of dirty
snow marked with vehicle tracks.
There was no time to be indignant. To disembark we had to climb down a rope
ladder over the side of the ship into a waiting LARC (an amphibious vehicle).
It was an alarming thought that we had to entrust our safety to the army men
we were drinking with the night before.
Much of our time at Casey is a blur. Sue, Ted and I slept on mattressesWILDCARE
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on the floor of the gym in the 'red shed' – the living quarters.
We were lucky to be able to stay ashore; some of the other roundtrippers from
the ship had to sleep on board.
There was a radio station operated by the expeditioners, Sue tells me. She
says that whoever was on 'slushy' duty in the kitchen got to choose
the music. I remember someone kept playing 'Achy Breaky Heart'.
It was like a ski lodge gone wrong.
Sue also remembers a tour of the medical quarters, seeing a stainless steel
bath chamber which was used for reviving hypothermia patients, and thinking
'this is what Rory needed'. She worried about the effect this sight
might have on me. I vaguely recall the medical quarters but not the hypothermia
chamber.
When Rory was dying, in the snow, we were a long way from any help. He had
been weakened by an illness he'd picked up in Nepal a few months before,
and succumbed quickly to hypothermia. I cursed my lack of first aid skills –
I had no idea what to do. My fumblings with sleeping bag, tent and hot soup
were of no use. At thirty three, Rory was too young to die.
When I knew all hope had gone, I had to take the tent and leave Rory lying
there in the snow. I needed to find a flat place to camp before dark.
The sound of early morning thunder always takes me back to the morning after
Rory's death. Lying alone in our tent in the snow, thunder rumbling in
the distance, desolate, stunned. I packed up – I had to walk past where
I had left Rory the day before. In my mind's eye I had a picture of him:
sitting up in the snow waiting for me, impish smile on his lovely face. I can
still summon that image. But he was lying where I had left him, sodden sleeping
bag covering him.
That day I walked for seven hours through the snow. I noticed everything, marvelled
at pale patterns on birch trunks, delicate pointy larch fronds, icicles hanging
from small frozen waterfalls. I broke into a ranger's hut by smashing
a window with a snow shovel. I put on dry clothes, cooked some food, spread
out my tent, sleeping bag and clothes to dry. I wondered whether I could just
stay there, it was warm and comfortable, but sense prevailed and I radioed for
help. I inspected my numb, frost-nipped fingers, toes and legs.
A helicopter arrived. I was delivered safely to the senior ranger's house.
The kindness of that family broke my trance.
The roundtrippers were taken on a tour to Shirley Island, a small island about
a kilometre from the station. We walked across the sea ice to get there. The
air was thick with the voices and droppings of thousands of Adélie penguins.
Adélies are classic small dinner-suited penguins, with triangular heads.
We had never before been confronted with the reality of life for wild animals.
A skua landed, its great brown and white wings flapping to earth. Skuas were
waiting near penguins on their nests. A wrong move could mean the end for an
egg or chick. Blood stained the ice.
One of my jobs for the Antarctic Division was to inspect the condition of the
protected area at Bailey Peninsula, near the station. It is special for the
plants which grow there – mosses and lichens.
Sue went with me. She didn't have a permit, so as an 'inspector'
I should have arrested her. Instead, we looked at the fascinating shapes and
colours of the mosses and lichens, which were so remarkable in this landscape
dominated by ice. She filmed the plants, close-up, with her super 8 camera.
A few of us were taken to Robinson's Ridge by Arthur, a winterer; he
was glad to take us as this was his last field trip. Robbo's is a two-hour,
twenty-kilometre trip from Casey. It is a world away.
The sheer snow slope beckoned – I could fall into it, become part of it.
Sue and I had been reprimanded the day before by the station leader for trying
to sneak off, unauthorised, with skis. We realised now that we couldn't
have skied anyway, the snow was icy and ended in a drop over a cliff.
Sue wrote a letter to her husband Michael and four-year-old son Simmy when
we returned to Casey and she posted it there with an Antarctic stamp (though
it would have gone back to Hobart with us on the Icebird). She wrote:
We went for a long walk down on the snow. We walked along an ice cliff overlooking
the beautiful bay. There was an island in the bay with a penguin rookery. We
could hear thousands of penguins, all talking to each other from across the
water. A few penguins had swum across the water and came quacking towards us,
waving their wings like little arms. They were not scared of us at all. During
the night we heard loud booming and crashing sounds – it was the ice crashing
into the sea from the cliffs where we had been walking.
I stayed out of the hut as much as I could – it was very cosy in there,
but the weather was clear outside. I had never been in such a beautiful place.
I saw a snow petrel nesting in a nook in some rocks. I watched the sun setting
over the slope behind the hut; everything – the hut, the tall triangular
tent next to it, the snow, the rocks – was glowing orange pink When I'm
thinking about that luminous landscape, I want to be back there, alone, on the
cliffs, looking out to sea.
The station held a barbecue to mark the departure of the Icebird. Our
return voyage was taking back the Casey winterers, some of whom, including Arthur,
had spent well over a year at the station. It was a difficult time for them,
though they handled it as brashly as everything else done there.
As a special New Year's treat the captain steered a course through 'Iceberg
Alley', Patersons Bank, with its rows of spectacular icebergs. A pod of
killer whales accompanied us for a while. It was good to be back on the ship.
We saw in the New Year with a party, in the mess, out on deck, in the bar.
The return voyage is even more hazy than the trip down. After that first night,
the atmosphere on board the ship was more subdued, reflecting the mood of the
returning winterers. I found an empty cabin where I could try to sleep in peace.
As we approached Hobart, after more than a week at sea, we could feel the tension
in the air. The winterers were very quiet. I can't pretend to know what
was going through their minds.
About a day out from Hobart, Tasmania was enveloped in the scent of eucalyptus.
It must have been an overwhelming sensation for the winterers, if it was strong
even to those of us who had been at sea and on the ice for only three weeks.
The ship was bagpiped to the wharf by the army chap, fully kilted, who, I now
remember, had piped our other arrival and departures. The winterers, especially,
were hanging over the side of the ship looking out for family and friends who
were meeting them. There were lots of people waiting on the wharf, waving, excited.
I waited on the ship for as long as I could; I couldn't see any of my friends
on the wharf. Sue and I were the last passengers to say goodbye.
I felt as if I had been cut adrift.
I returned to my empty house in South Hobart. I was greeted at the doorstep
by Rory's old shoes, with flowers growing in them.
SHARON MOORE travelled to Antarctica in the summer of 1992-93 while
an employee of the Antarctic Division, and will be forever grateful for the
experience. This is a work of creative nonfiction – while the stories it
tells are true, some details have been changed to protect privacy.