Redhead Amok in Antarctica
Meanwhile Back At the Ranch...
I won't be home for the arrival of the thing in this belly, but I await my impending Aunt-hood with glee.
The cat, Fleder, however, has an entirely different opinion about it. He will no longer be an only child.
The baby is due in late February. I won't be home for the still wrinkled version of it. But a few months later, I'll be there.
posted by: coldwish at 10:50 |
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fuels 2007-08
The Whole Damn Tree
I sit at the power plant tank, awaiting the power plant engineer to officially open the tank for a fuel transfer from bulk tank D13 up on the pass. He's taking his time, but I am content. The walk was dusty and dry and challenging and under my fleece I'm in a sheen of sweat cooling off. I'm more than happy to be on the edge of town watching this new flurry of snow come down. Somewhere in the atmosphere above us a flock of goose down pillows has been blown up. The snowflakes are as large and soft as goose feathers and spiral gently down, tiny calm dervishes coming in for a landing on our black and brown dust bowl. With my view the Hut Ridge faces me black and rocky, and the white flakes dance clearly outlined between us, softening the dirty edges they land upon.
Close ups reveal these flakes as a melange of the perfect classic snowflakes, large enough to the see the details of the branches and edges. Some flakes are like pine boughs, some in 3D, the whole damn pine tree, others spin crazily down like shuttlecocks, my eyes follow the ones who drift in for a landing like tiny moths and winged insects with personally chosen trajectories and intentions.
I am lost in the flakes landing on my black fleece and Carhartts, utterly enchanted with the microscopic uniqueness of each one, some as large as my finger tip, blatant and bold. They linger on me, unmelting, for long enough that I fall in love with each one as I gaze, rapt, into it.
Then my radio crackles and the power plant engineer arrives and I am pulled back to my fuels tasking. But my heart is full with the awe of this small gift on Boxing Day in Mactown.
posted by: coldwish at 07:08 |
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fuels 2007-08
That Dark Brown taste
It's on a windless day during a Willie Field fuel transfer that one can come dangerously close to channeling Eartha Kitt on top of a fuel tank.
The runway was shut down early due to the impending holidays. Flights were done for the day and the runway town was about deserted. Silence had descended upon the airfield. Antarctic silence can be huge and comforting, and witrh all our human interference and busyness, rare and special. All I could hear atop the tank was the liquidy gurgle of incoming jet fuel.
I was steaming. Literally. I had just gotten back from riding the fuel line (soft hose line leading from the runway to the bulk fuel tank in the pass between Scott Base and McMurdo). I had shoveled all the connections out. I was soaked from the knees down, my gloves and back up pair of mittens were ringing wet. It has been warm in this part of the season, easily hitting 40 F (5 C) several days in a row, and the snow gets warm and sticky, and it actually melts on your clothes. Even the fresh inch we got the night before the transfer had collapsed from its crystalline fat flake perfection into a white mush. The digging was easy, but I got very wet.
So with the sun out, seated on a brick red tank of 20,000 gallons, writing in my notebook in between dips, I watched my knees steam. It is still not anyplace but Antarctica, so as the steam rose from my wet Carhartted knees the tiny fabric hairs frosted over. I could just barely see my breath.
Windlessness is a gorgeous trait for an icy continent to exhibit, a respite from the dust, the biting cold, a space within which we can actually feel the heat of the sun beating down on us. Its one drawback in my department is when filling a tank with diesel. The fumes displaced by the incoming fuel shoot straight up out of the tank and hover heavily around the top of the tank and the Fuelie dipping the tank. That Fuelie huffs beaucoup fumes during these moments, and ones brain can react. I found the entire lyrics to "I Want To Be Evil" spinning merrily through my head, and oft released past my tongue into the still air. I try to remain sotto voce, as I am no singer, but the diesel tempts me.
"I want to wake up in the morning
With that dark brown taste.
I want to see some dissipation in my face.
I want to be evil.
I want to be mad.
But more than that,
I want to be...bad."
Of course, Antarctica has its own sense of evil. Within 30 minutes of writing that we were being pelted with the frozen ice equivalent of rock salt, horizontally blowing in from Minna Bluff and sweeping us all up in hunched, back to the wind, chilled grumpiness.
posted by: coldwish at 07:04 |
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fuels 2007-08
Trained Professional
I slept with my roommate last night.
And y'all know my roommate's a boy named Brad.
He snored only once, gently rhythmic, which I thought was polite of him under the circumstances. I farted and tossed and turned all night.
We'll be sleeping together again tonight.
All because some damn fool drove through town with an erect dump truck the other night. The dump truck was straight up in the air, unbeknownst (one hopes) to the driver, just before midnight, and it caught on some power lines that cross the road. It hit with such force that it snapped off the two power poles attached to those wires and blacked out much of the area around it. Not dorms, or main people buildings, but the Carp Shop is still powerless several days later. The outlying buildings up on the hills are restored. Luckily the pole that snapped and landed on the FUEL LINE (hard pipe) between it and the road did not do any damage (that we’ve ascertained thus far).
This event necessitated calling in all able bodied electricians and linesmen. Brad, though a power plant engineer (babysitter), is a former linesman. So in the middle of his "day" off around midnight, he was called in to help out. I vaguely heard him come into the room around 1am to fetch gear but I fell right back to sleep. He worked all night. Then he was back in the room, sleeping until noon, for a 1pm callback. He worked the rest of the day, and was asked to work today at 7:30am for a full day. It may be a few day's like this. We went to bed at the same time, about 9:30pm.
It was odd having him in the room during my nightly bed preps. I fart (a lot), I blow my nose, I clear my throat, I pop vitamins, I toss and turn.
His last words to me when I asked him if it was okay for me to turn out the last light in the room were:
"That's okay. I'm a trained professional. I know how to take my pants off in the dark."
posted by: coldwish at 06:56 |
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fuels 2007-08
Why The Lights Went Out In Mactown
Story later.
posted by: coldwish at 19:07 |
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fuels 2007-08
Basler Goes Down
Some of you may have heard the news of the Basler, the ski-equipped DC-3 operated by Kenn Borek Air out of Canada, and its pre-Christmas crash. There were a lot of rumours and 4th hand reports all over station. But I now have a link to the blog of an actual passenger on board as she "went down". Everyone's all right.
http://mitchell-antarctica.blogspot.com/
There's pictures and everything. The props look pretty cool, actually. I imagine the guy in the pics is wearing jeans because he had to change out of the pants he crapped himself in when the seat he was belted into came unbolted from the floor of the plane and catapulted him into the pile of people, seats and gear at the front of the plane when it came to a skidding halt.
I miss all the fun.
posted by: coldwish at 12:50 |
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fuels 2007-08
Bulk Tank Peace
I found a moment of peace atop a 2 million gallon bulk fuel tank the other day. I'd climbed it to get the dip (how we calculate the volume, by depth) and the temp (volume rates differ according to the temperature differences, because of thermal expansion) before transferring fuel to the Heliport tanks. There I was in the middle of a world of fuel tanks and something struck me as more gorgeous than it ought to be. It had snowed yesterday, a fine scattering of ice crystals dropping out of the sky, occasionally swirling in tiny wind bursts, to remake the town white.
I woke happy, to a bright, clean landscape, all dirty evidence of our human failings coated in an inch or so of fresh snowfall. What a difference it can make to my heart, to wake to fresh snow. This is a filthy ugly town, a brown and dirty collection of mismatched and hideous metal buildings, strung about randomly, huddled in a bowl of groomed and bulldozed and blasted volcanic scree, a stain on the Antarctic landscape. No evidence remains of what Mt Erebus and wind and ice and snow once wrought here. We have erased it thoroughly.
McMurdo is a depressing place to be, with no magic. But on a day when the Ice cleanses us, turns us once more softer-edged and bright, returns us to what belongs here, there is peace to be found looking out from the top of a blond tank, shedding its collection of gentling snow in the wind that constantly devils the pass. The snow blows off in clouds of dancing white like heavy smoke, alive and possible again.
And I, too, feel alive and possible again for those few moments alone atop a bulk fuel tank.
posted by: coldwish at 12:37 |
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fuels 2007-08
Let's Hear it for the Boy
I am happy with my roommate this season.
I couldn't ask for better. It's not so much his personality as it is his absence. Anybody who is in the room as little as Brad is would be my favourite person on station, but this season, Brad claims the honour.
There's also something about rooming with a guy that simplifies things where one might imagine them to be complicated. But I am fed up to here with girls. I am tired of the clique-ish mean girls of the new generation, born post-feminism into an idea of self-empowerment that is somehow wrapped up in displays of meanness that I have never learned to deal with well. Is it that an awareness of how their privileged snotty attitude affects their fellow humans is a weakness? Is being awful to other people (most specially other women) such an expression of strength and power?
Is this that much vaunted Girl Power?
It seems so terribly young and insecure, and so damn ubiquitous. This season has been like being at an all-girls boarding school: moodiness, passive-aggressive tactics, cliques and whispering, sarcasm and downright impossible attitudes.
So, when I sing Brad's praises, there is definitely a note of gender-specificity to it. I'm glad I'm rooming with a guy. I don't want to have to be best friends or to have some kind of close emotional relationship with my roommate just because she's female. I don't want to have to deal with her shit on top of mine at the end of my day. Gender does not make us the same, but it sure as hell puts a lot of expectations on how we relate. I retreat to my room for peace and quiet, to get away from people, to recharge, desocialize in a community where there are too many people. I need to be alone, not emotionally grooming people as I do so often out in public. I don't want to take care of anyone, or tiptoe around their moods in my own room.
Brad is never home. When he is, we get along fine, we have fun talking, we respect each other's space and mess (personal or organizational), but then he leaves. He's always leaving. Why? I'm not chasing him away, he just works night shift. So, we barely see each other. Having a "daysleeper", as we term the night shift workers here, as a roommate serves me well. Each night I get off work, he is starting his day and heading out. So I can hide in the privacy of my own room all night long with no interruptions, completely and utterly isolated. I listen to music, I read, I watch DVDs on my MacBook, I revel in the absence of other people.
In fact, this freedom to hide in my room unmolested by social expectations has turned me into somewhat of a hermit this season. Or the utter meanness of so many people on station this season, has forced me to hide and recover my sanity in a survival mode of solo time.
There are drawbacks to a daysleeper roomie. I cannot blithely pop into my room at lunch time to make phone calls home to North America at decent hours with the time zones so different. If I am home sick in my room, he is sleeping in the room at the same time. On Sundays, I either stay out of the room entirely, or I quietly lie in bed all day reading and listening to music on headphones. I certainly do not sleep a lot. My naps are not restful with him in the room.
Brad snores. Oh my goodness, this man has a panoply of snores so varied and amazing that the times I am in my bed while he sleeps in his, on the other side of the wall of wardrobes we have built between us for privacy, I am forced to stifle my giggles in my pillow. He's a tremendous snorer, and luckily for him, and me, a very very deep sleeper. He can sleep through damn near anything. He'd have to be to sleep through some of the stentorian roars and whistling hoots and ruffled snorts he comes up with. I've never in my life heard such a wondrous collection of snores. If we were both on the same schedule, I'd have smothered him in his sleep by now, but the rareness of my witnessing it makes it charming and amusing and bearable.
At first, this season, I went through spasms of guilt, bending over backwards to accommodate his privacy and sleep needs. I stayed out of the room, I changed in the bathroom, I asked him what I could do to make things better for him. If I HAD to be back in the room before he'd woken up I would tiptoe around as if fearful of waking the wrath of the disrupted sleeper. But he required nothing from me. He sleeps like the dead and the innocent.
I can recall a few days when I came home, and was disrobing on my side of the room as slowly as possible, aware of every static crackle and snap the electricity made as I peeled off each of my many layers of long underwear. To my ears I sounded like heat lightening in a bowl of rice crispies, unbearably loud zippers of sparking and popping. But not a stir from him, and when questioned after his alarm went off for the 3rd time, no awareness that I had even been in the room at all.
I have learned to relax around him when he sleeps, because he's simply unwakeable. And if woken, he can turn over and be back asleep in an instant.
Which is so completely unlike me. I am a lousy sleeper. I sleep light and shallow and am woken by the sounds of my roommate rolling over in bed on the other side of the room. Over the last few seasons I have learned to sleep through the minor sounds. This season, sleeping alone in the room every night, I learned just exactly how little sleep I was actually getting those previous three seasons. The mere presence in the room of another person renders my sleep disturbed and restless.
The few times he's been back to the room in the middle of my night I was completely unaware of it. Which shocked me because I am such a light sleeper I wonder how he did it. It must have taken him 5 minutes alone to open the door noiselessly enough not to wake me. How considerate is that?
I'm more of a nester than he is, and the room, quite hilariously reflects the division between my side and his. I have tapestries and curtains and fuzzy pillows and pictures and Xmas lights on my side of the room. My part of the room screams GIRL (but not in a pink way). I have built a comfortable retreat in shades of green and yellow and orange and all the warm fiery colours of a fireplace, textures soft and furry and warm feeling. I spend a lot more time in the room than he does. It shows.
So, Brad is the perfect roommate for me: never around.
But really? I love it when we overlap. He's a great person. He's honest, funny, quirky, intelligent, and straightforward. We get along fine. We respect each other's space, we keep the room clean, we neither of us smoke, and he barely drinks. We don't have a TV, neither of us wanting one in the room. We don't have guests over, though I do marginally more than he, which is hardly at all. And when we talk, we range unfettered across topics one wouldn't expect a platonic male/female pairing in a small room to cover. I like him.
You may wonder how it is to room with a guy in such tight quarters, but I find it easier than with a girl. If something needs to be said, it gets said without the emotional spasms and backlash of loud silences and angers of a pissed off uncommunicative roommate. If I or he needs to change while the other is in the room, we have our wall, and I have hung a curtain at the end of my bed to add to my illusion of privacy. We respect each other.
He's perfect.
posted by: coldwish at 12:34 |
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fuels 2007-08
Season of the Carrot
One never knows what will be the prevailing food item in a season. There have been seasons dedicated to the consumption of sausages, blazing red fish lasted two seasons, and the chicken never ends. Each season brings upon us food mysteries. Why the ever present this, or the complete absence of that (okra, egg noodles)? Why do we run out of soy milk so constantly that those of us dependent upon it end up hording it? Who makes the purchasing and supply decisions for the station?
And why so many carrots?
This season we are facing the bright orange logs, straight and diagonal slices, and chips of carrots in damn near everything we face in the line. The carrots are shredded for salads, chopped for boiled veggie mixes, left in artificial mini logs ("baby carrots") that, though mushy on the outside, a fork cannot cut through without spinning it off your plate onto a neighbour's lap or tray. Curries, soups, goulashes, stews, lentil loafs, pilafs, all spotted and lumped with carrots.
Now, I like carrots. I like the colour orange. I enjoy the bright improbability of eating something that colourful, something that tastes as sweet as it looks. I am well capable, several times a week, of consuming an entire microwave heated bowl of boiled carrot slices with butter on 'em. If I don't microwave them the butter will just perch disconsolately on the top of my heap of sweet goodness, maybe it'll even droop, but it will not melt into that soup of fatty yellow tongue pleasure that I enjoy with my carrots. Salt & pepper complete the sensation.
But this season, I am becoming traumatized by the ubiquitous presence of carrots. If a meal passes without carrots (save breakfast) it is almost a shock to look at my plate undecorated by the bright orange, as if a colour is missing on the food spectrum, and the meal looks duller. This does not help me, nor others, in dealing with that many carrots.
I've taken to segregating my plate. I'll consume a certain number of carrots and then the remainder will be pushed off to the reject pile, joined by the 1 and 2 inch square chunks of seitan (why can’t it be broken up smaller?), the lima beans and the uncooked or overcooked beans from the salad line. I'm learning, carefully, that I cannot fill my plate full in optimism with all the possible non-dairy or non-meat items available, as I have in seasons past. I have become more of a pessimist in the Galley line, after too many heartbreaks, tears and disappointments. I walk through the line and my plate is half full, with only the few items I know I can consume: more often than not the carb/boiled veggies combo, and if I'm lucky, a dessert or two.
Where do I get my proteins? I rely strongly on the availability of the soy milk, which is sketchy at best, and goes unavailable for 3-4 days in a row each week.
But, on the positive side, I feel less guilty as I separate my garbage at the end of the meal into food waste and burnables and utensils. I am discarding less food in the food garbage line.
But, I am discarding a LOT of carrots this season. It may take me awhile after the season is over to reconsider carrots with anticipation and lust, no matter what gleaming fresh orange blares at me from the vegetable aisle.
posted by: coldwish at 12:20 |
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fuels 2007-08
Incommunicado
I realize that my silence has been worrisome for many of you. It's been a rough season for me. It's been hard finding time and energy in my day just for much needed retreat and recovery, let alone having the emotional wherewithal to peel back the defenses I have thrown up in defense, and write anything of significance. I've had some ideas, but really, it's been easier to watch Boston Legal on DVD and then go to sleep early.
Things have gotten better in the last few weeks. I'm eating better. Well, maybe not BETTER, but I'm eating more.
But I sit in front of this empty screen with an equally empty mind, nothing to say. I don't usually get stuck like this, so I figure I have nothing of worth to say that is not bitching and whinging about my lot in life. Which is a crock of shit, really, to complain about being in the most magnificent place I've ever been, doing a job I enjoy almost every day, working hard just a few short months each year and traveling for several months afterwards in New Zealand. I have a good life.
So, really, I should just shut up.
And that's what I've done.
posted by: coldwish at 13:23 |
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fuels 2007-08
C'est Moi, Genevieve:
Loonatick redhead in love with the Ice.
Wanna search my blog?
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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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