Free Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels Page B

where interesting tasks took him. He had a professional reputation for both eclecticism and a very defined expertise in the conservation of waterlogged wood. But the reason we were invited to Canada was salt.
    I would come to discover that Athos’s interest in Scott’s Antarctic travels was not entirely impersonal. In fact, Athos himself had briefly considered applying for the expedition, for he was at Cambridge at the time and, like many Mediterraneans, had a contrary passion for things polar. But Athos was newly married and never went to Scott’s recruiting office in London; nor did he ever regret this, because, as it turned out, he and Helen had only five years together before Helen died. There were two geologists on the expedition, Frank Debenham and Griffith Taylor. Athos didn’t know Debenham or Taylor at Cambridge. Athos met Debenham later, during the First World War. Debenham was stationed in Salonika and he heard Athos give a lecture on salt. Debenham had travelled far and seen much and known the hearts of men thrown together in dangerous places, and now he found himself sitting under a ceiling fan in a claustrophobic lecture room moved by Athos’s descriptions of the desirous ionic bond. Sodium chambers like solid fog in the black earth. Miners, lovers, the sea stained with that ancient taste. The lofty salt hills of Thaikan, the baked salt cakes used as money in Kain-du.
    Between the wars, Debenham had helped establish the Scott Polar Institute. He and Athos wrote to each other occasionally, and it was Debenham who told Athos that Griffith Taylor was setting up a new department of geography at the University of Toronto.
    Griffith Taylor knew something of Toronto because another member of Scott’s team, Silas Wright, had been born and raised there. Taylor and Wright had walked from Cambridge to the Antarctic recruiting office at St. Paul’s, a waggish stunt to convince Scott of their mettle. They carried hard-boiled eggs and slabs of chocolate to keep up their strength on the twelve-hour march. Wright, used to canoeing and hiking in the wilds of Northern Ontario and British Columbia, was particularly sensitive to the suggestion that scientists might not have as much muscle as navy men, and on the voyage south he was reefing and hauling with the best of them. In fact, as soon as he returned from the hardships of Antarctica, Wright took Debenham on a camping trip in northwestern Canada.
    In the midst of the very British Antarctica, Wright asserted his Canadian roots, for which he was heartily mocked. Taylor was fond of referring to Wright as “the American,” a comment for which Taylor endured his due punishment. As Taylor reports in his diary: “Wright fell upon me and succeeded in tearing my pocket.”I
    Taylor’s Antarctic diary is studded with exclamation marks, as if he’s continually astonished by what he’s writing, as if the whole frozen experience might be an hallucination. He recounts the day trips he took with Wright, including a march to Cape Royds to find Shackleton’s abandoned hut. They opened the door to a spotless cabin. A two-year-old lunch was waiting for them, the table set and laden with biscuits and jam, scones and gingerbread and condensed milk, preserved by the cold. Taylor and Wright stepped into the ghostly room, sat down and ate, as if they’d been sent an invitation by their long-absent host and two years later had arrived just in time.
    It was one of Athos’s regrets that he never met Wright, who had been visiting with Taylor only a week before our arrival in Toronto. The two Antarctic explorers went to the Canadian National Exhibition, where they ate snow-cones, rode the midway, and attended the horse show. These were the same men who’d been the first to cross Antarctica’s Dry Valley together, a mysterious zone where not a drop of moisture has fallen for over two million years. Now Wright was back in his home town, showing Taylor the fair he went to as a boy.
    Taylor