Midnight Delta Driver

Not only is that the name of one of my favorite songs, it is also now—well, me.  We got Tina Marie back from the garage and I took her out to do some wheel packing, which means driving back and forth over mushy piles of snow that develop on the snow road.  And even though it’s light outside around the clock there is still an appreciable difference in the sun’s angle, providing dusky pinks and oranges from 1 - 5am.  It is also quiet as most of the rest of town sleeps, particularly so as it’s been overcast and the weather has kept planes away, meaning I get plenty of time in the office with my knitting project.

view of Hut Point from the beach, 1am

Quite a stretch of cloudy skies has also meant soothing heathery grays:

inadvertent modern art sculpture at the airfield

So far the hardest part of working nights is figuring out what day it is.  Instead of making plans for “tomorrow,” my fellow midrats say, “See you in the lounge after the next sleep.”  (Midrats is a fun term leftover from the Navy days, shorthand for “midnight rations,” a.k.a. lunch.  It’s what we call the nightshift.)  So far the best part of working nights is waking up on my Saturday morning, eating breakfast, and heading to the bar to hear some bands because it’s 9pm.  Even after partying with my daytime friends ‘til they pumpkin, I’m barely halfway into my day off.  Then the nighttime hush steals over McMurdo once more, and we midrats revel in the speedy internet, explore unlocked corridors, and sit uninterrupted in the ethereal underwater murk of the observation tube to listen to seal space-laser noises.  Click to listen!

Night Lights

And just like that, it’s like I never left.  In this place, seasonal workers, wanderers, wilderness guides, bush pilots, and disaffected office workers rest their itchy feet and enjoy the sense of community.  My suitemates’ creativity transformed the bland white rectangles in which we live into a cozy den/entertaining hub.  Cat refers to “the house” and decorated her front door with a plastic cat skeleton; Will picks his banjo and eats lentils by the bearskin rug; Julie fills the air with bird calls and patriarchy-toppling dialog; and I look starry-eyed at the rocks and snow and invite people over for fancy cheese.

me and Gale on the snow road

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Sidebar: As someone once eloquently put it, there is an elasticity to time here.  The endless sunlight combines with the long work days, the long long weeks, and the high frequency and intensity of social interaction to transform time into something simultaneously fleeting and abundant.

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So I drive a van!  And a giant moon rover thing called a Delta!  But, um, not very often—at least, not yet.  The squally weather and subsequent delay setting up the airfield means we have fewer people to drive around.  We’ve done a lot of training and sharing of cautionary/mocking tales of accidents past.  There are checklists and daily duties, checking of dipsticks and lug nuts, and hours and hours of leisure reading.  Also, I’m working the nightshift the first half of the season.  The uncanniness of eternal light and eating breakfast for dinner just unleashed a new dimension of time.

The sun about to emerge from a week-long cloud bank.

Temporary Kiwis

Historically stormy weather caused 500 of us to pile up waiting to fly out of New Zealand.  This triggered contractual spoils: paid-for hotel + per diem (that’s per diem, mind you, not per weekum).  After sitting through eight hours of PowerPoint about repetitive motion injuries, trash-sorting protocol, and “harassment training” [sic], I whiled away a few days with brunch and botanic gardens.  And then, just after reuniting with old pals, we were torn asunder—supposedly, Christchurch ran out of hotel rooms.  With no room left at the inn, a select group was deported an hour away to the backwater of Methven.

The Methven 66, as we now call ourselves, were paired in tiny rooms with naught but a sliding wooden rectangle for toilet privacy.  At first the mood was grim: we scoffed at our white-bread-and-marmite continental breakfast, and the mountains taunted us far, far in the distance.

But we rallied like fucking champs.  I mean, really, things aren’t so bad when you’re being paid to hang out in a hotel.  And then you discover Tony’s Unlimited and Well-Worn Rental Cars and start hiking anywhere and everywhere.  How about a nice communal picnic on Sheep Poop Ridge?

photo credit: Tim Wenzel

Or an easy walk up Peak Hill, with just a dusting of snow?

After 12 days of fresh air and sunshine, more and less successful horse track betting (Abiento for the win!), dolphin viewing, hot pool lakeside lounging, dark sky star gazing, fierce Special Edition New Zealand Trivial Pursuit battles, and so very many meat pies, it was a shock to abruptly transport to Antarctica.  That’s right, I am here, please send mail, and remember our internet bandwidth = two cell phones’ worth of data.

This year I will make choral music happen.  This year I will unwind from a long day’s work not with a Coors Lite shower-beer but instead sip a thimbleful of chartreuse while luxuriating in my Parisian eveningwear.  With luck, there will be ancient glacier ice in my glass.

Hi, Bye!

I guess you could call me a francophile.  No country is perfect, but as compensation for the unabashed promotion of the feminine mystique, I'll take an efficient rail system, subsidizing of pastries, and this fairytale-quality medieval abbey:

Mont-Saint-Michel is stunning.  It sits on a large rock plopped onto a tidal flat that stretches for miles, allowing intrepid visitors to squelch around in the mud around it half the time and alternately gaze it awe at the natural moat that forms around it.

Is that not magical and otherworldly?!?!

But also: Aud's wedding!  Turkish baths with Marta!  Buttery croissants, buttery omelets, multiple forms of soft-as-butter roast pork!  Somehow it was sunny and warm for a week straight in London; also somehow I managed to have a cold for half this trip.  Such a lovely variety of English roses adorned our bouquets, an amount I once would have termed splentiful-spledgible.  The crustless glories and light creamy dainties of high tea, kaleidoscopically delicious Indian dishes, roast and Yorkshire pudding, bao steamed buns, not to mention an unparalleled literary tradition...apparently I am something of an Anglophile.

So it is with a huge store of good things done and consumed that I briefly pause before heading south again to Antarctica.  I will thwart the calendar and continue along with summer (or "summer," what with freezing temperatures), and doubly abscond with time as the sun won't set for five months.  During that long afternoon, I would love you, kind friends, to send notes, funny stories, pictures of flowers, cool stickers, and/or poignant satire when you have the chance.

Claire Veligdan
PSC 769 Box 700
APO-AP 96599-9998
claireveligdan @ gmail.com

Senior Year Abroad

I suppose it’s official now that I signed a contract, am verified tuberculosis-free, and passed the rectal exam with flying colors: I’m going back to Antarctica!  I have metamorphosed to my third phase:

1) cafeteria lady (‘14-16)

2) telephone switchboard operator (‘16-17)

3) bus driver/penguin chauffeur (‘18-19)

Everybody pile into the van, it’s time to drive with extreme prudence!  If I’m lucky, I will pilot the mythic-stature conveyance knows as Ivan the Terrabus:

One of the best parts of being a professional Vehicle Operator is that, to clarify radio communication, I attain the moniker Shuttle Claire.  While not overly creative, it is nonetheless a nickname, something I’ve long (semi-)secretly desired.*

*Cat, I’m embarrassed I asked, but it was kind of you to indulge me with Beans.

**Spence, I adore that you and you alone call me C-Money.

***Tim, I don’t think it counts as a nickname since you actually just think my name is Emma.  Thank you for remembering to say Claire at my wedding.

****Si vous m’adressez en français, vous pouvez m’apeller Sabine.

It’s been…whoa, shit…almost a year, guys.  I missed writing here.  But it didn’t seem like the right place to report on my experiences with online ESL homework, laminated dough and pie baking techniques, or attempting to charm the local 29-year-old male population.  Here are a few key takeaways:

- English language learners benefit from both aural-visual and kinesthetic lesson plans.

- Bake croissants at a high temperature, such as 425F, to prevent butter leakage.

- Pipefitters know all the good dick jokes.

- When a guy says it’s been a while since he was on a date and holds up a splayed palm, he might be indicating not five weeks or months, but years. When a guy says, “Nothing surprises me anymore,” it might turn out his ex-gf was a prostitute.

- When I like a guy I will commit unspeakable acts, such as petting his dog and enduring it licking my face.

That’s mostly it.  My family is awesome, Matt and I are in touch, my friends are there to help celebrate with fine wine or commiserate with Boone’s Farm, we had a real northern MI winter with a fuckload of wonderful snow, I swim and eat good cheese and take pictures of pretty flowers.

I will likely submit dispatches from a Euro adventure in September (Aud wedding! Historically accurate British vintage car race! Marta-Paris-cheese-baguette party!)—and then it’s back to the Ice again, for season four of fantastic people, places, and things* bathed in eternal sunshine.

*OMG YES NOUNS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

P.S. - Okay, I did try to come up with a version of the blog for life here. Inspired by the at-times-comically-inane rural weeklies, I called it The Boardman Courier and Mail, Rucksack Local Edition.  I never got further than the almanac.  Its mission statement: “Our intrepid reporters will cover the minutest neighborhood developments, the narrowest of civic pursuits, ever endeavoring to fulfill our motto: cogitare umbilicus.”

And the Winner Is…Comté

Forty days is a lot, but still kind of short.  Exactly half of those days I woke up and scurried off to class, to train a sluggish brain to re-conceive the world.  The goal is not to translate, but to forge new paths of comprehension.  One at-first-mind-boggling conflation for me was that of sensory perception—sentir (“sense”) is used to describe feeling (physical as well as emotional), smelling, and tasting.  And parfum typifies scent as well as flavor.  But think of how evocative it is to, for instance, sense garlic: do you really taste alone without smelling?  Is the taste not accompanied by various sensations such as a peppery bite, a lingering pungency?

Will, does this have to do with Pokemon?

Speaking of complex flavors, after much sampling and reflection, I have concluded that my favorite French cheese is Comté.  It’s pretty much just fancy swiss cheese, but it’s perfect in every way.  Aside from traveling well, you can sink your teeth into it, it’s tangy and rich and bright, and it is fantastic alone and goes with everything.  Apparently lots of other people feel this way, as it is the most-produced AOC* French cheese.

*government quality regulation

Thank you for following along on this trip to France—and huge thanks to Marta for hosting me and sharing her life well lived.  What’s next is a surprise.  Tune in to find out if I:

- return to the regularly scheduled program “Antarctica Part IV: Ice-Shattering Adventures in Cargo Loading and Unloading”

- enroll in more gratuitous educational courses and “Teach English in Mystery Country”

- manhandle questionable meat while awaiting auroras at “Alaskan Winter Truck Stop”

The Future Simple

After a mere eighteen language lessons, we were asked to project what our lives will entail in 2040.  In class we took turns impersonating palm readers, and later I waxed poetic in my written homework.  Inspired by my fantastically-romantic writer-hero Patrick Leigh Fermor, I will swim the Hellespont at an advanced age (I’ll be 57)—and do him one better, reciting Byron’s verses in between breaststrokes (another Europe-to-Asia swim club member).  The future conditional (to say nothing of the subjunctive) is a beautifully nuanced construction.  In English it’s so concrete to say “If I see him, I will talk to him”; I rather like the French finessing of the verb to express the potentiality of the action, with conjugative elements of the infinitive, future, and imperfect all wrapped up in one word (“Si je lui vu, je lui parlerai”): I totalkperchancewill to him.

Crossing the bridge to the medieval quarter of Lyon, where verisimilitude = bed bugs.

All last week the city slowed.  One by one the bakeries put up notices of August closure and the dive-bomb buzz of motorbike engines lessened.  It was doubly surprising to find that Lyon, France’s second largest city, was simultaneously near-abandoned and stuffed with tourists.  Lyon, I cannot fathom why in the still of summer holidays you hosted some WNBA showcase with commentary amplified to fifty miles around until after midnight in addition to posting willfully atonal brass bands on every third corner.  And in case I didn’t get the hint that Lyon doesn’t like me…bedbugs.  Universe, you were supposed to check off the box for failed/traumatic youth hostel stay when I was, like, 20: why did you wait until now?

Luckily, the near future (at the moment of bedbug horror) was good.  In French, any plans further down the road than the next hour or so qualify for the future simple:  

-What are you going to do today?  

-I will meet up with a friend, we’ll catch up, go eat a delicious lunch, drink a glass of wine, and then walk around town for a while.  

No finessing layers of meaning into as few words as possible; just, simply, the future.