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‘roger’ and ‘wilco’ instead of ‘yes’ and ‘I’ll do that’, and where every conversation finishes with the word ‘clear’.
    Then there was nothing but the background hiss from the HF, punctuated by occasional splurts caused by incoming cosmic rays (which Sarah calls ‘cosmic raspberries’). She told me that the swishing sounds, like waves on a beach, were radio storms on Jupiter, and that low-pitched curtailed whistle was a passing meteorite.
    Sarah first came south in 1985. She was the youngest of four kids, the baby, and being outdoors meant that nobody else would be bugging her. ‘All I ever wanted was to have my own ideas and not be told what to do and how to do it.’ In the end, her parents used to take Sarah and her dog out to the lakes near her home in Iowa and leave them there to kayak all day. By the time she applied to go to Antarctica, she had spent fourteen years as an instructor in the National Outdoor Leadership School. Still, it took two years for her to be accepted. (Her boyfriend was accepted in two weeks.)
    And on her first view of the landscape, she was captivated. ‘I felt like I had no place to put it,’ she said. ‘It was so big, so beautiful. I thought it might seem bare, but that b word didn’t occur to me. Antarctica was just too full of itself.’
    The US Navy was still running logistics then, and there were twenty-eight civilian women out of perhaps a thousand people. Of course that meant there was a permanent spotlight on every woman in the place. The men who didn’t think women should be on the ice had no qualms about saying so. For many of them, if women could do this then it wasn’t such a big deal, it didn’t feel quite so heroic. But there were also, she said, plenty of men who were delighted with the changes, who loved having women as colleagues and friends.
    â€˜A few years in, a bunch of Russian men were coming through town,’ she told me, ‘and the National Science Foundation Rep, Dave Bresnahan, invited me to a cocktail party for them. “What is this?” I asked him, “An escort programme?” But Dave said, “No, Sarah. The Russians don’t let women in their programme. I want you to talk to them, tell them what you do. Influence them.”’ She was clearly touched by this. ‘It wasn’t women fighting a world of men,’ she said. ‘It was women and men together, fighting the bigots.’
    Over the years, Sarah had now worked in many different roles: in the field centre, as a mountaineer, as a helicopter technician, and she even operated the base’s short-lived (but legendary) hovercraft. But her season as camp manager up on Mount Erebus was the one she most wanted to talk about, the one she still saw when she closed her eyes and thought about the ice.
    Mount Erebus overlooks McMurdo and much of the rest of Ross Island. It is the most southerly active volcano in the world, the bottom part of the Pacific ring of fire, and one of the very few volcanoes that has a permanent molten lake of lava. It looks like a softly sloped mountain, draped with snow, except for the distant wisp of smoke that is visible whenever the cloud clears.
    Erebus is high—nearly 13,000 feet—and Sarah’s camp was within striking distance of its summit. One day near the end of the season she took a skidoo as far up as she could get and then hiked the rest of the way to the crater. When she reached the true summit and looked south for the first time, she burst into tears. ‘I looked right down the peninsula and saw that tiny thing that was Ob Hill and to the right, the Erebus ice tongue looking like a chainsaw. And I thought, “How did I ever earn this? What will I have to do to pay for this?”’
    It took her three hours to walk round the rim. The weather was cold but beautiful, and the air stank of rotten eggs. (She got ‘plume