McMurdo Station is on holiday today, celebrating Thanksgiving two days
late to construct a two-day weekend. People work nine hours a day six
days a week here, taking only Sunday off, so having two days off together
is a really big deal. However, from where I’m sitting it’s odd enough
that we are 21 hours ahead of California, putting local Thanksgiving (actual
Nov. 24) a day ahead of home’s, but then like I say McMurdo has to go
and observe the holiday a day after that. As a result, real Thanksgiving
here was a non-event. A typical response to my “Happy Thanksgiving!” greeting
that day was: “Oh…is it Thanksgiving? Yeah…”
The next day, when it was Thanksgiving at home, I waxed homesick, and
today’s Thanksgiving observance winds up seeming a bit contrived. Nothing
daunted, I shall dress up for the event, put on lipstick even, and give
the over-consumption of turkey and pie my all. The galley is doing the
event in three seatings (3, 5, and 7 PM). When I wandered past a bit ago,
I saw white linen tablecloths where bare wood usually shows. So maybe
this will be okay.
Enough with my kvetching. Of all the pictures of Antarctic life painted
for me before I came here, a lack of momentary lapses in wishing I was
somewhere else was not one of them. Besides, on November 24th I awoke
in a bunkhouse that was chained to a rock to keep it from rocking too
much in a relentless 60-mph wind or, for that matter, blowing away when
it gusted above that, and therein lies another story.
The bunkhouse is on Black Island, the home of McMurdo’s telecommunications
relay station. I went there with a traverse crew from Fleet Ops led by
Katrina, a young woman who cleans up just fine, but loves to drive tractors.
When I asked her the obligatory, “Where are you from?” she replied, “I
grew up in California, but I’ve lived in Alaska and just now my storage
unit is in Idaho.” If that doesn’t paint a picture of the kinds of people
who find their ways here, nothing will.
But there’s more: The crew also included Ron, a Kiwi my age who’s been
to the ice enough times to have managed Scott Base (New Zealand’s operations
base, located three miles from McMurdo) and consider a tour of duty working
for U.S. Fleet Ops to be something of a sabbatical. We also had Gary,
a man about five years younger than I who grew up driving tractors on
his uncle’s farm in Missouri. And we had a kid from New York I’ll call
Thomas. I get to call him a kid for an assortment of reasons that shall
become richly apparent.
Our job was to carry heavy supplies to the telecommunications station,
renew the markers, and re-compact the snow along the way. Setting a flag
route is a large undertaking. The traverse to Black Island is 60 miles
long, and all but ten of those miles needed fresh flags (10-foot bamboo
stakes topped by fabric about a foot long) set 200 feet apart. We headed
out from McMurdo in a convoy led by a Caterpillar tractor called a Challenger,
which pulled a trail-grooming device called a goose. The trail had to
be dressed in order to manage the weight of a Delta, a 30-ton, articulated
vehicle that lumbers along on six balloon tires as tall as I am. We also
had two snowmobiles, meaty things built by Bombadier.
We started out with Katrina driving the Challenger, Ron driving the
Delta (nicknamed “Flipper”) with me as passenger, and Gary and Thomas
as outriders on the snowmobiles.
Our procession moved along at something under fifteen miles per hour.
The traverse had been delayed one day in the hope of optimal weather,
and in fact it was a nice enough day, for which read the customary temperature
in the teens, partial overcast, and light winds. The problem with the
weather in Antarctica is that it can deteriorate in a blink, and what
was tolerable can decay to yikes-it’s-cold with no apparent change in
the breeze or cloud cover. Literally one moment I’ll be stripping down
to two layers of polypro and the next I’m diving for the big red parka
and cinching it up tight around my face. And that’s just minor shifts;
when it starts to blow, it’s time to pay strict attention to exposed flesh,
and when a blizzard (“Herbie”) blows in, it’s time to get under cover.
An hour or so into the journey, Ron offered to teach me how to drive
the Delta. I jumped on the chance. These vehicles were originally designed
to transit tundra in the Canadian arctic. The front wheels don’t turn;
instead, the whole front end of the vehicle swings. Deltas are built
with big people- and cargo-carrying housings over the rear wheels, but
Flipper had experienced a rollover accident earlier in its career (when
it was a fire truck) and had been converted to a flatbed by the welding
shop. I did not find it difficult to manage Flipper. It’s a glorified
automatic with power steering (duh) and five forward gears. It reminded
me quickly of the little balloon-tire Jeep CJ’s I drove way back in
the before times at the USGS, when I studied sand dunes and needed a
way to commute over loose and creek-saturated sand. The game there was
always to keep up as much momentum as possible while retaining a delicate
detente with the traction.
On we went, stopping briefly at a hut on skis nicknamed “the KOA”
for lunch. We had brought our lunches with us, 3,500-calorie specials
packed by the galley termed “flight lunches.” They are comprised of
two sandwiches, a juice drink, a packet of chips, a big brownie or other
rich cake, three other packaged snacks, and the obligatory Cadbury’s
bar. I must be getting acclimated to the cold, because I ate only one
sandwich and the chips, then swilled down the juice just in case. I
offered to let Ron drive again, but he was delighted to have someone
else take the wheel. I enjoyed the challenge and so kept going. When
we hit soft spots in the snow, the big oaf of a vehicle typically gave
me plenty of warning that it was having difficulty, both as auditory
(engine speed decreasing) and a kinesthetic (weird squishy feeling;
if really bad, a bouncy bit) signals. It was easy enough to downshift,
regain traction, and proceed. An interesting thing was to glance into
the big rear-view mirrors when the signals came and watch the snow in
front of the nearest wheel. It would start to wrinkle forward of the
tire, a soft wave of snow heaving up as a warning of worse things to
come if I didn’t get it back under control quickly. It was difficult
keeping the thing going as fast as it could because the accelerator
pedal had a funky habit of hanging up halfway down, producing only half
speed. Ron occasionally had to remind me to break past this and step
on it.
Fearless leader Katrina and Ron lunching at the KOA. |
We continued until we were about 20 miles short of our goal, then resorted
ourselves into a flag-setting team. We were now around the south side
of Black Island, in an area known as the dead zone because the island
creates a radio blackout. The rule in Antarctic travel out of McMurdo
is that one checks in hourly while en route, and twice daily if in camp
status. Katrina gave Mac Ops (the radio monitoring service) a call about
two miles past KOA apprising them of our impending radio blackout, and
was given five hours to get to the other end of it and call in before
a rescue team would be dispatched. The same would happen if we were
late with any of our hourly updates while outside the dead zone.
So we got to work. The system was to have one driver lead with the
Challenger, a second drive the Delta with a rider on top of the load
on the flatbed, pitching flags every 200 feet, and two outriders on
the snowmobiles poking them into the snow. The hard winds come out of
the south in this region, drifting in snow that had tried to fall somewhere
else. Twelve-foot flag poles that had been set two feet into the snow
only a year before (ergo, with ten feet showing) were sticking up only
two or three feet.
View from my snowmobile. |
It was blowing perhaps 10 to 15 mph. I took a long turn driving a snowmobile
and driving in poles, figuring that the exercise would keep me warm,
and it did. Katrina showed me how to manage the throttle and brakes
on the snowmobile and handed me an iron pike about five feet long and
a couple of inches in diameter. The game was to stab the pike into the
snow, ram it down about two feet, pull it out, and then jam the bamboo
pole into the hole thus created. If layers of ice were encountered,
the chisel end of the rod was a good bet. If neither end worked, there
was also an ice screw, something like a brace and bit, but four feet
long and built to go through a good crust. Beyond that, we had portable
motorized ice drills. The two flag-setters more or less leap-frogged
down the route, but some holes took a bit more persuasion than others
and some of the bamboo poles were bent, requiring that the holes be
made wider, so sometimes a flag-setter would set two for the other’s
one. Needless to say, this effort did burn a few calories, so even in
the wind I stayed warm enough. Katrina kept asking if I was ready to
rotate to another job. I was a volunteer, after all, and she wanted
to make sure she didn’t ask too much of me, but I was enjoying the work
mightily. It was nice to be doing something straightforward, something
I didn’t have to break my brain around, an honest day’s work for an
honest day’s dose of flight lunches and joie de Delta driving.
A couple or three hours into this, the snow got so deep and fresh that
driving the Delta even over freshly compacted areas became tricky. Thomas
was driving it at this point and got it stuck. Thomas is not given to
finesse. When the tires began to slip, he punched it and whipped the
wheel left and right, turning the freshly-groomed track into a buffalo
wallow. I could see him up in the cab, his face turning dark with some
cocktail of negative emotions. Luckily he stopped before the vehicle
began to sink out of sight.
This is a good moment to insert the information that Thomas is not
given to much conversation. I gathered over the course of this adventure
that he had evidenced a certain disgruntlement with his assignments,
and had been brought along on the traverse as a treat. Certainly getting
out of McMurdo is a plum assignment that anyone of greater imagination
would have jumped at. Alas, instead Thomas asked questions like, “Am
I getting overtime for this?”
Poor Thomas was keenly disconcerted to have brought progress to a
halt in this manner, or perhaps the progress was not at issue with him,
but instead the fact of the limits of his skill set having been unshrouded.
Or perhaps he gave not a whit what anyone noticed, but felt sorry for
himself for having been put in the position of driving a vehicle that
couldn’t find its way from A to B without getting itself stuck. Whatever
the cause of his mood, his sporadic expressions of dissatisfaction darkened
then into moping.
I take time here to describe this event and Thomas’s reaction to it
because his behavior was by local standards considered extraordinary.
Indeed, no one got on his case. Anywhere else I’ve worked, he would
have been summarily chewed out or given his marching papers, but here
in the Antarctic everyone has to pull together even in spite of the
weakest link in the chain. It’s just like driving the Delta: you do
what you have to with the equipment available. This is not to say that
the others had nothing to say about this. We’re talking about four well-adjusted,
camaraderie-happy adults, however, so no one wanted to call him names.
Instead, we limited ourselves to bemused and amazed expressions of our
fascination with the phenomenon, albeit through clenched teeth, and
there were several suggestions that perhaps Thomas’s prior employment
with the Army had brought him to expect that life was going to spoon-feed
instructions to him.
Having spent a lot of afternoons working on sand digging other vehicles
out of such wallows, I allowed as how it was shovel time. The snow Thomas
had excavated and heaped up around the tires had to be removed so that
someone with a more delicate touch could simply drive the 30-ton heap
out of the hole. This took two minutes, and we were on our way again,
with Thomas relegated to the top of the load to unpack and pitch flags.
I drove the Delta. While the rear-view mirrors gave me a good view of
the tires and a glimpse of the flags flying away from the sides of the
vehicle, I couldn’t see the snowmobiles, so when I got too far ahead,
Thomas would take a pole and bang the back window of the cab, and I’d
stop. Given the circumstances, this reminded me of a story Jim Thomson
told me about drilling tests for minerals exploration in Namibia. His
driller was a Boer who communicated by throwing empty whiskey bottles
at him.
At last we broke out of the dead zone, left the snow behind, and climbed
the rocky ground to the shoulder of Mt. Aurora, whence sits the Black
Island Telecommunications Facility. There is no snow here for the simple
reason that the wind pounds that naked expanse of basalt so hard that
nothing finer than fist-sized gravel remains. I’ll confess that I found
the setting rather bleak, but the welcome that awaited us at the facility
itself was sublime. But that’s not to suggest that I wasn’t offered
certain warnings against what to expect. Folks back in McMurdo had told
me I’d find one of Antarctica’s gold-plated characters out there, a
man named Tony Marchetti, who manages the station during the four and
a half months each year that it sees maintenance. Ron had been telling
me about Tony, too, no doubt wondering what I was good for, and, when
we stopped to unhitch the goose and button down the snowmobiles a half
mile short of our destination, Katrina said simply, “Tony can be a bit
abrupt at times.”
“I’ve got him on radar,” I told her.
Jessica taking excellent care of us. |
She smiled. “Okay. Just give him a load of s---.” Abrupt? Hey, Tony
turned out to be a soft-hearted teddy bear with a verbal crust like
day-old Melba toast. What, did they think that after all my years working
with geologists I’d never heard a little language? I am an acolyte to
language, and Tony turned phrases like a wood-chipper spits. I was in
heaven.
But first I was treated to Jessica the camp cook, who was damned glad
to see a couple of other women for a change. She dishes out three squares
a day plus cookies and smarts to the crews of telecommunications tweakers
who come to work on the equipment during the daylight months of the
year. Having a station manager and cook became necessary when it was
discovered that the transient workers knew what to do with the wiring,
but did not properly maintain its housing. Jessica is a French Canadian
from upstate New York who knows her way around everything from pot roast
to pancakes and “bug juice” to cookies. She’s the kind of woman who
can hold her own in that kind of setting with aplomb and earthy grace.
She took me under her wing, saying, “You’d better get your gear out
to the bunk house now, because the wind’s only going to get worse.”
It was blowing a steady 60 mph out of the south. I grabbed my duffel
out of the Delta and staggered across the ground to the bunkhouse, which
I noted was held to the ground with steel cables twice the thickness
of my thumbs. Moving against that wind required that I lean into it,
but keep my upwind leg a bit outboard to catch my weight in the instants
when the wild turbulence put me back into the embrace of ambient gravity.
I’ll confess that I was a bit anxious. The path to the bunkhouse took
me just upwind of the crest of the hill, and I didn’t want to find myself
flying over it. As luck had it, I didn’t need to get down on all fours
in the time it took me to get to the bunkhouse and back to the main
facility.
Telecom specialist Richard with some of the guts of the system. |
Jessica then took me on (literally) the cook’s tour of the place, which
proved to be a series of tight buildings and geodesic domes connected
by short passageways, allowing workers to move around the equipment
without having to go outside when it’s REALLY blowing. There’s a kitchen/dining/living
room with bunks beyond it for Jessica, Tony, and two visitors. There’s
a shower with sink in one room (with signs all over enforcing “extreme
water conservation”…part of our delivery was a huge tank of water, which
we siphoned into their tank) and a highly efficient toilet system in
the other (as in the Dry Valleys, everything we brought in would eventually
go out). Beyond that lay store rooms, a catacombs of huge electrical
storage batteries (powered by four wind generators, three solar arrays,
and three backup diesel generators), and a room full of electronic spaghetti
all wired to a team of computers, and beyond that lay a door leading
into the main geodesic dome.
The 11-m dish at Black Island sits inside this dome. |
Drum roll, literally: The dome was one big wind instrument. With all
its Kevlar panels pounding in that wind I could barely hear my tour
guide shout. “It’s like being inside a whole farm of kettle drums!”
I howled. “Nah, I think it’s like having a freight train go overhead,”
Jessica roared back. She was right. The thunder had that kind of kinetic,
rumbling roar of heavy transit. The piece de resistance was the satellite
dish that, I can now attest, is bringing this email to you. It is 11
meters in diameter. It is cold and gray. And it is tipped almost up
on its edge. It is aimed just three degrees off the horizon so that
it can peek through the thousands of miles of space that divide it from
a geostationary satellite that hovers some unimaginable number of miles
above the equator. That satellite bounces the signal onward to North
America. McMurdo Station needs this relay station because it sits in
the shadow of Mt. Erebus, a 12,000+-foot-tall volcano, and can’t see
over it to catch that satellite. All in a day’s extremes here in Antarctica,
where the unusual is usual and the usual is unusual.
We had a fine dinner, then sat around and rested and visited (all except
Thomas, who had adopted the demeanor of an inmate weathering a prison
term). Jessica played cards with Katrina, Gary, and the raft of electronics
whizzes while Ron and Tony caught up on old times and I listened on.
Ron (in his Kiwi accent): “Well, Tony, I see where you’ve lost a bit
more of your hair.”
Tony (pointing at the remaining bit of stubble that provides no real
protection for his shining dome): “Yeah, I’m going to get a little tattoo,
put it right there, of a guy with a lawnmower.”
Later on in the conversation these two “old” Antarctic hands get to
discussing compatriots who have died. They swap stories about scattering
their ashes, reveling in what went bawdy about those events. Tony explains,
“This one guy’s girlfriend comes to me [with his ashes] and says, ‘You’re
one of the last people who still goes to the ice,’ which means,”—here
he puts thumb and forefinger against his forehead in the shape of the
letter L—“I’m a f---ing loser, because I don’t have a real life!” He
and Ron laugh boisterously. “They’ve named a mountain after that guy.
Me, when I go, I want a sinkhole named after me. ‘Marchetti’s Depression’
they can call it!” and he roars with mirth.
On the wall beyond him are a great many interesting pictures that
have accreted over the years, including a photograph of a beach somewhere
with waves gently lapping onto it. Carved in the sand are the words:
“Just like Black Island, only much much better.”
We short-timers trundle out to the bunkhouse when it’s time to call
the broad daylight a night. There are bunks for eight there, and every
one is filled. The wind is still howling, though it has dropped to perhaps
only 55 mph, just a minor hurricane. I have been told that when the
wind isn’t blowing, it’s too hot in the bunkhouse, and that when it
is, it’s too cold, so Jessica has supplied me a polar storm sleeping
bag to go with the sheets, blankets, and pillow normally supplied. I
lay out a lower sheet, stuff the pillow into its case, and climb into
the bag, using it as a form-fitting comforter. I don’t need my sleep
visor because there are blackout blinds on the windows. The building
rocks gently in the wind despite the anchor cables. I conk out fast.
Sleep runs out for me by 4:00 AM.
I got up and headed back to the dining room to force fluids. Dehydration
has continued to be a problem for me. McMurdo’s water tastes like soap
(I have discovered that potash is added to keep it from corroding pipes),
and adding tea to it can make the problem worse. Jessica, elegant soul
that she is, has a Brita filter, so I fill and refill my glass while
I check on emails at the computer in the galley and await the rising
of my compatriots. Tony is up first at 5:30, and everyone but Thomas
has shown his face by 7:00. Katrina sends someone to fetch him. We offload
the rest of our deliveries now that the wind has dropped to just a minor
buffeting and then consume vast quantities of griddlecakes with yoghurt
and blueberries, bacon on the side. Then it’s time to say goodbye to
our hosts and mince back down the mountain to our gear and get started
again with the flagging.
We’re several miles into the job with Ron and Thomas on snowmobiles
setting flags, me on the load pitching flags (this became an idiot’s
delight, seeing if I could stab them into the snow, latent javelin-chucker
that I apparently am…few stab in vertically…most hit about at a 45…some
hit ice and fall flat), Katrina driving the Delta and Gary in the Challenger
when I begin to notice that Thomas is always right there next to me,
snowmobile parked, feet up on the dashboard for a quick R&R by the time
it’s time for me to pitch every fourth flag. This seems odd to me as
from my perch I can see that there are two and three flags still leaning
at a 45 or lying on the road where they dropped. Hmm… I thump the cab
to get Katrina to stop. She seems to have noticed something, too, and
explains patiently to Thomas that if it looks like Ron has hit some
tough holes, he should take the next flag in line and not skip forward
one. After focusing a snow-goggle stare on her for a moment, he revs
the snowmobile and heads back along the line.
“He was skipping two or more,” I tell Katrina.
She shakes her head in amazement. “He seems to need every little thing
explained to him,” she comments. “And if something changes…”
She leaves the comment hanging and gets back in the cab. Like the
others, she is not angry, just baffled. I find myself itching to ask
the little goof-off what he’s doing in a place like this.
At last, during our break for lunch, I do ask Thomas what brought
him to Antarctica. “I was looking for a job,” he informs me.
“Where were you?” Ron asks.
“On the computer.”
Gary grins. “No, he means where were you?”
“In New York. You know? You can do a search on construction jobs,
right there on the computer.”
Silence ensues. Dog’s-body jobs like Thomas’s don’t pay well, and
no, they don’t pay overtime, but there are people lined up to take them
just for the adventure of visiting Antarctica. There’s just nothing
to say to the Thomases of the world except what Katrina did, which was,
“Well, let’s get back to work.”
The back of nowhere. |
We drove on through the blue-white landscape over sculpted snow, over
crenulations of ice, the landscape slowly rotating about the island
as we went. We set over twenty miles of flags that day, for a total
of thirty-five, before we ran into blue ice and out of time. When we
broke out of radio silence, the hour dictated that we either hunker
down and sleep in the KOA or cut for the ranch, and we didn’t have the
cooking gear necessary to do the former, so we did the latter.
As a reward for my help, Katrina sent me forward to the Challenger,
which Gary taught me to drive. It’s got ten forward gears and two in
reverse, plus four hydraulic lines, though only one was necessary to
operate the goose. It took me a while to get the hang of it—the thing
will spin on a dime and give you nine cents’ change, and the goose flummoxed
me thoroughly—but it was a pleasure to drive, and as we hove into range
of McMurdo, the radio slowly grew louder, giving us a tune. When we
reached Willy Field, the snow runway that will be put into use in a
week or so, we took a left on a three-lane route (a regular Interstate
highway!) and, as Gary put it, “took it home,” punching it into high
gear and roaring along at 18 mph. I only clipped one flag in the process,
so I count myself if not a pro at least a talented amateur. We made
it back in time for dinner, first scattering to drop bags and use the
facilities. Katrina, Ron, Gary and I found each other in the galley
and chowed down, once again amazed by Thomas, who did not show.
Sunday...sunny and +32F: a heat wave!
I don’t need to draw a summation or a moral to this story as it speaks
for itself. I was tired when I hit the mattress that night, slept hard
and late, then joined the rest of McMurdo for the Thanksgiving festivities,
which were indeed worth showing up for. Men rolled out in neckties and
a few women even had skirts. Two wags trotted about dressed up as turkeys.
The food was fabulous, including a wealth of freshies and rows of pies.
The cooks came out of the kitchen and took a bow. Folks got a bit tiddly
or perhaps just whacked out on all the tryptophane in the turkey and
got into group hugs. I still missed my family and friends, a mood exacerbated
by being bone tired for all the most honest reasons. But that’s what
it’s like here in Antarctica, a place where [most] people hunger for
the adventure and drama of the ice knowing that they can and will go
home again to the sweet, safe embrace of folks who love them.
With warmest best regards,
Sarah
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