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)

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…

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.