Eleven Hours Of Sleep
On Monday night of this week I slept 11 hours straight, uninterrupted, sound, dead to the world, sleep.
This is the first time since I hit Pole to have slept more than 3-4 hours at a stretch. I am constantly being woken by bulldozers moving snow around outside my Jamesway, neighbours getting home at the end of their shift all jolly and relieved with alcohol, other people's alarm clocks, my own thoughts.
On Tuesday I was bragging about how much sleep I got.
Last night I was optimistic and went to bed at 8:30pm. I lay in bed thinking until 10:30pm. I woke several times duringt he night to adjust pillows and place more on my head. The dozers started, the neighbours got home, my mind spun endlessly in its rut.
When I dream I dream of valves and hoselines and planes arriving. I am unprepared. I sleepwalk to the degree I have woken myself up several times looking for valves to turn in my own "room".
But that's okay. I seem to be able to function like this, sleep-deprived. My waking hours at work and at play are enough to keep me content. I still like it here. Diamond dust makes me smile, the frost in the Fuels Arch stills my heart in awe, everything sparkles and shines here.
Marry Me
Hunger pangs hit me just moments after a precipitous drop on my body temperature, and I am shivering in the cold as I await the signals from under the Herc wing. The flight schedule has conspired once again to make it a good 6-7 hours in between meals for us, and *I* have run out of fuel. I am running on fumes from lunch and my body protests the abuse by slamming into me with the cold I’ve been aware of but only as a minor discomfort that accompanies every activity outside here. Within seconds of the hunger pangs my fingers start going numb in their two-pairs of polypro liners and thick suede mittens. I can feel my legs cool down inside their 3 pairs of long underwear as they rub up against the insulated Carhartts, my butt starts getting in on the action and reminding me of its presence and its inability to heat itself, my shoulders tighten up as if a cold wind had made it inside all the many layers I sport up top. None of it is true. I’m just hungry. Really fucking hungry.
The hunger here is a constant for me. It has nothing to do with a lack of appropriate food, or not eating well or enough. I am just drawing on so much of my physical stores for the simplest of tasks that I cannot keep up with my body’s needs. I have lost some weight, as I expected, I simply am unable to eat enough to keep up.
I have been fed well by the Galley here, and my relationship with the Galley staff, on my side, is slightly twisted and needy as a result. There are days I come in from the cold barely able to drag my heavy blue boots into the Galley past the line of food, an empty plate strikes me as a weighty object, and I can hardly recall the need for silverware. From several years of habit in McMurdo I scan the line, eliminating the meat and cheese/dairy options, until I am down to potatoes and boiled frozen veggies. I am on the verge of tears. Then I am spotted by Stephanie of the lovely green eyes, blond hair and smart smile and she says she has something special for me. The Galley staff have created an entrée just for me and my limitations, and it is straight from the oven to my plate. Or Eli sees me and lights up with a broad smile of friendliness and warmth, straight black hair pulled back from her face, and she leaps to tell me that they have something specially for me tonight. Or Joel at lunch looks up, catches my eye, and asks me if I can wait a few minutes while he prepares something for me. Often it is a variation of the veggie option, sometimes it is something prepared specially for me.
Yesterday he prepared a spinach and mushroom-stuffed pastry of such delicacy and cleverness I couldn’t bear to finish my meal. Delivered to me with a wink and a smile of such charm I was nearly on my knee in front of the whole South Pole asking him to marry me. I’ll build you a kitchen and a studio for your music, I’ll cultivate a garden of vegetables green and delicious from around the world. Just cook for me in the middle of this bleak cold place that I am struggling to survive.
I am well fed here, well cared for, and my hunger needs though large and unwieldy are met exquisitely. Is it any wonder, when hunger can so often be accompanied intimately by the onset of an unshakable chill and the misery of cold, that when I am fed a delicious meal by caring people I fall half way in love with them all? There is always plenty for me to eat, and it is delicious and filling.
I love the Galley staff here. They are so very good to me. They have provided me with more than sustenance, they have given me pleasure.
Drowning at the Pole
I have lived at sea level most of my life; seashores, islands, oceanside. I have lived where the fog smells tangy and rich with salt and the life of low tide. If I had any altitude it was a rocky promontory overlooking the sea. When I travel, live, work elsewhere, I dwell at sea level, or close enough.
My understanding of high and low pressure, barometric pressure, and of life, comes from the sea as base, as source, as influence. When a low pressure area moves into the area, “bad” weather is coming. A high brings sun and warmth, a low brings rain and snow. I have felt storms moving in, on my skin, in my ears, in my nose, like a live presence. I can smell snow before it falls, I can sense rain the same way. It’s a feeling in my senses that just says weather. I am familiar with my body acting as a barometer.
I have rarely even visited higher elevations. Denver gives me headaches at 5280 feet, day and night. Each of my three visits there have left me at visceral odds with myself. I am dry-mouthed, headachey and I don’t sleep well. It doesn’t appeal to me, that mountainous, elevated life so far from the sea.
The altitude, physically, at the South Pole is 9306 feet. Physiologically speaking it is more like 10576 feet. I can feel it every moment I am here. I am learning to live with it. My first week here was, on many levels, not least of which being the altitude, the hardest and longest week of my life. But, as predicted by everyone, I got used to it. But what I got used to was a permanent state of hypoxia.
There are still moments, not infrequent moments, when an activity as simple as walking up the steps to the new station brings me to an edge of panic from lack of oxygen. I’ve only experienced this onset of freaking out without actually tilting over into panic itself when underwater. It is that momentary flash of realization, that punch of awareness, where your body tingles and screams from every cell for air, and it is not immediately available to you. While diving or swimming it is that last metre of frantic ascent to the surface with nothing left in your lungs until you break through gasping with disbelief and relief simultaneously. It feels like the end but with a tiny bit more effort it proves not to be.
At the top of the stairs there is none of that instantaneously big-lunged relief, just panting and gasping through the slide into the shit panics you feel coming on, until enough of the pale O2 has been sucked in from the inadequate supplies to feed your lungs.
It is different from being winded from exhaustion, though it is completely exhausting. The O2 is simply not there to the levels my body understands. I am doing a very physical job despite a constant state of hypoxia, and frequent two-steps with breathless panic. I am doing it outside in the bitter cold.
I’m still getting used to it. I wouldn’t say my body is becoming more efficient at leaching O2 from the air, I’d say that I am getting used to living with less O2, on the verge of winded at all times. I’m learning to pace myself. I’m learning that I will not drown at the South Pole.
Every day varies in my response to the altitude. Every day they move the goalposts. I never knew, as a sea level dweller all my life, that the altitude can change based on barometric pressure. It can be literally 9000 feet one day and over 10000 feet the next when I wake up. My water bottle will not open, vacuum-sealed shut by the altitude rise as it is, my shampoo bottle will ejaculate all over me on opening when the pressure changes, the bag of chips will puff up like a blowfish. My lungs will labour harder for every molecule of O2 and the day will be harder for me. Then the next day I think I’ve finally gotten used to it, but no, the altitude will have dropped 400 feet overnight.
It is this altitude that makes the Pole hard for me, not the cold. There is surcease from the cold; we have heated spaces to which we can retreat to get the feeling back in our fingers and toes. Everyone acknowledges the cold and the efforts and time we must take to survive it.
Not so with the altitude. “You’ll get used to it!”, “It’ll pass.” Peoples' responses to the altitude vary widely. Some people are adjusted in a day or so, others get pulmonary edema and get medevaced. I’m on a middle ground where I really do not function as well as others here. I am rendered weaker, less efficient, less capable of the simplest of tasks.
I hate this state of frailty, of being incapacitated so easily. It makes me feel older, weaker, less able to do my job. I took pride in McMurdo in stepping up to the plate, in exerting myself physically, in meeting the challenge. I left McMurdo fitter than when I arrived. I got stronger. My job consequently got easier. I rose to the challenge.
Now, with the Pole, I am an invalid just crawling after months of bed rest. I am not who I consider myself to be.
I love the Pole for its beauty, its stark unceasing assault on my capacity to survive and live, I love the smaller community. But I wonder if I could survive a whole season even if I wanted to. I wonder, am I tough enough to be a Polie?
The Dehydration Tango
There are different kinds of cold, there is that which comes from the outside, and that which comes from the inside and leaves you vulnerable to the efforts of the outside to get in. I have different levels of vulnerability to the cold, depending upon so many factors. If I am dehydrated, I am more likely to get cold. That’s a physiological given. So the game we play, as women in this environment, is one of playing with the drinking enough water vs needing to pee at inopportune times. I’m learning the game. At what point in my evening do I stop drinking water in order to sleep through the night unhindered by the calls of my tiny bladder telling me messages of doom and gloom? If I do it soon enough in the evening I can make it through the entire night unhindered by the call of the pee bottle, but then I wake in the middle of the night with such a dry mouth I reach for my water bottle just to unhinge my dried shut lips and peel my tongue off the sandpaper roof of my mouth. I gulp it down like a dying woman in the desert. So that’s too early to stop.
If I stop too late, I’ll walk to Summer Camp from the station, after using the toilet, only to need to pee immediately upon arrival. The cold makes you need to pee, that’s a physiological given too. So I drop by Ice Palace first, perform my ablutions, relieve myself and head over to J-13 to bed. Within 30 minutes of hitting my “room” I need to pee again. It’s not that I can’t disregard the urge, for awhile, but it makes for a difficult falling asleep and I’ll need to get up and pee in my bottle while semi-comatose in the dark within a few hours. So I climb out of my just-warmed bed to squat over the water bottle, wrapping it in a towel not for spills but for sound-proofing. Mustn’t wake the neighbours.
Waking in the morning is a dry affair at best, I reach for my water bottle immediately after slamming off the alarm, holding it to me and gulping it all in one swig, my body crying out for liquids. I can feel my skin cracking, my nose hard with dried boogers, my lips sticking to the nipple of the bottle. I have not even sat up yet. I am too stunned by the mere idea of being awake. I cannot believe I have to go to work on so little sleep. As dead as I feel I must face the day and do hard physical work in the cold, winded all the while by the lack of oxygen.
By the time I finish my bottle of water I need to pee. This requires getting out of bed and putting on socks and shoes, a jacket over my t-shirt and flannel pants, sunglasses and a hat pulled halfway over them to my nose. I must emerge into the light. The cold is manageable, the brightness is the full-stop period end on my ability to sleep and I resent it like hell. The cold does hit and make me need to pee even more in the 15 seconds it takes to walk to the loo.
Then it’s back to J13 to get seriously dressed in the underlayers, head to the new station for food, and drink as much water as I can in one sitting without bursting. Pee a few times before work, then head over to the Fuels Shack to get dressed in my work gear, boots on, prepared for the cold. Of course, by then I need to pee again. Now is the time for a choice, I can go for the relative luxury of Cargo’s Little House on the Prairie, where I can sit on a blue Styrofoam toilet seat over a bucket in the floor and do the business of both ends. Or I can save time and head into the B.A.R.F.F. (Barn for the Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting truck) where in the corner we have a 30 gallon white plastic jug with a metal funnel in it: UG the Pee Jug. Now, for us shorter female folks, this presents an issue. I don’t generally stand to pee, and if I did, I’d be too short for this jug. So I pull over the light stand for the 6 extra inches of lift it provides at its base, do the Carhartt removal fandango, and squat over the opening of the funnel and pee into the jug. I haven’t had any mishaps yet.
Of course, when you are in the Fuels Arch or there’s a flight on deck, you don’t get that kind of leisure time to pee, and it is once more a pee when you have the opportunity, not when you need to. All it takes is one 45 minute defueling operation with a full bladder outside in the cold to bring to mind the negative aspects of being well-hydrated. So, you don’t drink quite as much in between flights, you skip the sip here and there so you no longer have to pee at that inopportune time in that inhospitable place.
Then you’ll be standing outside in the cold and a chill will come over you that you can’t shake off. It just sits on you, and you feel it not just in the fingers which are always vulnerable, as often as you remove your mittens so you can actually do something with your hands in their doubled polypro liners, but in the shoulders, the thighs, the arms, the legs. It is not getting colder at the Pole, you are just not functioning as well in a state of dehydration, your central heating system is failing in you.
So you drink some more. And have to pee more. It’s a bitter dance and it takes a long time to learn the balance of the Dehydration Tango.
Photos
Note new photos.
This took me 2.5 hours to upload from the South Pole, if you ever request any more photos you will never see another from me. Suck it up and deal. I get them up when I can. Now is not the time.
I prefer to sleep.
The Importance of Shadows
Without shadows one has no sense of time or depth or progress here. On bright blue sky days the sun rotates in the sky high above us, shadows get long but the colour of the light does not alter. McMurdo being further north still has a sense of twilight even on the longest day of the year, and the light changes significantly. Plus there are features of the landscape and views which respond to the light shifts. Here, it is flat and white and the lazy old sun rolls around heaven all day, pivoting a bit above us. On these days, shadows are like dark handles, rotating around, giving meaning & direction to everything. On the flat light, shadowless days, where the horizon disappears and the sky is the same colour as our footing, we are disoriented. Our footsteps, the tracks of vehicles, sastrugi, drifts, all disappear. We are left flailing and walking into obstacles unseen. Dark objects like triwall boxes, buildings, vehicles, appear to float in an endless white, often our senses only indication of horizon, of direction.
I love these days, they are uniquely winter to me, and a new winter sense, one I never experienced growing up in Nova Scotia where snow was plentiful and friendly, and often wet. It's a different winter here, in some ways oddly innocent because it is so dry.
One doesn’t defend against the snow on our clothes, we do not need to keep the wet off the outside of our gear. I kneel in the snow, sit in the snow, get my whole body in the snow as I work, and I just brush it off drily, it doesn’t melt on me. The defense we must maintain, is that of our own sweat moistening our interior layers, where the cold and wet will steal off with our body’s heat and kill us. We rely on modern materials, magical qualities imbued, to keep us warm and dry.
Hero Shot
“Hey, it’s only 12 out! It’s bloody warm!”
Polies don’t bother saying “negative twelve”, just "twelve". It’s a given, it rarely ever gets above 0F, and that is a veritable heatwave here. Yesterday was -12F and it seemed balmy. I was outside without facemask or goggles, and the sun shone long and bright through some delicate thin cloud cover. It was really beautiful lighting, not the brisk cold light of most days, but a warmer more golden light, relatively speaking.
If I had had the time, and not been at work, I would have been out at the actual Pole marker getting my hero shot. As it is, I’ve been here 11 days and I have yet to visit it. There have been tourists with their tents all over the place, I’ve been exhausted after work each day, and I can see it from the Galley. Plus it seems sort of touristy, even if de rigeur for anyone who makes it to the Pole.
My instinctive response is, like when I see an over-hyped Hollywood movie, to avoid it like the plague. But then, in the context of how few people in the world actually make it to the South Pole itself, it is sort of like an independent film, and reasonable, despite the hype, to prove I was here with a hero shot.
So, I'll be getting my hero shot eventually. I'll even post it. I just need to coordinate my camera with a computer and satellite coverage at the same time. It ain't as easy as it sounds.
How To Grow Your Own Hoarfrost
The oft-mentioned Fuel Arch of the South Pole is 45, 10,000 gallon white tanks full of AN8, the jet fuel used to run the station. The arch itself is a huge metal corrugated storage facility placed alongside the original station Dome--now used only for storage until they retro it and take it off continent to be built as a museum elsewhere. That’s the fantasy anyway—and just as buried in snow as the Dome. Think of the last corrugated metal pipe you saw used in a culvert next to the road, now split that thing in half lengthways and increase its size to about 3 stories tall. That’s the Arch. Imagine the last tanker truck you saw on the highway, now imagine that tank times five, stacked like inverted Olympic rings. There you have 5 tanks. Now line this long metal arch lengthways with 9 more pods of five tanks, to create 45 tanks of 10,000 gallons each. Standing at one end of the arch by the pumphouse, if you were to look to the other end of the arch and see me there, I would appear perhaps little more than an inch and a half high. It’s big. And cold. It remains -50F down there at all times. We are buried under the drifting snow and barely obvious up on the flat white, as engulfed as we are. We enter this arch by going down into the main entrance of the original Amundsen Scott South Pole Station Dome. We descend a snowy slope into this entranceway and turn left before reaching the Dome itself, into the dark. But there is beauty in this sunless zone, as everything the cold touches grows a fringe of delicate paling fur of frost, hoarfrost, flakes of crystal like fish scales and built up often several inches from the walls or items left to stay in there.
People can grow their own hoarfrost in there. At -50F, every exhaled breath of humidity from our lungs, floating up around our faces, goggle free to see in the dim light, freezes to our eyelashes, the threads and fur of our hats, the hair that sticks out from under, our gaiters. Everything on us grows this delicate scrim of white until we are all magical creatures blinking and steaming in the cold. We are ancient mariners in the northern seas, rimed in frost and ice within minutes of our descent.
I have mentioned the fuel bladder a few times. The fuel bladder is the largest water bed in the world, fuel cold beneath you as it rolls and sways oceanic in its size: 25,000 gallons. It is a huge plastic/rubberized pillow used as temporary storage capacity, encased in a berm*** dug into the floor of the Bio-Med Arch, which is on the front of the Fuels Arch. The berm is lined with a black plastic liner, and then on top of that a huge taupe tarp that rises up the sides to create a containment against bladder spills. I got here just as the logistics were completed on the emergency fuel bladder set up and the actual set up was to begin. None of us in fuels had actually set up a fuel bladder before, and the whole build berm, line berm, roll out bladder, plumb bladder with hard connections, valves, and soft hose to fill and suck from was new and time consuming. I worked overtime every day last week but Saturday, the day the bladder received its first fuel infusion. There was joy and satisfaction in bermville that day, to have completed that task.
***There are a few terms in Antarctic life that may be confusing in their use. Berm is definitely one of them. There are two distinct versions of a berm. The traditional berm is the built up area on which things are placed to winter, to control the drifting and keep items from getting covered up by snow. The other berm is similar, but it is a contained square of berms with a depression in the middle, in which we place either bulk fuel tanks (those berms are lined and the dikes around them are volcanic rock) or fuel bladders (depressions dug out of the snow with built up snow walls lined in plastic). So, berms can go up, berms can go down. Either way they contain things.
Panty Sculptures and The Redlight District
I know I shouldn’t, but there is so much effort involved in even the tiniest of things that sometimes I don’t put my polypro gloves back on when I’m only going from the loo (dubbed Ice Palace at Summer Camp) back to my Jamesway. I get lazy. So my recently washed and moisturized hands make contact with cold metal doorknobs. If I have not dried them sufficiently, the touch of my wet flesh on frozen metal produces a weird freezing & crackling sensation in my hand, almost like pop rocks, solid carbonation. I do not freeze to the doorknob, not yet, as it’s only -12 to -23F out there right now, but I sense the danger and know I must be more careful as temperatures drop.
Since we have curtained corridors in the Jamesway, most of us, we must learn the etiquette of curtains. These are thick canvas curtains that do not flow lightly. When another person is passing your “room” and a curve sticks out into the hall, it’s a large noise that reverberates in your space. Some people push the boundaries of their space by placing things on the floor inside their curtain, where it is really in the pass through space of the hall. So, in the darkened hall I am always kicking something, brushing hard against the curtain & often stumbling. I have pulled my curtain flat, removed the swagger of it, and made it unlikely that the sober person will brush by it hard. I do this for myself and my Jamesway-mates.
Some of my fellow dwellers have used leftover packing crate plywood to close off their rooms, creating walls and doors to the hall. I envy them. I believe the 4 plywooded spaces in my J-13 are occupied by Graveyard Shifters (10pm-8am). If I were here all season, I, too, would make that effort, to close off my space, make it more private and less noise-vulnerable.
Because there is so much light outdoors, so blindingly stunning white at all times, whether the sun is out or it is flat white, we all cringe when we emerge from our darkened half-pipe caves. It is kept dark deliberately, as we try to control our environment and our bodies’ responses to the inappropriate 24/7 days. The rare person can sleep in this light, I am not one of them. I have jerry-rigged my space so that even the hall light turned on, or my opposite number in the Jamesway turning on his room’s lights, does not get in my space. I am very sensitive to light when I sleep, to the point where I do not have a glowing face on my alarm clock because it wakes me up. Because of this craving for dark, most Jamesways, though they had corridor lights one could turn on & off, were kept pitch black. Stumbling in from the glare into the dark was always disconcerting. Recently red light bulbs were installed where the white ones were. To encourage us to keep at least some light available for safety without it being so irritating we turn it off all the time.
So, I now live in the red light district. It feels like I am entering a hallway of prostitutes in the poorer area of Amsterdam, curtained walls and redlights. I’m in J-13, #2, come visit me there. For a good time…
On Saturday when I took my first shower, I took a 4 minute shower. I am limited to 2, two minutes showers per week, and I had only the one, so I took them both at the same time. I had to. I also did laundry. Both involve wetness in a cold cold place. The bathroom itself is warm enough that one can turn on the water, then turn it off and soap up, without the chill one might expect of turning off the hot water. This year in dorm 211 at Mactown it has not been the case, one needs the water on at all times or one freezes bits one doesn’t want frozen. A waste of water ensues. Pole is more intelligent about that, if they are going to enforce the 2 minute rule, they need the bathrooms to be warm warm warm to offset the cold cold cold.
Needless to say, post-shower, I had wet hair. My hair this season is long enough to need drying with a towel for a good amount of time. It’s about 8 inches now. Did I want to stand there drying my hair for 5 minutes? No. Could I even get it completely dry? No. Did I go outside without a hat with wet hair? Yes. In less than 10 seconds my hair was snap frozen crispy curls. It wasn’t cold on my head, just solid strands of hair. I suppose I was lucky that when I reached up to touch it it didn’t break off like shards of glass, but again, it’s not that cold yet.
When I did my laundry, most everything went in the dryer, except those vulnerable items I washed in the mesh bag, like my underwear. I always hang my underwear to dry. So I fetched my underwear from the washer and took it back to my room to hang. By the time I got to my Jamesway I could have propped up my underwear upside down like sculptural panties. In the 15 seconds it took, with the mesh bag hanging from my hand, to reach my Jamesway, the bag itself froze solid with all my panties in a cold wad at the bottom. I reached my room, and I had to extricate crunchy panties from the bunch to hang them. Frozen panties don’t hang per se, they sort of sit balanced on the line until the heat makes them droop around it. The trick is to make sure the frozen panties are centred properly so they will drape slowly over it. I could have broken the frozen ones and forced it, but I was enjoying the creative aspects of “hanging” my panties to dry. Then when they did dry it was nearly instantaneous. Much more like desiccated panties than dried ones. Snap freeze, snap dry.
******
Temp: -23 F (-33C)
Windchill: -47.2C (-44C)
Altitude: 10201 ft
Today was my first day I got cold. We spent 3 hours in the Bio Med Arch nursing our fuel bladder into rotundly pregnant 25000 gallon fullness with infusions of fuel. Then windchills reached -50F outside. Brrr.... I could feel it like a smack in the face after the slow sneak of Arch cold.
Day Off
My first day off, I've been here a week now. I am showered, exfoliated, moisturized, but still sleep deprived.
We got buzzed by a private hire Twin Otter (still Ken Borek Air but not one of ours) picking up some of the tourists who skiied in from the coast, a set of three women who pulled sleds toward the Pole for 54 days.
And y'all thought I was insane.
But early this morning as the whole station snoozes, the damn Twotter (as we rudely call them) buzzed us all as it came in to pick up the skiiers, and then again as it left. Grrr. I got to bed at 3am, awake and reading in bed by 8am. Bleh.
I'm tired but less down, cleanliness may have something to do with it, and the completion of the bladder project also. Great satisfaction in being involved in the successful creation of that monstrosity. Kudos to Cathy & JonO for their shepherding of that project from the very start of the logistics nightmare it was.
Long wonderful chat tonight with the third Wagner brother, Joel, here at the Pole. I know Luke (of the blog in my links, at WAIS Divide with Luci) and Jesse (now in Mactown). Now my third of the five possible brothers. He's the cook who keeps an eye out for me. I think I'm in love. He cooks beutifully, he's musical and he's got a charming smile. *sigh* Smitten.
I have a few pictures now. They'll be up sometime this week.
Off to bed.
