Therefore: Andre, The Toasty…
He writes:

“when susan asked me to write a guest-blog for her on the subject of being toasty, as i cowered from the crowds at mcmurdo’s first annual prom at gallagher’s, my first thought was “do i know you?” i noticed that there was a spark of familiarity, and seconds passed before the recognition came. “ahh! you’re the food girl!” i then spent a moment wondering if i was being honored or insulted.

i’m guessing that she asked me because i may be the poster boy for toasty, the ambassador of fried brains, a former vital and reasonably-intelligent person reduced to the intellectual equivalent of that feral and boomerang-flinging orphan from the road warrior.

as i begin my fifteenth month on the ice (out of the last sixteen) the idea of toast is very real to me, or – rather – it would be real if i had the mental capacity to spend any real time contemplating it. i am, however, struck by the irony of the word usage to denote someone who’s suffering true brain deficiency due to long periods of isolation in this frigid place – all the terms relate to heat, as in toasty, fried, burnt, or singed. perhaps freezer burnt might be more fitting?

the symptoms of the toasty condition are many and varied, can be quite amusing for the short periods that you can remember them, and are a goldmine of storytelling material once you manage to extricate yourself from our island paradise. these symptoms include insomnia, memory loss (both short-term and long-term), irritability, anti-social behavior, chronic fatigue and an increase in alcohol intake, and i have suffered and / or enjoyed every one of them.

your previous life, before antarctica, ceases to have relevance, and the names and places of people you know and where you’ve been fade away. at one point, i incorrectly spelled my own name. i forgot that my sister had children (she had two at the time) or that she was pregnant. i forgot that i had a sister (i have three). i couldn’t remember the name of the town i lived in, or what those big vehicles that people pay money to ride in are called. i referred to them as “kind of like a delta”. just last week, i couldn’t remember the word ‘hose’ and referred to them as “those squirty things”. (i’m a firefighter, and we use hoses on a daily basis). tragically, i forgot that my father had died, and tried to call him one afternoon.

a toasty person might start walking in one direction, only to wake and find that they’d been walking somewhere with no recollection of where they were headed, or why. a really toasty person then forgets that they forgot something and keeps walking, quietly enjoying the alone time.

one afternoon in the middle of winter i decided to have a shower. i gathered up my showery things, put on the soft, fluffy parka (you might know it as a ‘bathrobe’) and walked out into the hallway. i turned right, and walked to the stairs. i walked down, through the doors into highway one – our main corridor in building 155 – and over to the galley. turning right, i continued past the barber shop, the newspaper office, and turned right again, past the radio station. i walked into the light room – one of the dorm rooms converted into a lounge with bright lamps and a hydroponic growth chamber – and stood there in the doorway, towel in hand, wondering where i was supposed to be.

i should mention that my room was directly across the hallway from the shower, a distance of about ten feet.

i have lost the ability to be social, and for the last three weeks my best friend has been the digital recreation of the 2001 new england patriots on my x-box. i have a tendency to sit in the dark and stare, wishing that i had the ambition to get up and do whatever it was that i had forgotten to do that day. if only i could remember. i write things in my green brain – the little notebook we are all issued to write down what we will inevitably forget – but forget that i wrote them. i forget that i have a green brain. i forget that i have a pen. i stare at my pen while i try to remember what this marking stick is called, and wishing that i had a pen to write down what it is called when and if i remember. i forget to eat. i have daydreams and think that they are real, and start conversations based on the events of these dreams. “so…” i might say to random person, “that was quite a large snake we found this morning over by the practice field.” i’ve gotten used to the blank stares of incomprehension.

i have one concrete measure of my descent into idiocy. before i came down here, i had an addiction to logic puzzles, and would bust them out in any situation where i had to sit and wait for any long period of time. i would rapidly complete the ‘four star’ difficulty puzzles in contented bliss. it wasn’t too long before i found the ‘four star’ to be increasingly difficult, and moved down to the three, then the two, then i found myself unable to complete the basic puzzles. currently i hide the puzzles in a drawer, as i’ve found them as incomprehensible as the code of hammurabi in the original babylonian.

these symptoms truly manifested themselves when i left the ice for a short vacation a few months ago, when i found myself walking into traffic, lost on some street in christchurch. i was incapable of operating a pay phone, and as for the intricacies of ordering food in a restaurant, well…the less said about that the better.

i’m told that the condition fades once you leave the ice, once you spend a significant time back in ‘the world’, back amongst the people. i can only trust and hope that this is true. the thought of spending the rest of my life as “i am sam” is too horrible to contemplate.

my friend genevieve was witness to some of my post-ice nonsense, and documented it brilliantly on her blog. the story is available at this link: play that funky music pale winterover boy”

You can follow more of Andre’s adventures here.

At 2:30 this morning I was sitting on the frozen beach of Hut Point (on the edge of town), next to the huge, Swedish icebreaker that is moored at the ice pier in the harbor. I’d taken a nap after work, intending to sleep for only an hour…and woke up six hours later. Sleep schedule shot, I went to the midnight meal for the night shift workers, and then walked down to the Point with a friend, Adam. The icebreaker floated unhindered by ice; recent wind storms had blown the loose chunks of broken ice out of the channel, leaving a wide expanse of open water.

These are magic words.  McMurdo Station is situated on an island, surrounded by the Ross Sea.  In the normal flow of seasons, the sea freezes during the winter, and is thawed and broken up by midsummer, leaving the station with a wide open sea view.  For the past five (six? seven?) years, though, the sea ice has been bottled in, blocked by two massive icebergs that had set up camp fifty miles north of the island.  Though the sea ice might have weakened, no amount of blowing winds could shift the icebergs and thereby free the seasonal ice, which means that McMurdo hasn’t seen open water in a long, long time.  Open water is a dream, a fairy tale, a phrase uttered by the old timers, those who’ve spent ten, twenty, thirty years in the USAP, who reminisce about emperor penguins roaming through town and orca whales in the harbor eating seals.  This year, the icebergs are gone.  The sea ice hasn’t blown away completely, but it’s on its way, slowly.  The Oden and The Polar Sea (the two icebreakers currently in our harbor) have carved out a channel and a turning basin (in preparation for the resupply vessel, currently en route).  This has weakened the overall composition of the ice, and each windy day clears away another few hundred feet off of the terminal face of the ice, now located perhaps five miles north of town.

This morning was clear and calm after two days of cold (12F, -7F windchill), gusty days – and behold, a wide open pool of midnight blue Antarctic seawater.  The shoreline where I sat with Adam was still ringed with ice, rising perhaps a foot above the cold, lapping waves, but for the first time in six months (tomorrow’s my six month anniversary) it felt like a shoreline.  The sun was at its low point for the day, directly south, and it painted a line on the water like any sunset back home.  And then: a plume, three feet in the air, steam and moisture expelled in a burst of sound.  Whales…. It was a moment for quiet, whispered awe.  Two minke whales, surfacing and diving, breathing and playing, displaying their dorsal fins and swimming in circles.  Adam and I sat and watched for over a half an hour.  Magic.

I celebrate six months tomorrow.  There’s a word for people who have been down here for too long: “toasty”.  Folks who have gotten toasty are, quite simply, folks whose minds are toast.  No memory, problems sleeping, difficulty forming sentences and remembering the proper words for things.  Giggling uncontrollably over inane happenings.  Trailing off in the middle of sentences, spacing out with a thousand-yard stare.  It’s a verifiable condition, though the cause is hard to pinpoint.  I wrote in my last entry about the long hours, the constant sunlight, the drinking, the constant barrage of people and activity and lack of privacy; these are all factors.  John, my fellow Lead DA and I are both displaying these symptoms, as are the other DAs.  Two days ago John was singing Christmas carols in the dish room.  We play ’rock, paper, scissors’ obsessively to decide the most trivial details (who will write the menu on the white board before lunch? should we serve Cheerios or Total for breakfast?).  I wander about like a windup toy – I start walking in one direction with a specific purpose in mind, only to come back to my senses sixty seconds later, still walking in the same direction I was first pointed, with the task not only uncompleted, but forgotten entirely.  In some ways it’s an attempt at self-preservation.  The job and the lifestyle are relentless; it doesn’t bear thinking about too much.  Without letting one’s mind go a bit, it might well snap.  The DAs have become masters of silliness…we’ll don random hats, create makeshift bow ties out of plastic wrap, draw fake mustaches on our faces with grease pens.  During Thanksgiving, Julia (a fifty-two year old mother who’s working here with her husband) found an especially attractive rutabaga, and was so enamored with it that she duct-taped it to the top of her head.  Toasty…it means it’s time to go.

Six months; 24 weeks; 168 days…and only twelve left to go.  I feel like I’ve been counting down since I got here, and find it nearly impossible to believe that it’s almost here.  In less than two weeks I’ll be back in NZ.  It doesn’t seem real.  Antarctica, McMurdo has become my reality.  This is the real world.  I’m conditioned now, institutionalized.  In less than two weeks I’ll have to start paying for my food, clothes, accommodation, activities.  I’ll go days without seeing anyone I know.  I’ll have to drive to get around.  The sun will rise and set and I’ll follow the cycle of the moon.  I’ll be a transient once more, all my clothes in a backpack.  The sheer amount of details that are about to change are going to be overwhelming.

The energy around town is high; the word on everyone’s lips is Christchurch.  It’s like an incantation, calling up trees, greenery, scents, humidity, mountains, grass, flowers, animals, rain, restaurants – sushi, pizza, ice cream.  Culture, movies, music, radio stations.  I’m excited about being able to cook my own food, about getting back behind the wheel of the Doc.  Having options.  I’ve been fantasizing about going barefoot, about lying on a beach in the sun for an entire day without moving a muscle…sitting in the mountains completely alone, not having to talk to anyone.  Everyone, everyone is itching to go.  Twelve days…on February 16th I land in Christchurch, weather permitting.  Roll on, twelve days…

In case I don’t catch up with this again – I’ll see you in New Zealand.

- Thanksgiving!
I ran the 5k Turkey Trot race, served up massive quantities of turkey and stuffing and pie, and then crashed on the floor of a friend’s lounge, wrapped up in my duvet, dozing through the Lord of the Rings. Walking back to my dorm after the movie, the strap to my flip-flop broke, and I had to limp back with only one shoe. Two observations about being barefoot in Antarctica: 1) volcanic rocks are sharp; 2) after about two minutes you’ve forgotten how sharp the rocks are because your foot has gone numb (and 3: barefoot in Antarctica…ha!).

- Runway Testing at Pegasus
Was asked to work for a day with Fleet Ops (the crew that maintains the runways and drives all the heavy equipment), performing density tests on the Pegasus white-ice runway (the only one like it in the world!). Drove a truck up and down the runway, stopping at certain coordinates to measure how many taps it took to drive an RSP (Russian S-something Penetrometer, a 3 foot long, 1 cm thick steel needle) 120mm into the snow on the runway’s surface. The runway’s 15 miles out of town, on the permanent ice of the Ross Ice Shelf – town looks like a tiny smear in the distance. Lovely to be OUT, even nicer to be out AND performing essential tests on a runway…in Antarctica. As a thank you for my help, Rudy (one of the Fleet Ops crew) brought me out to the runway’s namesake: the wreckage of a Navy airplane (the Pegasus) that crashed during landing perhaps thirty years ago. I climbed on the partially buried Navy plane and carved my name among the others on the tail and body – making my mark on history.

- “TNT…dyn-o-mite!”
There’s ongoing construction outside my dorm. The Fleet Ops blasting crew is gradually leveling a hill, piece by piece, to make room for a new addition to the Science Support Center. The ground’s so frozen that it takes explosives to break it up into movable chunks of volcanic rock. They’ve been blasting every day for the past three weeks – and on one particular day, I was the one pushing the detonator! Marty, the blasting supervisor, sat next to me on the C-17 that brought me down here, and offered me the job of “guest blaster”. Yay connections! “Blasting in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – fire in the hole!” And then KABOOOOOM. I even got to keep a blasting cap as a souvenir.

- Pressure Ridge Hike
Over the hill, on the ice shelf near Scott Base, gigantic frozen waves stand, blue and icy. Tidal movement far below the surface drives the seasonal sea ice into the permanent ice shelf, lifting these wave-like pressure ridges that shift a little bit with each tide. Scott Base staff maintain a trail that winds between, over and around the one-foot to four-meters high ridges. It’s typically off limits to the Americans, due to certain individuals behaving badly in the past, but I won a spot on a guided hike of these gorgeous, impressive phenomena. I got three hours off of work to wander through this blue wonderland of ice and snow and abstract sculptures. It’s magic, the way a short walk changes one’s perspective. As one janitor in my group said, “THIS is why I clean toilets!”

- Women’s Soiree
An annual event featuring the talents of McMurdo’s ladies…belly dancing, guitars and singing, tap dancing, poetry recitation, acapella, jazz dancing, a musical performance on a stand-up base – and the finale: yours truly and six other women, lip-syncing, dancing, and acting to “Cell Block Tango” from the film “Chicago”. If you’ve seen the movie, you’re thinking, “Woah…Catherine Zeta-Jones, tango, black lace and lingerie, sex and violence and sensuality…oh my!” It wasn’t quite up to Catherine ZJ standards, but it was still pretty hot. We’d spent three weeks choreographing and learning tango, and it paid off marvellously.

- Christmas!
First, there was the huge holiday party, in the Vehicle Maintenance Facility (VMF) with food and dancing and Santa Claus posing for pictures on a snowmobile. I’ve been taking swing dancing lessons from a good friend, and this was the perfect venue to unveil my new skills: being flung in the air, flipped and tossed and spun, kicking and smiling and loving every minute of it.

The next night – Christmas Eve! I went camping. Yup. CAMPING. Sleeping outside, in Antarctica, on Xmas Eve. Oh, wow. Not far out of town, just a couple of miles out onto the permanent shelf ice, where they typically teach the snow survival classes. I hiked out with another DA after work and just enjoyed…it was a warmish night, perhaps 15F. No wind, and low clouds to make the sunlight seem dimmer, almost like it was setting. I sat out around the cooking stove with friends, melting snow for hot chocolate, snacking on stale granola bars and PB&J, loving it. Slept with Dana, my fellow DA inside a quinzhee (snow mound). Surprisingly warm, though a little cramped. You’ll have to check out the pictures – my powers of description are feeling a bit strained. Waking up in the morning to hike back into town was like being reborn. I can’t begin to explain the wonder of knowing that it was Christmas and that I was in Antarctica. I slid out of the quinzhee and saw nothing but white – the clouds had closed in, and large, soft snowflakes were floating by on the wind. A cold start, but the simple joy that came from having been outdoors for the last 12 hours (the longest I’ve been outside in nearly five months) was all I needed to carry me back to town.

As a thank you for recent hard work, Jennifer, my (wonderful!) supervisor gave me the option of taking either Xmas day or New Year’s Day off – with the rest of town! I chose Xmas. What a novelty, having a day off at the same time as the rest of the community! After unloading my camping gear, I sat at brunch for two hours, talking to friends, relaxing, basking in the community holiday spirit. As I had the afternoon off, I was able to be pulled into an interesting McMurdo tradition: Santarctica. One participant described it as “beautiful mayhem”. Picture it: 20 or so McMurdians dressed in Santa suits and elf costumes (hats, beards, jingly bells, shoes, the works), running around like maniacs, chanting “ho ho ho!” and cheering, playing impromptu games like “Red Rover”, making appearances at: rugby practice; brunch; the weight gym; the computer kiosk (among other places). This year the event planners stepped it up a notch…this year, Santarctica created Art. Way out of town, near the Pegasus runway, NSF-funded artists had created an installation piece on the ice: The Stellar Axis. 99 large, blue spheres placed within an (approx) 100 meter square area, each sphere intended to represent the 99 brightest stars in the southern hemisphere on the summer solstice (Dec 21). That’s the artist statement. The practical description is this: 99 blue balls scattered randomly across the ice, like a handful of marbles dropped from the sky. What better place to unleash 20 Santas and their elves for a little mayhem? It was two hours of singing, running, frolicking, cartwheeling, snowball-fighting and human-pyramid building. It was a beautiful thing. Cold, windy, snowy, and exhausting, but great fun.

- New Year’s!
Finally. The last, and most recent event of note. What can I say? There was dancing, champagne, and carousing…inside an empty fuel tank. A very under-the-radar event, a secret well kept until about 9pm on the night itself. The bottom line, though: I said hello to the New Year from Antarctica. Antarctica!

The end.

(new pictures to supplement: http://community.webshots.com/user/susanm483)

Nonetheless – today was Christmas day! For me, anyway. As with Thanksgiving, I will have to work on the holiday itself, and instead get to celebrate with an extra day off, two weeks early. I’m not complaining, though. Having two days off in a row is like having Christmas come early. Oh, wait…

So today, Christmas day, found me engrossed in work – constructing toilet seats for science! I spent the day volunteering in the carpentry shop. The key to successfully lining up a better job for future Antarctic deployments (yes, I am considering coming back) is spending time in the work center in which you are interested, meeting the people in charge and showing them what you can do. One benefit of working in the galley is having odd days off – which means that I can visit other work centers and scope out future jobs. I’m trying not to put all my eggs in one basket, but if I was to pick a favorite basket, the carp shop would be it. The sweet smell of sawdust, the squeal of the band saw, and the satisfying whirr of the screw drill kept me in a happy, productive mood all day. To be working with my hands, creating and building and then seeing the results stacked up next to me at the end of the work day – ahh, awesome.

But, back to the toilet seats. Years of experience in answering the call of nature in the Antarctica has resulted in a unique and excellent toilet seat design: a plywood base with two inches of hard styrofoam adhered to it. Cut out a hole in the middle, use a rotor to turn hard edges into streamlined curves, and voila! A toilet seat that will never, ever get cold. These foam fabrications top the royal thrones (read: holes in the ground/ice) of scientists and laborers at work in the field. They’re used in areas that are more remote and can be more freezing than the South Pole – and yet, when folks get down to business, their bared bottoms are met not with wince-producing cold, but with warm, inviting foam. Thus it was that I spent today using band saw, skill saw, jigsaw, pneumatic adhesive gun, putty knife, clamps, grips, screw drill, rotor and sander, all to create comfort and luxury for that which I am here to support: science! The guys in the shop found my enthusiasm rather amusing – they’re hard at work at building important, complicated things like crane platforms, staircases, cabinets, shelves, tool boxes, crates. But at the end of the day, looking at my hands – splintered, dirty, scraped, covered in adhesive residue – and using an air hose to blow sawdust and styrofoam bits out of my hair, I was happy. Merry Christmas to me!

Despite the illness, this multiple-days-off-in-a-row thing is luxury beyond belief.  We work six days a week – fifty-four hours at the absolute minimum.  I get one day off a week.  Just one.  Last week, joy of joys, I celebrated my Thanksgiving holiday and had two (two!) days off in a row.  Because we in food services have to work on the day that the rest of town marks T-day, we’re given a random day off elsewhere in the month.  This is why, on November 6th, I found myself celebrating Thanksgiving by hiking the Castle Rock Loop with my kiwi friend Helen.  This is the second time that the two of us have attempted the ten mile route.  The first time was on cross country skis; this time we’re sticking strictly to hiking boots.  The weather is vastly improved from our last trip as well.  Two months ago the temperature was at -54F with windchill; this day it is +20F, and there’s not a breath of wind to stir the green flags on the bamboo poles that mark the route.  We climb the steep hill outside of town to gain the ridge line, and then plod comfortably along in the softening snow.  Sunglasses firmly in place against the blazing bright sun, Castle Rock in our sights, and Mt. Erebus rising royally behind it, the ever-present plume (is it ash? steam? smoke?) feathering gently into the sky, straight up - no wind even at 12,000 feet.  The Rock itself is a giant orange-brown thumb of rugged stone.  It sticks up vertically from the ridgeline; at approx. 150 feet it is the tallest thing on the otherwise flat, white, unbroken horizon.  It’s quite a scramble to the top, but it’s warm enough to tuck my gloves into my pocket and use my fingers to gain handholds in the sun-warmed rock.  There’s also a line of fixed rope to provide help across the large slides where the rock has been eroded into scree.  At the top, 950 feet above the sea ice, we stand and turn in a circle.  The landmarks sit like compass points: to the north, Mt. Erebus.  Northeast, Mt. Terror.  East is White Island, southeast is Observation Hill.  To the south, Black Island and Minna Bluff, the gateway to the South Pole.  Mt. Discovery rises in the southwest, and to the west-northwest the sharp edges of the Royal Society mountain range stretch out into the as yet invisible open ocean.  Pressure ridges, blue ice, and snow fill in the degrees between, and above all, the blinding cobalt of the sky.  Antarctica.  Helen and I sit for perhaps a half hour, soaking in the sun’s warmth that we can feel through our layers of clothes.  Gorgeous.  Happy Thanksgiving!!

Sensory deprivation.  These are a few of my favorite things that I didn’t know were my favorites until they were removed from my world.  Bugs.  Rain.  Outdoor smells.  Green.  Fresh draft beer.  Trees.  It’s the bugs that I miss the most, I think.  Or, they’re the things that are most obviously missing.  I’ll see a dust mote float by and swat it out of the way, thinking it’s a fly, only to remember, with a start, that there aren’t any bugs here.  A speck on the wall is a spider, an odd shadow in the corner is a cobweb – except it’s not.  Seeing rain on TV, reading a description of a wet, stormy night – I’m enthralled.  My uncle mailed me a stack of the Sunday comics, in color (a treasure in themselves!).  One strip showed a family standing in the rain in their soggy front yard, surveying a growing drainage problem.  I was transported.  I could feel the cold, raw moisture in the air, hear the squish of the grass, smell the rotting fall leaves.  Vivid sensations from a comic strip.  I think I stared at the newsprinted page for fifteen minutes.  Little things are treasured; small reminders of the outside world: fake spiders sit glued to window sills, silk ivy crawls around office cubicles, plastic palm trees tower in dorm room corners.  Every bathroom stall on station has a tropical-themed picture taped to the back of the door.  People find ways to inject their white, icy days with shots of sunshine, life, warmth, greenery and bright turquoise water.

Little things…I wish I could describe the sense of humor.  The best I can do is say that it’s all about the little things.  Subtle.  Creative.  Fueled by the inherent madness of subtracting oneself from the real world and moving to a cold, dead place where one lives in too-tight quarters and works too-long hours.  Release happens in the oddest ways.  For example.  This past weekend: The Halloween Party.  Costumes planned for months were pulled out, painted on, and paraded across a stage for the entire community to cheer and jeer.  Little things take on enormous importance.  I have spent hour-long meetings discussing whether or not to put our galley napkins into dispensers on the tables or to leave them in a central location for community members to pick up before sitting down.  When we introduced silverware-sorting at the dish window, there was chaos.  Routines are followed to a T.  Changes incite revolt.  As if we as humans can only bear so much, and living in this place has already stretched the limits.

It’s a community of travelers, adventurers.  Every Monday night someone presents a travelogue – a slide show and talk of their recent journeys.  So far we’ve had people speak about Tibet, Guyana, Suriname, Mongolia.  We’re readers.  There’s a drawer in the dish room that the DAs use for their personal effects; it’s always full of books.  During our breaks we sit two or three at a table and plow through classics, comic books, history, biographies, comedies, tragedies, poetry.  Cribbage is the card game of choice.  Carhart is the fashionable name brand for pants, shirts, and insulated bib overalls.  The more patches, the better.  In any given gathering, heads wearing hats will outnumber the bare ones.  Facial hair for men is an art form: chops, fu manchus, goatees, soul patches, handlebar ‘staches, trimmed beards, wild beards, and the ever-popular two-day stubble.  The community is swollen at the moment – we’re nearly at capacity at 1092 people.  For the last two weeks we’ve been overrun by Polies – a hundred or so Raytheon employees waiting, waiting, waiting to fly to the South Pole.  The temperature has to be above -50C (approx -64F) before the LC130 Hercules planes can fly.  Colder than that and the fuel lines will freeze.  So far the temps at the pole have sat solidly at -60C, -70C.  And so the Polies sit, drinking coffee in the galley, checking their email in the computer kiosk, living out of their carry-on bags, getting up every morning to check the passenger manifests to find out if their flight has been cancelled yet.  But this, this is our community.  Twenty-eight people living in my dorm in transient housing, waiting to make the eight-hour flight to the South Pole.  The South Pole.  Many of them have been volunteering in the kitchen, washing pots to while away the hours, and a few I’ve gotten to know well.  Two weeks now – they’re bored and excited and itching to go; I’m jealous.  Take me with you!!

And, this week’s magic moment…
Visited Scott’s Terra Nova hut, at Cape Evans!  A fifteen mile ride on the sea ice in the back of a big orange delta (flat bed vehicle with a passenger box strapped to the back – bumpy), and then stepping into history.  Walking through the hut where Scott and his polar expedition spent a long, harsh winter, burning seal blubber and planning their ill-fated overland trip to the South Pole.  I was training as a hut tour guide, so it was hard to take the appropriate moments of silent, reverent appreciation that the space deserves.  But.  I’m training as a hut tour guide, so I’ll get to come back.  The highlight of the day, however, came on the drive home.  PENGUINS.  Three Adelies – tiny black and white waddling cuties, flapping and sliding their way across the ice.  Abracadabra – Antarctica.

The sun set for the last time on last Tuesday, October 24, at 1:41 AM.  I stood outside in my pajama pants and watched it sink below the horizon…and then come back up.  There’s an awful lot of light these days…not much warmth.  For all the spring brightness, I’m craving the bone-warming heat of a beach, a park, a grassy lawn.  Just keep my eyes on that golden NZ beach taped to the back of the toilet stall door…

If the three helicopters arriving at the heli-pad less than a hundred feet from my window were an alarm waking me from the deep, satisfying sleep of winfly, then yesterday and today have been the equivalent of the early morning stumble to the bathroom. Everything is painfully bright; my head is fuzzy and full of dark thoughts about being out of my warm bed; seeing even a single person standing at the bathroom sink is too many. On Tuesday morning of last week, there were 395 individuals residing at McMurdo. By Tuesday afternoon, there were nearly 500. Poor weather on Wednesday and Thursday put a temporary hold on the onslaught, but Friday dawned clear and Saturday clearer. Three planes between those two days brought the population to a seemingly seam-bursting 678. Fasten your seat belts, kids. From zero to sixty in fractions of a second. Warp speed, dead ahead!

New people. And lots of ‘em. I’m feeling shell-shocked, slightly (recent experiments in sleep deprivation and all-night dance marathons have probably contributed to this). The winter-overs…I think they’re in hiding. I’ve seen my few winter friends who are still in residence. I’m put off balance by the changes; some of them are close to unhinged, although they are buoyed by the fact that they are days away from getting on a plane themselves.  I, on the other hand, look around and see four long months with these indistinct shapes and figures who are my future, and I mourn for the days past.  When we (winter/winfly people) meet in the galley or in the bar our eyes are panicked, glazed until we make eye contact and cling gratefully to each other for the rest of the night, protecting one another from the rough, featureless blur of unfamiliar faces. Change is scary.

How quickly things change. Six weeks ago I was as shiny and new as the recent arrivals – newer, even. I’m still a FNG, whereas many of the “new” people have decades of Antarctic time under their belts. And yet I’ve developed a fierce possessiveness for the town, the people, the places. Who’s hung their coat on my hook?  How dare she sit at my table? I remember my first week here.  The winter-overs spoke in riddles, inside jokes, and told raucous stories of departed friends.  It was a wall, carefully and deliberately built in order to preserve their separateness from the newcomers, the interlopers.  It was self-preservation, I realize now, and understand, at least on some small scale.  Goodbyes are hard.  And when followed immediately with two to three hundred new “hellos,” the sadness overwhelms: an emptiness.

Lighter and lighter – the days are growing.  Sun rise: 5:34 AM.  Sun set: 9:54 PM, though the colors from both events spread and glow for hours when the skies are clear.  I’m going to miss the colors in the sky.  We’ve bid farewell to the stars.  The dead of night is now little more than dusk.  And it’s heating up.  +12F (-11C) today.  When the wind is still, the air actually feels warm on my face.  The snow on my dorm melts in the sun and then refreezes, forming icicles in the cold air.  It’s the end of winfly, and the start of mud season.  Nearly two months down…

It’s been six weeks.  It feels like forever.  Long enough that this bizarre place has begun to feel comfortable and familiar.  Normal.  Just in time for everything to change.  The time period known as “winfly” (“winter flight” – six weeks during which the ice runway is built and town is prepared for the bustle of the summer season) came to a smooth but sudden halt early this afternoon when the first C-17 of mainbody touched down.  It circled once, a tiny black bird that grew steadily larger as it approached.  I stood with several others on Hut Point and applauded when the wheels made contact with the blue stretch of sea ice two miles outside of town.  The applause was both heartfelt and sarcastic.  We cheered the skill of the pilots and the excitement of watching planes land on a frozen ocean in Antarctica, and we grimaced as we thought of the one hundred souls who were about to be released on us.  One hundred people today, another hundred tomorrow…by Saturday our population will have almost tripled.  Life is about to get exponentially more interesting.

The night at the coffee house was perhaps a week ago; each night since has grown progressively brighter.  The continent awakes, gradually easing out of winter hibernation.  People are keeping track of “firsts”: first blue sky; first day of positive degrees on the thermometer; first time sunglasses are necessary; first seal sighted outside of town.  Among the firsts and the excitement, another population is counting the “lasts.”  The winter-overs, the last of the winter workforce, are saying their goodbyes, making their peace, preparing to reenter the world.  Some have been here for six months, others twelve, and a few awe-inspiring folks are tallying their fourteenth straight month on the ice.  I, the FNG, watch the behavior patterns and interactions, understanding only a fraction of the emotions that emanate from their faces in visible waves.

Winter, or the idea of spending a winter here is a compelling consideration.  I’m being seduced by the bonds that I see among the community of winter-overs.  Andre (a twelve-monther: http://mcpenguin.livejournal.com) has given me the singular, weighty blessing of being “A Groovy Person,” a distinction which acts as a passcode and allows me entrance to the winter-over clubhouse.  These kids rock.  If wintering in Antarctica means I get to hang with these guys and others like them for six solid months, sign me up.  They’re not friends; they’re family.  The love is a perceptible thing; it’s the sunshine that brightens the six months of night.  The allure of these relationships is offset by a certain sense of pain and awfulness.  These are not easy bonds to break, and as I’ve been told on several occasions, Antarctica is about goodbyes.  It’s hard to describe.  Although, I don’t feel that I have the right to discuss the pain of separation.  I’ve been here for a mere six weeks.  The sadness I felt today as I watched the first twenty departees board the bus to the runway is laughable when I see the tears, the embraces, the brave clasping of hands.

I seem to be living a life of extremes.  It is exhausting.  Joy to sorrow, contentment to anxiety, calm to stress.  Each day runs the gamut.  One day feels like four; a week is a lifetime.  It is fitting, however, to live this way, in this place.  There’s a sticker sold in the shop here that reads: “It’s a harsh continent.”  Yes.

My first night working as a shuttle driver, transporting drunken souls the mile or so between McMurdo and the Scott Base for the weekly “American Night” over on the Kiwi side of the island.  I’m from NH.  I know how to drive in snow, wind, sleet, hail, rain, fog, ice, deer, moose…but an Antarctic condition two storm proved to be a whole new game.  Gusting winds buffeted the van as I attempted to navigate the narrow pass over the hill.  Snow flew past horizontally, steadily lowering the visibility from perhaps 100 feet, 50 feet, 20 feet… Forward movement was measured in inches as I first tried to follow the reflective road markers, my high beams picking them up at odd moments through the curtain of snow.  When those vanished I dropped my headlights and followed the tire treads on the road directly ahead of my front left tire.  And in the moments when the wind blocked even my view of the hood of the van, I sat on the brake and marveled along with my passengers.  THIS is Antarctica.

It’s gone condition two twice more since then.  The wind has woken me, shaking my corner, ocean-view room, screaming through the plumbing, hiding and revealing buildings less than 50 feet away from me as I walk to work, my legs blown sideways each time I lift one to take another step forward.  If my face wasn’t shielded by goggles, balaclava, and the hood of big red, you’d be able to see the maniacal grin.  Roll on Condition 1!!

#2 – Flagging Field Trip!

Spent an entire day away from work, away from town, and miles away from reality.  Fifteen miles north of my current reality, to be exact.  In a Hagglund, a Pisten Bully, and two snowmobiles, ten eager souls and I drove and rode out onto the sea ice, along the edge of Ross Island to Cape Evans.  THIS is what I came here for: an impossible to duplicate experience in an extreme, beautiful and unique environment.  If I hadn’t been absolutely stupid with excitement, I could have wept with wonder.  Memories of the day have the delicate sense of a dream about them: more feeling than fact.  Our mission was to plant tall, bamboo flags into the sea ice, marking the safe route for vehicles traveling to the cape.  The lead vehicle laid down the line, and the rest of us took turns following behind, drilling into the bright blue ice with electrical and hand-driven augers, then setting the flags against the wind.  I drove the Hagglund (a giant orange bisected Swedish military vehicle)!  I drove the snowmobiles!  I stood on Antarctic ice and walked across a pressure ridge; I worked next to the Erebus Ice Tongue and within sight of the Barnes Glacier.  I gazed up at the sun, low in the sky, watching as it illuminated the snow blowing off of the islands and cast pink shadows on the Royal Discovery Range on the other side of the Sound.  I felt the -20something air chew through my gloves, and experienced the once in a lifetime opportunity to feel the (significantly colder) wind on my bare skin as I dropped my drawers and peed faster than I’ve ever peed before.  At the end of the day, the sun didn’t set: it melted.  It softened, losing its spherical form and oozing across and into the seam where the ice meets the sky.  The sun’s blood is red and yellow; I watched it spread from the snowmobile, sitting backwards, leaning against my friend Andre’s back as he drove, speeding over the frozen water on our way back home.

#3 – The aurora australis

The Southern Lights!  As the nights get shorter, the opportunities to witness these natural phenomena become fewer.  One night last week, however, they were visible from town, bright enough to overcome the building lights.  I stood with a friend, Brennan, on the back staircase of his dorm, and stared at the pale green wisps of…light? cloud? energy? fairy dust?  They resemble all of those, but are in fact something quite different.  They dance.  The music is far beyond our sense of rhythm; they seem to drift, disappear and reform in irregular patterns and intervals, but nothing this smooth, this beautiful, can be the product of an entirely random, senseless universe.

Forgive the laundry list…time is a precious and rare commodity here.  I rush through the last two weeks in order to focus on the coming days in more detail…wait for it.