Читать книгу The Word for Woman Is Wilderness - Abi Andrews - Страница 10

PASSING THROUGH THE HELIOPAUSE

The space probe Voyager 1 left the planet in 1977. Any month, day, minute, second now it will enter interstellar space and become the furthest-reaching man-made object, and the first to leave the heliosphere. This will be one of the biggest moments in scientific history and we will never know exactly when it happened. Three things would signify that Voyager 1 had crossed the border of the heliopause: an increase in galactic cosmic rays, reversal of the direction of the magnetic field, and a decrease in the temperature of charged particles. Voyager 1 reports show a 25 percent increase per month of cosmic rays. But its signals take seventeen hours to travel back to Earth at the speed of light.

When did my journey begin? At the moment of its conception? When I left home in a delivery van with a friend of my dad’s who was going north with some furniture? My parents waved me off with the dog; I filmed it, my mum cried. That felt like a beginning. Or was it the moment the freighter pulled away into the mop-bucket waters off Immingham on a grey day in March?

It came about like this: I was watching a film about a runaway called Chris McCandless, who ditched his ivy-league-trust-fund life and travelled all across America to get to Alaska and live the Jack London dream, where he ate some poisonous potatoes and died. This was 1992, the year before I was born. I cried and promised myself I would start a savings account to fund a trip to Alaska, where I too could live in the wilderness in total solitude. Then I went through the film step by step and analysed how it would have been different if the guy had been a girl.

Really, it would have been a completely different film. Not just in the sense that there were situations in it that would likely have different outcomes for the different sexes (e.g. when he got beaten up by a conductor who finds him stowing away on his freight train) but more fundamentally because a girl wanting to shun modern society and go AWOL into the wilderness to live by killing and eating small animals and scavenged plants would just be considered unsettling.

Wood-cutting mystic Henry David Thoreau shares some of the blame for this. He said things like ‘chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it,’ as though even having sex with a woman would ruin your transcendentalism. ‘Man’ is used to refer to humanity as a whole. When ‘Man’ is pitted against nature in a dynamic of conquest, nature is usually ‘she.’

Wildness in women does not mean autonomy and freedom; their wildness is instead an irrational fever. Simultaneously, in survivalist terms we are the weaker sex and cannot prosper individually outside of the social sphere or without the protection of a manly man. Women both are excluded from, and banished to, nature.

Even on those documentary channels that do programmes on whole families homesteading in the wilderness the woman is always Mountain Man’s wife, never, ever Mountain Woman, just an annexe of the Mountain Man along with his beard, pipe and gun. In Coming into the Country: Travels in Alaska, the writer John McPhee describes lots of Mountain Men in careful detail and a few mountain women in passing comments. One of the Mountain Men tells John McPhee that he wanted to be utterly and totally alone, cut off deep in the country, with only three daughters and one wife, or his ‘womenfolks,’ as he liked to call them.

There are exceptions to the invisibility spell, of course. There is Calamity Jane the cowgirl. Nellie Bly, who did a trip around the world in seventy-two days. Freya Stark, the travel writer of the Middle East. Mary Kingsley the explorer, and that old lady who went over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. But the problem is exactly that there are exceptions. It is as though there is something significant to learn in the wild but it can only be accessed by men. In the wild, men carve out their individual and manly selves, as though women are not allowed individual and authentic selves. The story has the exact same plot, but ‘a woman alone in wilderness’ means something totally inverted. So I had this idea for a journey to Alaska.

Maybe I have read too many Lord of the Rings quest-type fantasies, but I cannot shift the notion that to be deserving of a destination that is really far away you should have undergone some sort of expedition to get there, like how people make a pilgrimage out of piety. So the other element of its ethos came from an aversion to aeroplanes, a combination of carbon-footprint guilt and a suspicion towards the paradox of crossing time zones in a matter of hours to exist suddenly and indifferently in a place you should not naturally be. Not just flying to a place and kind of congregating like these ‘all-inclusive sun, sand, sea, collect your tokens in the Daily Mail’package holidays.

We were one of those families that always went abroad, apart from years when Dad was out of work. By the time I left home I had travelled to nine different countries. If asked to describe those countries I could have told you that beaches in Spain are busier than beaches in Greece, that in the Caribbean you are advised against going onto beaches that are not owned and segregated by your hotel, and that Disneyworld is too far away from the shore to go to the beach but you can go to a pretend beach at the parks anyway and one even has a slide that is a tube going underwater through a tank with dolphins in it.

Living in a technological era means that in an abstract sense the other side of the world is just a few clicks away. Everywhere on Earth has been explored and put in an encyclopaedia. And the internet has brought all of those encyclopaedias together and ordered them into a messy but functional directory. There are no more enigmas. But it also means that passage of travel has become a lot less elitist. I can utilise the internet in the same way that a man of old might have clutched a quill-written recommendation allowing him passage on his father’s tobacco-merchant friend’s ship.

It is very easy to feel nowadays that humanity has saturated everything; that we have conquered the world. If you were to watch a time-lapse of Earth from the beginning of its history up to the present day, for a very, very long time not a lot would happen. The continental land masses would gradually drift, asteroids would impact intermittently, and you might catch an erupting super-volcano, tiny button mushrooms of smoke diffusing. Earth would remain a relatively tranquil marble, its atmosphere pearly eddies and swirls. Then, in the eighteenth century AD, you would see a metamorphosis: cities growing like bruises, fertile soil turning to desert, debris gradually accumulating in a dull metallic orbital constellation.

There are now satellites in the sky that will far outlive us, as big as football fields, suspended in the Clarke Belt, 22,236 miles above sea level, at a distance that means they rotate in geosynchronous orbit. They experience little to no atmospheric drag and because of this they will not ever be pulled back to Earth. They might cease to exist only when everything in proximity to Earth is swallowed by our expanding sun. Until then these will be one of humankind’s longest-lasting artefacts, and a legacy of the twenty-first century. Our civilisation will be immortalised by these grey exoskeletons, usurping the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Māori, etc.

Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Anything that is living on it 6 billion years from now will be vaporised when the sun dies and will be as far from us as we are from those little fish that jumped out of the sea. But we are myopic. In the scheme of things, the rate of change over the past one hundred years is just a blink to the universe, and yet shit, it took so long for me to get to nineteen years. I want the trip to remind me that I am small and getting smaller. (I am stood on a dot on a balloon, all the dots are evenly spaced, as the balloon gets bigger the other dots seem to get further away but it’s only because I am standing on a dot.)

Alaska is the place to feel this. It figures in the collective psyche as the Land of the Mountain Men, the Last Great Wilderness. It is big and vast and mostly unpeopled. The British Isles would fit inside it seven times and about a seventh of Alaska is set aside as protected wilderness. Its entire population is ten times smaller than London’s.

I saved up £2000, the approximate cost of a return plane ticket to Alaska, after a few months of working full-time post-A-levels and living scrupulously. This is to be used for travel expenses only, and must get me from the UK to Iceland to Greenland to Canada and across into Alaska. Any money I need to exist will be made along the way. All of the above will be summarised in a tasteful voiceover on top of some sort of video montage of all the places I go looking mysterious and cloudy.

Travelling by sea and land, it will be an Odyssean epic, only with me, a girl, on a female quest for authenticity.

HAUNTED BY THOUGHTS OF AN ELSEWHERE

I have a cabin on a corridor with all the other cabins; each cabin has two bunks, two lamps, two lockers and a porthole. The cabin doors do not have locks and next door keeps walking into my cabin, mistaking it for his. From what I gather he works in shifts, engineering things. Most of the employees are Icelandic but speak at least partial English. I get by with a kind of pidgin formed from their rudimentary vocab and my pocket phrase book.

There are also two students: Kristján and Urla, a guy and a girl from Manchester and Leeds Universities who use the freighter to travel home to Iceland cheaply in the uni holidays. They live in different cities and only met on their first trip. They now make their trips home coincide so they can keep each other company, and they have a rapport with the regular employees. Everyone seems to be under the impression that they are, or are to be, in love.

I am trying to capture the ‘essence’ of life on board Blárfoss for the documentary. Can I do that by filling a memory card with pictures and videos of every inch of the ship, enough to make a 3D mosaicked replica? As though to get at the essence of something is to cover its every angle, like a method of scientific inquiry, exhausting its possibilities? Probably not, because the memory card is nearly a quarter full already. I have also interviewed just about every English speaker afloat. Urla especially thinks the documentary is ‘totally cool.’ Everyone was taking part as a way of alleviating boredom but it has evolved into some strange kind of fame-ritual, because in the tiny world of the ship the interviewee becomes something akin to a celebrity. At first I was worried about this tainting the documentary, but I suppose I can make it a case in point.

The ship’s interior is functional and plain, with dull and unengaging shapes and cold pastel colours that work to intensify the inside of the lounge, the colours of the board games and the humming of the heaters. Aside from the ubiquity of the ship’s engine, which can be felt more than heard, outside the lounge there is rarely any sound apart from the intermittent tannoy presence of our captain (who we have nicknamed Capt. Oz). We have all found ourselves taking an unusual interest in food and meal times, which are almost always the same. Plokkfiskur, it is called: fish stew, in all its variants. Then underpinning the whole experience is a feeling that I would tentatively call weariness or dreaminess or, combining both, dreariness. A kind of suspension, being both still and unstill, wonky, caused by the weird sensation of movement when nothing visible is moving, the force of gravity contending with the swell of the ocean. Being on an object that is floating makes you more conscious of gravity. With time to think about this, I have come to an arbitrary decision as to what zero gravity might feel like.

In outer space I figure you develop a stronger sense of proprioception, which is the sense of the body parts in relation to each other. (I read this in one of the only English magazines from the lounge, Pro Bodybuilding Weekly.) The brain can adapt the senses to compensate each other, so a blind person might feel and hear better. In outer space, with minimal stimuli of sound, sight, smell, taste and touch, perhaps proprioception becomes enhanced. Weightlessness makes any body movement effortless. Forces would radiate from the inside of your body, your pulse would throb through your limbs and you would feel ‘embodied’ in the most literal sense. This is all just boredom-speculation. I also like to think I can imagine what it would feel like to not have an arm, or to have a third arm, or a penis.

LAND OF THE ICE-QUEENS

Every star is a sun. Every sun has its own planets. Every planet has its own constellations. The 3D world is a hologram of a 2D world projected from the edge of a black hole.

OUTER

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

We do not make enough of outer space. The only remaining frontier and it is no longer of much interest to most of the public. I suppose that is a good thing, and practical. Things would be trickier if everyone was ultra-conscious of their infinitesimality. My mum does not believe in space. I asked her once when I was young if she believed in aliens and she said don’t be silly, Erin. I said it seems far more likely that there are aliens if space goes on forever. She said she had never really thought about it. I asked a bit more because I wanted to know what was past the blue sky in her head if she did not think about space. She told me to shut up, she had more important things to think about, like working overtime to make money now that Dad had lost his job at the Cadbury factory because it got bought by America.

Having busy parents meant spending a lot of summer holidays in kids’ clubs and eating mainly breadcrumbed/fun-shaped frozen foods. Our domestic life was founded on convenience. Remove foil before heating quickedy-quick Micro Chips I feel like Chicken Tonight like Chicken Tonight. Only modern convenience did not bring the liberation they said it would because Mum still had to work a job and vacuum as well, thank you, Mr Dyson. So really she can be excused for not stopping to think about infinity.

I have been standing out on deck and looking out to sea. The sea that goes on unbroken to the horizon. There is nothing, no things but gulls, and you think, how do the gulls fly without tiring? Do they not feel panic that there is nowhere for them to rest their wings apart from actually on the ocean, and here they might get eaten by something big that comes from what to them must seem another dimension? No place to rest their eyes and sleep? The empty space makes me think of a diagram in a physics book of a ball on a plane of Newton’s, a single arrangement of matter rolling on a grid of space, the loneliest object in the world. We are the ball and the sea is the grid. I have only been on an unbroken and empty plane like this on a P&O ferry to France once, and that was only for a matter of hours. By day three I feel like the Ancient Mariner.

Urla likes to read and we got along quickly. We have formed a kind of two-way book club where we swap and then discuss. We have been dipping into Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel. Urla says she likes Le Guin; the book’s world Winter reminds her a little of her own icy home, but she is not so keen on Bishop, maybe because some of the intricacies of language are lost on her, maybe because her BA is in Business Studies. I have read a little of her book, Lean In, by her hero Sheryl Sandberg. It is all about how women in business can help themselves to succeed in a male-dominated workplace by learning to be more like men.

Part of the trip obviously had to be about personal growth, and I have resolved to take the extended opportunity to make myself a more well-rounded human being. The five-point plan goes like this:

–Read lots of insightful books

–Know rough history of every place before visiting

–Immerse self in culture of each place

–Learn important phrases in each language

–Write. Every day

Urla’s parents are separated. Her mum is Icelandic but her dad is English. He lives near to her in Leeds and she has split her time between England and Iceland since she was ten. I was planning on staying in a cheap hostel in Reykjavík but Urla’s mum has a spare room that I can stay in for free for as long as it takes me to figure out how to get to Greenland. So instead of having to infiltrate my first foreign city with the blunt ram of a tourist I have Urla to show me around and she has an SUV, so we can even go see the best bits of the landscape of Iceland, something that would have taken some logistics considering my budget. Urla talks like everyone should listen and has a way of draping herself over everything like a languid cat. I think it would be fair to say that I have a girl-crush on Urla, a kind of feeling of affinity and admiration that is completely free from jealousy.

WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST CONSPIRACY FROM HELL

INT. MESS ROOM — Urla reclining on sofa with dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick in hands — room is large with three sofas arranged in square and coffee table centre with books and magazines — small television with VHR mounted to wall — bookcase with videos, CDs — CD player on top of bookshelf — bookshelf modified with balconied shelves to stop books sliding off with sway — outside wide windows ocean — white ocean birds — wall of ocean rises, falls, rises, falls with motion of boat — one other sofa occupied by two men — legs splayed, reading magazines —

Erin: (BEHIND CAMERA) So maybe you could just talk a little about feminism in Iceland

Urla: Okay, sure

— sits up and turns to men on adjacent sofa —

Urla: Do you wanna talk about feminism in Iceland with me?

— the men look up from their magazines, shrug —

Urla: They speak little English. So. There are many surveys say Iceland is the best country in the world in which to be a woman. Because it is the best country in the world in which to be a person. We have no army. We run on renewable energy. People are mostly very happy apart from those that get sad of the darkness in winter

— the man on the left is reading an Icelandic magazine on 4x4s — he is watching Urla over the brim of the page —

Urla: Let me think, so, in nineteeeeeen seventy-five 90 percent of Icelandic women went on strike over equal pay and then they got equal pay. We elected the first female president in Europe in 1980. Finnbogadóttir. She was a divorced single mother like my mum and she was re-elected three times until she retired. And then our prime minister was the world’s first openly gay prime minister and she started out as an air hostess. The state church bishop is a woman. And we are the only country in the world to make strip clubs illegal for feminist reasons

— 4x4 magazine man makes a semi-discreet ‘humph’ sound — Urla turns to him pointedly — he looks down and flicks the pages of his magazine straight —

Erin: Do you think that has to do with nakedness being starker because in the cold climate you have to wear so many layers on a day-to-day basis? Kind of an anonymising of the human figure that might take away some issues of sexualising the body. Like in The Left Hand of Darkness, where cold and androgyny made a society with no misogyny and no war?

— 4x4 magazine man shakes his head disbelievingly — Urla does not notice — she looks down at her body in high-necked woollen jumper, thick grey joggers tucked into woollen socks —

Urla: I don’t know. Probably (PAUSE) what else. So women do not have to change their surname if they marry. And when a baby is born its parents get equal leave. BUT

— she raises her right index finger in a scholarly manner, holding the book to her chest with her other arm —

Urla: Even in the best place in the world in which to be a woman it is still better to be a man

— she looks at 4x4 mag man, who is leafing through his pages with a look of nonchalance —

Erin: Nowhere has completely got rid of gender inequality and the attitude of some people here now is like, Okay, we get it. You have everything you want now. You have it the best in the world so stop being so righteous. Other women don’t have it so great. You can give it a rest now. Although it’s totally cute when you get all angry

CUT

HOW TO BE A GROWN-UP IN A POST-FEMINIST SOCIETY

You are fourteen years old and you have just started your job as a waitress in a small restaurant owned by a family, each member of which fills a role in the kitchen and also deals drugs. Having never had a job you take everything here to be archetypical of the working world. You are not a feminist because feminists are lesbians and hate men and you don’t. You like boys more than girls, girls are lame and preoccupied and bitchy and you’d rather hang out with boys and skate and mess around. The only girls you do like want to be boys too.

Stuart is the father of the family and the manager of the restaurant. He is short, fat, bald, and has buggy eyes. When you are introduced from across the worktop he grabs your hand in his stubby, sweaty hands and kisses you up your arm with his fat wet lips. You squeak and recoil and the other girls laugh at you. When you are outside the kitchen one of the older girls tells you you get used to it.

You do get used to it and after a time you manage not to squirm when Stuart strokes your pubescent arse, which is taut in those tight-fitting Tammy Girl trousers he makes you wear because he likes it when you squirm. When he creeps up behind you when you’re standing behind the till counter on the restaurant floor and kisses you on the neck, making a squelchy sound, none of the customers ever say anything and some of them must catch him sometimes.

You watch a seventy-year-old man dine an escort while he strokes the downy hairs at the dip of your back and hips, while you tell yourself ‘the dip of my back and hips is merely the concave of a crescent in an assembly of matter which is a body in which I reside.’ When your mum asks how was work you say yeah, fine, because if you told her it’d be embarrassing. She’d call the police or something. None of the other girls have told anyone, the customers never say anything, so what makes you so special you call the police? It’s something you’re mature enough to ignore. It’s a part of being a woman. When Jodie the new girl starts you even get a bit annoyed when she keeps going on about how Stuart likes her because she’s prettier than you.

It’s an easy job and you don’t want to lose your job cuz then you won’t be able to go to the cinema or anything. If you quit you’d have to come up with a good reason for Mum and you can’t think of one. And you’re lucky to have this job because you’re really shit at it, they tell you that all the time. You do everything wrong and you’re really slow and clumsy and you never smile. And the other girls are always saying he’s good to us, he looks after us, he gives us free food and he’s like a dad really.

You let Stuart do it because it turns him on if you don’t. When you are in the cloakroom one time he calls your bluff and puts his fingers all the way down your underwear, which are the ones with ducks on them. You don’t tell the other girls because they’ll just think that you think that you’re something special. Nobody else is complaining, don’t be such a crybaby. When you close your eyes to sleep you can see clearly the spittle on his fat wet lips.

SYMBIOSIS OF ALGAE AND ANIMALS

Urla’s mother’s name is Thilda. Her house sits behind Reykjavík and from it you can look out over the backs of all the buildings looking out to the sea. It is spring and the trees and parks are very green and the water and sky very blue. The buildings get so close to the sea that in certain lights, when you can’t see the horizon and the harbours and the lakes are filled with sky, it can look as if the city is sitting on the edge of infinity. The sun sets but seems to sleep just out of sight, and I had to buy a sleep mask to convince my body it was night-time. Although it is getting warm for Iceland it is still cold, and whenever outside I wear my ski jacket.

Leaving Blárfoss had the potential to be emotional, but because for most of the others it was more of a suspension of the experience rather than an end — because most of the others would be repeating the journey again and again with slight variations in crew — it wasn’t. I will have to learn not to get emotionally attached to transitory places, seeing as a journey is entirely transition. Even Urla and Kristján treated their goodbye with admirable stoicism. She says that their relationship is Blárfoss, that they have agreed not to see each other outside of it before university finishes, and she does not think it can even exist independently of it. I think it is very sensible.

She seems to be able to look at their relationship with a manly and objective clarity that I admire. She seems totally indifferent to Kristján, in fact, spending most of her days on the boat with me, aside from joining him in their shared cabin at night. If they were together and I approached them, Kristján would make any excuse and leave, which became an ongoing joke to Urla; she would laugh and shout, ‘Bye, Kristján!’ after him. I got to feeling really bad about it and started to leave them be, but then Urla took to abandoning him for me.

She says as soon as university finishes she wants to do a trip like mine, that the trip is brave and important. She made me swell up, as if with her approval I become a little bit like her. She is sure of herself in a way that I envy, in the way that she talks and holds herself. You can tell she was one of the girls at school that everybody wanted to be friends with, or wanted to at least not to be not-friends with, to be in the focus of her dislike, which I imagine to be conducted with precision and ruthlessness.

At school I preferred to be on my own. I would ride my bike places on weekends, with my rucksack — an antidote to the typical feminine handbag — full of practical stuff that I would find use for even when it was tenuous, just for the sake of being able to cut everything neatly with my pocket knife even where I could use my teeth, nursing the smallest of wounds with my first aid kit, using my compass even when I knew the way just for the reassuring comfort I found in knowing exactly where north was, its orderliness and its simple truth, comfortable in apt autonomy like Thoreau.

There was one place in particular that I would cycle, an hour by bike, across the river and down empty country lanes, to a tree that I used as a hide that looked out over the top of an abandoned limestone quarry, and it was here that I would sit with my binoculars and bird-watch. In the town the only birds you ever saw were little common backyard birds like tits and chaffinches and sparrows and wagtails but out in the quarry and away from the town there were birds that prey on other things, other birds, predatory and exciting.

I had myself an Identification of British Birdlife book and would sit still for hours just to collect the sight of them and the sound of the name of them like talismans. There were plentiful buzzards and kestrels that would slip in and out of the area on their hunting routes, sliding on the warm air to hang and observe like snorkellers at the water’s surface, periscoping their necks then locking still before the dive, limiting any movement to the final flurry. Or the thrill of the goshawks that would sometimes weave and dip in and out of the trees either in the valley beyond the quarry or on the opposite ravine. Sometimes the goshawks display-danced, spreading their tail feathers like splayed fingers and falling through the sky like grabbing hands.

But what I really held out for were the days when I got to see one or both of the rare pair of peregrine falcons that nested somewhere in the trees around the quarry. They would always fill me up with the magic of hope, their tiny defiant bodies wheeling against the sky so small against the big, so dark against the blue, and so free. In their sky-dance they revelled disobediently against their declared local extinction.

To be able to tell the difference in these birds by their shape and their movements and to point at them and call them by their names has always been to me an affirmation of the solid truth of the natural world as a system that can be described with taxonomy, and a reminder of my place in it. It is also a reassurance; it shows me that these things still exist because I can collect them. That there are still places to watch and be a part of a realer order outside of severed civilisation.

I do not know if Urla can tell that I was the kind of person to spend my lunchtimes at school in toilet cubicles with my feet up so no one would recognise my shoes. My parents can’t reconcile this sudden bid for independence and shrugging off of domesticity with what they think of as my nature; introverted and docile. They are confused by my surety and think that instead this impulse must stem from some malady; that I overthink things, that I feel too much, that I should not watch the news if it scares me so much that it makes me want to leave what I must see as the train wreck of modern society.

What they could not seem to see was that this limiting aspect of me is in part the drive for my leaving, that I want to learn how to be without it. To prove to myself and everyone else that solitude is as much mine as any Mountain Man’s and that I do not have to be relegated to loneliness and displacement just for being female. It is rational and deliberate and it had always been part of the plan. I have always been obedient, the model daughter. Mum and Dad said finish school and try hard at it so I did. I kept my nose clean and I always ate my vegetables (frozen for goodness).

Already I feel something changing. I look at Urla and the way she oozes and I think, does doing this project make her think that of me? Am I that person, even if only from certain angles? Is it having a camera and a plan that gives me that authority? Or actually, just being nineteen and female and travelling alone, does it do that? It is possible that Kris’s discomfort around me came from a place of awe, like the awe he shows for Urla in never talking back to her.

Yesterday Thilda took us to a geothermal spring. Neither of us remembered to pack swimming things so we had to go in our underwear and bras. It did not matter because it was raining so we only saw a few hikers and they weren’t close enough to distinguish underwear from swimwear anyway.

‘The best time to go to the springs is when there is rain, because the tourists like to stay dry. But in Iceland we think, if you are going to get wet, you might as well get wet, okay?’ Thilda had said.

We parked the SUV where the off-road terrain offered no more leeway, still a bit of a distance from the pools, whose grey iridescence we could just make out. The sky hung low like the pelt of a sad, wet sheep, the rain fading all outlines into each other like a bleeding watercolour and the mossy ground skirting the rocks and water, luminous in contrast. We took off our clothes and shoes, slammed the doors, and ran towards steaming water, laughing and screaming. The rain stung our skin pink.

We fell on our fronts into the hot water, slipping and flailing, trying to submerge every inch from the cold and spitting and coughing and laughing at the water filling our mouths. Then we settled still and quiet with just our eyes and the tops of our heads out of the water, blinking the rain off our lashes and bringing our noses up for air like seals. Thilda started to tell us a story.

‘The famous saga of Erik the Red may be called so but it is really about a skörungur, which is what we call a strong woman hero. Her name was Gudrid the Far-Traveller, his daughter-in-law, and she lived in the tenth century.’

Iceland is steeped in sagas and mysticism because the landscape is animated as if it is telling its own story. Glaciers walk, the ground moves and magma seeps, and geysers erupt like blowholes on the humped back of some giant. It is as though these are living parts acting out their own narratives. The Icelandic legends are shaped by the elements, because here the elements are all-pervasive.

And the landscape is volatile and fierce. Like Thilda says, the Icelandic women are strong because they are descended from Vikings and conquerors and raised by the icy sea winds which sting their cheeks and the hot geyser steams which scald them. And in a land where fire and ice are in battle and care little for anything around them, all people must be strong.

In the landscape the elements merge like there is no limit to their pervasiveness, no clearly defined contours. You can feel it seeping into you; trading off with the algae in the water and the mud between your toes like nourishment. You can feel the shuddering of the water making everything on your body reach out in reciprocity, every hair a tentacle. Half submerged in the hot spring; in and out; half still and warm, half cold and lashed; ears under, eyes out; the patter of rain on the surface, the gasping of the spring.

Thilda’s story gives me a feeling like recognition, a sense of inevitability and completion, a slotting into place. Like finding an object you never noticed was missing until you found it and realised its lack had been haunting you all along. I recognise it by knowing its antithesis; my own home and environment. See, where I am from there is not this boundlessness. The outside that I know is broken to pieces and scattered.

Our cul-de-sac is on a suburban estate built on the site of an old power station that had been running up until the eighties. All the houses look the same with neatly trimmed rectangular lawns and faux-Tudor beams, no weeds (there are sprays for those), and the streets are named after famous ships. Our town was typical of Midlands industry because it is well connected to the canal and river systems. There was a power station, a vinegar factory, a sugar beet factory, and several carpet factories, one of which my mum worked in as a secretary while I was in her belly. The power station was coal-fired and archaic and the factories moved to China so they knocked it all down and built the suburbs and a giant Tesco. My mum and dad got jobs a thirty-minute drive away, closer to the city, and no one could grow anything to eat in their yards because the power station left radon in the topsoil.

The outside that I know is pastoral, a grid of owned and regimented spaces, moderated for production. Some people think the English countryside is pretty but that is the tragedy of it. It is a result of the way our small country was built, when a bunch of rich men parcelled up what was once shared land to make it easier to go about ploughing and producing more crops. Our common wilderness became a commodity. On an island so small the mark of this is hard to not see: a monotonous quilt of rectangles divided by hedgerows. Especially in the Midlands, where there are not many mountains or bogs or other bits of stubbornly unprofitable land, and where the remains of failed industry create a graveyard landscape, the stumps covered over with prosthetic suburbia.

The peregrine quarry was the one place I knew that had a semblance of wildness to it, of richness and possibility. This is an invisible kind of poverty, this lack of all of the complexity that Urla and her mother are born from.

Gudrid lived in the days of longboats and raging seas. She travelled to what we now call Newfoundland, which is my own first port of call in Canada. This was before lucky-lost explorer Christopher Columbus, and Thilda proudly points out that although the Spanish like to think that the sagas are make-believe, Icelanders know who really found the New World. Gudrid was the first European mother in the western hemisphere.

She had a son; they called him Snorri. But with their small clan and without the guns the Spanish had, they were driven away by the natives. Or savages, as Thilda called them.

She concludes her story by saying, ‘Gudrid travelled further than all of her husbands, who died one after another and proved early in our history that you don’t need a penis between your legs to make you a great adventurer.’ I look up at the bulking hills and think about how Gudrid personifies them, and the geysers and the winds, and the looming, enduring volcanoes, the shifting ground. And how so much of Thilda is in Urla, and Gudrid in them both. And it feels kind of feminine, all this entering. It feels like pregnation.

It is this harsh softness. Of a landscape that is fertile and hostile. And it takes on this significance for me and for my journey so that I have to squeak into bubbles under the water, because I feel like for the first time ever I know exactly why I am where I am right then in that moment.

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

Our plans for Greenland have undergone sudden and fantastic developments. Urla and Thilda had been plotting the whole time to put us on a boat with Urla’s uncle Larus, who is a whale scientist. Larus has his own research boat and is intending to go out into the Denmark Strait, the channel in between Iceland and Greenland, to survey a pod of long-finned pilot whales. They hadn’t told me in case it didn’t work out, but it has and we leave for Greenland in four days’ time.

It is against protocol because the boat is only supposed to carry two people, but Urla threatened to stow away if her uncle took me and went without her. She will come with me as far as she can before she has to get back and work her summer job, so we will be in the double cabin and Larus will sleep in the steering room on the floor. Urla will then carry on through Greenland with me until I find a way to follow in the wake of Gudrid on to Canada. It is perfect because she can translate for me in Greenland, and she said she would write up the subtitles for the Danish when I edit the footage for the documentary. Because her uncle Larus still has to do his research it will be a slow journey of five days but we get to go whale watching and learn about the behavioural patterns of the long-finned pilot whale.

It jarred how easily Thilda let Urla go across a foreign country with a stranger so soon after they reunited after so long. I suppose we will be with her uncle and then her family friends in Nuuk once we find a way to reach the west coast, so the prospect seems safe to her. Maybe also she is used to Urla leaving, what with her being at university and having spent half her childhood away at her dad’s because of the separation. But the contrast to my own parents’ response is stark.

Why can’t you just be simple like other girls your age, get a job somewhere in town and work your way up, or at least go away to go to university, make something of yourself?

What did we do to you that made you so determined to leave us?

We won’t sleep until you return.

We won’t sleep ever again.

I could not make them understand that my breaking-away-from is inevitable and keeps the history of the world in motion. The young always leave. At least the male young of the species always does. My leaving would have been a casting out, an initiation ritual, had I been a boy. Women who leave always abandon. Imagine the pinnacle form of this, the mother who leaves her children to her husband. Unnatural! Monstrous! And the man who does it? My bet is he ends up smug with a younger wife, paying minimal child support.

Urla does not need to lurch away from Thilda because Thilda lets her go. The two of them are twinned in ease, in their mannerisms, in a way that makes them seem more like sisters than mother and daughter. I prefer to be definitive about my being, where it ends and what its characteristics are. I have my dad’s nose, my mother’s green eyes and dark brown hair. I have his stubbornness and her impulse to over-empathise, weeping easily. But I try hard to also not be like them.

Peregrine; chaffinch; woodpigeon.

Field; hedgerow; river.

Mother; father; me.

THE CHEMICAL WAR ON THE GYPSY MOTH

Larus has given me Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring because ‘it is one of the most important books you will ever read.’ In 1962 Silent Spring was published to tell of how different chemicals invented for killing people in the world wars were being used for killing pests on food crops and were then having unexpected repercussions, like the death of birds and children. This is in the sixties, so everyone was doubly pissed with the government for also putting them in range of nuclear weapons that might come at any time without warning and telling them they would be safe under desks.

Widespread use of DDT was stopped because of Rachel Carson’s book and the US got a mainstream environmental conscience. Acceptance of the ‘ambivalence’ of the oppressors could be scrutinised. Women could have rights, black people could have rights, gay people could have rights, animals could have rights, even grass and trees could have rights, and if you took to the street in a crowd with billboards you could make anything happen.

Larus overuses his own coined collective nouns like ‘the nascent youth of today’ and ‘the ignorant herd.’ He is exactly the kind of man you imagine when you imagine the kind of man who would get upset about bees. He speaks as if he is playing an internal monologue on constant reel, projecting it into the world like his mouth is a loudspeaker. Just by looking at him I can tell he probably actually weeps at the mention of Arctic drilling.

There are certain stereotypes that fit with giving a shit about the planet, and funnily enough these are generally in some way feminine. To be a socially acceptable environmentalist you have to be female, a child, or an eccentric (which itself entails being kind of effeminate, if you are already a man). I have come to the conclusion that this is because environmental issues are perceived to be melodramatic and melodrama belongs to the feminine because women are of course by default hysterical, ‘in touch with nature,’ and so easily brought to tears by images of seagulls stuck in Coke cans in conjunction with sad piano music. Melodramatic because there are more pressing issues like terrorists and fascism and the looming employment crisis of the robot workforce, never mind the bees. Women just like animals because they are cute and summon their maternal instinct.

It is a vicious circle because there is no way of talking about the issues without evoking a whole discourse that is by now tainted by this idea of melodrama. Caring about the environment is lame, Greenpeace is run by scaremongers and weirdo conspiracy theorists, and the bees have gone somewhere, but it is a boring mystery.

Can YOU give just one pound a month? JUST ONE POUND A MONTH?! One pound could feed cats like Maurice for a whole year and provide shelter on wet nights and windy days and buy the love he so cherishes. Maurice loved his owners (cue sad piano music, image of wet Maurice sat in a box at the side of a road) but one day they took him out in the car and just left him at the side of the road because he had fleas and he smelled. We must protect animals like Maurice, the furry little creatures that god gave us to steward.

But bees do kind of pollinate about everything we eat. So really, though, Larus, where have the bees gone?

I USE SONAR TO EXPRESS MYSELF

We have found the pod of long-finned pilot whales. There are over one hundred of them and it is incredible to look at, their bodies rising smooth and bulbous from the grey water like bubble wrap, blowing air from their blowholes, spraying water like saliva from a blown-up balloon let loose. After two days of tailing them I am reassured that they are not going to rise up as one and overturn our little boat. I was pacified by realising that they also hang around with dolphins. Dolphins are an animal I can trust. In our pod there are a group of Atlantic white-sided dolphins; Larus says they herd the fish together with the whales. The dolphins are curious about us and come right up to the boat to play around in the foam that comes off our propeller. Their faces and noises are the epitome of happiness, just pure unbridled joy at this strange thing chopping up their water and making it foamy. So simple and pure, like the joy of children.

I have won the tolerance of grumpy Larus. He was moaning about how it is ‘people like me’ who have ruined Bali by thinking they are all spiritual and swamping the place with their yoga mats. He sees this as something flawed in the psyche of the youth of today. I asked him how many children he had and he said he has five from three different mothers because that is just how it was in the sixties. I asked him if Bali’s overcrowding was not just the inevitable outcome of overpopulation and that there were the same annoying yoga mat tourists in the sixties, but in the sixties there were fewer people so there was less yoga mat crowding and that maybe it is actually his generation’s fault for breeding so much. He grumbled some stuff but since then has been actually quite amicable towards me.

On top of his research for the Ocean Association, Larus is conducting his own. The pod is particularly interesting to him because of the dolphins. He uses the equipment on the boat to record and plot their sonar and by measuring patterns he hopes to be able to crack their language. The graphs in the office already prove that the dolphins are talking; Larus has plotted the quantified appearance of each distinct vocalisation in descending order across a horizontal axis, the times occurring across a vertical axis. The plot of a graph where information is being communicated always results in an angle of 45 degrees because all languages have units that range on a spectrum from frequent to infrequent. If it is not a 45-degree angle then the noises are random and uncommunicative. This is the same for any language, Icelandic, English, Dolphin.

Larus says he can apply this method to any long piece of sound data. His other focus is noise picked up by dishes aimed at outer space. A friend in America has built his own dish behind his house in the desert and he and Larus work on the data because the only government-funded dish used specifically to listen for aliens, the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio, was taken down in 1998 to clear space for a golf course. It ran for twenty-two years and it actually picked up the kind of thing they were looking for. It appeared to come from north-west of the globular cluster of M55 in the constellation Sagittarius. It lasted for seventy-two seconds and they called it the Wow! Signal because that is exactly what astronomer Jerry R. Ehman wrote on the computer printout.

But the signal it picked up only occurred once, so after searching for it they eventually presumed it was some sort of fluke, the logic being that any intelligent civilisation would keep on sending a signal over and over to make it more likely to be heard. A three-minute-long radio signal was sent from Earth to a cluster of stars at the limits of the Milky Way one time in 1974 and never again. By the time any hypothetical civilisation had got it and then sent a reply it would be around about AD 52,000. The sustained attention span of the average human ranges from between five to twenty minutes.

The guys that sent the signal referred to themselves as the Order of the Dolphin. They called themselves this because one of their members, the marine biologist John C. Lilly, used to take hallucinogens and climb into tanks with dolphins to explore interspecies communication. John Lilly found that dolphins can process linguistic syntax. He taught them to differentiate between commands such as bring the ball to the doll and bring the doll to the ball.

He would talk about them like he thought they were people. Larus played us a track by a lady spoken-word poet that I liked. She imagined what a whale might say to John Lilly if it could speak telepathically to him, and what the whale asked as it swam circles in its ceramic-tiled prison was whether every ocean has walls.

Because of the difficulty of relaying a message through both deep space and deep time, Larus thinks we also need to consider that aliens might have come to Earth billions of years ago and encoded a message into our DNA, in the genes that do not do a lot apart from sit around. He says that some decoders are looking for mathematical patterns because intelligent civilisations must understand pi and prime numbers and things as universal truths that transcend language. What Pythagoras said: the whole cosmos is a harmony and a number.

Some of the guys from the Order of the Dolphin, like the turtle-necked celebrity cosmologist Carl Sagan, also worked on the Golden Records that were sent into space with Voyager 1, which by now could be outside the solar system and on its way to somebody else’s. The Golden Records were a kind of time capsule. In it they sent pictures of a whole range of cultures and creatures, sounds from Earth like screaming and laughter and greetings in lots of different languages. President Jimmy Carter left a written message for the aliens inside the time capsule:

‘This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO SURVIVE OUR TIME SO WE MAY LIVE INTO YOURS.’

— President Carter

The time capsule is President Carter’s baby. With it he has conceptually colonised the future.

THE CEILING IN THE SKY

I nominated myself to help Larus while Urla fished for dinner because I like to sit and listen to him talk about space. I am helping group all of the sound bites that Larus has from the dolphin recordings into categories that are similar sounding. He plays them from the computer and we decide which of seven folders to put them into.

When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut up until age thirteen, when at careers day I sat with my parents and told my head of year about how I wanted to be an astronaut; they all laughed as though it were cute and he signed me up for work experience at a paragliding centre on the basis that I must have liked the idea of flying.

Larus was at Kennedy for the lift-off of the Apollo 11 mission. He was there to protest, stood in a line with its back to the launch pad, holding a sign that read ‘Meanwhile in Harlem,’ but as soon as he heard the roar from the propulsion engines he turned around and could not take his eyes away. There is a photo somewhere of the group with him turning and gaping; he did not ever cut it out of the newspaper because he had spoiled the integrity of the group’s statement. He told me this confidingly and made me promise not to tell Urla because she would never let it go.

My being an astronaut was something I did not ever doubt as a child because Mum always told me the whole world is your oyster and until that careers day I had no cause to doubt her. It did not matter to me that all the cartoon astronauts were men. I think I always positioned myself as male without actually being aware of it. Whenever I watched films or read books with a male hero I totally imagined myself as that hero. Call me Ishmael. Call me Ralf, call me John McClane. It is not fair that only the boys get the fun parts.

I said this to Mum and Dad about fun parts when they started protesting at the idea of me doing this trip after college. It took a while to dawn on them that I was being serious and had come of legal age to do it without their permission anyway. Mum said, ‘Your father and I have decided that we can’t help you financially with this trip because we are not behind it.’ I told them that was fine and I could fund it myself. ‘What if you are in an unsafe place and have one of your spells?’ (By this she means my propensity to kind of faint for no apparent reason sometimes.) Of course I have not told them the real tundra-wilderness plan and the full extent of the ‘survivalism’ experiment, because, well, that would just have been cruel when I know they would suffer for it.

When America shot a rocket to the moon, even with the sexual revolution in full swing, it was still too soon to let women have a cosmic one. Larus was telling me about an independent programme called Mercury 13 (which he agreed to talk about to the camera), which took accomplished female pilots and put them through the testing that NASA did on their own astronauts, the Mercury 7 programme, the theory being that for various biological reasons women were actually better suited to space flight. It was a success but NASA just could not have ladies on the moon before men, so they kept the requirement that all NASA astronauts be a member of the air force, and women were still not allowed to join the military. So none of the Mercury 13 pilots were taken on, although they had more air experience than a lot of the men at NASA (some of whom secretly did not have all of the requirements anyway). When Larus told me this I remembered how bitter I felt at the paragliding centre while two boys in my year got sent to Leicester Space Centre on ‘limited allocation’ work experience.

Maybe America sent a man to the moon to undermine Russia’s female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She was ten years younger than the youngest NASA astronaut and had spent more time in space than all Americans combined, orbiting the Earth forty-eight times. Man astronaut Neil Armstrong did not go for all of mankind and he certainly did not go for women. America only went to space in the first place to show that communism could not be more progressive than capitalism. Tereshkova worked in a textile factory before she became a cosmonaut. Her mother before her worked in the textile factory and her father was a tractor driver. What if Apollo had crashlanded? Would Russia rule the world now?

But Tereshkova was a human propaganda pawn: the Russian female programme was dissolved the year of the Apollo moon landing. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s official birthday was moved a day so that there were no records that he was really born on International Women’s Day; Russia could not have had him as a national hero if he were born on International Women’s Day. That would make him a sissy.

MANNED SPACE FLIGHT IS THE TROPHY WIFE OF THE SUPER-PHALLUS

INT. BEDROOM CABIN — Erin and Urla sit on opposite sides of the bed, facing each other — on her head Urla has a cone with wings coloured with felt-tip pens to look like a rocket — on its side it says NASA under a penis with flames coming out from beneath the testicles — they are talking into walkie-talkies —

Erin (Jerrie Cobb) (PUTTING ON AN AMERICAN ACCENT): Oh hey, NASA. It’s Jerrie Cobb from the Mercury 13. So I did everything you said I should

Urla (NASA) (BAD AMERICAN ACCENT. DEEP FOR MALE): Mm-hmm. What’s that?

— Erin bursts into laughter —

Urla (IN HER NORMAL VOICE/LAUGHING): Hey. What? Are you laughing at my accent?

Erin: Sshhhh

— Erin clears her throat and resumes her serious-American tone —

Erin (Jerrie Cobb): I did all the tests like all the guys did. And hey, it’s funny. I actually kinda blew them out the water

Urla (NASA) (ACCENT) (THEATRICALLY SUSPICIOUS): What tests?

Erin (Jerrie Cobb) (LAUGHING): You know. All the secret tests you make the guys do so they can go into space

Urla (NASA) (PAUSE): I don’t know what tests you’re talking about

Erin (Jerrie Cobb): I’ll remind you then. I put freezing water in my ears to see what it feels like with no balance. I spent days alone inside a box. I ran on a treadmill till I thought I might die. I drank radiation

Urla (NASA) (SCOLDING): How’d you find out about the secret tests? They’re secret

Erin (Jerrie Cobb): Er, well now. We have a scientist friend. He invited us to do them. He said you didn’t have your own programme for ladies so he made one to show you that you should have

Urla (NASA) (THEATRICALLY CONDESCENDING): And why’s that?

Erin (Jerrie Cobb): Because all his evidence suggests that it is way more logical to put a woman in space than a man

Urla (NASA) (GRINNING): There is no NASA-led evidence to prove this

Erin (Jerrie Cobb) (WHINING): Oh please, NASA. I promise I won’t let you down. I coped just as well in the physical tests. I’ve got a higher pain threshold. I beat all the guys in the psychological ones. I’m so small you’ll hardly even notice me, I swear. I won’t take as much food or oxygen. I could even go up there in a smaller shuttle. And all of my reproductive organs are inside of me so I’m less likely to have radioactive children

— the girls both laugh then recompose themselves —

Urla (NASA): That’s all very nice but we won’t be taking the female programme any further

Erin (Jerrie Cobb): But why? We worked so hard. Some of us lost our jobs or our husbands

— Urla/NASA waves her hands dismissively —

Urla (NASA): There are many reasons

Erin (Jerrie Cobb) (SMIRKING): Give me one good reason

Urla (NASA): Er. I’m, er. I am not authorised to divulge that information to third parties who are not associated with any official NASA programme

Erin (Jerrie Cobb) (LAUGHS/MOCK ANGER): Well, why the hell not?

Urla (NASA) (DRAWLING): Let it drop now. You’re like a dog with a bone. Do you have a husband? Think of how you’re making your husband feel. If not think about your daddy. You know your daddy wouldn’t want you up there

Erin (Jerrie Cobb): But gee. All the tests show I’d do just fine

Urla (NASA): The tests are not fully conclusive. You might well get up there and just faint or something. And what if you got to space and got yourself raped by an alien? Imagine if you were the courier for an extraterrestrial being back on our planet

— Urla straightens up and wags a finger on her free hand pointedly

— continues in her best pretend-self-righteous voice —

We will not continue the female programme because of the risks it would bring to the American public. My word is final

— at this Erin/Jerrie Cobb screams in frustration and throws her walkie-talkie into the duvet — Urla jumps and her rocket hat falls off — both the girls are laughing —

CUT

NOT THE WHITE BULL JUPITER SWIMMING

INT. CABIN — MORNING — Erin is sat on the bed with laptop — Urla has camcorder — zoom in — Erin’s face — zoom out — sudden noise from outside —

Larus (SHOUTING): GIRLS — GIRLS COME — SHI—

— Larus bursts into cabin, knocks into Urla with camera — Urla turns — camera focuses on Larus — excitement —

Larus (WHISPERING): Girls. Come quickly. Outside

Erin: What? What is it?

Larus: You’ll see. Come quickly. Quietly.

— girls follow Larus into corridor — Urla is in front with camera — Erin out of shot — out onto deck — Larus looks over deck — girls gather round — water slaps against side of boat — Greenland is faint on horizon — iceberg — no whales/dolphins —

Erin: What are we supposed to be looking at?

Larus: Shush. You’ll see

— the group stands silently for fourteen seconds —four metres away from the boat the water breaks — gush of air from blowhole — ridged back of sperm whale breaks surface — Urla shrieks —

Erin (YELLS): OHMYGOD—

Larus (SHOUTING): CHRIST. It’s nearer than before

— boat rocks —

Urla: Is it safe?

Larus: Jesus. Sorry. It took me by surprise. Yes, we should be safe. Just no more screaming, girls

Urla (LAUGHING): You screamed loudest. I have it all here.

I can play it back to you

Erin: It’s so big. I’ve never seen anything so big. Is it a sperm whale?

Larus: Yes, it’s a sperm whale. We will be safe, they’re not that curious. But it’s very close

— creature resurfaces further from boat — Erin jumps —

Erin: Oh god, it got me again

— nervous laughing — group stand and watch the whale resurface twice more before sinking into the calm water, its mass leaving its imprint in tiny bubbles —

CUT

THE COMMUNISTS ARE IN THE FUNHOUSE

KULUSUK: looks pretend. It is a tiny island ‘settlement’ with only five hundred people in it, which is, apparently, quite large for Greenland. The houses look like they were erected from a flat-pack box, as if they could be neatly folded away and taken with the people if they migrated. They are painted block primary colours: little toy houses, stage props. They are set into the rocks at jaunty angles. The slopes sit vertical against the still water, as if the island is built on the tips of a mountain range that lies just below the surface. The water must not get stormy because some of the houses sit just metres from its edge.

Urla is glad to be back on shore. She was short and restless and pacing in her catlike way, flitting between being happier reading on her own in the bedroom cabin and coming into the wheelhouse to sit with us but not saying anything, as though to remind us of her presence before slinking off back to her book.

I can’t sleep now, my womb feels like it is full of acid and lined with tar, and I can’t flail around like I would in my own bed because I will wake Urla. One of the nearby houses has huskies and they have been howling all night at the moonless sky. My eye mask itches, my Mooncup is uncomfortable and I am scared of leaking on the sheets on our last night with Larus.

This is the kind of period that requires a big fat nappy towel but I am trying to be good to the environment. I am still so glad to have my periods back that I feel no resentment towards it. The pill had stopped them and I went without for the whole time I was on it. I went on it like a lot of teenage girls do, because my periods hurt a lot and would interrupt that steady forward march to the drumbeat of patriarchy, making me take time off work and school. As though being female is an ailment to be cured with medicine.

I have been staring at the first ever picture of Earth for about an hour now. The one taken from the Apollo mission where they flew around the moon to take pictures of craters, the mission before they actually landed. They went up there to take these pictures of the moon’s craters but the astronauts decided to turn the camera around and film Earth rising from behind the moon.

At that moment, for the first time ever, images were appearing on the screens at NASA of Earth from outside Earth. They were watching themselves watching themselves almost in real time from 238,857 miles away. Right then, they reached a new level of self-consciousness that will probably never be recreated outside that room and moment ever again. A Copernican Revolution.

In the 1960s, the space race expanded the human psyche to incorporate a concept of deep space and deep time. The Earthrise photo made people stop and think about Earth more holistically. Maybe that is why people of the sixties cared more about each other and the future.

It is the most reproduced image on Earth, and has become more and more abstract until it has been reduced to an icon for human achievement in the twenty-first century, its significance totally inverted. I am starting to feel a bit strange about it. Because I have been exposed to it so many times that it has numbed me to what I am actually looking at, I am staring at it to try and really see it. It stays on my retina when I blink hard, so when I open my eyes it bleeds into the image on the screen and I can kind of imagine it rising.

They gave a name to the feeling astronauts get when they look back at Earth; they call it the ‘Overview Effect.’ When they are going round in orbit and they are trying to put it into words and it is all cauliflower clouds and dancing green ribbons of aurora and lightning like flicking modem lights and any way they put it sounds so stupid, they get frustrated with their words because it is the most earthly thing on Earth but at the same time it is outside our earthly logic.

It is the same in parts of science that deal with a reality that evades our logic. The scientists have to simplify things using a language we can all understand. Three guesses whose language they use!

But they have to use one language to talk to other scientists, and to distill their complicated theories until they make sense to us laypeople. But in so doing they make them into something nothing like what they wanted to say in the first place and we believe in this end product because it came from the mouths of scientists. They talk about quantum soup and quark flavour mixing and you wonder if it looks more like a minestrone or something smooth like pea soup. And they call their instruments things like THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPERCOLLIDER, so you wonder if they left the naming jobs down to earnest five-year-olds.

My favourite example of this is physics king and wife-manipulator Albert Einstein’s name for non-local faster-than-light interaction of atoms that are separated in space. The particles were created in the same instant in space but then got widely separated, but they can still be said to be the same particle, and if you measure one it immediately affects the other. I do not understand it fully but I just like what he called it. He called it spooky action at a distance.

And astronauts say things that seem so obvious and dumb, like, ‘You realise that the whole world is interconnected,’ and you snort at how obvious and dumb these clever astronauts sound, but then you think about it and actually maybe they are on to something. They say things like, ‘You realise that we are all already in space, on a giant spaceship, spaceship Earth,’ and you think they are just saying that in a condescending sort of subterfuge to everyone who is not really on a spaceship, until you realise that you had been thinking of yourself as on this anchored point from which they send rockets to space, when you have been out there the whole time. There is nothing underneath you and nothing above or either side for a very, very long way. The moon rolls around a groove in the space—time fabric created by the gravity of Earth.

There should be a flight about every five years that takes all of the current world leaders into orbit so that they can look down at Earth. If the UN wants world peace why have they not thought of that one?

MUSH QUIMMIG MUSH MUSH

Urla has taught me how to say: Hello, my name is Erin, thank you, yes, no, and the food was very nice. There is a Kalaallit Inuit family from the settlement that were travelling today to pick up supplies from Kangerlussuaq (gan-ker-schloo-schooak) on the west coast, where there is a DIY shop that has something specific that they need, and a family member that needs ferrying, and various other menial things which all seem insane to have to travel FIVE HUNDRED MILES for.

They intend to return with a heavy load, so the family are sending the dad and son out with two almost empty dog sleds. The dogs can run between forty and sixty miles in a day, so the thing should take us thirteen or fourteen days. It is too mountainous to get into Nuuk from the east side, but the ferry that goes from Kangerlussuaq to Nuuk only goes once a week. If all goes well, I should get into Kangerlussuaq the day before the ferry.

The dad is called Amos and he loves his dogs. When Amos put me on the sled with his son Umik he made things awkward from the offset by explaining that he might be a bit shy with me because he did not get to meet many girls in the village. Umik is about fifteen, does not say or smile much, wears a beanie with Miley Cyrus on it and a pair of neon orange-framed sunglasses which he never takes off.

Urla switched her mood as soon as we started moving again. She seems erratic, as though a cloud passes its shadow over her but lifts and then sunshine again. I was a little worried that maybe she had become bored with me; she seemed frustrated by the conversations that me and Larus had. It was the only way to keep time moving through the days at sea, but she would groan ‘boooringggg,’ Larus would throw a small object at her, and then she would leave the room.

When we left, Urla hugged her uncle aggressively. I was sad to leave him, but it feels like he has a place in my future as some kind of surrogate uncle or something. He gave me a pile of books and a badge that says Save The Bees which I put on my rucksack, and a knife for gutting fish. He also gave me his Skype and his mobile number, saying that I had to keep in touch weekly, and that he would worry about me once I had left his niece behind. This paternalism irritated me a little.

Urla is riding with Amos and I am with Umik and Genen, the lame dog who refuses to be left back at the house without the pack. He is sweet but a bit much. He has taken a shine to me and is keeping my legs warm but cutting off their circulation intermittently. He also smells, all of them smell, from being fed almost entirely on preserved seafood.

I have tried talking a bit with Umik using the Greenlandic phrase book but I am appalling at pronouncing the words. I think he resorted to putting his iPod on to stop me trying. I thought it would be nice of us to try Greenlandic in case they are sore about still being a colony. I got the phrase book from the harbour office in exchange for my Icelandic one and eight Danish krone. It is a thin thing and useless for actual conversation. I can only pick from utilitarian phrases that are laid out in this odd way that falls into accidental narratives at points:

Please

Thank you

How much does it cost?

This gentleman/lady will pay for everything

Would you like to dance?

I love you

Best wishes

Leave me alone!

Help!

Call the police!

I enjoy the narratives of phrase books. They always seem to follow a haphazard protagonist who is forever getting lost and bothering the emergency services. Oh, our hero is at a bakery. Now they are at a flower market. Oh, now they need an ambulance, holiday over! The phrases are like the names scientists come up with for things, almost useless but better than nothing, I suppose.

I am starting to really need a wee. I have asked Urla how to broach the subject and tried to convince her to tell Amos she needs to go so that we both can because I do not want to. I am just going to hold on until we stop, whenever that is, nightfall, which won’t actually fall but just become a state that we suddenly find ourselves in at some point in the unforeseeable future. By midnight the sun will just about disappear for a few hours.

THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

The command to make the dogs stop is extremely satisfying. They say ‘aaahhh’ really loud just like that, like letting out a massive sigh. The dogs lose momentum and the sleds come to a prompt but smooth halt, proportionate to the length of the sigh/command. Aaaaaaahhhhhhh. We did not head off until the afternoon today so we have had a full seven-hour stint without breaks. It was about eight in the evening when we stopped, very hungry and sore. I was almost definitely sure my period had leaked in my salopettes but no one could tell through the thickness so it was fine. Bit of a panic as to what to do but we have now figured out the toilet situation. One of us holds up a piece of tarpaulin while the other goes, but we have not yet found an explanation for Umik and Amos for the hysterics that Urla goes into as I try to take care of my Mooncup discreetly.

It makes me think about the Inuit relationship to the land, how consciously gentle they are to it, how aware they are that every single human being leaves an imprint, a mark on the land behind itself. Out on the ice with no plumbing and no soil this becomes stark. Every time you have to expel your waste a mark is left in the sparkling white snow and that impact is made so very concrete. Starting from our beginning anyone could track us right to where we end no matter how hard we try to leave everything in this place as we found it, could follow our paw marks and scratches and dug-up snow and buried bones.

The two tents Amos has look so tiny and bright against the vast white of the ice; accidental, futile, defiant, out-of-depth. Like a single plant clinging to the side of a cliff. We are sharing a one-man between the two of us, which at least guarantees maximum body heat exchange. Without the swooshing sound the moving sleds make, and with the dogs all asleep and huffing, this place is eerie-silent. Apart from when the wind makes the tents crackle, their taut skins whipping frantically. The quiet is ominous; we all feel it, the act of writing this itself feels like pathetic fallacy. But there is nothing but us for miles around, the nearest town is the one we headed off from. Urla says polar bears never come this far south, so not to worry too much about attracting them with my blood. It had not occurred to me to worry until she said.

Urla got a really great interview with Amos today. She did all the speaking, of course, with me filming. We watched it back and Urla translated it for me. He talks about being out on the ice, especially alone (he does most of his trips without Umik but he brings Genen).

I took it so that he was sat cross-legged on the ice with Genen, with nothing else in shot. It was almost perfect, like it encapsulated this ethereal feeling we have both tried and failed to describe: something just less than emptiness, a white collage.

What Thoreau said: in wildness is the preservation of the world. He is often misquoted as having said wilderness, but he meant pure wild-ness. Not wilderness in the sense you usually conceive it, a space set aside to be chaotic or fierce or biodiverse. He meant it in the sense of ‘wild’ as in ‘self-will’ in the past participle. Like looking out over the ocean, or into space, a blank and human-void place, and feeling tiny; this is what Thoreau meant. The very opposite of culture or civilisation.

It is an overwhelming feeling because it reminds you of how you are not like it; vast, indifferent, unfathomable. The ice will erase you. When you and everything living here leave, the ice will swallow up all of your traces. No symbols at all. You. Not you.

The ice sheet refuses human cartography utterly. It is an empty and markless expanse with nothing to anchor the lines of a map to. Well, probably there are glaciologists who can map it in some way, density of ice maybe, accumulation of atmospheric particles perhaps, but this can only be seen with a very specific kind of vision. An esoteric landscape does not help a person to find their way if they are lost; you could walk from the centre of here and never find your way again.

It makes me feel light-headed, this nullification, if I stand and look out into the expanse. But it is not like a paralysing onset of agoraphobia; instead it is the jolt of a sudden release, the severing of an anchor. It is so not at all like home, where cartography is inescapable, knitted into the soil, and there is no chance to get lost, not really. This is a place for walking, this is not: Welcome to the County of Worcestershire, Private Property, Do Not Walk On The Grass.

I asked Amos if he thinks we are on course to get there in time for the ferry. He just said, ‘Immaqa,’ which kind of means maybe and is the catchphrase of Greenland. Bodes well. Most methods of transport here only happen on a weekly basis.

ON BEING OF GREAT ADVANTAGE TO MY SEX

Sledding across all this snow it kind of feels like we are doing an antithetical version of messianic explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctica expedition. I watched the Herbert Ponting documentary for inspiration before we left England. At the beginning there is a slide with a quote from King George V along to some jolly colonial-era trumpeting. King George said, I WISH THAT EVERY BRITISH BOY COULD SEE THIS FILM FOR IT WOULD HELP TO FOSTER THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE ON WHICH THE EMPIRE WAS FOUNDED.

I wanted some of that spirit, even being of the 50 percent already excluded by KG. Positioning myself as male again; my masculine counterpart who lives in my brain, appending a fraud penis so I can traverse Scott’s Antarctica in my imagination.

We hunt and shoot some seals, but we have to feed the dogs that way so it is not too bad of us. And then they start to anthropomorphise the seals, which is kind of sweet, oh, nice guys, right? But we get all fond of this one seal and her pup, who is too fat and small to clamber out onto the ice when some killer whales chase it because they are hungry. Then we harpoon the killer whales to rescue the baby. Then we sit down to a bowl of seal stew.

Scott and his men died to put a flag at the South Pole. This is where the fine line between exploration and imperialism was crossed. The expedition was not an exercise in curiosity and adventure but a race of nationalistic pride. Men just love to stick their flags in places. North Pole, South Pole, on the seabed underneath the North Pole, on the tops of mountains, on the moon. Like territorial animals pissing on things.

Annie Smith Peck was a mountaineer who beat Indiana Jones to the summit of Mount Coropuna and stuck a ‘votes for women’ flag on the top of it. She was one of a handful of female explorers to be recognised for her success. Okay, ladies, Annie Smith Peck can have that one, although she is a ‘superwoman’ so don’t you mere mortal women go getting any ideas.

People go mad for that stuff still now, this boyish British Peter Pan nostalgia for exploration and empire. Scouting and wilderness techniques and Bear Grylls, the zealous Christian outdoorsman on the Discovery Channel. When it came out Scouting for Boys was only beaten as a bestseller by the Bible. It actually came out after the imperial age of Scott and Shackleton when British masculinity was feeling threatened by the waning strength of empire and the rise of the women’s rights movement. The emasculation of men. Which is maybe what the current resurgence of Mountain Man documentaries on television is all about. And they made Bear Grylls the new Chief Scout.

I want my documentary to be the opposite of colonial exploitation. I want it to explore, quietly, without imprinting. To be porous to all things without contaminating. I want it to be conscious of its tracks in the snow (I did get footage of this to use to that purpose).

THE RESURRECTION OF RACHEL CARSON

Today I ride with Genen again. I go to the furthest places at times like this, when I am stationary in transit and alone with just my own head. I fell asleep and had a dream about Rachel Carson. I was in the ‘woods’ that are near my house, which really is just a square of lank trees they did not cut down when they built the estate. It is also laced with radon. It is kind of a recreational area for the housing estate, where everyone walks their dogs. It stinks of dog shit. Mum told me not to play in there when I was young in case it somehow got in my eyes and I got blinded by the shit.

I was in the woods, standing in the woods and being very still because I could hear buzzing and I was trying to figure out which way not to walk. Then next to me what I had taken for a very ordinary mound of undergrowth started to move. It began to rise in the horizontal shape of a human body. The human shape pulled up all the turf around it as it began to sit up, plucking the plant roots out of the soil like snapping violin strings. They made a noise like that, pluck pluck pluck. When the human shape had sat up it started to brush itself down, its clothes caked in mud and its skin smeared with dirt and dog shit. I recognised Rachel Carson even though I don’t know what she looks like and her face was just a smudge with lichen for eyes.

‘Pigeons are suddenly dropping out of the sky dead.’

I was not sure if she was addressing me. It was hard to tell what way her lichen eyes were facing, but her head was turned away from me anyway. Then I woke up from pins and needles because Genen was sat with his femur digging into my shin.

FIRST FOOTPRINTS IN THE FRESH SNOW

Every day here is just a slight variation on the first, differentiated by switching sledges, sluggish topics of conversation, and a sky that will sometimes bleed dramatically pink to orange like the belly of a rainbow trout. Sometimes there are strong winds. The constants are the smell of the dogs, wincing at the whip-crack, tensing for the snowdrifts, pins and needles, and the white nothing. I am trying to stay proactive and read but I am kind of too bored to concentrate.

A THOUGHT: This nothingness is going to be a very prominent part of the trip. Lots and lots of sitting around, waiting on things, being in transit, but out on the ice like on the ocean this is intensified, your own small contours marked out against the vastness of ether, so that you look at your hands out in front of you and follow the line of your fingers up and down and think, I end here, all of me fills up this container that is my body.

Like proprioception. I keep on thinking that this is the closest I will ever come to moonwalking. There are parallels: the same bulky outerwear, the same being-in-emptiness. Yes, it is almost like moonwalking.

All day I was with Urla and we did not speak more than ten words. Today is day nine, entries are sparse because, mostly, I had nothing to say. It is hard to think with no stimulation. Doing nothing is exhausting. We have slipped into this kind of mental hibernation, except Umik and Amos, who have their tasks to occupy them. Mostly I have been sleeping lots and dreaming vividly. And the ice has saturated my dreams. After a while nothingness becomes potent and textured because of the sense of what is absent. Things are evoked more than if they were actually there: colours, heights, depths. Slight changes in the monochrome landscape come out in relief. When the ice-mountains precipitate onto the horizon they appear as a whisper and disappear as quietly. The horizon is the only spatial marker and it is always on the horizon. We are perpetually at the centre of nothing.

It feels like trespassing to be alive in a place that is not dead but is inexistence, negation of potentiality. Anything alive is only ever passing through. I cannot put a word on it and when I try I can only think ‘primordial,’ but that word entails potential because a beginning initiates a narrative. The one I want is the very opposite of origin.

Words are getting harder and I am starting to think like the ice; without contrast there is no definition. The ice is self-referential and there is no way into the tautology. I cannot get my bearings if there is nothing to grasp.

THESE ARE SHINING PARTS

I was sorry to leave Umik behind to look after the dogs and sleds. We all hugged goodbye awkwardly, which made him visibly uncomfortable. It felt strange to be walking, and to be walking off the packed snow. I thought permafrost was a permanent frost that kept the ground crispy, but Amos explained it is underneath the ground, and keeps the water up so everything is actually wet and boggy. It was a difficult walk with all the sucking mud, and the weight of our rucksacks. It got a bit warm, even with the wind, so we had to take our coats off, but the wet brings all the insects out and some of them were biting through our thinner sleeves.

I had managed to walk all that way without looking up much from where my feet were going and what insects I was slapping into my skin so it did not even occur to me that the ice was gone until we started driving. Amos was so excited to be in a car, he drove the whole way with the window down and his arm resting on the door, which made it cold in the back but neither of us wanted to say anything. He was talking to his brother, who picked us up in his 4x4, all animated, which suited me because I like to zone out when people are talking a language I do not understand.

Then I started to look out of the window and it hit me how colourful everything was. Not really objectively, but in such contrast it nearly hurt my eyes. All this space just mossy and vaguely pink and it just went on and on and on. It hardly changed for the whole journey, flickering on in muted colours, and in front and behind the road was a thin wisp existing through it. The only shape to change was the twisting spine of the mountains.

Wilderness, vast open spaces untouched and just left be. Not a reserve portioned off as a space where you are supposed to go and be recreational. It made me think of Alaska, and how much left I have to see, and how out here it is easy to imagine yourself alone and happy in it.

As I watched the landscape thaw I thought I felt my spirit thawing a little with it. As if there was something deep inside me that was frozen and had maybe always been frozen and like an Alaskan wood frog frozen dormant for winter it was beginning to wake up to the world again with the spring.

A RECURRING FEELING: getting excited like forgetting something and then remembering you already did it, like I was waiting for a phone call from Mum asking me what the hell I thought I was doing, young lady, and to come home right now, but realising, nope, she was not going to.

Amos was really apologetic about leaving us at the hostel and seemed genuinely distressed that he did not have room to accommodate us, which was very sweet. We gave him money, which he took with some sort of feigned coaxing; he kept saying, ‘Lovely girls, lovely girls.’

Kangerlussuaq was only built quite recently by America for the airport. The hostel seems like it is made from slotted-together foam board, partition walls. Like knocking into it would just make it collapse. All of the furniture looks like it was bought from Staples and the mattresses are made from foam.

There is a television with American cable and the Discovery Channel. I am taking notes from Bear Grylls for the documentary, both for handy tips and for a character profile of the kind of idea of ‘man and wild’ I keep going on about. As though modern feminism is more ubiquitous than ever before (or so it seems to me, as maybe it does to each new generation) and in backlash, with renewed fanaticism, a strain of hyper-masculinity has occurred. Compensating; which men have always liked to do!

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ENDURING THE MOST DRAMATIC HARDSHIPS YOU CAN IMAGINE

INT. — Erin sits on the corner of a bed with a notebook and pen in hand, facing a television — outdoor survivalist show with presenter Bear Grylls — interior is sparse: desk, table, chair, window, rucksacks and possessions spilt on the floor — Erin turns to notice camera and snorts — zoom in on her face — then on television screen — Bear Grylls is hoisting himself up a waterfall —

Bear Grylls (ON SCREEN) (YELLING): SURVIVAL can be summed up in three words (PAUSE) Never. Give. Up.

— camera pans back to Erin —

Erin (PUTTING ON AN IMPRESSIVE IMITATION): I have penetrated every crevice of the planet and conquered the WORST nature can haul at me. There is nowhere I haven’t taken on. I’m going to show you the skills I invented that you need to be as man as I am. And survive anywhere on this unforgiving planet

— Urla is laughing behind camera — camera back to TV screen — zooms in and out erratically on presenter struggling against onslaught of water —

Erin: If you’re stranded in the wilderness you need a weapon. Ideally a rifle. If you don’t have a rifle nature will sometimes throw you a rope in the form of a makeshift weapon. Behold.

For example

— Erin flourishes her pen to the camera —

Erin: This thousand-year-old arrowhead I found on the floor. I will tie it to a stick with the cord from my parachute. If you don’t have an arrowhead or a parachute cord, use your initiative. Initiative is man’s best weapon

— she winks — Urla laughs —

Erin: I am on a journey of SURVIVAL. (THROWS BACK HER HEAD AS SHE SHOUTS) Every step of this journey is me. Man. Surviving. Not dying. Never succumbing to the weakness that is death

CUT TO —

INT. — still in same interior but props have moved — belongings piled in corner — Erin has T-shirt tied to her head turban style and is brandishing a broom handle like a scythe —

Erin (GESTICULATING BROOMSTICK ON EMPHASISED WORDS): The tropics are home to most of the plants and animals in the world, most of which are trying to KILL YOU. Not every creature in the jungle wants to kill you. Instead these ones want to EAT YOU ALIVE. Sometimes in the jungle it can feel like everything is out to get you. BECAUSE IT IS. Man must reassert his dominance in the jungle. I flick the tarantula off my leg

— Erin mimes flicking her leg —

Erin: Petty bug

— pan to television — presenter is in a desert, talking with spear-clad barefoot gentleman who is holding up to him the corpse of something furry — pan back to Erin, who is looking at the screen —

Erin: If you are stranded in the desert you can expect a visit. FROM DEATH. It would take years to learn all the skills of the San Bushmen but I have done it in a matter of hours. They eat every morsel of the desert hare and respect its soul. I will bite out its liver and leave the rest because its liver contains a vitamin that is vital for preventing something bad I mentioned earlier

— onscreen presenter passes the carcass back to the San Bushman —

Erin: Take the rest of the carcass. I have no use for it. No, you may NOT have one of my adventure-sports-sponsorship power-bars, San Bushman

— camera shakes with laughter —

CUT TO —

EXT. FROZEN LAKESIDE — Erin in snow next to a body of frozen water — she is now brandishing a large stick —

Erin: Here in the Arctic there are fish under the ice. I have a frozen deer leg so that’s what I’m going to use to smash through the ice. If you don’t have a frozen deer leg, use your initiative. I’m going to make a line using some cord from my parachute. And some other really useful stuff I found in my pocket

— she takes to hitting the ice with the stick —

CUT