My Journey To The Ice

I have a new and improved blog page where I can actually insert photos.  So, we continue the adventure at:
http://journeytotheice.blogspot.com/

We served grilled flank steak with mashed potatoes the other night.  A man complained there was no gravy for the mashed potatoes.  He claimed it was “un-American.”  Cindy informed him that we are not in America.  He replied, “My tax dollars are paying for this.”  She replied, “It’s a harsh continent.”

I went to visit one of the field camps today.  LDB - Long Distance Balloons.  Scientists send balloons up into the atmosphere to check for all sorts of things - things like the ozone layer, the troposphere, the ionosphere, this sphere, that sphere, whatever…  Anyway, I asked where the facilities were.  I had a choice between two outhouses.  You don’t have real bathrooms out here?  They melted down last week.  In the fire.  Spontanious combustion.  Ergo, no real bathrooms…  It’s a harsh continent.

Chicken breast is buried in the warehouse for the next month.  The instant oatmeal is going to disappear soon.  We are dangerously low on masking tape.  Can’t we get more from New Zealand?  Can’t the planes bring us some masking tape? 

Apparently not…  It’s a harsh continent.

I found a ladybug in the cabbage the other day.  We get fresh produce from New Zealand a few times a week.  Ok, once a week if we’re lucky.  Anyway, he was alive.  I thought, wow, what a journey.  He’s the only bug here.  I brought him home and made a little house with water and cabbage for him to eat.

He was dead the next morning.

It’s a harsh continent.

The South Pole Traverse. 

Ten vehicles.  180,000 gallons of fuel.  Lots of supplies for the South Pole Station. 

Due to the massive budget cuts, it was deemed too expensive to fly fuel and other supplies to the South Pole this year. In light of this, the powers that be have decided it would make better sense to have a crew drag this fuel and supplies across the Continent; across the Sheer Zone,  across a glacier and through the Transantarctic Mountains.  And this is known as the South Pole Traverse.  They have made test runs of this endeavor, but never with the fuel and supplies.  The team was allotted 25 days to make this haul of 800 miles.  After two weeks, they managed 17 miles.  Maybe they’ll be there by Christmas of ‘09.  What were they thinking??? 

My ex-roomate is on this trip.  Her job is to watch the GPS monitors and ground penetrating radars for crevasses.  When they find a crevass, they stop.  They inspect it.  Maybe they go down into it.  If it’s big and unstable, they blow it up. Then they check it again.  When the crevass is happily filled and stable, they carry on. 

Seems a litte nutty to me. 

It’s a harsh continent.

October 21 was our last sunset and sunrise.  When you awake from sleep, you really have no clue as to what time it is.  I will go home at night and close the big black cloth over my window, because I have decided it is time to be night.  It is odd to emerge from the bar at midnight, only to be confronted by sunlight and the need for sunglasses.  The sun is never overhead;  it just circles around maybe about 45 degrees over the horizon. 

It never rains here.  There are no thunderstorms. 

It snowed a lot today.  More flights were cancelled.  If this were a real airlines, they’d be out of business.

I’ve driven a vehicle once in the last two months.  I’ve been in a Hagland and a Piston Bully. 

All the buildings are numbered and while they do have names, they don’t seem to want to put signs on them.  This puts me in a tizzy.  It took me three tries to get to the Post Office.  I never remember where the bar is.  I passed the science building that I have been to on three occasions.  Why?  Because there are no signs on these buildings!  What is the big deal?  Why can’t we have a sign?  Is this really asking too much?  And eveything looks alike.  Well, not everything.  But some buildings are very odd.  The gerbil gym looks just like the coffee house.  It’s not right.

After two weeks of getting my ass  kicked in the kitchen almost everyday because we have been understaffed, more flights with more help came in, including a gang of Polies (folks heading out to work at the South Pole) and now life is calm again.  And in light of my hard work, I got the opportunity to head out to the sea ice and be a divetender for a day.  What does this mean?  I shall tell you.  We loaded equipment into the Piston Bully and headed down from the dive shop to the ice.  Then we picked up the “tomato” (also referred to as the “pumpkin” and “orange”… I said a pick a fruit and stick with it, damn-it) which is a hut like tomato on skis.  This was basically the snack shack.  It contained food and emergency supplies.  Mainly food.  Then off we went way out on the sea ice.  I was sitting on top of huge camera used for underwater photography.  We were out with photographers who were filming for the BBC a new series called Life. One of the photographers filmed for Planet Earth.  How cool is that?????  So, we shlep gear into the dive hut, which sits over a giant hole that was cut into the ice so divers can access the ocean.  We help the divers with their gear and lower equipment down to the ocean floor.  Then we all waited as the cameras sat doing their time lapse photography thing.  So, I got to spend the day with the Planet Earth photographers.  Not a bad day on the bottom of the planet.

I was surrounded by seals ready to birth.  You can hear the seals under water.  They make those whale like sounds.  I did not know this.  I have a video clip of a seal popping his head through a hole and looking about. 

I also experienced silence.  Out on the sea ice, when there was no wind, there was no sound.  No trees rustling, so small animals scurrying, no water trickling… nothing.  Absolute silence.

This is Antarctica.

Now the update.  Today, which is another day, I went to the science building to track down my new found diving friends.  And they showed my the results of our time lapse photography.  It was amazing!!!  You can see tons of starfish scurrying about (and they don’t really scurry) over a period of 4 hours.  And giant sea worms.  Like eight feet long.  Unbelievable.  And I was there. 

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were celebrated with the microcosm of Jews we could round up, which included Marci, Ben, myself and Dr. Don who acted as Rabbi.  For Tishlich, we wrote our sins on a piece of paper and tossed them into the mixed paper reycling bin.  We thought this appropot for our location.

And Nick the baker made challah!

And I have successfully managed to have a number of the galley staff greet me with, “Shalom, my sister!”

Happy New Year to my Jewish friends and loved ones.

There was a  woman here named Tally.  She left today.  She was here for over a year.  Tally is 62 years old.  She officially retired last week and she will spend the next 8 years or so backpacking around the world.  She is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.

When we first got here, Tally had a class on how to make a stove from a beer can.  After that we named her McGyver.  Tally can make anything and fix anything.  The other night she had a class on how to make a stand for your beer can stove.  I think both classes were kind of illegal because they involved “unsafe” activities.  Like cutting a beer can with a razor blade and lighting your stove indoors.

Marci and I were discussing building a menorah with beer cans.  I will get back to you on that.

We have little or no fresh product.  Everything is dry, frozen or canned.  Except for some fresh produce that the planes will bring every so often, all the food for the season is already here.  That’s a lot of food.  We have menus.  We could be missing half the ingredients for a menu item.  I have been told to figure it out and make it up.  So that’s what I do.  My favorite part of the day is smashing the frozen vegetables.  I like to take out the 30 pound case of frozen diced onions that has become one giant glacier in itself and get the ice axe to smash it up.  I have mastered the use of powdered milk as a substitute for heavy cream.  The ingredients change every day.  You never know what’s going to show up at the next delivery.  Then we have random cool stuff.  Like, one small bottle of truffle oil.  What the hell am I going to do with that for 1000 people?  A bag of Hawaiin salts.  Bags and bags of dry lemongrass that has no flavor at all.  Tons of curry pastes.  Lots of asian ingredients.  Even powdered coconut milk.  Then there is the food that is buried.  Buried in the warehouse.  We haven’t had roast beef on the deli because a 1000 pounds is buried.

No dinner tonight, it’s buried.

My ex-roomate works for science support.  She trains scientists in field safety before they go out to the harsh and dangerous environment.  She is also part of the Search and Rescue Team.  She has the coolest job here.  She has gone to the most amazing places in this area.  Anyway, she took me out to this area last week called the Pressure Ridges.  This is where the Ross Ice Shelf converges with the sea ice.  The ice shelf is bigger and stronger than the sea ice, so when the pressure becomes too much, the sea ice cracks and pushes up, kind of like an earthquake, but different.  Anyway, we took a stroll around the pressure ridges and it was the most amazing landscape I had ever viewed.  Large chunks of ice, standing straight up.  Totally surreal.  Very much like being off planet. Of course, we both forgot our cameras.  Then I fell into a crevasse.  I didn’t go far.  It was pretty neat.  And it smelled like fish.  And seal.  There was year old seal poo and pee around.  It freezes.  What a concept.

This is the link for Karen’s photography website.  It has awsome pics of Antartica.  I highly recommend checking it out because I will never get photos like this.
http://www.karenhilton.com/section180375.html

I also recommend checking out her blog from last season.  It gives a lot technical information about Antarctica and what we are all doing here.
http://karenhilton.blogspot.com/

First, my face was falling off. Then my fingers started to crack.  The other night I had a bloodbath on my pillow because my ear was bleeding. And I have the cooties.  Red spots around my torso.  The doctor gave me cooty cream. 

This environment is harsh on one’s body.  We are all dehydrated.  You can’t ever seem to drink enough.  And we’re always peeing.  And washing our hands ad nauseum.  Which means super dry, rough hands.  Katie said she washed her hands 34 times one day.  I believe her.  In the kitchen, you have to wash twice after you pee.  Once in the bathroom, then again upon return to the kitchen.  We discuss our water intake.  We discuss the color of our pee.  Is it clear and copious (what does that mean?).  If not, drink more.  The more I drink, the more I pee.  Now I pee at night.  I never peed at night.  My bed is up high and I think I will crack my head getting down to pee.  SAFETY MEETING!  Of my gosh, don’t let me go there.  Town safety meeting after every injury.  Apparently, things were out of control.  New philosophy:  slow down.  If they need it Tuesday, they’ll still need it on Thursday.  We decided it was not safe to cook dinner.  They’ll still be hungry for breakfast

And all that peeing on a date?  I will not elaborate, but it’s annoying.