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.