The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,27

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?

7

It was close to midday when Mary forced herself to make lunch. All morning, she had waited for the arrival of the ranger, and still he had not come. It made her anxious. What if he didn’t show? What would she do? She hadn’t much time to fulfil her debt to Jack, and if the ranger didn’t turn up, all was lost. Her family would come and drag her back to Hobart; Jan’s nursing home loomed