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Part 8: McMurdo Miscellany
10:57 AM +26F, winds gusting to 30 kts, snow blowing in from
the south: a mini-herbie.
It’s a good day to stay in my room and squeegee some stories into this
machine. Since Thanksgiving, I’ve been making day trips out of McMurdo
Station , but today I’ve hunkered down to get some rest. I spent yesterday
sorting through impressions and experiences with a friend in the galley,
then interviewed scientists in the Crary Lab and fiddled with logistics
for much of the afternoon. About 4:30 PM, I realized that I was forgetting
things people had told me only hours before and was falling into micro-sleeps
in the middle of conversations, so I turned in at 7:00 PM and slept with
only brief awakenings until 7:00 this morning. I stumbled out for a bit
of breakfast, but have now returned to my room to diminish the continuous
over-stimulation that has rendered me that tired.
Above and beyond the activities in which I formally engage in the name
of research, there’s always something going on here. In fact, there are
too many activities from which to choose. The rec department lists all
sorts of offerings—from yoga and tai chi to writer’s workshops, evening
lectures and dance lessons—and then there are the special and unofficial
events that have a way of occurring, like cosmic bowling and toenail painting
parties. Here is a sampling of the past week’s research and frivolity:
Saturday, November 26, Thanksgiving Day (observed) (besides
the big meal, about which I already wrote)
At 10:00 AM, the annual Turkey Trot 5K run between McMurdo Station and
Scott Base (the New Zealand research station) was cancelled due to snow
(I’m not making this up), but run anyway. At odd moments throughout the
day, young men dressed in oversized, three-toed costumes with big cardboard
tails were spied trotting about the station hailing all with robust bonhomie.
At noon, the 109th Airlift Wing afforded a static display of the marvelous
Hercules LC-130, the STOL (short take-off and landing) aircraft used here
to carry all manner of cargo and pax (passengers) to all sorts of places. It
can land either on skis or rubber tires, or take off from one and land
on the other, a neat trick. There are up to seven of these marvelous birds
parked on the ice. The New York Air National Guard brings them in, hopping
from their home, Stratton AFB in New York, to Travis AFB in California,
to Hawaii, to Pago Pago, to New Zealand, to McMurdo (all of which takes
about a week), to wherever the cargo is needed…South Pole Station, the
Fosdick Mountains, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet drilling site, way out
there in the middle of nowhere. The men and women of the 109th serve as
pilots, flight engineers, navigators, and loadmasters, coming here for
up to two months each year to provide the continuity of knowledge necessary
to manage these difficult missions. Imagine landing a cargo plane on a
remote glacier where no one has ever even walked!
LC-130 with its skis down, Sea Ice Runway, McMurdo Sound |
Sunday, November 27
"I'll save you, sir!" |
1:00 to 5:00 PM, open house at the Fire House. McMurdo has a full staff
of professional firemen and firewomen because you just don’t want your house
burning down when that leaves you out in this cold. There are three runways
to staff as well, with all that fuel being moved in and out by air. Just
like all the other employees here at McMurdo, these firemen applied at a
job fair and found their ways down here from all over the U.S. And they
put on a good party Sunday afternoon. I got to use a fire extinguisher for
the first time in my life, but that was just a warm-up. Next those rascals
dressed me in turnouts and Scott pack and persuaded me to crawl through
several rooms that had been filled with smoke in search of a “body.” I learned
new respect for firefighters everywhere; that Scott pack was heavy, and
crawling through low-visibility airspace was uh…sobering.
Later in the afternoon I traveled out to Pegasus Runway to visit the
hulk of an airplane that crashed in a blizzard about a decade ago. It
was a cold and lonesome place to visit such a spectacle, and, while many
have come by and scratched their initials in the paint since that nasty
day, no one along on that visit knew even what nationality the pilots
were or whether anyone had died in the mishap. But escorting me there
was an escape from the island for many whose mobility is considerably
less than mine, so the event was considered a howling success.
Sunday evening at The Coffee House (a wine bar), which is not to be
confused with the far more notorious Gallagher’s and Southern Exposure
bars, I was duly installed into the 506th Expeditionary Tractor Squad
as “Tractor Sarah with an H.” After being thus uh…honored, I was given
my official mouse trap and hat (Mouseketeers, anyone?) and then was allowed
to relieve myself of $25 at a model tractor auction (hey, it’s a Caterpillar
Challenger, I had to have it!). After that…well, I’m going to put the
rest of it in Em Hansen No. 11, In Cold Pursuit, and you’re just
going to have to wait for it. Tease! Tease!
Monday, November 28
Sea Ice Training. More sobriety. Cecelia Mortenson of F-SToP (Field
Safety Training Program) loaded nine of us into a Hagglund and took us
out on the sea ice (ice that freezes from salt water, not to be confused
with the ice shelf, which is fresh water ice that has slid off the continent). There
we learned to “profile” cracks in the ice so that we could transit this
changeable environment safely.
Cece Mortenson driving the Hagglund (it's noisy in there) |
Even when the sea ice does not break up, the sea ice is deformed by
glaciers and such, so cracks can open, or open and close and open again
with the tides, creating all sorts of hazards. If one wishes to drive
a vehicle across the ice—or even just walk across it—one has to be able
to spot the cracks, test the thickness of the ice to either side and
measure the gap, then make an educated decision regarding whether or
not it is safe to cross it. Enough said!
Testing the thickness of the ice: adding a flight to the drill
|
Andre the fireman helps divers with their gear. |
Tuesday, November 29
In the morning, I accompanied a scuba team as assistant dive tender
(a burly fireman did the heavy lifting), watching three courageous mortals
suit up in three layers of insulation plus dry suit, weight belts, tanks,
and what-have-you and descend through a hole in the ice that once upon
a time was 1.2m (about 4 feet) in diameter. These holes slowly freeze
shut again, narrowing as they go, and first fill up with slush. The
ice itself is several meters (70 to 80 inches) thick, which plunges
the undersea world into darkness. The divers dove to sample foraminifera,
which are single-celled animals. Neal Pollock, a PhD in physiology who
led the dive, gets so overheated getting dressed that he usually jumps
into that 28F water to get his head wet before he puts on his hood. Woof!
In the afternoon, I looked after miscellaneous items of business, but
made sure I was done in time to be at the heliport when Karl Kreutz
and his team from Upper Victoria Glacier returned to town. I greeted
them with fresh apples and other goodies from the galley. They climbed
out of the helos looking quite uncertain about immersing themselves
in what passes for civilization here and at first did not seem to recognize
me. At length they settled a bit, quit shifting their gaze left and
right, smiled tentatively, and thanked me for the apples, then loaded
their gear on the van and with evident unease headed up the hill to
find out where they had been billeted. Transient personnel get stuffed—space
available, not by teams necessarily—into six- and eight-bunk rooms with
no view, not the Hyatt by any stretch. After taking their first showers
in six weeks and phoning their loved ones, they appeared, one by one,
in the galley, where they continued to stare into space. Culture shock,
McMurdo style.
Wednesday, November 30
For the day’s research, I had two excellent offers: a visit to the
Penguin Ranch with some glaciologists who were about to leave the ice
and the opportunity to tend another dive. And I had something of my
own to offer: a visit to Scott’s hut on Cape Evans. Visiting the hut
is part of my field plan, so I had trained as a hut guide to satisfy
the requirements of the treaty organization that protects them. So,
bon vivant that I am, I combined forces and led a party to all three.
My first penguin sighting |
Going down |
First we loaded the short-timers into a Pisten Bully and the divers
into a Mattrack and headed to the Penguin Ranch, where biologists are
studying the diving physiology of Emperor Penguins. They have brought
some of the birds in from elsewhere and have created a penguin Shangri-la
for them by making a couple of nice dive-holes in the sea ice far, far
from the predatory seals who attack them at their other haunts. The
nattily-attired birds have settled in and are cheerfully gaining weight,
but in exchange for this security, they find themselves fenced in when
atop the ice so that they can’t wander away while the scientists make
their observations. The biologists have an tube you can climb down into
to watch the creatures from below the ice, but unfortunately for us,
the birds weren’t in the mood to go swimming that day and the tube window
had grown a coating of ice which obscured the view. I wiggled down inside
it anyway and pretended I was one of the penguins in the movie Madagascar
(“You didn’t see anything…”).
From there we convoyed to “the wall” at Cape Evans, where the volcanic
rock has broken into a sheer cliff and the water gets really deep really
abruptly. The glaciologists and I watched Neal and his gang suit up
and go swimming again.
While they were under the ice (with another tender watching over them),
I took them over to Scott’s hut. As a hut guide, I can take people inside
the huts and instruct them on how to do so without causing damage to
these historic sites. As we neared the hut, Peggy, an old Antarctic
hand who had been there many times said, “Sarah, you should go in alone
first. Give yourself that.” So I did.
Scott’s hut at Cape Evans is one of the larger huts. People at McMurdo
had suggested that there might be ghosts there, and I had seen pictures
of some of the artifacts for which it is famed, but overall I hadn’t
gathered much of an impression of what it might be like. In fact, I
expected to feel fairly blasé about my visit, as much because Shackleton
is my favorite Antarctic explorer, and I have plans to visit his hut
on Cape Royds tomorrow. This is an irrational sentiment to be sure,
as both men died long before I was born and Shackleton came to Cape
Evans with Scott long before he got caught in the ice of the Weddell
Sea, but I read Endurance when I was at an impressionable age,
and there you go. At any rate, here I was at Cape Evans, and yes, it
was a mighty bleak setting in its own forbiddingly beautiful way, with
Mt. Erebus rising 12,000+ feet directly behind it, just chuffing out
a little of its volcanic vapors.
I got out the key I had been issued and unlocked the modern lock on
the outer door and stepped inside a long ante-room which smelled of
seal blubber, very old seal blubber. Okay, that was fine, on
to the next thing, so I reached out to open the inner door. It had a
whittled wooden pull on the end of a rope that lifts an inner latch. I
had taken my gloves off to open the outer lock, so my fingers were naked
as I curled them around that pull. It came to me that I was putting
my hand on an object worn smooth by the hands of Scott, Shackleton,
and their many companions. In that moment, these men became infinitely
more real to me.
Inside Scott's hut |
And then I stepped inside. The hut is fairly spacious, and is crammed
with not just the bare furnishings of an expedition, but also the myriad
foodstuffs, sleeping bags, socks, scientific equipment, books that sustained
and supported their days. Chemist’s glassware sat on a bench, and a
darkroom stood ready for the next photographic image. In the foyer I
had found their skis and even a bicycle. In the stables alongside, I
found the names of their ponies stenciled on the walls of the stalls,
and even a packing box laid open with an open box of biscuits. Back
home it would long since have become the food of a thousand forms of
mice, worms, and insects, but no such vermin live here. Even the voracious
skuas have not found their ways into this sarcophagus of an expedition,
this time machine altered only by the corrosion of the salt air. The
brilliant colors I associate with human settlement—analine dyes, flesh
tones, inks, pigments, and hues of every sort—were absent; the only
tints beyond soot and rusted iron were the faded silver of the pine
planks and the exhausted yellow of the labels on the cans of food.
I had stepped from my time of digital color photography directly into
a sepia existence. Another moment formed: I was no longer in the time
and space of the modern adventure that had brought me south, but in
their Antarctica.
After perhaps a minute, the time it took to inhale a tiny fraction
of their experience and exhale in exchange the context of my own, I
turned and let the others in, quietly showing them how to clean their
boots before walking across the boards left pitted by the crampons of
another age. We took pictures of each other incongruously standing about
in our big red parkas, but the flash was not enough to drive away the
darkness born of tiny windows, days past, and lives lost in the pursuit
of knowledge.
Outside, Peggy led me up the hill to a trash dump—some things never
change—and showed me the molted tail feathers of penguins that lie as
an avian overprint to what humans had discarded. I pickup up one feather,
ran it along one finger, put it back where it belonged. All such things
are part of this world, and not to be taken home to mine. Then I drove
the glaciologists in their Pisten Bully back to the dive hut, switched
into the Mattrack with the divers, and took them over to the hut. The
second time I was able to take in a little bit more of its intricacy
and details, but still the scene was overwhelming.
Soon we loaded back into the vehicle and headed back out across the
sea ice, past rough islands of volcanic rock, past rollers and pressure
ridges bent into the ice by the pressure of an odd, narrow glacier called
the Erebus Ice Tongue, and back home to our dinners and warm beds. At
the place where the sea ice meets the ramp of rock that leads up to
the station, the driver announced return to “Mac Ops,” the radio center
that monitors our movements should we require assistance. “Mac Ops,
Mac Ops,” he intoned, then identified the vehicle and the project number
for whom they had made the dive.
“This is Mac Ops. Go ahead,” a woman replied.
“We are at the transition, five souls returning, and all is well,”
he announced, and we headed up the slope to the rough little foothold
on Antarctica we call McMurdo.
An artifact from Scott's hut
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