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.
Day 24-29: 06-11 February, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, 1,033 miles remaining to McMurdo
The pressure to get SPOT 3 heading back to McMurdo from Pole starts well before SPOT 1 had even begun to roll. Amundsen-Scott is open for only about three months out of the year, and though it remains staffed with a skeleton crew throughout the long, isolated winter, transportation to or from the remote station is completely out of the question in all but the most dire of circumstances—and even then getting a plane to land and take off safely from the dark, shuttered skiway takes an astounding amount of guts and an even greater share of luck. The South Pole (overland) Traverse, traveling across the Antarctic backcountry at speed, and on a tight, grueling schedule, is more exposed to risk than much of the rest of the program, and thus it has been decreed by the USAP that SPOT must travel under the protective umbrella of Pole’s Search and Rescue apparatus as long as it is outside of the range of McMurdo’s. As this is only possible so long as there are aircraft staged at the station, the stress placed on getting the last leg of the last traverse of the summer quickly underway is enormous—and as the effect of delays throughout the season due to such inevitabilities as bad weather or mechanical failure are cumulative, that stress is felt even during winfly, while the first preparations for the year are just beginning.
That pressure only becomes more intense as the official closing of Pole looms ever closer, however, and so we motored into the station in early February with an iron knot in each of our stomachs and the shared drive to deliver our payload of precious diesel and get the fuck back onto the road as quickly as possible. We began by staggering our days off, so that half the operators could start the offload while the other half strained themselves to cram into one day as much as rest as possible after the 1,033 mile journey across the monstrous and lonely continent. When we weren’t working on relaxing, we worked tirelessly in the sharpening cold and the continuously growing wind, haunted frequently by the screaming roar of the LC-130s that landed twice per day to deliver a few last pieces essential cargo and carry off the summer staff in small clumps back to McMurdo, and thence to the wider world above. The cold was an unfortunate complication to the work, stiffening all of our muscles and joints while icing the straps on each of the fuel loads into solid blocks—but it was the deafening whine of the large, decrepit aircraft, which can never shut down their engines while at Pole for fear of freezing up and never starting again, that truly made the job a grim, miserable ordeal. Most afternoons we were reduced to exaggerated pantomime as only form of communication in the fuel pit.
We were, once again, camped a few minutes’ walk from the station’s front entrance, and just a couple hundred feet from the ceremonial South Pole and its half-wreath of flags. The station manager had come to our table as we were clearing our plates the night we rolled into town, welcoming us back, thanking us for our hard work, and saying, rather awkwardly, over and over and over again that if we wanted anything, absolutely anything, anything at all, not to hesitate to ask for it. The request that had been made for the eleven of us to be given rooms inside the station—which acquired a dozen more open beds every single day we were there and another crop of Polies flew north—went unmentioned. The station may have depended on us to deliver the fuel they needed to keep the lights on and the heat flowing, and none of the locals were shy about sharing their appreciation, but that gratitude, apparently, didn’t extend quite as far as the housing berthings. It was fine, really—no worse at any rate than a winter in McMurdo, where every building is spaced in such a way as to give the residents the full force of the regional environment between every meal. Even so, being made to carry bottles full of our own pee every morning into a heated building just so we could pour them out into the flush toilets the diminishing local population could easily take for granted did a fair bit to sour our welcome into the community. But if the galley staff’s seemingly cathartic—perhaps even desperate—replayings of the Eagle’s “Hotel California” several times each day were any indication, we may actually have been better off being held at arm’s length from the Polar fraternity: unable even to check in, we, at least, were still free to leave.
It was on the second day of fuel offload that we learned, quite by accident, that one of the mechanics had been injured during the return of SPOT 1, and had been hiding his injury for the last 1,500 miles. Such is the fear of the Antarctic contract worker of being NPQ’d, or labeled as not physically qualified for work and pulled from the job, that they will suffer in silence through long and sleepless nights, hiding their pain from those around them in the hope that by so doing they can stay on the team. When the mechanic’s injury finally came to light, he was sent straight to Pole’s tiny clinic, where a quick and dirty x-ray revealed that he had spent the last month working with a broken wrist. It had healed in that time, sort of, but was still in delicate enough condition that he would not be allowed to return with the rest of us—he would be sent back to McMurdo on the first plane out of Pole, and from there back north, his journey across the great plains of ice brought to an early end. One morning, the eleven of us were working toward our return trip exactly as planned. By lunchtime, our crew had been abruptly pared down to ten.
Not that rest of us had any idea, at least at first. All those of us working in the fuel pit really knew that afternoon was that the mechanic had just up and disappeared from the defueling operation, with only a vague idea as to why. It wasn’t until the end of the following day, when we drove his perfectly-tuned tractor onto a set of red plastic skis to be towed back home, that we understood that his worst fear had been realized. A good old boy who hailed from the Gulf Coast, he had never even seen snow before joining us on SPOT for his first deployment to the Antarctic. This traverse was all he had ever known of the ice, and now that he had lost his place with us, he would making his way to back to McMurdo without the only people on the continent he knew. We were a strange and mismatched crew on traverse, yes, a messy amalgam of skills and off-kilter personalities that would and could never blend in any other environment. But we had been blessed with a group that had always gotten along, even in the most trying of circumstances, when the weather and the gods of bad luck had conspired to work us into misery while trying to fix some desperate problem or other in the driving snow. It isn’t possible to live and work so closely together out in the world’s greatest, hardest wilderness without becoming a kind of family–and, strange and demented though this one might be, it was a bummer to lose one of our kin just as we were closing in on the finish.
“I really wanted to see this thing through to the end,” the young mechanic told me in his deep Panama City drawl, as we walked down the station’s central hallway the evening before he was scheduled to fly, “but I guess it wasn’t in the cards for me.” He looked ruefully down the corridor. We would be leaving soon ourselves, having just delivered an impossible-sounding 185,000 gallons in under three and half days. The pace of work had been brutal, leaving me feeling as if I had just been jumped by a mob of angry, well-fed Polies, but it meant we would soon be back on trail, living and working within the rhythm to which we’d all become accustomed—all but the lone, injured mechanic. We stood in awkward silence for a moment, as the winds howled outside the station, blowing snow blotting out the world beyond the small windows set at regular intervals along the wall. The second journey to Pole was over, and though our routes would be very different, our separate travels back across the empty land were both about to begin. Together, once again on the cusp, but now for the last time.
