The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,24
‘How you going, girl?’
She tries to scramble onto my lap and I indulge her in a crowded hug for a moment before pushing her back down to the floor. She’s all doggie smiles and wiggly body. I wish humans could show their pleasure as transparently as dogs. We’re all so self-contained.
‘We’ve got work to do,’ I remind her. ‘Then we can go for a walk after dinner.’
Walk and dinner, two words that she knows. She pants happily up at me from the floor on the passenger side.
On the drive back to the garage, the flyer slips from the dashboard onto Jess’s head and then to the floor. I scoop it up and put it on the seat. I wonder what this Emma Sutton is like. The young female scientists are generally the most temporary of all the staff. They have a few seasons in them before their lives are screwed up by a series of ice-based relationships that usually fail to survive back in the real world. Then they leave for other pursuits and to sort out their lives.
But it’s not always as simple as that. I only had one season south and I’m still not sorted out. Bazza thinks I should be over it. But I’m not. It’ll haunt me all my life.
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.