57 North

We have a high sitting on us; at the sunless bottom of this glen, it is about -4°C and (after 48 hours) quite thickly frosted, although I can see from the window that you don’t have to go far up the slope for the frost to have gone. It is dead still.

Yesterday, I went out at about this time to fetch the post and give the birds some sunflower seeds. I had two fleeces and a hat on. It was….cold. I have always relished the cold and might, in a previous life, have gone for a brisk walk, but now, in my enfeebled state, it felt inimical to life.

As far as I recall, I have only twice before had this feeling of the cold waiting to get me. Once was in Norway in winter when we were learning (hah! not very successfully in my case) to cross-country ski. It was nearly -30°C, and it was, in fact, the case that if one had become immobilised out of reach of help, one could have died quite quickly, and certainly overnight. Looking back, it must have felt like a very heavy responsibility taking about 6 more-or-less incompetent ski-ers up from the valley to the saetr (summer pasture, with little farmhouse/hut) for a picnic lunch. I have never before or since picknicked at -16°C, which is what it was inside.

On other occasion, it was a lot less cold, probably not much below zero, but there was a sharp wind blowing. We had been landed by Zodiac from our ice-breaker to visit the Adélie penguin colony and Borchgrevink’s expedition hut at Cape Adare. Cape Adare is the first bit of the continent you meet coming from New Zealand heading for the Ross Ice Shelf; it doesn’t have the tourist traffic of the Peninsula; we were probably the only humans for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles and the chances of anyone just dropping in were nil. It was overcast and gloomy, although not actually getting dark, since it doesn’t really in the Antarctic in January. The ship had various control mechanisms for counting passengers, including a system by which you turned a tag when you left the ship and back when you rejoined it. We had been treated to another lecture that morning about never ever turning someone else’s tag; on a previous voyage, a husband had helpfully turned his wife’s tag, assuming she had come back in the other Zodiac, and they had accidentally left the wife on shore, and taken about three hours to discover this fact and return, by which time she was….not very happy. Standing in the dim, watching the Zodiac have some difficulty in weaving through the ice which had come into the bay with the wind, feeling rather chilled after several hours on shore even wearing unfeasible amounts of clothing, I could almost imagine what it must have been like. (She couldn’t even have sheltered in the hut, since it would have been carefully locked up again by the Kiwi parks department people on board).

Feeling that the cold is waiting to get you is actually not right. It is more the realisation (emotional, as opposed to intellectual) that the cold – indeed, the world, apart from a few humans – is quite unaware of and indifferent to your existence.