The following is the personal account of a single, long-winded individual’s experiences living and working in Antarctica. No part of it has been reviewed or in any way endorsed by the United States Antarctic Program or the National Science Foundation, or any other public or private organization, institution, contractor, or company associated therewith. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone, for good or for ill.
November 2024, 1040 miles remaining to Pole, McMurdo Station, Ross Island, Antarctica
It had been years since I’d last seen my ex-girlfriend face to face, and now that we were both finally back in McMurdo at the same time I was determined to face this inevitability with grace and maturity. My plan was grossly overthought but simple, and, I hoped, both reasonable and kind: when we eventually walked by one another in the hallway, I would look her directly in the eye and say in a calm, sincere voice, “hello.” That was it. If it worked, my brevity would ensure that she wouldn’t feel overburdened by the presence of someone she’d probably rather altogether avoid, but my friendly directness would also gently suggest that we needn’t be at odds with one another, however acrimonious our breakup had been—that the continent was indeed big enough for the two of us to share amiably. When the moment came, however, and she burst before me from the coat alcove outside the galley, I had been rendered mute by the soft, chewy peanut butter cookie I had just shoved whole into my mouth. Our eyes met for the barest moment, my cheeks packed like a chipmunk’s as I nodded a stilted acknowledgment and she looked away, and we passed one another in awkward silence.
McMurdo had been unbearably crowded since my return from the Shear Zone. True, the noise and jostle of the summer population had felt overwhelming even before we’d left, but the addition of several hundred more people only heightened the contrast to the solitude we’d experienced while living on the ice shelf. Our quarters had been tight, but the SPOT 2 kitchen had been a sophisticated dance of patience and civility compared to the circus of chaos and brutality to which we returned at McMurdo. It was almost a relief, then, to dive into the arduous process of rigging and filling fuel bladders out at Willy Field, where we had no one for company but the pair of Fuelies assigned to work at the airfield pits, and the physical nature of the work left me too drained at the end of the day to experience the riot of faces in the galley as much more than white noise. The operators who had stayed behind while we’d gone out to explode cracks in the snow had already done the lion’s share of the work, and now it was up to us to finish the job: peeling bladders from the piles in which they’d been stored, dragging them across the ice shelf to the waiting sheets of HMW, netting and tying them down as the fuelies filled them, getting the straps just tight enough that the bladders wouldn’t roll off the plastic while they were being towed, and burping them of air until fine sizzle of diesel sprayed from the bleeder valve on top of each one onto a ready absorbent pad. We threw ourselves into the job, quickly picking up the constant stink of petroleum, a noxious cologne that infiltrated every stitch of clothing—especially, for some reason, my knit hat—until our noses became so fried that we couldn’t smell it anymore. It couldn’t have been pleasant for Sean Meadow to live with, but she never complained.
What we were doing, and what we would move on to do for the remainder of the summer, is something not done anywhere else in the world. There are no long-distance pipelines in Antarctica, no paved roads, no infrastructure of any kind to support the cross-continental movement of fuel—nor is there the budget to rig up a system that would at least imitate something that you might see back home. Every piece of this transport apparatus had either been custom-built for the job, or else was being used in a place and manner far outside the environment or purpose for which it was designed—from the tractors intended for the loamy hills of temperate farm country to the bladders themselves, which had never been intended to be tied with straps to sheets of slick plastic and dragged across a thousand miles of uneven ice and snow in temperatures reaching -50° and below. There was so much that could go wrong, so much that had over the last twenty years, so much that the experienced drivers warned us to watch out for during those last few days as we readied our loads and slowly packed up our personal gear. This was a job that was neither easy nor straightforward, the SOPs totally unique to the USAP and ever-evolving as each generation of operators discovered new and exciting mistakes to learn from. The closer we came to our eventual departure, the more I marveled that any of it worked it at all.
Of the 12 Challengers rolling to Pole, 10 of them would tow a fuel load—each comprising 8 bladders filled to their 3,000 gallon capacity. The tractor traditionally driven by the mechanic foreman would pull the modules that made up our kitchen/bathroom, the generator/freezer, the sleeping berthing with 5 compact 2-person rooms, the 4-person bunkhouse, and an additional 2-person hut that would mostly be used for heated storage but also housed the traverse’s second incinolet. The heaviest tractor would be used to drag the tool shed, along with three 40’ sleds loaded with cargo. I had helped to secure the complex network of straps holding much of this freight in place, and I remember looking over the morass of webbing and ratchets with a sense of relieved gratitude that I, like everyone else who was new to the department, would almost definitely be assigned to tow an octet of bladders.
I was informed that I would be pulling the cargo load as we were heading out to SPOTSA the morning after we’d finished filling the 10th and final bladder set, and instructed to hitch the sleds together so they would be ready to move. Using a giant, hulking ag-tractor to get the forward end of one sled close enough to the rear another to tie them together is an awkward business, and when the job was done, each piece of the train was accordionned at 90° angles to one another. I wanted to get the lines straightened out and have my load well-positioned relative to the SPOT 1 camp just across the way, so I started pulling it in a long, wide arc that I hoped to bring eventually back around to the SPOTSA pad, only it proved to be insufficiently wide and insufficiently long. The skis under the sleds really only work well when moving forward, and any but the gentlest turn adds an immense amount of drag—meaning that I got stuck the moment I left the compacted surface of SPOTSA and hit a patch of softer snow. My first test drive with the load I would carry for a thousand miles, and I needed to be pulled out within minutes.
Back on the island, the community was abuzz in anticipation for the upcoming Halloween party in the station’s Big Gym. For McMurdans, this annual soirée is the first big station-wide event of the summer; but for those leaving on SPOT 1 it would also be the last before we left the pandemonium of town for the isolation of the trail. At first, I was reluctant to go, sinking into a middle-aged torpor on our uneven couch with one leg draped over the backrest and my face buried in a crossword puzzle as Sean Meadow darted around the room piecing together her costume, a sort of glittering motif of gold sequins and glitter. But in the end I rallied, throwing on a simple black-cat onesie I pulled from storage under the bed. The walk to the Big Gym was chilly, though not the wind-blown apocalypse it was most years, and we could hear the steady low thud of a party in full swing as we made our way down the hill. As we approached the doors, they burst open with a thick, opaque cloud of human-generated steam, driven by a pack of revelers looking to cool off from the sweaty mass of whirling bodies within. We stepped inside, and immediately shed all the layers we could. Outside lay the Antarctic, the driest, coldest, largest desert on Earth, but just inside the double doors the atmosphere was downright tropical, humid and hot, the pulsating darkness broken only by the swirling lights playing across the dance floor. I was sweaty before I even managed to get my thick, quilted coat all the way off.
I’d never been to a McMurdo Halloween party while sober, and it was immediately apparent that the few other people celebrating the holiday without alcohol and I were spectacularly outnumbered. I’d made the trek down to the party expecting to be overwhelmed and probably grossed out, figuring I’d stay for one of the contrived, bass-driven clichés on the playlist before irish-goodbying the whole mess. But as we wandered across the transformed space, and the maelstrom of swirling costumes and over-cranked dance music swept over me I found myself almost sub-consciously joining in. Before I realized what I was doing, I was in the thick of the crowd, dancing with Sean Meadow in a fog of noise and sweat with complete abandon. In just a few short days I would be gone from this place, rolling in a sort of agricultural tank farther and farther into the limitless pale void to McMurdo’s southeastern horizon. The days in the cab of that beast would be long and solitary, broken only by a few brief hours with the small band of outcasts coming to the South Pole along with me. But on the edge of that dead white sea and our journey across it was this roiling, very much alive sea of humanity, my partner there with me at its swirling center, spinning and sparkling in her disco-ball splendor. I felt the last threads of my constant self-consciousness let go as I gave in completely to the unstoppable current of the moment, a part of something silly but profound, insignificant but impossible to forget—substance-free but under the influence of something more intoxicating than alcohol.
