The Lightkeeper's Wife

6



There’s something about Antarctica that locks you in for life. Maybe it’s the landscape; so wild and bare and sparse. Or maybe it’s seeing so much white. Or the relationships, all so intense. Whatever it is, somehow, in all that vast space and luminous light, you become transformed. You discover a new self. An ability to melt into distance. An uplifting sensation of freedom. At the same time, eternal yearning is born. You want to return. To reunite with the self you uncovered down there, a self unchecked by normal boundaries. When you go back to your old world, along with the other injuries Antarctica has inflicted, raw longing rules you. Your soul is in bondage. The healing takes years.

As my wife pointed out later, Antarctica is not something you can share with people who haven’t been there. You can’t show them how light shimmers over ice or glints from the angled faces of icebergs. When you talk about Antarctica after you return, you see the reflection of your craziness in people’s faces. It’s like grieving a death; those whose lives haven’t been touched can’t understand. So your isolation thickens. You wonder how you can feel more alone in a city of sixty thousand than in a field hut twenty kilometres from base.

For just over a year, Antarctica was my reality. I went, and I came back. My old life tried to reimpose itself, but parts of the puzzle were missing. They were lost in light and space. Captured by wind. Trapped in a blizzard. That’s the cost.

Antarctica keeps part of you forever. You can never bring your whole self back again.


My wife Debbie found the ad on the Antarctic Division website for a diesel mechanic to overwinter at Davis Station; which would mean two summers and a winter away from home. We’d been married a year and bought a house. It was nothing fancy, and the mortgage wasn’t huge, but neither of us had impressive incomes, so the loan was a financial constraint. I wasn’t much of a spender, but Debbie was into clothes and shoes and manicures.

The Antarctic salary was three times my wage. Debbie decided we needed this job to set us up. We’d pay a decent sum off the mortgage and that’d relieve the strain. It’d be easy. I could go south and work on engines and look at birds—my two great passions, she pointed out—while she’d stay home and organise a few renovations to the house. I’d be away fifteen months, and sure, that was a long time and she’d miss me, but she was confident it’d work out beautifully in the end.

Ten years ago, in October, I left for Antarctica on the great orange ship the Aurora Australis, her horn blaring as she inched away from the wharf. On the helideck, I clung to the end of a streamer while down on the wharf Debbie held the other end. The ship slid through the inky waters, engines thrumming, until the streamer stretched to breaking point and gave out with a flick. It was hard to look back with the ship pointed south. One hundred metres from the docks and distance was already asserting itself.

As the wharf shrank away, the other expeditioners disappeared inside the ship. I was left alone in the approaching dusk. I stayed there until Hobart was long gone and the Aurora hummed smoothly through the quiet waters of the Derwent then down the eastern side of Bruny Island. The sadness of departure was tempered by the anticipation of new experiences, and I was filled with guilty excitement.

Beyond the tip of Bruny, we churned through the peaks and troughs of the Southern Ocean. The motion plastered me to my bunk. Occasionally, I braved the deck, watching the heaving waters stretching south, and trying to catch a glimpse of an albatross riding the updrafts around the ship. The birdwatchers on the ship showed me lists of seabirds: cape petrels, prions, royal albatross, black-browed albatross, wanderers, light-mantled sooties. But I was too ill to spend long out of bed. I’d snatch a brief gasp of frigid air, then stumble below and collapse on my bunk.

On rough days, the sea sloshed at my porthole like a washing machine. My cabin mate told of cups rolling off dinner tables, of the swell riding up onto the trawl deck at the back of the ship, of someone vomiting on the bridge. Dinners were bowls of pasta with rich creamy sauces, lobster thermidor, lasagne, steaks. But my meals consisted of dry biscuits chewed gingerly in my bunk. Only horizontal did I feel vaguely normal. I lay there fighting seasickness, waiting to acclimatise so I could sit up for long enough to write home to Debbie.

It took four days to find my sea legs. I was like a bear emerging from hibernation—slow at first, then grasping life with increasing energy. The bridge became my home. During the day, I helped with seabird counts, watching petrels and albatross riding the icy winds as they followed the ship. When I wasn’t on the bridge, I was down on the trawl deck where the albatross dipped low over the water, skimming the surface of the waves. Down there, I saw krill swarms kicked up in the ship’s wake, and seabirds diving to feast on them.

While others worked out in the weights room in the bowels of the ship or raised a sweat pummelling a boxing bag, I jumped rope out on the trawl deck, finding some sort of lurching rhythm as the ship rose and fell with the waves, my breath rising in clouds of vapour. Some passengers did nothing beyond eating and sleeping and watching videos in the gloom of the lounge.

On Saturday nights, I braved the throng down in the bar, discovering another aspect of ship life. After the mess, the bar was the place for meeting people. The Aurora is a dry ship these days, but back then people survived for their beer rations. Our trip was a new adventure for many, but there were also lots of returnees, who talked endlessly of people I didn’t know and previous Antarctic expeditions. It was hard to fit into the crowd. While everyone else socialised and drank too much beer, I sat and observed the behaviour evolving among the passengers. Liaisons were budding everywhere; you’d have thought everyone was unattached, but many had relationships at home.

While all this was happening, the ship steamed south, churning through the roaring forties and the furious fifties into the screaming sixties. At times, we pushed into fog with black and white Antarctic petrels fading in and out, still following the ship.

A week in there came a new sound, a swishing against the side of the ship. And now the ship rolled more slowly, almost lazily. Out the porthole, pancake ice stretched to the grey horizon in neat rounded plates with crusty upturned edges. From the deck, I squinted into brightness, watching the swell running slowly through the shuffling horde of frosted discs. In the space of a day the world had transformed. The pancakes became larger cakes and then ice floes, and we were into the pack ice.

Wherever possible, the ship followed dark open tracts of water called leads. But as the floes thickened we began to break ice. Down on the fo’c’sle I hung over the railing, watching the ship ride up, feeling the tremors in its metal hulk as bits of ice grazed, split and tumbled under the bow. Occasional deep judders jarred the decks as the propeller carved chunks of ice with a jerk and a shake. There was eerie booming followed by groaning and creaking as the ship cracked floes with her weight.

By email I tried to share my experiences with Debbie. But the words sounded distant even to me. A week and a half from Hobart and I didn’t know myself anymore. I was in this strange luminescent place and home was a receding memory.

We clunked west through the field of ice for two weeks, lengthening the gap between us and reality. People wearied of the pack ice. The crunching, crushing force of icebreaking. The echoing, tinny sound of ice on metal, shrieking and grinding. And yet the days of sameness were laced with surprises. Emperor penguins appeared from nowhere and launched themselves onto floes, fleeing the bow of the ship. Crabeater seals lay like silver slugs on the ice, waking up as we approached and spinning spectacular three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turns, lashing their tails, hissing and lunging as the ship ground past. Spouts rose as we rode alongside minke whales in breaks of open water, their small curved dorsal fins peaking as they dived. Snow petrels of purest white fluttered over the mashed ice in our wake, hunting krill. Helicopters took off from the back of the ship, heading out over the vast icescape to survey seals or to search out open stretches of water to speed our progress.

I passed the days up on the bridge, watching for seabirds by day, staring into the spot-lit night looking for icebergs. The captain told me we could hit a berg at nine knots without sinking. I thought of the Titanic going twenty-two knots in a field of icebergs.

At least twice a day, I pulled on all my layers of clothing and braved the cold above the bridge, staring into the blinding light, or leaning out over the bow watching ice crumpling, splitting and fracturing. Sometimes we became icebound, locked by slabs rafted up against each other, all twisted and strewn. Then, after working back and forth for up to an hour, the ship would finally create a crack in the ice large enough to push through into easier territory.

At the end of the third week in the pack ice we approached Davis Station, gliding through Iceberg Alley at sunset. The light glittered on the carved faces of the bergs. On the ice below, Adelie penguins scattered from the path of the ship. Eventually, we could see the station; the blocky shapes of buildings nestled at the foot of the crumbling brown Vestfold Hills. The frozen sea was dotted with hundreds of icebergs, snow-dusted islands and lines of black penguins.

As soon as the Aurora shuddered to a halt in the ice, we were into the intense rush of resupply. Each day the ship was out from Hobart cost the Antarctic Division tens of thousands of dollars, so anyone with a free pair of hands was put to work. Hägglunds, tractors and bulldozers flocked around the ship, and cranes swung into unloading. On a rotating roster we whizzed into station over the bulldozed ice highway on the back of a ute. They fed us and slotted us quickly into rooms where we could stash our gear. People like me—the incoming winterers—had rooms in the lime-green Living Quarters known as the LQ. The rest—those who would leave at the end of summer—were bundled into faded red shipping containers lined up across the road like holiday units at a caravan park. The road was the separation zone. Summerers and winterers; us and them.

The ship was gone within three days. Apart from the nuggety shapes of grounded icebergs, Prydz Bay was empty—a frozen sea with a jagged scar where the ship had done a six-point turn and crunched back to sea.

Life on station started to take shape. The first beer allowance was distributed. Scientists organised themselves and their field requirements. Duties were delegated. Field training began. In the machinery shed we diesel mechanics were always in demand. A quad bike that wouldn’t start. Fuelling up a Hägglunds. Repair and maintenance of motorboats, tools, skidoos. Chainsaws for cutting ice. Fixing and modifying equipment for scientists. Constant monitoring of the power house. Maintaining the firefighting Hägg—a vital task down there, where fire meant disaster.

Soon scientists commenced field work, disappearing over the ice. The days gained a regular sort of rhythm—breakfast, smoko, lunch, smoko, dinner. People whose weight had bloomed on the slow hours of the voyage south expanded further with the calorie-dense meals which were mostly covered with cheese. And all that food had to be prepared. Food for fifty, five times a day. The two chefs were the most important people on station: food was essential for morale. But they couldn’t do all the work alone. Rosters, known as slushy duty, were set up to assist them in the kitchen: hands to peel buckets of potatoes, hands to pack and unpack dishwashers, hands to peel and chop carrots and onions, grate cheese, serve food.

Amid the routine, station dynamics evolved. On Saturday nights parties shaped themselves from nowhere. A birthday was an excuse for a binge. A few musicians formed a rough sort of a band and jammed in the lounge. Gossip was born and grew—some real, some fabricated. Clashes emerged, scuffles over girlfriends. Relationships developed. Others died. Marriages came under strain.

Among all this, I found my own way. I wasn’t into the field-hut drinking trips or the binges on station. When I wasn’t in the shed or in the computer room emailing Debbie I was away, hooking myself onto field trips to assist biologists: counting penguins, marking seals, taking samples from frozen lakes, grinding out ice cores with the glaciologists. One diesel mechanic always had to be on station, so the opportunities for escape from work were few. But scientists often looked for helpers, and they wanted someone quiet and useful.

I patched up my loneliness with the vast landscapes, bizarre animals and luminescent light. I skied out from station, passing Adelie penguins waddling urgently in single file to their colonies on the offshore islands. Among the powdery blues of the towering bergs was an iceberg of magical deep jade, its surfaces scoured by wind. Near the ice edge, a leopard seal was sleeping, its heavy head resting on the ice. The sinuous length of its powerful body stretched, and then it rolled and yawned, showing strings of sharp teeth.

As the season progressed, I assisted wherever I could. This included tagging and marking Adelie penguins on a nearby island. We laughed at their rock-stealing antics as they fought to build the largest nest of stones, the fury of flipper bashings as they squabbled. I sat for hours watching them courting: the ducking and weaving of heads, the slow rhythmic flapping. And always more penguins arriving, waddling towards the island or tobogganing on their bellies, propelled by strong-clawed pink feet. The deafening noise of the place—the chorus of squawking black bodies scattered over rocky hillsides reuniting with returning mates. As the summer unfolded, egg incubation began, and the busy clucking calls subsided to quiet restfulness. Penguins sat belly-flopped on their nests, eyes like slits, the wind ruffling their feathers.

Eventually, the sea ice melted and blew out. My breaks were reduced to snatched days walking the valleys and lakes of the Vestfold Hills, although I managed to score a few days helping with field work on remote islands. When data collection was done for the day, I watched fulmars soaring straight-winged in the stiff breeze. Snow petrels scuffling about the rock faces. Sometimes I sat listening to the water lapping beneath the melting ice that surrounded the island, watching Adelies porpoising in the shallows and the wind drawing patterns on the surface of the sea.

Through all of this, I missed Debbie. Once a week we spoke by telephone. In between, I wrote emails telling her of all that I had seen and done. I wrote of the bergs dotting Prydz Bay, their varied shapes and colours. I wrote of the late sunsets, the ever-lengthening light, the lone emperor penguin in Long Fjord that glided up on its belly and sat beside me for several minutes. I wrote of the ice gradually melting, the bizarreness of twenty-four-hour daylight, the ugliness of station once the snow had gone. I wrote of the long hours in the shed, of the emptiness without her. I wrote to Debbie of how I missed her, of how I thought of her in our little house, and of how we’d soon be back together.

It still amazes me that you can be destroyed without knowing it. Even as it gives, Antarctica takes away. So, after all that happened to me because of that place, why is it I still long to return?