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Cheers,    Genevieve

 

Does anyone actually care what I do once I leave the Ice? Give me a reason why I should write once I leave.

Yesterday was a wonderful, sunny, warm day.

I woke up sounding like a deep sea diver breathing through water, then coughed and hacked up some more cheese curdish stuff from my tired lungs.

I lay abed wheezing like this until several hours later, showered and then went out, long after my mother’s own solo departure from the room. She went to wander the city and use up some of the gift certificates I have. She spent the afternoon doing the
Lyttleton Wildlife Cruise, checked out Cathedral Square and had an eggs benedict with smoked salmon at Le Cafe for breakfast.

When I did emerge I wandered out short-sleeved into a gorgeous day with a lovely breeze, slathered in so much sunscreen I could have slid down the street. I intended only to change money, and buy proper tissues before the three day weekend (Canterbury’s Cup & Show weekend is on, everything shut for Fri, Sat & Sun) and pick up my Green Spot whiskey from Whisky Galore but I walked past a little vintage shop (Two Squirrels) on Hereford on my way to Colombo St and got sucked in by a beautiful 50s cotton dress with blue and green flowers on a white background on a mannequin in the window. Gorgeous dress, with such fine details and darts and pleats, for a shaped figure requiring boobs a la Genevieve and an ass a la Jennifer Lopez. One out of two attributes ain’t bad. The kind of vintage to make my heart sing, and perfectly suited to a summer’s celebration of release from 13 months of winter incarceration.

Wheezed and sniffled and coughed up the short flight of stairs in the old wooden building stuffed with a variety of antique shops selling jewelry, tchotchkes, furniture, decorations, and clothing. I mentioned it to the woman there, who addressed me as “sweet” about as many times as her chatter required commas. A charming verbal tick in a nice Kiwi accent, delivered with enthusiasm and a love of vintage wear. I tried it on. Too big, it hung on me like a sackcloth, none of the darts and shaping hanging on me where it should to give that hourglass silhouette the 50s and 60s styles deliver. I was disappointed.

But I spotted another lovely vintage 50s dress on the rack, a pale silvery blue silk, like moonlight on snow, with teal blue embroidered flowers on it, a brocade silk, with a waist line and a scooped neck to die for. The bodice is lovely, fitted mostly to the waist, where it flows out with oodles of fabric hanging heavy and cool against the skin to mid-calf. It swings divinely. THAT fit. I bought it. $100NZ. An impulse, a splurge and a reward for myself on a sunny warm day of freedom. I intend this cocktail dress for a Christmas party in Auckland with a posh friend. I will also bring it to Pole for next winter for one of the dinners. It’s a stunning dress and I look awesome in it. I want to dance in it.

Except my boobs weren’t anywhere near the darts. Them crazy 50s bra lines. I needed about 2 inches of lift to get mine near where they needed to be. I tried the dress on sceptically, believing my boobs would never achieve the heights they once did for maybe a year as a teenager, but I reached in and hauled up my bra straps, and thereby my boobs, to see what I would look like in it with the proper chest positioning. Size good, droopage not so good.

The owner of the shop recommended I go for a fitting at Ballentynes, just up the street and around the corner, for a proper bra to get them up there. Expensive bloody department store, reeks of money. But without hesitation I walked into the lingerie dept in my torn and saggy jeans (yet another pair of Levi’s only just over a year old giving up the ghost on me, WTF?) in my pale and bulbous body with a daypack on my back hanging fleece and water bottles on it, and asked for a bra. For a dress.

After spending NZ$100 on a dress, was I going to balk at the price of a bra to put my boobs in it right? Not likely. Was I going to accept the stigma implied in the slightly airy tone of the place that shrieked You Do Not Belong But We Will Be Polite To You Anyhow? Nope. Walked up to the first clerk available and said I needed a bra. For a dress.

She led me into the dressing room.

I removed my t-shirt and she measured me, not once indicating to me that she was appalled at the hairy armpits or the saggy boobs. Once around the ribcage (I’m small of chest in that regard) and once around the boobs. Then she asked me a few basic questions like did I mind the colour or without lace or what? I pulled out the dress and showed her what I was trying to get my boobs into. She held it up, tilted her head, and left the dressing room. A few minutes later she came back with two bras, same one in two different sizes. Commenting on the discrepancy between the size of my chest and the size of my “chest”.

I dislodged my boobs in front of her, from my black lace bra, and she slid my arms into the new bra, then walked around back as I leaned over to place my breasts in the cups, and did me up in the back. An odd way to enter a bra, for me. She adjusted the straps and I stood up, yanking bits of stray boobage into place.

Holy cow. Me grandma. Yup, a granny bra. A lovely soft cream lace, not itchy at all, a hefty pair of straps and cups that covered the entirety of each boob sans bulge. Very comfortable, actually. A bra with DARTS, and suddenly my chest was anchored firmly to my front somewhere closer to my clavicles than they have been for decades, and they were not going to BUDGE from that position. No bouncing, no shifting, all sorts of frontage going on. Perfect for the dress. I tried the dress on and it was divine. Boobs exactly where the darts were. I could probably do handstands in this bra and nothing would shift, they would continue pointing right out there.

But then I noticed the unsightly bulges on my hips/waist where my panties cut into the fat I’d accumulated there over the winter. She went and found some granny panties to cover that up, and I was set to dance, to twirl, to move about in a comfortable, gorgeous dress at a fancy party.

Except for the hairy legs and the knotty toes boot-clad far too long. Oh, and no I won’t shave the armpit hair. I have so little I can hardly even make a proper feminist statement by not doing so.

Bra NZ$60. Panties NZ$25.

Need shoes. Perhaps ballet flats in silver or white or teal?

Before I left the dressing room the clerk adjusted my own black lace bra for me, tsking just a little, bringing the boobs up at least an inch in them. A bit of a revelation, that.

From there I sailed down Colombo St to Whisky Galore, stopped in at Toff’s (used clothing) on Gloucester and bought a purple cotton sarong (NZ$6.50) with a nice print and a three quarter sleeve white cotton eyelet top with gentle
green vines and purple flowers, button up, slightly fitted. (NZ$6.50) Summer clothes, summer weather, summer freedom. Looked for shoes. Everything has heels and I will not be wearing heels of any sort for a very long time at this point. No luck.

It was a longer walk than I expected to Whisky Galore, out past Valentinos. Picked up my two bottles of Green Spot, had a “wee dram” of another very expensive fine whisky which cleared up my lungs IMMEDIATELY, but made me lightheaded. Whereupon I sailed back down the sidewalk to Thomas’s, fell into bed and slept until Mum came back from her adventures. Mum had a marvelous day, saw a few Hector’s dolphins, the harbour and bought a scrunchy cream cotton knit hat with an adjustable wire brim at the market in Cathedral Square. She’s having fun and being very independent.

Then I cooked dinner. What fucking bliss. I made basmati rice (GOOD RICE!!!!!!!) and did a quick stir fry in olive oil of zucchini, carrots, onions, garlic, fresh ginger, and a chopped tomato added in at the last moment. Salt, pepper, soy sauce for flavour and sauce and pillowed by a mound of this lovely delicate white rice that stuck together in these delicate long grains. Colours on my plate orange, red, green and white like a flag of freedom, half an avocado on the side. Mum had wine. I had water. Consumed the whole plate. Moaning the whole time. FRESH vegetables, good rice, the flavours were divine and clean and
each bite had the taste of the slightly crisp vegetable and a tinge of ginger and garlic, and the rice as the simple comfort and fragrant bed upon which I delivered it.

But I have not really budged much yet. Next year I will get off the Ice, get a room for a week paid in advance, and just stutter to a halt. No visitors arriving right on the heels of my redeployment, and I bloody hope no lung issues again or broken foot. Just stop and roll over in bed looking out the window at the wind ruffling the tree leaves and the blue sky brocaded and water-coloured with clouds. Cook a little, shop a little, sleep a shit tonne of hours, willfully spend time being profligate with water in showers.

I’ll admit having my mother here is lovely and fun and I’m excited to unfurl with her and show her NZ, but I am so exhausted I can only feel guilt at being unable to perform the simplest function like getting Brad’s (of Brad and Me and Ruby Make Three) van WOFed and registered so we can actually get on the road and visit NZ. She’s seeing Christchurch and the airport. I can barely organize my shower things, let alone make calls and make appointments and make inquiries about schedules and such. I am still sick and dragging.

Similarly stunned winterover Polies wander solo and in occasional random clusters around Christchurch, barely able to get it together enough to leave the city and start their vacations. And most of them having got off a week or more before me. And they healthy. I seem to be the only one felled by every germ that winked at me off the first
plane to Pole. NO immune system. Ass kicked on so many levels.

But nonetheless, yesterday was a lovely day.

**Caveat: this post was written several days ago, early in my arrival, and is perhaps influenced by a steroid-induced moodiness and not necessarily indicative of current emotions***

My arrival in Christchurch is not what I expected, but at this point I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps some repeat of sensations from seasons past: a fascination with bugs and trees and grass. But stepping off the plane into the moist night air with 12 other winterover Polies, all I wanted to do was get away. From them. From my whole winter. I landed stunned and numb and paralysed from the neck up, if not completely stuffed with snot and in some pain from the airplane pressure changes, and unable to hear properly. I took 5 minutes to return my ECW Gear to the CDC (Clothing Distribution Centre) and then I ran as fast as my bum foot and the airport luggage trolley could take me to the Sudima Hotel next door.

Some of that could have been the vicodin I took for the flight on the doctor’s recommendation, to still the coughing jags I am having, to alleviate the feeling of being in a large nutcracker with every cough. Now with head cold. And I also got the mean cramps and heavy period 10 days earlier than scheduled. My body has come undone. Whence my brain?

I dream not of Christchurch and the food varieties in its many restaurants, but of a small yurt somewhere in the forested hills, no responsibilities to anyone but myself and sleep for a month.

I am exhausted. I woke my first morning in NZ with every ache and moan of my season sitting on me. From the roots of my hair to my belly to my arms and shoulders and back and hands and feet and face all throbbed with protest when the alarm went off. I felt sat on by heavy expectations and responsibilities, not freedom and humidity.

Where was my release? My freedom at last achieved? If this is it I have no energy for it.

I still cough, my sinuses ache, my ears hurt and I go in and out of hearing like I have water in my ears, I resent having to pay for things, and paying so damn much with the exchange rate just catching up with the extra cost of everything in NZ to make it as expensive as the US.

I am disgruntled. Angry. Restless and unable to stop my mind, yet saddled with having to get up in the morning and deal with shit. I would dearly love to just find some space somewhere off a river and park Ruby there for a week and stop doing anything but being, unthinking, undoing, undoing. Yes, undoing the season in my mind, unbundling, unclenching, undoing and disentangling the knotted leftover emotions, the horrible constants of 9 months of being treated as if I were incompetent, stupid, lazy and not worthy of the very basic respect and honesty. Not by the vast majority of the crew. they were caught in much the same syndrome as I was, many of them.

I am so damn tired. Screw birds and greenery and humidity, screw the charming garden city of Christchurch, screw the glorious Botanical Gardens, screw Two Fat Indians and Sala Sala (Japanese), I just want to sleep for a week unthinking, looking out the tent door at the sky and then rolling back over with a muttered “fuck it”. I just don’t have the energy for anything.

I try to sort the different strains of “fuck its” going through my mind, I try to figure out how much is being so fucking sick, how much is the hangover of a winter, how much of it is the aftermath of this particularly difficult winter (and how can I differentiate there when this is my only winter?) and how much the culture shock of being back in the world with all the daily choices and responsibilities of choosing food from menus and finding a place to stay for the night, let alone the larger responsibilities of getting a van roadworthy and hosting my mother’s first trip to NZ. Has it been too long I have lived the simple life of the same small dorm room, the same 42 other people, the same meal times, the same unforgiving cold? Is this shock? Too much change too soon too quick?

Because this is not the simple life anymore. May I abdicate? May I shrug these burdens for awhile, finish out my antibiotics, stop taking the steroids? May I have my health and mobility back so I can go out there and enjoy the things I missed at Pole so much I almost hallucinated them?

Can you make the noisy fuckers 10 strong and drunk at the restaurant table behind me shut the hell up? Someone please, turn down the volume on the world for a bit. I am overwhelmed and just can’t handle it right now.

The flight out of Pole on the Herc was more eventful for the vomiting half the passengers experienced than any great emotional storm of release. The last 45 minutes of the flight were in some pretty severe turbulence (though rumours of faulty stabilizers in the plane did go around) and most folks were found to be vomiting on themselves and into sick bags provided by the crew, but not as far as I heard, into their hats.

I felt the turbulence but found it quite soothing, as I hung onto my backpack to prevent it from flying off my lap. I lay there eyes closed with a small smile on my face. To other Polies it may have appeared I was enjoying their discomfort. Not so. I simply didn’t realize people had been sick until the crew was collecting the full sick bags. I was lying there feeling quite soothed by the rocking and swaying, and thinking how much like being on the ocean it felt. In a cross current, perhaps. But quite peaceful really. A new sensation after such a long time on the flat white of Pole.

The only negative, for me, of the ride, was the explicit knowledge as we bounced and swerved and swung and swayed through the sky that my bladder was pretty damn full. By the time we landed I needed to pee like a banshee. Most of the male Polies were put in the Housing of Last Resort: the ill-reputed Man Camp. The older dorm, Hotel California (or HoCal) has one bunkroom with 23 or 25 beds in it. McMurdo has been so full of folks trying to go to Casey Station (Aussies) and Pole and WAIS and Siple and Byrd Camps, or just anywhere the hell away from McMurdo, that the housing crisis (a seasonal thing) has reached the No Room At The Inn status and flights incoming from Christchurch, NZ have been delayed to keep people out of a place where vertical wall duct taping would be the last sleep/bed option.

Poor guys. Sick as dogs many of them, exiting from a 9 month winter with a finite number of people, and suddently they are in the land of 1000+ and to them they are damn near ALL strangers. And they have to walk all the way across town to Man Camp where the room smells like all the worst smells men in bulk can generate, and vomit was definitely one of them. Ugh. Perks to being a girl are no equivalent bunkroom for women, just 5 other roommates in a room in 155 (same building as the store, the computer kiosk, the galley, HR, Housing, etc). No pillow on my bed, but no complaints, I slept in my Big Red anyway.

Perks to being ME, of course, are my previous 4 seasons in McMurdo made this place like shrugging into an old shirt. Familiar as ever, and as irritating as ever. But as if my winter had never happened and had disappeared into the turbulaence somewhere overhead. The crowds in the galley, where the breakfast egg line holds as many people in it as I spent the last 9 months with, are loud. Almost insanely so.  Hard to deal with. As hard as the friends happy to see me are, shrieking in my ear (over the noise of McMurdo), and freaking me out so hyper and excitable are they. I pushed a  few friends away with the shock, rudely so. But within 24 hours I had settled into the same old same old rhythm of this place. Though unemployed, and at loose ends when everyone disappears to WORK. (Funny concept that.)

I am reconnecting with good friends and unloading my winter in various pretty intense rants, whenever they ask me the inevitable “How was your winter?” But they are forgiving and understanding and supportive and I am lucky to have them around me while I recover some sense of myself as a respected, likable person who people actually value and care for. It’s been a long time with little self-worth and less self-esteem, and good people are reminding me of me and those feelings are slipping back in and giving me my backbone back again.

I was supposed to be in McMurdo from Wed 11/3 and fly out on Friday (today) Nov 6. Last night a friend made me laugh and I nearly hacked up a lung. “Oh shit,” I thought, “the CRUD.” Any opportunistic germ brought in to the isolated community of Pole that looks at me askance and whoops! sore throat already. But I arrive in McMurdo and I land in the centre of the PLAGUE. Everyone is coughing and sneezing and wheezing and in general sounding like a colony of seals in heat. The store has run out of cold medicines lilke Nyquil, Dayquil, Sudafed, Tylonel, etxc, so sick is everyone. Medical has been STORMED.

So I thought, yeah, I fit right in.

But no, not really. I am special. Not only am I a Polie who just frelling wintered, even when surrounded by Mactown friends, but I don’t have the CRUD. I have fucking PNEUMONIA.

Yeah! That’s me, gotta go one further with EVERYTHING. Stepping Over The Lne All The Time.

Spent the morning in Medical here in McMurdo, the morning I’m supposed to fly to Christchurch, NZ and humidity, grass, insects, flowers, rain, sunshine so warm it’ll burn me and warm me to the depths of my soul, avocadoes, trees, birds that fly, traffic, newspapers, children (not sure about short uncivilized people), cellphones, semi-naked people in shorts and spaghetti-strap tops legs and boobs and skin all over the place, cats, pollen, bodies of water larer than a dishpit sink or a toilet bowl, endless showers, GREEN.

Speaking of endless showers. Polies preceding me to Christchurch talked of a camp stool, a six pack of beer, and parking under the shower head on full blast until thebeer, or the hotel’s water supply, is GONE. And that sounds really freakin’ appealing, but with Ginger Beer. Or hot tea with honey and lemon (LEMON!!!)

But yeah, I was in Medical. On IV antibiotics and steroids and an inhaler/nebulizer. Becasue I do not have the crud, I have PNEUMONIA.

Even if the plane taking us out of here hadn’t broken down carrying our cohorts out of here yesterday (blew an engine on the way up, no worrries, three others on every plane), and all the remaining Polies were to leave here, I would have NOT been on that plane anyway. Not with PNEU-FUCKING-MONIA.

Delayed until Monday.

And Tuesday? November 10th? My 45th birthday and the day my MOTHER arrives in Christchurch for a two week visit to see the country I’ve been falling in love with all these years. As close as she’ll ever get to Antarctica, but a close second. I intend to be there to meet her and I intend to show her a good part of the South Island. There will be no lounging around hacking up a lung on her vacation. She will not be a nursemaid to me in my pale jittery winterover state of maladjusted freaked out paleness.

So, there it is. Out of Pole, but sick in McMurdo and not quite free yet. I cannot kick anyone in the ‘nads. just. yet. I have to be in Christchurch a minumum of 24 hours after I get there to do that and not get fired.

Wish me well, wish me luck.Wish me good aim.

Loud.

109 people, 38 of whom are winterovers. Five having already left.

Crowded.

The first Herc arrived, way out of schedule, bearing 40 people. We had received two Baslers of 16 each, a week apart from each other, so the transition was easy. And on those first two Hercs were friends, and very few FNGs or people I didn’t know at least in passing. The transition to double our population, to 72, was easier for me than for others.

Many of our winterover population were FNGs to Pole, to the Ice, to everything Antarctic when they signed on for the winter and waved that last plane good bye in February. So these first two planes have been more challenging for them than for me, they were an invasion of strangers. Changing everything, making radios chatter and beep with unfamiliar voices and demands.

We even had folks on those first few planes who ATE. FRESH. EGGS. on their first morning here, in front of a winterover who has blog-based egg trauma, not just everyone else with an 8 month long complete absence or yolks and whites. They gave all sorts of excuses for eating our eggs and eating our freshies. We are not talking FNGs here, clueless newbies still seeing the stars of hypoxia, but very experienced Antarctic folks. Such was the shock, I may have ranted somewhat over a meal at them.

But I didn’t stab them with a fork.

I came damn close tonight when 40 people arrived, a majority known to me, and I stood in a line of 20 people to get my food in the galley and the newly arrived IDIOT in line in front of me, tanned and clean, took a bunch of grapes from the bowl. While I stood there watching, paralyzed, fork at ready, not sure if I could speak well enough to say something that might prevent me from actually stabbing him. I was also thinking Where do I stab him? In the ass? Fleshy and painful. In the hand reaching for the grapes? Might get blood on the grapes, fork maybe not sharp or strong enough, shoulda got a steak knife in preparation for this possibility. In the eye? First I’d have to get him to face me, and that may involve speaking.

Such a fucking dilemma I was in. I did nothing. But amongst winterovers I ranted and stared hard at the guilty party, waving my fork.

Then I went to get a cookie, after a meal of wild rice and grapes. Don’t ask. And the cookie tongs WERE GONE.

I had another moment there in front of the cookies. I barked, “Tongs! No tongs!” until another winterover passed me and understood and I was unfrozen enough to duck into the kitchen barking quietly to myself, “Tongs! Someone took the fucking cookie tongs!” and get a damn pair of replacement tongs.

Then there was the summer idiot who thought he was too macho to wear a gaiter over his face while disembarking from the Herc and walking into the wind (-45F, -80F windchill) up to the station, to the astonishment of two winterovers who remarked as he entered about the HUGE WHITE PATCHES on each cheek. He snarled back something about not being a wimp and having wintered before and this was nothing. Doesn’t make him any less of an idiot, really. Indeed, it probably ups the idiot quotient right there.

I saw friends from Cargo: Gift, Katie and Greg and knew with their arrival Paddy was finally getting the help she needed. I got hugs. Gift is amazing and lovely. Weeks nearly lost his shit he was so happy to see his friends on this plane with whom he had wintered LAST winter. I’d say a perpetual motion vibrating superball of happy and glee was he. His ears were easily a few inches further back on his head with grinning.

While I stood in line (stood in fucking line!) for food watching fellow winterovers greet their newly arrived boss, trapped at a table with him as he blathered fatly on about nothing important at all. Pale smiles like rigor mortis and polite nods issuing forth from my fellow winterovers as he said a lot of shit all and they avoided direct eye contact with him as best as possible. I caught their eyes and a knowing winterover look of understanding passed between us, identifying the summer idiot as both summer and idiot.

I have already met FNGs who speak with authority and exclamation points about cold and wind to people who have just wintered at the South Pole, and had that same look, that split second meeting of the eyes of winterovers where you know you are really rolling your eyes at the idiocy of what this dude just said. But we do not contradict. He can have his opinions and try to change How Things Are, they just are, about this place by imposing order and rules and locked doors like he would back home. He’ll run into the reality of Ice and learn his place, and stop talking with all those authoratative exclamations points like An Excitable Boy!

But tonight it is loud, and busy. And there is yet another flight arriving LATE tonight, almost midnight. A Basler with 12 more people. We will be 121 people for breakfast, and I will not go. I have retreated alone to my room for the night.

But my replacement, Philip, has also arrived. He breezed off that plane, first up to the station, speeding along so quickly that I thought: Is this a winterover? (Indeed he is, he wintered as the wastie the winter before mine.) Why don’t I recognize his WALK? His clothes? Among a crowd of people stepping off that plane in full ECW gear, with an orange bag over their shoulders, very few made it more than 10 steps before dropping their bag and dragging it off the skiway, gasping for breath no matter how many season they had. It is always a shock. Philip cruised right up to the station like he’d been born to cold and altitude. Then we met up and he told me my season was over, he was here and he was taking over. And with a twinge of No This Is My Fiefdom Dammit You Don’t Understand but a whole shudder of Oh Fuck Me Take It ALLLLLLLL Relief, I laid down my complicated winter burden for him to sort through and figure out and take care of For Me.

It’s time for me to heal. My foot, my soul, my borders, my concept of myself. I will stay to pass on the winter info he needs, and clean up some paperwork, but I am DONE. I am passing the burden, the torch, the effort. It’s over, my winter, I’m finished. I survived.

We are 43 people. We have been alone with each other for the last 9 months. Except for a brief visit of 2 pilots and a mechanic on a Twin Otter that broke down for a few days early last week.

Tomorrow, if weather holds good, we will receive 32 people on two flights of the Basler by the end of the day. I had intended, and imagined all along, that I would be out there on the flight deck to greet them. Many of them are known to me. I wanted to be there to welcome them back, but I am trapped inside on crutches, having twisted my ankle while fueling early last week. Most significantly, several of them are very good friends of mine who supported my decision to winter and made my summer a significantly joyous season. This winter has not been joyous. It has been nothing of what I expected. I had heard of winter crews bonding, becoming a tightly-knit community, a group of people who seek each other out in the days and months and years after they wintered together, even decades later getting together for reunions. I had heard of issues in some winters, with break ups within the community, with deaths and divorces happening beyond our world. I had heard of laughter and tears and trust in fellow Winterovers when things became hard on or off the Ice. Together, these former crews I heard about, faced everything that was flung their way. Sure, hatreds developed, irritations flared into aggression, and isolation with each other rubbed across inescapable familiarity to produce sparks. There were cliques, divisions, drinking buddies and sexual partners rotated through the 9 months. But ultimately the feeling I have been given by former Pole Winterovers is of the closeness of the friendships they formed during their winter with each other.

This season is nothing like that. It ends soon, and I would say there is a significant proportion of us who hope against hope for that first flight to make it into our small community so that the additional people can CHANGE the season we have remaining here for the BETTER. It has been a horrible season.

I am not saying “I have had a horrible season” though that is true on a certain level. I am broadening this declaration, against common sense while still trapped here under the aegis of those who have already punished me for my blog, to include the majority of this station’s winter crew. We did not bond as the last flights left, we did not come together as the sun went down, we did not pull in the same direction as the going got tough, and certainly we are not all making great concerted efforts at the end of our season as exhaustion humbles us and we face the changing of everything in preparation for the busy summer season just around the corner.

We did not spend the winter complaining about the cold and the dark. We came not to know anything but the cold and the dark, so soon was it our norm. Within that cold and dark we had gifts of such rare beauty that the cold dark was never an issue. We each were able to step outside and gaze up at a sky dressed in an array of coloured sparkles and galaxies farther and wider than it is possible to see with the naked eye almost anywhere else on earth. We saw the Milky Way and it was…well, a milky spilled cream path of pinpricks of light across the sky so dense we knew we were not ever alone in the universe and that the possibilities of Other were so vast as to be unfathomable by science, or imagination. We saw purple and pink and gold hued galaxy clusters, and individual stars so bright we knew them clearly to be suns, and they shone with colours that shifted and danced in our vision. There were rainbows in the sky, in those stars, in that endless blazing sparkling universe nestled within the blackness over our heads.

We navigated by the light of the moon, and moved amongst moonshadows that followed and advanced across the snow all around us. The moon in such permanent darkness was more than just illumination, it was a friend, a guide, it was our high noon casting light onto and back from our snowy white landcape in blues and greys no one can ever capture on camera. It was light like I have only ever seen under a full solar eclipse, almost negative light, unique to winter at the South Pole. We could see our horizon and the curve of the earth by the light of that moon, and know just how far away we were from the rest of the world.

We stood and kneeled and lay on our backs, or just stuttered to a halt, watching the Aurora Australis, our Southern Lights, above us. Several times our sky filled from horizon to horizon with auroras so bright and solid and colourful and ALIVE! that I fell over mid-step trying to crane my neck back enough and whirl in place at the same time to see everything happening above me. There were greens and purples, oranges and hints of red. We watched them dance and skip and swirl and heave and breath and swing dance across the sky, nestling into each other like Fred and Ginger, Ginger’s skirts gauzy with feathers kicking up in swaying and hustling glory. We watched the snow we stood on turn the colour of this outrageous display so loud was it.

There was no reason to complain about the outdoors. But come indoors and we lost our thread, fell about in cliques and divisions and hatreds and distrust of each other so immense as to fracture the entire winter. Anger was the overriding majority emotion of this season. Some people escaped it through ignorance, sometimes deliberate, or the miracle of positive thinking, but we all felt at least a little bit of it a little bit at a time. We saw the effects of anger on other people, and we felt it within ourselves, like a grinding daily habit that was unkempt nails digging through our tender skins and making us bleed unhealing.

This is not a normal thing for winter. I KNOW this. This was very specific to this winter and it had a very specific source.

Many of us retreated, resentful, into invisibility, unable to break through our own pain to reach other people and sooth ourselves. When we did, they were angry too, and it became only an encounter that exacerbated the anger. It was not a bond. It was not a sharing of WHO we were to cause healing, it was a sharing of frustration, disbelief and anger that would spiral in the middle of the group and cause us to leave vibrating with the stirred up emotions we had tried to control by disappearing into ourselves and our rooms to survive. Some of us survived by drinking a lot, daily, alone. Some of us fled outdoors to work, to walk, to photograph, to the darkness. Some of us fled into the arms of others. Some of us fled into phone calls home to people who knew us outside this horrible season, who could remind us of who were were without the anger, when we were real. Some of us fled online. Some of us fled to nightshift. There was a lot of fleeing going on. Hiding. Lying to ourselves and others.

It had all the hallmarks of winter. We have achieved a full winter season and a 6 month long night here at the Bottom of the World. We have joined that extremely limited band of fellow South Pole Winterovers through the ages. We are in a very exclusive club to have done so. We have our numbers in that very short list. We have our memories, and our bragging rights. We survived. But the survival was not of the Polar Winter and the hardships of our geography, it was the survival of disillusionment, resentment, anger, hatred, resignation, depression.

Everything else was easy.

For that reason, I am coming back next winter. I am going to come back to the dark cold, the beauty, the hard work here at South Pole during a 9 month winter. I am going to see that sky again, feel that cold wrap around me more intimately than any lover, get inside my clothes and snuggle up against my bones and let me know just how little I belong outside at -85F. I am going to struggle with banding and building and strapping triwalls, and sorting trash and lumbering along inside a bubble of redlit swirling snow in a loader delivering to the snowclad and drifted berms way past me in the dark. I am going to take the risk that I will fall down the stairs again, lose digits to frostbite, lose feeling in my ass before anywhere else, have another hot flash outdoors and have to find a warm boiler to hug myself back to warmth when it stops. I am going to do all that again, because what happened inside, though terrible, horrible, and it made me raw with emotions larger even than the dark cold outdoors, HAS to be an anomaly. It CANNOT be what defines my memories of wintering at Pole.

I want a do over.

I WANT the winter I was promised, and damn it, next year will be another chance to have it. This time with a different more experienced crew under a different more experienced leader. I’m enough of an optimist, or a fool, despite my experience this winter to want to come back and try again.

But until then, until this one leaves, I want that damn first flight to get here so I can finish out this one surrounded by friends, protected by their presence from the hazard, albeit remote, that I may just break down and finally react to the BAD of this winter and do…something I regret.

There’s always the chance that I will watch it happen to someone else.

**Yeah, this was supposed to be the post that explained what happened to put me on crutches. Short story: outside fueling a Jamesway (tent-like building) with the Hurley (portable fuel tank) at -73F in broad daylight, wearing Blue Boots with no ankle support, rolled my right ankle, prevented a fuel spill, got carried to medical, not broken, on crutches, can’t go outdoors to do my actual job so everyone else is pitching in to help. End of story. Sucks to be me.**

In depression over hearing the announcement, in Weeks’ voice over the comms system, that the first Basler flight had boomeranged and returned to McMurdo—after reaching less than an hour or so away from Pole, bearing Andy, Paddy, Lisa, Kricket and other friends—I skulked back to my room from the Galley. There I cried. Not the tears of joy I had awoken with to the announcement that the Basler would launch at 0900h.

I had spent the day, in between joy and sorrow, hobbling about on my one crutch, leaving my left hand free to carry items, run the vacuum as I cleaned the rooms people would be moving into, day pack on my back to carry smaller items I took out of rooms that didn’t belong, and skua’d items that were really waste. My right foot was feeling okay, as I was keeping it off the ground and not using it for much more than the occasional pivoting maneuver into a closed room to drop of one of my Trash Matrixes (a document that helps the FNG figure out which trash item will belong in any one of our dozen plus trash and recycling categories) on the desk or bed.

By lunch I had been up and down the stairs a dozen or more times, and in and out of every unoccupied room on station, and a few occupied ones completely inadvertently when I misread the list I had in front of me. That was interesting. After 9 months of living with these folks in this tiny station, I finally learned where everyone lived, what rooms they’d chosen as their jail cells for the winter. Except for my familiarity with neighbours along my hall, from seeing them come and go, I had no concept of where people lived around me. I didn’t care, and I preferred it that way. I wasn’t about to go visiting, and this community has not really been one conducive to that kind of socializing, as splintered as we were from so early in the season.

During my lunch in the Galley, the announcement of the boomerang came. Having spent the entire morning on my foot, my left foot, my good foot, it was aching and exhausted. I had also spent the entire morning tilted seriously far forward in anticipation of that first flight’s arrival. Even going so far as to burst into tears in a variety of empty rooms around station, tears of happy joy as I imagined the faces and forms of my friends being borne my way on this first summer flight, officially demarking the line between winter and summer by changing EVERYTHING on station with their presence. I imagined their walking through the doors at DA (Destination Alpha, the set of stairs on the skiway side of the elevated station) fully clad in Big Red or the green Pole parka, carrying the one orange bag they are allowed on the Basler, on one shoulder. I saw them in a scrum, some confused and new to the entire Pole thing, but the faces I sought were old hands at this, arriving to save me from Winter dynamics.

But that didn’t happen, because they boomaranged due to weather at Pole. So, heart aching, foot pounding and tight, I retreated to my room and to my bed for the afternoon. Screw work I had to do, I couldn’t do most of it anyhow with a bum foot. I wasn’t allowed outside at all.

And there I dreamt a nightmare.

It started out just fine, with familiar and friendly Winterover faces in it. At first, the station was not as I know it, but not a threat, just different and not as sterile as it really is. I was visiting someone’s room and a bunch of us were watching something on TV on a series of comfy couches, heaped high with the ubiquitous Antarctic dark blue and burgundy twin bed comforter. No fancy down for us, just cheap artificial filling quilted over with thin cotton. In my dream I was exhausted and sleeping, uncaring of who saw or how I tilted against my couch neighbour. Indeed I fell over his legs until he adjusted them and made a place for me to lie as he sat upright watching the movie, holding me. It was comforting, and he stroked my back like a cat as I slept there, comforting me more.

But when I woke from my dream sleep I woke to a radically changed station where the Basler had arrived carrying hundreds of young FNG strangers who were invading every inch and moving into every stray room. My other crutch had disappeared. I wandered the halls, suddenly filled with bags and furniture and people and broken trashed doors, looking for it. I found many other crutches, metal, wood, plastic, but not the match to mine. I hobbled quickly down the suddenly insane hallways of the station to my room, scanning for familiar faces, looking especially to see if Andy had showed up, since I’m in his room this winter. I figured that’d be the place to find him. But my wing had changed and I no longer had proper walls or doors and was in a Jamesway-like environment where the walls were plywood and my room wall only came up to my chin.

I arrived back to my room to find that a group of three, bigger and younger than me, strangers had walked right in to MY ROOM to see how the Winterover had decorated her room. I started yelling and screaming at them to get the fuck out of my room, to fuck off, to get the fuck out, all the while my brain telling me that I am just confirming the imagine of a crazy Winterover Polie by acting that way. But I don’t give a shit, in my dream, and continue. But my patchwork wall above my chin is only pieces of grey army blanket and fabric with great holes in it and FNGs. strangers, continue to look right in at me as I am seeking to hide in my room. I use my crutch to fend them off, trying to pin my pillow case up on the plywood up high to hang down and close the view, to block them out.

I cannot find any familiar faces, Winterover or even Summer from any summers past in my dream. There is no one and everything has changed and I have been invaded and demeaned and am on display.

It is a nightmare.

I woke up in my room. The flight is really not coming. My friends are really not coming. I am trapped for another day or more wanting to see them, missing them fearfully and hungrily, needing them to bring fresh cheer and summer energy to change this station for me. I have been waiting for this flight since March when the winter went to shit. Since April when I spent a week in my room seriously contemplating quitting. Since July when I fell down the stairs. Since September when I temporarily lost my ability to deal with anyone here, including my friends, without being offensive and offended.

And they fucking boomeranged. It could be days more before I see them, get to hold them, be hugged by them, hide behind them to survive until my winter is truly over and I can leave.

Last night was a wonderful night for me. While the rest of the station showered and dressed up and sat at one long table listening to the Winter Site Manager give his speech, yet again, I stayed unwashed and away from it all. I was in no mood for people, the same people, always the same people with the same habits and clothes and stories who I have been stuck with for the last 7 months. I was in no mood for anything but privacy, time to myself, a place to myself with no prying eyes and minds. I was in desperate need of it.

I am not a social person. I make efforts to be so, when expected, but it is frequently those exact expectations that are most likely to have me running pell mell away from the occasions that warrant socialising. I am not a drinker, so I do not use alcohol to make these occasions easier to survive. My survival around people is based on being able to withdraw to an unjudged, unknown place on my own, where I can once more render my emotional boundaries and rebuild my sense of self based on my knowledge of myself, not what is said or heard or how I am responded to. Yes, I hide. I disappear. I withdraw. If I do not, the challenge of other people is overwhelming and I can lose my way in rudeness and ignorance and snark and just not giving a fuck about others’ feelings.

Perhaps I simply feel others too strongly, and am too easily influenced by them to be at peace around them.

I have reached a state this season, in which I swing in an out of the seething Fuck Its. A simmering state of Not Giving A Shit that flares and bubbles too quickly and too hotly. I have come to a boil. The only way I can remove myself from the heat is to withdraw to my room, or to go outdoors. Both solutions are necessarily limited. Warmth and food and toilets are all indoors and in public.

Wintering in such a small community has been a challenge to me and my anti-social habits. I am incredibly lucky to have such a solo job here, one that takes me outside and leaves me on my own much of the time. If I had to work in tandem with another person, any person, I would quickly go insane with their everpresence. I’m not the only one, I see this endless repetition of tiny habits and quirks wearing on the best of working relationships here. I’m just lucky.

Even so, I am in the mind to escape. Not to escape the South Pole, but to escape the people. Yes, I yearn for warmth, for sunlight that I can feel on my skin and right through to my bones, for an outdoors that does not require the suiting up in armour like a soft medieval knight plodding heavy and slow across the white landscape. I seek the freedom of a car, my Ruby in NZ, who can go in any direction I choose, trusty steed, red chariot of freedom and possibility. I want to go away.

I would settle with everyone else going away. Sometimes I sit outside and I imagine the work required to survive here if I were the only soul mid-winter to survive an attack by the Wraith zipping everyone but me up in their darts. (What, you didn’t know I was a sci fi geek? Haven’t you been paying attention?) It’s a peaceful thought. I could stay here, alone, wandering the station.

Sometimes, even with 42 other people here, it feels like that.

Last night, with everyone occupied with celebration and good food, and unexpectedly clean and neat companions, and music and alcohol, it felt like that.

I was restless. Mightily restless. I lay in my bed awake at 11pm and could only imagine movement, activity, change. I was vibrating out of my skin and mind with the need to GO, to DO, to BE elsewhere elsewise elsehow. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear myself.

So, I climbed out of my bed, dressed in comfortable BLACK clothing, unhooked my iPod from its charger and speakers, and left my room. I walked down the hall past the late-night drunken belligerence and goodwill of fellow Polies wrapping up their celebrations, did not accept their drink offers, went to my office, fetched the stereo/boombox I have there, and walked into the darkened gym. The gym is the one place on station where the window coverings have not yet been removed. It is still dark there.

At midnight on a Friday of our long Sunrise weekend (you do understand that our long weekends are TWO days long, yes?) after much food and drinking, the likelihood of my running into anyone in the gym was quite..well…nil. I walked into the dim gym, and put my gear down under a basketball net at one end. I did not turn on the lights. There was red glow from the two EXIT signs, glimmers of pale outdoors dawn light in the cracks between the cardboard and the windowsills up high, a dozen or so tiny flashing green lights of the smoke detector in the ceiling, and the sulfurous yellow bar of light from the stereo itself.

I plugged in the stereo, I attached my iPod, I pulled the volumes up to max on both and I hit PLAY.

For the next 4 hours I stayed alone unmolested and undiscovered in that dark gym. And there I exploded into a fury of restless energy and motion and singing and yelling and dancing until my lungs and legs and back and arms and neck and shoulders and feet and mind had released every restless molecule of need to be elsewhere and alone. I exercised and exorcised my anger, my need, my joy, my unfathomable love of this place and my desperate yearnings to be out of it.

I flailed, I pogo’d, I jumped, I skipped, I stretched, I swayed, I screamed, I cried, I laughed, I kicked and punched the walls. I waved my arms about eyes shut and dervished my way into dizzy exhaustion, fetching up hard in the dark against the padded walls. I paced the rectangle of the gym floor, footsteps keeping time with the music, I skipped from corner to corner, I ran around in circles and squares. I played basketball. I lay on a yoga mat on my back surrounded by music loud and soothing in its loudness, floating me in the dark like a night boat on the sea. Mostly I moved without consciousness of how or why or what, I just moved until I ached and gasped and coughed with it.

The music absorbed me and my anguish, comforted me, wrapped me in its depth and familiarity, hid me in the words and songlines, floated and buffeted and tugged me from side to side, my hair an extra appendage swung and flung about with arms and legs and hands. I returned to the music of my adolescence, for the most part, goth and punk vying for my affections, the time of my life most unbearable for the hormonal flux and madness, to which my menopause and this long winter seem to have returned me wholesale and unwarned. I gloried in the angers and depressions and shouts of resentment, I rolled in it, wallowing in the urgent hungers of that age where love and hate were messily intertwined and inconceivably powerful regrets. In memories and hopes, beauty and anger, in darkness and energy I found calm to the beats and sounds of long ago, from a time when I could not sleep without music to lead me to it.

In the dim darkness of the gym, trapped in the elevated station, I had the place alone, and I had the space to move. In the return of daylight here I have lost the freedom of the outdoors as an innocent unviewable place of retreat and peace. In the late night solo revels of my night in the gym I was able to release the burden of other people, and the trapped energy of needing to get away from them. I exhausted myself into a state of peace. Slowly, I let it all go, I unbundled my self and unwound into a messy pile of relief. Tired enough to return to bed and sleep, unmindful of the thoughts that always race in circles around my head.

“On days like this, in times like these,
I feel an animal deep inside,
heel to haunch on bended knees,
living on if and if I try
somebody send me please”

“I’ve got nothing to say
I ain’t said before
I’ve bled all I can,
I won’t bleed no more
I don’t need no one to understand
why the blood runs cold”

Sisters of Mercy “This Corrosion”

*Blog post title from Sisters of Mercy’s “Body Electric”

During the winter months, the divide between outdoors and indoors is utter. All windows are covered on the inside with cardboard to prevent light pollution from the station from leaking outside and into the light sensors the winter science uses. We are defended against the cold with insulation and fossil fuels and double-glazed windows. The darkness outside is often deeper and harder than any you can imagine, but the sky sparkles with lights and jewels and arrays of crystalline lights, galaxies visible to the naked eye.

Indoors it is warm, and lit up. The station never goes completely dark, there is always some hum, some light somewhere, a smoke detector flashing green, a radio charger indicating red or green state of charge, light everywhere. When you walk down the halls or past empty darkened rooms motion sensors turn the lights on ahead of you. But with the windows covered, you have no sense of the outdoors, unless the winds rise and you feel a chill emanating from the upwind side (usually the front of the building facing the pole markers, geographic and ceremonial.)

There are people on station who work indoors, and their ventures out are limited to standing on a deck underdressed to catch a 10 second glimpse of an aurora. There are others, like myself, who are outside for long periods of time almost every day, working or commuting to outlying science buildings.

Outdoors in the dark, with the windows of the station covered, you are immensely alone in your tasks and travels. The reality of the warmth and light of station seems a distant concept as the cold creeps in and numbs your fingers and the wind stings the little bits of exposed skin on your face when you face the wrong way.

Each, indoors and outdoors, is divided by the walls and windows of the station from the other. Technology and modern architecture provides this “safe” place for us to hunker down for the winter, to which we retreat when the cold gets too much to bear outdoors. It is a destination, a beacon of safety while outdoors.

But it also holds the other people, trapped indoors with each other, inescapable. The outdoors, though cold and harsh, often is less difficult to deal with than other people, so it is an escape route taken frequently by several on station, regardless of job requirements. The divide between indoors and outdoors becomes a sanctuary, the dark a peaceful place where no one sees you and you can be truly alone.

I learned to simply walk down our halls without thinking about the outdoors, my head slowly learning to stop seeking the view from windows. To see outdoors I had to be outdoors.

Now the window coverings are off, and the sun rapidly approaches the horizon. We are at a very light dawn, with yellow and pink and blue in the sky and no need for lights. I can see across the station, I can see what I am doing with my hands.

And others can see me.

I can no longer leave the station to find peace in working outdoors alone at my Waste Yard, laughing to myself at the ridiculous nature of my job, or stopping to gaze up at the dark sky alive with auroras above me. I am highly aware of the open windows and the curiosity of those contained within the warmth gazing outwards to see what they have not seen in so long. I feel like a salamander whose hiding rock has been lifted, exposing me to scrutiny and inquiry and danger. I feel judged and considered and poked by these unseen eyes from the windows. I have lost my freedom outdoors.

It is beautiful outside at this transitional time of year, between our one night and one day. The light is diffuse and warmer looking than in summer, the light from the sky casts across the jumbled drifty sastrugi-strewn landscape and the snow reflects pale butter yellow. I could stay in this state of light, this hazy grace of indirect sunlight, forever. But the sun comes, and next week it will rise above the horizon and become the harsh bright all-consuming forever sunlight of the polar plateau in summer time.

Now, when I am indoors, I am easily distracted. The window coverings are down, and I am slowed as I commute the halls by my need to swivel my head and pause at every window, at every forbidden for so long view that reveals the buildings in blue and orange and white and grey and texture on the snow that I did not see in winter darkness, only trip over as I wandered on it.

It is wonderful, whilst indoors, to have this division between indoors and outdoors cast aside with the cardboard coverings, views restored and changes in the light witnessed so easily and from such an innocent place of warmth. It is terrible whilst outdoors to know there are eyes looking out onto my once private landscape.

I am learning much about myself here this winter, and lack of light, darkness does not bother me. Light, unceasing invasive light, also doesn’t bother me. I yearn for its vivid return as much as I mourn the loss of my precious dark.

I am torn. I miss the darkness and the privacy it lent me, but I am also infused with happiness at the return of the daylight.

There’s a saying down here that you hear quite frequently: “Cotton kills.” Cotton as a fabric holds moisture and provides no warmth to the wearer, and if damp or moist to any degree, it actually sucks heat away from our bodies.

It’s a fact. We mostly wear the new fabrics like polypropylene, or the newer merino wools against our skin.

Except for a few t-shirts I tend to sleep in, I don’t have much truck with cotton.

But this week, I had a lot to do with cotton. Almost a full day and a half I dealt with cotton.

The Vehicle Maintenance Facility (VMF) at Pole is in a giant cold arch, within which is the large heated facility. I have a very shortened waste line inside the barn doors of the arch, by the front doors of the VMF. I have a large triwall for cardboard, a large triwall for Non-R. The VMF generates a lot of Non-R, essentially a category of mixed media that cannot be recycled at all.

Over the summer season, the waste bins were on the left side of the arch, out of the way of the machinery constantly moving in and out through the constantly opening doors to the shop. Over the summer season, the barn doors remain open pretty much 24/7, as the VMF is staffed day round. Over the summer season, there is very little to no accumulation of snow, let alone storms or windy periods that move the snow around all over where it gets in our way. and if it does, it is almost instantly groomed by machinery large and small.

Things change during the winter season. We don’t groom the station. We only have two people in the VMF working days. The snow during a windy period (like we are having right now) blows around and builds up, not just outside the VMF but inside the barn doors in the arch. Anywhere there is a crack, snow moves in and populates the space with white.

The winds predominate in such a way that they blow from the back of the arch down over into the slough in front of the VMF entry way. It grows. And it sneaks in. When it is windy, the barn doors are shut for the night. The habits of wind and snow cause a great deal more snow to pile up on the left side inside the VMF arch where I had my waste triwalls.

Wide open waste triwalls. I have no covers for these bins to keep the snow out, and shutting the flaps, only to open them and close them each time they needed to be used, would just cause the frozen cardboard to snap off with a few bends. So, in the first months of the winter, the half full triwall of Non-R disappeared under a mountain of snow on a weekly basis.

Noticing that the RIGHT side of the arch did not get the same snow, one of the VMF guys, Keith, brilliantly suggested that we swap the skidoo fueling station on the right side (which gets very little use during the winter) with the left side waste triwalls. He made it happen and helped with the shoveling, and Boyd, the Heavy Equipment Operator (HEO) moved in with a bucket on the loader to clean up before and after the move.

Since then, there has been mere inches of snow inside my triwalls, versus the feet and feet of snow piling up over on the other side of the arch. HUge;y great idea and a real help to my season, this switch. But it did happen a bit late in the season, and during a relatively busy part of the season. So the several feet of snow already in my Non-R triwall, on top of a few feet of trash, had to be moved out of the triwall. I cannot ship a triwall full of snow, about 2/3rds so, on a warm airplane to a warmer climate. It’d just melt and destroy the triwall, leaving Wasties down the line with a foul mess on their hands and hours of labour to clean it up.

So I had to get inside that triwall and get all the Non-R waste items up out of that snow into a fresh triwall, then shovel that snow out of the bin. Easier said than done. The larger items, like hose and engine bits and rubber gaskets and filters and bits of chairs, and old bamboo flag poles, and the used hand and toe warmers, were easy picks, as I stood there on top of this dirty snowy mess. By the time I (and my divine helper du jour, Lee) had the larger pieces out, I was left with a triwall full of dirty grey snow speckled with tiny bits of broken insulation and plastic bits, 2 feet deep.

And as I discovered when I came back the next day to complete the task, as I sorted this stuff out, shovelful by shovelful, someone had tossed a butt load of clean cotton balls into the mix. Yeah, right category, Non-R, but cotton balls?

I couldn’t just shovel this snow out of the triwall into the great snowy landscape of Pole with all those cotton balls mixed up in there. I had to get all those cotton balls out of the snow. One by one. Cotton balls are white. Snow is white.

The snow had hardened and clumped by then, so it was not a question of powdery sugar snow dotted with soft rounds of cotton. It was a landscape of cottonball and larger sized clumps of cottonball-coloured snow, containing cottonballs.

I spent a lot of time, at -85F, inside the arch and out of the wind, standing and kneeling inside that triwall, picking up a shovelful of snowy cottonball mix at a time. Using the shovel as a platform, I sorted snow from cottonballs.

There is a technique to this, as I quickly learned, standing there shovel in front of me braced on the edge of the triwall. I would quickly pound the clumps of snow flat, and anything I pounded that bounced back into cottonball shape, was a cottonball and picked out of the mess. Hours and hours of pounding and picking later, I had emptied that triwall of its snow, and had a pile of cottonballs.

It’s not exactly something I saw in my job description, and I certainly dreamt that night of pounding and picking white against crumbly against bouncy. Despite the seeming monotony, and the sheer ridiculousness of the task I had set myself, I had a very fun day. There is satisfaction in completing a task, as picayune as all that, simply in the completion of it.

Add in the fact I was doing that in full ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) Gear, at -85F at the South Freakin’ Pole of the whole damn world, and I can’t help but have a smile on my face and a giggle in my heart damn near the entire time.

I wouldn’t change places with you back there in the warm real world of sunshine and humidity, but I might beg you for an avocado or a pint of fresh raspberries to make my winter easier.