Blazing Ice (20 page)

Norbert and Scooter studied the map. Crary's track ran around the edge of the Ice Shelf. All his snow strength measurements came from along that track. We were cutting across the middle of the Shelf, where Crary didn't go. We had crossed his track back near the Shear Zone. We'd cross it again somewhere up ahead.

“You see these closed contour loops he's mapped around the middle? Where we are right now?”

Scooter and Norbert nodded. Those contours indicated what Crary believed would be the softest, weakest snow. He had to extrapolate those values over a hundred miles because he wasn't here.

“Scooter, do you think your TG snow is the same soft, weak stuff Crary was talking about?”

“I want to look over this report more closely,” Scooter said. “But I think so.”

“If it is so,” I speculated, “then there's hope that we'll come out of this swamp. Up here closer to the mountains, where Crary went, the contours show a harder surface. Now let me show you this other one.”

The other report was only a half-inch thick. It collected contributions to a traverse conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1994. NSF sponsored it and CRREL hosted it. The list of attendees named French and Russian traverse experts, Caterpillar tractor dealers, and other snow vehicle manufacturers. Names like Dave Bresnahan and George Blaisdell rang familiar.

“Check this name,” I turned the page. “Russell Magsig.”

Their eyebrows rose. I added, “Our Russell has been in on this for a long time. Respect that. But here's what I want to show you now …”

The next section represented glaciologist's contributions. I'd never met Robert Bindschadler or Gordon Hamilton, but I had heard their names around
the program a lot. Their notes described criteria for selecting the Leverett route across the Transantarctics. We were not there to debate that. We were going to test it. But their list of criteria included features they thought should be avoided: abundance of crevasses, steep slopes, blue ice, and “depth hoar.”

“Scooter, the alpine mountaineers in my home town are always talking about weak depth hoar layers at the base of the snow pack. They predict avalanches on account of it. As I understand, that stuff is pretty much the same as what you've been digging here?”

Scooter nodded, his eyes wide open and attentive. “Right. The old timers used to call it depth hoar. These days we call it TG, and the process that makes it is kinetic metamorphism. It ain't going to avalanche on this Shelf, of course, but it's the same stuff that collapses under your tractors as you squirm through it.”

“Thank you. I thought so. Those glaciologists thought depth hoar should be avoided. And I reckon we know why, now. You put those guys together with Crary's projections and you have this big swamp. Had I understood that ahead of time, I might've made a strong argument for building a road across it first, before we brought out heavy loads to break trail.”

Scooter cocked his head. “Hey, nobody can blame you, John.”

“Blame's beside the point. That's dinosaur bones. I'm looking at that three-year schedule to complete, and wondering how big this swamp is.”

We got our first indication on December 27 that second year, still headed south. Quite suddenly in the afternoon, all our tractors started riding up on top of the snow. The overcast that obscured our skies for weeks rolled back. Golden glints of sunlight reflected off the distant mountains now rising for the first time on our southern horizon. Scooter invited me over to his snow pit that evening. I dropped down beside him.

“Look at this, John.” He pointed out the various layers exposed in his pit wall.

“No BBs. Is this all WF snow?”

“A lot of it is. But look at these layers with the finer grains. This is equi-temperature stuff.”

“What? ET, now?”

“Just another name. But check this … it's bonded. It doesn't spill.”

I stood up in the pit, studying the new mountains. “You suppose they have
anything to do with this snow being here? I'm talking about weather and wind up close to them. Not like those foggy doldrums behind us.”

“Could be. There's a lot more to learn.”

“If we've just come out of three hundred miles of swamp, then that would be wonderful.”

But we would wait a year to find out. The next day was December 28. There was a red mark on the calendar. We turned around to run back on the road we'd built behind us.

Snow accumulates in Antarctica to such an extent that, over time and depth, it compacts itself under its own weight. It squeezes the air out of its mass until it becomes dense ice. When that ice cracks, you get a crevasse. If you're building a road across Antarctica, crevasses are a terrain problem that will slow you down, or kill you. We understood this, and sometimes our knowledge flowed back to the mountaineers.

Matthew Szundy had rotated in for Scooter as we retreated from our farthest south. His boyishly handsome, clean-shaven, and smiling face loudly proclaimed: I am ALERT!

During our retreat, we stopped at a place we called the George Trend to explore for crevasses that might be lurking there. Blaisdell had called my attention to a satellite image where he noticed a staggered array of linear features cutting across our path. If the features themselves weren't crevasses, they might be telltales of crevasse country. Our outbound trip proved that a hundred-foot-wide, twenty-mile-long path through the George Trend was free of crevasses. That was good enough for us then. But on our return, I wanted to see if we could actually find a crevasse there.

Matthew and I went exploring in the PistenBully. He ran the radar, and I drove. Over two days we ran one-mile squares on both sides of our trail. Cloudy skies gave us no surface definition. I navigated by GPS. But even had there been clear skies, we had no landmarks. At 120 miles from the Shear Zone, the peaks of the Transantarctic Range hid below all our horizons.

While we mapped out one of our western squares, the clouds broke a tiny bit. A shaft of bright sunlight struck the snowfield in front of us, and cast an oddly curved shadow on the snow. I broke Matthew's concentration. “I don't believe my eyes. Do you see what I see? Is that a
hill
in front of us?”

Matthew looked up from the radar screen and out the windshield: “You don't believe your eyes? That looks like a hill to me.”

“What's a hill doing out here?” Matthew was new to the Ross Ice Shelf. Did he get how weird that was?

“Maybe we're in a trough?” he suggested.

That would mean we were in a bottom, looking up, with another hill behind us. And we hadn't felt any slope-change by the seat of our pants. We'd never have seen this hill if it hadn't been for that shaft of sunlight.

We went ahead to find out what the radar saw. Matthew reported the stratigraphy beneath us rose as we started climbing. It flattened out as we crested the hill. That meant some sort of fold lay below us, an anticline of sorts.

We continued into a broad, sunlit stretch of flat ground.

“STOP!” Matthew cried.

I let go of everything. The PistenBully automatically stopped.

“I got a crevasse,” Matthew turned the computer screen toward me.

He was on it. The clear black needle-form in the radar image was probably ten feet in front of us now. It looked narrow, like a crack we could drive over. But it was too small to account for what we'd seen on the satellite images. I looked right into Matthew's bright blue eyes.

“Good job. You know, I teased those CRREL guys all the way from the Shear Zone out to RIS-1. They never found a single crevasse on the open Shelf. But here, on your first day out, you found one! You are
good
, man! You are
much
better than those CRREL guys!”

“But I thought finding no crevasses
was
good?” Matthew puzzled over my praise.

“Finding no crevasses
is
good, but it didn't stop me from teasing them. Now I'm teasing you.”

Matthew laughed uneasily. He was brand new to our haggard mob and needed to fit in right away. He knew his routine job would be running the radar and looking for crevasses. He'd dealt with alpine crevasses as a guide, but these were Shelf crevasses. And our job was to get tractor trains through, not paying clients on foot.

That evening in our galley, long after the crew retired to their bunks, I slouched wide awake on the galley bench. All the scenes of our ignominious
defeat in the snow swamp replayed for me on the ceiling. I plotted solutions, but I wondered if NSF would receive our horror stories as whining complaints or as lessons learned. Matthew surprised me as he stepped in from outside.

“Hi, John. You're not asleep?”

“No, I am cogitating.”

“Me, too. Cogitating. Been thinking about crevasses,” Matthew confessed.

“Have a seat?”

He dragged the caster chair out of the comms booth and sat across the floor from me. My legs stretched across to a stool on the other side of the galley table.

“I'm concerned about these crevasses. I'm not sure we're paying enough attention to them,” Matthew said. I saw where this conversation was headed.

“Well, that's actually an old joke,” I replied.

Matthew's neck straightened. “What?”

“A
very
old joke,” I repeated. “You know the story of the blind men and the elephant?”

“Yeah, I know that story,” Matthew said, probably wondering if he was getting through to me at all.

“Okay. One blind man says an elephant is like a tree. Another one says it's like a wall. And another one says it's like a snake … You with me?”

Matthew smiled at the twist his earnest conversation had taken. I was going to enjoy this.

“Well, I'm talking to my hometown Rabbi,” I continued. “Marvin Paioff, the smartest man I ever met, and our conversation turns to Jews' preoccupation with anti-Semitism. ‘Marvin,' I said, ‘I had a college buddy named Jeff Schwartz. We shared an English literature class together. Every time we had to write a paper, I'd explore my favorite theme of medieval knighthood. Jeff would explore anti-Semitism. So it'd be ‘The Value System of the Red Cross Knight in Edmund Spenser's
Faerie Queene
,' for me. For Jeff, it'd be ‘Anti-Semitism in Chaucer's
Wife of Bath's Tale
.' Now, Marvin, that's what Jeff was interested in. Exploring anti-Semitism. He did it every chance he got. And I explored chivalry, every chance I got … until I understood it to be licensed hypocrisy. But I've noticed over the years that many of my Jewish friends have Jeff's same infatuation with anti-Semitism. Why is that?' Do you know what he told me?”

Matthew, thoroughly lost, was nevertheless intrigued. “I have no idea what Rabbi Paioff told you.”

“He told me the same thing I just told you.”

“What?”

“That it's a very old joke. And he asked me if I knew the story of the blind men and the elephant?”

“But what's the joke?”

“Oh … you want to know that?”

“Yes!” Matthew demanded.

“Okay. I was wondering. A U.N. delegation studies the elephant. When they're done, they write up their reports. The United States representative turns in his:
The Use of Elephant Manure as an Agricultural Crop Enhancement
. The German's report is titled
The Elephant as a War Machine
. And the Frenchman writes about
The Love Life of the Elephant
. You know what the Israeli's paper is?”

“No,” cried Matthew, now grinning from ear to ear.

“
Anti-Semitism and the Elephant
.”

“Aw jeez,” he laughed. “I thought we were talking about crevasses!”

“We
are
talking about crevasses. Haven't you been paying attention?”

Matthew gestured with open palms and open mouth, as if to say, “What? What?”

I took a more serious tone. “You're a mountaineer. You've seen a jillion crevasses. You're a crevasse expert. If you're like other mountaineers, you figure you've got a lock on crevasses. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Matthew said forthrightly, now more engaged with the subject. There was no backing down in him. No false modesty. He was going to work great for us.

“Okay. Matthew, you're a mountaineer, and you've got a lock on crevasses. Think about old, gruff Russell. He was in the Shear Zone when
Linda
went down. He saw that huge bulldozer disappear with two guys on board, so Russell knows something about crevasses.”

Matthew's attention grew.

“Think about Stretch. Stretch has run that eighty-six thousand pound D8 Cat right up to the very edge of crevasses. Right there in the Shear Zone, last year … He filled them full of snow and drove over them. Stretch knows
something about crevasses. And those two guys are in their bunks, not twenty feet away from you.”

My point began to dawn on Matthew.

“Now me,” I said. “I have a feel for how huge masses of material behave under stress. And I've studied and studied this route.
I
know something about crevasses. My first choice is to
avoid
them. Our problem is we've got to find the crevasses before they find us. My second choice is to destroy them. Like we did in the Shear Zone. You're a mountaineer, and a damn good one I understand.
You
know something about crevasses, too. But you haven't got a lock on them. See what I'm getting at?”

Matthew nodded deeply.

“We
all
think about crevasses
all
the time,” I said. “And you can be sure every one of us is scared to death of them. That's why I'm up late at night and can't sleep. I'm looking ahead to the Kelly Trend, wondering what crevasses may be lurking there tomorrow.”

Matthew sat back in his chair. I never moved my legs, or changed my slouching posture. I wanted to relax, and I was doing a fine job of it.