Wrap Up

Today is my last full day at McMurdo Station. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I will board a C-17 bound for Christchurch and begin the next adventure. My five months here have been everything I could have hoped for, and summarizable simply as ‘an experience.’ I haven’t written anything in almost two months, but not for lack of things to write. On the contrary, by the time Christmas rolled around, in my mind I had planned material to last me the entire season, and from there on forward there was plenty more that came my way. The bars and coffeehouse deserve their own post, as do my coworkers and the things I did as a shuttle driver. The living creatures that inhabit this cold continent – penguins, whales, seals, skua… especially the skua – were all engrossing and welcome signs of life around the station and driving the Plagusus road.

By the way, by the end of December, the road to Pegasus had become much more driver friendly; with the constant presence of vehicles packing the road down, it turned into a veritable highway, where the primary difficulty was sticking to the speed limit of 25 mph. Well, there were still a few treacherous spots now and then…

The flow of life on the station was always fascinating, and the slow, subtle grinding that accumulated as long hours, confined spaces and an isolated population began to take their toll made for a case study in social dynamics. I wish I understood it all. For myself, I am a little relieved to have completed it. I am thankful for the people I’ve met, the things I’ve been able to do, the views I’ve seen. There is more here to explore, and there is more I would do were I to return. And it’s a place where I feel quite comfortable. I could do it again, and be happy. That said, it’s not a place I could be continually. The fact that with the completion of a summer season we contract workers are obligated to leave is necessary because the pace we set is too hard to do year round. Maybe for other people, but not for me. I like to go full bore until I am exhausted – until I’ve fulfilled the goal – and then step back and reset. I feel like I’ve accomplished that. 

Speaking of going until I have nothing left, I managed to accomplish a life goal while I was down here! I participated in a marathon. What a thrill. What a miserable, cold and lonely thrill. I finished it half limping, unable to walk straight, with my knees battered and my quads cramping. It was masochism, and it was – admittedly – madness. At the end there was nothing left in my legs and I was exhausted. There were times in the 18th mile, the 19th mile, the 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd where I didn’t know how I was possibly going to finish, how this was probably a mistake and how making it to the next flag along the road – with each red flag on the snow road a mere 100 feet apart – was going to be a challenge. There were over 500 flags that I passed that day. I never wanted to do anything like it again. I was completely and utterly devoid of any desire to do it again. And that feeling, that total exhaustion, somehow made it fulfilling, because I had given pretty much everything my body had to offer on that day and subsequently gotten everything I could have out of participating. Such are the confusing glories of life.

Some time prior to Christmas there was a gingerbread house building competition. Shuttle Elisha organized a shuttles team with myself, Shuttle Mel and Shuttle Guy. Arriving at the dining hall, we ran into Fuelie Turk, who is a friend to shuttles, and we invited him to join our team. He provided much camaraderie, creativity and fun. There were 8 teams competing with the goal of, nominally, making a gingerbread replica of Discovery Hut. To that end, the gingerbread pieces had been baked into the necessary shapes required, with triangular wedges to make the roof and rectangular ones for the side. Few of the teams had any intention of following the cookie-cutter blueprint.

Naturally, as shuttle drivers, our gingerbread creation was going to be shuttle themed, and it was quickly settled that we would make a delta. Of course, we made that decision on the spot, as the two-hour time limit was beginning. So much for planning ahead! Surveying our construction material, we found all kinds of sweets: candy canes, red-hots, ice cream cones, mint chips, cookies, frosting, food coloring. Our construction took shape as parts of the delta were fashioned: front cab, passenger cab, wheels, engine compartment. Into the frosting red and yellow food coloring was combined to make a convincing orange for the paint job. To add to the scene, the ginerbread base on which the delta was to be mounted grew up with little flags, pressure ridges and penguins in order to mark ‘The Road to Plagusus.” The wheels were secured to the ground, and carefully, delicately, the unbalanced, top heavy monstrosity was placed and frosted into place. What resulted was, if I may say, an engineering feat that very properly conveyed the cantankerousness of a real delta. We all had a great time.

I hope to post a few more anecdotes for posterity, but for now it suffices to say that this place, like so many places where you take the time to appreciate it for what it is, was wonderful and unique. I feel pretty good that Igotthis place, which really was the whole point, after all.

Plague-asus

When adversity strikes, there are several reactions one can have as the peril begins to unfold. “What have I gotten myself into?” is a common one, often accompanied by panic, despair or rueful musings on how whatever had led up to that moment was clearly avoidable if only someone – possibly yourself – had had the presence of mind to talk some sense into you. For those who prefer the more aggressive half of the fight-or-flight instinct, “Bring it” encompasses the sort of stubborn defiance that, yes, what’s coming is not going to be enjoyable, and probably won’t end well, but doggoneit you’re going to go down swinging.

It just got real.

I feel like that’s a very non-committal response that nevertheless portrays the arising of something both unpleasant and unexpected. It’s the thought that went through my head as the back-end of my van threatened to overtake the front end while driving down the road from Pegasus. Pegasus is the permanent runway at McMurdo Station, securely situated on the Ross Ice Shelf, a several-hundred-foot thick sheet of ice sitting on top of the ocean. Early in the summer season, a temporary airport is used for flights, since it’s close to town. However, it’s also located on seasonal ice that becomes too thin by mid-summer, and operations are moved to the more distant Pegasus runway. A one-way trip to Pegasus is about 16 miles – only 2 of which are on land – and takes about 45 minutes since the speed limit is 25 mph.

But I wasn’t really thinking of that at the time. Nor was I marveling at the physics involved in a vehicle moving sideways down a road, about which prior to that moment I had always been curious. I wasn’t even really worried about the fact that I was pointed directly toward the dreaded flag line, where the snow is notoriously soft and unwary drivers can find their vehicles stuck if they drift to close. I’d already been through that experience on my first day driving to Pegasus: my front passenger-side wheel had sunk through disarmingly pristine snow near the flag line and dragged the rest of the vehicle with it. Despite my heroic attempts to guide the van out, its momentum had slowed, slowed… slowed… stopped, one back tire digging un-helpfully deeper into the bank. It had taken a call to the road maintenance crew and a half hour wait before I was on my way again that time.

This time, though, I was thinking about how bad the entire road had become, and how, if this was the fate of the rest of my season, it would be an epic struggle of man against nature, with nature claiming more than her fair share of victories. She was already savoring several, as my drive to Pegasus included weaving around 4 stationary vans waiting forlornly for roadside assistance at various points along the road. One van had broken down the previous night, tearing a coolant line. It had had emergency first aid consisting of a bucket being placed beneath it,  and then left for a later time when there were less pressing concerns. The three other vans were jammed into banks of snow or caught in ruts too deep to climb out of. Each of those three vans had fellow shuttle drivers – some with passengers as well – who watched and cheered as I fought to get around them. I dared not stop for fear of not being able to go again.

And that’s really one of the keys: not stopping in the worst sections. Sometimes even that’s not enough, but it gets you through a lot. Between the swollen snow tires and the four wheel drive, there’s much vans can handle, albeit bumpily. Driving them along, you can feel when they’re getting grip and when you’re relying solely on the momentum they had built up. Even when they lose grip and start sliding out from under you, there’s confidence that the momentary loss of control is only momentary, and the back end will some whip around to back where it belongs. But when you get caught in the foot deep ruts, you are forced to follow them wherever they go, and sometimes that place is not a happy one. Or when you come across a pit of soft snow you can only hope your momentum will carry you to the other side.

I cut my steering wheel all the way back, but for a moment, the van was in no mood to respond. Then one of the tires found grip and the front was again pointing forward. The victory was brief, however, as a swamp of soft snow loomed before me. Should I follow the deep ruts of previous drivers, or cut a new rut? I hesitated, and too late decided to make my own path. The van caught the edge of the old rut, bounced out and slammed into the untouched patch, robbing the speed it was carrying. The engine revved but I could feel the wheels weren’t finding traction as the van coasted to a stop.

Crap.

For a moment I was resigned to the high likelihood that a call to the road crews was in order, and another wait was moments away. But there’s one hope: forward was not an option but maybe I could ease the van back the way it came. If the tires slipped and started spinning, then I was doomed. Perhaps I could shovel my way out, but it would still be a moral defeat if it came to that. I set it in reverse, gave some gas. The van rocked, the tires didn’t slip, but I didn’t go anywhere. I tried again, timing each rev of the engine to the moment of the rocking that would give it a little more motion. Feeling the back tires clear the lip of the rut, I kept moving backwards until there was snow that feels solid enough to build some speed on. My second attempt at the snow swamp cleared it with ease and the journey along that plagued road from Pegasus continued.

Creativity, Part 1

There is no shortage of creativity in McMurdo. Considering the demographics, I suppose that it shouldn’t be surprising, but there is still something unexpected in seeing such a dense concentration of it in a community that is so small and feels, on a day-to-day basis, more like a mining town than a mecca of craft and imagination. In my stereotypical world, a remote place such as this with 1000 people will consist mostly of men, dirt and alcohol. Actually, McMurdo fits that bill, and yet it flourishes artistically both in work time and off time. I think this can be attributed to the people who are drawn to a place like Antarctica, often times taking jobs well below their abilities to get the opportunity just to be here. Even the janitors and dining attendants are exceptionally intelligent and adventurous people. I don’t envy some of the stuff they have to deal with from the population as a whole, but they do it with energy and enthusiasm and spend their off time expressing themselves and having fun.

I think nothing is more emblematic of this part of McMurdo culture than Freezing Man, hailed as the Burning Man of Antarctica. Yes, it’s not nearly as big, it has none of the psychedelic drugs, and there are a ton fewer conspiracy theories (maybe because McMurdo – and Antarctica as a whole – is so often a component of conspiracy theories in the real world?), but it does have this to greet people as they enter the event:

I suppose this is a peace van. There is a lot of absurdity in it, not the least of which is the thought of anything green and living ever being found anywhere close to here. But it’s an interesting piece, and I think about what a pleasant niche this would be to retreat to with a few people where the main event gets excessively loud or crowded. Now, however, it’s early and the airporter is abandoned.

The bulk of the event is held inside the “Big” Gym, where many of the station-wide gatherings take place. The last party held here was Halloween, and by the end of the night the space inside was filled with several hundred pirates, vikings, animals, cartoon characters, Village People, and mad scientists. At that event, I had donned my fuchsia silk shirt and added to it skinny jeans, a black afro wig, and a faux-black fur-lined jeans jacket to become Freddie Limbo, the 1983 to 1985 Long Beach State Limbo Champion.

The peak of the Halloween party came at the costume contest, where those with the best costumes (or just the most self-confidence) gathered on stage to offer their creations to the crowd. There was a crayon, a bottle of whiskey, a “runner” in what can best be described as a full-body stocking, a Conestoga wagon, and two dozen more outfits that were examined by the judges. Eventually the competitors were narrowed down to Oscar the Grouch and Winnie the Pimp (just to the left Of Oscar), and it was left to the crowd to cheer for the winner.

Winner: Oscar, but narrowly.

That was followed by the group costume contest, which was represented by Captain Planet and the Planeteers, the Village People, a colony of penguins, Frosty Boy (the ice cream machine down here), several trout and Cougars… of the human variety. The finalists were the Cougars and the fish, and allowed to perform for the crowd, the fish stole the show. They swam around the stage, jumping up and down and being all around… fishy. When the MC had had enough of their antics, he told them to get down, and they immediately dropped to the floor and started flopping helplessly. They were the runaway winners.

But back at Freezing Man, where it is still early, the gym has few people in it, but it is far from empty. I arrived early to get pictures of the booths before it’s too crowded. Near the entrance, I come across the Hugging Deli:

This is an absolutely brilliant idea. And the variety… this might give patrons more choice than any comparable Deli anywhere on the continent!

As I survey the gym, I see a number of booths and things to do, some expressive, some silly and some expressively silly. There is a porch swing tied to the basketball backboard, a blank canvas with paint supplies sitting on a nearby table, and a half dozen hula hoops sitting in the middle of the gym. Presiding over the event is the freezing man.

Later in the night, with the lighting turned down and the blacklights turned up Freezing Man towers over the party, glowing yellow and pink and purple. I doubt that at the end of the event he will be set on fire like his Arizonan counterpart, but maybe he’ll be thrown outside.

I am drawn – inexplicably – to the wooden board with holes of decreasing size cut into it and Frisbees sitting at its base.
Throughout the night I return to it to chuck a couple disks at the board.  When the music is turned up and people start dancing with hula hoops, balls on strings and other props, I take a disk and twirl it to the music – upright, sideways, upside down. I’m not big on dancing, but I can get into a groove with the Frisbee.

In another area there is a mock bedroom, with bed, nightstand, couch and chair. I don’t know what exactly to make of this. Who had ever thought to include this here? What is the message, or the purpose? I figure that I’m thinking about it too hard, and decide to just go with it. And I can’t help but think how pleasant it looks. Later, party-goers use it as a place to sit and chat.

If the bedroom seems out of place at this event, the Anonymous Interpretive Dance Screen fits right in. A translucent screen is tucked in a corner and surrounded by walls. This would create a private alcove, but there is a red lamp opposite the screen and people who go in have their shadow cast onto the screen, visible to everyone in the gym. Of course, that’s the point: you can see there is someone in there, but since it’s just a shadow, it’s nearly impossible to tell who. All around, the gym, I have the impression of people expressing themselves in creative ways. As the night goes on and people arrive, I see outfits that rival those at Halloween. Perhaps they’re not as varied or themed as Halloween, but they are more expressive. For my part, I have on orange Underarmor and my multi-faceted fuchsia silk shirt. Other people are wearing silver dresses straight out of a 1950’s sci-fi, authentic Irish kilts or tight spandex. The atmosphere is light and spirited. Over the course of the night, a large percentage of the base passes through, some to participate and some just to catch a glimpse of it all. I imagine that the organizers of this event put a lot of work into it, and I find myself hoping they realize what a great environment they’ve create, and how much of a success the event is.

Discovery Hut

This place smells like a barn.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad smell, but it gave me flashbacks to my childhood and the farm next to my house. I could smell hay and old wood and dust. And something else underneath it… something oily.

I hadn’t known what to expect prior to entering the hut. From the outside it looked like it could have been built in the past decade: there were almost no signs of deterioration, no rotting shell or crumbling walls. It looked like some rich adventurer had decided to build a vacation getaway shack so he could pretend to be roughing it will soaking in the hot tub that must surely reside inside. To have such an impression is an impressive feat for a building that was erected almost 110 years ago. Moreso from one that has been unused for the past 90.

The first signs that this was no resort hut came beside the front door, where there sat a dark, human sized pile of rough looking… rags? covered in tar? It took several moments of wondering and adjusting the angle I was viewing it to realize that once, long ago, it had been a living thing. But now it was only a carcass, partially flayed and long ago mummified by the cold. It was a seal, one of surely many that were used by the first expeditioners to Antarctica as a source of food and heat.

But if the corpse seemed odd paired with the exterior, the smell and the interior made sense. I, and the rest of the small tour group, entered with flashlights in hand. It was dim and dank inside, though even without the flashlights it would not have been particularly dark – only the deep greyness of dusk, before one’s eyes have adjusted. It was not a cozy place, nor the sort of shelter I would want to spend a long dark winter in, as explorers a century prior had had to do. But for all that, the hut felt roomy, and evidence was all around as to how it had been used by those first expeditions.

Bunks had been put in the wall where men once slept, though now all evidence of their existence was gone, save for the word ‘bunks’ typed into the wood. In a small corner room so tight you had to back out, seals had been butchered. Some pieces still hung from a low ceiling. Like their counterpart outside, they were dried and shriveled, but still contained an unsettling red sheen around the exposed ribs. Another side room contained a bricked pit, for what I assumed had been a cooking fire. Arrayed nearby were what appeared to be pelts, possibly hats or gloves, the insulating technology of the time. There was a stove in the main room and tins piled everywhere. Tins of dog biscuits. Tins of human biscuits. Tins of biscuits for who knows what. Over in another area where tins of cocoa, sugar and tea. The thought of living off such supplies, supplemented only by seal meat, for endless months is foreign to me.

Why do we do such things? What glories are worth these sacrifices? Is this the result of the ‘indomitable human spirit,’ that same impulse that sailed around the world, colonized the frontier or ventured into space, for both good and ill? Some who came to this hut for shelter never left the continent, and many others left only after the icy touch of Antarctica left them indelibly changed – physically and, perhaps, psychologically. Did those who returned to civilization look back on their trip and feel vindicated in the exceptionalness of their journey? I don’t know if I could accept the terms of the exchange: the dark isolation, the bitter cold and the deadly hardship for the chance – the chance – to become a small part of history. But then, I live in a different time and place, and I stand, on the same ground they once did, a world apart.

One of the tourists, clad as I was in a puffy red parka that keeps the wind and cold out, and the warmth wonderfully in, had been closely examining one of the walls with her flashlight. On it, faint and difficult to see in the low lighting, was writing. Words and numbers… names and dates, written long ago by those who ventured here before us. I wonder what they would make of us?

The Ob Tube

As the wooden manhole cover slides into place inches above my head, cutting out the bright blue skies and 2 AM daylight, there is a momentary feeling of nothingness, and a sinister nagging that it will not end. I imagine that it’s this sensation running rampant in one’s imagination that induces claustrophobia in people. This is certainly not the place for people who have qualms with tight, dark places. I am standing on bars of uneven heights, blind, with my back braced against and my shoulders curving along the cylindrical wall. The tube might be two feet in diameter, though I wouldn’t put money on it being any larger.

A moment passes and my pupils dilate to reveal a sliver of light streaming through the boundary between the tube and the cover. But it’s down I’m going, and contorting to see past myself, there is an aquatic blue glow coming from below. Descending, my body shifts rhythmically clockwise and the counter-clockwise, as each sway provides the room I need for my foot to take the next rung. Twenty feet down, and the hard, uneven footholds end abruptly, replaced by a rope ladder and open space. While the blue glow has brightened into a gloomy sort of mood lighting, I can’t simultaneously look down and move my feet, so I struggle to transition from the stability of the rungs to the flimsy ladder, which flails in the extra room at the end of the tube. There is an uneasy feeling that if I slip in these close quarters, my face is going to go straight into the metal rungs.

Easing my way down the ladder, I touch something solid. As I lower myself out of the tube and into a small pod, I see it’s a wooden crate to sit on. I promptly do. The space I find myself is roomy compared to the tube, perhaps three feet across with enough clearance to turn and look around me. Each wall is nothing more than a window.  The view is spectacular. I find myself about 15 feet below the sheet of ice I had just a few moments before been standing on, floating in the middle of an icy ocean.  Above, the ice glows blue, the only source of illumination here, and spikes of it grow downward from the frozen ceiling. Below in the murky depths I can make out the sea floor to one side, but it slides away into darkness below me. And all around the ocean is an empty sort of blueness, but it’s dotted by sparkling stars that the ice-light shines on: small creatures of the Ross Sea, drifting serenely by. Many are like tiny shrimp with wings, and once in awhile a spherical blob passes, its flagella whirring frantically.

It’s strangely warm in here, shielded from the wind. The tightness keeps my body heat close. I sit silently, and suddenly become aware that there’s more in these waters than just insects. It comes to me as a whistle first. From which direction, I can’t tell: the sound echoes and reverberates and makes it seem like it’s everywhere. And close. I twist and turn, looking for motion, but the visibility down here extends only 50 feet or so. I listen. There’s a wheeeeerp, the pitch starting normal and sweeping impossibly high. It’s not quiet either, but clear and crisp and right there. It feels like the maker sits just at the edge of my world, prowling the edges of my vision.

I whistle back, as high pitch as I can hit, and pause. A whistle comes back to me. I whistle again. The response puts mine to shame. Seals: they’re out there hunting, playing, perhaps even talking to me. It’s simultaneously fascinating and intimidating, for though I know they are no threat, the fact that I can’t see them – or anything past my little universe – makes the imagination see something larger and darker out there making these noises. They know where I am, but I don’t know where they are. A series of pings come to me, the pitch starting high and going low, lower, lower, each one a short zap, like an futuristic ray gun from the techno 80’s. Animals do not make noises such as these, do they?

It is an experience both eerie and awe-inspiring.

It’s a Harsh Continent

There is a saying down in McMurdo:  It’s a harsh continent. You use it like you would use the phrase ‘Tough cookies’ or ‘Life is hard’ elsewhere in the world. Someone whining about the food? It’s a harsh continent. No more beer at the general store? It’s a harsh continent. Just get assigned the airporter that has no heater and smells of diesel? It’s a harsh continent.

The etymology is clear enough. Antarctica has some of the more extreme conditions you’ll find in this world. The day my flight arrived I was greeted by crystal blue skies and temperatures hovering around 20 F. Three days later the temperature was -13 F and the wind chill was -38 F. I can say with certainty that I’ve never experienced conditions like those before. But here, they are not uncommon, and still nice compared to mid-winter. Frostbite and hypothermia are big concerns, and there have already been instances this season of people affected by both.

Cold as it can get, it’s the wind and accompanying wind chill that are the biggest everyday dangers. The town itself is nestled snuggly between several large hills, and can be somewhat protected by the wind. That by no means makes it immune, however, and when it blows through town, even a walk 100 yards from the galley to work is miserable if attempted without gloves or a sufficiently thick coat.

Elsewhere the wind is not so lenient. Between our base and the New Zealand base (Scott Base), there is a pass between a large hill that sits on the edge of the peninsula and an upland that extends towards the heart of the island. In the pass are the fuel pumps for our vehicles. There is also a constant wind funneling through it, and woe to the person who thinks he doesn’t have to bundle up to refuel. Sometimes the winds howls through the pass, and hits the metal pipes at the right angle and speed to create a resonance in them, and the area is filled with an eerie tonal sound coming from seeming emptiness.

The wind also creates one of the more mesmerizing effects across the ice. As it blows along the surface, it takes particles of snow along with it, and rivers of snow particles cross the road, migrating to places unknown. But the view is a delicate one, and all my attempts to capture with camera have failed. Still, driving out to the runways there are usually several streams of snow along the way, and I could spend a long time watching them flow by if I had not places to be.

The wind is a near-everyday companion down here. Less common are the storms, though we’ve had 2 or 3 since I’ve arrived. Since even on clear days the wind can blow, and do so quite violently, I think storms are better delineated by the accompanying visibility… or lack thereof.

The storms are most appreciated when outside of town on the ice, driving to and from the air field. In bad conditions, an alert is issued, and no one can travel between the town and the air field without radioing in to the firehouse first and telling them who you are, where you’re going, how many people you have and when you expect to get there. If they don’t hear from you before your estimated time (even if it’s just to say you’re running late), things get serious quick, because no one wants to risk the possibility that you’re in trouble out there.

In the worst conditions, they only let people go if there is a dire need, as we had during one of the storms. All personel had been recalled to the town because of bad conditions, but 6 people were stuck at the airfield with only a pickup truck and loader to bring them back. At first, they considered putting two people in the back of the pickup, but that was quickly nixed because no one wanted them to drive into town with 4 people and 2 popsicles. So Dan and myself were given the task to join up with the group and bring them back.

It’s a somewhat surreal experience driving out onto a frozen ocean, featureless in the foreground except for flags placed every 50 feet, the distance an all-encompassing, gray nothingness. There is no sky, no ground and no horizon between the two. It’s not dark. It’s not bright. And it’s everywhere.

Carefully, slowly, we made it out to the air field. What was normally a vista of shacks on skis was reduced to the occasional flag or crate popping out of the murkiness, and being engulfed by it almost as quickly as we passed by. We reached the workers. Three got into our vehicle, and the truck caravan-ed behind us.

The loader was waiting at the road back to town, and would lead the way with his higher vantage point in the loader’s cab. Finding the road back to town proved difficult, and much harder than finding the workers: the airfield contains large patches of open space, trivial to traverse in clear conditions, but dangerous when you can’t see where you’re going. If you’re not paying close attention and get disoriented, you can easily find yourself driving off into a wasteland of crevasses and emptiness. Finding the flags of the road are paramount, and after what seemed like much too far a distance, they appeared, with visibility hovering around 100 feet. The caravan proceeded back into town, and there was much rejoicing. Some video of our journey can be found here and here.

The weather, the wind, the snow and the sun combine to make McMurdo what it is, and make it a unique experience. Maybe it’s just that I’ve missed winter living in Tucson for so long, but I am wholly embracing the idea that this is a harsh continent.

Ice Living

Life in McMurdo is extraordinarily unique and familiar at the same time. As I live and work here, I think to myself “I know this.” It’s college all over again: living in dorms with strangers, eating in dining halls buffet-style, having no commute to speak of. People wander the halls in flip-flops and towels, subtle tensions rise and subside in living arrangements that have multiple people sleeping on different schedules in confined spaces, and some rooms seem perpetually open to a revolving door of folks watching TV, playing video games and partying.

And yet it’s not college. Not by a long shot. We are here to work. Our responsibility is to our jobs, and if we fall too short of the expectations, we are unceremoniously escorted back to the world. The leash is tighter here than in college, and the hours are longer. Underneath it all is a general feeling of greater individual responsibility (though it’s sometimes lost by those individuals who actually think this is still college, but they are the minority). So when I’m at the bar or a social event, there is revelry and camaraderie and all that comes with time off after a long day, but it’s tempered by the fact that tomorrow we can’t just skip class and sleep away the hangover.

So we live like we’re in college, and work like we’re in the real world, and the two combine to make something different that is nothing more than what I’ve already known.

My room is designated to house four people, and four people it is housing. When I first arrived at McMurdo there was only one person living in there. He had lived in McMurdo throughout the winter, and had had the room to himself during that time, allowing him to arrange the room as he saw fit. The room is ‘divided’ into two halves, the sleeping half – where all the dressers and beds exist – and the living half – with two tv’s, two mini-fridges and some seating options.

It’s an optimal arrangement for one person: there’s a lot of space for hosting people, and a nice little corner to sleep. But there is minimal privacy if several people are living there. Within 10 days of my arrival, the remaining beds had been filled in. What was a great design for one person is, at best, passable for four: as our schedules begin to change, the people working the night shift sleep during the day, and we each get different days off during the week. As a result, the ability to host other people in the living area declines, and the desire for privacy to sleep uninterrupted increases.

I’m lucky that all three of my roommates seem to be considerate folks. Two weeks into our cohabitation and each tries his best to be quiet and keep the lights off when he suspects others are sleeping. No one has stumbled home loud and drunk; no one has noisily dressed or cranked up the TV volume in the morning. I am pretty sure that at 27 I am the youngest, though I wouldn’t peg the oldest (the winter-over) at older than 45. He’s tall and somewhat lanky, and you can tell that as the sole occupant over the winter, the invasion of his space by us summer workers has made him less comfortable. He handles is well though. The other two are of a similar age to one another – perhaps early 30’s – average height, strongly built with rough facial hair to augment the impression of being outdoorsmen. When I see them separately, I have to think very carefully which is which, though in the room together the mistake is hard to make.

For now we get along well and see no need to rush changes in deference to the veteran of the room. Still, I suspect that once the winter-over leaves (in mid November) we will reorder the room from its current sleeping half – living half design to, perhaps, four individual sleeping corners. Almost certainly the beds will be unbunked, and a couch will be removed.

We live in a hall with a dozen similar rooms as well as community bathrooms, and four such halls comprise the second floor. Down on the first floor there are a few more dorms, but many more community facilities. Washers and dryers sit across from computer kiosks. A craft room sits in one hall next to a hairdresser and a gear issue sits down another. There is the general store, with its everyday items, $6 six-packs, and souvenirs.

Along with the coffee house and bars, this store is the only place where money can be spent. Everything else, from food to laundry, library books, movie rentals and haircuts is free. There’s even a community “Goodwill” store, called skua, where past travelers leave behind the items they no longer want. Everything in it is free to whomever desires it. Skua doesn’t have the same clean organization as the general store, nor the predictability, but a variety of useful and useable items passes through it to help augment a new McMurdan’s clothes or room.

What about food? The galley is also located on the first floor of my dorms. Here, the majority of the 1000+ population gets feed, with exceptions for the airfields which have their own small galley’s.

Truly, the food variety is remarkable. Each meal typically has a selection of hot foods, a selection of cold foods and a selection of baked goods. Depending on the meal, there is also a sandwich chef, or an omelette chef, or a meat carver. Below are my plates for a Sunday brunch and a weekday dinner.

Delicious looking right? Especially considering that everything has to be flow in from off continent and has to be made for hundreds and hundreds of people. It takes everything in my power not to overeat each and every meal – right now it’s only every other meal or so. Each meal is different, and while some meals are better than others, rarely is there nothing the looks particularly good. Really, I can think of only one meal that I looked at and despaired…

…and then I tried the salmon pasta bake anyway and enjoyed it.

I’m told that in past years the food has been pretty abysmal. Going into the season, people were warning me about the perils of trying to get enough sustenance when all of it made you gag. The crisis culminated last year when entire weeks went by with little or no fresh food and people going straight for the fake-ice cream machine, frosty-boy, which often was the sole bright spot in the galley. But this year, with a new head chef and an increased budget for fresh food (reverently referred to as ‘freshies’), everyone is raving about the increased quality. As someone who at times can be a bit… picky… with his food, it seems I chose a good year to come. 

Other thoughts:

I have been transitioning to the night shift for the past few days. Pragmatically, what this means is I have two days off to shift my internal clock by 12 hours. But I’m much more interested in the response my body is going to have to this change. I’ve always been a night person, happy to sleep late into the day and then stay up until almost sunrise. Conversely, getting up in the morning has always been one of the harder tasks in my everyday life. But now what will happen in a land that has no end to daytime? Even though it is the night shift, there will never be any darkness. Will my body still treat this time as daytime – perhaps analogous to the near-horizon passages of the sun in winter days back home – or will it still acknowledge that I am running on a fundamentally different schedule than those around me? I suppose the question is: am I a night person because of physiological (lack of sun) reasons, or psychological (lack of people) reasons?

It was asked that I get  all the vehicles I drive in the same photo to better gauge their relative sizes. Bam.

Tools of the Trade

It is an endlessly stereotyped mantra of corporate America: you, as a worker, are part of a whole; a gear in the machinery; a cog in the wheel. For the system to work, you have to do your part, and no matter how insignificant you may think your part is, if you do not do it, everyone will be set back because of it. Hyperbole? Absolutely. But the idea does touch on a key point here at McMurdo (even though it may not be true back in the states), which is that each and every job here exists because it is important. Every person at McMurdo is employed for the sole purpose of supporting scientific research on the harshest continent in the world. There is no other reason for being here. The NSF grantees, the construction workers, the shuttle drivers and the dining attendants all work to advance the knowledge of mankind. Even though the company that employs us (Raytheon) is here for the money, at the very top this venture has no profit motive.

My little part to play in this adventure is as a shuttle operator. My job can be broken down into several aspects, but at its core I am a taxi driver, driving people and their supplies around McMurdo, to the airplane runways and to the nearby science stations. Like most employees at McMurdo, I am housed at a building that is meant to be functional and nothing more:

 This warehousy-looking building is as 140. It’s home to the shuttles department. It also houses the air services department, all of cargo handling, the central supply room and the mail room. If you follow me I’ll take you on a tour of the little corner reserved for shuttles. Up those stairs and through the door in the white patch you’ll enter our building’s welcoming lobby

Cushy, huh? When people arrive at McMurdo, the cargo department unloads the luggage into this area, and passengers can pick it up and be driven to their dorms (by us!). The shuttles office is the door to the left. No, not the door you can see, that’s the ladies’ room. Our door is to the left of that one, mostly obscured by the cubby-holes. No matter, I’ll show you in.

And if you come with me to the other end of the room, we can turn around and see where we’ve been.

Thanks for taking the tour!

We don’t exactly have a lot of space to work with. We also have 27 shuttle drivers, so fitting even half of them into our office is a tight fit, but it can be done in a pinch. Of course, most of the time most of the drivers are out in vehicles doing tasks about town, so office space isn’t a high priority. Our jobs range from being town courier, to shuttling people to the runway, to taxiing people around town and out to various field stations. At the heart of the operation is the dispatcher, keeping track of all the drivers currently on shift, what vehicles they’re driving and where they are. Here we can see Shuttles Mike working hard at it.

You can see around Mike many of the things he’s responsible for. Right now he appears to be taking a call, recording a taxi run and composing an email message for a vehicle heading into an area that requires authorization. Oh, and he’s probably listening to the dispatch radio for updates on road conditions or driver status-es. Basically, he takes in information from emails, the radio, the phones and the flight boards, and dispenses tasks to the drivers via the radio and the Big Board, which tells where every driver and every vehicle we have are at any given moment. 

Dispatcher is a high-pressure task. It is simultaneously awesome and nerve racking. Multi-tasking is an essential skill, and I can thank all those video games I played growing up for being able to juggle those tasks, micromanage effectively and adjust on the fly. The part  that kills me is dividing my attention. As a dispatcher, I have to sometimes be taking a phone call, listening to a flight report on the radio and telling a driver where I need him to go at the same time. Oh, and often there are 6 or 7 other people in the office who may be having other conversations. Anyone who knows me knows I am terrible at focusing on voices in the crowd, and dividing my attention in general, so this part of dispatching is going to prove to be the most challenging.

But dispatching is only one task. And as I said before, most of our time is spent with our vehicles. Let me show you our fleet. We have 17 vans

3 airporters

3 deltas

Ivan the Terra Bus

And 2 prototype vehicles, which are useless without their comically long trailers

The prototypes have a funny story, at least if you consider $4 million dollar prototypes that have been sitting unused for months and months funny. Effectively, they have proven unable to pull themselves and their trailers up hills, and their designers are… reluctant… to send a troubleshooter to figure out why. So for now they languish as roadside derelicts, and are the target of many unflattering comments by passers-by.

Ivan, on the other hand, is a beast. It holds 50+ people and is so unwieldy that a special position, Heavy Vehicle Operator, exists for people qualified to drive it. Alas, I am not one of those people, so I do not get to operate Ivan. I DO get to operate the deltas, though, and they are a nice consolation prize. They hold 20 passengers, are mini-beasts, and have articulating midsections which allow a driver to make absurdly tight turns. They are a handful to drive, but a lot of fun as well. Their big drawback is that they are not a particularly smooth ride, as captured in this cartoon:

Since we’re still in training, I’ll save talking about our job tasks for another day (i.e. once I have a better idea of what they’re like), but these are the places and vehicles I’ll be doing those tasks in.

Other thoughts:

–It has taken me almost two weeks to understand why my sense of direction has failed me and why I’m always confused about where the sun is. Being so close to one of the Earth’s pole, I knew that darkness would never really fall during my time here. And I also knew that a much larger fraction of the horizon would find the sun above it: in the states, the sun rises in the vicinity of east and sets in the vicinity of west, spanning a little over 180 degrees of horizon as the day unfolds. But near the pole, even before everlasting daytime, I came expecting closer to 270 degrees (75%) of the horizon to have the sun passing over it. What confused me was how every morning the sun seemed to rise in what I thought was roughly the easterly direction, but moved northerly instead of southerly in its trip across the sky.

Of course, that exactly what’s supposed to happen: I’m in the southern hemisphere! The sun traverses the southern half of the sky in the U.S. because the U.S. is in the northern hemisphere. Now that I’m in Antarctica, after the sun rises it swings around the northern half of the sky. This took me 2 weeks to work out… and I’m supposed to be an astronomer.

— While most of the experience has been enjoyable, there is one incredibly irksome thing that I have to complain about: my useless friggin’ smartphone-turned-mp3 player. It holds a whopping 8 GB of data which I gleefully filled with music, dreaming of hooking it up to an FM transmitter and blasting tunes during my long drives. Having dumped over half of my laptop’s library there, I set about organizing playlists so that I had my options open depending on my mood and the audience in the vehicle (I don’t want to be offending anyone’s potentially delicate sensibilities). But I noticed a strange phenomenon: sometimes my phone would complain about being unable to play a song which it had just successfully played.

No problem, right? I mean, I have something on the order of 5 continuous days worth of music stored, so a missing song here or there I can live with. Sadly, it’s worse than that: huge chunks (90%) of the library go missing seemingly without reason, and when they do my playlists – and all the time and effort put into organizing them – go as well. If I can’t get this fixed, it could be a very big pain in my neck.

Next week: Dorms ‘n Dining

On the Ice

After a week of life down at the bottom of the world I feel like I’m getting adjusted. I’m learning on the fly at work, which is a real challenge, but so far I’ve managed to retain a good chunk of what I’ve been taught. I’ll go more into that in another post, as I will about life, society and everything else that’s happening here. But that is all for later.

Stepping off the plane was amazing, and now that I’ve been here to see the reaction of other people as they arrive, I feel like I appreciate it more. When we disembarked, we were in the middle of nowhere. There were a few vehicles around, a cargo crate or two and a mass of people in exodus, but out across the horizon there was a vast open expanse. I imagine it would be kind of like standing in Tucson if it were still uninhabited desert, with vast expanses of land ending at distant mountains, but even more barren. The plane literally lands on the sea. Of course, it is frozen over and 6 or 7 feet thick, but there is such openness. We are isolated out in the middle of nowhere.

You can tell from the vehicles they have at the runway that they don’t screw around when it comes to driving in Antarctica. If it moves, it has a ton of clearance, and is made for moving through soft ground.

 The veterans of shuttles say that there will still be a lot of getting stuck as the season progresses. The temperature when I arrive is a breezy, balmy 20 degrees, but in the days to come it will get stuck around the single digits, and dive as low as -13 degrees with a wind chill of -38. It won’t stay that way though. With 24 hours of light brings enough energy to heat up to freezing or above, and even if the ambient temperature is below freezing, the sun’s rays will melt the snow and make driving messy.

But that is all for later. For now, the world is a bitterly frozen one, but still breathtaking to behold. And getting over the initial moments of taking in this place, I can see in the distance my home for the next few months. Far, far across the ice and tucked away on the side of a mountain is this settlement which belongs in some hobbyist’s basement, surrounded by model train sets. It certainly seems too quaint to be an outpost on the edge of civilization.

The drive from the airport to town is perhaps 15 minutes. The welcome talk is an hour. And then, we’re released. To be honest I have no idea where to go or what to do, but following everyone else seems like the correct survival strategy. We head to 155, the heart of the living quarters, to pick up bedsheets. My room is somewhere in the building too, along with the dining hall, library, general store.

But that is all for later. For now, I have to go get my bags, which are being unloaded in the same building where I will start working the following day. Once again, the lemming approach seems prudent, and I make my way there with little difficulty. Turning back, I can see out over the town, across the frozen sea and to the distant mountains of the continent itself.

 With my bags in my room and unpacked enough to make it another 24 hours, I have just enough time to explore a little bit before it’s time for bed. I find myself on the far side of the base where they are building the ice pier. Layer upon layer of water is sprayed onto the surface, allowed to freeze, and sculped into one, massive block of ice. Three months from now, an icebreaker – the one whose near-absence could have cost me my job –  will come plowing through the ice, and the cargo ship that follows will pull to the far side of the pier. For a week, cargo will be unloaded onto this pier of frozen water and trucked into town constantly, 24 hours a day, until it’s all delivered. For now, a lone loader or two prowls the perimeter, making sure the ‘construction’ is proceeding apace.

 Days later, I make my way to an overlook of the town. This is my home for a while. A bleak and beautiful place.

It’s picture time. While I’ve been here for a day and a half, and a ton of stuff has been thrown at me, I want to step back a minute and chronicle my trip here in pictures. It started in Denver, where I spent two days at orientation:

Raytheon Polar Headquarters

The folks there were friendly, helpful and everyone, both new and returning, where excited to be there. Here was our greeting:

After orientation, we had our marathon flight to Christchurch. Once there, one of my favorite things I can across was this Indian restaurant, which clearly used to be a gas station in it’s previous life. I ended up eating here for dinner, and it was quite good (though I am no expert on Indian food)

Indian Restaurant in Christchurch

The next day we got our Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear at the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center). There we tried on all our clothing to make sure it fit and was in good shape. If it wasn’t we were able to exchange it. I asked for size L jackets, shirts and parkas, but they all turned out to be a bit small so I went to XL. Much better. The CDC, once emptied, looked like this (the orange bags were where all our ECW was stuffed):

Decked in my sexy parka and overalls, I looked something like this:

The parka (as with all the gear) really is extreme cold weather. I love it. It promises to keep me warm even in pretty bad conditions. The downside is that it is ridiculously bulky, so once it warms up a bit I may stow it away for smaller things. Speaking of weather, next up is a graph! It shows how my local high temperature has changed over the past few days as my journey has progressed.

Once we were geared up and ready to head down, they loaded us into a C-17 which had been modified to carry about 100 people. The interior looked like this:

We were delayed for about on hour while weather passed through McMurdo, but we were soon on our way. The flight was loud, but we had earplugs which muffled the sound well. 5 hours later, we landed at the bottom of the world. Unfortunately, I can’t post the video here, but you can find it on my facebook page. Let me know if you have trouble viewing it and I will try to upload it to youtube.