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.