Antarctic Mountains & the Madness of Cold

Or ‘how in the cold of hell did Scott of the Antarctic take a shit?’

Folks who give writing advice, or advice for writers, it seems to me are wont to repeat this mantra, ‘write what you know’.

But what the hell does that even mean?!

Socrates definitely wouldn’t have anything to say – and he’d say that’s wise.

Whenever I encounter that piece of advice I find myself flummoxed. I’m happy I spelled that word right first time as it’s not a word I’ve used in a long, long time.

Does it mean I should write about something that happened to me? Does it mean I should ramble on about some opinion of mine which more than likely most people will not share? Does it mean I should look out my window and write down what I sense?

I have no idea.

Does it mean I should base all my characters on people I’ve met, and storylines on, erm, stories I’ve heard or stuff that happened to me? And it all only happens in places I’ve been to myself?

Am I not allowed an imagination?

It’s not that I don’t understand what they call ‘literary fiction’ – sure I do – just that I don’t understand that piece of advice. Notwithstanding that my life is not boring. That’s not the issue.

But I thought, well, I want to write something but I don’t know what. So let’s try that advice and see where it goes. Perhaps it will be designated literary fiction but I don’t think I write flowery enough for that genre. My problem is I simply don’t have the range of vocabulary, darling. Like when writing about some characters taking a stroll in nature I simply don’t know enough names of plants and trees and birds and all the rest of it to conjure up something vivid. Which is probably just as well, because I often feel those carefully crafted sentences with all the flowery prose end up detracting and distracting from the dramatic action. Like ‘stop giving me all these awesome descriptions and get on with the effing story, eh.’

It also deprives the reader of filling in the blanks for themselves.

One has to concentrate so hard on working out what the meaning (if there is one) of each sentence is – even each phrase – and often re-read it half a dozen times (then give up) before you can move on with the prose, and by the time you’ve done all that of course you have no idea what the narrative might be.

So I think that sort of thing should be left for poetry.

But then there’s all this poetry which is just prose arranged on a page to look like poetry. Devoid of rhymes or cadence or scansion or anything. Just pretty words.

Might be nice to look at, but what does it mean? Is it a bit like modern art? ‘What do you think it means?’ – ‘Well, I don’t know! I didn’t write the damn thing! Or paint it!’.

Like modern art – they say it’s supposed to mean something, but perhaps the truth is they are taking the piss and it doesn’t, as it happens, mean shit.

Designed solely to make critics look stupid and pretentious.

But I digress.

That is something I know how to do.

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Well, that was a good three hundred words already and I haven’t said anything (now it’s five hundred, with today’s little additions). So I must be doing something right.

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Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Anyway, write about what you know. Ok, here is a little train of thought which goes through my head at this time of year. By which I mean, when it is bitterly cold and we have run out of wood for our only source of heat in this old French house, namely two woodburners, one in the living room, one in the kitchen (the latter is a delight to cook on, I should mention – we had exquisite homemade shortbread biscuits today with a sugar glaze and roasted almond flakes on top – delicious and highly recommended with any hot beverage of your choice on a chilling Epiphany).

Bedtime (it’s fast approaching at the time of writing) is a trial. We heat up old bricks on top of the woodburner or even in the oven, then put them, surrounded by bedclothes, under the bedcovers ten-to-fifteen minutes before biting the bullet and venturing up to bed.

I wear some five layers in bed, with a hat and woolly bedsocks, and sometimes even a scarf. Yesterday I noticed that the thermometer up there was reading zero degrees. Today it surpassed even that with a shuddering minus one.

So when I am finally snuggled in, having made a cocoon for myself, weighed down by sheets and blankets and duvets and – to begin with – quite warm with the bricks, it will still take my brain several hours to fall unconscious into sleep.

Write what you know. Ok – here’s a train of thought which repeats itself night after night as I am lying there waiting for my brain to stop working and just, please, let me sleep.

How did Scott of the Antarctic take a shit?

And why in the cold of hell would anyone even think about trying to walk to the south pole in the first place?

Yes, of course I understand the spirit of adventure and exploration and discovery and all that – fine, I have no issue with it – but I do think there must’ve been a madness to Scott and his companions. Captain Oats especially – ‘I’m going out for a walk. I may be some time.’ and he wanders out in his socks and never returns.

Or am I getting mixed up with Scott’s Porridge Oats?

I can’t be bothered to look this stuff up, so I am writing all this based on what I learned in school.

That’s to say, I am writing what I know.

Or don’t know, as the case may be. The name Evans springs to mind too. Maybe it was Evans who went for the infamous last walk.

Anyway, because I know what cold really feels like, I mean, sleeping in cold – and this is only zero degrees, mind (those bricks don’t stay warm for more than a few hours maybe), and of course I get woken up by my bladder several times during the night (it takes a while, maybe half an hour, before I muster the courage to actually come out of my cocoon – I know I won’t get back to sleep), I do genuinely wonder what could have possibly possessed Scott of the Antarctic to venture into those mountains of madness. I mean, if it was just zero degrees and he was nicely wrapped up and it was only, like, a hundred mile walk maybe, and he has thermal underwear and thermal tents and all the rest of it then sure, fine. But those crazy stiff upper lip British real men from posh boy schools were doing, what, a thousand miles? In minus effing forty! And blizzards! Might even have been minus eighty at one point.

And this is 1912 we’re talking here. No modern conveniences like electric blankets and electric sleeping bags (if that’s even a thing). And no one could’ve known where they were in those days.

But how can you possibly survive that? I mean, how can you set up a tent in a bloody blizzard, and even then, how can the tent protect you? What was the temperature in the tent and even with some sort of oil-heater what sort of temperature did it manage to produce? Minus twenty? That’s even colder than one of those walk in freezers isn’t it? How can you survive that? It’s sheer bloody madness I tell you!

And how, in the cold of that damned hell, did they ever take a shit?

I refuse to ask Chat-effing-GPT for an answer. ChatGPT wouldn’t survive the Antarctic, so what does he know?

Maybe they just didn’t shit at all. I can’t remember how long their journey was, but they can’t have gone, what, months without defecating, surely?

And what of pissing?

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Photo by Robert Haverly on Unsplash

Obviously they can’t have gone outside. Their willies would’ve frozen off for a start.

So did they go in the tent? In a pot or something? But in what temperature? Minus thirty?!

Like ‘I’m just going for a shit – I may be some time…’

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I also heard about some more modern explorer, one of the Fiennes I believe, who took his gloves off in the Antarctic to tie his shoelaces – it was like minus forty or something – and immediately got frostbite and ended up losing several fingers. How dumb is that?

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Of course then there’s the double tragedy of that ill-fated expedition. First, they get to the south pole only to discover that the Norwegian (I think he was Norwegian), Amundsen, had got there first. Apparently Amundsen won because he used dogs and sleds.

Isn’t that a bit cruel on the dogs? Did they have tents?

Then the second tragedy was that apparently they were only about ten miles or so from shelter when they died. I think that shelter was some sort of cabin or something. So it would have had a generator and a heater and tins of food to be hotted up and – one hopes – many bottles of brandy or, yeah, whiskey (Scottish, if we’re talking Scott).

This is the point where my hopeful imagination kicks in. I imagine Oats (if it was Oats) going for his walk and seeing this shelter mistily appearing through the snowy haze and crying out for salvation! But then he’s out in his socks and his feet don’t work anymore.

So he dies.

Or maybe he did wear his boots after all, and he does make it to the shelter, but by the time he can get back to his companions they’re dead.

Or there’s more parallel world versions here. Maybe he does make it back, tells them about the shelter and so they muster up the stiff upper lip for one final push for those last ten miles and yay! They stumble through the doorway and slam it behind them into the swirling snow.

Oats has already gotten the generator working so now they’ve got the temperature up to, I don’t know, minus ten or something luxurious like that, and yes! there is a bottle of brandy and it’s defrosting slowly on top of the stove, along with some tins of baked beans or similar. Except baked beans are going to make them fart, and then they’ll need a shit.

But the cabin has a toilet. Well, a bucket at least (no, of course it’s not an outside loo – that would be cruel). So after a tin of beans and half a bottle of brandy (each), and the temperature is now a glorious zero, they venture forth to the crapper and lose half their weight after months and months of constipated abstention.

And then they just wait for the weather to turn, and march onwards to their waiting ship (yes, it’s still there – what? Did you think the crew would abandon them? Of course not – they’re a British crew, don’t you know).

By then, I personally wouldn’t give a shit if I’d come second in this race to the south pole. I would have been spending the entire trip dreaming of being back at home in front of a warm hearth fire with mince pies and brandy and central heating.

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Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

I don’t know what possesses people to make journeys like that. It must be some sort of madness, for sure.

I am also reminded of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which is set in Antarctica. I know that Lovecraft himself had a mortal fear of cold, and simply couldn’t tolerate low temperatures.

I know exactly how he feels.

But the terror in that story is as much a product of the simple cold as anything else. Lovecraft must’ve had some of the same thoughts I have about mad people like Scott of the Antarctic. As if perhaps it’s not the mountains which are mad, but those who choose to visit them.

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And now I am reminded that Antarctica wasn’t always ice-covered and cold as hell. It only drifted there with the tectonics. Several tens of millions of years ago it was a lush, southern tropical paradise where exotic prehistoric creatures roamed.

And yes, probably strange aliens too, if only just visiting. And it would be a beautiful place to visit, in those days. And if visiting aliens weren’t in the polite habit of clearing up after themselves before they leave, I would not be at all surprised if there were exotic remains buried under all that ice, perhaps curiously angled tunnels carved into dreadful mountains opening out into vast, aeon-riddled chambers littered with ominous granite sarcophagi etched with unnameable hieroglyphs no man doth dare read aloud.

But then the weather turned, and the visitors departed.

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Perhaps the tale we have been told of Scott of the Antarctic is all a great lie, a fabricated tale of tragic valour told to schoolchildren to encourage their admiration for the Great British stiff upper lip and the magnificence of the English posh boy schools, with their ostentatious quads green with neatly-trimmed grass and edged with hallowed stone cloisters and there, some great gothic chapel leering across the countryside as if sending a statuary message to the plebs, ‘behold our magnificence and weep! Look on our works, ye plebs, and despair!’.

Perhaps this fiction has been carefully curated to conceal the real truth – that Scott and his companions never intended to reach the south pole. Instead, they ventured directly into those mountains of madness and – yeah, it is true that they were never seen again, but not for the reasons we have been told.

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‘That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons, even death may die…’

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There, I wrote what I know.

But I still don’t know how Scott of the Antarctic took a shit.

If you know, dearest reader, then postcard me with your answer.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you are warm.

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If you enjoyed this post, you may also like next week’s one, which is equally fun.

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Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

Ah – I almost forgot – I know a lovely thing for warmth – coffee! If you fancy buying me one to help me overcome the cold, I will be wonderfully grateful.