White-out (December '67)
Our rule of thumb was that we could travel in winds less than fifteen knots
because we could see over the spindrift but at higher wind speeds
visibility was nil. I recall that in 1968 on the Shackleton trip I fitted
the anemometer dial next to my bunk in the caboose (our ski born caravan),
I could therefore decide whether or not it was worth getting up without
even sitting up to the window! Whiteout however was different. Visibility
was often several miles, but because horizons were lost and there was
nothing to focus on, one often realised one was gazing intently at the snow
ten yards in front, hoping to see a flag two miles away. It was like being
in dense fog, until a flag or drum suddenly appeared with stark clarity a
mile away. It was silent too, often eerily so.
A heavy bright blanket enshrouds the world
Our world
A world of complete unbroken flawless white
So flat
So featureless
So uninspired
A new canvass awaiting it's Constable
A blank manuscript hoping for Mozart
A clean sheet before it's Shakespeare
A dead thing pleading life and meaning,
Pleading new horizons
For there are no horizons
They have fled this world
Our white world
As though no longer needed here
But demanded elsewhere
To separate laughing deck-chaired sands
And shrilling bare legged sea
From blue-white gull gliding summer skies,
That little children might look up
From their castles in the sand
(Castles in the air?)
And exclaim
"Look Daddy - A Ship
Out there on the horizon."
But we have no horizon
And no ship to define it.
Dead, blind, unfocussed silence,
A confusing battle of light
Between cloud and snow
The skirmish ends when some snow-sympathetic gale
Drives off the cloying cloud
Only then can the snowscape come from hiding
Resuming its form and distance,
Its smooth contoured snow hills
Its beautiful sastrugi like leaping dolphins
Schooled but sculptured mid flight
In frozen poetic poise amidst this sea of ice
This sea with its clear clean horizon
Close by
Encrusting those dolphin flanks,
Delightful snow-quins cling in clusters
As beds of minute mussels,
Unashamedly catching the eye
Winking, glistening
Pink, blue, green, gold
Enchanting the senses
But now their flirting frivolity remains subdued
And iced dolphins dive to oblivious depths,
For no gallant wind has yet relieved
The snow of its burdensome cloud layer;
Snow and cloud fight for recognition
Each negating the other with scattered light
And their effort is futile
Unheard, irrelevant
It's only effect on we mortals privileged to witness,
Is stillness
Silence...
Nothing...
Whiteout.