Ice, White & Blue

Redhead Amok in Antarctica

Furry Kisses

Never kiss your cat immediately after applying chapstick.

Ptui!

posted by: coldwish at 14:20 | link | comments (4) |
between 2006

Ice Reflections

I did not expect the re-entry burn to be as rough, nor as extended as it has been.

I knew from last year that the whole reintegration into society bit was difficult. But last year, I was dumped back into my life as I'd lived it pre-Ice almost unchanged: same job, same city, same friends, same habits, same video store, same people every day.  I can recall sitting in my cubicle surrounded by my friends and coworkers at a good company doing something I was good at and enjoyed doing, and feeling bit by bit the erasure of the last 5 months of my life, and the experience that I felt had radically transformed me, removed me from society and altered the warp and weft of my soul.

By returning to my past post-Ice, doing the same thing, I had somehow left myself without a way to prove to myself that I had changed, had the most wonderful adventure of my life. I had no proof, it was all just memories. Then I was feeling alienated from my own memories. I stopped feeling the glare of the white, the tang of the cold, the bouncing jouncing of the Deltas I drove. I lost the visceral, tangible, bone deep knowledge that I had fallen deeply in love with Antarctica. The comfort of that love was distant.

And that I could not do. It nearly killed me, it certainly abraded my sense of self down to a tiny nubbin of who I am and how I want to live my life. I HAD to return to the Ice, my sanity depended on it. The return was difficult too, getting the job, the uncertainty of when I'd leave. I was in the headspace where I'd been before I'd met my love the seventh continent, I was willing to do ANYTHING to get back there. From a yearning crush on an unknown adventure, I had fallen in love, learned to need this place in my life. I would once more offer up my own toothbrush to clean toilets if only they'd let me go back there. Two and a half months had not been enough to slake my thirst.

But I did make it back, and I made it back during Winfly. In an office job. I had a very rough season, both for reasons specifically relating to my job (office, no windows, no Antarctica, and the emotional requirements of caring for so many people) and outside the Ice (Mr Harris and Sue dying so close together). For much of the season I was in an emotional tailspin, in which my only sustenance was that I was actually with the one I love, and the Ice offered back to me some of its purity and vastness, healing many of my hurts time and time again. In glimpses, and stupendous vistas, in the interstices between the buildings and the people everywhere.

But I was tired. Six months and I was tired. Not of the Ice, but of the people. Not of individuals, but of the masses swirling around everything you do there. Perhaps 1100 people may not seem masses enough to those off Ice, but it is different when you live with them, eat with them, pee with them, everything that is done is done with them. There is very little privacy. I found the constantness of the people exhausting. I am a loner, I love to be alone, free to wander, free to have my own thoughts uninterrupted by outsiders.

As a Shuttle Driver I had that space in my job. I had oodles of solo time trundling across the land and ice back and forth to the airfields. In Housing I was never alone and my job was the people who came in my door. I was never able to put my job down, because I ate meals with those same people, lived in a dorm with them, played cribbage with them, celebrated my birthday with them. It was not like Shuttles where when I was not driving I wasn't expected to drive. Housing is a job you never put down.

I can recall one time as I was sitting on the toilet when I saw feet entering the neighbouring stall, and a voice said, "Genevieve? Is that you?"  She identified herself. I greeted her, a friend though not close, but certainly someone I liked. It's not uncommon to greet friends in the loo down there, we live and work so closely with each other.

There I was in my stall, and there she was in her stall, and there she was asking me if I could help her with a roommate issue. I felt like a priest in the confessional, both of us facing the same way murmuring through a wall. But my jeans were down around my ankles, her Carhartts were down around hers. (Okay, so maybe that's a bit priestlike). And I did offer her my advice on how the system would work if she came to us with a formal complaint as she had laid out to me. I detailed to her the picayune regulations, and social constraints, by which we were bound and what her options were.

I didn't resent her for invading my privacy when I quite obviously wasn't working. I knew if she had come into the office it would have started a ball rolling she wasn't sure she wanted rolled. I understood this, we are a small community down there and not much happens without everyone talking about it as if it is much more important than it actually is. It happens when you put so many people so closely together with no way to get out.

This is just to illustrate how difficult the job was for me last season. There were few boundaries and I was working in an office who most people considered the Bad Guys, if not closely aligned to the The Powers That Be in Denver who Just Don't Get It (it being the realities of Life On The Ice).

So when I redeployed I was desperately unprepared for how much of an emotional defense I had thrown up around myself in order to survive. Certainly the re-entry into society and humidity was abrupt and sometimes dismaying, but I had no idea how deeply went the instincts to Shut People Out.

I was lucky, and profoundly grateful to my first WWOOF host, Pav, who gave me 5 whole days alone with no one but the sheep and the wekas. That was about the level of social interaction I was capable of sustaining right out the gate.  It was a time of introspection, uninterrupted by other people, that I needed in order to reground myself in myself.

I spent 3 months in New Zealand, traveling, hitchhiking, working, visiting (bless my friends for their generosity, Tanya for Getting It and just leaving me to crash and burn in her spare bedroom), hiking. I thought I had it all sorted, it was time to head home and get myself underway for next season on Ice. I had been traveling for long enough, I needed to unpack and see familiar faces, hear the voice of my cat echo through the house (you don't know my cat if you think I'm not being literal when I say echo), hug my mother.

I didn't expect it to be so hard to be back.  Of course, after 9 months of being in a differnt time zone, a diferent date zone from here, the jetlag was raw and discombobulating. Every few days I thought I had it licked and I was sleeping through the night and waking during the day, then I'd wake bolt upright in bed at 3am starving, go eat something and then be up for hours, losing the next day until 12 or 3pm.  I've done jetlag before, so I'm familiar with the symptoms. But with the openended nature of my being home, there was no pressure for me to rush the process. I was not returning to the same old same old as I had before. My focus, my only focus, was to complete the PQ (physical qualifications) and get my ass hired for next season.

So I tilted at that windmill until all was done. I am healthy, officially. Right now I await word that I'll be working as a Fuelie next season in McMurdo.

Now, I have just started contacting friends again, touching base with other people except for the close few who I knew could handle me if I fell asleep on their couch when they got up to answer the phone (Joyce, my precious understanding friend) and then awoke starving and demanding food like a 12 year old boy.

I've been back long enough, and done what I can to get back to my Ice in a position that will not rub me quite so raw that I leave the Ice as vulnerable and defensive as I did this time. I have started my summer. I have a cook out to go to, people to have dinner with, movies to see with friends, time and energy to catch up.

I can still feel the raw punch of the wind and the ice cream headache it causes, the hollow rubbery squeak & crunch of the snow drifts, the blood red glimpses of hell advancing across the ice in a sunset that lasted for hours and hours, the harsh edges of the Ice and our presence there gentled by a rare fresh snowfall on Thanksgiving weekend. I know these things and hold them tight inside me, because they are much of what makes me who I am now. I can't wait to go back.

I can now reengage with the world and be here where I am now; Changed once more irrevocably, but not erased of my experiences, enhanced. I am back up out of my defensive crouch.

posted by: coldwish at 07:11 | link | comments (3) |
between 2006