Shackleton's Drift

By Craig Cormick

Shackleton's Drift is a compelling parallel story, comparing the famed Antarctic explorer's epic travails on the ice with those of an author trying to write Shackleton's story. The narrator is struggling to make sense of the uncontrolled drift of his own life in the face of social disintegration and increased terrorism, but finds meaning and consolation in following Shackleton's story, imagining himself on the drifting ice with Shackleton and his men, battling against the elements to save themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merino Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780646509495

Craig Cormick

Dr Craig Cormick OAM is an award-winning author and science communicator. He has published many more books than he has children and grandchildren (and he has four and three of those respectively). He was born on Dharawal Country – Wollongong – and has lived in the Blue Mountains and Queensland. He currently lives on Ngunnawal land in Canberra. He has been Chair of the ACT Writers Centre, co-host of the literary podcast Secrets from the Green Room, and has edited several magazines and books. He is drawn to stories of people whose voices have been hidden from history. Find him at wwwcraigcormick.com

Book preview

by Craig Cormick

First Published in 2009 by

Merino Press

12 Giffen Close

Holt ACT Canberra 2616.

© Craig Cormick 2009

We all have our own White South.

—  Sir Ernest Shackleton.

––––––––

You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.

—  Thomas Pynchon, V

Sir Ernest Shackleton was always good in bed. Frank found he liked him best late on chill nights when he couldn’t sleep, or when something had rattled him. He was a great comfort to a man then.

Well, that was how Frank liked to tell it, anyway.

He sits up in the cheap motel room now, turning pages of Shackleton’s autobiography, South, that tells of his epic 1914-15 expedition to try and cross the Antarctic continent. He is reading the bit where the ship becomes trapped in the pack ice and they are nearly crushed. He’s been reading that bit a lot lately. It took Shackleton and his men a year and a half to get back safely to civilization, never having set foot on the Antarctic continent. But he made it back. And Frank thinks that one day he’ll look back on this difficult time of his as his own time in the frozen wilderness.

He likes the sound of that too, and he writes it in his notebook. It sounds more like some deep wanderlust that needs fulfilling than leaving home, as Trisha has accused him of. Then he glances around the room and his eyes fall on his bags. Still packed in the corner. It’s a symbol of the first night of his new life, he thinks. He waits for some line about that to come to him – but none does. Maybe later. He’ll insert it retrospectively into his notebook then.

He looks back to South, studiously ignoring the small TV screen on the hotel bench top in front of him. It is as blank as the white brick hotel walls now – though he’d switched it on when he first settled into bed. Just for the company of a face and a voice. He started going around the dial with the remote, as you do, when he found the news showing some plane crash in some foreign country. Undoubtedly another suicide bomber or hijacking gone wrong. There was twisted metal and baggage strewn across some snowy forest floor. He stared at it a moment and felt his blood turning cold like it always did. And the memory of his own crash flood over him once again. The feeling of being trapped within twisted metal. The cold. The terror. The only one to survive. He felt the shaking start deep within him, so he switched off the TV. That’s when he picked up Sir Ernest Shackleton and lay back on the bed with him. He truly was a great comfort at such times.

An avoidance tactic, his wife Trisha had called it. Or ex-wife. Or separated wife. Or whatever he should now call her. But he said it was more about controlling the terror. Said he was developing a theory on it. But she never understood it when he tried to explain it.

He tries to concentrate on Sir Ernest’s narrative. His consistent control over chaos. His single-minded sense of purpose. But Frank finds he is thinking of Trisha again. He wonders what she feels, knowing that he’s not in the spare room anymore. Knowing there’s not going to be another fight in the morning. Knowing that he’s finally left.

He supposes they will fight about that too. He will claim that she threw him out and she will claim that he left her. But he’s already written in his not book, Tonight she chucked me out. She told him if he couldn’t make up my mind about their relationship then he might as well go. And Frank can imagine holding up the notebook in court one day, for lawyers and historians to see, and saying, ‘You can read it for yourself! I was thrown out!’

And she might say in reply, ‘But you’ve always said that we shouldn’t believe everything you write in that book. That a lot of the incidents are imaginings of facts rather than things as they actually happened. Just stories, you said.’

And Frank would sit down and mumble, ‘The truth is an elusive thing!’

He sighs and wishes that Ernest Shackleton really was there in bed beside him, sitting up against the too-hard motel pillows. Frank would ask him what it felt like when he set out alone into the wilderness. But then he ponders that and thinks it sounds just a little too much like a tabloid TV question. You know, he’s stepping onto solid land for the first time in many months and he’s just survived nearly two years in the Antarctic, lost his ship and most of his provisions, suffered enormous travails, and the reporter sticks a microphone in his face and asks, ‘When you set out on your journey, what did it feel like?’

What on earth could you say in ten seconds when it took him over 300 pages to tell the whole story? And yet, although Frank has read South several times, he has a nagging feeling that Sir Ernest is holding something back from him. Something he needs to understand.

He looks around the room again. ‘My first day in the wilderness,’ Frank says out loud. It is the first sound in the room in about half an hour, and is gone as soon as he has uttered it. He stares down at the book in his hands. Stares at the words there and wonders how close they are to what Shackleton really felt. For that’s what he needs to know.

So Frank lays down South and picks up his notebook again, turning to a new page. It is as blank as the bare motel walls. As blank as the overcast southern skies must have seemed to Shackleton as he steamed south from South Georgia Island in 1914 – the last outpost of civilization – facing the uncertainty of the future. That’s a good line, he thinks. And that’s where he decides he’ll start his story. That point where Shackleton is leaving civilisation, with no clear idea if he’s going to make it back or not. Frank likes the image of Shackleton standing at the helm of his ship, the Endurance, as it steams out of Grytviken whaling station and heads steadily southwards. It’s so clear and stark.

There is a slight pause for effect. If they ever make a telemovie about his life, Frank thinks, they’ll want to do a re-enactment of this. The crucial moment when he finally began writing his epic book on Shackleton. The point at which the great work was begun. There would be a slow building of background music and then a zoom in to a close up on his face. He concentrates and then slowly brings his pen down towards the empty page and he writes the words Sir Ernest Shackleton is looking out the ship’s windows, towards that overwhelming emptiness in front of him.

Frank smiles and feels like punching his hand into the air. He’s done it. Crescendo of music. Close up on the words on the page. He feels like jumping out of bed and ringing Trisha – his ex-wife or separated wife or whatever – and telling her that he’s begun the book. She’d said it would never be written. Said his endless research was just a way of hiding from things. Like the publishers told him that there were too many books on Shackleton written already. But Frank knew they were all wrong. Knew his book was going to be different. It was going to be a revelation! The book that finally got into his head and found the truth of the great yet enigmatic man.

And now Frank closes his eyes and tries to conjure up that feeling of standing at the helm of the ship there himself. The last land fades behind him. Nothing before him but the emptiness and the future. And Frank thinks he can feel it. He really can. He knows just what that bleak emptiness feels like.

Like two bags, still packed, in the corner of a bare motel room.

- - -

Ernest Shackleton is looking out the ship’s windows towards that overwhelming emptiness in front of him, but he keeps glancing across at Skipper Frank Worsley, who is writing up notes in the ship’s log. The Skipper, feeling eyes upon him, looks up with a question on his face.

‘Must make a few notes myself when there’s an opportunity,’ Shackleton says. The Skipper nods and looks back to the log book, mumbling, ‘Most important to keep a good journal.’ But Shackleton, who they all call simply the Boss, just stands there, staring out at the grey ocean and sky ahead of them. He wonders how many more days before they will sight icebergs or pack ice. The whalers at South Georgia Island have told them that it is a bad season. The worst they’ve see for many years.

‘Did you know that Captain Cook named it?’ Worsley asks.

‘Named what?’ Shackleton asks.

‘South Georgia,’ he says. ‘After poor old mad King George.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ says Shackleton.

‘After his New Zealand visit, of course,’ says Worsley. The Skipper is a New Zealander and has told the men many times that he has mixed Maori and European blood and is descended from generations of great sea-farers.

All the crew on board the Endurance are a little subdued to be leaving South Georgia, for they know there is no further port of call, nor human settlement, ahead of them, and no one they will be able to turn to for help but themselves, should they require it. But God willing they will not. Shackleton has prepared for this expedition meticulously, like one might research the writing of a book, making endless notes before beginning a single line of writing.

It’s a good analogy, he thinks, because it is his mission to not only lead the expedition, but to record it in words. Each detail and victory and emotion. Like the feeling of facing the stark emptiness ahead of them that settles upon him now. He opens and closes his hands behind his back, as if trying to pluck that feeling out of the air and hold it close to him. Then he leaves the bridge and goes to his cabin. He sits on his thin bunk, as he prefers to, and opens his journal in front of him. He stares at those blank white pages for some time as he turns back to his last entry. He looks at the words. He sometimes thinks of them as being like tracks across the snowy wastes. This small book bears the weight of the expedition, he thinks, for he knows that the success of his expedition, financially and historically, will largely be derived by the success of his words in capturing it.

Robert Falcon Scott’s journal had already become as well-known and as well-quoted as the Bible in England. His expedition, the previous year, was a failure – he was beaten to the Pole by Amundsen and died on his return journey. But he was a grand hero because of his journal. The nation had hung on his words as if they had all been dying in that small tent with him. Women’s bosoms heaved across the nation and grown men had cried.

Lines like: Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions, which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

Then Shackleton looks at what he himself has written as his own last entry: Left Grytviken on morning of December 5. Weather fair. He can’t imagine any women’s bosoms heaving nor grown men crying when they read it.

He fears he does not have the skill with words that Scott had. ‘Scott! Scott! Scott!’ he mumbles. He had travelled with Scott on his first attempt at the Pole in 1901. They had to turn back when they were still a distant 745 miles from their goal. Poor planning, Shackleton had blamed it upon. Scott was always undone by his poor sense of planning and his haughtiness. It would lead to his death one day, Shackleton had often predicted. And it had, of course. But he’d become a national hero nevertheless.

He has heard it said that Scott’s journal was actually rewritten by his good friend Sir James Barrie, to make it more appealing to the public. To make it more fantastic perhaps, since Sir James, as the author of Peter Pan, had a flair for magical fancy.

But that has also been a consolation to Shackleton, for he knows that regardless of how well his is able to tell his story in his journal, when he has returned to England after having completed his successful crossing of the Antarctic continent, he will be able to rewrite his own notes, perhaps working with another author, to publish a definitive account. And he wonders if Scott knew, at some point, that the only way he would be able to turn his failure to victory would be through dying, and how that effected his writing? He wonders at what point a man knows these things?

- - -

Frank is happy. Happier than he’s been for a long time. He reads over what he’s written and feels he’s really gotten off to a good start. He thinks of the metaphor of steaming through rough seas and avoiding any icebergs that might block his way, but thinks it a poor choice. Although he recalls somebody describing writing as being like an iceberg – with 20 per cent above the surface where it can be seen and the rest all lurking below out of sight. Or was that 10 per cent above the water? Or was it perhaps 12.5 per cent? It doesn’t matter, for he thinks it a poor metaphor anyway. If writing was an iceberg you could argue that it could easily disembowel your vessel if you got too close to it.

Icebergs are also lettuce, he thinks, but that thought doesn’t really go anywhere. He sits back in bed and wonders what Trisha might say if he rang her up right now and told her that he’d not just started his book at last, but that he was off on a roll. She’d probably scream at him for ringing her after mid-night though. He lets that thought just drift away from him.

She screamed at him when he left. Or when she threw him out. Well, she didn’t really, but he thinks it would sound better in the telling if she did. She didn’t say anything in fact. She left for work and had taken the kids to school and he had half the day off for a moving day. He’d packed his bags then sort of just wandered around the house and he remembers thinking that in the movie of his life he’d probably have Trisha sitting there at the dining table, reading one of her psychology text books, while he packed and got ready to leave. Maybe it would make his vacuuming make more sense, because as he stood at the door, ready to step out into the unknown, with his bags packed, he looked down at his feet and he suddenly noticed all this ground-in dirt in between the floorboards. He wondered if it was all just from the ten years they’d been in the house and why he’d never noticed it before.

And God knows why, but he suddenly decided it was vitally important to drag out the vacuum cleaner from the laundry cupboard and run it over the wooden floor of the hallway. Frank pushed the vacuum up the hallway and then back down, the roar of the machine filling the silent house. But in the movie script he would peer into the dining room to see Trisha was still pretending to be reading her text books. Pretending it was really important. Like he was pretending it was really important that he vacuum right at that moment.

So he kept going and moved into the laundry. It hadn’t been vacuumed in a long time. Certainly not by Frank. He stepped in from the doorway, reaching around behind the door, moving the laundry basket and getting right in close beside the washing machine. This was Trisha’s territory normally. Frank had never quite understood the washing machine’s different settings for rinses and woolens and coloured and whites. He just threw everything in and ran it on standard wash, but that’s why so many of his whites had a pink tint to them from red things, and why his kids, James and Beth, wouldn’t let him wash their clothes. The vacuum scraped on the tiles a little as he worked his way around.

When he was done he looked around the laundry and then closed the door and stepped out into the hallway again. She would still be sitting there at the dining room table. A camera shot like peering around the doorframe, showing her still staring at her books. And Frank still kept vacuuming. He went up the hallway and into the spare room where all his boxes of things were stacked. The vacuum was much quieter on the carpet. He stood there looking around at all his life gathered up in so few boxes and vacuumed around them. He knew that when he carried them out to the car there’d be dust squares on the floor where he’d had them stacked, but he decided he’d like to know they were still there even after he left, and so didn’t vacuum any more there. Then he went back into the hallway again. Behind him were the kids’ room. He opened James’ door first. It was a bit of a mess, as always. He made his way in carefully with the vacuum, working around the loose socks and small toys. He thought about picking them up, but felt that cleaning James’ room would actually make it looked unlived in.

A sudden rattling noise startled him. Frank looked at the vacuum, fearful that he’d broken it. Then he knew what it was. Some coin of James’ pocket money was going up the vacuum hose, ringing around and around as it rolled its way up the metal tube. He wondered if he should stop the machine and get it out for him. But he kept on. The cost of having someone clean his room for him, he thought.

Back in the hallway he paused a moment, and then opened the door to what had been his and Trisha’s bedroom. He decided not to go in. There were more things in there than it would be possible to vacuum up. So he closed the door and just stood there a moment with the roar of the machine filling his ears. He stood up straight and felt a little giddy suddenly. Maybe he should go a little slower, he thought. A little easier.

He moved across to his daughter Beth’s bedroom, and worked through it quickly, doing the edges and behind the door. She had thrown all her clothes and things on her bed. As always. A teenager’s sense of making her whole room her wardrobe. It didn’t take long to do the floor. Then he was back in the hallway and looking into the dining room again. He took a deep breath and dragged the vacuum cleaner in behind him and concentrated on looking down at the floor. Trisha wouldn’t even look up as he moved closer. She would still be pretending to be reading. And Frank would squeeze in behind her, staring at the dirt on the floor. Their dirt.

The camera would close in on him to show that he felt like he should say something, but was afraid that if he opened his mouth to speak it would all come out. His fear of moving out and the way he was also looking forward to it. The way he wanted to avoid another final shouting match, but still felt there were things he could say. So he would squeeze in behind her and say nothing. Let the roar of the vacuum fill the silence. He’d look quickly at her book, and would think she was still on the same page she was reading a half hour earlier. Probably something about compulsive behaviour or denial in middle-aged males. That was what she was always going on at him about.

Around the other side of the table now and then he was done. He moved out of the dining room and into the kitchen. The last room to do, he decided, and he’d do it real quick. To be honest Frank was starting to get a little tired now. His back was hurting a bit from bending and pressing so much. A normal clean would entail just running around all the main areas lightly.

Frank bent to the task. He vacuumed up dog biscuit crumbs first. Then all the food remains around the cupboards. He could see some ground-in food on the lino, so he grabbed some paper towels off the bench, and the cleaning spray, and he bent down onto his knees to attack it. He left the vacuum running beside him, and wiped at the grime until he’d worn a hole in the paper towel and it was all gone. But down close he could now see that the cupboard doors were dirty too. There were spots of food scraps and grease all over them. He took a new handful of paper towels and attacked them until they too were clean.

Then he could see how dirty the stove was. There were large balls of dust between it and the wall. Why had he never seen that before? he wondered. But the space was far too narrow for the vacuum hose. Frank was thinking of how he might somehow lift the stove right out and clean in there when he suddenly realised what he was doing. If Trisha had been watching him she’d probably have realised it earlier. She’d probably read it already somewhere in her psychology book. There was probably a whole chapter there on how a man would try and make the house as clean as possible before leaving it to try and wipe away all the stains of the past ten years.

And Frank wondered if that might have dawned on him quicker if they’d had slate floors. The metaphor of wiping the slate clean would have surely occurred to him much earlier. And Frank then wonders what the actor they choose to play him might look like and what his face might show at this point, when he realises what he’s doing. Close up shot on his face. His eyes blinking slowly. Knowing it. Then the camera goes soft focus into whiteness.

Frank hopes it isn’t Tom Cruise. Not because he’s a scientologist or anything. The scientologists have never hijacked a plane to the best of Frank knowledge. Just because he’s such a dick! Maybe Hugh Jackman or Heath Ledger, he thinks.

And Frank remembers climbing to his feet and switching off the vacuum cleaner. Letting the roar fade away until there was only the silence left. And he had this great line in his head about wondering how all the feeling was sucked out of their relationship, leaving nothing but this emotional vacuum between them. He wasn’t sure how you’d say that in film though.

Lights dim and slow fade out didn’t quite convey it.

Maybe he could convince the producer to use title cards or a narrator’s voice over, as if it was a standard documentary. He likes the idea of crossing boundaries. Another metaphor, he thinks. The voice over would say that Trisha dated the beginning of things becoming really difficult between them to September 2001. September 11 to be precise. She had this head for figures and dates like most women. She’d said Frank had become sort of fixated from that date. Near catatonic for a few weeks, and that was the point that he began losing his compass, as she described it. He loved that line. Knew he’d steal it one day and use it for himself.

But she was wrong, Frank knew. He dated everything back to the Mount Erebus air disaster of 1979. The one where an Air New Zealand sightseeing plane crashed into Mount Erebus in Antarctica, killing all 257 passengers and crew on board. That was the moment the world changed. Those who didn’t get it until September 11 were just slow on the uptake.

Frank can still remember it vividly. He was ten years old at the time and saw pictures of the crash on television. He had nightmares for weeks. He could even remember some things that were never televised. Debris and rubble spread across the mountain side. The smoking danger of the volcano. Rescuers diggings bodies out of the snow to see if any were still alive. Frozen bodies being carried away on sleds. And from that moment it was like he became attuned to every air disaster or terrorist bomb around the world, and they were all forming part of a big puzzle that was coming together. The shooting down of Korean Airline flight 007 in 1983. The bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. The Entebbe hijacking of 1976. The bombing of Air India flight 182 over Ireland in 1985. The Malaysian Airlines Fight 653 crash in 1977.  The shoot out aboard Egypt Air Flight 648 in 1985.The Arrow Air Flight 1285 crash off Newfoundland in 1985. So many flights and numbers and lives lost. And September 11 was like finding a corner-edge of the jigsaw puzzle. Frank could start to see a pattern emerging. Sort of.

But Trisha didn’t see it like that. Post-traumatic stress, she described it as. Said it had to do with his own near-death experience when young. Said that crash has led to delayed trauma. Said it could be common amongst already highly-anxious people. Frank thinks that’s absurd, of course, as if he were just standing around all those years waiting for a hat rack to hang his anxieties on. Like nothing really changed after September 11, but Frank’s attitude to the world. How couldn’t she see it? Everything was different. The whole world had become more chaotic and dangerous than it had ever been before.

‘I don’t see why you have to make yourself so anxious about the state of things,’ she’d say.

‘I don’t see why you can’t,’ he’d reply.

‘Get over it. We’re in the post-age of terror now,’ she’d say. And it would deteriorate from there. Spiraling around and around. Sucking out everything good between them. And Frank suddenly thinks of another great line. The worn-in dirt that binds. He’d have to use that in his Shackleton book somewhere, he thinks.

For Sir Ernest Shackleton fought with his own