Part 1: Getting There

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Part 1: Getting There

November 5, 2005, 11:30 AM New Zealand/McMurdo Time (Greenwich Mean Time+12)

On the flight deck, Air National Guard mission #AZM018, en route Antarctica.

I am writing this from a C-17 flown by the U.S. National Guard. I am somewhere over the South Pacific, about halfway between Christchurch, New Zealand and McMurdo Station, Antarctica. A C-17 is the big, olive green, four-engine, high-wing cargo jet. There are 44 passengers aboard, strapped into folding sling seats along the naked walls of the cargo area, where giant parts for the new South Pole Station are held down by giant hooks. A few minutes ago, the captain took me up to the flight deck to enjoy the view as we crossed the invisible line of 60 degrees south. We were flying at 35,000 feet, and the world was made of cold ocean overlaid by a carpet of puffy clouds that stretched forward into a vast curve.

Today, we are going to 77 south; at sixty miles per degree of latitude, that’s about another 1500 miles. I am dressed in ECWs (extreme cold weather gear), which includes heavy wool socks and white, inflatable “bunny” boots, a thick layer of black polypropylene underwear, snowmobile pants, and a huge red down parka with snorkel hood. Actually, I’ve taken the parka off. Like most of the people aboard, I am sweating like a pig.

It has been just a small handful of days since I was walking around in the darkness in my home neighborhood, greeting friends and neighbors dressed as scarecrows and pirates. Halloween is the social event of the year in our town, which is all of about six square blocks of houses populated by people who relish dressing up funny or just dragging a red wagon down the street carrying a lit pumpkin and urns of (flavored?) coffee to hand out. Duncan dressed as an insurance salesman and Damon and I followed along with our dog Kaji. All along the route, I was greeted with hugs and well-wishes. One woman I hadn’t seen in months. She threw an arm around me and wished me a great and safe trip. “You’re leaving tomorrow!” she crooned. I was startled, wondering how she even knew I was going out of town. Then I realized that the adventure of going to Antarctica is so large that people talk about it. They are excited for me. I am going to Antarctica for them as much as for myself. In fact, I am going to Antarctica for everyone I know.

Across the Pacific: I left Los Angeles the evening after Halloween aboard a Qantas 747-400. The aircraft was so large that I could only see a section of it through the waiting room window, more like looking across at another building than at something that could find its way into the sky. In fact, all sense of where I was and what I was doing was hopelessly out of scale and scrambled by then. Preparations for the trip varied between nerve-wracking and giddy. Friends came by for a potluck two weeks back dressed all in white. They brought nothing but white foods—vanilla ice cream, white wine, marzipan snowballs, vanilla vodka. A plate full of white after-dinner mints was graced by three little wind-up penguins. In the last hectic days, I couldn’t feel much except a gnawing nervousness (Was I forgetting something critical? Would my family be all right without me? Would I be okay without them?) I was reduced to living off lists of things that absolutely had to be done, and many slipped by regardless. I felt like I was going not to another continent, but to a distant planet.

At last I took my seat and stared out the window along the enormous wing of the jet. Then the engines came full throttle for the takeoff roll with a massive roar. The giant aircraft shuddered mightily as it lifted from the runway, lurching its way into the air, and then all at once went everything went smooth and quiet. The lights of Los Angeles briefly dotted the ground beneath me, then slipped away into the night as we left the edge of the continent. I won’t see North America again for two months.

Fourteen hours later, I changed planes in Sydney, which was staggeringly hot and humid, and while I waited, made the acquaintance of three men who are going to the ice to work: an electrician named Chris bound for McMurdo, a plumber named Kevin who is going to South Pole Station, and a kid named Rowdy who does something I couldn’t quite grasp. We passed through customs in Christchurch, New Zealand together, and were shuttled to the Antarctic Centre for ECW issue. Two orange duffels awaited me in the women’s changing room. I was instructed to try them all on to make sure they fit. I took a picture of myself with the wind-up penguins.

ECW test, Antarctic Center, Christchurch, NZ

Going Kiwi: On to the Windsor Hotel B&B in downtown “Cheech” (a local name for Christchurch) and much confusion trying to walk a straight line down the sidewalk. I’m sure people thought it odd that a nice middle-aged mom from America might be drunk in the middle of the afternoon, but somehow things were all upside down and sideways and I could not hold my bearings. Giant azalea trees bloomed lavishly along the sidewalks. When I phoned home, I discovered that it was only three hours later in California, but in fact it was the evening of the previous day there, the one I lost when I crossed the International Date Line. I don’t get motion-sick in the three dimensions of space, but within the dimension of time…well…

By the next day I was walking an almost straight line, and while I had trouble understanding New Zealand English, I soon heard myself twisting my vowels in the same direction. The first time a Kiwi “E” slipped out, it was like giving birth to an alien through my mouth without having known I was pregnant.

The Windsor is a crossing of paths for folks going and coming from the ice. I met up with AAWP (that’s the program I’m on—Antarctic Artists and Writers) painter Alan Campbell and his son Colin, who were returning from the “Winfly” (Winter Flight, the first flight in after the austral winter). Though I’d only met him the once at our orientation in Denver last July, Alan gave me a big hug. The Antarctic is like that; it makes fast friends out of people who have that one thing in common: the ice. Christine Siddoway and her tribe of students from Colorado College (my alma mater) sluiced in a day later (more hugs) and will follow me to the ice in a few days. My onward flight had been delayed one day by weather. This is the way of the ice. So we all went out for fish dinner at the Dux de Lux.

The Windsor Hotel, Christchurch

Last thoughts before the leap: On our return from dinner I found a notice on the desk announcing that my van ride to the airport would leave at 5:30 the next morning. I went to bed and lay there in the darkness, inventorying the various tensions in my body, releasing my remaining ambivalence as best I could. When, in April, 2004, I was first invited to apply for this program, my answer to “Would you like to go to Antarctica?” was “Sure!” I had never thought about going there. I knew nothing about it except that it had penguins, and that Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men had spent a very bad year locked in its ice, but I like travel best when I have a job to do when I get there (I make a crummy tourist), and it’s even better when it’s somewhere far from the beaten track, and this place definitely qualified on both counts. And to be honest, I have high hopes that it will be what everyone says it is—the adventure of a lifetime.

In the intervening 18 months, I’ve learned that epic journeys are not simple acts of romance or the untrammeled answer to a middle-aged housewife’s need to do something decidedly different for a while. It’s been an obscene amount of work and adjustment getting this far, and I’ve barely begun. As an AAWP grantee I will face certain prejudices and enjoy certain privileges, though rumor has it that the latter are eroding under the chill winds of bureaucracy.

So as I lay there in Christchurch too keyed up to sleep, searching out niggling little fears about what lay before me. I was concerned that I would not get along in the close, rollicking society of McMurdo Station. Beneath that, I feared the deepening separation from my family and friends. And deepest of all, I feared that, after all the months of hanging on through bureaucratic knocks and bruises and broken dreams (“No, you can’t go to the South Pole! Why would you want to go there anyway? It’s just big, flat white place.”), hanging on by the slender thread of the support and tutelage of people with large, romantic hearts, that I would not love it. I feared that going to Antarctica would be a non-event, that it would hold no magic, that it was not another planet after all, but just another place. That would be the greatest separation of all, the separation from meaning.

After a while I got up and took a shower so that, in feeling the hot water course over me, I could feel my own skin. Then I lay down again, the renewed knowledge that I was just a small bit of an infinite universe transporting me into an untroubled sleep. I rose early and sat on the front step of the Windsor, enjoying a view of the constellation Orion standing on his hands in an inky blue sky.

Now on the C-17, people are climbing out of their jump seats to crowd around the two small portholes, excitedly pulling out cameras to snap pictures of their first view of the halo of floating ice that surrounds Antarctica.

The truth is, I really don’t know why I’m going to Antarctica.

I have good friends and a loving family who support me in the loopy things I do, and that in itself holds meaning enough to fill a lifetime. In the quiet of my last night at home, Damon held me in his arms and comforted me. “You’re going on an adventure,” he told me. “It’s not a vacation, it’s an adventure. Parts of it will be fun, and parts will be really difficult. I’m jealous as hell, and I’m so glad you get to do it. Just hang in there, sweetheart, you’ll be fine.”

Sarah

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