Homeward Bound

If I had to create a slogan for this country, it might be: New Zealand -- cultivator of our better selves.  The colors are vibrant, the mountains steep, the rivers clean, and the poached eggs and hollandaise plentiful.  Just as important, though, the people are friendly, helpful, and moderate, in the best sense of the word.  It's adorable that even punk teenagers call out "thank you" to drivers when exiting buses; it's inspiring to see people hiking with strapped-on babies and little kids, or well into their 70s.  And I know it's a self-selecting group, but everyone that gave me a ride hitch hiking was interesting and open-hearted.

New Zealand is the metaphorical train station between Antarctica and the real world.  You leave one behind and have to wait a bit before materializing in the other, because they can't possibly both exist simultaneously.  NZ *feels* like the normal world, it has cars and restaurants and grass and kittens -- but it's far, far from home.  And NZ *feels* like an extension of Antarctica, because Ice friends are around and we don't have normal-life responsibilities and can still live in our somewhat utopian-communal/cycle-of-virtue fashion.

Anyway, I did a lot of great hiking, camping, gardening, and eating.  I saw crazy amazing night skies, ate so very much peanut butter, and surprised myself by being quite gregarious.  I could tell you about it in greater detail but a picture is worth 10^3 words.  So I’ll save you pages of reading:

walking along the ridge, Lake Angelus

hitching & camping extraordinaire, Farewell Spit

baybee seeel, Kaikoura

Baby Bird

Holy crap, guys, so much penguin action!  Adelies hunkering down on rocks, toddling around the middle of town, trying to catch a ride in a van:

Why walk when you can flap?

And now we do all the goodbyes and last-minute partying and deer-in-the-headlights realization that we're all headed back to the world.  We even have a Goodbye Gauntlet, with people lining up in tunnel formation, to hug and smile and wave as people leave for each flight.  It has been such a fun season.  Like always, I'm not particularly itching to leave, but I'm looking forward to New Zealand, and then Alaska, and then back again.

Seasonal work forces you to exercise the letting-go muscle.  Things ramp up, wind down, and then are lost in the rearview mirror before you know where you are.  But I still hold by a certain sentiment, with apologies to Lord Tennyson: It is better to have eaten too much cake and barfed than never to have eaten cake at all.  I think.  I'm a little confused, and nauseas, so I might have misquoted.

See you in Michigan, Alaska, Antarctica, or wherever you let me sleep on your couch in exchange for cooking dinner!

It does eventually set.  Also, penguins on the bottom right.

fwends

Land of Milk and Honey

If you're not an early explorer that suffered frostbite and unimaginable deprivation, Antarctica is a sort of promised land, a land of endless sensual delights.  Ok, I tend focus a lot on the food-related ones, but also: alternating snowflakes and warm sunshine on your face; the smell of fresh cedar in the sauna; color-spectrum-expanding electric blue ice; hypnotically soothing wave action washing over the stony coast.

It's getting to be that time of year all the good free stuff shows up in Skua.

Anyway, back to food (and drink).  We have been enjoying apples and broccoli every day now.  Other people get really into the return of salad; give me three apples a day.  I brought some wine and a variety of candy to share at dinner one night, but the real key to spreading joy and increasing your popularity is doling out a giant box of ice cream.  Despite Frosty Boy, our beloved non-dairy frozen dessert, there is no actual ice cream.  There is some at the South Pole, though sources tell me it is stored in close proximity to gasoline and you have to dig out the center to minimize the off-taste. A lucky few folks out in the field get a half-gallon to, say, celebrate an otherwise culinarily lackluster holiday in a tent in the middle of nowhere.  Scott Base down the hill, however, knows what they're doing, and built an entire room just for ice cream.  That is where the invaluable giant box came from, ten sacred pounds of Hokey Pokey, delicate vanilla studded with golden nuggets of toffee.

Just to be clear, the contents of this shipping container will

defoliate trees and suck fish out of the water upside-down.

And brunch is back.  The resupply boat finally pulled out of harbor in the early morning hours, unfreezing alcohol sales, bringing a reprieve from gangbusters work scheduling, and making way for the enormous platters of cheese and donuts that assuage the tumult of another week.  I am quite a happy lady with creamy and sharp wedges, maybe a gherkin or two.

In fact, the only way improve upon brunch might be a select second seating, with a picnic blanket, on top of a hill, the better to watch for whales in the open waters before you.

Prevailing Winds

Hey February, 'sup.  You brought a good couple blankets of snow, and then blew it all around like crazy.  I feel bad for the people working to offload the resupply boat, but in addition to being pretty and wild, the weather is also swiftly removing the sea ice -- to the tune of scores of square miles a day.  There is open water in front of town.    I saw the telltale spurt of water from a whale blowing his nose.  Aaaaaaand an adorable camouflaged penguin.

Balletic coordination of vessel ops from above

Can you see him?

This molting fellow was a little bonus following a triumphant dodgeball battle.  To be clear, my inferior ball handling wasn't what put us on top, but I did run sufficiently swiftly to grab a ball at the start a couple times, and I had a rather intimidating mark on my belly that we flashed at the opposing team.  I was (and still am, thanks Sharpee) the sixth character spelling out "CARGO!?"* 
*I was playing with some Cargo guys.

Because of the resupply vessel, we had to forego brunch this weekend.  Luckily, in my moment of need, months-overdue package mail arrived, so I supplemented the day-old bread and month-old fridge-tasting butter in my room with fancy chocolate, dried figs and apricots, almond butter, and my roommate's divine coffee.  But next week, the stars should align and there will be baked brie AND maple syrup on my pancakes, and they will have to hunt me down to get me to leave this wonderful place.

Open Water

Yesterday a group of us shed our habituated, nonchalant attitudes and end-of-season ennui, giddily crowded the bow of a boat, and went on an Antarctic cruise.  The icebreaker needed to make another pass through the channel (read: empty its toilet tanks away from station), and for the first time in eight years they ferried some of us out with them.  There are glamorous jobs down here that involve flying helicopters to unique geographical formations and penguin colonies; the rest of us spend six months driving loaders on dusty roads to pick up trash, or treading the maze through the kitchen hundreds of thousands of times, looking forward to taking out the trash because it’s the only time you go outside.  In Shuttles, I’m pretty lucky to drive the seven miles out to the airfield every day, but I still qualify for this trip to the edge of the sea ice.

Actually, it took an hour to work our way out from the pier.

It was mercifully not windy, and the sun came out for a bit.  Sitting on deck and peering past the guardrail, we became tourists again, exclaiming as enormous chunks of blue-hued ice broke free and bobbed, lackadaisical seals lifted their heads to wonder at the commotion, and penguins toddled in the distance.  Chugging along in the channel, we were overtaken by a sensory novelty: the briny smell of saltwater.  Near the edge, where the ice thinned, we broke a new path.  The ice first cracked, then cleaved with satisfying low booms like distant thunder, then seawater rushed to fill the deep fissures.  The open water was black under the overcast sky, its calm immensity undisturbed (disappointingly for us) by whales.

The ice near the edge appeared to be five or six feet thick,

though softer/slushier on the bottom than further inland.

It was the icing on the cake, if you will, to the week, which included a job interview for Alaska, NASA movie night featuring Robert Redford robbing banks, ducking into the historic hut and seeing hundred-year-old dog biscuits, a doomed (for our team) but fun Canadian-themed trivia night, and the trifecta of hike+dinner+Flight of the Conchords with one of my favorite people.

Is it another kind of biscuit?

Boatloads

After staring across the white plane of the frozen Ross Sea for several months, a boat on the horizon is like a benign UFO, patiently clearing a path from the ice edge, revealing water.  In the distance the icebreaker looks like a new high-rise building that popped up overnight.  It doesn’t seem to move, but within twelve hours, it’s suddenly in front of town, towering above the ice, the insistent drone of the diesel engines joining the industrial chorus of town machinery.  Though slow, it is inexorable: the hundred or so seals lounging in its path lazily shifted position, some encircled by the turnaround loop the ship carves.  Hundreds more seals have convened further up the ice, generously sprinkled across the ridges and melt pools in front of Scott Base.

I finally made it to the bar at Scott Base this season.  A friend played guitar and sang, so the usual boisterous-can-of-sardines vibe was, thankfully, tamed.  And I got to enjoy a Shuttles perk—stealth pick up and ride over the hill when the regular shuttle van was already full.

There and Back Again

Autumn set in all at once, the temps plunging down to the teens, with unforgiving chill winds, and I wore my hat for the first time in weeks.  Shaggy-haired, somewhat-greasy people are returning from field camps, scientists are packing up their samples, and shipping containers are trundling around town, like offerings raised high on forklifts, in preparation for the annual resupply boat. 

This year the boat is packed with construction materials to update and expand station.  But more importantly, it will have some fresh fruits and veggies to perk us up and mercifully end the fascist parade of beige and brown that has usurped the cafeteria.  Some cook friends admitted that we are pretty much down to Scandinavian Blend™ (a sad and non-sequitur frozen medley: cauliflower+green beans+carrots=Norway???), and corn, both cobbed and cobless.  I’m not sure when Iowa tricked society into thinking corn is a vegetable, but it is not. 

To change things up a bit, last night a friend and I got tarot card readings from a bearded, plaid shirted, Alaska ice road construction guy.  It was less of a mystical-read-your-future experience and more a self-acceptance therapy session.  He shuffled and dealt, and the cards provided a jumping off point for discussing troublesome feelings.  Around us, the Coffee House was filled with relaxed Sunday night chatter, softly clinking glasses, trills of laughter and rolled Rs from the Spanish Club, door hinges creaking to announce friends’ arrival, heavy comfortable chairs scuffing across the floor into sociable arrangement.

Home Stretch

Post-holidays, it always feels as though the season is careening downhill to the finish.  People solidify post-Ice travel plans and scramble to apply for next year’s jobs (not to mention upcoming summer jobs back in the states).  At this point, the toll of accumulated net loss of sleep, battle of attrition with staying hydrated, and state of simultaneous pale-yet-sunburned skin is impossible to brush aside. 

Who's got two flappy arms and a chill chill vibe?  This guy.

But take heart, ye lads and lasses—there’s still six weeks of eternal sunshine, with gobs of fun to be had.  My daytime schedule has opened many fun avenues, including singing.  The week was full to the brim.  Play (and win) a ‘lil trivia and euchre; clomp around the gym in a stranger’s worn out sneakers and shoot a few hoops; marvel at a friend’s travelogue about running a marathon in North Korea; delight in the creative works at the McMurdo Alternative Art Gallery (bonus: a hot tip about ten penguins down the road); sip a beer to the dulcet tones of various guitar-playing carpenters, the shop machinery and tools artfully draped with canvas to create an industrial-warehouse-club-vibe.

Even during work, I luck out and pull my van over so various passengers and I can observe a lone emperor penguin navigating a hiking trail.  And when I happen to get the 2pm run, it’s a chance to chat with lovely galley friends, who maybe bestow an extra filet mignon on me as they tidy the kitchen before we leave.

And to completely banish thoughts of the season ending, spend a glorious eight-hour softball tournament amongst ribald hecklers, laughing through heavy snow and random bird attacks, grinning beneath your scarf when the boy you like hits his sixth home run of the day, and when he sprints to catch a drive to the outfield, and when he high-fives his teammates, victorious, and you are happy together in this place.