Ice, White & Blue

Redhead Amok in Antarctica

Pending Tanker

So much of the Fuelies' year is aimed toward our biggest event: the advent of Tanker. The fuel tanker comes in once a year to provide us with a new batch of fuel. Offloading this tanker is an enormous task, requiring our department to switch to a 24-hour workday, split into two shifts of twelve hours. Back in town, the entire Fuels Department has been on this shift, has been sundered in two, for over a week now.

But the tanker is not here yet. First it ran into weather on its way down here, a "gale" at sea, which delayed it by a day or so. Then it got here, as far as the ice part of the Ice, and now it's sorta kinda stuck in pack ice on the ice edge. The Odin (Swedish icebreaker) has been sent out the shipping channel it has been keeping open in preparation for the tanker's arrival at the pier, to go crack this ship out of its trap. Or so I hear. This, to me out here at Marble Point, is merely rumour, but it is rumour fleshed out by its impact on me.

It is why I'm still here. Rotating me back to town during this forward leaning, anticipating, on the edge of our seats wait for Tanker, doesn't make sense at this point. Everyone in town has their appointed role in this performance, and I don't belong there. I was at Pole for Tanker last season, and I am at Marble this season.

So they wait, and I stay here.

Aww. Shucks. What a darn shame.

posted by: coldwish at 14:26 | link | comments (1) |
fuels 2007-08

I Ain't No Hogback Girl

This is why fools like me climb hills like this. Because for all the doubts and pain of the ascent, our curiousity gets the better of us. What will I see when I reach the top? I am, at these moments, an optimist, eager to see the new view, the changed angle, widen my experience.  I am also too ashamed to fail so close to the top, ashamed to give up, I push on against burning thighs, aching knees, labouring lungs. Even though I could lie to others and myself, the latter would be worse, and what would I be missing by not continuing up the last steep impossible climb? I am supremely alone in Antarctica, solitude surrounds me with vast vistas, wide open spaces for my doubts and joys to flourish.

I’m on top of Hogback Hill (734 metres, 2408 feet) at Marble Point: I started with a two hour casual hike north along the face of the Wilson-Piedmont Glacier, stopping for dessicated seal carcasses who knows how old, dead disemboweled Adelie Penguins, curious recce flights by a dozon or so non-aggressive skuas, stepping from stone to stone across mats of black algae and flowing water from the melting glacier, climbing the crunchy snow ankles of the glacier, listening to the everpresent sounds of water dripping and rice-sized ice crystals tumbling and tinkling down the face to where I gaze up enrapt.

That is just to get to the base of Hogback. Then began a grueling--(for this middle-aged woman), staggering, pausing every 10-20 paces upward for a half dozen panting breaths and a long reminder of the view at my back--climb over sharp boulders, remaindered snowfields, and vertical loose gravel. I can see north to open water, I can see all of Ross Island, and I can see the open water reflecting back Mt Erebus and the tabular icebergs floating therein. There is so little wind and I am so overheated that I resent its absence. At one point I raised my innermost layer and hiked barebreasted to cool my core off.

I broke for snacks, I broke for water, I broke for pictures, I broke to fart. Any excuse on the way up.

Then I was 20 feet from the top and I knew why I was an optimist, becuse the view over Hogback was just becoming evident.

When I crested all the pain and doubts flooded out of me in great gasping loud howls of astonished, pleased, unalloyed happiness. I cried, hugely, for a good few minutes as I turned in place, catching the entire panoramic view.

I was standing on a par (it felt) with the Royal Society Range to the South, snow-capped and jagged, at the entrance to Taylor Valley (the southernmost of the Dry Valleys), looking at glaciers cropped at the edges before they hit the dry environment of the valley floor. I could see the blue glints of crevasse fields revealing the shiny ice as the glaciers squeezed through the peaks of the Kukri Hills, or swooped around corners in their gravitational efforts to get down from the Asgard Range with their heavy slow weight of accumulated snow and ice, cracking under the pressure. Or the high valleys in the peaks of the Olympus Range, dry and brown, speckled with snow.

I can see Ross Island in its longest view, from Ob Hill like a dark pyramid above an invisible town--how tiny we are and how glad I am for the perspective when McMurdo can loom so overwheming--to the right most end, then lowly extending along the snow ridge with Castle Rock a wee brown button halfway to Erebus. This flank of Erebus is long and bleaker, barer of the soft swoops amd muscles of snow that faces town and the runways (my most familiar view). But Ross Island goes on norther with Mount Terror and it ends surrounded by glassy waters and icebergs.

But I, I have the Dry Valleys here, I am right on the verge of being there. I am so close that I can taste my dream of going there one day, in fact, it feels fulfilled from up here where my eyes water and sparkle with the smiles that blaze on my face.

Far off White Island and Black Island are small low lumps on the Southern horizon of the ice shelf. Between us the ice freckles with light and dark splotches as the almost mackerel clouded sky filters the sun in patches on the extended flat white. I can see forever and I am surrounded by that which makes Antarctica such a vibrant and miraculous continent, it is the snowy landscape of my innermost yearnings and I am stunned to be so damn lucky to be here.

I am glad now of no wind, now that I am still, becalmed and bewitched by beauty, here on Hogback Hill.

This is solitude.

This is joy.

This is my Antarctica.

posted by: coldwish at 14:01 | link | comments |
fuels 2007-08

Mourning Hone Tuwhare

Rain

I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind

the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground

the steady
drum-roll sound
you make
when the wind drops

But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you

you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain

Hone Tuwhare

This man has died. He is the first poet for whom I shed copious tears, upon hearing of his death. His work was new to me, discovered along with New Zealand only a few short years ago. In typically Kiwi fashion I discovered him via this poem, Rain, while peeing in a cafe loo in Greymouth.  I sat there on the porcelain seat and twisted around behind me in absolute astonished joy as I read this poem written in large letters on the walls surrounding me. I had just gotten off my second season on Ice, and was reveling in the moist greenness of NZ, in particular the warm rains of the West Coast. This poem spoke volumes to my dried husk of a self. 

I waited for three other people to use the loo after me before returning with a notebook to record the poem, then I went to the nearest bookstore and looked for his work. There I discovered so many pleasurable little nuggets of pure poetic impact and beauty in amongst his prolific works, that I fell in love. So I mourn his passing, and treasure his words for they have enhanced my life for having read them.

I am watering the Antarctic landscape with my tears for him today.

No Ordinary Sun

Tree let your arms fall:
raise them not sharply in supplication
to the bright enhaloed cloud.
Let your arms lack toughness and
resilience for this is no mere axe
to blunt nor fire to smother.

Your sap shall not rise again
to the moon’s pull.
No more incline a deferential head
to the wind’s talk, or stir
to the tickle of coursing rain.

Your former shagginess shall not be
wreathed with the delightful flight
of birds nor shield
nor cool the ardour of unheeding
lovers from the monstrous sun.

Tree let your naked arms fall
nor extend vain entreaties to the radiant ball.
This is no gallant monsoon’s flash,
no dashing trade wind’s blast.
The fading green of your magic
emanations shall not make pure again
these polluted skies . . . for this
is no ordinary sun.

O tree
in the shadowless mountains
the white plains and
the drab sea floor
your end at last is written.

                        Hone Tuwhare

posted by: coldwish at 07:54 | link | comments (1) |
fuels 2007-08

Sleepwalker On Ice

I have a long and varied history of sleepwalking. It's important to know this about me, because should you ever be staying at Marble Point, Antarctica, and fetching yourself a late night snack from the kitchen, then you need to be prepared for the disheveled redhead saying things about helos and valves who comes charging urgently out of her room past you to the back foyer.

I haven't made it so far as to get fully geared up in these midnight excursions, but I've definitely patted down my Carhartts as they hang on the nail on the wall, looking for something, possibly my radio. I'm usually just waking up by the time I pass the kitchen because the light in the living room will have tweaked my sleep-wake dial just a bit more towards wakefulness and the semi-awareness that I am not actually hearing a helicopter, and the house radio did not just sound the approach.

My Mactown roomie, Brad, is a lucky guy to not have experienced me in full sleepwalking state yet. I have had a few moments this season, when he first switched back to working days, in which I've woken in the morning to find that I have definitely been sleepwalking because my bedside table is suddenly missing its tray top, and it's by the foot of the bed on the floor, but the alarm clock and my water bottle have been replaced back on the table by the bed. Not sure of the logic behind that one, and I can't point the finger at him as a practical joker. I have way too long a history of sleepwalking to ever doubt my ability to move furniture in my sleep.

Here at Marble, the stresses are minimal indeed, but my response to what little there is seems to be pretty impressive. It has been a rare night indeed that I do not launch myself panicked from my bed ready to fuel a helo within an hour or two of my head hitting the pillow for sleep. I sleepwalk from anxiety. The tiny worry I go to bed with here is that there will be a helo needing fuel from me. Sometimes, it is not an unreasonable worry, and I'm expected to take the radio to bed so I can wake up for the expected night flight that needs fuel.

Dawn (camp cook) always reassures me that even if I miss the radio call, the helo pilots know that if they land and Marble is sans evident Fuelie at the Pit, they can always knock on the Fuelie window. So reassuring. I'm such a light sleeper though, that there's no way a helo could sneak up on station without my being out there half-dressed already.

Stress is the primary cause of my sleepwalking. The first known record (to me) of my sleepwalking was the night after I was taken to see Jaws at Acadia Theatre in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. I had insisted I was old enough to go (I WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD! WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!), and my Dad took me. Later that night, as the adults sat in the kitchen, I walked down from my bedroom upstairs and asked them if we had any "black powder". I have no recollection of it. They all assumed I meant dynamite, to take care of the sharks.

Years later, while in Japan and in my 20s, I was on an island off the coast of Niigata, Sado Island. I was staying there for the Kodo Drummers' annual summer Earth Celebration, and was tenting at a campground just outside of town. A severe and sudden squall came roaring through from offshore one day just after dinner, and we all dived for our tents to get out of the rain. Thankfully so, because as I sat inside my tiny dome tent with my sleeping bag and backpack strewn on the floor around me the entire tent was lifted up around me and were it not for my own weight it would have Mary Poppins-ed itself right up the side of the mountain behind us. I was in a vertical howling tube of wet lilac-coloured tent fabric. Then just as suddenly it collapsed on top of me. We all emerged from our tents to inspect the damage around the campground and compare stories. All my tent poles were snapped or bent, and I could not find more than one tent peg, and that metres away. My tent was a sodden mess, as was everything in it.

I was invited into a neighbour's tent for the night, along with a few other refugees with similar damage. But I did not sleep well. Nor did my poor rescuer, for I repaid him by having a nightmare that I was being attacked and consequently with all my sleep-enforced strength elbowed him fiercely in the nose. I bloodied it. Luckily he didn't boot me out into the night.

The next time I had a significant issue with sleepwalking was some years later in college. At least it's the first time I had any incontrovertible evidence of my being active in my sleep. I must have had a lot on my mind, it was toward the end of the school year and I'm sure that I had a lot of essays and final papers due. I had no roommate, and my door was locked. I was the only one in the room. When I woke in the morning I had removed, carefully so as not to rip the corners, every single poster and picture I had on my walls, and had laid them in order of size from largest to smallest on the foot of my bed. I woke to the odd sound of paper rustling at my feet.

Throughout my time in New York City when I worked in the film business, with all the weird hours and weirder responsibilities, I know I woke several times during the nights before a new gig started with new call times each day.

It wasn't until the most stressful time in my life, when I was taking care of my brother's business while he was out of the country, that I realized just how much of a sleepwalker I am. I lived alone, and I had complete responsibility for the business and the employees, and my work days were often 12-16 hours long. But I never went to bed without something on my mind, some concern preying on me. During that time period I was so active in my sleep I did some weird shit.

One morning I woke up and found on the kitchen counter a half-empty pint container of melted Godiva Belgian Dark Chocolate ice cream, next to a bag of no longer frozen peas. The ice cream had been full the day before. I know I ate it because I farted pretty much all day long. I have never eaten in my sleep before or since.

I also would wake up in the mornings and find that I had completely remade my bed with the pillows on the foot end and slept in it that way. I pulled my bed out from the wall. I turned a stuffed chair in the corner around to face the wall. I removed a 8' x 3' framed painting down off the wall and laid it on the floor.

Then I almost killed myself. Accidentally. I have a vague recollection of what happened but am not sure as to the why. I stood up in my bed in the pitch dark, three feet off the floor, and stepped off it. I pitched almost face first but slightly tilted to my right side into the air and landed hard on the floor. I do not know if I blacked out, I do not know if I fully woke even then. I vaguely recall getting up and staggering, my right hip bone, my right shoulder and my right temple pounding with severe pain, to the freezer, where I fetched a bag of frozen corn to apply to the most alarming pain: my hip bone. At the point when the lights came on in the fridge I came to full awareness. I honestly thought I'd broken my hipbone, as it had taken the brunt of my fall to the wooden floor.

Perhaps in my dream I was back in Japan and sleeping on a futon on the floor. No matter, it was the single most frightening thing up to that point in my life I had ever done to myself. It scared me badly. There was no way I was going back to sleep after that incident. I prevailed upon my younger brother to come up for a few days and sleep on a mattress on the floor for my comfort, then after that another friend came over and stayed with me. I refused to sleep alone for over a week, because I was simply too scared to sleep. Sleep was a threat to my life. I could have killed myself.

It has never been as bad as that since. I learned several lessons during that period of my life, most memorably how I deal, or don’t deal with stress.

I never realized just how consistently I do it, until I had a roommate here (Marsha) my first two seasons on Ice, who regularly went to bed several hours after my bedtime and would report the next morning on my travels around the room from drawer to wardrobe looking for something. Occasionally I wake up deep into my urgent need and realize that I do not have a valve that needs closing and why am I halfway up my wall on top of my bed looking for one?

When I wasn't moving about in my sleep, according to Marsha, and Shana (my third season roomie), I also regularly sleeptalk. Articulately. And loudly. No formless mutters and mumbles for me, but a loudly barked command or question is my preferred form of speech when I sleep.

So, be warned Antarctica. I'm dangerous when I sleep. When I finally reach the point where I can fuel a helo, in my sleep, then it’s time to have me put away, because I am a danger to the program

posted by: coldwish at 13:37 | link | comments (4) |
fuels 2007-08

Longer Marble

I've been given a reprieve. I did not get sent back to town today. I am still here, possibly until the end of this week.

Yessssss.

posted by: coldwish at 21:45 | link | comments (3) |
fuels 2007-08

The Flora & The Geology: or Imperial Aneurysm Part Deux

On the same hike in which I gave the Emperor penguin a stroke, by sneaking up on it (all unbeknownst to even I who was doing the alleged sneaking), once I continued on around Gneiss Point, I fell upon a bevy of bathing beauties: sleek golden blonde seals spotted deep under their translucent shiny coats with darker browns. All of them laying belly up to the sun, hips cocked like particularly sun-drugged supermodels, not even a flipper flopping in recognition of my presence. I did not get very close, they were just off shore by the pressure ridges near a little indentation in the land. A common trope in Antarctica whilst traveling on sea ice, is: Where there are seals, there are cracks in the ice.

Not a melt hole with access to the sea, but actual open water, kept somehow open by the pulsing and rhythmic surging of the sea. From the cliffs above dribbled and dripped a constant flow of glacial melt water, down a small crevice into a sandy delta maybe a few metres wide on the beach, upon which rested frozen ice. A deep blue-green crack led from the land here out into the sea ice, showing open water and the evidence of tides and waves. The ocean was very alive here as it surged through the ice onto shore, floating pancake ice sheets the size of turkey platters in and out. The pressure of each wave squeezed the water through the space onto the beach, and the receding wave sucked it back through. In and out, in and out, slowly breathing under all the ice, strong evidence of oceanic currents and tides. I could see where the higher tide had frozen into place, only to collapse as the tide withdrew, leaving the glossy flat ice to collapse finely in upon itself.

I had not seen the movement of the sea, the rhythms of tides, up close like that on Ice. I stayed and watched it move, captured by the ebb and flow, the movement under the ice that always sits so still and flat in front of town, under the runways where we worked, only showing movement against the land with the slowly emerging cracks.

My hike also brought home to me how much life there is in Antarctica, despite how inhospitable is the environment. Unlike the volcanic soil of Ross Island, where Mcmurdo squats, where we have mud but it is not organic squishy stuff, so much as volcanic silt and dust ground into a rough approximation of mud. Mud is supposed to slurp at your boots, grab moistly at your feet, not grind and keep your footprint as you pass.

Marble has mud. Hell, Marble has more flora than I supposed we could sustain at this latitude. I was stepping on stones in order to avoid the VAST mats of algae, black crumbly algae dried into cracked mudflats tinted green in places like moss. I found bright orange lichen, incongruously vivid and alive, in the centre of stones, even some rare florets of lemon yellow lichen doing its best to survive during the short wet warm (0C, 32C) season of summer. I was astonished, I’d spent 4 seasons on a dry arid volcanic island thinking nothing could flourish at this latitude, but here, across the Sound, I found all sorts of life. There were shades of pink and green and blacks in the algae, different strains or the same? I don’t know, but I walked on it endlessly, and it gave beneath my feet like dried moss.

Further around the corner, once I was forced to ascend the Point to get to the Bay of Sails I found another stream from far inland, started in the melt waters of the Wilson-Piedmont Glacier and flowing long and sure to the sea by the rocky beach there. In this stream I found the most shocking green...what?Algae? Seaweed? (it extended along the beach front into the sea water too) Long and flat like slim fettucine, slightly translucent, and attached to the rocks in the stream floating downhill. Was this introduced? Was this from the sea? Did we contaminate this landscape with our effluvia and cause this? It was unreal and wrong looking, too vital a fresh green to belong here. The muted tones of the mats of algae elsewhere suited the lunar-like feel of the landscape. But here was this shocking blatant green. I still don’t know what it is.

So much of this hike raised so many questions. I wanted a geologist to explain the stones in their myriad friable collapsing shapes. I saw boulders of rounded white, like piles of large salt crystals, crumbling and spreading its crystals downwind on the black algae. I touched the "boulders" and they collapsed under the gentlest pressure, a barely connected, formerly known as a boulder heap of loose crystals. There were stones that appeared to my Maine eyes like granite, but the granite I know is a solid respectable stone, not one that splits itself open like the splayed pages of a book, exfoliating into sheaves of stone I could hold to the sky and SEE THROUGH like lace. There were huge areas of tiny sandstone platelets, fingernail sized and flat, pale golden brown like tiny pottery shards, scattered for a mile on the Point, with no boulders of the same colour indicating where this delicate stone came from, how it broke down to coat the land here. There were enormous, striated with white quartz-like veins, black bulges of sharp stone, once sediment, that thrust themselves up out of the Point to stripe the landscape. Sometimes these stripes were pale fox-coloured and less jagged and flowed like waves to the sea edge.

But mostly there were the jumbled random variety of sharp stones, cracked by the freezing of water, but not moved from its no longer conjoined twin by any force of sea or wind. These stones and boulders were brought here by the glacier from far inland, ages and ages ago, older than the imagination.

My hike home was into the wind, the prevailing south wind, and led me by the ponds and lakes that dot the landscape in front of the glacier. It is these bodies of fresh water that, frozen solid through a long Antarctic winter of darkness, absorbed me so completely last year I thought I was riding the Milky Way, that I was crawling on top of quarks and seeing into the very secrets of the scientific world. Last year, I came to Marble for few days in early November when the 24 hour sunlight had not been long enough upon the land to melt it into what I hike now. I thought I would miss the ice I crawled across on my belly gazing down into it for hours on end. That memory is what tugged at me, brought me back to McMurdo for the chance at more time on Marble Point, a regular 3-week Fuelie rotation.

Indeed, I still yearn for it. I yearn to lay my body against that cold sheer solid mass and touch my nose to the flat ice and focus my eyes as deep into the ice revealing dancing frozen bisected bubbles and strings of air balloons and explosions of cracks like stars and snowflakes and frost inside the clear ice deep into the dark recesses of itself.

But if that were now, I would not be venturing far from the station at all. In between helos I would be face down on our closest pond giggling happily to myself, drunk and silly on the revelations to be found within. If I did not venture out, I would have missed the longer views here, lost and deranged in the intimacy and mystery of ice.

And the longer views, took my breath away, partly because of the effort to get there, but  largely for the massive beauty of what lies beyond my nose, way beyond my nose, out behind the glacier face.

posted by: coldwish at 21:37 | link | comments (1) |
fuels 2007-08

Imperial Aneurysm Part 1

You’d think with all the time I have had on my hands out here at Marble that I would have spent more of it actually blogging, but the Marble attitude is quite laid-back, relaxed even. I am watching a lot of movies, and not taking the hikes I imagined I would.

Marble is a few miles from the shore itself, about half that in front of Wilson-Piedmont Glacier, or one small portion of its 30 mile long face. The Wilson-Piedmost is not what one thinks of when one imagines a glacier; a long frozen river congealed and solid yet skating down a valley floor between mountain ranges to the sea. In fact, the Wilson-Piedmont is fed by glaciers of that sort, but is actually very shallow, being all face and no legs. The Wilson-Piedmont parallels the north-south aligned McMurdo Sound shore line out from the Dry Valleys. On the map it looks like a huge flat terrain that engulfs much of the shoreline, with three main named feeders arriving from inland: Wright Lower Glacier, Debenham Glacier, Victoria Lower Glacier. There are other lesser feeders leading from inland, but they are unnamed on the map we have on the wall here.

The station squats in a small snowless broad saddle on glacial moraine and loose rock next to ponds and lakes of glacial melt water, behind which lurks the tall icicle encrusted, vertical, barely blue face of the glacier. I stand facing this great cresting wave, frozen and still-seeming, each time I fuel a helicopter. Already, in less than a week I no longer really see it. It is simply the dirty white cyc against which the bird poses. I haven’t even been to visit it.

I have every intention of doing so, but for all the casual work demands of Marble Point on a Fuelie, I am actually on call 24 hours day, 6 days a week. Though each fueling takes at best 15 minutes, the helos often arrive with less than 10 minutes warning. So it behooves me to be in camp at all times, be it inside lounging in my long johns, or outside working around the camp on various chores. I can gaze longingly in the direction of my fantasized hike, but can’t go there. If the radio crackled “Marble Point, this is 36H, we are 4 minutes out. We’ll be taking fuel.”, there’s no way I could get back from my distant horizon sans a hitch on said helo to get back to camp to fuel it.

For the most part I’m done my day in the early evening, but for night flights that may or may not show up. If there is a possibility of a night flight, then I sleep with my radio and wait for that 10 minute warning announcement, wake with a startled scramble from a deep sleep, stumble from jammies into Carhartts and boots, gear up for the weather outside, wipe the crusted sleep from my eyes, try to peel my nasty tongue from the roof of my dry mouth and get out there to fuel the helicopter.

It doesn’t actually happen often, only three times in a week have I had to sleep with my radio, and only once have I had to actually fuel a late night flight, but I am to be ready for it. Ready for it means being available to fuel at any time on very short notice. However, the flight schedule is so frothy that it can be just before bed time before I know if I can close the pit or am expecting a night flight. And my bedtime is around 9pm. Heck, the camp's bedtime is around 9pm, Dawn and Crunch turn in then too.

So I yearn somewhat. And tilt away from camp in my heart. Except on Sundays, when the helos don’t fly.

My first Sunday, I got up late, after my normal alarm time of 0540, around 0700, and was dressed, fed, packed with camera, binoculars, food, water, sunscreen, flagpole, book, pen, notebook, radio and extra clothes just in case the weather changed, and out the door before 0900. I was intending to be out ALL DAY LONG.

All by myself in Antarctica. Just me, all in black and grey, day pack stuffed with gear, ball cap pulled low over my face to cut the extreme glare, tromping through the the odd geology and flora and fauna of Marble Point.

You may wonder at the flagpole. I took a 6 foot bamboo pole, bearing a sporty blue Fuels flag, and wove the end of it into my day pack’s straps, in order to defend myself against the more aggressive fauna of Antarctica. Marble Point is home to many many skuas. I had met the townie version of this bird, and had admired its tenacious pluck and intelligently planned food raids on the unsuspecting. But tales from other Fuelies about their own personal interactions with masses of these aggressively pissed off scavenger birds here at Marble had led me to believe I should have some kind of defense. The flagpole was it. Sticking up a good 4 plus feet over my head and flapping merrily in the breeze, it causes the attacking skua to misjudge my size and accessibility for attack. They aim for the head and the eyes, coming straight across the landscape face height shrieking in their whiskey-soaked Lauren Bacall squawks, always with the sun in your eyes. It can be quite intimidating. If I did not have the flagpole, they would have targeted my head. They always pull up short in confusion at the flag.

Okay, yea, a few times I had to actually swing the thing at a few birds who seem to have figured out the whole head vs flagpole difference. Not to hit, just lazily looping it about my head in large circles.  I understand I got off easy, since it is not baby season.

My chosen route was down to the beach front following the hose line that pumps fuel into the station tanks when a traverse delivers it every few seasons. I was ostensibly inspecting it, as it was on my casual list of chores to work through whilst at Marble. I made it to the shore and being the sea-fond girl that I am, that was my route. I was going to follow the shoreline north around Gneiss Point up to the Bay of Sails. Gneiss Point is a broad round hump that sticks out into the "sea" north of Marble Point, just north of which is a deep indentation filled with small bergs, either drifted in from other glaciers calving or calved from the the face of the Wilson-Piedmont that reaches the sea ice there.

But I was walking around this outcropping, partially cliff-like. I had a choice to go high or to go low. High would get me into skua land, and my arrival just on the outskirts had already excited comment and divebombing raids. My choice is usually to follow the sea, not watch it from up high while dodging feral birds, so I went low. Low could be tricky for other reasons. I could see it turning into a cliffside scramble in places. The shoreline, from what I could tell did not come directly up against the cliff in all areas. Of course, the ocean was frozen and covered in snow and ice. I could see the pressure ridges ringing the point around the corner, but I did not know what was under much of the snow cover. It made sense that I followed the exposed bits of beach and land around the point. I'm all for a Polar Plunge someday, but not inadvertently, fully clothed and completely on my own.

The stones faded in and out of the snow cover, and I trod carefully. Luckily for me the snow cover seemed quite firm where I was forced to step, and my guesses as to land under it or water under it were all good except on a few occasions where I had no choice, and found myself ankle deep in water after breaking through the surface. My boots are seriously waterproof, so it was no damper on my hike plans, just a warning.

What between the careful picking my way around the point, in and out of rocky outcroppings, and the occasional recce flight by an aggrieved skua, I was not prepared for further evidence of Antarctic wildlife. Nor was the Emperor penguin hunched sleeping and moulting in a little dip in the rock. I wasn't looking up, so much as watching my feet, and wearing a ball cap to boot. I startled this poor penguin into a wing-flapping, head-bobbing, wild-eyed and yelling for help aneurysm.  It did not help that I, in my turn, was flapping my arms and shrieking back in my shock and dismay. Eventually we both calmed down, and eyeing each other warily we negotiated a settlement. I agreed to calm the fuck down and back away, and the penguin agreed to pose for photos, then get the hell out of there. Because really, there goes the neighbourhood.

Continued later....internet is slow and this big upload may not work...

posted by: coldwish at 10:33 | link | comments |
fuels 2007-08

You CAN Teach An Old Dog

One of the oddest things about being out at Marble Point is how we pee and shit.  My first short visit last year caused me no end of internal suffering, and it was my biggest anxiety before returning here this year. Could I do it right?

We have two different toilets, one indoors for peeing, and one outdoors for shitting. The latter is known alternatively (depending on company) as the pooper (in official notices), the crapper (in polite company) and the shitter (everyone else). Marble Point does not have any flush toilets, there is no sewage system a la McMurdo and Pole. The indoor pee toilet is a fancy version of a u-barrel, a 55-gallon drum with a funnel into which one pees. Unlike other field camps, we don’t have to deal with the barrel and the conundrum, for women, of how to approach the funnel. Do we squat forward, barrel between our legs? Or do we park it backwards and hover with the funnel under us, hoping to aim well into the centre of it and not get splashback? I tried several variations while at Pole last season; our closest “toilet” to the Flight Deck was a u-barrel in the BARFF (Barn for the firefighters’ vehicle known as ARFF) next to us. As a short woman, where the barrel is already well over my waist, it was a bit of a challenge to McGuyver myself into position, perched on the wheeled lightstand’s base nearby. I found the splashback and balance issues were best under control if I squatted on it, assuming I could acheive the height. It was never elegant, what with Carhartt shoulder straps and the bib hanging all over the place and one hand steadying the funnel itself and the other hanging onto the lightstand for dear life in hopes I didn’t topple over and knock the u-barrel over.

Here at Marble Point, we are in comparative luxury. The pee toilet is inside the house, and there are both male and female “funnels”. The men’s is a crotch height funnel (an actual white plastic funnel), as usual, but they have provided the women with a sit down toilet seat, on a platform which hides the welded metal “funnel”.  Of course, I dunno which tall woman they measured for the seat, but when I sit down my toes dangling don’t even touch the floor.

Both funnels attach to pipes which lead through the wall to the u-barrel outside the house. Either sex taking a tinkle into this contraption echos loudly as the urine flows down the hose into the barrel. But for when the women sit on the toilet, they get to read the warning sign at knee height in front of them: “Please No Pooping! The Pooper is Located Outside!”and therein lies the anxiety for me.

It’s a physiological conundrum for me, to separate the urge to shit and the urge to pee. Perhaps it is so for most women, because when we sit, we release. It’s not like I need to particularly differentiate between No. 1 and No. 2 in the modern water-wasting world of flush toilets. You sit, you do your business. For me, like as not, I do both almost every time. You probably didn’t want to know this about me, but there ya go.

Men are different. When they visit the loo, they get to choose the physical urge they need to address, and then choose the facility--urinal or stall--and the position: they stand to pee, they sit to shit. If it involves doing one in one place and doing the other elsewhere, no big deal. So this whole Marble Point separation of shit and pee is no great anxiety for men. I don’t see any extra furrows on their brows when they need to use the toiltet. Even if they need to do both, they have that kind of control and foresight covered.

I don’t. When I need to pee, it is the rare time that I can just go straight to the urinal and know with 100% certaintly that I do not also have to crap. Nor, upon first arriving here, did I have any idea I was capable of confidently separating the two zones, front and back, so darn close to each other that as far as I could tell when I clench, it’s the same set of muscles. So there I was, my first few days, clenching so very tightly against No. 2 that I could barely let a trickle of urine out each time. Eventually I learned the difference. I now, proudly report, that I can pee without crapping. Applause, please.

But, I am woefully ill-prepared to learn the trick of crapping without peeing, out in the shitter. Let me explain the shitter etiquette to you. First of all, it’s outside in a box not even attached to, so much as snuggled up against the side of, the house. Outside in Antarctica generally involves putting on the shoes that are not allowed in the house. Or hopping along the plank path barefoot, because, really, who has the time to go to the BACK door and fetch her boots and carry them to the FRONT door, put them on, and then trot outside? Not when I KNOW I need to shit. There’s not always that much of a heads up...errr...notice.

Out I trot to the shitter, open the refridgerator door on the box, and behold the toilet. It’s an actual toilet seat, and at a decent enough height that I am not left dangling over the edge when I s(h)it. Oh Joy. There is even a small heater at one’s feet, a box of magazines ranging from People to Self to National Geographic and Backpacker. The toilet itself was originally intended as, what we in the program refer to as, a Rocket Shitter. Officially known as the Storburn: Wilderness Comfort Station, in which one deposits the load, then the toilet burns the shit up. I don’t know the details, exactly, as ours either doesn’t work or we just don’t want to use it that way. What we have is much less high-tech, and it never breaks down: Except when some DV (Distinguished Visitor) arrives who doesn’t read the directions over the roll of toilet paper and he fails to follow through wth correct procedure.

The “official” directions, taped up on the shitter wall, are as follows:

“Crapper S.O.P.:

If possible, take a leak in the main building beforehand.

Enjoy your moment.

Paperwork.

Squueze all air out of bag and tie in knot.

Tag bag with name to later show supervisor level of productivity and consequently eligibility of Level 5 Bonus.

Put in poly-pak located outside. (actually an open-top 55-gallon drum with a huge rock holding the top down in the wind)

Replace with new bag.

Wash hands.”

Some of this S.O.P. is tongue-in-cheek.

What we have jerry-rigged in this loo uses plastic bin liners (trash can bags). Upon arrival in the loo one SHOULD find a clean bin liner placed over and tucked in under the toilet seat, (as if one were placing it in a trash can around the rim) with the main part of the bag placed in the toilet bowl. Advantages to this? You are guaranteed not only a pristine seating environment, but the weight of your deposit in will not accidentally cause the bag to collapse into the bowl, because your own ass is weighing it in place, not just the toilet seat.

Ingenious, doncha think?

Anyhow, follow the directions and remove the clear bin liner from the loo, squeeze the air out of the Bag O’ Poo, getting up close and personal with your product, tie a solid knot in the bag and deposit the bag in the drum outside. REPLACE the BAG. There is nothing worse than--well one thing maybe: a used bag in the loo--arriving in the shitter needing to poo and finding that one has to struggle with wrapping the bin liner securely around the toilet seat before one can even drop trou and take care of business.

The shit gets shipped off the Ice. So does the u-barrel.

Sometimes, when I am convinced I’m going to need to poo, I get out to the shitter and seat myself, only to find my urge was to pee. No shit at all. Even a little bit of shit would justify my choice between shitter and pee-er, because I have learned to forgive myself that when I shit, I also pee, and cannot, simply cannot, stop myself from peeing when I have relaxed enough to shit, which I only do in the shitter.

At least once every few days I end up with a Bag O’ Pee instead. At which point I realize just how dehydrated I really am. I have the copious part pretty much covered, but the clear part of “clear and copious”...I’m sorry, I’m failing that test out here. My pee is a bit robuster in colour than it should be for a properly hydrated person.

So, there you are, with way too much information about me personally, and how we do the doo at Marble Point. That and a wee issue my first week here with constipation, since I was simply too freaked out about shitting in the pee-er to even have a decent shit at all. Boy did I end up with a substantially impressive Bag O’ Poo that day!




Follow this link to another blogger with a slightly antiquated version (2001) of Marble Point. He has pictures of the shitter. The shitter remains the same.

posted by: coldwish at 10:06 | link | comments |
fuels 2007-08

Sometimes Awe Is Not Enough

One moment I was on Weather Hold in Mactown, and the next I was being whistled at by Josh the helo tech who had been sent to hunt me down in the Galley to tell me I was on the next helo out.

Indeed I was. I sprinted (danced!) for my dorm to get into my ECW Gear, and get my ass down to the Helo Port. I was on my way in an A-Star  helicopter to Marble Point, and it was only Friday at lunch. I had lost  only TWO days!

I took one of the Bell 212s out to Marble Point last year, and sat in the back of the larger helo, scrunched in with half a dozen other people in their ECW Gear. I at least had a window seat. I had not been impressed by my first ever experience in a helicopter.

But this time, It was me and the pilot, Mike, in the front seats of this tiny hovering glass bubble rising up out of the accumulated snow of our three day storm.

This storm had dropped snow that was over a foot deep and wet all over town, we were whiter than  I'd ever seen in town, and many departments had the equivalent of a snow day at school. Nothin' flyin', nothin goin' on. It was odd around town. Front loaders thundered around trying their best to scoop up the snowy mush that was compressing into yellow muddy slick slush and endangering ambulatory humans and vehicles alike. We don't usually get this kind of snowfall, so we are not equipped with snowplows. We have dozers and forklifts and dump trucks and all sorts of heavy equipment, but for the most part we build our roads ON the snow, drive ON the snow that falls, not spend all our time trying to excavate the roads we have. This is Antarctica, we don't try to get under the snow, we just try to stay atop it.

Up we rose out of the cleansed and softened landscape, scooting up between Observation (Ob) Hill over the bulk tank farm toward Scott Base, then swooping back around the hill to face across the sound toward Marble Point.

Mike apologized for the weather, wishing it were better for my flight. But I sat there with my mind blasted and seared by the beauty of the clouds and ice and winterscape laid out before me. Though I have lived with this view for 4 seasons now, at this angle and height, removed from the gravitational shortness of land-based life, everything had new texture and fresh attitudes. We flew low across the sea ice, fresh white and pocked with angular turquoise melt holes, toward the horizon. The clouds were low in many places, especially off to the north where the ice edge showed a dark blue horizon of ocean. This dark reflected upward to the flat undersides of the solid clouds and glowered darkly in a rainbow of blues and greys evocative of hope and death, freedom and danger. We flew over the Oden, a Swedish icebreaker hired to crack a track in the sea ice for the supply ship and the tanker to reach the Ice Pier in town. On the horizon that normally sported the Trans Antarctics, or our portion, The Royal Society Range., we could only glimpse the feet of the glaciers that swerved downward from them, Mount Lister peaked out above the line of clouds, but the bulk of the horizon was obscured.

Here and there at very low levels, lower than we flew, were wisps of white cloud, clearly visible against the darker clouds around us. On the ice, frozen in place by the sea ice, appeared several large icebergs, tabular and broad, blue sides glowing in the refracted sunlight that flattened and enlightened every feature on the landscape. We flew directly toward one. Mike asked me if I had ever seen an iceberg close up before. I hadn't, I responded. So he flew closer and closer to this large child of the enormous B15 iceberg

Being the only pax on board, and Mike's only assignment, was a good thing. All he had to do at this point was get me to Marble Point and a few minutes spent getting a closer look, on my behalf, of this flat topped slice of ice shelf that had birthed itself over 10 years ago, then calved off the world's largest known iceberg to get stuck here in Ross Sound. So down we swooped, closer to the sea ice, closer and closer we flew to the wall of blue, delicate translucent rich blue, pale with age and compression, glowing with a life and light from deep inside. We scooted along about 4 stories up, about two stories down, massive blue wall alongside us, reaching unfathomable depths below the water.

This blue, this massive luminous blue piece of ice, scored by waves, jagged edged, smoothed by time and wind and melting, cracked from top to bottom, sported such variety of texture I was once more transported into a land of miracles and awe. We sped past it, my glass bubble showing me nothing but this sight. My camera sat useless in my hands, my mouth was open and I desperately tried to keep the tears in my eyes from obscuring the details, the richness, the precious gemstone perfection that surrounded me. My eyes took in what they could, and my mind grasped pathetically at tiny details as they whizzed by. I had little time, I spotted curved semi-circular caves carved into the base, the vertical scratches of some giant sliding mercilessly off the edge, there were gentle vertical folds, rhythmic and regular but offended by horizontal crevasses, plaiding the face of this iceberg in shades of deeper blue like some mad Scot with a new Antarctic tartan.

I am easily enraptured, bespelled by what ice does down here, how water freezes and folds and pressurizes itself into such startlingly lovely colours and emergences from the flat white landscape we perch on. I stand on ice at the runway, look down into blues from the end of time, and crawl around pressure ridges that burst with their spectrum of blues from the landscape. This time I flew alongside a wall of blue so pure that all my previous concepts of blue faded and failed. Each year I encounter new blues here, to redefine blue in my heart and mind. Only icebergs have this blue, and yet surrounded by frozen sea ice, it did not have the translucence that I've heard icebergs afloat in the ocean sport. I can only imagine that there are more blues for me to discover when I think this. I could spend the rest of my life understanding Antarctic blues, and fail utterly in my ability to describe them.

No, I have no pictures for you. My mind failed me and could not support the invasion of a camera in front of my eyes as I witnessed this.

Because then, Mike looped suddenly sideways and upwards and we were landing gently on the iceberg. My left hand gripped the door handle tightly as I gazed down through the glass at my feet. Once more the horizon was flat and white and the edges of this massive berg disappeared into the rest of the flatness. And I was seated in a helicopter upon a massive iceberg. I did not get out. Within minutes we took off and sped directly to Marble Point.

But my eyes were full, my heart was aching and there I was trying to contain the disbelief and joy that I had felt so many times before here in Antarctica. I wish it had not taken such a long time to reach me this season, but I am glad it finally did. I would gleefully go through the same hell for the few minutes of uncontained pleasure I received.

Then we arrived at Marble Point. And so begins my sojourn here. For that trip here, those few moments of bliss, I am content, no matter how short my stay may end up being.

posted by: coldwish at 19:18 | link | comments (3) |
fuels 2007-08

There

I made it!

More later.

posted by: coldwish at 19:27 | link | comments (2) |
fuels 2007-08