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?