Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  That was plain perverse. After wandering the planet for years, he had chosen for his home one of the few places on Earth where he wasn’t allowed to stay. Everyone has to leave for at least two months every summer; if you don’t, they’re afraid that you will go crazy. I didn’t say a word, but my face obviously showed what I was thinking. Jake burst out laughing, acknowledging an unspoken hit. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘It’s ironic that after travelling so hard for so long I’ve found the one place where I want to stay, and they won’t let me.’

  The first two winters, he worked as a general Mr Fix-It, but since then he had been operating the heavy machinery—the big macho snow cats—moving snow, fuelling the outer buildings, doing water runs, bringing in food for the galley or raw materials for construction. He quickly discovered that even in the full darkness it was easier to operate without lights. You learned to spot something on the horizon that was darker than the rest, something that you would want to avoid. And once in a while you could motor up to the flag line and buzz the scientists, pretending not to see them and making them jump.

  The cats can operate all the way to -80°F. Down to -85°F they can do station-critical things like gathering snow for the water melter. But if it had been below this for days, Jake would sit glued to his monitor, here in the shack, watching for the moment the temperature rose. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s noon or three in the morning, as soon as it hits -80°F I’m out of the door. Because it hasn’t started blowing yet. I could have a window of twelve hours, three days, or two hours before it warms up enough that it starts blowing like hell.’

  The other main hazard, he said, was the sugar snow. These are crystals that have been blown around so much by the storms that they have lost all their delicate limbs and are just lumpish squares. For snow crystals to stick together, they need to have barbs. Sugar snow doesn’t cohere. It’s more like quicksand. If you drive a cat into a patch of sugar snow, it’s like going down in an elevator shaft; you could drop more than three feet before you get some kind of traction. Sugar snow is almost impossible to see on the surface, but when you’re backing out you can tell the difference in the texture. You can apparently taste the difference, too.

  Jake, it turned out, was an inveterate snow taster. He started telling me about the taste of the different crystals in the archways of the Dome. They were quite musty in places, where the growing icicle had taken on board gases from the power plant, or from loading trucks, keeping an inadvertent record of everything that happened in the air around them.

  But his favourite thing to do, on his time off, in that freezing, lifeless darkness, was to go outside and watch sastrugi grow. These are great, sculpted waves of snow, which make the plateau look like a frozen ocean. In summer, they are delicate, as if rippled by an invisible breeze. But with the powerful winds of winter they can grow into behemoths. And Jake would watch them do it.

  ‘It starts with just a few grains, the way the wind crosses and hatches, and those minuscule crystals hook on to each other and form this goliath, four feet high and twenty feet long. And it’s constantly changing throughout the season. You can lay down out there, under a full moon or a really good aurora show and you can watch it fucking happen. It’s alive. Anybody who comes here for the winter and says it’s boring, dead, there’s nothing going on, is a stupid fool with their eyes closed. There is so much happening, you just have to be aware of it.’

  He leaned back and lit another cigarette.

  ‘You don’t talk like someone pitching himself against elements,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think you’d make it through a winter if you did,’ he replied. ‘I love watching those guys who come in with that swagger, and you know they’ll be sucking their thumb and asking for momma by July.’ And then he grinned. ‘There’s nothing wrong with sucking your thumb and asking for momma, that’s normal. Everyone should do that. It’s the macho attitude that’s the problem.

  ‘This place has a lot of patience. Think about it. A glacier sculpts mountains. And when that’s happening, where are you? You’re nothing, you’re tiny. You’re insignificant. So if you walk in here with that attitude of “I’m going to kick this place’s ass”, you’re wrong.’

  We had been talking for nearly two hours now. I changed the disc on my recorder and Jake poured us each another slug of whisky.

  ‘You must have been here for the medevac,’ I said. In 2001 the Polies achieved the first, and only, medical evacuation ever done from there in the dark. Jake brightened. ‘That’s probably one of the highlights of my entire life,’ he said. ‘It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done.’

  It was at the beginning of April that the station doctor, Ron Shemenski, reported a problem. He had been feeling more and more ill and was now in agony. For the doctor to be getting sick was especially bad news. The two people on station you really can’t afford to lose are the doctor and the power plant mechanic. If a scientist or carpenter gets sick, the job goes on hold; if the cook gets sick everyone can get by on macaroni cheese. But the power plant mechanic and the doctor together equal the life-support system of the whole station.

  But then it became clear that the problem was even worse than that. What the doctor had was seriously life-threatening. He had passed a gallstone and suspected that he had pancreatitis. Though he didn’t want to leave, the physicians back in the US told him he had to get out of there or he probably wouldn’t make it through the winter.

  Though the Hercules flights to the Pole were long over and the sun had already set, there was still a chance of rescue if everyone acted fast. This was a job for the cowboys, the Twin Otter planes that could slip into places on bumpier air strips and colder temperatures than the Hercs could dream of. But there was almost no time left. Twin Otters could only make small hops. They would have to fly from their home base in Canada down to the bottom of South America, and then hop over Drake Passage to land at the only available airstrip on the Peninsula, at the British Rothera research station, while one of them remained on standby and the other continued on to the Pole. And Rothera’s airstrip would be accessible for only a few more weeks.

  The Otters scrambled, and Jake and his colleagues at the Pole began their preparations. They took down the flag line that crossed the skiway, and they started trying to make a decent runway for the Otter to touch down on. It was so dark, and the steam and smoke were so thick that Jake couldn’t see the front of the snow cat’s blade. The temperature was south of -90°F, and there was almost no friction on the snow. They wanted to make a strip like marble, but it was more like wet cement. The pilots of the Twin Otter were risking their lives coming in here; everything depended on a safe landing. By the time the plane came in and made a faultless touchdown on the snow, without even doing a practice fly by, Jake had been working thirty hours straight.

  ‘It was brutal, but we took care of it. We took care of our own. That felt pretty good. And then we were talking to a couple of people in Rothera on the satellite phone. They sent some T-shirts down and we sent some T-shirts back. It ties you together. We knew that there was another brotherhood, another clan, ten hours’ flight away, who we would never see, we would never meet, but they just helped save one of our guys. It ties this frozen continent together. I get a tingle even now when I think about it. I don’t even know who those guys are.’

  Now he had tears in his eyes. There is something truly striking about that warmth in Antarctica, which transcends the boundaries in the outside world. Here, it seems that what matters most is that you are Antarctican.

  And, then, Jake took me by surprise.

  ‘I was there in 2000 when we lost Rodney Marks,’ he said.

  I held my breath. Rodney Marks: the only person ever to die at the Pole in winter; the one whose unexplained death had cast a silent shadow over every winter since, and yet who remained out of conversational bounds. ‘Nobody will talk to you about it,’ Nick Tothill said. But now Jake Speed, of all people, was doing just that. ‘He was an incredibl
e guy,’ Jake was saying. ‘Talk about a renaissance man. He taught us all astronomy courses that year. But he also had a purple Mohawk haircut when he was going through customs in New Zealand. When they were suspicious of him and asked “What do you do?” he replied, “I’m a scientist.” He loved pushing their buttons.’

  I waited for one beat. Two. And then Jake said: ‘I was in there when he died in my hands.’

  That was my opening. And three weeks ago when I first arrived on station, I would probably have taken it. I would have gone straight in there, asking him: what does it feel like to have one of your colleagues die in your arms? What was the atmosphere on station? Were people scared? Were you scared? Did you think you might be next? And yet, sitting there in Jake’s cabin, I didn’t dare. The pain in his eyes as he spoke about Rodney was almost indecent to witness.

  ‘I wasn’t going to mention it,’ I said.

  ‘That’s OK,’ he replied. He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Everything’s intense here. Obviously the weather and the climate, but I don’t think that’s the most intense thing. It’s the people, the interactions that you have with them, that’s what hooked me. In winter here you’ve got a small tight-knit group, a very small tribe. You’re all in it together, there’s no titles, there’s no job description, there’s no HR, there’s no bullshit.

  ‘Even though your professions may be profoundly different, you can maintain this wholesome, unique, excellent friendship. Nowhere else are you going to meet a carpenter, a high-energy astrophysicist, a cook and an administrator, who will be having dinner together on a nightly basis. I’ve never seen something so dynamic in the outside world as I have this place in the winter. It’s out of control.’

  By this point, I’d almost forgotten about Jake’s Carhartt overalls, but I noticed again how battered they were. Bill Henrickson had been right; Jake was indeed a deep thinker, and he was also one of the least macho people I had ever met. So why on earth did he insist on reusing his clothing every year? Just to show off what an old hand he was?

  ‘What’s the story about the Carhartts?’

  ‘Well, um, you put them on, you wear them.’

  ‘Yes, but what happens to everyone else is that they get their clothes issued new each season . . .’

  ‘These were brand new at the beginning of this season.’

  ‘That can’t be true!’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Well, think about what happens to a fibre at a hundred below, it shatters. I’m not winding you up. Look at these bunny boots, they’re shattered, they’re gone. Everything takes a beating.’

  And then, looking ruefully down: ‘I guess they are pretty wasted.’

  South Pole winter, June-August

  Now that you are several months into your winter, you will probably be used to the permanent darkness and the intense cold. You may also have got used to the idea that you are stuck here no matter what happens. And that focuses everyone’s attention on taking very good care of the place that’s keeping you alive.

  Fire is taken seriously here, very seriously, especially in the winter. If you’re in the fire team, the moment the alarm sounds you will leap up, swear and run for the comms room. If your gear is handy, you will have pulled it on before anyone else in the room has registered that there’s a bell ringing. They call it ‘Fire Alarm Tourette’s’. I saw it happen once, in summer, in the galley. Bell, jump, swear, gear, run . . . all in the time it took me to lift my fork to my mouth.

  As part of the fire team, you will already have done your training at the Rocky Mountains Fire Academy in Denver, in the US. It’s an organisation that caters for professionals, so they can be quite snooty about training a bunch of amateurs. They don’t understand the power that fire has down here. But they do give you a decent grounding in how to use the bunker gear—fireproof jackets, pants, a hood, breathing apparatus, so that every scrap of skin is covered and you could survive temperatures up to 2,200°F. They will have sent you through a burning building to see what it feels like. You get hot under the gear, but not unbearably so, and you begin to feel confident that it will keep you safe.

  If you’re still uncomfortable about marching into the flames, you might be assigned as a first responder, just to go and assess the situation. Nobody will ever go into a blaze, even down here, unless there’s somebody’s life to be saved or the chance to save a building that’s crucial to survival. Mind you, in the winter most buildings are pretty crucial. If the power plant goes, or the water melter, or the human habitation, that puts everyone’s lives at risk.

  In the depths of winter it could still be possible to summon a Twin Otter or two, as happened for the 2001 medevac. But it takes at least two weeks for them to fly down from Canada to Rothera, assuming the runway at Rothera is accessible, say another week or two at Rothera, waiting for the right weather conditions at the Pole, and even then fuel and size limitations mean that an Otter can only take out two or three people at most. That’s no way to evacuate an entire base. Depending on the conditions, you might be able to get a Hercules to fly over and do an airdrop of food and fuel. But if a fire took out the base, most of you would have absolutely nowhere to go.

  The new station has a sprinkler system, which is a big improvement on the Dome; but that would still only help slow a fire down. There is also a sort of inner sanctum sealed from the rest of the building by extra-heavy insulated fire doors, equipped with an emergency generator, beds, a kitchen and . . . a laundry. (When I asked why it needed a laundry, I was met with a surprised look and the response: ‘Even if the station has burned down, you’d still need to wash your clothes.’) If the whole station went, there would always be the possibility of bedding everyone down in the outer-lying science buildings in the Dark Sector or the clean air sector. There are emergency rations stored out in the frozen berms—bags of food where you just add hot water and stir. As long as you can maintain power for heating and water, you’d survive the months before the Hercs could come and get you. But it wouldn’t be pretty.

  By now, if you don’t have to go outside, you probably won’t. Unless you have some purpose out there, even just a few minutes at -90°F and a blowing wind isn’t much fun any more. There is, however, one magic temperature that you might still be waiting for. If the temperature hits -100°F you will immediately hear an announcement on the station loudspeakers: ‘The temperature is now minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit’. This is your cue to go racing for the sauna. Somebody will probably have started firing it up already. It usually only goes up to a maximum of 180°F so you will probably have to put the thermostat in some water to get it to creep up to the important (and sweltering) figure of 200°F.

  You will sit there, naked, until you can hardly bear it. Then, and this is the important part, you will leave the sauna, pull on some bunny boots and a face mask—but strictly no other clothes—and run out into the snow. If you are really hard core, you will run, naked, all the way to the Pole and back. This is not recommended for the fainthearted. In fact, it’s not recommended for anyone. But if you do it, you will have experienced an instantaneous temperature change of 300°F and become a member of the legendary—and highly exclusive—‘300 Club’.20

  A less insane way to celebrate your presence on the ice takes place on 21 June, the Midwinter Festival. Cooks begin planning the menus for the feast weeks in advance. Everybody dresses up. Across the continent, all wintering bases exchange specially designed greetings, usually in the form of photos of the winterers with some additional message inscribed over them.

  It is around now that relationships with the outside world may start to break down. The headquarters for the US support staff is in Denver and winterers often complain that they have little or no understanding of what life is like down here. ‘People in Denver are in a completely different world,’ says Jake. ‘Few of them have wintered and they have nothing to base any of their demands or requests on. You can be standing there on the phone saying “OK, so, you wan
t me to go out and count all of the cargo chains. They are under seven feet of ice and it’s a hundred below and . . . you want me to count ’em? We’re not going to use them until a month after you get here, so maybe we should count them when it’s sunny and warm and there are all kinds of new people here who aren’t frozen.”’ When he really wants to throw someone from Denver off balance, he simply asks them: ‘can you feel your fingers?’

  In 1997 the cook decided to roast some turkeys for the midwinter feast. There were twenty-eight people on station and twenty-two frozen turkeys. The request went out for permission to use some of them. Permission was denied. Word came from Denver that the turkeys had to be saved for station opening. For station opening! When new flights could bring in turkeys galore, and freshies that the wintering Polies could only dream of! ‘Midwinter is a big deal here,’ says Robert. ‘We get Midwinter greetings from the White House. But we weren’t allowed to cook our turkeys. It went all the way up to the National Science Foundation. Finally they said OK but it was too late, because the turkeys would have taken too long to thaw.’

  To be successful, any winter station manager has to be an excellent mediator. He or she has to maintain the respect of the wintering crew while also keeping sensible relations with the outside world. And though the resentments from the winterers are easy to understand, the people in the north can sometimes also be in the right.