Thursday
14th December 2000
From
Paolo Calisse.....
These days I am still working on the
instrument (the SUMMIT), waiting for adjustments in the observing
strategies (see previous diary entries), and attending to
minimal improvements in the instrument setup. A twice daily
contact by email with the team in Sydney requires some calibrations
in advance, data analysis, that keep my days quite busy. But,
since John has left to go back home, I have plenty of time
to spend alone in the lab, and so plenty of time to think
instead of just talking, which is my natural tendency...
So, today I wrote something that doesn't
look exactly like a diary, but is just a series of thoughts,
some taken from earlier notes, about my past experiences in
the cold continent, that could also interest some of you.
I hope you enjoy them.
For the others, there is still the
choice to move to more interesting sites as suggested in the
past.
What I want to write about is the curious
nature of some things, that is that as you get closer to some
actual situations, you understand there is a mess of less
relevant details, small hints, unexpected aspects, that at
the end constitute the main part of the real understanding
you have of them, but that can hardly be reported in books,
reports and documentaries.
As an example, as I wrote in a previous
diary entry, Antarctica is the realm of light, despite the
common point of view, built by hours of Discovery Channel
programs and BBC documentaries. Now take into consideration
the permanent comparison with the cold people experience here,
sometimes for the first time in their life. No one is able
to even imagine the small adjustments and solutions mind and
body are able to find during one of these contemporary journeys
to Antarctica.
From my humble point of view, with
the relative knowledge of this environment that I have, I
am not even able to imagine how, in the past century, people
not very well trained, with inadequate clothing, pulling loads
up to 500 kilos on a wooden and leader slit, with food not
even sufficient to sustain a coach potato on a rainy Saturday
watching sports on TV, was able to cover this continent on
foot. Crossing the monstrous crevasses that can now be seen,
with horror from the aircraft, as considerable stretches of
the whole planet. And then to continue throughout the Transantarctic
Mountains, and the immense plateau that drives to the Pole.
One of the passages that makes it
impossible to me to understand that natural drive to suicide
that seems be shared by an unneglectable portion of mankind,
are the celebrated last pages of Scott's diary of his journey
to the South Pole (I highly recommend this book to anybody
interested in Antarctica). I found a sense of horror and death
even more gripping than the most severe pages of the tales
of Primo Levi (an Italian author that spent years in a nazi
lager), or the Anna Frank's diary, or of any other pages I
have read by somebody writing as a "dead man walking".
I feel a bit guilty about that, as I can easily understand
the difference between a personal choice and an unfair conviction,
but this is how I feel and I can't do anything about it.
 Nevertheless,
I am thinking about the real heritage of Scott's trip to Antarctica.
It's just, it's hard to write, an endless lines of faeces,
nearly equally spaced every ten miles, probably spaced further
apart toward the end of the journey. Starting from the permanent
and tormented ices of the Ross's sea, raising up to the continent
platform to overtake the hill and the dry valley of the transantarctic
Mountains, reaching the South Pole. Getting back approximately
the same way up to 15 miles of the famous "One Ton Depot",
where the three perished after a couple of weeks of starving
agony, in a way slightly different for each member of the
team, in weather and environmental conditions absolutely incomprehensible
for almost the whole of mankind. Any time I read those few
lines, on one of the several plates posted up everywhere,
there is a link to Antarctica in the world, as a sort of self-celebration
of the Victorian edicts, I have the feeling that the tale
can't actually finish there, and that, somewhere, there must
be a solution to move the story to a different, happy end.
Unfortunately, this is not the case,
and the three frozen bodies found about one year later by
the rescue team, demonstrated it in the most incontrovertible
way.
So, if an extraterrestrial civilization,
evolved on some far, cold planet, should land on the Antarctic
Plateau looking for traces of life, bringing with them a probe
to see through the ices and the eternal snow, they would find
this long theory of shameful remains, probably changing along
the way from the effects of the ipovitaminosis and of the
various inconveniences suffered by the team. They start from
the coast, reach a place just in the middle of nothing, get
back and stop with no apparent reason, as if a hand had suddenly
withdrawn their will. What could they think about? A religious
ritual? A sort of madness?
Years ago, during one of my first trips
to this continent, I visited an Adelie's Penguin Community
of about 5,000 individuals, on the coast of the Ross sea,
quite close to the Italian Station at Terra Nova Bay. The
day was outstandingly clear as it happens, in summer, quite
often in this part of the world. It was an absolute pleasure
to walk over the "martian-like" landscape running alongside
the iced, cyan sea, reflecting the sky and some far ice tongue.
No trace of a path, no flowers, no plants. Only a few lichens
yellow and bright, ones which grow with infinite patience
only a millimetre an year, in an almost deadly laziness.
Suddenly I look over from a saddle
onto the large penguin colony, quite confident of what I was
about to see, as BBC, National Geographic and Discovery Channel
documentaries make it quite impossible today to find something
really unexpected, at least on Planet Earth.
Maybe some of you know something about
penguins. How long they live, we probably couldn't say the
same about the common annoying houseflies. We know something
about how they live, how they raise their chicks, and we imagine
them as a funny tribe of mums and dads with their kids, grazing
in the sea of this sterile earth.
What the films can't report, and that
is what immediately struck me, is that these surreal southern
communities are permanently embedded in the smell of death,
putrefaction, and dung. A colony of 5,000 penguins in the
breeding period live with a constant percentage of individuals
sick or close to death, which are viewed with indifference
and apparent cynicism by the others - "mors tua, vita mea"
- in a community unable to gather piety.
My feelings were oscillating from imagining
a mad crowd of decadent nobles, condemned for their abuses
by a crazy witch to an eternity as clumsy birds permanently
dressing in tailcoats, or what we would see if we could just
look through the walls of one of our towns. Meanwhile, a crowd
of Skua were flying over the penguins community, ready to
prey on any inattentive individuals. This is also, to tell
the truth, quite a rare event (skuas, also heavy and aggressive,
can't easily prey on a healthy, adult penguin, as penguins
are larger and quite aggressive too, when threatened).
When walking along the coast, I accidentally
got closer to the nest of a couple of these tough predators
- the skuas - and became the target of a sort of "ritual"
attack, with noisy flying overhead, and then shit thrown.
It kind of suggested to me that I should immediately change
my course.
Was really nice, anyway, to watch the
small Adelie chicks, loosing their plume tufts to acquire
the adult dressing. To observe how one or two sage adults,
protecting a small group of them while the other parents was
fishing, avoided any casual contact with me just carefully
driving the group away while I was crossing the colony. So,
I quickly recovered from that sensation of death, even forgetting
that bad feeling in my later visits.
Penguins are really interesting birds,
unable, for historical reasons, to understand the possible
danger represented by our species. A night, years ago, I was
working around a small radiometer, about hundreds meters from
the coast and the pack, at the Italian station at Terra Nova
Bay. Suddenly I saw a medium height Adelie Penguin walking
awkwardly toward me and the instrument, probably attracted
by some shiny reflections on the mounting or by the periodical
hisses emitted from a tilting mirror. When he was a few meters
away, he stopped and watched me, apparently a bit embarrassed.
To feed or perturb animal life is strictly forbidden in Antarctica,
so he was probably not expecting something from me, like animals
are used to in more civilized places. I think it was just
curiosity driving him to me. Continuing to work around the
instrument, I watched his yellow and black eyes slowly going
off, the nice, small head tilted on his bent shoulder, and
he fell asleep standing up as I busily worked with oscilloscopes
and screwdrivers to catch the deep and weak wheezes of the
Big Bang (actually, it was just atmospheric noise...).
Another time, walking on the pack,
I saw a group of five Adelies point toward me from about half
a kilometre, walking excitedly with that hesitant movement
that alternates between sliding on the belly along the short
descending slopes of the sastrugi, helped by the back paws,
to short runs standing up. On this occasion they stopped just
a few meters away. In an individual, heading the funny group,
you could guess a leader role. It was evidently in charge
of deciding which was the safest distance to avoid any threat,
satisfying, at the same time, the irresistible curiosity of
the others, a bit more timorous and embarrassed.
We stayed there, watching the others,
for several minutes. Me crouched, smiling - actually I can't
tell you why - and perfectly silent, with them undecided.
Then, the small group, after grunting a little bit more, diverted
toward Nord, to reach the sea again, apparently their curiosity
was satisfied and they began looking for activities more profitable
like fishing.
These contacts with the wild animal
life in the coastal region of Antarctica represent probably
the most peculiar aspect to people like us - Italians - realizing
that the apparently more stupid animal knows that is better
not to trust this arrogant and stinking biped, and stay away
from the pile of trash and smell they spread out everywhere
in the world.
These, just a taste, were the details
I wanted you to listen to about this singular, cold and far
world, apparently easy but complex at the same time, so complex
that it is very difficult to get a final feeling.
Moreover, we can maybe begin to imagine
what coldness was for Scott, Shackelton, Amundsen or Mawson,
or any of the other Antarctic pioneers, not only a daily comparison
with a fuzzy and not very detailed experience, but a series
of small gestures, some of them perhaps disgusting in their
roughness - like to free the nose of a continuous itchiness
created by burnt capillaries, a series of continuous adjustment
to your behaviour that everybody experiences after a few days
on the ice. You learn quite quickly that the underneck must
stay in a certain position, otherwise a layer of ice will
fog your sunglasses (common at pioneer times, as quite often
they got a disease called "snow blindness"). Remove
a glove for more than a few minutes in windy conditions can
mean you do not recover for long time, even if you get back
in a warm room. The nose's capillaries can break if you breath
the cold air for too long. Who, living at temperate latitude,
could imagine that one of the most dangerous and advised disease
in contemporary Antarctica is dehydration?
Who knows how many thousands of little
things that bunch of stainless seamen and explorers waiting
to be rescued for a long winter at Elephant Island learnt,
after Shakleton's ship Endeavour was shrunk and sunk by the
ices pressure. People not washing themselves for 18 months,
eating just seals fried in seals fat, and diluted in "pennicam"
for the long winter in one of the most frightening and inaccessible
corners of the planet. This island really looks like the entrance
to hell, with black and steep walls diving on an ocean permanently
furious and upset. They were dreaming about, as the chronicle
reports, eating "kydney's porridge", after the anticipated
trip back to England. Actually, most of them died during the
WWII which began just a day after they left their starting
harbour in South Georgia, at the beginning of their journey
to Antarctica. They were never even aware of the war during
their trip.
To be continued tomorrow....
 
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