- 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…