Redhead Amok in Antarctica
Linerider
There I was on my knees, shovel in hand, sweating under my gear but encased warmly against the wind and blowing snow. I was the linerider for the Ice Runway Transfer of fuel from town.
We had had several days of blowy overcast snowy days, threatening to be worse, forecast for worse, and the fresh snow had been accumulating in drifts downwind of everything that stopped long enough to look around. The soft Chemcoil fuel hose (made in England it proudly proclaimed)—running down the hill from the Bulk Fuel Tanks on the pass, across the disrupted ice of the transition where if we had a sea, it would be where the waves broke on our beach, all the way out to the tanks at the Fuel Pits where we fuel planes--is semi-permanent and had mostly drifted over. So, as I rode slowly along it on the snowmobile looking for leaks (yellow areas in the snow), I had to stop all the time to shovel out the wedding bands, connectors holding two lengths of hose together. The first trip took quite some time.
I wasn’t complaining, I was alone in this ineffably Antarctic landscape, digging this dry crisp and weightless snow up, covered in snow up to my waist. I looked up at Mount Discovery draped in its lazy cloudy glove like a slow soft creep over the top, the sky soft blue above, with strips of blatantly pure clouds streaking across, and darker brisker blues arising in the sky above.
I set back on my haunches and let out a bark of loud and happy disbelief at my luck, to be digging a hose out of the snow in the most wintery landscape the world could ever conjure up. There is a lot of space and freedom in a fuelie’s day to allow me such private moments.
This morning I worked with the incomparable Tim O’Connor, one of the world’s good souls, funny, clever, immensely easy to be around. He’s also a new fuelie. We were tasked with filling 36 55 gallon drums with pre-mix (a mix of Mogas and engine oil in a 50-to-1 ratio used for skidoos and other two stroke small engines on the continent) for the South Pole.
Both of us were a little fuzzy as to the details of how to accomplish this, but we had the SOP, radios, and knew how to ask questions if we needed help. Right from the start we were stymied, and not by our lack of experience, but by a mechanical difficulty; the filter on the line from the Mogas tank to the nozzle could not be sumped (to sump a filter means to drain some fuel from its bottom where sediment, dirt, water, etc may have collected) because the small nut at the bottom of the filter, through which we would drain fuel, was stripped.
We reported this to Bodie in the Fuels Barn. The mechanic, Scotty, was out on another assignment, so it feel to us to effect a repair. A few nuts & bolts, bits & bobs, a bucket, some absorbents, some drip pans, tools, teflon plumbers tape were gathered and off we trotted to figure it out.
Just us two Brand New Fuelies.
There’s certainly an element of “Holy crap! What are they thinking!?” about this, but mostly there’s that freedom and space and trust in us. Not that we have the experience but that we can figure it out, and it least try. That kind of management is in rare supply down here, where your boss, having out in the effort deciding you were worth hiring, then let’s you go out and try.
Both Tim and I enjoyed this, and felt good trying. And together, we did it. We drained the filter, made suggestions on the next steps to each other, changed the nut, tested it and succeeded. That tiny bit of trust and freedom made us both feel more confident as we move forward.
So, add that feeling of confidence and belonging, of being of value, to the landscape I found myself n that afternoon, and it is no wonder I was hooting for joy at my good luck.
It doesn’t take penguins and glacial ice to make me happy down here. Simply being outside is sufficient. Simply being outside is sufficient to have me get up off my knees, fetch the shovel and do a little two-step as I get back on the skidoo.
posted by: coldwish at 06:35 |
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fuels 2006-07
Marble Point Pictures Up
Look to your right...
Not politically, we have the House & Senate back. Just for the pics.
posted by: coldwish at 22:47 |
link | comments (2) |
fuels 2006-07
A Mad Mad Love, Inescapable
I have seen the centre of the universe, and have staggered home drunk on the beauty of it.
This has been percolating in me for awhile, such huge and unarticulated joy and beauty that I feel transformed. So much about this season has been transformative, my warp, my weft inextricably altered. I am deep in a mad mad love.
Each time I am smote with the beauty of this place, and start to relax in knowing it, it heaves up new and wondrous experiences and allows me to witness it. I am starting to wonder about karma and balance in the universe and for how much longer I can get away with this joy before it is taken away from me.
Until then, I am living for the moment, carpe diem, no regrets, no doubts, qualmless. I live like this because I have to embrace my experiences, my encounters with the microcosmos and the vaster, slower universe, precious and secret. I try to share them here, but on so many levels I fail, and I am set up to fail. I only have my five senses with which to describe to you what is happening here, and I can only add an inarticulate description of its impact on my emotional landscape, to give you minute glimpses into the Ice and my time here.
I went to Marble Point this week, for two days, one night. Marble Point is a helicopter fueling station across the McMurdo Sound about 50 miles northwest of here. Each season individual fuelies are stationed there for 2-3 weeks at a stretch, to refuel the helos coming and going from the Dry Valleys. We have six large tanks of diesel fuel to feed the whirlies. This is a choice assignment, and we are rotated in & out, on 24-hour call the entire time for any helos that stop in for fuel. There are only two other permanent station members: a mechanic (Crunch) and a cook (Dawn). Everyone else just visits for the night.
In past years, before the advent of B-15, the iceberg that changed everything, the tanker that refuels McMurdo each summer, and the icebreaker that creates the route through the ice, could get close enough to Marble Point to refuel it. The last few years the sea ice has been so problematic that the fuel to refuel Marble has been dragged across the ice in vast 3000 gallon tanker sleds, 8 at a time. One of these sleds, while fueling it on the Ice Runway end, was the cause of my major diesel huffing high the other week.
They did this traverse to Marble Point four times this year. I caught a helo out there on Wednesday for the last one, in order to offload the fuel up a mile of hose from the beach into town, and then pack the temporary pump and hose attachments up to be dragged back to McMurdo by the traverse crew.
This trip was really the minimum I asked for from Fuels this season. I have never in my life been in a helicopter, and that’s what I wanted. So this was my chance. As exciting as it was to ride in a helo, as odd as it was to feel I was in a tiny rowboat in a large wash skating down the sides of waves, suspended and pivoting from a central overhead axle, the helo trip fades in my memory, becomes prosaic in the context of Marble Point itself.
We landed, unloaded, got into our work gear (from the ECW gear we are required to wear for flying), and were off to work. There was a brisk wind blowing solidly all day long, the sky was blue and the clouds were mares’ tails, goose down feathers, against it.
The Marble Point station buildings are few and red, crouched down on clear land in front of the face of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier. The land is gently rolling hills and dales of rocky glacial debris, fragile crystalline fragments, stones, small boulders strewn about by the comings and goings of the ice river that fronts this land. The station is tiny in the context. The landscape remains largely free of snow for great swathes. It was posited in 1971 that the US base at McMurdo be moved to Marble Point because there was so much flat open land available they would be able to build a permanent runway on it, and thus stop bothering with the endless cyclical rebuilding of the three runways at McMurdo (Ice, Willie, Pegasus) based on seasonal ice changes.
They didn’t. Thank goodness. I cannot imagine the area crawling with Americans and run by Raytheon, with its inane safety restrictions on what we can do and where. This way it remains less trammeled, and the joy of discovery unique and rare.
My responsibility during the offload was to walk the line and be the communications pivot point for our line-of-sight radios up on the ridge. The line from the beach to the ridge was about ¾ of a mile all up hill across a snow drifted lunar landscape of brightly coloured fresh stones and weird geological shapes and textures. At the ridge was the air vent, should we need to relieve pressure during the pumping process, and the place where someone had to be at all times so communication between the tanks at the base, in a slight dip behind the ridge, and the tanker sleds on the beach could be maintained. Gallons per minute, positive rise, pumps losing prime all reported through that point.
This responsibility was shared with another Fuelie, Lisa Chaiet, and an Ops GA (Operations Dept General Assistant). We rotated out for half hour lunches, one person eating while another walked the line from the ridge to the beach, checking for leaks/seepage, and the third sat in the lee of a rusty barrel sheltering from the endless wind, keeping the radio warm.
I preferred the walking, specially the downhill part. Coming back up the hill, with the wind in your face, insecure footing, heavy gear…was an exhausting haul. The snow had blown in freshly over the previous weekend, and there were drifts solid enough to give me a good 5 paces on the crust, then 20 steps into soft packed snow with my boot toes caught on every upward step on the thin crust. Moving from snow to ice to frozen land to sandy soft gravel, all uphill into a headwind was an exercise in optimism. Somehow no matter how many times the footing disappointed me, as soon as I came across more firm areas I relaxed and strode forward, only to once more stumble into softer snow. It could be jarring, adding to the uphill effort each time. And I certainly did that uphill several times.
By the end of the offload I was plumb tuckered out, yet raring to finish dinner and get out on my own to explore the area. I did. I snuck away from a small guitar performance by Lisa of her own material, changed into windpants and light boots and headed out the door; straight for the face of the glacier looming behind town.
Something that big enveloping one’s horizon is bound to draw a walker to it. I was drawn right up against it, though at a respectable distance, given the ice falls I saw here & there along its front, where it had collapsed pieces of itself at various times. I stalked along the gentle snowy angle beneath it, drawn along its edge and around the corner, pausing to marvel at the chunks of ice it had released at my feet, older than my imagination and knowledge could follow. There were sharp chunks of pale blue and softer rounded pieces of pale yellow resting side by side, drifted around with white snow creating long downwind tails on each piece. I approached as safely close as I dared, judging trajectory from above for the next loose bit. Each fallen piece of ice had been sculpted by the wind into soft curves and waves, where the ice wore differently. The ice itself was denser than any ice has a right to be, clouded with tiny infusions of air, compressed into itself over eons of travel and pressure. I saw bubble striations lined up perfectly rigid and parallel, no indication of which line of bubbles was the weakest point that cracked it just there off the glacier face. The face itself was tall like a 10 storey building, and the snow cover on top of it drooped architecturally over the edge like wedding cake frosting or marble cornices, drapery hanging in gentle white waves over the bluish corrugated front of it. From this snow drapery descended hundreds of clear icicles like a delicate glass fringe.
Imagine being humbled by the antiquity of chunks of ICE. Ice before Antarctica was always for me a transient state, a temporary way station in the life of water, and always returned top water. That was part of the miracle of winter, the short-lived state of grace with snow and ice and blinding bright white. Here in Antarctica ice is the state, and ice rarely melts here, it evaporates, it is sculpted and wind worn and blown away, but rarely does it melt.
I walked further on, headed around the gently curving face to where the snow cover sloped down to the ground like the world’s largest sledding hill. I wore my super slick jacket on which I have sledded Castle Rock and had illusions I would climb and slide.
But no, Marble Point had other plans for me, for nearby I glimpsed ice. More ice, frozen glacial melt water ponds at the foot of the glacier. I reached it and looked down into what I will only fail to describe adequately. I can barely dig deep enough into the impact this had without retraumatizing myself with memories of beauty and a euphoria so powerful that I cried for the next hour of my hike. Inasmuch as I hiked. I was mesmerized, hypnotized, stunned, flabbergasted, lost, completely and utterly lost to the world. I fell in love again, harder and with more force than I could ever anticipate, or recover from.
The blue, the clear colourless ice, grey ice, sheer glass ice I stepped out onto was as pure as air itself, the surface of the ice sheer though occasionally wavy, and impossible to grip. I slid along bit by bit on my feet stopping every few inches to murmur terms of endearment and astonishment as each fragile pattern evolved into more patterns, and the source of everything became clear to me. I could not remain long on my feet for being too far away from this beauty and was soon on my belly, creeping slowly along in a gripless and slick swimming motion, head whipping to & fro as I passed cracks, swiveling in place, and cell walls and forests of white milky bubbles alive and solid in the clear, descending like tiny white ball chain hung into the ether.
I was on my front my forehead pressed against the ice, gazing deep into this ice world and its population of tiny silver bubbles cylindrical and spherical. I could see the facets of the ice like jewels refracting, areas that looked like vaguely square cells suspended in the clear ice, dissected by the variegated white globes. I focused as deep as I could, as wide as I could, and if I could have transmogrified I would have been inside that ice. I do not think there is a hallucinogen as powerful as the effect this had on me. I was awestruck, dumbfounded.
I close my eyes now and I am still inside this ice, there is no 2D wall of air to ice division in my mind, I was inside this ice with my mind wandering the levels of a fairy world, lost forever to its seeming logic, and random oddness. My body is not clamouring on top of the ice to be released into this world of pristine detail. I am inside it. There are floating milky white bubbles in the blue, flat like pancakes and stacked in decreasing size. There are strings of pearls floating up to the sky I inhabit. There are streaks of silvery ice one molecule wide where the ice has cracked to its depths and followed a geography of weakness across the landscape deep inside. There are otherwise crystalline pure bits where the ice has formed delicate silvery shimmery walls like stacked cells, the occasional bubble a nucleus. There are feathery cracks like goose down, delicate lace fragile frost creations creeping along INSIDE the solid core of the ice. There are tiny living hollow tubules supporting odd bits of greenish brown algae, and pushing them to the surface. Despite the solidity of this ice, it is everchanging. The sun beats down and heats the dark objects inside, heating them inside their icy grasp, magnifying the heat like a solid greenhouse, until the dark thing (a tiny stone, a piece of glacial lake algae) melts the ice from the inside, creating silvery paths of air bubbles like liquid mercury trails echoing its shape, bearing it up to the surface in stages of melt/freeze/melt.
I am startled and wondering and awed, and do not understand the whys and wherefores of this ice. The purity I can perceive, but the ever changing life and activity that caused all this quilted quantum miracle of ice is beyond me. I have so many questions, I lost so much time. I staggered from lake to lake, each one offering up to my seeking lusting senses new marvels, new possibilities of linear circular curvaceous planar space. I have seen the soul of the universe, I have been inside a diamond, I have crept along suspended in mid-ice seeking a way in.
While thus entranced, sprawled on the ice, eyeball mere millimeters away, the glacier shadowing behind me spoke. It creaked, it groaned a tenor squeak, it tinkled its delicate fringe of icicles with each minute living motion. The glacial lakes responded with their own chorus of sounds. Once the ice I lay on spoke with such force I thought I had caused it with my weight. I started, my heart leapt into my throat, my body froze in place and every fibre of my being listened for the next note. But no, ice is a living breathing thing, ever transforming itself, restless in its solidity and seeking surcease. Summer sunlight lends it some flexibility, just as the harsh pressures of the dead of winter must make it groan with the effort to contain all that momentum. I was incidental to its music.
Eventually I dragged myself back into the reality of air and my body and looked at the time. I had to return to base. My footsteps are still there and betray a route back across the snow random and odd, no direction holds me for long, some steps I am stumbling with the effort to leave, others I am torn astray by the simplest of distractions. My camera's battery had died long ago, and I had hundreds of pictures of this ice. I yearned to have a proper camera and time enough, perhaps a year of summers, to capture this unique state and its myriad designs.
Next year, when I come back here to Marble Point, I will have 3 weeks in the interstices between helos needing fuel, and I will be lost again. I will have a good camera, and I will obsessively photograph this phenomenon where each glimpse affords me a hint of what has so captured my senses I cannot pause to recall it for crying. I have been asked what it was like and I have gushed, I have cried wordless tears of awe, I have fallen speechless in my efforts to explain why I am glowing so brightly these last few days.
Because Antarctica, she reveals her secrets to me without my ever understanding the whys of them. She dances before my eyes when I shut my lids, in shades of white, blue, bright light. I do not know how I can ever recall all the unique memories I have if I am ever torn from this place permanently. I have to treat each moment as some cherished secret gift I can never repay, for I do not know the giver beyond this mad mad love of mine.
posted by: coldwish at 21:26 |
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fuels 2006-07
I Heard The Emperors Speak
In the grand scheme of things, I think I can explain the baby seal who broke my heart. I am, however, at a loss for the six Emperor Penguins who marched through my day.
Yesterday was a great day for Antarctic wildlife. My second day back at work, and the last work day of the week, Saturday. I was assigned to Delta Scharen, the fuels delta, an orange, articulated beast like the ones I drove in Shuttles. But Scharen, she hauls 1800 gallons of diesel to the outlying runway buildings and generators at Willie, Ice Runway and Pegasus.
She also sucks. I am in no way being insulting, she really sucks. She sucks hoses, she sucks drums, she suck tanks and yesterday she sucked a pump house. Where there is unwanted fuel, excess usable fuel dumped into drums to relieve pressure, capped lengths of hose still loaded with AN8 after an over-the-wing fueling on a Herc, buildings about to be moved with fuel tanks needing to be emptied; Delta Scharen sucks and feeds both.
This was my training day on Scharen, and I was paired with the inimitable Lisa Keller, with years of Fuelie experience under her belt, and a cheery, talkative personality, able to deliver a load of fuel and the knowledge of how to do it smoothly and enjoyably. Since I knew the Deltas from two seasons ago, it was the fueling aspect that I needed to learn.
We fueled the control tower’s tiny tank, attached to the side of the building like an odd square limpet, then the noisy main generator for Ice Town, the White Elephant. As we were wrapping up the White Elephant, the generator mechanic, Will, drove up in his truck with the biggest smile on his face and news he could barely contain: There were SIX Emperor Penguins down at the runway generator, headed quickly this way.
Lisa K and I heard the news and knew we couldn’t do anything until we had finished our next task, for which we were being radioed with a “Delta Scharen, what’s your twenty?” We had responsibilities to attend to.
We started the day with very few tasks, the morning one being to go down to the Ice Runway and suck the fuel out of the Fore Pits pump house. We have new filters this year, and the old pump house was being replaced by a newer one with the new filters. So all the fuel in all the hoses and pipes and filters and connections had to be drained before it could be moved. Scharen sucks. So Scharen sucked. The scene was crawling with Fuelies, Scotty the mechanic, Scott our boss, Brian, Dave W., Tonya, me and Lisa K, and down in the aft pits dealing with a Herc, Shana and Seth.
We sucked and sucked, maneuvering into tight spots to suck again and suck some more. Post-suck, in a moment’s lull, I was suddenly accosted by Shana, arms waving, jumping up and down, delivering the news that the Emperors had just walked into Ice Town and were headed in our direction through the cargo yard.
Sure enough, I looked up, and there was the determined, if elderly, waddle of SIX of the imperial visitors headed straight for us. People from the runway buildings were boiling out of their shelters, carefully and quietly trailing behind, cameras in hand. These were the stars of the Ice, Antarctic’s version of Hollywood celebrity, and we humans all turned into stalker paparazzi. Unfazed by the creeping furor, the growing throng of camera-wielders, the penguins continued their way toward the Fuel Pits.
Until the crews, flight and ground and pax all, from several Hercs on the apron, came tumbling out of their planes and cameras in hand started approaching from their front. Then the Emperors paused and circled up, surrounded by a forest of green-clad Guard members jostling for the best shot. They responded to this wall of camo and khaki.
As I understand the Antarctic Treaty in regards to human interaction with the wildlife here, we are to do nothing at all that alters or changes the behaviour of the wildlife here. So, on a long march for a place to molt, these Emperors had charged right into our midst, and seemed to have a trajectory aimed more toward Scott Base around the corner, definitely a better neighbourhood. Right in the centre of the apron, they changed their minds; largely due to the seemingly impenetrable wall of green approaching slowly and carefully to get their best shots. They paused, consulted with each other, considered the options and turned around.
Followed by their ever-thickening net of green and red clad folks they turned to walk toward the runway, walking right under a Herc under repair. They paused in a clump to look up and peer at it, then moved on. Once more toward the runway. At this point the firefighters had clued into the visitation, and it being their responsibility to herd wildlife off the runway and environs should it ever wander over, they appeared in full gear to redirect the penguins off the runway. The wall of green fell away. There were planes to fly and this would be only a slight delay.
But, wow, how many people get the chance to really see Emperor Penguins in their native habitat, right here in Antarctica? I just wish we humans had a little more style about us when we get this rare and special chance. But no, we jostle against each other, creeping ever closer inch by inch one after another until we are all ultimately too many and too close for their comfort.
But, y’know, I cursed myself for having gone to work for the first time this season without my camera on me. I’d like to think I would have refrained from the close up stalking, and just basked in their glory from a distance. But would I have? Perhaps yes, but I think largely because Emperor Penguins seemed so unattainable an Antarctic goal that I had not even hoped to list them. They were not what would define my Ice Time as good or bad by their presence or absence.
The penguin visitation all but over, Lisa K. and I headed over to top off the Day Tank, off the road to the Ice Runway where all the heavy equipment Fleet Ops and Cargo runs out here (plows, graders, snowblowers, Challengers, forklifts, etc) fuel up. The day tank is placed on a snow berm, piled 3 or 4 feet higher than the surrounding landscape, so the vehicles can pull up alongside and gravity will feed their vehicles when they open the nozzles into their tanks.
We pulled up to the berm, face in, Scharen’s wee front porch crunching gently into the snow. We hauled the nozzle up to the top of the tank via a rope left there, and just as we had it in place Lisa K. exclaimed “What’s that?!” and pointed. Next to the berm halfway between us and another berm lay a baby Weddell seal. No Mama in sight.
We looked around for Mama, no one. I got down to look behind things and see if we had a ferocious Mama about to pop out at us around another berm, but we both, by the look of this infant, knew there had been no Mama for quite awhile. She was small, and skinny, hipbones showing like a supermodel, not plump and sleek in that coddled fat way a baby seal is meant to be in Antarctica. Her skin hung in thick folds as she rolled over, her flippers flopped desultorily.
But she saw us. Oh she saw us and gathered all her meager energy up and humped her way in that rolling fat, faster than you expect on land, ungainly seal way toward us. Soon she was right next to the berm, almost huddled next to it and making the most piteous mewling barking sounds to us. We were her first signs of life in this bleak Mama-less landscape, and maybe, just maybe, were Mama.
From 3 feet above her on the berm I looked into the biggest, roundest, saddest pair of solid liquid black eyes, not able to focus on me but recognizing my movement. This baby was a Weddell seal and had the gorgeous, if unkempt, translucent blond marking splattered across her dark brown back. Her fur was matted in places, and worn away in others. She raised her head and gazed at me, opening her mouth to cry her hunger and loss.
My heart was in shreds, shattered on the cold ice of this continent and its heartless ways. Even more heartless was the official response I knew this abandoned pup would receive from humans. No interference. Not only do we not have the means to raise a seal pup, which would ultimately not survive our efforts, but we are constrained by the conservation treaty from interacting with the wildlife.
So the cries, the weeping falling barks and bleats, the coughs, the whimpers, the open maw, pink, toothless and wide with need, the great effort this pup went to in reaching us, tore me to pieces. I desperately wanted to take this infant in my arms and hold it, comfort it somehow, ease it, feed it, meet its needs.
But no. We filled the day tank as it slowly made its way around the berm. By the time we had finished the pup was on the other side of the tank berm and metres from our parked Delta, headed straight toward it. We quickly wrapped up our hose, put the nozzle away, got the final dip, and too late got back on Scharen. The pup was underneath us looking for a nipple on the tires, reaching up for the dark mass we represented overhead, nuzzling anything in its path out of need and confusion.
We couldn’t move. We were trapped. The pup stopped there. We called in to the firehouse to request help. They were still all hands on deck for the penguins on the runway, so it was a good 30 minutes or more before the Fire Chief showed up. By this time the baby had eased its way out from under the uncaring dark presence of Scharen and was about 10 feet behind it. There it stopped: exhausted. There we stood, distraught, unable to act.
Eventually we were rescued and backed Scharen out in the tightest turn this articulated vehicle could manage. Off we headed to lunch, never to see this baby seal again, except on photographs on the I: Drive where the community shares its photos, and in rumours around town of its moving onto the apron.
An emotionally disparate and charged day.
But far from over.
For we had to drive out to the farthest runway, Pegasus, in order to fuel the generator there. The snow was blowing and the horizon was starting to disappear as we set out along the road of flat white and red flags receding into the white. This would be my first visit to Pegasus this year and I was quite thrilled to be out in the weather, this far away from town trundling along on a mission.
We arrived at Pegasus, looked over to the Pegasus tank, and saw to our disappointment that the Fleet Ops vehicles (to groom the snow) were parked on both sides of the Day Tank berm, totally in our way, abandoned, doors flung wide. Odd.
Then Lisa cried “I knew it! There they are! Look!” and pointed at the six Emperor Penguins arriving at Pegasus just as we pulled up. Delta’s doors flung wide, after a mad scramble for the camera I had retrieved from my room at lunch, and there we were joining the three other lucky souls at Pegasus on our stomachs on the ice, cameras unfurled and eagerly clicking. Five of us whispering to each other like we were in a secret society, and the Emperors were completely unfazed. They marched in line right past us not 40 feet away. A slight old lady pause at a downed flag, a bevy of dignified seniors in bonnets peering down in a circle to this odd object intersecting their path. This after much neck craning underneath the wings of a Herc only hours ago. Curiousity intact, innocence untrammeled, these largest of penguins then proceeded to pose for us. They stretched, preened, curled their toes up off the ice in the essence of toe-curling, they leaned, lengthened, almost squatted.
I even, in the blowing snowflakes large & soft, landscape paradisical, heard them speak. Familiar sounds so startling to hear in real life. The celebrity speaks! My gawd! She sounds just like in all her movies! The sound enchanted me, I died again inside, happy to be alive and lucky to be there. I heard the Emperors speak.
Then they moved on, and we five humans let them go. We did not trail along behind them like stalkers, we got back to work, springs in our steps, smiles on our faces, honoured to have had the private show. Each of us fans to the core.
I look at the photos taken at the Ice Runway with their close-ups of these pristine, elegant, luminescent birds, and in that environment, they are so beautiful as to appear unreal in their environment, Photoshopped in, 2D cutouts placed for a joke in front of the Herc. Or perhaps it is all our human evidence, like detritus on the pristine flat of the ice, that has been Photoshopped in behind these magnificent creatures. It is we who do not belong, we who are misplaced, we who have too large a footprint already on this continent. It is we in our ugly greys and greens and misplaced colour schemes who do not deserve to be seen amongst these natives. We are wrong here, and these travelers only serve to highlight that fact. We have no beauty here. For they, they are beauty, stark lines, sharp blacks and whites, the yellow fade on the neck, iconic penguin beauty, the quintessential and improbable fact of Antarctic life.
I am charmed and blessed, and endlessly startled by my day and the creatures who visited it.
I am so lucky.
posted by: coldwish at 07:15 |
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fuels 2006-07
It's A Good Day
Yes, it’s a good day for singing a song
And it’s a good day for moving along
Yes it’s a good day
How can anything be wrong
A good day from morning ‘til night
It’s a good day for shining your shoes
Yes, It’s a good day for losing the blues
Everything to gain & nothing to lose
A good day from morning ‘til night
I said to the sun “Good morning sun! Rise & shine today”
You gotta get goin’ if you’re gonna make a showing and you got to right away
Cause it’s a good day for paying your bills
It’s a good day for curing your ills
So take a deep breath and throw away the pills
Cause it’s a good day from morning ‘til night.
--Peggy Lee (but I prefer the Bing Crosby version)
It doesn’t fail, this landscape of blues and white, to bring emotions like joy, awe and disbelief welling up in my heart. A moment alone, gazing out on Mt Discovery from Ice 1, and a smile spreads across my face and through my body. I do a little dance in the snow. There are soft white fresh snow-bright clouds forming ridges and explosions in the sky above, which changes blues from robin’s egg to stained glass as it ascends above me. The clouds drift and sway, changing, sometimes echoing greys over a darker landmass lie Black Island, aptly named for its casual hold on the snows that make neighbouring White Island permanently white.
There is promise in the sky, of humidity and events I cannot fathom. The sun shoots through luscious and shocking on the white flat of the sea ice, and suddenly the clouded turquoise of the exposed ice is revealed.
I watch our tiny noisesome efforts at the Ice Runway from this peaceful vantage point, and I am reminded, after weeks of intimacy with these loud raucous ugly planes upon which we so depend, of just how minor we are in the scheme of things Ice. I like this reminder. It brings tears to my eyes.
Four days flat on my back, stupidly sick and useless, and just this view is a treat. This I would not be here to witness had Scott not taken the chance and let me be a Fuelie. This is the job I wanted, yearned for, aimed for from year one, and here I am, the lucky one.
This place steals away with more and more of my heart every season. My life makes sense on a larger level than the daily inanities I describe may indicate. I am doing the right thing. No hesitation. Risks be damned, be they as small as climbing a Bulk Fuel Tank in a high wind to not investing in real estate for my retirement. I must live for the now, when the now, looking out, redefines blue, questions the ineffability of white and displaces concepts of cold in my heart.
I’m glad to be back at work.
It’s a good day.
posted by: coldwish at 06:39 |
link | comments (2) |
fuels 2006-07
Mean Boss
My boss is mean to me.
He sent me home! To bed. Just cuz I’m a little sick.
Okay, so I nearly hacked a lung up last night and I’m on cough drops laced with codeine from medical here. But really, when I’m not coughing and breaking into a sweat trying to bring up my other lung, I’m fine to work. Really, I am.
I have spent the last two days in bed. I’m bored, I’m wracked with guilt, possibly even more so than with coughing. I should be at work. I’m missing out on something, I know it. I can feel it happening outside my dorm room, at the Ice Runway, at the pump house, at the barn. Fuelies are all over the place doing important things, working hard, and here I lie in bed feeling just a teensy bit under the weather.
I’ve got the codeine, I feel fine.
Two days in bed and my back aches with it, my mind aches with the boredom. I’ve gone through a lot of books in the past few days. I don’t recall them at this point, but I know I’m getting low on my season’s allotment I sent myself.
But mostly I’m losing my identity. I’m not a Fuelie when I’m flat on my back wheezing for air. I’m no Fuelie if I can’t haul my ass back up to work and make myself useful. But no, today, I wake tired and a bit coughy, but I get up at 6am and have my first breakfast with eggs in 3 and a half weeks (PM Pits), stumble up to work with my special grape-flavoured coughdrop in my mouth, get into my work gear, greet my co-workers after so damn long I can barely recall all their names. Park my butt in the office for the morning meeting and have a coughing fit.
Scott raises an eyebrow, looking at me suspiciously. He doesn’t like sick people. Doesn’t want them coming in to work, doesn’t want to catch what they have, doesn’t want his employees killing themselves, doesn’t want the whole department taken out by one selfish hard-working Fuelie. He asks me if I’m okay, I say I’m better now with the meds I got the day before.
Duh. Shouldn’t have mentioned it. What kind of meds? Cough drops with codeine to keep me from coughing. But I’m fine, really I am. I cough again, liquid and nasty sounding. I break out into a sweat with the effort. I reassure him I can be of help. I argue with him for a good 5 minutes about it.
Nope. No drugged up “sicky pants” (HIS words) allowed in his dept today. Go home, sleep until noon, come back at 1pm. They’ll make use of me for the Ice Runway Transfer at Ice 1. I won’t be operating any equipment, responsible for any valves, laying hose, in short thinking. I’ll be sitting at the valve at the crest of the hill behind the Heloport. That’s all I’ll do. I’ll be babysitting the control valve for several hours during the transfer of fuel through gravity feed from one of the Bulk Fuel Tanks. I’m told I should bring a book, water and snacks, and keep my radio on full loud so they can wake me from my drug-induced stupor when they need me to open or close the valve.
Yeah. I can do that. I’m happy to do so. As long as I’m being some kind of useful.
So I went home, pouting. (Okay, and coughing.)
I hate being sick, and my boss is mean to me.
*************
Later that same day I am sent home at 1pm too. I refrained from having a purple cough drop in order to be more compos mentis for work, and the walk from 155 to the Barn caused my chest to hurt, I nearly started wheezing again. I took a cough drop as soon as possible after that, and feel fine again. Sent home again.
Reports of my morning loopiness follow me.
Garden variety crud my ass. This feels like last year.
posted by: coldwish at 17:57 |
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fuels 2006-07
Like Light and Day
Twenty-four hour sunlight. The sun describes an ever narrowing parabola in the sky, a discus flattening inward. Shadows move short to long, the quality of light changes from harsh to a golden yellow as the angle becomes more oblique to the ice. Yet still, at 10pm as my shift ends, it is broad daylight.
I hardly notice it. It is my norm. The idea of the sun going down and night spreading its comforting wings across this land for 4 months is both alien and attractive simultaneously.
My sleep is that of the exhausted, unaffected by the light outside. I hit my bed hard and oft times wake 8 hours later unmoved with the bits of my body bedside down numb and flat. I am satisfied with these nights, even if the print of my pillow on my cheek and forehead takes several hours to fade.
It is easy to do a late shift or a night shift here in the perpetual day. I do not constantly struggle against my own circadian rhythms.
Though oddly, I still hate to get up early in the morning. Waking up at 6am for a 7:30am work start ought to be illegal no matter how much daylight they fling my way. It must be all in my head, especially down here, but nonetheless I am a les effective person when woken that early.
Oh hell, I hate waking up no matter what time of day/night it is.
On Saturday nights it is easy to stay up, blithely unfatigued in complete disregard for logic, until 4 or 5 am on Sunday morning. I have done this my last three Saturdays. I get off work, shower, moisturize and get dressed in girly clothes and go to a party. I dance, I flirt, I talk over loud music, I tolerate the drinkers. Usually I leave around midnight on my own. It is still broad daylight, though night time nonetheless when I emerge. The station has quietened save for the drunks stumbling out from the bars after last call, looking for more party.
I head to the Galley, less in hunger than in thirst, thirst for the conversation of the one person guaranteed to be there all Saturday night: Mike.
There he is alone at his table in the nearly deserted galley, watching a DVD on his laptop, reading, sitting by himself on his night off. He works night shift for the Guard, an airplane mechanic on the 6pm-6am shift. I take advantage of his time.
I invade this very private man’s privacy, bust in through his isolation, needful of significant, meaty, articulate communication. We talk. It’s easy. It’s remarkably delicious. It’s, most important of all, ONE on ONE. Concentrated, hours long conversation with only one person, uninterrupted.
I’ve never even seen him raise an eyebrow at my attire. He appears completely unflappable, ineffably unaffected whether I am dressed scantily after Halloween or clad in my Carhartts, or dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. On some level that explains why I am able to be so much myself around him, not having to perform or change my response according to the impact I may discern in my male partner in conversation. I don’t have to be socially “on” around him, the way so much of life demands down here.
I am not easily a social person. People en masse exhaust me. I define en masse as more than one person, and even one other person is often too much for me. I need to withdraw from all people after contact with people, in order to recharge my batteries.
Conversation with Mike recharges my batteries while I’m on ice. Mike gives good talk. He’s a thinker, a reader, a former history teacher. He’s decisive, confident, open-minded, concise, logical and curious.
Last year he nearly, unwittingly, saved my life. In a season as emotionally exhausting and as public as that one, my talks with Mike were none of that, completely unlike the remainder of my hours each week. Conversation with him was an escape, a surcease, a relief. I craved the logic, the challenge, the unlimited, unfettered yet finely controlled and precise tone to our conversation. He grounded me mentally during a maelstrom of a season where people so exhausted me I thought I’d never recover.
He was solid, smart and steady. It was easy to shed my stress and feel like an intelligent person around him.
I was devastated when his tour ended. I was ecstatic when I when I walked into the galley a few weeks ago at brunch to see him at his same old table. He saw me, we smiled broadly, I walked over to him and we hugged.
We sat down. We talked for the next 2 and a half hours, even through the folks who joined our table. When they left we were still talking.
That’s what I seek at midnight or 1am on a Saturday night. The 24-hour daylight is a blessing, as it hides the passage of time and the errant irritations of “shoulds”, like I should go to bed. I force myself to leave him. Sometimes he protests, sometimes I think he relishes the privacy back.
We talk all night and the sun never sets.
posted by: coldwish at 17:40 |
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fuels 2006-07
PM vs AM Pits Smackdown
Self-pity is a horrible thing on one’s birthday, but easily come by when sleep-deprived. My roomie and I are on as opposite as schedules come in Fuels right now: I am PM Pits (12:30-10:30pm) and she is now AM Pits (5:30am-3:30pm). I am crawling into bed at night after she’s already lights out. Half the time just the door opening startles her awake. Then she is getting up at 4:30am, in the middle of my night, and as hard as she tries, I wake up. We are in a constant state of disrupting each other’s sleep, despite our efforts.
I’m a very light sleeper, and I have learned this week that if woken up 4-5 hours into my 8 hour night I cannot for the life of me get back to sleep.
The tension is growing between us, we’ve snapped at each other already. We both of us are less inclined to communicate our frustrations than to hold them in and make assumptions, but we are learning. Much is complicated by the fact we work together.
So, in a way, I am glad that Saturday was my last shift in PM Pits. I am back on the Town Schedule as of Monday, 7:30-5:30pm. Which is only a two hour difference from AM Pits. I can adjust my sleep schedule to go to bed earlier, get up earlier, get a real breakfast (with bag eggs) and have a hot supper with the rest of McMurdo. The biggest downside of PM Pits has been the fact that I am always fueling planes during the supper hour, and have only had a few very fast hot meals, generally eaten in 5 minutes with the remainder dumped on the fly out the door to catch the damn Herc taxiing past the window to the pits.
I’ve enjoyed the quiet mornings with the seeming oodles of free time before I start work, and the built in excuse of work to explain my increasing hermit-like tendencies during the week.
I am looking forward to less noise. Holy batshit, folks! My ears ring every night, and all day, the constant use of earplugs notwithstanding. The engines of the C17 are particularly egregious, the helos flying over head make my lungs pound, the pump house engines constant background vibrations, the Hobart plane heaters, the Hercs taxiing in and out, the mosquito buzz of the Twin Otter and the larger buzz of the Basler, the skidoo, the Fleet Ops and Cargo vehicles rumbling about. As busy as it gets in the airfield, the noise is endless. Enough so that when the last flight takes off and Antarctic silence descends on the airfield, it can seem blessed and precious. It is those moments at the end of the night, when there are a few minutes when I lie down on my back on the sea ice, gazing up into the sky, and feel most content. Just to stop moving, stop yelling over the noise, get off my feet, and gaze upwards through my goggles. I crave those moments.
I do like PM Pits, but the risk of having a lousy roomie relationship is not worth it.
I’m ready for Town Crew.
****
Aaaawwww....and then she wakes up at midnight of the eve of my birthday just to make sure she's the first to wish me Happy Birthday.
posted by: coldwish at 17:37 |
link | comments (3) |
fuels 2006-07
One Gallon of Fuel And Counting
I'm not shocked.
Nope. Not at all.
But I've lost a gallon. 7 lbs and counting. Not happy about this.
The food just sucks this season. Most of the veggie food has had dairy in it, and right now, though I am starving to death, I have no appetite for the food they put out. None.
Same old same old.
This too shall pass. I'll get my appetite back at some point and I should level out weight-wise.
posted by: coldwish at 10:44 |
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fuels 2006-07
Gas Station Attendant
I've become a bit blase about large planes taxiing about me while I reflake the hose, or dip the tanks, or do what needs doing. After three weeks in PM Pits, with planes of all sizes coming & going, my heart no longer spazzes as they approach me. They are just like larger cars being parked by a parking attendant, or pulled up to a gas station. Except maybe for the propwash, the intense noise, the possibility that the propellors might obliterate your head if you approach while they are still turning. I don't make a move until the props stop and the hum dies. All the planes turn off their engines to fuel in McMurdo.
Pole, however, will be fun. Due to the extreme cold, the planes cannot turn off their engines while on the ground or they will freeze. So, I will be defueling Hercs whilst the engines are running, which involves carrying a bloody awkward and quite heavy hose with a big honking single point nozzle on it over one shoulder, and holding a grounding wire (static is an issue in the dry here) in one hand, leaning & tilting to drag it all out under the wings of a plane in which the propellors will still be turning and the propwash and exhaust will be flying past me.
Not only that, but I am given to understand that since there are no ground crews from the ANG at Pole, guess who gets to flag these monsters into the fuel pits: Wee fuelie me. Yeah. Fun. Danger.
Head rush.
Power trip.
It's recommended that I not practice my tap dancing moves at these moments.
posted by: coldwish at 10:31 |
link | comments (2) |
fuels 2006-07
C'est Moi, Genevieve:
Loonatick redhead in love with the Ice.
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Genevieve Ellison RPSC McMurdo Station PSC 469 Box 700 APO AP 96599-1035
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Genevieve Ellison RPSC McMurdo Station Air Post Office Private Bag 4747 Christchurch, NZ
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