Thanksgiving...

Thanksgiving.

All dressed up and ping ponging with friends...

Including my long-time email contact friend of a friend -
Laura, who helped me while applying to come down here

Indeed. The festivities began quite in advance of our Saturday evening meal. First we received a large amount of fresh vegetables. Then we had volunteer prepping time all week in the evenings, culminating to the quintessential home-cooked thanksgiving dinner, that we were are all unable to make for one reason or another (crazy enough to be working here is the most popular excuse). As goes with any good day off in these parts the after(anythinig)-party will be present.

So I signed up for the potato peeling party. This is pretty darn exciting because it means our mashed potatoes won't come out of a box! Teems of polies (those who work at pole) signed up for this task, which with many hands and the guidance or our own James Brown (Pole Chef Extraordinaire) only took an hour. Of course I didn't get to touch the potatoes. I got the Beets! One of my favorite vegetables and still with bits of soil attached. Euphoria. Tom Robbins said it best:

"THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious... The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies" And here they are, at the pole!



I also managed to chop up some cucumber, carrot, and pepper to round out the euphoria. Pub trivia, happening in the same room gave a thrilling distraction to the spaces between prep work. Amongst other polar topics, the oddities of the people around us was the evening's theme! Who grew up with such and such diva rock star? Who modeled hats in Las Vegas for four years?

The next night: pie night. Pumpkin, Apple, and Pecan the stars of the evening, my emergency logistics team leader busied himself with the bread for the stuffing. We had to have the best logistics team at pole to handle this ultra-important ingredient!

The finale: Three candle-lit seatings with all our friends and neighbors dressed in their best; ordeurves in the hallway kept company by live music;

Wine stewards who we all knew perhaps too well, armed with a plethora of wines; mod lighting;

and of course excellent food. Swing dancing, an 80's dance and a bucket full of sangria that we all dove into and then backed far far away from finished off this start to the holiday season. Our two-day weekend treated us well giving us all the opportunity to explore the best sledding mounds, finish that book we've been reading (mine was "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" - excellent), play some sports and write some letters to you lovely folk on the dirt side.

Hope you all had a great holiday as well!

All Points north

So where to go from here? Well the pole of course! Good bye Mt. Erebus, good bye moon, good bye dirt, good bye Hotel California...

Loose that jets and the wheels; those things don't work down here. It's props and skis from here on out. Our LC-130 and the lovely folks from the NY Air National Guard who brought it to us. They just arrived down here the same week, and have begun their tireless shuttling of people and things (LOTS of fuel) to and from the Pole. They arrived from similar activities they were pursuing in Greenland, at another US research base there. (Many workers and one carp i work with also make this seasonal trip). So here it is, Hercules equipped with skis and little jets on the back, for that extra push getting off the ice with a heavy load.

All packed in and ready for an exciting ride, we contemplated the 50s era seat belts and helped each other pull with all our might to tighten them; we were off. Our flight took about 5 hours, for most of which the only thing to see out the window was the two-mile thick ice sheet covering the continent. We were only a little disappointed when the landing was smoother than a commercial jet. Maybe it was the skis? or the snow? or both? The thrill seekers in us were not sated, but we were all happy to land safely in the hands of our excellent pilots.

So what now? We get off the plane. We're home. Enjoy the view. You know, you can see the curvature of the earth down here.

Oh, yes, and enjoy the weather!

This is a screen that scrolls constatntly all day long showing temp, wind chill, wind speed and virtual altitude (here just a bit over 11000 feet.) Of course this is just an example. When we arrived it was about -50 F with a windchill below -70 F. The weather above, however, was probobly more uncomfortable due to the windspeed. I think you may be able to get current weather at southpole.usap.gov.

McMurdo

Climbing off the plane, we all finally realized what we had just done. But it took days for this to sink in. Not unlike the Grand Canyon, the landscape was all but imperceptible. The idea that we had just landed a gigantic airplane on an ocean, albeit a frozen one, was a little bizarre. And then there were the funny machines... A world quite alien. So many had been here before us, but not 100 years ago Shackleton got stuck here trying to traverse the continent for the first time, not 50 years ago was the first permanent base established.



Mt. Erebus, the local active volcano, steams or smokes most of the time. It is a rare type of volcano because it has a constant lake of molten lava present. Only two in the world like this one. this is actually on Ross Island, just off the coast but connected by the Ross ice shelf



A Delta from the 80's used for carrying people here and there. There are other containers attached to the back for carrying fuel, water, etc... I Can't remember this one's name, but it surely has one, just like every piece of equipment or building around here.

McMurdo, our destination for a couple of days, is the biggest base of human habitation on the Continent. It sports one of the only existing manual-set bowling alleys, the worlds southern-most pottery studio, the Hotel California (where I slept), the most amazing views of anything I have seen in my life, and... oh yes, lots of fascinating science.

Climbing atop Observation Hill for a great view in all directions, I met a guy who is driving with a team of scientists across the continent collecting data on stable isotopes of H2o. My iterest has only amplified as I've learned of the sea life in this all but uninhabitable place. In the lab there is a "touch tank" where you can pick up and hold all sorts of familiar but somehow very strange animals. The spindly under-water spider the size of the hand I held it in was particularly thrilling. There are science lectures and periodic tours of labs at both McMurdo and South Pole.

The lecture I attended last evening was on the form of the universe by a fellow who is looking back in time to light and sound waves produced during the "big bang". The basic idea is that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, and therefore we can see all the way back in time to the big bang, and then darkness beyond (The light from stars far yonder has not had a chance, nor will it ever reach earth) It all came home with a firey analogy to ping-pong, which I would love to tell you more about, but perhaps over a game of foosball (I have lots of international friends, and partial isolation helping to hone my skills - so watch out 2012 Olympics!), and coffee with instant hot chocolate mixed in (my new favorite break-time beverage, especially with the home-made peanut butter cookies).


Check out some pics of the Ice Caves trip I managed to squeeze into in my two days at McMurdo!

Highlights also included a stop at Scott's hut (an early 20th century antarctic explorer),

and a penguin! (This is a somewhat rare and priveledged sighting as many work here for years without seeing one)

As an aside we managed to get incredibly nice weather while here, to the point at which the sun melded enough snow to make puddles of muddy water on the ground, hence McMurdo's nickname: MuckMurdo. It gets very muddy here in the summertime, apparently a constant challenge to the maintenance crews. In short, I know the weather is unpredictable and sometimes worse here than at pole, but it kind of felt like cheating! On to Pole!

So I'm a little behind on starting this blog. Only two weeks really, but so much has happened, and continues to happen, that I can hardly imagine conveying it all to this place. If you aren't in the mood to read lots of words, perhaps you shouldn't and just check out the pictures! But here it goes!

In a place far far away (from me currently), and for the past couple of years, two friends of mine have told many a tale of their years as snow birds. Of course, they strayed off the typical course and found themselves so far south, that there was no more south to be had, and stayed there for several months. Someone gave them shovels, and though it was a punishing -70 degree windchill at times, they merrily went about the work of unburying a world that succumbs to the nature of wind and subsequent accumulation of huge amounts of snow each and every winter. They said the sun never went down and the dance parties were unmatched, a phenomenon apparently attributable to intense solar radiation and canned peaches. Of course I was blown away by all these extremes and excesses, and found out that there is a whole community of seasonal work in this mystical place called the south pole, and jobs are at the whim of your fingertips, and a simple 30 minute phone interview with a guy named Dog. Fast forward nine months or so, and here we find a moose in an unexpected hemisphere. In fact, in three hemispheres all at once. But this is jumping ahead. My hope is to tell you a little bit about the adventure of getting here in the first place.

Leaving home is something I do a lot of, and since I have lived many places, I get to come back home quite often and have a load of different experiences. Most recently, and in rare form, I have found myself quite attatched to a home in the Northern most reaches of VA, in a community of farms and farmers. Leaving home felt a little strange for a second, and at the airport, while being dropped by two dear friends, I had a moment of home-sickness. Since then I have been through a hurricane of air travel, new faces, corporate jargon, and timeless beauty.

After a slough of domestic flights and days of (b)orientation in Denver, I found myself at the LAX Quantas terminal. This was exciting because it reminded me of Rainman, the only reference I have for Quantas in my life, and that they have never crashed a plane. (A comforting detail when one is about to fly over the abyss of the largest body of water on earth). I got to see (and thought until the last minute) I would be riding on their giant new airbus plane. This thing is huge. How do we humans do it? In conclusion, Quantas is a much nicer airline than I am used to, and all things considered, it was a tolerable 14 hour flight to Oceania.


















New Zealand found me gasping for breath, first at the fairyland beauty, and second every time my shuttle driver made a left. I got such a brief though breathtaking view of such a small and urban part of the country that I will have to reserve my praise for future adventure stories. 'nuf said. I landed here in time for election news, and some interesting election celebration posters. A very important topic all over the world. This was the main topic of conversation (aside from the irish dancing) at the Pub.

So on the morning of my departure, myself and a pile of what I would guess to be 100 folks, woke up at 4 AM, and piled onto a retired military cargo plane wearing a ridiculous amount of clothing. Probably the warmest, though certainly not the hipest clothes i will ever possess, they are currently keeping me alive! We had a ball trying everything on and requesting different kinds of Extreme Cold Weather Gear, or ECW's. I know it's out there and as soon as i find it I'll post an ECW Calendar-boy photo. I promise.

We came from places such as farms, offices, fire crews, construction sites, laboratories, Italy, France, NY, and even one friend from Martha's Vinyard. I think I am the only one from the mid-Atlantic. So they were taking us to Antarctica of course. Where else would such an odd assortment of uniformly overdressed strangers be headed to? (Yes, of course a Civil War re-enactment was a good guess)


My companions and I affectionately compared riding aboard the C-17 to Space Mountain. There are very few windows, so your experience is largely transmitted through surprise feelings of the world falling away and gravity shifting in that way that makes your parents sick to their stomachs. We loved it. That and the nice National Guard folks (who seem to all wear giant ears just like that trillion dollar disney icon) even let us into their private chamber where they controlled the ride.




The first views of the sea-ice and mountains were euphoric. It must have been a similar feeling to seeing the earth from space, an image we are all familiar with, but have no realistic reference for. The whole plane was giddy. And I don't think it was the Liquid O2 (They forgot any mention of this in the safety talk).

Why?

A question that has been all-too familiar to me over the past 6 months of Antarctic planning. Why? Why would you want to do that? I've given a plethora of answers, none of which satisfied me. Is it interesting? Is it the science? How about the challenge? Someone even suggested it was just something interesting to tell the girls!

Well, it is definitely interesting, there is no lack of science or the sharing of it, and there is a challenge in every move you make, but really I can't say in words what caught my eye about coming down here. I can simply say I'm glad I did and I'm glad to share my experience here. So here it is, my journey into public blogs and to 90 degrees south, all at once.

So put on your dancing shoes, get out your giant red parka, and curl up with your favorite mug full of hot cocoa for me. It's all ice from here!