Finding Endurance by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

Author:Darrel Bristow-Bovey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781915563019
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2023-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

20. THE END OF THE WORLD

Never predict the end of the world. You’re probably wrong, and if you’re right there won’t be anyone there to congratulate you.

JOHN GREEN

We all suffer loss. We all ache for something that was taken, that can’t be had back.

Until relatively recently, part of the imaginative appeal of Antarctica was the idea that, in a world of loss, it’s unchanging, and that time there, if it exists at all, is deep and geologic.

There’s enchantment in that thought and there’s also some science. A core sample drawn from deep in the east Antarctic ice shelf glitters with compressed silvery bubbles of million-year-old air, preserved because the snows that fall on the continent don’t melt but accumulate, each layer compressing the one below it to form ‘firn’, made of compacted snow and ash and atmospheric particles of air. With each year’s snowfall the firn is pressed and squeezed and frozen until it becomes glacial ice. Melt the ice and you can inhale an inconceivable past, a time so long ago it’s a different place.

Nothing decays in the Antarctic, and because it’s not a human place, there’s no human sense of things passing. It feels like there’s no heat, so there’s the illusion of no time. You can go to McMurdo Sound tomorrow, to Hut Point and Cape Royds, and see the hut that Scott built or the hut where Shackleton stayed. You can curl up and take a nap, as Sara Wheeler does at the end of Terra Incognita, on Scott’s own bunk. Until the last few decades, the Antarctic presented itself to the imagination as a place where the river of time doesn’t flow but freezes over, and is never subtracted from but only added to.

The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, is a lovely attempt to make this dream of permanence real. It’s a vision like Gene Roddenberry’s utopian Star Trek future: the twelve countries whose scientists were involved on the continent agreed to declare the Antarctic a place of scientific collaboration, with no central authority, where military activity is banned and territorial claims suspended. There are 54 signatories to the treaty now, agreeing to keep it unchanging: no permanent structures, no unremoved waste, no foreign species, including dogs. Nowhere else in the world is so monitored for change and flux. The dream of the Antarctic is a promise of stasis: an Always Land, an Ever Land, a Never Land.

When Scott was dying in his tent on the ice, he wrote to his good friend J.M. Barrie. They had met six years earlier, introduced by Scott’s wife Kathleen. Scott gave Barrie a copy of his book; Barrie invited Scott to a rehearsal of Peter Pan. Barrie was delicate and fearful, a stay-at-home, a writer, but he declared that he wanted to join the next expedition, in order to know ‘what it really feels like to be alive’. Scott and Kathleen named their son Peter, in honour of Peter Pan. Barrie was his godfather.

Peter Pan was first a play then a novel, both written by Barrie.

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