Part 4: Heading Out to the Field

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Part 4: Heading Out to the Field

November 15, 2005, 17:55 Mac time

Bright and sunny, winds calm, little puddles standing in the basalt mush they call a street here.

My field duffels are all packed, weighed, and waiting at the helo pad, and I am sitting up very straight in my chair here. Tomorrow morning I’m off in a little four-seat helicopter to the fabled Dry Valleys where I will join Karl Kreutz and his gang of renown cutting an ice core on Clark Glacier, which for you geography fans is about 77o23’S latitude, 162o30’E longitude. I am ready to get out of town…really, really ready, having given up today’s sea ice training for a reconnaissance flight on a LC-130 Hercules (“Herc”) to the Fosdick Mountains in Marie Byrd Land that was in turn pooped out by bad weather (they call it getting “canxed,” an abbreviation for canceled).

But many of you have written to ask me to say more about such topics as the people and the food at McMurdo, so why not now?

A whimsical scrap metal sculpture overlooks McMurdo, standing on the ubiquitous basalt gravel. The sculpture was made by someone on the winterover crew. The white ball sits on top of Mac Ops, the radio and weather center. Crary lab is the gray metal building farthest away and to the left. The background is sea ice with a compacted snow road and in the extreme background another island.

McMurdo sits on Ross Island, so technically speaking I have not yet been on the continent. That comes tomorrow!

The people are great. They are an extraordinarily well educated, friendly gang of adventurers. As you can imagine, being outdoorsy is a common element, but for many jobs it’s not a requirement. Some seem to come for the sense of removal. Some come for the beauty of the landscape, some for the society: it is said, “The first year you come for the adventure, the second year for the bonus, and the third year because you realize you don’t really fit in anywhere else.” I would add to that, Don’t fit in anywhere like you do here. It’s instant buddy land times 1,100. There is 100% employment. There is pride in the achievement of living in a harsh environment, in doing something few have done. And there is plenty to do here.

First, the town maintains hiking trails (shall we say, they mark the route to stay on, as in "Don’t leave the trail as you might fall into the ocean or a crack in the ice") and steep hills to climb for unparalleled views of pristine wilderness. Okay, that was an understatement: the deal is that McMurdo, nearby Scott Station, South Pole Station (850 miles from here), Palmer Station (3,000 miles distant), and a sprinkling of much smaller outposts are the only places that are NOT total, unseamed, untrammeled wilderness in an area 1.5 times the size of our lower 48. So beyond the runway out on the ice, there are no marks made by man. Zip. Nada. None. I am one of the ones who came here to drink that in.

So what are the people like? Here’s an eclectic sampling:

There’s NSF grantee David Ainley, whom you may have seen on TV talking about Adelie Penguins. David hails from Sausalito, CA. He watches me with his clear blue eyes, his face framed by an outdoorsman’s wreath of prematurely white hair and speaks softly, and every word holds knowledge and love for the many species of birds who are his concern in this world. David is a biologist, and there are also geologists, glaciologists, atmospheric scientists, oceanographers...it's a science bonanza, and they're all right here in Crary lab or out there somewhere in a Scott tent doing incredible things.

On the logistics side, Jules the heavy equipment operator pops to mind. She operates a Cat to dress the runways. She is 50, rawboned, beyond tomboy. The first Sunday I was here, she raucously bemoaned the fact that I was wearing a wedding ring. I’ve quit telling this tale around here (“Gee I was only in town 24 hours before a woman hit on me!”) because everyone says, “Oh, you mean Jules,” before I get another word out. And there plumbers and electricians and power plant operators and firemen and a whole fleet of people who manage the recycling and reuse program, which is the most comprehensive I've ever seen.

There’s Holly, the IT wizard, who is as pleasant, calmly intelligent, and smiley a person as I’ve ever met. Holly is short for Heilios (I think I spelled that right), which is a combination of Haile as in Selassie (because he’s part Ethiopian) and the sun god Helios. He’s also part lots of other things, and he’s reading this, so I’ll stop the descriptors right there. Gotcha, Holly!

There’s John Wright, who is currently driving a big tractor to the South Pole, compacting snow and marking a flag route. John is from Silverton, Colorado, and is cut on mythic lines, all tall and far-gazing. He has a deep, textured voice and an air of competence as massive as the rock he cuts when he’s home in the U.S,. building tunnels into mines. He can recite poetry by the yard, I hear, something he cultivates as he moves with his traverse crew at seven miles per hour across the 600-mile expanse of the Ross Ice Shelf. He says that out in the middle of that flat expanse of ice (he’ll rise 400 feet in all those miles), Mt Erebus and all other promontories fall beyond the curve of the Earth.

John Wright and about a third of the traverse caravan, all lined up and ready to go One of the traverse tractors...Bob Kayser eat your heart out! House behind is on skis as is the fuel tank, which is one of eight. The red thing to the right is a grooming tool.

Continuing at 11:30 PM...about +12F, fresh breeze (flag flapping out almost straight)…teams of lenticular ice clouds over the Royal Society Range…sun six fingers above the horizon and streaming in my office window.

There are high winds at the South Pole, so all seven Hercs are sitting all lonesome on the runway wishing they was going somewhere, and the flyboys have been sloping about town bored to tears.

There are three main categories of personnel here. The National Science Foundation calls the shots from a building aptly named the Chalet, and the NSF grantees fill Crary Lab, from which I am writing this. Loads more grantees are out in the field. They are the best and the brightest from universities and a smattering of other ports of call around the world, a highly cosmopolitan, erudite bunch. Raytheon Polar Services is the service contractor. And then there are the flyboys (and girls), the 109th Airlift Wing NY Air National Guard. They hang out in green flight suits or green camouflage fatigues, which really cracks me up. Do they think there are maybe some bushes around here they might hide in?

The Guard fly the Hercs, the LC-130’s, which are C-130’s (four props) with skis. Hercs are high-wing, STOL (Short-field Take Off and Landing) aircraft. Then there are the Twin Otter pilots (a much smaller STOL aircraft built by DeHaviland) from Canada, who are hard to spot in the crowd, and the helo pilots, who at least wear gimme caps with their insignia. Being a pilot, I have a special fondness for sitting with the pilots and navigators at dinner listening to them discuss the aviation and navigation of the cold continent.

Six of the Hercs, Royal Society Range for scale, this being the view from my office window.

The cafeteria serves four meals a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midrats) to 1,100 people. As I said in an earlier email, food is the fuel that keeps us warm, so they really lay it on in vast amounts and with great variety to keep us pumping the calories. Having not gotten much exercise or been in the cold that much yet, I have gained four pounds on the rationalization that I’ll need it starting tomorrow.

But here’s the real reason: It’s yummy. Tonight I had roast lamb, mushroom pilaf, and cauliflower, my choice of juice, freshly baked bread, and flan. There are usually two or three menu items plus soups, two or three desserts, self-serve soft ice cream, several salads, and it’s take all you want, eat all you take. I could go into detail about the beverage offerings and condiments, but it goes on and on. Breakfast is everything from cereals to whole-grain pancakes with toppings to fresh or canned fruits to the omelet bar, and Sunday brunch includes Belgian waffles. I am particularly fond of the yogurt, which is made on site, topped with their own granola and some applesauce, no doubt from NZ. Lunch has a sandwich bar, such things as burritos, casseroles, you name it. It’s a good thing the soft-serve ice cream maker broke down, because I had learned to combine a small amount of coffee and a lot of vanilla slurp.

Well, as I mentioned it is almost midnight and I have to be on deck at 7:30. There is so much going on here around the clock (that’s why they serve midrats) that it’s easy to forget to get enough rest. I want to take it all in. Time flies by, speeding up as things happen and then slamming people into walls of frustration when the weather shuts in. And as I mentioned, tomorrow at 10:10 I lift off for the vast drama of the Dry Valleys…weather permitting.

Until about Thanksgiving, g’day!

Sarah

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