He had a lot of corners, certainly. For starters, take the names he gave his kids. What kind of a name was Ham? Sounded like a football team. His wife had wanted Enkidu, so popular for a boy. But he had his way.
He got them down at the pub too. The way he kept banging on about how it had been a crime to kill Humbaba and destroy the cedar forest. Too much moral high ground. They nicknamed him Tree Hugger.
Then there was the zoo. You couldn’t eat them, and—well most people had the odd pet, but the aye-aye and kakapo and things? A waste of rations.
It got worse. He started obsessing about sea-levels. Look, they said, stop doom-mongering. There’s a sage in India has worked out that if you fix big sheets around a spindle, it’ll turn round in the wind. Put a belt between that and a screw, you can put all the water back in the river. We’ll cover the fields with the things if we have to. That’ll fix it.
They knew he had flipped when they found their Tree Hugger and his sons in the woods with an axe. They had to laugh though when they saw what he was building. Call that a boat? Draught’s too deep for the river, anyroad.
His wife had the worst of it in the end, having to leave her sisters in god, who had helped her through the difficult bits—and he was difficult. Their duty was to their husbands, hers to hers.
It made tsunamis look like a surfer’s lunch break. They got to the high ground, the residue of the cedar trees. The snow melt had opened up some more cultivable land. With other survivors, a women’s group calling themselves the Daughters of the Plains, they used what they had rescued of the biodiversity.
Being cursed with longevity, he watched the later generations go forth and multiply, and multiply, cutting down more trees. They had a story about how Him Whose Name could not be Written had been miffed—probably because someone had been writing his name down. It had all been beyond anyone’s control. Nothing to do with cutting down the trees. And there had been the rainbow, so it would never happen again.
This time he flipped for real. His sons found him one night, drunk and embarrassingly naked. All they could do was leave him to sleep it off in the pigeon-loft.

John RG Turner is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist. He won the John Dryden Prize for Literary Translation in 2009. His translations and original poems have appeared in Poetry and Audience, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and Comparative Critical Studies and on www.brindin.com and www.stephen-spender.org.

Even if our predecessors had started from land with inadequate supplies, they would have managed well enough as long as they drifted across the sea with the current, in which fish abounded. There was not a day on our whole voyage on which fish were not swimming round the raft and could not easily be caught. Scarcely a day passed without flying fish, at any rate, coming on board of their own accord. It even happened that large bonitos, delicious eating, swam on board with the masses of water that came from astern and lay kicking on the raft when the water had vanished down between the logs as a sieve. To starve to death was impossible.

The old natives knew well the device which many ship-wrecked men hit upon during the war chewing thirst-quenching moisture out of raw fish. One can also press the juices out by twisting pieces of fish in a cloth, or, if the fish is large, it is a fairly simple matter to cut holes in its side, which soon become filled with ooze from the fish’s lymphatic glands. It does not taste good if one has anything better to drink, but the percentage of salt is so low that one’s thirst is quenched.

The necessity for drinking water was greatly reduced if we bathed regularly and lay down wet in the shady cabin. If a shark was patrolling majestically round about us and preventing a real plunge from the side of the raft, one had only to lie down on the logs aft and get a good grip of the ropes with one’s fingers and tots. Then we got several bathfuls of crystal-clear Pacific pouring over us every few seconds.

When tormented by thirst in a hot climate, one generally assumes that the body needs water, and this may often lead to immoderate inroads on the water ration without any benefit whatever. On really hot days in the tropics you can pour tepid water down your throat till you taste it at the back of your mouth, and you are just as thirsty. It is not liquid the body needs then, but, curiously enough, salt. The special rations we had on board included salt tablets to be taken regularly on particularly hot days, because perspiration drains the body of salt. We experienced days like this when the wind had died away and the sun blazed down on the raft without mercy. Our water ration could be ladled into us till it squelched in our stomachs, but our throats malignantly demanded much more. On such days we added from 20 to 40 per cent of bitter, salt sea water to our fresh-water ration and found, to our surprise, that this brackish water quenched our thirst. We had the taste of sea water in our mouths for a long time afterward but never felt unwell, and moreover we had our water ration considerably increased.

One morning, as we sat at breakfast, an unexpected sea splashed into our gruel and taught us quite gratuitously that the taste of oats removed the greater part of the sickening taste of sea water!

The old Polynesians had preserved some curious traditions, according to which their earliest forefathers, when they came sailing across the sea, had with them leaves of a certain plant which they chewed, with the result that their thirst disappeared. Another effect of the plant was that in an emergency they could drink sea water without being sick. No such plants grew in the South Sea islands; they must, therefore, have originated in their ancestors’ homeland. The Polynesian historians repeated these statements so often that modern scientists investigated the matter and came to the conclusion that the only known plant with such an effect was the coca plant, which grew only in Peru. And in prehistoric Peru this very coca plant, which contains cocaine, was regularly used both by the Incas and by their vanished forerunners, as is shown by discoveries in pre-Inca graves. On exhausting mountain journeys and sea voyages they took with them piles of these leaves and chewed them for days on end to remove the feelings of thirst and weariness. And over a fairly short period the chewing of coca leaves will even allow one to drink sea water with a certain immunity.

We did not test coca leaves on board the Kon-Tiki, but we had on the foredeck large wicker baskets full of other plants, some of which had left a deeper imprint on the South Sea islands. The baskets stood lashed fast in the lee of the cabin wall, and as time passed yellow shoots and green leaves of potatoes and coconuts shot up higher and higher from the wickerwork. It was like a little tropical garden on board the wooden raft.

Extract from Kon-Tiki Across the Pacific by Raft (1950). Full text available from the Universal Library at www.archive.org .

Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) was a Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer with a background in zoology and geography. Heyerdahl became notable for his ‘Kon-Tiki expedition’, in which he sailed 8,000 km by raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands.

Simon heard a sound like metal falling from the sky, and the planks of the pier clattered under his feet. He pitched to one side and grabbed onto the corroded rail of one of the fairground rides. A blonde girl wearing a blue dress fell to the floor in front of him, and he knelt down to help her to her feet.
She took his hand and stood up shakily. She had knocked her head, and there was a deep cut above her eye that was bleeding profusely. One side of her face was covered in dirt. Simon took a tissue from his pocket and pressed it to her wound. She looked perplexed at first, not realising that she was injured. She winced as he touched her face, then put her hand over the tissue and pressed it firmly to stop the bleeding.
Simon could see, across the water, the old burnt-out skeleton of the West Pier listing and toppling into the sea, the birds wheeling out and away from it in a great cloud. The Brighton seafront was obscured by a haze of dust; behind was a pillar of flame. A crowd was gathering around the sea wall, and people were fleeing onto the beach. Some were running into the water. There was the sound of screaming, of breaking glass, car alarms and sirens. The perfect summer sky had begun to darken, and he could feel a choking wall of heat radiating outwards from the coast.
A middle-aged woman knelt at his left side. Her eyes were screwed tight, her hands clasped together.
‘I look for the resurrection of the dead,’ she prayed, ‘and the life of the world to come.’
*
Simon’s surroundings stuttered, froze, and broke down into a myriad of pixels. He sat back in his seat, sweating and feeling light-headed.
‘What happened?’ he said. ‘Why did we stop?’
Jen got up from her chair and knelt down next to him.
‘Atrial fibrillation,’ she said, examining the readout on his screen. ‘The system is a bit overcautious. It stops automatically if it thinks you’re unwell.’
‘What?’
‘I thought it was fixed, but paroxysmal AF can be tricky. I’ll check you over this afternoon.’
Simon sighed. Jen smiled affectionately at him as she unclipped his occipital cable. After another glance at his monitor, she went over to help Rekha out of her chair. Rekha blinked as Jen unplugged her. She was breathing rapidly, and stood up slowly and cautiously.
*
In her small white office, Jen took Simon’s blood pressure, listened to his heart and then doubled the dose of his medication. She explained that he should be fit to start again tomorrow, but for the afternoon he should take it easy.
He returned to his room, but found himself restless and unable to concentrate on anything. There was something wrong, something missing, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was.
He flipped open his computer and let the SETI program run. It was something he had started as a hobby. The software interpreted a data feed from the various radio telescopes around the world, as well at the array placed on the far side of the moon, shielded from the Earth’s chatter. It used his computer’s processor to sift through a tiny portion of the masses of signals from other stars, looking for patterns that might denote intelligence. No one had ever found anything, and most people had lost interest, but he kept going with it. It was just something to hold onto, a little piece of hopeless hope. He sat back and watched the data cascade down the screen.
*
Simon and Jen ran to the entrance of the pier. There was a dense crowd pushing and shoving at the turnstile, trying to escape. Jen tugged at his arm and pointed at something on the beach. Simon angled his head to look. There was a man on fire hunched on the ground; two onlookers were trying to beat out the flames.
A police car pulled up in front of the pier, and a young officer emerged to try and control the evacuation. Simon could see the muscles on his neck stand out as he yelled at the top of his voice, but couldn’t hear a word he was saying.
The steel of the pier shuddered and groaned, and Simon felt himself falling. Hands grabbed him from behind and pulled him backwards. He turned and found himself facing a slim young Asian woman. Before he could say anything, the whole structure began to shudder. The crowd, sensing what was about to happen, made a rush for the shore, which only speeded up the inevitable. As Simon, Jen and Rekha fled in the opposite direction, the near end of the pier twisted and collapsed, scattering the people who stood on it onto the stones of the beach below.
*
The image inched forward a few frames, then stopped altogether.
‘What’s wrong?’ Simon asked, unclipping his cable and getting out of his chair.
‘I don’t know,’ Rekha said, frowning at the spooling readout screens.
Jen stirred in her chair and opened her eyes.
‘Maybe we need to reboot it,’ she said.
‘Maybe,’ said Rekha, sounding unconvinced.
‘Couldn’t we just skip the day of the bomb?’ asked Jen.
Rekha shook her head. ‘No. The Memory Palace works through our shared memories. The bombing was the first time we met. If we don’t process that, then I doubt it will work at all.’
*
Simon and Jen sat in the lounge and looked out over the Icelandic landscape. Their base was in Thingvellir, a short drive from Rejkjavik. The landscape was bare and bleak under the pitiless glare of the twenty-four hour sun. Small shrubs clung hard to the rocky ground, holding tight against the harsh wind that howled across the plain.
‘Not quite the retirement I had envisaged,’ said Jen.
‘I just never envisaged retirement,’ said Simon. ‘Anyway, technically we’re employed.’
‘Technically,’ said Jen.
The three of them, Simon, Rekha, and Jen, had stayed in touch after they survived the attack, and their friendship had strengthened through the decades when other friendships, relationships and even family ties had withered away. Simon wondered sometimes if they would have been friends if they had met in different circumstances, what he would have called ‘real life’. This was, he knew, a pointless question. The day of the explosion, the first nuclear terrorist attack on British soil, was about as real as life could get. It was the complacency of day-to-day existence that was the illusion.
*
During his last year in England, Simon had begun to feel on edge, irritable and ill at ease in company. Soon after, he had experienced the first of the flashbacks. It was as if he were in two places at once: simultaneously an old man taking the spring air on a warm day in London, and a young man on a shaking platform of steel and wood, fearing every moment for his life.
Before long, they were occurring virtually daily with no apparent provocation. He had mentioned it in passing to Jen when they met up one day, and she had looked concerned.
‘Any problems with your memory?’ she asked.
‘Nothing unusual. Losing keys, forgetting my passwords.’
‘It’s just that sometimes this happens when people get memory problems. Trauma comes back.’
Reluctantly, he booked an appointment with his GP, who sent him to a specialist memory clinic. They confirmed that Simon was in the early stages of dementia.
*
The near end of the pier collapsed. As Simon, Rekha and Jen fled to the far side, Simon thought he heard something, pitched somehow above the general chaos surrounding them. It was very faint, and he had no idea why he had suddenly tuned into it; but there it was, a human voice close by, crying for help.
He froze where he stood and looked around, but couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. The wreckage of the amusement arcade, torn metal and fallen girders, lay in a twisted mess next to him, like the broken body of a huge mechanical beast.
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Stop, there’s someone here!’
Rekha spun around.
‘Come on!’
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘I heard something. There’s someone here.’
Jen took a few steps forward, and Rekha grabbed her arm.
‘Even if there is someone, we’ll never get them out.’
Simon wavered a moment and then stepped forward reluctantly. He heard it again. He couldn’t make out the words, or even if the voice was male or female, but there was no mistaking the urgency of its tone.
He hesitated and turned back.
‘What was that?’ he heard Jen say as the picture froze and dissolved. ‘That didn’t happen.’
*
Jen came in to Simon’s room and sat down in the chair next to his bed, where he lay trying to concentrate on a book. He had downloaded plenty to read before leaving London for Iceland, but hadn’t been able to finish a single one since arriving. He reflected sometimes that there seemed little point in filling his mind up with things that would only trickle out again anyway, like escaping grains of sand.
‘It isn’t going to work, is it?’ said Simon.
‘Give it time.’ As she leant back in the dimly lit room, her platinum hair falling off her face, Simon could have imagined that she was again the young woman that he had met all those years ago. The white scar on her forehead seemed almost luminous.
‘How’s Rekha?’ he asked.
‘She’s still going through the system, trying to work out what happened.’
‘Surely we should expect some inconsistencies?’ said Simon. ‘The three of us can’t remember everything the same way.’
‘None of us remember hearing that,’ said Jen. ‘The Memory Palace doesn’t make things up.’
Simon sat up suddenly.
‘You know, Jen -’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’m not so sure that didn’t happen. I seem to remember – it’s so hard to tell – I remember the voice, at least.’
Jen got up from the floor and began to pace the room.
‘I don’t – ’ she said. ‘I can’t – ’
‘You remember it, too?’ said Simon.
She nodded. Simon thought he saw a look of guilt pass across her face.
‘We need to talk to Rekha,’ she said.
*
‘Nothing like that happened,’ said Rekha. ‘Nothing at all.’
They were sitting in the lounge, looking out at a walking party making its way across the landscape, little coloured dots in the distance.
‘Anyway,’ Rekha added, ‘we shouldn’t talk about it too much. That’s what the Memory Palace is for.’
The Memory Palace – in fact the whole complex – had been kitted out using Rekha’s money. It was her final project – a quantum computer that would interact with the structure of the human brain. As she put it, it was a combination of a psychotherapist, a neuroregenerative device, and an artificial memory bank. She envisaged that the second generation Memory Palace would work with individuals: however, the prototype relied on several simultaneous users. She had explained multiple memories worked as triangulation points to ensure the machine reconstructed past events as accurately as possible.
Iceland was the ideal base of operations, and not just because of the supply of cheap thermal energy. Since the great floods of the thirties, what remained of Britain had become so overbuilt that the level of secrecy required for a project like the Memory Palace was simply impossible.
‘Perhaps we didn’t register it at the time,’ said Jen. ‘That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’
‘Survivor guilt,’ said Rekha. ‘We all felt it. It’s just a manifestation of that. I’ve been through the program. From now on, all we’ll get is the narrative memory. Just the facts.’
Jen looked uncertain.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Simon. ‘What did Anthony have to say about it?’
Jen and Rekha looked blank.
‘Who’s Anthony?’ asked Rekha.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Simon, ‘I seemed to remember – ’
‘Remember what?’ asked Jen.
‘I don’t know,’ said Simon. He racked his brains to come up with an answer. Why had he just said that? He had known plenty of people with that name, but none had particularly stuck in his mind, and certainly none had any relevance to the Memory Palace. He tried to form a mental impression of the person had been thinking about, but whoever it was remained stubbornly beyond the threshold of apprehension, like a word stuck on the tip of his tongue.
*
Simon, Jen and Rekha dug through the rubble. The cries were becoming louder. Finally they exposed a white hand, covered in dirt and blood, twitching convulsively.
‘Come on,’ said Rekha under her breath as they pulled aside the debris.
Soon they had cleared the head and shoulders of a man. His face was bruised and bloodied, and it was impossible to tell how old he was.
His head lolled back as he fell unconscious. Jen shook him gently to wake him up, and when this failed rubbed her knuckles hard against his sternum. The man threw his head back and let out a cry of pain that momentarily drowned out the noise around them.
When the session ended, Rekha said that they would not use the machine again until she had gone through every circuit and line of code to iron out the problem.
*
They met over breakfast the next morning. Simon had slept poorly, in spite of the thick blackout blinds that were fitted to the windows of his room.
‘The hardware was fine,’ Rekha said, ‘it was a problem with the software. There were lines of code that I hadn’t been aware of. It didn’t even look like it was there for any sort of purpose – I couldn’t make any sense of it. It just seemed to be filling space.’
‘Like junk DNA?’ Jen asked.
Rekha shrugged.
‘Where did it come from?’ asked Simon.
‘A hacker,’ said Rekha. ‘Maybe someone trying to stick a bit of spyware in the system.’
‘It’s fixed, though?’
‘Yes,’ said Rekha, ‘and we should start ASAP. We have to make up for lost time.’
They finished their coffee, and walked across the wet, blustery courtyard to the Memory Palace.
*
The man cried out again as Simon and Jen pulled him from the wreckage. He was almost naked, his shirt and trousers hanging in tatters.
‘We can’t move him,’ said Jen. ‘His back may be broken.’
There was another tremor and the pier tilted again, sending fragments of rubble skittering down into the sea.
‘No choice,’ said Simon. His arms were aching, his breathing laboured in the heat.
‘One last heave,’ he said, and counted to three. They lifted the man between them. He let out one more shout of pain when his legs touched the ground; they looked and saw that below both knees was a mass of red, pulpy tissue, studded with fragments of pale bone.
Rekha took the man around the hips and helped to carry him. Struggling to keep their grip, the three of them stumbled along the pier to the far end. They lowered the man gently to the floor. Rekha took off her jacket and put it under his head. Simon removed his shirt and gave it to Jen, who tore it into strips and bound it around the man’s wounded legs to staunch the bleeding. She knelt and took his pulse; it was fast but strong, and his breathing was deeper now, more regular.
All the while, the man’s eyes were narrowly open, regarding them uncertainly. He began to make a dry, sucking sound, his tongue scraping against his palate. Rekha took a bottle of water from her bag. She soaked a little into a rag to allow him to wet his mouth, and then gently washed clean the cuts on his face.
The man was mouthing something, but none of them could hear him. Simon held his ear close to the man’s lips. He could smell smoke and blood.
‘Remember,’ whispered the man, but his next words were drowned out by the approaching helicopters, their noise filling the sky like the beating of wings. The sea was calm and golden, like a sheet of bronze extending as far as the eye could see.
*
The image gradually faded from view, and the lights came up gently in the Memory Palace. As Simon’s eyes adjusted, he could make out the thick black fireproof drapes and the chairs in which his three companions sat.
Anthony was twitching awake, the servo motors in his artificial legs clicking and humming into life as they received the signals from his brain. He opened his eyes and breathed out.
‘Thank God that’s over,’ said Rekha.
‘I don’t know,’ said Simon. ‘Isn’t there part of you that always wanted to do it all over again?’
‘No,’ said Rekha.
‘He’s right,’ said Anthony. ‘That intensity – ’
He held his forearm. Simon remembered that Anthony had a tattoo there, a simple one showing the date of the attack in Roman numerals.
Jen nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Nothing ever meant quite as much, did it?’
*
Later that night, Simon and Anthony took a walk around the complex. The wind had dropped, and it was a cold, clear evening. They went side-by-side most of the way, but a few minutes before the end of the walk Anthony stopped and said, ‘You go on ahead.’
Simon looked back when he reached the door of the accommodation block. Anthony was facing away from him, in the direction of the tectonic rift. His white hair hung around his shoulders, and his hand grasped his walking stick firmly. He was standing perfectly still, gazing at the sky as if waiting for someone to arrive.
***

Niall Boyce has published stories with Liars’ League, Tales of the DeCongested, Dogzplot, A cappella Zoo, Sein und Werden, Smoke: A London Peculiar and Loquacious Placemat, amongst other publications. His stories are collected and linked at his blog,
http://strange-powers.blogspot.com.

Since its conception, Cape Farewell has worked in partnership with scientists and artists to create a cultural response to climate change. Scientists have worked tirelessly to identify climate change as a global problem but the causes are rooted in the way our societies have evolved and are magnified by the way we live now. Human activity is causing our planet to overheat. We need a cultural shift that addresses the problem and a creative shift to evolve and map new solutions.
- David Buckland, Founder and Director of Cape Farewell

Cape Farewell brings together leading artists, writers, scientists, educators and media practitioners through expeditions to the frontlines of climate change. Together they have mapped, measured and been inspired to bring home stories and make art that communicates the urgency and the impact of climate change. Cape Farewell collectively works with partners to inspire creative and visionary responses to climate change for the 21st century.

Cape Farewell has led seven expeditions to the High Arctic – one of the frontlines of climate change – and in 2009 Cape Farewell led our first expedition outside the Arctic to the glaciers and rainforests of Peru. The ambition is to inspire those who have joined an expedition to respond creatively to the challenge of climate change. Through our expedition programme, we have engaged over 50 artists in the subject of climate, including musicians KT Tunstall & Jarvis Cocker, visual artists Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread, choreographer Siobhan Davies, writers Ian McEwan and Vikram Seth, comedian Marcus Brigstocke, poet Lemn Sissay and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. By exposing artists to the world’s climate tipping points, Cape Farewell are contributing to the development and shared understanding of new scientific data

The philosophy of exploration and personal journey are values core to Cape Farewell. We invite artists to see at first hand the effects of climate change. The invitation to join the expeditions is simple: come, explore, be inspired. Through witnessing the environment, taking part in stimulating discussion and observing and participating in scientific field research, we enable our voyagers to gain a real connection to the subject matter. Our invitation to artists is to help encourage this conversation and through creative enterprise extend the knowledge, understanding and will for our audiences to change their response to the climate challenge.

Central to each expedition is the open dialogue between the artists and scientists, before, during and after, with active promotion of discussion and understanding between the groups of voyagers. This isn’t just about how climate understanding can influence creativity but also about how an artist’s creativity can affect scientific thinking.

Following each expedition, Cape Farewell works with the artists who have joined the trip to develop creative work in response to the journeys…

During their voyage, the crew members of the 2008 Disko Bay expedition were blogging from the Arctic and in 2009 twittering from the Andes expedition on our website www.capefarewell.com .

A selection from the blogs of the 2008 Disko Bay expedition:

David Buckland – Thursday 25 Sep
Almost ready to go

Tonight we head north after 9 months of very detailed planning with the Cape Farewell team. We are collectively relieved, excited and somewhat proud. Vicky, Hannah, Kathy, Nina, Lisa and I have lived and breathed this reality and now we voyage north with what I believe is a quite outstanding group of highly creative artists, musicians, comics, poets, architects, craft based artists, film makers, writers… I’ve been speculating about whether such a powerful creative group has ever been assembled before to address what is a culture- and life-threatening future truth. We will spend ten days together in the High Arctic working with the scientists and crafting our own response. As Vanessa Carlton has put it, ‘to challenge a stubborn world’.

(…)

Many of the artists have projects planned and as you can see from my frantic last minute packing, I too am planning video projections – a physical theatre. Bolted to the front of the ship is a container with all the science equipment, projectors, lighting and a piano [electric]. The ship has passed through two storms getting to the West coast of Greenland so I hope all this stuff is OK.

Tomorrow morning [very early] the US and the European groups get together for the first time in Reykjavik before we complete the final leg of our journey to the ship. This is an outstanding effort with people coming from faraway places, LA, New York, Canada, France, Scotland, Holland, Italy, England… I can’t wait until we can all join the boat and voyage north. The weather promises a bit of a blow for Saturday, which should bring the first winter snow and a whitening of the landscape and next week looks to be very clear and cold, -7C. We are declaring a Cape Farewell independent time zone on the ship to make the most of the daylight hours and to give Peter Gilbert and his film crew the best chance to work. Roll on the northern lights.

Robyn Hitchcock – Monday 29 Sep
Iceberg Television

Two standard responses to the problem of global warming are that either it’s not really happening or, if it is, there’s nothing we can do about it now so why not leave all the lights on? Well, it is happening, and the sooner we tame our energy emissions, the sooner the earth can return to being habitable for the citizens and other creatures of the 22nd century. Time is unlikely to stop when we die, it just seems that way sometimes. It’s true that we on this Cape Farewell expedition used aviation fuel and diesel to get here, but we will take the story back with us and spread it like butter on the toast of our item-rich society. As the scientists aboard research the effects of ice-melt on the ocean bed and trace the possible mutation of the Gulf-stream through salination tests, we artists are being exposed to a landscape that cannot fail to affect our work.

(…)

Earlier in the day, I was lucky enough to see Marcus Brigstocke half way up a snowy crag, doing a stand-up routine in his corduroy suit. As this was for the cameras, we were told not to laugh, which made his show even funnier. As his fingers froze, Marcus ranted on the malevolent spirit of Londoners in traffic, cursing into mobiles about other cell-phone users at the wheel. In the distance behind him stretched miles of slowly crumbling blue icebergs, a terrain most of us had never seen before and, if we leave it more than 10 years, will never see again.

Just prior to that, as we reached the summit, we discussed The Edgar Broughton Band and the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival: the more majestic the ice-scape around us, the more we sheathed ourselves in pop culture. We are stardust, we are golden, and we make one hell of a mess. Greenland has been assaulted by alcohol (‘mad water’) and Christianity; now it has the chance to make some money selling its oil. This would be like giving a terminal lung-cancer patient a consignment of duty-free cigarettes.

(…)

Lemn Sissay – Monday 29 Sep
Things Disappear

Listening to radio, an interviewer asks their interviewee: “describe the experience for the listener”. Description is all the listener needs, imagination does the rest. “well…” comes the reply “its just too beautiful for words”. The answer makes me want to rip out the interviewee’s tongue and slap them with it. The pursuit of description engages and overcomes the possibility of failure (to describe). If something is worth pursuing it means it matters. Ergo “it’s just too beautiful for words” causes things to disappear. You think I am taking this too far. Good. Then we are on the same page.

If a tree falls in the forest and if nobody saw it or heard it fall then did it? We have an obligation: to share what we see. It did. The act of sharing is as important as the information it carries: the action of description and acknowledgement is the greatest gift of language. The first words of a child are often the description and realisation of some body. Imagine it did not speak because the world was too beautiful for words. But the child does speak and therein its power. And in the relatively recent story of colonisation, language was the first to be taken from the children of indigenous peoples. The languages of the Inuit, here in Greenland taken by the Danes, the language of the Australian aborigines taken by the English, the language of the Kenyan peoples, in east Africa taken by the English. This is why I blog. I never had family. I blog because it gives me a point of record or reference that I was alive at any given time. In acknowledging the disappearance of the ice from our earth, in blogging, a simple act of description, we are acknowledging that they were there. Did the tree fall in the forest though nobody saw it or heard it? It did, ‘cause I did, I saw it. And if I don’t say it now there’ll be none left to fall. And what was the first word of the child? And why did it matter?

KT Tunstall – Thursday, October 2nd
Perdlerfiup Sermia Glacier

Woke up with a belly-full of metaphorical tequila. Still feel the shape of the balloon-dog heart in there, but feel altogether better about that. I know it’s good to feel this.

Snap, snap, walking in a Baltic alien landscape and still the grass grows through the snow, all that life that waits patiently beneath for endless sun. Dark red berries fresh under foot stain the powder like blood and trigger thoughts of the hunting that goes on here.

Blood on snow is a disturbing picture, and one that says much about our situation as humans on a planet straining to meet our needs and greeds. But the Greenlandic skill of using every last scrap of animal and knowing what to use it for is undoubtedly impressive.

Suzan-Lori Parks – Thursday 2 Oct
Around 3:30 am

As we leave Uummannaq I wake up, get bundled in most of my layers and head up to the top deck alone in the dark morning to have another look at the Northern Lights. We’d seen them earlier from shore but away from the lights of the town they’re more spectacular. Depending on who you ask it’s God’s curtains or wafts of electrical current or spirits playing football. Watching them I feel a great joy, an expansiveness and then, moments later, as we pass an iceberg and the ship’s light blazes on it, like a dutiful hand keeping the danger at arms length, I feel my phantom tail curl under. Deep fear. Afraid of something so much bigger than me.

Do I travel to get away from myself or to find myself? Is the far-awayness of the place in direct proportion to my need to escape from my little me? They say you can find yourself in a foreign landscape. Is there an equation that can show the relationship between desire for self-discovery and distance? I seem to bring along little chunks of myself stuffed in my overfull suitcase. Will I get seasick? Will I be cold? Will I lose a mitten? It only took two days for my concern about the cold weather to turn into love. That surprises me. Maybe this trip gets me far enough away to lose myself, find myself and, god willing, make a difference.

You can make wishes on the Northern Lights, and so, standing up there alone in the cold, I make wishes. Many wishes. Even though a science book would assert there’s nothing magical about them, but I say they’re science and magic and we’re lost and found; small and enormous; possible and hopeless.

(…)

Marcus Brigstocke – Sunday 5 Oct
Sunny days

I’m going home in the morning. It’s been wonderful and exhilarating and beautiful but I’m ready to get back to my family now who are all of those things only much much louder.

The good news is that we’ve solved that whole pesky climate change fiasco. It turns out it was the sun. It’s heat from the sun that is causing global warming. The sunshine did it. It’s not surprising, I mean when you look at the sun you have admit it does look hot doesn’t it. In scientific terms what’s happened is that the sun has sent a lot of heat energy down to earth for many hundreds of thousands of years making what scientists refer to as ‘sunny days’ (forgive the jargon but it’s important to be accurate I think). Now plants and little creatures have absorbed these ‘sunny days’ and then, sadly but with some degree of inevitability, died with the ‘sunny day’ literally trapped within them. then they have sunk down into the earth in the form of ‘sunny day’ rich fossil fuels. These ‘sunny days’ have later been released as people have needed the ‘sunny day’ energy in the fuel in order to power all the stuff we like – hair-dryers, Toyota Land Cruisers, Nintendo Wii’s, fridges, life support machines, jet boats, angle poise lamps, vibrators, DVD players, aeroplanes and whirlybirds, air-conditioning units to cool the effects of a ‘sunny day’, mobile phones, electric toothbrushes, motorised carving knifes, remote controlled cars, actual cars, car museums, Top Gear, cars and machines which can exactly replicate the browning effect of a ‘sunny day’.

I like a ‘sunny day’ as much as the next man, but it strikes me that if we force several ‘sunny days’ into one 24-hour period things are going to get… well warmer. We can’t control the actual sun – bad news! – but we can easily and without too much discomfort control the amount of stored ‘sunny day’ energy we choose to release – good news. Obviously there are some people for whom it will be agony, but they are mostly old and stubborn and ridiculous and in any case they’ve had their turn, wrecked it, whinged, bellowed and accused, so now it’s up to us. Step aside you flat earth twats.

(…)

Similarly, Ryuichi Sakamoto played one of his compositions on the piano and the hush that gripped the room as everyone realised how much gentle, passionate control he has of his craft was incredibly uplifting. I’ve learned a fair bit about climate change since I’ve been here and exchanged some fascinating and empowering ideas and inevitably talked in alarming terms about how far we have to come but I’d be lying if I said we have not been truly spoilt by many of the people aboard who have given freely of their talent with grace and generosity. Put bluntly I like hanging out with my musical heroes.

(…)

In a moment I am hosting a session, which I have called ‘How to stay positive despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary’. I’m quite nervous, there are some clever people on this boat and I don’t wish to insult anyone. On top of which anyone who is familiar with my work or has shared accommodation with me for any length of time will know that of all adjectives to describe me – positive would not make the list. Hairy, grumpy, troubled, funny, cantankerous, pompous, opinionated, mouthy, malodorous, speccy and sarcastic would all be there but positive would rank down at the bottom end alongside perky and shy (and you should hear what people who don’t like me have to say about me!).

Positivity has become increasingly important for me since Cape Farewell last year. From when I finally stopped the three-week carnival of vomit and disembarked the Noorderlicht – October 2007 until well into the beginning of 2008 I was deeply, worryingly depressed. I had an itch that I was trying to scratch and no matter how loud I shouted, or how many shows I performed, interviews I did, things I wrote, people I spoke to, or personal changes I enacted I could not satisfy the itch. I had accidentally let the threat posed by climate change become something I was trying to solve alone and unrealistically fast. I cannot do it alone. No one of us is capable of saving or destroying the planet and thoughts that lead us to believe we can are as accurate as Fox News and as much use as a chocolate teapot. They are worthless delusions of grandeur on a scale with the ones that so trouble the annoying gitwizard David Blaine. That is not to say that we are not responsible or that we should not care, but letting yourself get depressed is worthless. It doesn’t help the cause either, how can you convince anyone of the pleasures the greener life can afford us if you sound like Morrissey having just stubbed his toe on his way back from burying a favourite pet in the rain, near Hull on a Tuesday in February? You can’t, and so positivity is the theme.

Now I must track down and then pack my things and head back to reality. For anyone who has followed this blog or any others on the Cape Farewell website – thank you. The Arctic’s still really cold, warmer than before but still really bloody cold. Oh and we saw some Whales this afternoon – life’s good and every positive action is worthwhile.

The 2009 Andes expedition members were – due to bad internet connection – limited to twittering:

Day 1 – 3 (23/06/2009 – 25/06/2009)
The expedition launched from Cusco on 23 June, and the first three days saw us hike around the Salcantay and Humantay Glaciers, camping overnight at 4800m and at -10 degrees. We had blankets and tents to keep us warm and a spectacular view of the glaciers to wake us up.

Hannah Bird 26/06/2009, 2:20pm
“Learning about 2 glaciers, Salcantay and Humantay. Hiked nearby this morning but with time tight we couldn’t get too close. Glaciers are what water most of Peru. All glaciers below 5000m are in danger of disappearing by 2015…”

Day 4 – 7 (26/06/2009 – 29/06/2009)
After returning from the glaciers via Cusco we started our descent through the forests. Beginning in the Puna (which is both the top of the Andes and grasslands) at Tres Cruces and watching the sunrise over the rainforest below, whilst scientist Kathryn Clark completed a study of new landslides in the area.

Yadvinder Malhi 26/06/2009, 7:36pm
“In Iquitos on my way to join the expedition. Looking at the Amazon River, already over 3km wide but 3000km from the sea.”

Day 8 – 11 (30/06/2009 – 03/07/2009)
We arrived at Wayquecha field station, a science station in the Cloud Forests. Cloud Forests account for 0.1% of the world’s forests. They are a unique environment that we were privileged to work in and experience. At the field station the crew participated in some of the science research undertaken there, including measurements of temperature, humidity and carbon levels in the soil in plots both in Wayquecha and other plots across the Andes, so that direct comparisons about the way in which the soils and vegetation are behaving and responding can be monitored. We also collected Bromeliad samples and water samples from the river, helping the Environmental Change Institute gain a better understanding of the carbon dynamics of the systems we were interacting with.

Brenndan McGuire 30/06/2009, 1:37pm
“Walter walks us through his antiquated yet fascinating measuring equipment.”

Daro Montag 29/06/2009, 6:48pm
“Just saw posters drawn by children requesting an end to the burning of the planet. A global perspective from an isolated community.”

Day 12 – 14 (04/07/2009 – 06/07/2009)
The Trocha Union is an area of elfin forest and over a period of two days we descended approximately 2,000m through the woodlands. The landscape was incredible; camping on the edge of trees, of moss, of tree roots and a complete immersion into forest life. During the trek Kathryn Clark led the team in collecting leaf samples at each 100m descent for research being undertaken by the University of Durham and University of Oxford.

Yann Martel 30/06/2009
“Greenery so dense we walk through tunnels of it, roots falling like rain”

Marije De Haas 03/06/2009, 10:12am
“Feeling like the bug in the rug – unable to see the pattern”

Day 15 – 18 (07/07/2009 – 10/07/2009)
After descending the Trocha Union we headed into the rainforests for 10 days, first traveling along the Madres de Dios river on the outskirts of Manu National Park, visiting amongst other places Manu Learning Centre and Los Amigos Science Station before traveling along the river through Laberinto and Puerto Maldonado into the Tambopata reserve. The area of rainforest the crew were fortunate to experience has one of the highest rates of biodiversity in the world. For example, there are more species of trees in 100m2 of some Amazonian forests than in the whole of Europe.

Charlie Kronick 09/07/2009
“Failure to express is, fortunately, not a failure to experience. The challenge is to make sense of all the fertility/decay.”

Yann Martel 05/07/2009
“For science stumbling
and slogging in the jungle,
nature mocking us

In a boat
down an amazon river –
like a blood cell in a vein?

A jungle trail,
We go along, burdened,
while cutter ants laugh ”

There is more to read at www.capefarewelll.com, where you can also digitally accompany the next Art & Science Voyage that will set out to the Russian Arctic this September. During our previous seven expeditions to the Arctic, the Cape Farewell scientists and cultural team have engaged with both the Atlantic and Canadian Arctic and we have a huge track record of exhibitions, events, films and education materials developed as a result of these expeditions. However, nearly 40 per cent of this cold northern place is contained above Russia and there is a void in our knowledge of this icy landscape.

Summer ice at the North Pole decreased by a staggering 25% in 2008; in 2009 a major survey dated most of this as new ice. Cape Farewell has invested in plans to navigate from Spitsburgen to the Franz Joseph Islands with a crew that includes a team of international oceanographers from Russia, UK and France to verify evidence of climate change, attempt atmospheric measurements of CO2 levels and other pollutants and investigate the consequences of the ice melt, rising sea temperatures and the release of DMS gases. This epic 22-day sea exploration will also include 15 artists and writers, making individual artwork inspired by the environment and experience.