Six hours out of Christchurch, I walk toward the back of the Herc. I can see my breath. The wool shirt, once close and prickly and hot, is now warm and comfortable. I lean against the cold skin of the aircraft, slouch toward the window, and peer out.
The ice below me is spreading slowly, serenely, poleward. It is only this water molecule: these simple threads of force thrown and repeated over and over, a pattern of matter foreordained by the way that ten electrons weave themselves among three nuclei. The hydrogen of this molecule gropes for the outreaching electrons of that molecule, and the hydrogen of that molecule seeks its opposite charge on the next. If the temperature is low enough and the gropings are not unrequited, ice will form. Project these patterns over thousands of miles, thicken them, give them the hard, illumined edges of sea cliffs; let them gently curve with the Earth’s curve, be unreceptive of light, and you have what is below me in clear view, the glowing white underside of our globe. Greater Antarctica.
Varner is up now. He slowly works his way toward the back, squeezes by a wall of wooden crates. He hands me a crumpled sheet of paper as he passes. On it is a list of flight times. “CINCI to LAX, 4 hours; LAX to HONO, 5 hours; HONO to AUCK, 10 hours; AUCK to CHCH, 1 hour; CHCH to MCM, 8 hours.” “Only two hours more to go,” the sheet reads. “I want to be on the ground. Or the ice. Or whatever it is that’s down there.”
Soon everyone is awake, sitting rigid, hands folded in laps, knotted against the slick fabric of the windpants, the hoods of parkas pulled snugly around faces. We are banking toward Black Island, then away, coming in over McMurdo Sound, making toward the ice runway. The landing is smooth and there is a mild sense of deceleration as the wide skis of the aircraft touch down. The Herc taxies and in five minutes comes to rest; the engines fall silent, the door swings open. The gloom of the fuselage is broken, suddenly shattered by an almost supernal light. We have arrived.
We file through the narrow door. Outside there is silence, except for the wind and the crunch of boots on dry snow. Desert snow. I stagger a little at first, awkward under the weight of my flight bag and thirty pounds of clothing. I squint, trying to adjust my eyes to the glare.
Off to the right I can see Ross Island, and Mount Erebus, a line of steam at a perfect right angle to the cone. There is a cluster of huts to the left, like photographs of old Dakota mining camps. And then this vast whiteness in front of me and behind, and, far away, mountains running off behind mountains behind other mountains into the distance. A continent of mountains lost under the long ages of snow. Thirty million years of snow. I think of my father, what he said about openness and light. How these set you free. I look at Varner, who is turning slowly in circles. I put a hand on his shoulder. He says only, “This isn’t real.” Then he repeats it.
*The astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington begins his book The Nature of the Physical World with a fascinating discussion of the “two tables.” Which of Eddington’s tables is “real”—the table described by modern physics, or the table of our everyday sense experience—has been the subject of considerable philosophical debate ever since.
FOUR
The Map
I was remembering my father’s maps, those old Texaco numbers, creased into falling lint at the folds, folding open with the smell of paper dust and raw heat from the glove compartment. I was thinking of him opening his maps on the front seat of the Pontiac Chieftain, moving the wet, well-chewed El Producto cigar around in his mouth, exhaling a blue cloud of vapor that hung and hung until it got stale in the hot car. And we were in the back, eating these red-stained warm tomato sandwiches he had packed, wondering what curvy switchback of a road he was going to head down next and whether we were going to make it through the afternoon with our stomachs intact. And his head was down now, the map crawling up my mother’s arm, and his finger was tracing along some thin spaghetti of highway that ran near battlefields and the quilt of farms and over the river with its ferry and down to the sea.
And I wanted us just to stop for the day, get out, walk over behind the small white motel units beyond the neon signs into the fields and throw baseballs, make them disappear into the red evening sky and then reappear as plunging arrows onto the green earth. But he had his map now, shredded in the creases, red- and blue-veined and smelling of oil and heat, and the dead gray ash of his cigar was falling onto it, and he was brushing the dry ash away.
My mother was wearing a white dress or maybe it was a blue dress with a white collar, and she was saying nothing, just looking off into the distance beyond the chrome war bonnet on the hood. The map was my father’s instrument of navigation on the long eastward journey through the strawberry and melon and corn roads of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and through the streets of the seaside city with its wooden three-story guest houses and its seaside restaurants and its piers jutting into the Atlantic. With his map he would find us a room and a meal and a bed to sleep on. Most of all, with his map he would find us the churning, magnificent sea. The sea filled with light.
NIGHT IN ANTARCTICA is so little different from day. At McMurdo you sense only a slowing of the pace, a diminishing of machine noise. The orange helicopters, with their rigid schedules, sit motionless on the pad, their blades sacked and roped into place against the wind. The sun at this time of year merely circles the horizon, a pale disk low in the sky. In full daylight, the streets are mostly empty. People have gone inside, into the warmth and familiarity of the television room with its sofas and magazines and beer dispensers dropping Coors and Michelob for half a dollar into your hands; and into the officers’ club, with its antiquated popcorn machine, still there, still off in the corner across from the bar; and into countless dens and warrens of ping-pong and eight-ball; and into solitary rooms with their books and pens and papers edging away the distance and loneliness. In my own room, I pulled down the window shade, closed the drapes, and pinned to the rough fabric a map of the continent. I poured some bourbon into a plastic cup, pulled up a chair, propped my feet against the wall, and began to study the white and blue shapes that hung before me.
A map can do strange things. On a flat surface the incomprehensible world lies stretched and somehow intelligible, its myriad particulars brought together in a single, unified whole. Out of the chaos of coordinates and compass readings and place names, an order emerges, a system of relationships that seems somehow complete and enduring. With a few pins, or with a few words of historical commentary, the dimension of time can be added, the progression of events can be traced. In a single glance an entire universe of content and association can be reconstructed in a thousand different ways, each remembrance colored and shadowed by whatever unpredictable gloss the mind lays over it.
I remember once, while reading Moby Dick, I mounted a map on a large slab of cardboard over my desk and festooned it with pins that eventually traced the journey and fate of the Pequod. In greens and reds and blues, the pins marched across the breadth of the oceans from the tiny hook of Cape Cod, eastward to the Azores and south down the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, curved westward along the coast of South America to where the Rio de la Plata empties into the sea. Then they moved in a straight line northwest to St. Helena, south around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, northeast into the South China Sea, and off toward Japan. Off Fanning Island, near Samoa and Tonga, I stuck a black pin into the map, where the sea had rolled over the ship’s mainmast, leaving not a trace of its passage. The map that hung before me was like this: a symbol of movement and passage and quest, of objects vast and minuscule creaking and ambling and probing through time. A symbol of order, of things understood, connected and whole.
The click of metal, the sturdy door opening, brought me back. Varner had returned from the lab. There was a trace of isobutanol from the phosphorus analysis still clinging to his clothing. He sat down at one of the desk chairs and said nothing, as though