Ice, White & Blue

Redhead Amok in Antarctica

Freezing My Ass Off

Not.

Let me reiterate: I am not freezing my ass off. At its worst since I've been down here on the half-season Summer stint, it has been about 21F. Mostly it has been around 30F. The wind makes it colder, but with the proper defenses it's not THAT bad.

What I wear pretty much every day:

Smartwool Socks (expedition weight) & LL Bean Hiking Boots (not winter boots at all) The feets is the most important thing here. I am walking on dirt with pebbles & stones all around, climbing in & out of vehicles, swinging from the stars...errr...not. No stars here, just swinging from Deltas. Under these circs smaller shoes with ankle support are vital to my health & well-being. I am not at all concerned about cold feet. The socks keep 'em toasty. If I am out at Pegasus runway where it is colder and I stand outside a fair bit I might wear my Sorel Cold Mountain Boots, which have served me very very well during such "extreme" (ha ha) conditions as Happy Camper School and the few 2-3 inch snowfalls we've had thus far this season. Their most important feature thus far seem to be that they are waterproof.

Long Underwear of the silky polyester (black) sort. Most people don't wear this layer but seein' as I haven't got that natural warming layer myself I wear them every damn day, because on top of them I wear only a regular pair of jeans (Gap or Levi, sorta low cut, boot cut.) That layer is probably my only concession to Antarctic weather, really. I have two pairs of jeans and they get a lot of wear down here.

On top I wear a turtleneck, then a t-shirt, then a thin zip up hoodie fleece I bought at Ames before it went under, then the issue fleece jacket I received. This last layer of fleece is very dense, though not windproof. The key is layers, obviously, and layers that I can zip open & shut seems the most important key. If it gets windy I toss on my top layer, the windbreaker layer of my LLBean jacket, and I am warm & toasty. I would make a few changes to what I brought down if I'd known all this. I'd have brought a windproof fleece, invested in a good LLBean one, as long as it was zip up. I'd make sure every layer above t-shirt was zip up. Buttons are too fiddly, and a zipper is a quick way to cool off once I climb into a heated vehicle.

I wear a thick black watch cap I bought down here ALL THE TIME. There are people here who don't know I'm a redhead. This also necessitated the removal of most of my hair. I found that the wearing of a hat for about 16 hours a day made my scalp ache when my hair was longer than 5/8ths of an inch. All my hair would be flattened against my scalp in ways other than the growth pattern, and when I would take my hat off & replace it my scalp would hurt for a while afterwards. I don't have a sensitive scalp per se, but this was irritating. For those of you who've had long hair, it was like a full scalp version of the wet hair in a tight ponytail all day long feeling. So I figured I'd take it down to a 5 on top and a 3 on the sides. Much bettah!

Then sunglasses. I spent about $100 in this dept getting a decent pair of sunglasses that provided coverage on my face that wouldn't allow snowglare in the sides or up under the glasses. Amber-lensed 100% UV UB blocking glasses. I did not spring for polarization. It was recommended but I'm finding the amber lenses do me just fine when driving on the snow. Plastic frames are most important, because they leech the least amount of heat from your face in the wind.  Metal frames may even freeze to your face.

Gloves. They provide here, for the Shuttle Drivers, a special pair of Thinsulate 100 gram lined leather work gloves and unless I get them wet my hands remain warm & safe all the time. I LOVE THESE GLOVES!!! They get grungy bad when I have to fuel & fluid check the Deltas, or knock snow & dirt off the undersides. I tend to do the oil check & gas check using my gloves as a rag to wipe off the dipsticks. Most of us do. But they have worked thus far. The only drawback is that when they get wet they are wet for AGES and my hands will freeze. I went through 3 pair of gloves while Dive Tending.

I and most people here wear sunglasses OVER our hats, since we are constantly taking our sunglasses off & on, but mostly leave our hats on. I have met people in glasses & hat and not been able to recognize them unencumbered in the galley.

The most important thing I wear every day is sunscreen. 30+ SPF applied before I even walk out the door for breakfast. And not lightly either. Enough of it to make me look paler by half. Reapplied around lunchtime.

But I arrived in the full swing of the summer season here, most other people arrived in October when it was considerably colder. So I have been lucky in respect to weather, if you consider warmer weather in winter conditions lucky. I am actually seething with jealousy at the reports of 2 and 3 feet of snow you East Coasters got last week. I too want to go gamboling carefree and joyous in the fresh snowfall. We don't get that here in this part of the year. I'll admit we have snow, but it's taken millions of years to accumulate that much and it isn't exactly the softness or lightness that allows face first diving off porches to go ploompf! into the powder. Please enjoy it for me everyone, I'm pining away here for want of snow. Can ya freakin' believe it?

posted by: coldwish at 19:08 | link | comments (7) |
shuttles 2004-05

Purple Prose About Clouds

Erebus has been puffing away like a cigar store full of old men with Cubans these last few days, more plume than I've ever seen, blooming up over top big & fat & white then swept away for miles westward. That in itself is unusual, the westward plume, most days I've been here & seen a plume it has been eastward.

Yesterday the wind up there was blowing west, lifting snow & ice crystals from Erebus's flanks up into the sky to create the impression of Erebus moving into a headwind, sweeping trail away to the east. This made it look schizophrenic with everything on the eastward slope calm & clear, and the westward side all dramatic sweeps of cloud & blown snow & miles long plume. You could see where the division was where the wind hit and the peak went all to hell in brisk sideways snow trails, spreading it out under the westward plume. Utterly beautiful and powerful. It continues so today. Part of that plume/blown snow have turned into a school of long slim clouds that look like millions of pastel silvery blue & pink fish in a school of clouds just under the sun.

The clouds have begun showing colours now with the lowering of the sun toward the horizon for so many hours. I wouldn't call it a sunset at all, but the shadows have shifted and the colours in the sky have increased. I'm seeing infinitesimal hints of peach & pink & yellow in the white draped sky, the blue of the world a lighter more wintry pale.

Yesterday's clouds spent a few hours looking like the tracks of a celestial figure skater as viewed from under the blue ice, thin swoops and swirls & streaks against the blue. Some cloud lines looked hung with melting gauze flags in the palest of yellow tones like a nicotine stain.

It is colder and the clouds are often frozen by the cold, they are not just vapour in the air above us, ephemeral and drifting. They are denser, whiter and attract more light from the sun. The clouds in the cold become like formations of ice crystals & the sun shines through so they explode like a rainbow of carborundum hues. I could blind myself looking at the sun to see a ice cloud rainbows. They are soft clouds with hard-edged colours unlike that of a RAIN-bow which is all soft and diffuse, this is definitely a spectrum created by ice solidly sparkling and light diffracted & split with millions of prisms.

There is open water now out in the channel all the icebreakers (Polar Star - USCG, Krasin - Russian $50,000/day, Nathaniel B. Palmer - Science Vessel) have created. It reminds me firmly that McMurdo is on an island in the Ross Sea and that we are port. The view from McMurdo is only possible because we are on the ocean, as frozen solid as most of it is year round. I am never far from the sea in my travels & it is no surprise that I am in love with Antarctica when my experience of it is sea bound island life. I DRIVE on the ocean, over the sea on snow & ice. The vast expanses of "flat" white are what would be water between landmasses & islands in Maine. The sky is bigger at sea. The horizon is vaster from an island. There is a strong similarity in the long views & unfettered sky. The frozen permanent ice shelf, when viewed from up high (as from Scott Base Hill, a switchback turn down which I drive every day), looks like the ocean. There are waves and swells extending out from shore, the pressure ridges like permanent breaking surf leaping up out of the swells, dotted around by seals looking like ice leeches. The ripples extend further out echoing the curve of the land where the ice has been pressed up against it by the sea ice.

White Island is aptly named, being 95% covered in snow, very smoothly draped, without the shocking up thrusts of differently angled ridges to interrupt its slopes. In the right light, shining low & warmly horizontal across the ice shelf to the island's flanks, you can see the muscular curves of the enormous drifts that have collected there. In some areas the snow looks to be barely containing the rippling muscles of some enormous sleek beast, white & pure & vigorous, about to leap off the sides of the island. I imagine a giant white racehorse, flanks tensed & cut with strength, waiting to erupt.

In the Royal Society Range I can see the glaciers insinuating themselves powerfully & irresistibly down between the sharp young peaks to the frozen sea. The flow hugely & majestically sinuous downwards, shaping the range in their insistence.

Snow is alive here.

I am alive here. I did not know a body could contain so much bliss and still need to shit & eat. I feel I could split open, shed my skin & ascend to another plane here. It is so gloriously splendidly beautiful there isn't a language alive or dead that can parlay that feeling well enough.

posted by: coldwish at 03:51 | link | comments (4) |
shuttles 2004-05

The Skua Chronicles

I have decided that my favorite wildlife down here is the skua. Not only do I get the most access to it, because they are always around us hoping for a dropped or thrown cookie (in self-defense only, no, we're not feeding the birds, really, what do you think we do down here? Contravene the Antarctic Treaty on a daily basis? I'm shocked! Shocked I say at your infering such.) but because they have the most personality. I have watched these birds and what they do makes sense to my tiny human mind, in that they are most easily anthropomorphized.

They are not an attractive bird, really, no more or less than a seagull. They are very common & brown & mottled, whose only flash of colour and decoration occur on their underwings near the tips, with a sharp flash of curved white lightening through the brown underside. They are large birds, actually about the size of the Adelie Penguins, I have discovered. Not that you see them together here. Unless they are both stuffed and lying next to each other on a tray in Crary Lab. What, didn't I mention that? That Ivan-squashed Skua was resurrected. Oh, certainly, it died, but the beakers in Crary heard about it and came out quickly and scooped up McMurdo's first road kill and scurried back to Crary with it. We apparently have an amateur taxidermist among us. The formerly flat skua is looking rather robust nowadays, its only evident damage the cracked beak. Oh, and the death look thing too.

Next to the newly plumped up and feather-rearranged skua was an Adelie. I was stunned to find that when both are posed on their backs like that that they are approximately the same height and heft.

But back to the live version. I've watched these birds, who speak very very little, interact with each other a lot. I have that chance when I am out at Willie Field doing the Willie Field Taxi. WF Taxi involves sitting in a van just in case Air National Guard crew need rides from Willie Town to their Skiers (ski-equipped planes) and back. Due to the black crap that falls off the vans (dirty ice) onto the snow (melting holes in the snow), we have to vary the places we park and pretty much have free reign of where we go. As long as we remain on radio, we can wander around in & out of the van, in the Galley, etc. Good opportunities to take photos of Erebus.

Skuas hang out at Willie Field, more per capita than in town. Possibly the food detritus is less "protected" there than in town, perhaps the Treaty is less enforced due to fewer eyes watching the goings on out there. Either way, the skuas are bold and familiar. The Galley building is right next to the loo and the skuas often park themselves on the roof of either building. They compete with each other for people exiting the Galley. I've watched skuas swoop down on someone only to have another skua loop over the first skua and send it off target. Which can really piss the first skua off from. Pissed Off Skua #1 will haul ass after Skua #2 who is moving away at speed (say, over the parked aircraft). Skua #2 gets some momentum going and looks pretty good travelling away from #1, but #1 will have a bee in its bonnet about the previous engagement and will hunch its shoulders and shorten its wings and storm after it. Skua #2 after a short bit of this will catch up with #1, go, "Ha! Gotcha!" (I'm sure of this) and bounce off #1's head then flap leisurely away, having satisfied its blood lust for revenge. I love watching the efforts of Skua #2 to catch #1, that determined sprint with wings tightened inward and pumping like mad to catch up. Skua #1 never pursues Skua #2 after this payback.

Then there's the skua who watched me as I sat in my van eating a cookie bar. I admit to the mortal sin of having walked from the Willie Field Galley to my van with the Unwrapped Cookie In My Hand. So I take some responsibility for provoking the resulting skua activities but I will not be guilted into thinking I strayed from normal human behaviour into actual..."skua teasing". If anything the skua was teasing ME. The skua started out staring at innocent little me (no really) from up top the Galley, then swept down onto my head when I exited the building. I waved my hands and swore at the bird. By now I'm used to this. So are they, it seems. I don't recommend waving the hand with the cookie bar in it. It then flew to up top of the loo, beside which I was parking enjoying the sunshine with the window down & the view of the Royal Society Range over the airfield, minding my own business. Halfway through my cookie bar I was made aware of the intense gaze of the skua who had spotted my vittles, and there was lust in its eyes. What do I do when faced with a lustful skua? I roll my window up. Not completely though. I left it open a crack...so I could breath. The skua took off from the roof and landed on the snow outside my van door by about 3 feet. So I showed it my cookie. I showed it the cookie as I bit into it. I smiled. Told it the cookie was really very delicious, really. What a shame it wasn't in the Antarctic Treaty for me to share that cookie with the skua nation representative who was representing really strongly outside my van door. A real damn shame.

The skua came closer to my door. I rolled the window down one more inch. I waved that cookie bar near the crack in the window. That skua nearly drooled on the snow. I waved it again. The skua launched itself in the air and I rolled up my window. Most of the way. Hehe.

Then the skua landed on the roof of the van and sat there right over my head, proably marking the van with special skua shit markings designed to indicate to any overflying skua that Here Sits A Cookie Bar Wielder, Shit On Her.

Everyone who passed me as I sat there eating my cookie bar (as you may have ascertained by now I was enjoying it VERY SLOWLY) felt the need to point out that I had a skua on my roof.

Hehe.

But I did not share my bar. Not that I'm not a sharing kinda gal, but I couldn't POSSIBLY share a cookie bar with a skua under these circumstances. IT'S AGAINST THE LAW. 

posted by: coldwish at 07:51 | link | comments |
shuttles 2004-05

The Crud & Penguin Power

Sorry for not posting in such a long time, folks. Got The Crud. That ubiquitous cold crap that goes around isolated communities until someone new to the community introduces a new version of it. There have been a lot of new faces in the Galley, lately. The South Pole people (Polies) who are doing a Summer/Winter combo get a week's R & R here at McMurdo before heading back to the Pole where they close down flights in & out a month earlier than we do here. The McMurdo Winterovers are showing up and it's like old home week here for a lot of people. Some summer jobs are ending in the next week. Lots of movement on & off continent & intracontinent. The beakers are coming in from the field or making their last quick trip out, packing up their samples for the trip back to the ivory towers in which most of academe resides.

The South Pole Traverse returned here after getting to within 290 miles of the Pole, overland from Mactown to the Pole. They have been trying to find a land route between here and there the last few years, next year they will make it all the way. A lot of what they are doing is dragging fuel with them for their vehicles and going back & forth looking for a clear route through the crevasses and other obstacles to heavy vehicles. There is some international disapproval of this project but it is funded by the NSF and supported by Raytheon. I gave a ride to a SP Traverse fella the other day who said if the route is completed, in a good year, the round trip over land would be about 4-5 weeks. It was originally conceived of as a way to get oversized construction pieces to the Pole for the new station they are building. Well, that didn't happen, timing-wise. The Station is damn near complete and people have been living & eating in there since last year. But the Traverse continues. The road won't really prove to be a transport boon because of the time & the fuel required to make the trip.

The Nathaniel B Palmer is in town unexpectedly. This is the Science/Ice Breaker that wanders around the continent doing science-related drop offs & pick ups and sea-based science. We can see, from Hut Point if it's clear, the Krasin (Russian icebreaker putatively saving our asses from starvation-enforced evacuation...ha ha ha), the Polar Star (back out in the ice after repairs, now down a turbine but still doing its game best to clear the ice for the tanker), and the oil tanker. The cargo ship is on its way too and is at the edge of the ice as I've heard it. Looks like we are back on schedule.

It snowed all day yesterday and still today, nice 2-3 inches of fluff out at Willie. We'd had beautiful, clear blue days for the last week and all of those of us who get out onto the Ice are showing it in the colour on our faces. I'm darker than I've ever been, though the pattern is largely Trucker Freckles, up & down the left side of my face. Even with liberal application of 30+ sunscreen several times daily I can't keep up. I couldn't stop the freckles anyway if I tried with 100+ SPF. It'd take Plaster of Paris to stop me from colouring up in these conditions. The temps have also dropped just a few degrees to about 27-28F each day, which is a blessing. We're back in vans on the snow road to the airfields because it is now cold enough to freeze the transition.

As much as I love those Deltas they are exhausting to drive continuously back & forth, with the noise & the stink & the climbing up & down and the jostling & bumping. Better view though and more privacy. Still like them better, just maybe my body is relieved to be in vans again.

I am already packing up superfluous stuff and mailing it home. Last day out for package mail is Feb 7th, and I'll be damned if I'll carry this crap all the way back to Cheech, let alone back to the US. I'm intending to travel light and easy, and not be exhausted by schlepping, when I start tramping in NZ. I'll take a few days in Cheech to pack up whatever else I needed for the last few weeks here, then I'll get my camping gear in order (which I mailed to myself in Cheech before leaving for the Ice) and figure out what I want to do. Either way, I'm looking forward to the time alone outdoors.

Too many people here right now. I think I'm probably more suited to the Winterover lifestyle: single rooms, 200+ people, several months of permanent darkness, 4-5 hour sunsets & sunrises, and auroras like sky candy. People say that Winfly (Winter Fly In: Aug 15th, 3 flights in during a few hours of sunlight, then back to no flights until Mainbody in early Oct) is the most gorgeous time of year down here, and the coldest part of winter. I'd like to see that. I can't imagine it getting more amazing than it is down here now.

I will be here for the first Sunset of the year, Feb 21st, 12:38am (?). I don't fly until Feb 22nd, so it'll be an all-nighter for me. I have a "date" with another Shuttle Driver, Bill, to toast the sunset. He's a retired bus driver from Miami, one of the few of us with a CDL driving these big rigs. He's been very helpful teaching me about the vehicles, and also what to see & how to get there to see it. He's got a dry sense of humour that can be odd at first when combined with his slightly flippant authority & confidence around the vehicles. But that's what you get from experience, retirement, and being twice the age of your boss; the right to do what you wanna do & say what you wanna say without too much fear of repercussions. He loves it here too, and is well chuffed over the things he's been able to see & do. I love listening to him tell stories of the Adelie who stopped Mactown cold in its tracks, trucks & forklifts & cargo Deltas lined up all the way through town waiting for it to move off the road to the Ice Runway. It'd move, they'd get back in their trucks, start up the engines and the Adelie would come waddling back over intrigued by the new noises. Everyone would turn off the vehicles, get out and watch the one little bird do its little inspection tour of the road. The Adelie would move away, they'd get back in, and back that Adelie would scooch onto the road. The Power of Penguin.

 

posted by: coldwish at 20:35 | link | comments (1) |
shuttles 2004-05

Bits & Ends, Odds & Pieces

This week I learned that if I am in a van using my Beam-It technology in order to listen to my CD player on the radio, I can broadcast Eartha Kitt doing "I Wanna Be Evil" into any van in the vicinity tuned to 88.1 FM. I'm thinking of starting my own radio station out here, one not sanctioned by the National Science Foundation, let alone Raytheon.

This Beam-It device is a blessing for those days when I am assigned to sit in a van out at Willie Field doing intra-airfield taxi services. None of the vans have cassette decks or CD hook ups, and the paucity of radio stations here is only matched by the scary scary musical choices you hear on the Armed Forces radio. The Kiwi Scott Base Station has its moments of splendor, but then some of it is a determinedly 80s splendor. So if I have 4-6 hours out there I take a book, my camera and my own musical choices: this last time they were Eartha Kitt, The The, Nick Cave & Luciano Pavarotti. When one of the regular 1/2 hourly shuttles going between Willie & Mactown pulled in and had a few minutes break, he got in my taxi to hang out until time to leave and made some comment about the strange radio station I was also listening to. Bwa ha ha ha! That was me playing Eartha Kitt on my CD player. The power I have discovered...I promise to use it only for good.

Life doesn't get much better than Eartha Kitt and a view of Erebus. Though I could go for some Bing Crosby tunes while down here, I just have a severe shortage of non-vinyl recordings of his voice.

Some days here, after snow has fallen on the black hills around town I am startled to look up at these mounds of volcanic matter and see the bones of the mountains showing through. I don't know what it is about the stark black & white woodcut look to the hills with the white snow delineating the angles and shoulders, but it makes the mountains appear wind-scoured and peeled of the warm black layer until the white bones beneath show through in stark relief. It isn't until the snow accumulates sufficiently that you look up and see the warm blanket effect of white snow rounding the harsh contours of the hills. This doesn't often happen as mostly the snow is blown into place.

I would love to see a woodcut done of the hills over McMurdo in their stark black & white state framing the blue incandescence of Erebus, against the blue blue sky overhead. I think perhaps I imagine a certain cousin with a fabulous talent for woodcuts (among her many artistic abilities) doing this image. Because I know she could do it. Brilliantly.

A few days ago when we had had a particularly nice snowfall without any snow for a whole day or more, the world softened up on its usual glittery state and became warm and white. Later in the afternoon, the clouds started thinning and I was once more returning from Willie Field with the view of Erebus to my right, and Castle Rock jutting black and crenellated up from the white cliffside that extends all the way to the right where Scott Base squats at the bottom of Ob Hill just past the Transition. As I neared the cliffside I looked at it puzzled by what I appeared to be seeing. It looked like the gods had run thousands of fingernails upon the white snow, vertically down the side of the cliff to the road underneath it. It was a subtle sort of stretchmarked look that I couldn't figure out until I got closer, even then I wasn't sure I was interpreting it correctly. Closer up it looked like thousands of miniature avalanches, maybe a foot across falling to different levels: to the top of the cliff, over the cliff or half way up it. Then I made the turn into the road that parallels the cliff and looked up to see that what I was seeing was the wind building up from the north on the other side of the cliff and blowing brisk narrow fingers of snow up and over and across the cliff to fall off it onto the crevasses at the base of the cliff. I was startled and almost dizzied to realize this phenomenon I had witnessed starting at 4 miles away was an illusion of motion, not a solid definable event.

Even when the snow blows here it is alive and splendid, either in the sharp stinging bite of it on your face or the subtle drifting smokey creep across a black dirt road.

Today we are emerging from a heavy dense freezing fog that has risen from the fresh snow to shut down flights again. It sat on the airfield, but left McMurdo in sunshine all day yesterday, causing a Condition 2. Condition 2 means that we can still travel on the ground but we have to radio in to the Firehouse with the whens, whos & wheres of our intended route. Then we check in upon arrival. Condition 2 lifted just as I headed out on my first Willie run and by lifted I mean literally this wall of fog just lifted a few feet at a time, in place, upward, until it was a grey fog ceiling about a few storeys high. Since the fog is created by the temperature differential of the air & the fresh snowfall on the Ice Shelf, the horizon one glimpses under this ceiling is clear in a narrow strip all the way around. I could see the foot of White Island in shades of blue from dark navy stripes of earth to the shiny white satin of the snow with the sunshine on it, and the shadowed valleys in velvety pale blue-greys. This I want to quilt. I spent the trip out there thinking of the fabrics in my collection that I could use, or how I would dye with indigos the patterns I saw, enhancing it with quilted lines to show the textures of the snows.

I feel so alive here. I'm sleeping better, figuring out how much I need and how devious I need to be to get it. I crave alone time the most, and get a lot of it in the cab of the Delta if no one rides up front with me. I have found the library here. My first 30 minutes I spent with their large dictionary playing that random wander through definitions & histories & sources of words that is so soothing to me. I started with a word that had haunted me for a few days: prurient. Then I was off through pervert, then graft and grift and whatever word caught my fancy and reminded me of another word. It was very satisfying to just sink into the world of words and let associations and thoughts drift upward, fingers skimming & flipping through the pages. In the  visceral world I have been living in this last while, that was a treat for my intellect, lazily spinning from word to word.

Ah, I must go once more to Willie in a Delta. I will be passing the Kiwi - US Rugby match out on the snowfield on the way there. It promises to be a cold cold day out there, and I hope the Kiwis don't slaughter us too badly.

posted by: coldwish at 02:18 | link | comments (4) |
shuttles 2004-05

My Firsts

On Wednesday this week, after a leisurely sleep-in in my newly curtained-for-darkness room until 9:30am, I got a call from a beaker, Bryan, asking me if I wanted to do some dive tending.  

In 15 minutes.

 

In my ECW gear.

In 15 minutes.

At Crary Lab in my ECW gear.

 

 In 15 minutes.

I said yes. Of course, I said Yes. I would have promised him I could teleport myself fully kitted to wherever he needed me to be in order to go dive tending. I wasn’t ready. It hadn’t even occurred to me to be ready. Wednesday is my day off. I hadn’t even had breakfast.

As a Shuttle Driver I get odd days off compared to most of the rest of the populace who have to pretty rigidly maintain a 7:30-5:30 Monday through Saturday schedule with everyone drinking themselves stoopid on Saturday nights and having Sundays off to do laundry while nursing a hangover. My days off are currently Wed & Sun. Though I’ve been swapping out Sundays for Saturdays with another Shuttle Driver who is on the Rugby Team & needs Sundays off.

So my normal day off attire is several layers short of my usual work kit. I was already stripping one-handedly out of my jeans as Bryan described to me where I should be in 15 minutes. I stormed into my long johns, serious socks, wind pants, turtleneck, t-shirt and heavy fleece. I stuffed every glove I had into my rucksack, popped into my LL Bean clogs & whipped out of my room up to the Shuttle Office where we all keep our ECW gear.

Anybody who travels out to Willie Field or Pegasus Field must at least CARRY their ECW gear with them, just in case weathuh! descends and we are trapped in our vehicles between red- or green-flagged poles because the visibility has gone to pot and you can’t see the next one up the road. I keep my bunny boots and Big Red (issue parka) and bear mitts in my bag at the office.

I changed into the bunny boots, grabbed some hand warmers, zipped up Big Red & requested a taxi ride (in one of the vans, Shuttles offers this service in & around McMurdo) to Crary. Where I waited for 15 minutes for the Pisten Bully to drive up with Diver Kevin & Diver Paul, already 3/4s of the way into their red & black rubber dive suits.

Bryan & Amanda came out of Crary, we loaded the gear into the PB and headed out of town.

My First Pisten Bully Ride.

What I want to do is drive one. A PB is a tracked vehicle that was designed for grooming snow. It has been adapted for use on the Ice, but it was not meant for some of the…let’s say…bumpier conditions one may encounter with Wild Ice, as opposed to the Domestic Snow of a ski resort. We were piled – equipment, tenders, divers – willy-nilly into the back cab of this thing.

First we stopped at the Aquarium down on the shore in front of town. We needed to get a bucket of sea water that was at the exact correct temperature, to carry back any fish the divers caught.

 

 My First Antarctic Cod.

While arranging the nets & stuff, and cleaning out the insulated ice bucket, I gazed into a tank where I met the largest fish I have yet seen down here. It was in a blue fiberglass 8ft round 3-4 ft deep tank of 28F seawater. It swam desultorily, this Antarctic Cod; about 5ft long, bleak-eyed, and scarred with age and encounters I cannot even fathom. It gazed one moment at me as I leaned over it, then moved on. This fish was easily 10-15 years OLDER than me, possibly even 50-60 years old. It looked wise & sad with experience, and futurelessness. I cannot imagine being taken from the crisp blue & green horizons of the Antarctic Seas and placed in a tiny tank to swim around and round.

It saddened me, not just this one aged unhappy fish, but the idea that we eat fish like this. By we I mean we humans, not specifically we Antarcticans, but we eaters of flesh. How can we “harvest” these fish at 30, 40, 50, 60 years old if not older, and consider our actions sustainable? Or does sustainability have nothing to do with it? Are humans so shortsightedly profit-motivated that we will decimate the oceans of fish that take so many years to mature? When we don't even know what impact their destruction will have on the rest of the fragile ecosystem of the ocean, let alone the larger world?

I wasn’t expecting to think like that about a fish. Down here the impact of human activity is blatant upon this continent. We have already, in our stupidity & technological forward momentum, destroyed much of the ozone layer over this place. I wear sunscreen EVERY DAY here, all days cloudy or clear are days we are vulnerable to the UV rays that we are no longer protected from.

I need to know more about the fish I eat. I need to know which fish are sustainably harvested. I’m not sure I can live otherwise after having been gazed into by the eyes of this cold-dwelling bleak-eyed cod.

Organized at last, my soul still stirring with the ripples of doubt and sadness, we boarded the PB. As we drove onto the Sea Ice, we checked out by radio.  And requested that lunches be held for us, since we would be missing it.

My First Time On The Sea Ice.

Believe it or not, I hadn’t up till now been on the Sea Ice, just a glacier and the Permanent Ice Shelf.

As I mentioned before, PBs are not created for this kind of going. They can handle it but my ass could be better padded. Wotthehell. It’s a harsh continent and being tossed into the lap of a rubber-suited diver is not the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

The holes in the Sea Ice, through which the divers would descend, were located out front of Ob Hill by Cape Armitage, not quite around the corner enough to be in view of Scott Base, but not out of sight of McMurdo. A new view for me, though obscured by clouds, falling snow & sharply blowing snow.

My First Weddell Seal.

We were not going out to one of the dive huts; we were diving through holes on the ice marked only by flags. And a Weddell Seal. This one was about 5 yards from the first hole we checked, which was the second hole we dove at. This hole was about 4ft wide and was open and clear of ice & snow, kept so no doubt by the seal who’d staked its claim there, given the weather we’ve been having. Not that a big fat grinning sleeping Weddell Seal takes any notice of human activity. We did our diving; it did its sleeping & snoring (seals snore!). This seal didn’t look to be at its fattest, perhaps it was a mother whose pup was off gallivanting under the Ice, or had met its fate in the jaws of a Killer Whale. During the breeding season they dry dock themselves for the nonce, mother seals losing blubber and becoming relatively svelte with the lack of food. They lose a lot of weight and sleep a lot. In complete unconcern & disregard for weeks on end, from a distance these seal beachings appear like black leeches against the white landscape. There are no natural predators on the Ice here, just in the seawater with the large black & whites of the sea: Killer Whales. Killer Whales find them more than delectable with their muscular blubbery sleek bodies. The must be like huge strawberry & cream crepes to the whales (think about the insides of a seal).

While the divers were under the Ice doing what it is divers do (swimming really hard in place against the unexpectedly strong current just to set & check current & temperature-measuring equipment), Amanda & I left Bryan to actually watch the hole. We crept and crawled over to the seal to take pictures. The seal did nothing more than open one nostril at a time into the blowing snow & wind that carried our scent.

When it did open its eyes to confirm its nostril's conclusion that we were negligible company at best, I, being brought up on Disney images of seals with their limpid chocolate eyes, was STUNNED to be looking into The Fiery Pits of Hell. Or very easily the worst case ever of Pink Eye. Red fiery orbs blinked at me once, twice, then closed with a very dismissive accompanying snort from one nostril. Back to sleep. Leaving us the freedom to crawl a little closer. It didn’t react even at 8-10ft. So I was well within the Do Not Disturb Sleeping Seals Distance as per the Antarctic Treaty. Much more reasonable animals, seals.

I got so close that I could see the translucence of the seal's oval-splashed spotted fur. One would think the fur would be a dense coat, but at this distance I could see that the fur/hair was like delicate hollow glassine tubes shining with yellow and ochre and rust and browns from the inside against a background of dark brown almost black. Or so it appeared to me. I so severely wanted to pet that thing, but who knew what kind of trouble I’d get into with the seal, let alone with The Powers That Be down here. 

posted by: coldwish at 01:13 | link | comments (3) |
shuttles 2004-05

Strange Days

Today began with my being barely able to drag my ass out of bed and it hasn't even ended but I have been up down and all over. One of the few sunny blue sky days we've had for the last few weeks. We've been clouded over white on white with falling snow, blowing snow, drifting snow, dancing snow, The planes in & out of Cheech have all been on weather delay. The Polar Star is still broken at the Ice Pier awaiting parts on the planes from Cheech that just haven't gotten here. Then one of the pax planes that do the large numbers of pax movements from Mactown to Cheech and back has...broken down. So, between the weather and the repairs schedule on various modes of transportation, things have been interesting.

Rumours fly that there are three cargo pallets of mail & personal packages that have been waiting in Cheech since several weeks before the holidays, and people are jonesin' for mail. We have all been given our Redeployment Dates, and mine is February 22nd. Of course, we all consider that indefinite because we know the Ship Offload is getting later & later. Ship Offload is when the Cargo Ship comes in, for which the Polar Star icebreaker has broken ice, and we all scramble to unload construction materials, food, diesel, gas, vehicle parts, etc. All the things the station needs for the next Winter at minimum and for next Summer Season. We also pack up the last year's detritus, including the garbage we've generated, torn down buildings, dead vehicles, and other construction debris we have produced. A lot of it is the work that is being done to clean up the station from previous...tenants (like the Navy) whose concept (not solely theirs, but a generational dumbness) of garbage disposal was to bury or sink it. There is a long vehicular history on the bottom of the ocean offshore of here from when the Navy just shoved the dead through the Ice into the water. Out of sight, out of mind. When we find these things and can access them we remove them. There is also a lot of stuff around station that harks back to that era that we are offloading. There are entire departments whose responsibility it is to identify & pack up these items.

I started off my work day by breaking my supervisor's purple plastic ruler, literally not metaphorically. Much to her disgust. I was offered her ruler in order to measure a chair adjustment lever to see which wrench would fit it. The handle had broken off the night before and the seat in Delta 498 (quiet, smooth, no power, plagued by mechanical issues) had sunk all the way to the floor. Leaving me seated so low on the last run to Willie last night that a) I couldn't see over the dashboard b) my knees were up around my tits. I rolled up my Big Red (issue parka) and sat on it, but that was not fun. Left butt cheek 1 inch higher than right butt cheek, my back practically in spasms after the 1 1/2 hour round trip. Bad end to an otherwise good day last night.

So I reported the seat issue to my supervisor, who offered me her ruler. The Delta in question, 498, also has a history of driver's side door issues. Like when there's no way in hell you can get it open from the outside and have to climb up in through the pax side of the cab and crawl across the seats and manipulate your feet under the steering wheel and shove hard with your left shoulder while pulling on the door handle. Yup. Sat on her ruler at that point. Seat had been fixed the night before by the night crew. My report rendered moot. Ruler sacrificed for naught.

Then the sun started coming out, I got out of the office, and the mood on station improved rapidly (err, not consequent to my departure but the sunshine). I was sent out to Willie Field several times in a Delta where the snow sparkled and glowed like diamond & sapphire dust all over the place and Erebus came back out all softly blue & shiny with new snow. What can I say? I am so lucky to be here. I feel I have been transformed on some subatomic level by what I see every day here. A major shift on a nucleic wavelength.

I drove Ivan for only the 2nd time and managed to only shave one pole skinnier, not actually knock it down, while going around a corner. That was fun. Usually driving Ivan engenders looks of wonder at the size of it and no one actually looks at the driver, unless Ivan is rubbing up against something it shouldn't oughta be lovin' like that. Then there'll be a crowd of a dozen people, only one of whom will take the time to help you out of the mess you've gotten yourself into because YOU CAN'T SEE SHIT on your sides or behind you. Man, that thing is HARD to turn. I will build up muscles like a power lifter if I get in Ivan once a day. I can't believe some people go the gym here to work out! In my regular day's work I get a workout that includes aerobics, weightlifting, and stretching, from the Deltas alone.

As we were passing through the transition with a full load of Ground Crew for the Air National Guard (shift change) I pointed out a penguin over by the Ice side, splashing & scrumpfing to get out of the water. I looked in my mirror (like a school bus driver's mirror) and there were 20-odd full-grown, clean-shaven men in fatigues standing up and leaning out the Ice side window of Ivan, pointing & grinning like kids. Penguins do that to people. Universally. We all get giddy and charmed when we get to see even one penguin doing the things that penguins do. Watching a man who looks like he just escaped from a prison movie quietly creep up to a penguin on the shore on his elbows & knees with a camera in his hands to take pictures is wonderful.

My last trip out to Willie was in a van, transporting Flight Crew to the planes. I picked up two crews at DJ, who piled in with all their luggage (some going to Cheech & then home, some just doing a South Pole turnaround), along with 3 recreational passengers & their skis who planned to ski back from Willie. A beautiful night to do so. But the van, I'll admit, was overloaded. Normally we would be in a Delta for this run, but our Deltas have been taking turns going into the Day Spa for mechanical issues, so we HAD to drive a van.

I thought we'd never get through the mush at the Transition. It has been ridiculously warm this last week, up to 41F with sun. So the Transition is like driving through 2-3 feet deep mashed potatoes, McMurdo Galley Style (grey). We have 4WD and hopped up big wheels on these vans but still I was holding my breath as we sloshed & slipped & slid & squooshed & spun our way through there. It was a more personal ride for many of my pax than usual and I suggested they may want to introduce themselves before things got even more intimate.

Sped out to Willie on the hard packed snow and had a wonderful chat with Joe from the Guard who was riding shotgun. He's travelled quite a bit in Nova Scotia and had the pleasure of a trip with his wife to Newfoundland, where I have always wanted to go. I love these people who are stationed here every Summer Season for 8 years and still they look out the window and melt inside over the sheer beauty of Antarctica. They get misty-eyed & poetic about what keeps them coming back.

I requested permission from the Tower to take the flight crew out to the plane they'd told me was theirs, SK 01:

"MC1 This is Shuttle Genevieve requesting permission to enter the apron to deliver Flight crew to Skier 01."

"You're cleared to go."

"Thank you, out."

I drove the crew up to Skier 01 and we offloaded their gear (food, coffee, ECW gear, personal luggage, work gear, etc.) They looked around at this plane that did not look like it was ready for them and milled around discussing things for a bit before piling all their gear back into the van and saying, "Please take us to Skier 96." I did so with a small smile on my face. There we offloaded again only to have another Flight Crew boil out of the plane saying "We've already got this one." More discussion ensued. A possible Rumble At Willie Field I thought (or hoped.) It was then decided that I would drive one of the crew back in to Willie Field galley - as opposed to cruising past the other 4 planes asking where they belonged, or radioing the tower to ask where they belonged - where he would get a landline (phone, not radio) to ask which Skier they really should be on for this flight. He climbed in saying, "Let's see if we can try to salvage some semblance of professionalism on this one." By this time I was laughing my ass off and I turned to him, Frank, and said, "You guys are looking more and more like your Commander-in-Chief." He burst out in guffaws and said, "I know, this is how he pronounces Nu-Cyu-Ler. He drives me crazy."

I dropped him off at the Willie Galley and headed back into Mactown. The whole drive back with a grin on my face. Alone in the van, window down, blasting music and watching Erebus & Castle Rock in all their ineffably shifting glory.

I'm learning, after a month here, how to get by.

I love this place.

posted by: coldwish at 23:51 | link | comments (3) |
shuttles 2004-05

Dessert Metaphors

 I'm thinking I'm either undernourished or undersweetened down here.

During Happy Camper School, I decided in my infinite wisdom under the influence of the infinite sunshine & blue skies of the day to build my own shelter to sleep in over night. Clever girl, eh? So I took one of the Snow Saws or Ice Saws and proceeded to cut blocks of very dense snow into rectangles about 2 feet by 1.5 feet. As the afternoon progressed subtly into evening (some shadow shift but not much actual change in weather) and I was still working on building my shelter I started getting hungry. I stopped to eat, but the meal-in-a-bag and the circa-1998 granola bar were insufficient to satisfy my decades of yearning for sweets after a meal.

I wasn't hallucinating per se, so much as craving. And that snow as I was carving it into blocks was starting look a lot like vanilla sheet cake with white icing.

That was just the beginning.

A week later we got our first delicate snowfall that stuck to the ground and the hills around us. Now these hills had been brown & dusty looking until the snow hit, then they turned with the first dusting of moisture into deep brown almost black (single bean 76% cacao dark chocolate anyone?). Then the snow started to accumulate and all I could see when I looked up at the hills around McMurdo was Dark Chocolate Bundt Cake with Icing Sugar sprinkled liberally all over it.

It doesn't end there.

It's not like they don't have free desserts after every meal here.

Last week as we started getting some real snowfall, the roads started getting muddy brown. Well, over by Scott Base Hill the roads are a certain colour and viscousity that reminds me clearly of Godiva Belgian Dark Chocolate Ice Cream.

Then, today, driving back and forth in the gorgeous fat white flakes of snow from Willie Field to Mactown & back, my side view windows on the Delta kept on building up cookie bars.  Coming from DJ there would be a light layer of light brown snow, then going over Scott Base Hill there would be a liberal sprinkling of dark mud. Hit the transition and the snow would start building up deeply. On the return this graham cracker-like substance would have formed and a new layer of white snow would cake onto it. Then on top of that would be coated with droplets of various brown colours until by the time I got back to town, my side view windows were sporting coconut/peanut butter & chocolate chip cookie bars.

It's not like I'm craving cookie bars. Just my metaphors lately have been very dessert oriented.

 

posted by: coldwish at 02:16 | link | comments (4) |
shuttles 2004-05

BOHICA

Today was a day off for me. But things being as they are I had to come in to work for about 3.5 hours. Do I get OT for it? Hell no. I'm working 54 hours a week (unpaid lunches, but I s'pose, they DO feed me, sort of) for $417/week. I pay federal taxes, but I do not get federal protections, either OSHA or any other federal reg to protect workers. It's an odd world down here. BOHICA = Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

Sometimes I get it in my head that I'm getting screwed, but then they send me out in a smooth Delta to Willie Field twice in my day off and I get to chat with a handsome charming Fuelie (more about them later) and see the white on white red & green flags stretching into infinity whiteness road view and I am less disgruntled at the invasion of my day off by work.

Many flights headed out but very few to none coming in. The blowing snow has caused drifting on the runway, not to mention the snow raod out to it, and landing would be a bitch at best. I was dreading coming in today, I'd been scheduled for Delta 508 of the chevron-track tires (like the photo some of you have seen). Just Wednesday I got my ass beat up by Delta 508 on a trip back from Willie. I entered the Transition right after some snow-grooming equipment had been over the Track Road (vehicles with tracks or Deltas with chevron tires are restricted to the Track Lane between Willie & the Transition because of how we tear up the snow and churn it into Ice Pudding) and though I had been over it already a half dozen times that day and the day before and I KNEW where the HOLE was, it was obscured by snow and I landed right in it.

Now, when I say HOLE, I mean H-O-L-E. I could fit the Delta tire in that hole on its side easily. Where do these holes come from, you ask? Well, the road is basically compacted snow on top of a glacier. More compacted snow. White snow. On a sunny day anything remotely dark (like the mud & dirt we track out from town on EVERYTHING) that has dropped on the road heats up faster than the snow and sinks down into a hole (this has happened to whole STATIONS here) of melted Ice. Track vehicles, needless to say, shed more dark crap than a herd of cows. The Transition, therefore, is about 2-3 feet deep in grey mush that never quite melts and sure as shit this season hasn't frozen. Add holes to that.

Delta 508 at the best of times is a rough beast to ride, its tires are harder and bigger than the other 2 Deltas who have what we refer to as Balloon Tires. All the Deltas have what we not-so-fondly refer to as Spring Loaded Seats. Ahem. Spring. LOADED. They are supposed to give the driver a smoother ride. They were built for the larger heavier male beer drinker of the species. Cuz you place my petite ass (and mine is by far not the petitist ass to locate itself on Delta 508) on a seat with that kind of motion and wowsa. You get some bouncing & jouncing that has all us female Delta Drivers comparing jog bras. The springs catch hold of a small bounce in the tires and load themselves with tension, releasing themselves only after you've hit the next bump. Seatbelts? What seatbelts? You must be thinking of OSHA again. I have many a time hit my head on the (padded) ceiling (why on earth do they pad it? Gee whiz, perhaps there's some risk of BUMPING ONE'S FUCKING HEAD?). I solve these little problems by driving like a jockey over the Transition, butt in the air, hands gripping the wheel, leaning on it. 5 MPH at best.

Well, when this Delta hit that hole square on with its driver's side front tire, then BOUNCED out of the hole with the momentum and the back wheel charged right in after it...

I was LAUNCHED out of that driver's seat into the air. Actually, I was like a freakin' super ball inside that cab.  I bounced off the ceiling with my SHOULDER, I hit the door handle with my ass (? or I assume that's where THAT bruise came from), I bashed my knees on the steering column. I lost the gas pedal & the brake pedal and my hands flew off the steering wheel. Though 508 had passed safely through the HOLE, I was still jouncing around the cab of it for sometime after. I was just lucky that my passenger didn't end up face first in my lap or vice versa. Without my foot on the gas pedal 508 slowed down. I relocated my limbs where they belonged as the Delta Driver and continued on.

Do I feel like I've been thrashed? Yup. Pretty thoroughly.

So, waking today knowing I was driving 508...I dreaded it.

Then I got noisy old smooth ride Delta 363 (built in 1977) for my two trips out to Willie & all was well with the world. Riding along in the cab of 363 looking out into the white world of blowing falling snow, following the line of red flags on my right and green flags on my left on into the white horizon, was glorious. The first day we had conditions like this I was the ONLY shuttle driver who did not a) accidentally switch lanes or b) go right off the road into the soft snow with a whoompf! to be towed out by Fleet Ops.

Looking out the dirty window into the white while smoothly riding along at 23 mph over the small drifts that develop after each flag pole is soothing and calming. It feels like riding a lobster boat over the waves with the rocking motion, into the fog. The drifts are somewhat random so the rythm of the gentle bounces are uneven, yet still, rocking back & forth in there feels like I'm out on the sea.

Ok, so technically I am out on the sea. There just happens to be this little thing called an ice shelf between me & the sea.

Sometimes I imagine I am driving a combine in the prairies through oceans of wheat.

Hey, I AM alone in the cab mostly. One does what one can with one's mind in these circs when the view is not there to rhapsodize over.

Then sometimes you get a rider up in the cab. Like one of the Fuelies. Fuelies are the Fuel Operators. These people are all over all the stations and field camps, making sure we get the fuel we need to run our diesel engines to heat our buildings or to run our vehicles. The Fuelies strike me as being in the most vigourous of departments, the healthiest, the people with the most swagger, and deservedly so. They are outside a vast majority of the time dealing with fuel lines and tanks, so they get the snow glow of hours outside in the wind and sun. They are scruffy and fit and young and energetic. They are brown as berries and gleaming with strength, male & female alike. In their dirty, worn Carhartt overalls & jackets, browned faces and confident white smiles, they are like cowboys on the range. Y'know what I mean, those handsome romanticized young cowboys that every straight woman and gay man wants? We all want a cowboy. Fuelies are Ice Cowboys. Out on the range, coming in after a hard day's honest work from the outdoors. *sigh*

There's something about those Fuelies, a swagger, a charm, a glow, that is ineffably sexy in their outdoorsiness. So healthy.

Today I had a whole ride in from Willie with a Fuelie, Troy. That lovely scent of diesel & gas perfumed the cab and we had a wonderful trip.  Charming, handsome man, shouted conversation, smooth rocking Delta ride.

What more can you ask for when you woke up expecting to wrestle the 508 beast again and lose?

posted by: coldwish at 04:25 | link | comments (3) |
shuttles 2004-05

Exhaustion & Isolation

I admit that the constant sleep deprivation is having an effect on me, as is the isolation from friends & family. I would love to hear more from people, I love the comments but I'd love to hear more via email. I feel sometimes I have been farting into the void with my posts here and not getting any substantial responses. I am happy for every comment I've gotten but I'd love to hear everyone's personal news & views. I'm feeling the need to feel connected to y'all on a slightly more substantial level. 

I am over-emotional and a little panicky about my continued inability to sleep well. The food situation continues to be sketchy at best. It is not unusual for at least one meal every other day to consist of nothing but canned beans & fries. It's hard to be lactose-intolerant here and it sucks to be a lactose-intolerant vegetarian. Will I start eating meat as a result? No. I made a promise to myself almost 20 years ago now, to not eat fowl or mammal. I'm healthier for it. Certainly down here, though eating meat would enlarge the field of food options, it wouldn't necessarily improve the food I was eating nor make my diet somehow more balanced.

Yesterday it snowed beautiful snow that made everything clean and white. At 5:30pm everyone gets off work here and there were snowball fights and screeching shrieks of downhill running joy all around. We are all happy to have the snow, even as the continued cancellation of flights causes major hiccoughs on so many McMurdo levels.

McMurdo lately has been involved, as has the rest of the world, in efforts to raise money for the tsunami victims. Thus far the about 1000 people here have raised over $15,000, with more benefits (Buzz The Barber, Tsunami Bingo, etc) coming up. Anthing that can be done to raise money is being done. There have been quite a few people affected, losing friends & family & homes & businesses. We are doing our best, but we are still isolated at the bottom of the world and as a result there is some distance from what the remainder of the world is feeling. We don't have the luxury (?) of 24 hours of constant TV footage you all must be inundated with. This is a blessing for me. Many others here feel lucky not only to be alive but to be outside the media circus that must have leapt up in response to this most photogenic of tragedies.

Forgive me while I continue to enjoy my time in Antarctica during this time. It's what I'm here for and even the election of Bush & cohorts did not dampen my enthusiasm for very long.

I am still having fun. Engulfed in bliss. Shocked by others' lack of appreciation for the environment they are in down here. Not sleeping well and still trying to figure out how to improve that.

posted by: coldwish at 03:23 | link | comments (7) |
shuttles 2004-05