K
Nine
I don't goforfancy cars For diamond rings Or mouie stars I gofor penguins
Prior to sailing to Antarctica, the bulk of my penguin contact came via cartoons: Chilly Willy and Tennessee Tuxedo and Opus. I've never been one for wildlife books or calendars, nor even for National Geographic or "wilderness" specials, preferring to either be outside—or not.
The first penguins I encountered were Adelies, Pygoscelis ade-liae—named by the French polar explorer Dumont D'Urville in honor of his wife. They swam along beside the ship as we cruised into the Ross Sea. Penguins at sea do a Clark Kent-to-Superman transformation. They glide, speed, and generally command attention. What struck me was how they bore little resemblance to their onshore bumbling selves— shiny, glossed leather footballs in the water, hurtling along. I watched them through binoculars and wondered about their lives. They seemed to have required an unusually rigorous series of adaptations.
Penguins spend well over half, and some as much as three-quarters, of their lives at sea. Emperor penguins, Aptenodytes forsteri, swim an estimated six to seven miles an hour but have been clocked at an ecstatic nine miles an hour. The emperor is the largest of seventeen penguin species, averaging forty-five inches in length and weighing up to eighty-eight pounds, and chooses to live in isolated Antarctic colonies and nowhere else in the world. In the winter they live on the Antarctic continent.
Seeing this act, flying-in-water bird, gives more than a momentary pause. Seeing this act, a stereoscope ofbird, water, sky, air, light, I grasped why penguins have been anchored in our imaginations and histories since first recorded in the fifteenth century.
The first penguin fossils were found in New Zealand during the mid-nineteenth century; thirty-two extinct penguin species have been recorded to date. The Palaeudyptes antarcti-cus lived during the Eocene Period, 38 to 42 million years ago, and stood about five feet tall. In the Miocene Period, 11 to 25 million years ago, Pachydyptes ponderosus ambled along the New Zealand coast. Scientists estimate it may have weighed as much as three hundred pounds. It would be a more interesting world if Pachydyptes ponderosus remained among us; imagine one ofthose penguins emerging from the sea. Why did the human-sized penguins vanish? Researchers reason the supersized penguins disappeared as smaller whales and prehistoric seals appeared on the scene, either because they couldn't compete successfully for food or because they became dinner.
When I first encountered penguins on land, at the huge Ade-lie penguin encampment at Cape Royds, home to a historic Shackleton hut, they could not have been more engaging. Adelies sport crisp, white bellies and ebony backs, wings, and heads. I simply squatted on my heels on the perimeter of their colony, and bold individuals wandered over to me. One touched me with its beak. Then, satisfied with their examination, three stood next to me, gazing out at the silver sea. We stayed this way for some time. Later, I asked our resident animal biologist what it was all about. "They were most likely wondering what sort of penguin you were," she said.
I decided to read in detail about penguins. One story has the word penguin evolving from the Welsh pengwyn, meaning "white head." It was originally the name of the now-extinct great auk ofthe North Atlantic; great auks also could not fly and were also killed offeasily by sailors, who ate them. The word was reportedly pronounced "pin wing" in Newfoundland, however, and some believe the name is a description of the auk's more flipperlike thin wings. As early as 1588 the southern bird we know as penguin shows up in references. Some scholars believe the birds' stubby stature influenced their name, coming from the Latin word pinguis, meaning "stout" or "fat."
Penguins are Southern Hemisphere-only inhabitants and can also be found in New Zealand, South Australia, and off the Peruvian, Chilean, and South African coasts. The Galapagos Islands are their farthest point north. Here the world's only willingly tropical penguins fish and bask.
The architecture of penguins' glistening black, white, and gray feather coats amazes: on some, seventy feathers per square inch. In their unobstructed landscape, hopping from cold sea to ice often means facing a howling wind. Penguins are beautifully engineered to meet the demands of Antarctica. Their delicate feathers wick water away. Adaptation.
Perhaps penguins have found the cold is worth it. They'd rather tough out that world than try to make sense of our warmer version. In the winter, emperors survive temperatures that dip to —50 degrees Celsius.
Whatever their rationale, they certainly are not telling.
While emperor penguins may be the bread-and-butter of glossy wildlife calendars, standing tall and barrel-chested, they are not imbued with expressive faces. Or not expressive in a manner that codes well for human consumption. Like all their bird kin, they have been blessed with physiognomies that hide what is in their hearts.
Emperor penguins dazzle: They can dive to depths of nine hundred feet and stay down for minutes at a time. When they mate in winter, a single egg is laid, then the males of the colony form a comma-shaped huddle. The females swim out to sea. The males remain, gathering and shifting against the screaming wind, outer bodies shuffling to the center for warmth. They build no nests, choosing to balance an egg on webbed feet, nestling it in a flap of protective skin. Huddle, shuffle, move. Survival means working together.
One researcher noted that before 1998, there was no environmental impact on Ross Sea emperor populations. Now we can watch what warmer climates globally mean for these die-hard over-winterers.
One night I sat in a University of Canterbury lecture hall, listening to a scientist discuss why some birds choose not to fly. "It takes a lot ofenergy to fly," he said, shrugging. He pulled on a ginger beard. "Once birds don't need to, once predators stop forcing them into the air, they don't mind staying on the ground. This is where the penguin seems to have landed."
So. It seemed more like they found solace in their choice, a simple beauty in the fact of their own lives. There are a thousand and one things that pull birds in warmer climes down to Earth. Maybe penguins had a solid, species-wide memory of this list, shared stories from the old days of flight during their long, quiet hours on the floes.
While the Antarctic is well publicized as the coldest place on Earth, H extreme cold is hard for we tropically adapted animals to bring to S mind. There are the great Inuit peoples ofthe Arctic who have adapted o their lives to the cold. But cold is cold. Inuit histories are marked by s starvation and hardship wroughtfrom cold. We are not designed for it. Numbers used to describe cold challenge the imagination.
How do you bring to mind double-digit figures in the negative? All of us are familiar with what we call cold winter winds: wind-chill factor. The Americans Paul Siple and Charlie Passel first developed the old wind chill index in 1939-1941. Their model was based on the amount oftime it took a cylinder of water to freeze. But scientists felt they could improve on the pan of water model. So, the Joint Action Group for Temperature Indices was put together in the United States and Canada to reconsider how we describe the cold known as wind chill. In 2001, the U.S. National Weather Service officially introduced a new method of calculating wind chill, which takes into account modern heat transfer theory.
Superhuman effort isn't worth a damn unless it achieues results.
—Ernest Shackleton
It's just a mildewed book with a cracked spine, pages slipping free, glue long since gone to dust. The book rested on my desk, next to a cascading pile of 1950s era U.S. Navy pictures of Antarctica, many of which show airplanes looking like silver toys on a white sandy beach. Antarctica (1960, photography by Emil Schulthess) had caught Michelle Finnemore's discerning eye at a Christchurch garage sale and she bargained it down to 50 cents. Her note said, "Check out the photos of the store."
Antarctica documents Operation High Jump II, and among its black-and-white photos is one ofmen gathered in an Antarctic shop, circa 1956. The caption reads,
Every Antarctic station has its store. On Byrd Station, the store is under the control of Lt. Edward J. Galla, military leader in charge and station doctor. The most popular items are cigarettes, tobacco, beer, toothpaste and soap, although the stock is by no means limited to these and also includes films, flashbulbs, etc.
Four slick-haired men lined up along a high, wooden counter; one chewed a toothpick amid a wide, white grin. A man, Doctor Galla I presume, wore thick glasses, stood opposite ticking off items in a thick ledger. Signs tacked to the door stated, Beer and Soda, Tues-Thurs 1800-TO-1815 and Hip's Store, Mon-Wed-Fri 1800-TO-1830. Tiny packets of Tide laundry detergent, some upside down, lined a shelf, next to Baby Ruth candy bars; a dozen onyx rosaries dangled from rafters—in case you made it all the way to Antarctica and realized your rosary was back in Wisconsin. The Tide packets carbon date the scene: nothing ages as perfectly and incontrovertibly in the modern age as product packaging. None of the men appeared sun-or windburned; no one was disheveled or sported wild hair. Careful scrutiny of the photos revealed nothing about their clothes or the camp-store scene signaling they were even in the Antarctic: It could be the Poconos.
Antarctic shops had become a fascination ofmine after a chance encounter with Robert Isles, former tank driver and current manager of bar and retail sales in the Ross Dependency. I met him during a book launch at the Canterbury Museum, where I lurked in the back with Peter Fuchs, son ofthe great Antarctic explorer Vivian "Bunny" Fuchs, drinking red wine. The book being launched offered a new round of photos capturing the Scott hut at Cape Evans. Peter and I were bored. The cabernet-merlot blend bore a Scott Base label and showed a picture of Scott's hut at Cape Evans. "How very unusual," Peter noted, holding the gold and claret label closer for a better look. "I better get some to take back to the U.K." The bartender heard us and pointed out a man sporting a silver crewcut. Bob Isles handed me his card,and invited me to visit him at Burnham Military Camp on the outskirts ofChristchurch, where he ran the business when not in Antarctica. (Burnham had its own link to Antarctica as the site
- Frank Arthur Worsley as he appeared on his Red Cross identification papers at the outset of World War II.
of a first-aid training for the 1957-1958 Trans-Antarctic Expedition.) About a month later, I drove to the camp—it had the vaguely dilapidated, sagging feel that hangs over military housing, rows of white, single-story clapboard buildings, rectangular barracks, brick homes, and a small school with windows covered in faded, blue-tissue snowflakes, all wrapped in gleaming silver razor wire; soldiers in full camouflage gear marched in neat, rectangular groups.
I needed directions to Bob Isles's office and there was no sentry at the gate. A group ofmen and women in camouflage crawled along on elbows and knees, faces painted the color of dirt. Their leader, a barrel-chested man wearing a scarlet beret and shiny black boots, did not look pleased when I rolled down my window and called out, "Do you know how to get to Pukeko Road?" The commander walked, ramrod straight, toward me; a line ofsweat shivered along his brow in the still heat. "Sorry for interrupting," I added.
The commander gestured with a board-stiffarm: "Make a left where the road ends." His tone implied, that's an order! Then he turned and snapped back to the troops, who had lifted their heads from the ground, watching.
Isles stood in the driveway ofa brick, i950s-era one-story home waving to me. As I hopped from the truck, I asked Isles why he had an office on an active military base. We walked through the kitchen and into the living room, packed with tables and gift-shop wares.
He handed me a pamphlet detailing his employer, the Armed Forces Canteen Council; the phone rang and Isles gestured that he needed to take the call. The Armed Forces Canteen Council mission was spelled out in the pamphlet: to be the preferred provider of retailing and cafeteria services on all New Zealand Defence Force camps and bases and to further benefit all those personnel associated with the nzdf through the distribution of profits. . . . Their five-year contract with Antarctica New Zealand, the New Zealand government subsidiary that ran the Ross Dependency, began in 2002.
I flipped to the management board, all high-ranking military officers, brigadiers and commodores. Now they were in the gift-shop business, too. Antarctic maps covered the pale taupe walls, shelves overflowed with Antarctican books:
Matthew Reilly's thriller Ice.Station, Kim Stanley Robinson's sci-fi classic Antarctica, Arthur Scholes's The Seventh Continent; and the gleaming, teal seas and curvilinear forms of soaring blue ice standard to coffee-table books, which rarely showed what the Antarctic often looks like, which is cloudy, gray sky, hung low, and all the colors muted in response. A subtle beauty and more realistic based on my experience.
I thumbed through the latest personal accounts, journalists, chefs, scientists recounting days of lung-cell-popping cold, revelations of women standing to pee using a plastic extender, and the same institutionalized histories, Amundsen, Shackleton, and Scott. The Australian chef's account found us in a remote South African base—I skimmed along and found her moment of falling for the married scientist, then shagging in a tent. No one knew we were shagging, she offers, as though anticipating our questions. Sure they didn't: At a remote tent camp on the ice, where about a dozen people lived? No television, movies, cafés, or bookshops, where in my experience you come to memorize every article of clothing worn by your colleagues because some days this is the only thing breaking up a view of ice, ice, ice.
I jotted down the book's title, Antarctica on a Plate. Someone had recently asked me when a story set in Antarctica would no longer be special simply because of the fact it took place there (driving a truck on the ice, making tea on the ice, sleeping in a tent on the ice). The answer was and is never— or at least not until the Earth warms sufficiently to make the Antarctic comfortably habitable. Until then, we marvel at our ability to survive in that landscape.
Isles, who had traveled to Antarctica fourteen times, called out, "Come see how I monitor sales down there with a quick call or a couple clicks of the mouse"—he could ring down there at any time and retrieve detailed inventories. Isles punched some numbers into the speakerphone. In New
Zealand, ringing Antarctica was a local call—in fact, Scott Base was listed in the Christchurch phone book.
Margie, a cheery-voiced young woman, answered the phone after two rings; she managed the shop at Scott Base. Two cruise ships recently came to Scott Base, packed with tourists decked out in cash-padded snow pants. Scientists and other field workers who vector through the Ross Sea bases in force during the austral summer—close to four thousand per annum he estimated—were the shops' nickel-and-dime trade. The tourists represented a considerable spike in business: Ross Sea cruises cost about US$10,000, and the Scott Base shop had no competition for their spending dollars.
The numbers he read demonstrated sales were up again; two cruise ships had brought NZ$18,500 in business and NZ$13,500 respectively. (One of the ships had been the Kap-itan Klebnikov, with Baden aboard acting as historical interpreter.) Two U.S. icebreakers had been there at the same time, which could account for some of the sales, too, he added.
Isles pulled up digital photos of the Scott Base gift shop-emblazoned teaspoons, golf balls, Victorinix Swiss Army knives, Traser watches, refrigerator magnets. Models of the DC-3 (first plane to land at the South Pole), kids' daypacks embroidered with penguins, spaghetti-strap tank tops. The big loser came in the form of casual trousers that unzipped at the knee, creating shorts—not a single pair sold. Maybe, I suggested, shorts didn't offer the right sort of "I've been to Antarctica" image tourists crave.
We took a virtual tour ofthe newly remodeled shop, which resembled a hotel gift shop down to the Pringles and tacky trinkets. Black knit caps had seen a surge in sales. "I decided to add three penguins to them," Isles said, holding one aloft. The penguins closely resembled chubby black-and-white ducks. "Everyone loves the penguins," he added. "You put a penguin on anything—and wham-o!—she sells."
I wandered around his cramped desk-in-the-dining-room office and noted a single page tacked up; Isles saw me squinting to read, laughed, and snatched the paper down. He cleared his throat and began reading:
2 February 2002
The aircraft was a Twin Otter two pilots, one engineer and myself. Nil freight on board, trauelling from Willy's field to Browning Pass which is the airstrip used by the Italians.
We departed Willy's Field around 9 a.m. and we were going to a final approach at approx 10.20 a.m. I was seated directly behind the two pilots on the right-hand side and the engineer was in the seat at the rear of the aircraft. There was a large bang and a uiolent turbulent shudder and the aircraft banked sharply to the left and in my mind appeared to pull up. The flight deck crew were extremely concerned and anxious, they uoiced their concerns using explicit language to the engineer sitting at the end ofthe aircraft. He immediatelyjumped up to uisually check all external parts ofthe aircraft. This was done in a slightly panicked mode, I was told to tighten my seat-belt and by this time we had ouershot the runway. While we were circlingfor another approach the engineer was anxiously checking all external parts ofthe aircraft. The second approach appeared to be uery turbulent and we ouershot again. We did a large circuit in which thelght deck crew appeared to be trying to watch the shadow ofthe aircraft on the ground as they thought the nose ski had either come offor was hanging loose. As nothing appeared to be hanging loose we headed in to land and I was told to brace as the landing may not be as smooth as they would haue hoped.
Isles paused and added, "You can imagine there were a lot of 'gee whizzes' and other stronger language being tossed around."
Then he continued,
When you looked out the window, you could see the plane's wing was blowing open and closed. If we kept flying the whole wing would have blown off the plane. The pilot had turned around and told me to take offmy heavy coat. We all wore a lot ofpolar gear. We would most likely get soaked in fuel when we landed, so the pilot said there were two choices, if you get soaked in fuel, you're going to burn, and if you take off your gear you'll expose yourself to the Antarctic elements. I chose to take my chances with the elements.
"Hang on!" The Canadian pilot yelled and we literally fell from the air, unbuckled and ran from the plane across soft snow. No one was hurt, unbelievably.
Thefour men staggered over to the bright blue and red buildings of the Italian Terra Nova base; someone suggested they all get a whisky. The bar manager adamantly refused—the liquor stayed locked up until 6 p.m., base policy. Then the base commander came in and said, "These men need a drink." They spent the rest of the afternoon getting pissed.
Isles looked at the plane three days later, and it boasted new rivets and bolts; Princess Anne was due down to the ice and was slated to fly on a Twin Otter. When Isles flew back from Terra Nova Bay to Scott Base, a different engineer was on board. "The engineer remarked we were lucky the aircraft didn't cartwheel to the left, or the part didn't fly off and hit the rear tail wings, which would have definitely been fatal."
I asked Isles if this made Twin Otter flights to restock T-shirts and key chains less desirable. "No way!," he quickly answered. "All part of a day's pay!"
Isles detailed the planning of a year in Antarctic sales: "Think about this one: How do you estimate how much booze all those people will drink?"
I raised my eyebrows. I told him I had no idea what such an equation would look like.
"It's bloody hopeless! I have to order and have it containerized a year in advance—for people whose drinking habits I don't know."
"It's little things that can really bother people in Antarctica," he said. Isles articulated a well-documented Antarcti-can truth. Minutiae expanded in significance in the cramped, sensory-deprived atmosphere of a base or a camp, sometimes to the point of madness. Now, there was some stressful work—possibly running out of Jack Daniels and forcing a brand change to Jim Beam, a slight alteration in routine that could ripple across the community, instilling a vague sense of discontent.
At Scott Base, 46,800 cans of beer were ordered each year. A fax ticked in from the South Pole and Isles handed it to me. More beer had been ordered, but they had never heard of a brand called Speight's; the Polies needed to know, "Is that a 'dingo' beer?"
"Even at the South Pole they're ready to refuse Australian beer. Who wants to drink that piss, even at the bottom of the world!" Isles said.
For the next season, 2,268 bottles ofwine were on order. In addition to Scott Base and Terra Nova Bay, Isles stocked Dome c, a base about 455 miles from the coast.
I calculated this must be The World's Most Remote Gift Shop. I had read about the scientific work carried out at Dome c. A recent report from an Australian group studying atmospheric turbulence said it was the best ground-based site on Earth for developing a new astronomical observatory. In order to compare to an optical or infrared telescope at Dome c, a telescope built at one ofthe next best sites around the world would have to be two or three times as large. Twin Otter airplanes were used to supply the distant outpost.
Isles ticked off the season's hot sellers, Pringles potato chips, penguin-embroidered backpacks, knickers . . .
- Tryggve Gran bathes during the Terra Nova expedition.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Knickers?"
"Yes, knickers," Isles replied without hesitation. "That's what we call them. But you call them panties, right? Jockeybrand string bikinis," he added, made in China. Isles kept additional stock in the two adjoining rooms. Black, lime green, fuchsia, and purple, "Scott Base" printed in a white, whimsical font on the bum, panties piled high on shelves. On the next shelf four emperor penguins were depicted marching in a noble line across New Zealand Telecom's annual Ant-arctic-themed calling card.
"How many pairs of knickers do you sell a year?" I called out to Isles, who was back on the phone to Scott Base.
"Well, the core sales period is actually summer, when people come and go from Antarctica. In winter, the place goes to bare-bones staff during the twenty-four-hour darkness. So, summer sales? About two thousand pairs during four months." Isles sounded pleased.
As I drove out of the base, I saw the base primary school, and all the windows were coated with tissue paper snowflakes. Christmas in New Zealand is a summer holiday. Yet there remained an expectation of snow. The stacks of trinkets and clothing in the back room at Isles's office: Years, decades would pass, and the knickers would wander into a glass case somewhere. People would see them there, preserved as a sign from the past, sewing themselves into the blank space between now and then, a weave offact into story into text.
Gently turning musty pages, Kerry McCarthy, Canterbury Museum H photo archiuist and Antarctic scholar, pointed to a series of photos of S Tryggue Gran, Scott's ski expert on the Terra Nova expedition. t
The photos held in place by black paper corners, making an album, s a book, a primal instinct we seem compelled toward, creating a record of pages, rectangles of thick paper with a smell of yesterday. Imagine hands turning this page one day, in the sun, then tucking it back into a box, and sliding it under the bed. This one emergedfrom such a home. The people who donated it had said, we did not euen know it was there, under the bed, all these years.
Maybe Antarctica'sfirst nude photograph? In the immediatefore-ground you can clearly see a man's boot. Some might say the boot was included in the compositionfor scale, a common geologist's trick when attempting to explain scale ofrock or landmass uia photos. But I had to haue the boot pointed out to me. All I saw was Gran's sinewy form, rising from dark, clear waters, grasping the hands ofhis Ant-arctican doppelganger, a balance of man and water and ice.
Eleven
We might as well have been flying in a bow\ of milkfor all the visibility we had.
— Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, on flying in Antarctica, 1929
The dc-io passenger has warmth and even luxury as he looks down on a beautiful but harsh terrain which cruelly tested the hardihood ofthefirst explorers. He cruises in minutes over areas which took men desperate and trying days to traverse early in the century.
—Antarctica: The New Adventure, an Air New Zealand brochure (circa 1979)
In 1979, 257 people died when their plane crashed into the lower slopes ofMount Erebus. It was and is Antarctica's largest tragedy and at the time, one of the worst air disasters in history. The Air New Zealand dc-io had been on a "fly-over" tourist trip from New Zealand to Antarctica. This meant the passengers came not to walk or explore the actual ice, but to look down on the landscape and photograph it from the air.
There was almost no mention of it in any of the Antarctic museums; surely, I imagined, this would have to change. The event had dominated New Zealand news for more than a year as the inquiry unfolded.
Baden had told me most New Zealanders had some connection to a passenger or crewmember. The country was so small, he had reminded me, a disaster of that magnitude touched each of them.
On November 28, 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901 left Auckland airport at 8:17 a.m. On board were 237 passengers and
20 crew. The journey covered five thousand miles over eleven hours, traveling south to the Ross Sea, where it would make an enormous figure eight over the ice before returning to land in Christchurch.
The flights had begun two years earlier, but due to facts of the Antarctic wilderness—no one flew during the formidable cold and dark of the autumn, winter, and early spring— only fourteen had been logged by Air New Zealand.
The plane was due back in at Christchurch at 7:05 p.m. An American pilot named Major Gumble had been forty minutes behind the dc-10 that morning, flying a routine resup-ply mission to the American base at McMurdo Sound, a huge annual effort dubbed "Operation Deep Freeze."
Gumble had talked to the dc-10 crew on the way south but lost contact with the plane as they neared the continent. As he came in to land, he queried Flight 901 about their flight plan. Again, he got no response.
Flight 901's initial silence caused no alarm. But when no one heard from the crew at several predetermined intervals, search planes were mustered. By dinner hour in New Zealand, panic began to set in. By that time, the dc-10 would have been nearly out of fuel. Something had gone terribly wrong. As the story goes, South Islanders had spread the word to switch on all outdoor lights, creating an islandwide beacon, help for what they prayed was a badly incapacitated plane limping homeward in silence.
At 1 a.m. New Zealand time, a U.S. Navy Hercules, flying in the Antarctic's twenty-four-hour sunlight, spotted wreckage on the northern slopes ofMount Erebus. The wreckage was a smear of black across Erebus's lower slopes, 1,500 feet above sea level.
In the end, 213 bodies were identified. In February, 1980, there was an interdenominational service for the remaining 44, and their remains were interred in a single, mass grave.
Peter Mahon had the difficult task of investigating the crash for the New Zealand government. Later, he wrote Verdict on Erebus, in a certain brave, frank tone. Mahon braided a clear map of the legal and procedural morass he had been asked to navigate. The obvious answer lay in pilot error, but Mahon was not prepared to accept this without thorough scrutiny of all the facts.
His diligent inquiry revealed the fatal mistake. The plane's flight-deck computer had been programmed with a different set of coordinates than those handed to the pilots. The plane was not flying the course they had reviewed in their preflight check. Thus, they were commanding a jumbo jet in the world's most challenging air space, acting on the wrong information.
In the Antarctic canon, ghoulish details packed the histories—a man made mad by cold and hunger biting off his own finger, dog companions shot and eaten as food ran out, a man urged out into the cold when his slow steps slowed the party from reaching safety. Something about Flight 901, though, revolted even the most enthusiastic consumers of Antarctic horror. What was it? The fact that they had been airline passengers, with no desire to even feel the cold? That all they wanted was to gaze down on distant snow and be home in time for dinner? Was there an innocence in their flyover, an innocence perfectly obliterated when they vanished in a smear of black across the world's southernmost volcano?
The Christchurch archives branch kept thirteen boxes of Erebus information, from passenger photos and brochures to the restricted manuscript written by the man in charge of New Zealand's chunk of Antarctica in 1979. This manuscript had been embargoed until September 2003, twenty years after it was written.
As I flipped through white binders one morning, a middle-
aged man appeared who identified himselfas the main archivist. He offered his help. Had I heard ofthe exhibit they had put on the year before, regarding Erebus? I shook my head.
He disappeared for a moment, then returned holding a spiral-bound notebook. This was the guest book for the opening of the exhibit. You might find it interesting.
A black-and-white photo ofa cairn and cross and wreaths against a cloud-studded sky decorated the cover. The wreaths appeared to be mums or sunflowers or daisies. I could not tell from the photo what sort of flowers they were, precisely.
The notebook offered the chance to recall the day of the crash and reflect on how the exhibit reflected the event. Here is what was written on the pages:
Erebus Remembered
Flight TE901—an Archival Display
The display brings back the sadness ofthe crash and reminds me of the effort made to make the recovery successful.
This is one ofNew Zealand's defining moments and very close to Canterbury. Its sadness will remain with usfor a long time. Very sensitive exhibition.
I still remember the stunned silence around Christchurch at the unbelief of it all
Great pictures. Sad scene.
Very moving and brings back memories. (All bad.)
Remembering that tragic event often.
Many more things should be shown of this year now that initial agonies have passed.
A wonderful father lost. Still very much missed.
Very mouing, particularly the news broadcast the morning after. Incredible pictures of a tragedy that still casts a shadow so many years later. Euoked many sad memories of a uery stressful period and the loss ofa beloued husband and father.
Reminders of a lifetime liued without a father—Bryan may this always be remembered by us all and remind us of a country that pulled together, so I am told in a time of need. I loue you Dad.
Well presented exhibition. I sadly recall hauing to collect up the possessions of usa citizens who were killed in the crash.
Remembering Jim Collins, Greg Cassin, and theirfamilies and all those who lost loued ones that tragic day. Hopefully further research will uncouer all the facts and be on record as a true account.
The entries, so spare, read like something constructed by Basho.
I left the notebook and walked into the small gallery space, the home to an exhibit called Evidence of Us: Maintaining Today's History for Tomorrow. The exhibit space, the size of an average living room, was dimly lit and I was the only visitor. As my eyes adjusted to the murk, two views of New Zealand slowly came into focus: A map ofLyttelton in 1867 and an aerial photograph of what the crash of Flight 901 in Antarctica looked like from above.
A great clawed marking, black into white.
A placard offered this explanation:
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