The Abominable Read online

  Jacob Perry was smiling again. “You’re exactly right, Mr. Simmons. I was dropped off there just in time to see the last two or three penguins waddle and then paddle out to sea—the water was just preparing to freeze over again there at Cape Royds in early March, so that open water would soon be dozens of miles from the hut—and I was picked up in spring, October, before any of the Adélie penguins returned again to mate and raise their young there at the rookery. I didn’t get to see any penguin action.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it. You were ordered there for…my God, more than seven months, almost eight months…to observe the rookeries on the Cape when there were no penguins. And no sunlight much of the time. Are you a biologist or some sort of scientist, Mr. Perry?”

  “Nope,” said Mr. Perry with that lopsided smile again. “I’d been an English major at Harvard—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature with a lot of English Lit thrown in. Henry James was hot stuff when I graduated in nineteen twenty-three. James Joyce had published Ulysses just the year before—’twenty-two—and his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man six years earlier. Already in Europe for a year of skiing and mountain scrambling—I had a small inheritance that came due when I turned twenty-one—in nineteen twenty-four I read a story in Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review and decided I immediately had to leave Switzerland and travel to Paris to meet the young man named Hemingway who’d written such a story and show him some of my own writing.”

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “Yep,” said Mr. Perry, smiling. “Hemingway was working from time to time as the French-based European correspondent for the Toronto Star then and he had this neat trick to get rid of pains in the ass like me. I met him in his office—a grubby little place—and he immediately asked me downstairs to a café for some coffee. Then after a few minutes, with me and so many others, he’d glance at his watch, say he had to get back to work, and leave the would-be writer sitting there alone in the café.”

  “Did you show him your stories?”

  “Sure. He glanced at the first pages of three of them and said that I should stick with my day job. But that’s all a different story, isn’t it? We old men tend to maunder and meander.”

  “It’s interesting” was all I murmured, but I was thinking—Jesus, to meet Ernest Hemingway and be told by him that you weren’t a writer. What would that feel like? Or is Perry just bullshitting me?

  “So to return to what you’re interested in, Mr. Simmons—Antarctica in ’thirty-three to ’thirty-five—I was hired by Admiral Byrd as a roustabout and because I had experience as a mountain climber. You see, the scientists in the group had plans to do some research on various peaks during that expedition. I didn’t know a damned thing about science or about penguins then and not much more now, despite all the nature documentary channels our cable TV gets here at the home. But it didn’t really matter in nineteen thirty-five because the point was to get me out of Admiral Byrd’s sight until the Antarctic spring, when we’d all be leaving the continent.”

  “So you were alone there in the dark and cold for seven months,” I said stupidly. “What did you do that made him dislike you so much?”

  Mr. Perry was cutting an apple with a short but very sharp folding knife, and now he offered me a slice. I took it.

  “I rescued him,” he said softly, speaking around his own chunk of apple.

  “Yeah, Mary said that you were part of the small group that rescued Admiral Byrd from his solo Advance Base in nineteen thirty-four,” I said.

  “Correct,” said Mr. Perry.

  “So because he was embarrassed having one of his rescuers around, he exiled you to Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds to experience the same solitude he had?” It made no sense to me.

  “Something like that,” said Perry. “Except that I didn’t poison myself with carbon monoxide like the admiral did…or require rescue the way he did. And he had a radio to contact with our base, Little America, every day. I didn’t have a radio. Or any contact with the base.”

  “When you were part of the group that rescued Byrd that previous August,” I said, looking at the notes I’d taken from talking to Mary and looking things up in reference books (1991 being pre-Google), “you and three others drove a hundred miles through the South Polar winter—with the few warning flags for the maze of crevasses blown away or covered by snow—a hundred miles in near-absolute darkness on a snow tractor that wasn’t much more than a Model T with a metal roof. Just you and three others from the Little America Base.”

  Mr. Perry nodded. “Dr. Poulter and Mr. Waite and my direct boss in charge of the snow tractors, E. J. Demas. It was Demas who insisted that I come along to drive the tractor.”

  “That was your job in the expedition? Thanks.” Perry had given me another delicious slice of apple.

  “As roustabout, I did a lot of work on those damned tractors and ended up driving them in the summer for the various scientists who had to do things away from Little America,” said the older man. “I guess Mr. Demas thought I had the best chance of keeping us all out of a crevasse, even in the dark. We had to turn back once after we learned that most of the crevasse warning flags were gone, but tried again right away—even though the weather had grown worse.”

  “It still sounds as if Admiral Byrd was punishing you,” I said, the taste of apple clean and fresh in my mouth. “Sending you into solitary confinement for seven months.”

  Jake Perry shrugged. “The admiral’s ‘rescue’—he hated anyone using that word to describe it—embarrassed him. He couldn’t do anything about Dr. Poulter or Mr. Waite—they were bigwigs in the expedition—but he assigned Demas to jobs where he, Admiral Byrd, would rarely see him. And he sent me out on the summer’s expeditions and then assigned me to Cape Royds for the entire Antarctic winter. In the end, Admiral Byrd didn’t even mention me in the report about his…rescue. My name’s not in most of the history books about Antarctica.”

  I was astounded at the meanness and pettiness of such an action on Admiral Byrd’s part. “Being sent to spend the winter alone at Cape Royds was the equivalent of you being put in solitary confinement,” I said, letting my anger come through in my tone. “And no radio? Admiral Byrd went nuts after three months of being alone—and he had daily radio contact with Little America.”

  Mr. Perry grinned. “No radio.”

  I tried to understand this but could not. “Was there any purpose—any reason at all—for you to spend seven months of isolation and five months of absolute darkness in Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds?”

  Mr. Perry shook his head, but neither his expression nor his voice showed any anger or resentment. “As I said, I was hired on the expedition to climb mountains. After we’d rescued Byrd—which required the four of us staying with him in that little underground cell he’d created at Advance Base from August eleven, when we arrived, to October twelve, when Byrd and Dr. Poulter were flown out in the Pilgrim—I finally did get to go on some summer expeditions where I could help the scientists with my climbing skills.”

  “The Pilgrim was a plane?” I said.

  Mr. Perry had every right to say something like What else could it be if they flew out in it? An oversized albatross? but he only nodded politely and said, “They started the expedition there with three planes—the big Fokker…” He paused and smiled. “That’s ‘Fokker,’ Mr. Simmons. F-o-k…” He spelled it for me.

  I grinned. “Got it. But call me Dan.”

  “If you’ll call me Jake,” he said.

  I was surprised that I couldn’t—easily call him Jake, that is. I’m rarely impressed when I find myself with people known for their fame or title or supposed authority, but I found that I was deeply impressed in the presence of Mr. Jacob Perry. To me, even after I’d managed to say “Jake” a few times, he stayed “Mr. Perry” in my mind.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “they had the big Fokker, named Blue Blade…but it crashed the first time they tried to get it off the ground—or ice, real
ly—after we arrived in Antarctica. And they had an even bigger seaplane, named the William Horlick, but it always seemed down for maintenance. So the little monoplane, Pilgrim, was sent to fetch Admiral Byrd and Dr. Poulter as soon as the weather stabilized in October after we’d reached him and fixed the ventilation in his little subterranean hidey-hole in the ice. I remember that during the weeks we were waiting, Dr. Poulter did a lot of the star sightings, meteor watching, and barometric work that Byrd was too ill and befuddled to carry out. The carbon monoxide buildup hadn’t exactly sharpened the admiral’s brain cells. Then, after the Pilgrim flew Admiral Byrd and Dr. Poulter out in August, Waite, Demas, and I took the tractor back to Little America…just in time for me to join some of the expeditions heading out to the Haines Mountains.”

  “Had you joined the expedition in order to climb mountains in Antarctica?” Mary had knocked and come in with lemonade for both of us, but it was a brief interruption. And the lemonade was homemade and excellent.

  Mr. Perry nodded. “That was my one real skill. My one real reason for being on that expedition. Climbing. Oh, I could handle motors and fiddle with equipment well enough…that’s how I ended up working with the snow tractors for Demas during the winter, when there was no climbing…but I went to Antarctica for its mountains.”

  “Did you get to climb many?” I asked.

  Perry grinned and again his blue gaze grew ruminative. “McKinley Peak that summer of ’thirty-four…not the Mount McKinley, of course, but the peak near the South Pole with the same name. Several of the unnamed peaks in the Haines range…the scientists were looking for moss and lichens there, and after I got them safely situated on their ledges, I’d just bag the summit before coming back down to help them with their equipment. I summited Mount Woodward in the Ford range during that summer of ’thirty-four, then Mount Rea, Mount Cooper, then Saunders Mountain. None of them very interesting from a technical perspective. Lots of snow and ice work. Lots of crevasses, ice cliffs, and avalanches. Jean-Claude would have enjoyed it.”

  “Who’s Jean-Claude?” I asked. “Someone else on the Byrd Expedition?”

  Mr. Perry’s eyes had been at their most ruminative, but now they came back into focus and he looked at me and smiled. “No, no. Just a climber I knew a long time ago. Someone who loved any problem involving snow, ice, glaciers, or crevasses. Oh, I climbed Mount Erebus and Terror.”

  “Those last two are volcanoes,” I said, trying to show that I wasn’t totally ignorant of all things relating to the South Pole. “Named after British ships, weren’t they?”

  Mr. Perry nodded. “They were named in eighteen forty-one by James Clark Ross—he was credited for actually finding Antarctica, although they never really set foot on the continent—and the HMS Erebus was his flagship, while the HMS Terror was captained by Ross’s second-in-command, a certain Francis Crozier.”

  I scribbled all this down, not knowing what use it might be for my possible book about giant mutant killer penguins attacking Shackleton’s hut in Antarctica.

  “Crozier was second-in-command a few years later on Sir John Franklin’s expedition, where both Erebus and Terror were lost in the northern ice fields,” Mr. Perry said almost absently, as if finishing a thought. “The British icebreaker ships, that is,” he said with a smile. “Not the volcanoes. They’re still there.”

  I looked up. “They sank? The two ships the volcanoes were named after, Erebus and Terror…they sank a few years later?”

  “Worse than that, Dan. They totally disappeared. Sir John Franklin, Francis Moira Crozier, and a hundred and twenty-seven men. They were trying to force the Northwest Passage, and somewhere north of Canada the two ships and all the men just…disappeared. Some graves and a few bones of the men have been found here and there on empty islands up there, but there’s been no sign of the ships or the majority of the crew’s remains to this day.”

  I scribbled madly. I’d had no interest in writing about the North Pole and its expeditions, but more than a hundred men and two ships just…gone? I asked for this Captain Crozier’s full name and the spelling of it and Mr. Perry gave it to me, spelling it out as patiently as if I were a child.

  “Anyway,” concluded Mr. Perry, “since Admiral Byrd wasn’t all that happy seeing me around—I guess I reminded him of his near-criminal negligence for gassing himself up at his much-ballyhooed ‘Advanced Base’ and making other men risk their lives to save his behind—for my next and last winter there, instead of my wintering on the main base with the other men, Admiral Byrd ordered me to ‘observe the penguins’ while staying alone in Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds. March to October nineteen thirty-five.”

  “Observe the penguins that had already left,” I said.

  “Yes.” Mr. Perry folded his arms as he chuckled, and again I could see how powerful his forearms still were. They also showed several livid scars. Old scars. “But in the autumn, before it got too ungodly cold, I could smell the overpowering guano stench of their rookeries every day. But one gets used to bad smells.”

  “It must have felt like real punishment,” I said to him again, still feeling the horror of such isolation and moved to real anger at Admiral Byrd’s pettiness. “Not the guano, I mean. The sense of solitary confinement.”

  Perry only smiled at me. “I loved it,” he said. “Those winter months at Shackleton’s hut were some of the most wonderful days I’ve ever spent. Dark and cold, yes…very cold at times, since the Cape Royds hut wasn’t really designed to heat for just one person, and the wind found its way in through a thousand cracks and crevices every dark day there…but wonderful. I used canvas and Shackleton’s old crates to create a little cubby near the door where I could stay a little warm, although some mornings the wolverine fur around the opening of my sleeping bag was almost covered with frost. But the experience itself…wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.”

  “Did you climb any mountains that winter?” I asked. I realized it was a stupid question as soon as I asked it. Who can climb mountains in the dark when it’s sixty or seventy degrees below zero?

  Amazingly, he nodded again. “Shackleton’s men climbed Mount Erebus—at least to the rim of the volcano—in nineteen oh-eight,” he said. “But I climbed it solo three times, by different routes. Once at night. Oh, and although they credit the first winter climb of Erebus to a British climber, Roger Mear, just six years ago in nineteen eighty-five, I climbed Erebus twice in the winter of ’thirty-five. I don’t think that’s in any record book. I guess I just never bothered to mention it to anyone who might have written it down.”

  He fell silent and I also stayed silent, wondering again if this nice old man was bullshitting me. Then he stood, lifted his old wooden-staff ice axe, and said, “Just a few months ago…this past January…an ironworker at McMurdo Station, a guy named Charles Blackmer, did a solo ascent of Mount Erebus in seventeen hours. It was in various alpine journals because it set an official record. Beating the older recorded times by hours and hours.”

  “Did you pay attention to your time climbing the mountain fifty-six years earlier?” I asked.

  Mr. Perry grinned. “Thirteen hours, ten minutes. But then, I’d done it before.” He laughed and shook his head. “But this doesn’t help you with your research, Dan. What do you want to hear about South Polar exploration?”

  I sighed, realizing how unprepared I was as an interviewer. (And, in some ways, as a man.) “What can you tell me?” I said. “I mean something that I might not get from books.”

  Perry rubbed his chin. Some white bristles there scraped audibly. “Well,” he said softly, “when you look at the stars near the horizon…especially when it’s really cold…they tend to jitter around. Jumping left, then right…all while they jiggle up and down at the same time. I think it has something to do with masses of super-cold air lying over the land or frozen sea acting like a lens that’s being moved…”

  I was scribbling madly.

  Mr. Perry chuckled. “Can this trivia possibly be of help in writing a no
vel?”

  “You never know,” I said, still writing.

  As it turned out, the jiggling stars near the horizon appeared in a sentence that spanned the bottom of the first page and top of the second page of my novel The Terror, which came out sixteen years later and which was about Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage debacle, not about Antarctica at all.

  But Mr. Perry had died of his cancer long before The Terror was published.

  I found out later that Mr. Perry had been on several famous climbing expeditions, and various Alaskan and South American expeditions, and to K2 as well as the three-year South Polar expedition with Admiral Byrd we discussed that summer day in 1991. Our “interview”—mostly wonderful conversation about travel, courage, friendship, life, death, and fate—lasted about four hours. And I never asked one right question the whole time: a question that could have told me about his amazing Himalayan experience in 1925.

  I could tell that Mr. Perry was tiring by the end of our long talk. He was also speaking with more of a wheeze in his voice.

  Noticing me noticing, he said, “They removed a chunk of one of my lungs last winter. Cancer. The other’s probably packing up, too, but the cancer’s metastasizing elsewhere so probably the lung won’t be what gets me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the absolute inadequacy of the words.

  Mr. Perry shrugged. “Hey, if I reach ninety, I’ll have beaten a lot of odds, Dan. More than you know.” He chuckled. “The pisser is that I have lung cancer but I never smoked. Never. Not once.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “The added irony is that I moved to Delta so that I would be just minutes away from the mountains,” added Mr. Perry. “But now I end up wheezing and gasping if I climb a low hill. Just climbing a few hundred feet of pasture at the edge of town now reminds me of trying to climb and breathe above twenty-eight thousand feet.”