Ice, White & Blue

Redhead Amok in Antarctica

In Which The Nostalgic Author Turns In An Anti-American Rant

I'm learning more about how much I dislike cities, yet miss the good ones. If I were to live here again, I'd be a very isolated person in the middle of a crowd. I'd be overwhelmed by the nightlife, the choices of gigs, movies, performances, museums, but I would be afraid to go out of my apartment, because there are people are out there. Everything is available. But everything is people. We all know how I feel about people. Don't. Like. Them.

And after how many days here my Japanese has come back full force. Not my French, no, that would be too handy. But my Japanese. I walk into a Metro to buy a ticket and I stand dumb in front of the ticket seller, unable to come up with the simplest phrase "Un billet, s'il vous plait" until the person in front of me says it. I hear French all around me and I understand much of it, but still Japanese is more natural to me now, even after 16 years. So what blurts from me when asked the time is some odd combination of languages, or just dead silence and fear of what I might say and what the response will be, beyond confusion, irritation and a possible, aggressive, verbal, screaming attack like I received so many years ago one night in downtown Montreal.

I brush by crowds of smoking strangers on the crowded street outside a bar, and they say "Scuse". Me, I mutter "Sumimasen" and get all self-conscious and refuse to excuse myself at all at the next person I bump into. I am frozen again, silent in my fear, feeling monolingual when I know I am not.

I would rather be inside the bar, in the crowd, in the loud, where the air is fresh, than outside on the street inhaling all the cigarette smoke. Bars and restaurants have banned smoking, and the streets are a slalom of avoiding smokers. I zig, I zag, I plan my route down St Laurent by the thick clusters and clumps of happy smokers, outside int he glorious night time cool after a hot hot day of sun and sweat and discomfort. They almost ruin the night for me. I, too, walk the streets at night in cool contentedness, having suffered the egregious heat of two days in a row. At night, the streets are less demanding of me. I do not need to seek shade, or keep moving to create my own cooling wind, hating the stoplights pause and the flush of red-faced sweat that attends it. At night, the stores are closed but the window displays are lit up brightly, and I am in my own private cool museum of style, colour, remarkable shapes and things I would not buy even if I had the money. It is a peaceful way of doingt he city. Fewer people to dodge, fewer people hurrying past me when I want to stop. There is time and space at night. If I lived in Montreal again, I would be a night owl in the summers. Mornings would escape me in a fugue of exhaustion and sleep, afternoons I would greet sceptically, disgruntled with my sudden wakefulness, but as the sun went down I would come alive and the city would return to me, my private playground of streets and lights and noises.

I do miss Montreal. Intensely. It is a delicious city of freedoms and memories, and good friends. I have reconnected with many of them, those still living here. Some have not changed, they are the same, live the same as they did in 1985-87 when I lived here. Although I cannot imagine that life, still living the punk life, all these years, it comforts me to see that it's possible in Montreal. If I had chosen that life, it would be mine now and I would be able to sustain it easily. Cobbling together jobs and money-earning schemes to support the focus of my life as a gig-going, record-buying, festival-visiting, member of a group of musicians, artists and friends with wide open minds.

But, now, as an American, I don't have that choice. Canada is not where I return home anymore, and how fearfully heartbreaking that is to me. It is my home, where my heart resides, where my memories come home to roost, where I was formed as who I am, where I learned my critical-thinking, global-yearning, sceptical hopes and dreams. I am not the provincial, navel-gazing, selfish, ignorant American who does not understand her or her country's role in the world, who was shocked to the core by 9/11, who did not understand the historical and militaristic significance of our arrogant actions to cause us to be the target of such hatred and fear.

I grew up in a beautiful country of beautiful people, one where the rest of the world is part of us, where what happens in another country has an impact on us. I did not expect, nor appreciate, the loss of that international visibility, until I moved to the US and suddenly the rest of the world disappeared from view unless the US was doing something to it, or an American was impacted. America is a blind, self-loving, self-satisfied country that does not understand why so many people fear it so terribly. Americans don't realize how vivid that fear is even within them, in the lack of generosity, and honesty and trust shown to complete strangers. They sit on piles of their belongings defending them against neighbours and invaders and strangers, not realizing how they are owned and defined by their things.

So, when I am in Canada, I am indeed home. A casual, friendly, worldly home, where only the rare person doesn't know that Antarctica is Down There not Up There. But I can't come home here. I can only visit.

But, still, I would not live in Montreal again. Cities are no longer what I need. What I need is more space between people, privacy and time to myself. I need peace, not the screamed drunken anger and screeching brakes and loud music, skateboards and laughter that drifts through the open summer windows hoping to suck some little cool into the stuffy apartment. I don't want to meet old friends at a cafe where if I sit by the window I am constantly fending off the beggars and the crazy, I don't want my conversations eavesdropped upon by neighbouring tables. I don't want everything I do to cost money. I don't want to be paralysed by so much choice.

Then, at the same time, I am envious to busting at the seams with the plugged-in nature of many of my friends. They have to make so little effort to see the obscure little foreign film whose review they just read, to hear the new band at the front of a new genre of music, blowing audiences away with live wire energy. The libraries, the museums, the magazine stores, the food stores, the restaurants. The Montreal bagels, the bagel to define bagels.

I am lucky in my friends. I am lucky in my life now. I have got a life of great freedom and adventure, a life I could barely have dreamed for myself when I lived in Montreal so many years ago. And I do it, despite having an American passport, and living in that benighted country. But in my heart and mind, I am a Canadian. And this feels like home.

Even if sometimes, I don't want to go home.

posted by: coldwish at 07:05 | link | comments (2) |
between 2008, montreal 2008

Seatless in Seattle

In early July I was in Seattle for a few days to explore the city. I landed in the new library downtown. I wrote this in a madly scribbled rush of words once I found it and put my bags down. It has been edited a little for spelling and clarity.

My first impressions are Wow! Holy Crap! and Double Wow!  It is a labyrinth of brushed steel and odd levels, open metal bookcases bookended by clouded lucite panels, ceilingless rooms and banks of black flat screen computers on long black tables. This is modern architecture gone mad or even awry.

I take broad metal stairs up into a second floor of meeting rooms, everything the colour red, a fresh-spilt blood red: walls, floor, ceiling. Everything wet red and I can feel my blood boil and my face flush in response as I wander the curved halls around. Inside fresh arteries, only the floor flat to walk on. I am stunned into motionlessness when a door opens in this blood world and out steps a human from the glowing explosion of lime green radiation, an elevator. I enjoy this floor, improbably. It makes me smile, even though I am here needing to pee and not finding the blood red door with the blood red handle in the curved blood red walls under the wavy blood red ceiling.

I go up another floor via a narrow, steep lime green lucite walled escalator past more books and magazines and people clacking madly away, lined up all neat and geometric in front of their screens like a scene from Doctor Who, minds gone away from bodies. All this I see but no way off the escalator to access the magazines, the books, the heart of the library. The floors are not flat, the bookshelves are housed in angled levels, once I reach the top I have to angle my way down in long rectangular how-the-hell-do-I-get-out spirals. I am looking for a place to sit, to relax, to curl up with a book or doze off with a magazine but I am trapped in a sharp-edged Miro sculpture or bright colours and no heart.

The seats I do find are red--or eggplant purple or grey-black--and made of sharp-edged hard foam, like the Red Cross symbol in 3D with four seats each. I hope they are more comfortable than they look. When I  finally re-ascend up this atrium with slanted walls of pale blue-grey I-beams and diamond shaped windows, and the white ceiling is quilted in large duvet-like squares, a padded room for the rising insanity. There is a recessed light in the centre of each white fabric square like a button in a cushion sewn in too tight.

I sit. The seats are hard, rubber-lined foam and corners. Four seats available to each cross and no one willing to sit so close to strangers, backs to them, less than a foot apart. They are not conducive to curling up with a book, but it fits the library. I don't like it. I have just come from SEATAC Airport, and there is more accommodating and welcoming than this monument to the "future". This thing of Seattle pride.

I contrast this place with two libraries I have known, among many: the Dover Public Library, my hometown oasis, and the Denver Public Library--a modern playground of multi-hued abstract blocks from the outside but packed with fresh light and warm champagne-coloured wood. As modern, but a place where one can secrete oneself among the stacks with light and airy comfort and warmth and hear the whispers of collected knowledge and fantasy and wisdom float over you like a printed massage. I would move to Denver solely for its library, so welcoming and soothing is it. I could happily spend harsh winter days ensconced in the Denver Library, reading the hours away.

Dover is a town library in an old brick building, with its free WiiFii, an atrium with comfy chairs seated beneath lush green indoor trees and tall windows, exposed brick walls, magazine racks and carpeted floors much worn. On a short-lighted winter Sunday, cold and wet, spent shoring one's strength for the week ahead, this library is like bathing in intelligent sunny friendship. This small library is a retreat to the past without retreating from the future technology that has overwhelmed the information age. Some winters past I have owed my sanity to the Dover Public Library, as small as it is, with its personal feel and its personable staff.

But the Seattle Public Library is not a place of rest or relaxation, it is offensive to my soft edges, jutting harshly against my senses. Even the library silence rings mechanically in my ears, a simple library patron cough or the turning of a page echoes lonely and sharply in the ugly space. It magnifies it, exacerbates the silence into loneliness, isolation from books, a competitive territorial space of rules and regulations, listed by the dozen on all the walls. Do Not Do This. Must Not Do That. Never Do This. Or Else.

People here look like they do in bus terminals and the worst airports during a Thanksgiving weekend storm, uncomfortable, defensive and impatient. This is how a space can create or disrupt with architecture. This space is a monument, a marvel, but not wholesome in any way. I wander around again, with my camera, taking abstract pictures of the abstract beauty that disrupts the peace of being surrounded by books. On film, it is a remarkable place, endlessly photographable and absorbing. But do not look to read or sit or relax here. Wander it like you have stumbled into an alien distorted Escher print ("Relativity" a1953 lithograph) with shocks of colour, wander it like a tourist agog and about to leave soon.

I am afraid to use the toilets. I don't know what weird colour experience I'll have there that will set my heart pounding.

They turn out to be blank pale blue industrial toilets, unintegrated into the design sense of the building. I am disappointed, I expected purple toilet seats in a black tile clad room with a plaid of brushed steel dropped ceiling exposing pipes and other primary-coloured essentials to building function.


I bet it's designed to keep out the homeless, Seattle is rife with them. Parks, streets and green areas are littered with long piles of dirty clothes in which are sleeping people with hard lives and sad scowls when woken.

In a temporary, privileged way, waiting for my couchsurfing.com host to get off work, I was homeless when I visited. I waited hours in the library, a place I assumed would be a sanctuary, but when I settled in with a graphic novel at a hard black metal desk in a hard black metal chair, and my face fell forward onto my reading material in exhaustion, I was soon woken by a peremptory rapping next to my face and a sharp rebuke for sleeping in the library.

I had to move on.

posted by: coldwish at 16:06 | link | comments |
between 2008, seattle 2008

The Cradle Will Sway

There are times at sea when sleep is easier than others.  For the most part I find the swaying and rocking of the ship to be incredibly soporific, soothing, easily lulling me in moments of calm between tows into a groggy sated state. But when I go to bed, and climb into my aft facing top bunk, everything changes. Largely because the bed is simply too narrow for me. I cannot lie on my side and fling my arms out straight in front of me without clanging boney wrists and knuckles against metal walls. Add to this the rolling of the ship when we go braodside to the swells, and I am constantly uncomfortable. I have extra pillows by my hips on either side to brace myself from hitting hard, to cushion the rolling of my body, but there is nothing in the world that can make me sleep through the feeling that the boat is about to topple over, flinging me out of my bunk to a watery grave, when we really roll.

Yet on the biggest seas we've had thus far, with the lurching and shuddering and lolling and bouncing we did, I was not as easily woken. Sure it was a long night and a hard sleep, but I adjusted and grabbed the winks I needed. Somehow with the oily calm waters and flat low swells we've had these last few nights, it has become too easy for me to sleep harder, so the rare broadside swell and roll that tilts me further than norm, shoots me out of bed with the slightly panicked feeling I am about to tumble over with the ship.

That feeling is reminiscent of a recurring nghtmare of mine, post-Japan, about earthquakes. Since my first earthquake in Japan, that knocked me to my knees on the 6th floor of the building I was in--mid-step the floor shifted and my knees buckled--I have had the occasional dream that I was atop a skyscraper in Tokyo (explain that to me, why do earthquake prone nations insist on building so high?), on a viewing platform or some such 360 degree viewing area, and an earthquake has struck. In my dream the building bends like rubber, upright and planted firmly but bending over to touch its own toes. I always imagine that I will jump before we hit and somehow save myself the crash. I awake before then.

That then is the physical sensation of the deeper swells for me when it is calm and they are unusual and I am asleep in my top bunk.

Yesterday as we were steaming to our next station out near the Hague Line (the line that divides Canadian and American territorial waters) I parked myself in a folding chair on deck, reading and watching the ocean, as peaceful as it gets on the ocean. I had my feet up on the rail and barely made it a few chapters into my mystery before the irresistable pull of the rocking sent me into a crooked neck, mouth-gaping stupor of a nap. For several hours. Being a redhead, I was not just out there skin exposed as some fools would, I was covered in a blanket.

It is not being exhausted, though we work 12 hour watches, so much as the restful sway and loll and swing of the sea. I have a history of falling asleep in water. I float well. It could be the two frontal flotation devices I sport, but more likely it's just a general layer of fatty tissue all over. I have been known to lie back in the warm sea waters, hands clasped behind my head, and in the rocking of the waves, fall asleep soundly and contentedly. My head, my breasts and my toes above water. The lifeguards at one beach in Japan threatened to tether me to the rocky point, or the entrance buoy, so many times did they have to swim out to wake me up as I floated out of sight behind the headland of their protected coved beach.

Men have more muscle than mI do, and every moment afloat for them is an effort. My version of treading water barely involves my feet at all. I stand upright in water, shoulders above, hands fluttering a bit like a mild Charleston dance. For hours. No effort.

I love the sea. I feel at home on it.

posted by: coldwish at 04:23 | link | comments (1) |
woods hole 2008

Release the Dogs!

Yesterday was the day of the dog. Fish that is. From noon to midnight my shift brought in more dogfish than anything else, though haddock was a close second on some hauls. We had one net so chock a block full of dogfish that the boom couldn't lift it high enough for the crew to release the net, in addition to the fear that if they were able to do that the interior fine netting would be torn on all the spines. So, instead of putting everything in the catcher (the sorting table) they slowly pealed back the net enough for us to get in there and remove some of the dogs and unblock it, so they could peel back the netting inside, and dropped that load on deck. Waist high in wiggling sandpaper skinned spiny dogfish. And we didn't want them. So it was a full 30 minutes of 7 people, wading into these dogs, grabbing them by their tails and flinging them ass over teakettle back into the sea. Screw working them up (measuring, sexing, weighing), it was all dogs, and dogs not being a commercially fished species in the Atlantic US, it didn't matter how many we had. Because there were too many.

Sexing a dogfish is easy though. The males are quite clearly male, with these two pinkish white dog penis-looking things extruding from their anal area. These are known as claspers. The female simply have two fan-like fins that cover the area like veils. Hideous looking, the boys are. One could have nightmares. There are always more males than females in a trawl, but the females are bigger.

Other fish have the same external claspers as the dogfish, most obvious among them being the skates.

My favourite fish remains the vibrating, growling drag queen of the sea; the longhorn sculpin. I love to handle these. They look menacing in their tiny thorny way, big mouths on broad heads tapering to narrow tails, horns and fins and things sticking up all over the place. Handle them and they growl subsonicly from head to tail, it feels like a vibrating pager. I smile every time.

Sculpins are closely rivalled by the sea ravens, similar shaped but with more outrageous pectoral fins. They don't vibrate.

The oddest fish by a mile thus far has to be the lumpfish. This is an upright fish with a tiny mouth, that is shaped like a peaked speed bikers helmet with ridges. It does not flop, it does not wiggle or squirm, as most fish in our nets do. It can't. It just sits there like a lump on whatever plane its been left, most likely its flat belly. The oddest thing about this fish is that it is SOLID. You can thump on it, tapping around it, and nary a soft spot is found. It feels like solid cartilege, and is as heavy as a block of cement.

Some fish are simply named funny; like the fourbearded rockling. A simple little fish-like fish with four beards, two on its chin and two that dangle from its upper lip.

Then there's the microwave the other watch pulled up (full of dogfish of course), and the 30 foot roll of clear pastic linoleum. We are working on the remainder of the kitchen in subsequent tows.

Can I just say that haddock STINK!? No, really, for such a delicciously sweet-fleshed fish to eat, the fish itself is the most rank thing we pull up. They crap all over the place with this greeny brown stuff, and smell like rotten fish rolled in pigshit. You just know canine diogs everywhere would LOVE to roll in a load of these fish. Now with every bite of haddock I try not to recall that smell.

posted by: coldwish at 04:11 | link | comments |
woods hole 2008

The Head at Sea

More NOAA moments, more head comments...

***

We've had some fun seas here, leading to some head issues. Not the top of my head, head, but the loo toilet head. When this ship got rocking at the height of the seas the last few days, we had little choice but to adapt. I have a few complaints, minor issues really. If you are going to have a toilet that faces the stern of the boat, then for those of us sitdown pee-ers, please oh please, make it a toilet seat that is solidly attached to the toilet itself. I'm just sayin'. Cuz the sliding around port to starboard, slamming back and forth with the play in the screws holding the seat on, isn't fun. It requires bracing oneself against the sidewalls.

I much prefer the head in my stateroom (I share with 2 other women) which is aligned with the starboard side and even has a portlight. I can seat myself there is major swaying, in which the portlight is submerged in sea every third swing, brace my feet against the shower to hold me on, and sit there quitre contentedly doing my thing without fear of being launched off the loo. I believe, if the seas got any rougher and we wallowed any deeper in any of those rolls, I may even perfect the art of standing to pee without ever leaving the toilet seat.

But I have my sea legs, and any vague upset I may feel has faded no matter how large the sea get. The one deliberate vomit before bedtime my first night out on practically flat seas and I'm all good for the remainder of the trip of 12 days.

The bunk is narrow though, and as metal as I am bony. I have the use of 5 pillows, to brace myself in my bunk so I don't crash against the wall and the rails in the heavier seas.

posted by: coldwish at 04:05 | link | comments |
woods hole 2008

No Joshua Slocum Moment

More Woods Hole NOAA Survey Trawleer moments from early June.

*****

At least I am staying well-hydrated. I can see several of my shipmates descending into headaches, but I never see them drinking liquids, so I strongly recommend it. But no, as usual, they reach for the ibuprofen first. Ah well. The sea is getting a bit bigger, swells arriving on Saturday, expected 5 feet. Which is really very little but we've been smooth, with a little pitching and yawing only since we got underway on Wednesday.  I perhaps can cut back on my water intake, because I don't really see the necessity of the sympathy sloshing of my bladder to the sea's rhythm. And I really dislike the above deck's head. Windowless and aligned with the bow, so when we slide down a swell sideways the loose toilet seat swings left & right and back and forth, my arms outstretched and braced against the walls. It intimidates my peeing mechanism, as I'm never absolutely sure when the toilet seat upon which my bum is parked is over the toilet itself.

I much prefer the stateroom, below decks, head. It has a porthole, and is aligned port to starboard, and I can brace my feet on the shower as we roll. So, technically I have pee'd standing up, while still seated. We had some real swells, and I was able to go from standing to pee to lying down to pee, watching the porthole go from a view of the briny depths to a view of the grey-clad sky. Back and forth, back and forth. Firmly braced, it was a pity when I had finished my business, because THAT's the way to pee! Action peeing!!!

****

We have been catching a truckload of redfish. Very red, with a pink tone to them, spiny bug-eyed bottom feeders. They do not do well with the precipitous upward haul from the sea floor to our fantail, and get the piscine version of the bends. Their eyes bug out like big marbles, their stomachs balloon so much that they extrude from their mouths. Many among us have been speared through our thick gloves by their spines. They wiggle, and cannot just be grabbed ignominiously by their tails like the spiny dogfish, or the sea robin, sea raven, sculpin and large skates we find. Along with their obnoxious wiggling comes the regular splashing of fish bits all over us. I'm sure I'm sporting some behind my left ear as I type. Mostly what we end up coated with is their eggs, or roe, or the tiny tiny irridescent yellow and black comma-shaped embryos encased in clear liquid. It's a new look for me. Once they dry they are almost impossible to get off.

Then there are the fish scales. Goodness. Between hauls, the scales that have dried onto our gloves and gear become like large dandruff, flaking off us and drifting away in the breeze as we move.

****

I am enjoying the sea, though not as much as I'd expected. I can stand at the bottom of the earth (literally, at the South Pole), see the horizon flat white and curving with the earth, and tilt away from what little civilization we maintain there. But here on the ocean, without sight of land, I am not tempted. Nor am I fearful of the great heaving vastness of the ocean. I am in a ship with about 20 people, with hot & cold running water, good food, and interesting people and I am definitely not alone. I also do not yet feel the need to be alone. Or the impossibility of being alone on the ocean is so remote I do not yet feel the greatness of the sea. I have no inkling yet of a Joshua Slocum moment. Perhaps if the weather worsens I'll find some respect. Because I'll experience that rather sooner than I'll ever be alone in the middle of the Atlantic. Even with my survival suit on. One hopes.

posted by: coldwish at 04:00 | link | comments |
woods hole 2008

Out To Sea

Late this May, soon after my mother was home from the hospital and able to care for herself, I fled to sea. I needed to get away from the house, relearn my boundaries as something other than the disgruntled caretaking daughter I had become.

I was offered a position as a volunteer on a NOAA Fisheries Survey ship, the Albatross out of Woods Hole, MA.

These are some of my random moments at sea:

****

Things that startled me: the night sky from the fantail, emerging from the overhang and lights into the darkened back deck. I noticed lights bobbing in the sky erratically. We were already far enough from land on our first day that it was lost below the horizon, and I knew of only the Bigelow accompanying us. Imagine my pleasure when my brain twigged to the fact it was I and the boat doing the dance, while the stars remained constant. I smiled broadly in recognition of the hitch in my minds eye between body and senses and what I knew to be truth. I had already stopping being conscious of the movement of the sea on the boat, walking wide-legged and sturdy, with confidence about the ship. I had my sea legs.

****

Waiting for the net to be dragged up, we scientists all gather under the overhang on the fantail near the fish sorting/weighing/measuring stations, until the crew have released the contents of the net into the wooden sorting table (about ping-pong table sized and waist high, enclosed around all sides). For me, it is like coming downstairs as a child, full of expectation for the Christmas stocking and its mysterious contents, only known to us by the bulges and the feel of each present. Each net brings up varying amounts of different species, mostly dogfish about 1 1/2 foot to 3 feet long, but many yellowtail flounder, winter flounder and fluke. We learn the differences, patiently explained to us, repeatedly, each time we aren't sure. Lobsters arrive, a few, greeny red and waving their claws in threat at their startling rise from the seabed. Haddock with their identifying fingerprints by the gills and the subsequent reaction of lipsmacking from the collective viewers. Once so far a pout, with wide rubbery lips like a collagen-injected Hollywood reject. Scallops glaring at us through the shell lips with their many tiny black eyes fringed and hooded by shell, sand dollars dark grey and brown with a blush of purple. Too many species to name. I love the drag queen nature of the sculpins or the sea robins, explosions of spines and frills and bumps and fins, mouths broad and scoop shaped. The sculpins startled me on first handling, I felt the vibration like a cellphone through my thick blue rubber gloves. Still they make me laugh. Slippery devils too, hard to handle as we measure them.

****

I slept the sleep of the dead my first night, after doing nothing but try not to sleep while steaming out to our first location. We were supposed to meet the new NOAA ship, the Bigelow, at the first station around 2200-2300h but they didn't show until about 0500. I am on day watch, the 1200-2400 shift, and am not allowed in my stateroom while on watch, as the opposing watch is sleeping in there. So the effort, after several short-slept nights and long days at home before departing to sea, to stay awake was monumental. I was unsuccessful after 1900, and passed in and out of consciousness on a padded bench until I retreated to my bunk at 2400. Whereupon being below deck and changing out of my clothes was too much for me to bear and I vomited into the toilet. Any vague dis-ease I had felt through the evening was flushed down the head with my lunch and supper. Take me away from a visual check of the sea horizon, no matter the bobbing and swaying, and I am less than pleased, the above decks head (toilet) itself is often the most challenging, being windowless. I was asleep by 0035 and woke a few times to ship noises changing (the first haul took place at 0600) but had to be woken at 1100h for my watch.

****

I've seen a few birds, a shearwater, some petrels, many black-winged gulls, but unidentified beyond that. The people with me on ship know their fish well, but they shrug somewhat at the species of the air.

****

We have many squid, kilos of tiny pink shrimp I wish I could keep for my cat. She likes them that way, tiny and fresh and twitchy.

posted by: coldwish at 03:03 | link | comments (1) |
woods hole 2008

Oh, And Since Then...

The day I learned of the birth of my niece I was also informed that my mother had lung cancer.

The next day Brad had to get on a bus and leave for Christchurch and then Oz, and I had to get myself ready to go home and figure out what the hell to do with Ruby. I was allowed one more week in New Zealand, and I immediately fled from where I'd heard the news in Invercargill (southern-most NZ city) to the comfort of friends (Rochelle, and then Pav) on the West Coast. I soaked in as much of the areas between as I could as a way of fortifying myself with memories of extravagantly beautiful scenery, of arming myself with the possibilities of joy when sorrow seemed such an inescapable future.

I have been home since then taking care of her. No post-surgery chemo or radiation necessary, just recovery of strength and stamina. We were lucky. One grapefruit-sized tumour and no metastases. Yes, she smoked for many years, but she quit in 1972. Still, it fucked her lung.

She's fine now. Down one lung, but doing fine. Gaining weight, and well able to care for herself. We await her return to the pool, so we can see if she swims lopsided now. No, really, I'm curious about that.

I have also been getting to know my infant niece, Ave, and trying not to carry her like my cat, or call her by my cat's name. I don't have any experience with infants, never having been interested in any up to this point. The day I get her to purr is the day I'll have figured her out. By then she'll be headed to preschool, I'm sure.

posted by: coldwish at 19:46 | link | comments (2) |
between 2008

Of Ice and Then

I had a shit season this year, from beginning to end.

There were a few mitigating graces: Brad, the marvellous day sleeper roommate who I adore for his unflappable, sarcastic honesty; Karl and Mark, my clever, foul-mouthed, supportive, irreverent weekly Hearts opponents who kicked my ass all season except once on my birthday and I KNOW that was a birthday gift; Jesse, my AM Pits partner who made a challenging week outside funner than it had a right to be; meals with the hilariously dirty-minded and truthful Marisa (and Eric who gleefully put up with us); the divinely intelligent calm of meals with Marty and Dean; Thomas's loan of hockey skates and directions to the "skating rink"; reconnecting with Shana despite our occasional difficulties as roommates last season; the Adelie who came to the Ice Runway; the blizzards; the startled Emperor; the climb up Hogback; getting to know the helo pilots at Marble; seeing Mike on the other end of the Herc hose during a fueling, the clouds and hoarfrost and snow.  There were so many small moments and actions and interactions that floated above the shit of the season, and for all that I'm thankful.

I wouldn't have survived otherwise. I could not develop calluses fast enough, to be anything but rubbed raw by the evidently casual hatefulness of so many daily interactions.

All together the wonderful moments and people were not enough to keep me from a thousand-yard stare of bewilderment and shock in the Galley from my very first week back on Ice, and thinking "Why don't I just quit this shit hole?"

It wasn't the hard work, the bad food, the lack of privacy, the cold weather. It wasn't even the corporate cheapskates who run the place.

It was the people. It was more than just my constant issue with Too Many People.

It hasn't been easy for me since my first season (and I may have been blinded by Ice Love to the worst of that season, or I was just hopeful in my FNG innocence that it was the exception to the rule). I've had to scramble for moments of peace and bliss at McMurdo, between the crowds of people and their very often juvenile, mean behaviour, exacerbated by the corporate stranglehold on the place.

I don't mean to tar everyone with the same brush, but holy crap, there are enough of that ilk to taint the best of times in McMurdo.

When some of them work in the same department, then it's a huge issue. You don't "go home" when you finish work there. They are in your dorm, in your toilet, in the same line for food, one table over in the Galley, in the same knitting group, volunteering for the same activities, on the same few proscribed hiking routes at the same time, in the store, hanging up their coats next to yours, on the next computer over in the computer lab, drinking at the same bar. There is no recovery time from the people who abrade.

You could not pay me enough to return to Fuels at this point in McMurdo. As much as that department was able to offer me in terms of travel and ineffably Antarctic opportunities, we were not a good fit. As much as I truly enjoyed the work and many of my coworkers, I wasn't a great Fuelie. We won't miss each other.

However, you could pay me less to return to the South Pole in a different job.

I applied and was accepted and will be in Cargo/Materials next summer at the South Pole. I'm almost as excited about this as I was to be offered a position on Ice in the first place, 4 seasons ago. I LOVED my 5 week stint there the season before this. Watching the Polies transit through McMurdo to Pole in October was heartbreaking for me, because I wanted to go, too, where I fit better. I watched them go and was bereft, not only for missing them, but for being left behind in a McMurdo season that had already deteriorated to almost unbearable.

I couldn't get away far enough. I heal from people by withdrawing from the constant social pounding, by leaving the scene, by being alone. Though I had my dorm room blessedly and mostly to myself throughout the season, due to my and Brad's opposite work schedule, I still had to go to the Galley to eat, go the the loo to pee and shit. I still had to encounter the same people, and fake civility and sociability. By a certain point in the season, I was faking it with everyone. I felt like every time I left my room I skulked in the nonexistent shadows. Or that I was in drag and performing a sociable, happy, confident Genevieve that was simply not myself.

I bore it though, with gritted teeth and a greater need for the pleasure of working outdoors, preferably completely alone. But I was not in a good place, and was not able to achieve much of the inner poetry that Antarctica engenders in me, a rhythm to which I hum and vibrate when allowed the emotional freedom to do so. This season was heartbreaking for my inability to do much more than glumly notice the beauty around me. I was so trapped in my social misery the heaviness of spiteful, hateful people wore me down. And I couldn't share it, let alone allow myself the vulnerability to expose myself here. I hinted at the misery, I hinted at the beauty, but mostly I remained silent or spoke of less consequential things, like carrots.

But I am going back. But this time to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where I'll have no roommate, there's way fewer people, the food will be better, there's more space to get away from people even if I don't leave the elevated station, and the 360 degrees of curved white ice horizon will remind me just how much space there is in the world to get away in. Even if I don't.

posted by: coldwish at 19:24 | link | comments (1) |
fuels 2007-08

Aunt Genevieve Presents

The arrival of Abigail Virginia Eberhart Ellison on February 28th.

She's a redhead.

Let's all wish my brother, Andrew, luck, as he is smittten already.

Let's all wish my sister-in-law, Karen, a quick recovery and a baby who sleeps through the night.

They are thinking Abby as her name, but my mother pointed out her initials spell AVE Ellison, so she may be a little Ave, as in the Latin.

Hot damn, but I'm an AUNT!!!!

posted by: coldwish at 11:38 | link | comments (4) |
nz 2008