And when Darryl got his tent erected in under ten minutes, Lawson let loose with a “Props to you, Darryl!” and more props when he was able to dismantle and stow it back on the sled in even less time.
Charlotte, who was failing to win any of the survival skills tests, was looking more and more disgruntled. It was plain that she was used to being the star pupil and that she didn’t welcome the lectures on hypothermia and frostbite either. Those were topics she’d clearly already mastered, and while Lawson was talking, she would stare off into the middle distance, at the icy plains that surrounded the base on three sides and the ragged ridge of the Transantarctic Mountains, a muddy brown in those places where the snow had been blown away by the unrelenting winds. She looked even unhappier when Lawson announced that they’d be spending the night outdoors.
“In a tent?” Charlotte said. “My room isn’t much, but at least it’s got a bed, thanks.”
Lawson pretended to take it in good humor—or maybe, Michael thought, the guy really was impervious to any negativity—and said, “No, no tents. We’ll be building our own igloos!” For a second, Michael thought Lawson was going to clap his hands in joy.
“Well, if that’s how things are done at the South Pole,” Darryl started to say, before Lawson corrected him by saying, “Pole. Just pole.”
None of them entirely understood.
“No one says the South Pole down here,” Lawson explained, “or even the pole at all. It gives you away as a newcomer, or a tourist. Just say, for instance, ‘We’re going to pole next week,’ and you’ll sound like an old hand.”
While they all silently tried mouthing the new locution, Lawson produced four serrated ice saws from his rucksack, handed them out, and proceeded to show the class how to cut blocks of snow and ice from the ground as if they were slicing up a wedding cake. Then he went about demonstrating the proper method of stacking the blocks atop each other, though slightly cantilevered, in order to fashion a kind of sloppy dome. Even though the temperature was in the low twenties, Lawson was sweating profusely by the time he was done, and stood back to admire his little Taj Mahal.
“Didn’t you forget something?” Charlotte asked.
“You must mean the door,” Lawson said, grinning. His teeth were as white as Chiclets. “I was just taking a breather.”
Then, with the saw, a shovel, and often his mittened hands, he started burrowing into the ground like a beaver. Chips of ice and snow, pocked with the occasional bit of gravel, flew behind him as if he were a wood chipper. As Michael watched in wonder, he dug a shallow, and very narrow, tunnel that ran down through the snow, then up into the igloo. Casting the shovel aside, he got down on his belly, and gradually, his whole body disappeared, one segment at a time, into the earth, until, finally, his boots, too, wriggled out of sight. Michael crouched down at the open end of the tunnel, and called out, “Everything okay in there?” and Lawson’s voice, sounding winded and sepulchral, came back, “Snug as a bug in a rug.”
Charlotte looked like she’d like to squash that particular bug.
But when he reemerged, he managed to cajole them, under his close supervision, into making their own snow dome. Although he guided their every move, he insisted that they do the manual labor every step of the way, unaided. “You’ve got to know how to do this—and believe that you can do this,” he said, hovering above them as they chopped the blocks of snow. “It could make the difference between life and death.”
The close proximity of death, Michael reflected, was becoming a frequent refrain at Point Adélie.
That night, instead of repairing to the commons for dinner, they huddled behind an ice wall they’d built with the leftover materials from the snow dome, and thanked God for the NSF gear they’d found in their closets. They ate field rations that Lawson had brought along; they weren’t labeled MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat, but Michael suspected that they came from the same fine kitchens that supplied the U.S. military. Michael’s can said corned beef hash, but with his eyes closed, he wasn’t sure he would have been able to identify it as such. When they were done eating—a quick and cold business—Lawson passed a plastic bag around and every scrap of refuse was gathered up and tossed inside.
“Out here, we leave nothing behind,” he said. “Whatever humans bring in, we take out.”
The base itself was maybe a half mile off, and downhill; its bare white lights, illuminated even in the constant sunlight, were just visible by the shore of the Weddell Sea. Charlotte was looking off at them as if they were the lights of Paris. When the wind blew their way, they could faintly hear the howls of the sled dogs in their kennel.