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Once a Winterover

November 4, 2010.
A year ago today I left Pole.

No matter how long I am away I am always a Winterover, especially when I come back. I may never winter at Pole again, but I will always have that knowledge of the bottom of the world, in the dark, in the cold.

I did two Winters. My first Winter was horrendous. Truly, indelibly awful. No matter how amazing the individuals that make up a Winter community can be at the outset, when there is a failure, the whole season can go awry. Divisions, mistrust, hatred, resentment, laziness, all can culminate in depression and grief and trauma.

I learned some lessons during that winter. I learned that despite everything, the winteriness of Winter thrilled me. I had a job where I worked outside. Unlike most of the station, I looked at that scroll as the temperatures dropped, and the window coverings went up to close us in, and I still had to go outdoors to do my job. I had to venture into that daily colder cold, that daily darker dark regardless of the fear and dread. I thank my lucky stars for the job that I had, because it was outside, alone in the dark under the thick sparkling blanket of stars, falling over on my ass as I gazed dumbstruck up at auroras that danced and sang mysterious emerald shapes in the sky that I found joy. No matter how bad it got inside that station, all that petty squabbling and deliberately-inflicted misery, faded against the enormity of that sky and the peace I found in the dark on my own.

So I came back. And I had my good Winter. Leadership, experience and a companion made the difference between bad and good for me. Even so, my first few months, so close to the hard Winter and the engrained emotional responses I’d been trapped in just to survive it, were difficult to handle. I had to learn the difference between the Winters, and to do so I had to leave behind the bad Winter so I could experience what a good Winter was like. It took effort, and constant reminding, to do so. Not everything was able to be put aside. I doubt it ever will be, completely.

But I got my good Winter, outdoors and in. The one I’d wanted and hoped for. Yes, there were bumps and challenges, ups and downs, but I’d had my bad Winter, and no matter how bad it got, it never came even close. I measured bad differently. I knew what it looked like, tasted like and smelled like. And 2010 wasn’t it.

Now I am back on station, back at the South Pole, after a year away. I am here for the Summer, repeating my amazing season of 2008-9 in Cargo, as a Cargo Handler (or Air Transportation Specialist 1). In my year away I traveled the world. It was the longest time I’d been away from Antarctica since I started coming here in 2004. I needed it. Even after a good Winter. I healed. I relaxed. I thawed from the protective numbness that I’d developed.

Because Winters at Pole? Good or bad, they are universally hard. Hard on a body, hard on a mind, hard on a heart. Just. Really. Hard. Ten months here, 9 months with a small community. No way to leave when things go horribly wrong. And horribly wrong can be measured in so many different ways: the break up of a relationship, serious health issues, awful people, bad leadership, injuries, shit food, terrible news from home, a fire, or running out of chocolate.

You like to think, during your winter, that if any of these things happened you’d survive. That you are not really risking your life every time you go outside. That the station will not catch on fire, and that all the preparedness and training of every single member of the crew for such an event is enough to rescue ourselves should things go terribly wrong. That no one will have a heart attack, or break their neck, or have a serious head injury where we cannot take care of them with the medical facilities and personnel we have on station.

But reality is different. For most of the winter, we can’t get out. We simply can’t. There is no one who can show up at the drop of a hat to carry us all to safety. Maybe, one or two people could get out eventually, but not all of us. Not in time. Not in time to save us.

Not that there aren’t people out there prepared to try, should things be so dire as to need that effort. There are people out there who will fly planes, who will organize for such an event, and would risk their lives on our behalf, but it wouldn’t happen next week, or the week after, or the week after that. I may not even happen.

Realistically. You can’t get out.

So, you deal. You hunker down and get on with your day after day after day after day. You wake up morning after morning and you plug away at what you are here to do: science, waste, materials inventory, fueling, cooking, fixing machines, whatever.

And you watch the community– because it’s often the only thing in a day that changes at all—and peoples’ behaviour as the season plods on. You watch people buckle down and get on with it, or slowly lose their equilibrium so that character traits become exaggerated and define them, drink themselves into another reality, lose their shit spectacularly, or sit around on their lazy asses doing fuck all. Just like the world at large, its just so damn much more obvious here.

And then the winter ends.

And you leave.

And you recover and remember. And you forget. Or just try to.

And sometimes, some people, come back.

But that Winter, those Winters, they stay there inside you forever.

Here I am at Pole again, a year after I left my second winter, with a year of traveling and adventures and a world of change under my belt.

And boy, am I feeling my Winters.

This past Winter, the one I skipped, was a bad Winter. I know that look. I hear their stories and my entire being resonates in sympathy and understanding. I wish healing on the crew of 2011. Because I know it’s possible.

I am so thankful I wasn’t here for it.

Let’s start this Summer, and may it be a good one. I am back in a great department, with a boss I truly love, learning who my co-workers are and how we work together, and I’m telling you now, I’m EXCITED.