That’s what this whole stupid Antarctica polar plunge thing is about…bonding with the people you’re spending time here with. That and saying goodbye to friends. Sometimes I think it would be less painful to just start hating them right away than to go through this most stupid-of-all ritual. Alas, I jumped anyhow. Hopefully this is the last time. Next time, these people will be jumping for me! Three weeks and counting.

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I stay pretty tuned in to all things Antarctic. I subscribe to several RSS feeds that look for various terms related to Antarctica. This means that over the last few weeks I have become sick of seeing headlines about the latest Antarctic movie “Whiteout” which is based on a graphic novel and set in Antarctica and has something to do with a U.S. marshal investigating a murder. I knew that the “Whiteout” hype had gone mainstream when my mom asked me if I had heard of it. From the Miami Herald: 

There’s something analogous between the Spam-filled Moonpie and the marketing campaign for “Whiteout,” an Antarctica-set thriller whose commercials and trailers suggested an icebound horror film.

Here I am…polluting the internet with more “Whiteout” rhetoric.

One of the things that caught my attention as I have been scanning Antarctic headlines was this story about Qantas offering sightseeing flights over Antarctica:

Qantas A380 Selected For Sightseeing Flights To Antarctica

Fri, 18 Sep ’09
Passengers Will Spend 4 Hours Over The Antarctic Ice

A Qantas Airbus A380 super jumbo will undertake a unique sightseeing flight to Antarctica – the first commercial flight by an A380 over the south polar region, and the only aircraft permitted to do so on New Year’s Eve.

The flight, organized by Melbourne-based Antarctica Sightseeing Flights, a division of Australian travel company Croydon Travel, will originate in Sydney and fly via Melbourne to reach Antarctica. Passengers will be over the “ice” at midnight and be the first in the world to see the light of the new year.

The chartered A380 will fly figure-eight patterns above the breathtaking polar terrain for up to four hours before heading back to Melbourne and Sydney.

Two other Antarctic flights are also planned for the southern summer – a second A380 service direct from Sydney on 24 January and a Boeing 747-400 from Melbourne on Valentine’s Day, 14 February. All flights are operated by senior Qantas pilots, with the captain in command having previously operated Antarctica sightseeing flights[keep the bold part in mind - it's relevant to something later in my article].

It sounds a bit silly to me. Sightseeing flights in a small airplane where every seat is a window seat makes a bit more sense, but this is just ridiculous. I suppose if you’re someone who just has to see Antarctica, this is a good way to do it relatively cheap and a turnaround flight probably isn’t going to cause one to succumb to polar madness. Regardless of my opinion the sightseeing flights probably have quite the appeal to some people. The flights might even appear banal until you consider what happened on the last sightseeing flight over Antarctica. In November 1979 flight 901 departed Auckland, NZ on a sightseeing flight of Antarctica with 237 passengers and 20 crew members. The captain and co-pilot had not flown the Antarctic flight before, but the flight was considered to be straightforward and they were both experienced pilots. All 257 people on board died when the plane crashed into Mt. Erebus. The information on the flight recorder tapes showed there had been no emergency in the cockpit of the aircraft. Attention was then focussed on the possibility of pilot error, pointing to the inexperience of the two pilots in flying in the Antarctic.

The recovery effort involved over 60 people from nearby McMurdo Station. There are several grim accounts of the recovery effort – imagine working at high-altitude, in the cold and your job is picking up bits and pieces of New Zealand’s largest single tragedy. No thanks!

As this season nears its end I thought I would write a guide for my fellow winterovers on what to expect upon re-assimilating with the real world.

Here are a few things to keep in mind during this period of adjustment:

Meals & Food
• You will be expected to make choices when it comes to meals, e.g. what to eat, how you would like it prepared and at what time would you like to eat.
• A restaurant is much like the galley except there are many food items from which to choose and there are many different styles of restaurants.
• When finished with a meal at a restaurant, you are obligated to pay for your meal.
• You will likely have to sit at an unfamiliar table at a restaurant, embrace the change.
• Smegma, “The Shocker”, santorum and flatulence are all unacceptable mealtime conversation topics.
• “Freshies” are referred to as fruits and vegetables and are in abundance at most restaurants.

Social Interaction
• No need to obsess over male to female ratios as there are people of both sexes in abundance in many parts of the world.
• Women tend to be self-conscious about their size, thus their size won’t be stenciled in giant numbers on their Carharrt overalls.
• In fact, people in general are fairly unlikely to be seen wearing Carharrt overalls in any social setting. Much like choices in food, choices in clothing will probably be extremely overwhelming. Many people in the real world have a tendency to wear different clothes every day of the week. Oh, and these clothes will have likely been laundered recently.
• If you are a male and wearing a skirt or wig, you may be mistaken for a clown or a homosexual; discretion is advised if you don’t wish to be identified with either of these groups. The good news is that this scenario isn’t likely owing to the fact that wigs and skirts aren’t nearly as readily available as you have become accustomed.
• If you are a female, wearing a skirt or dress doesn’t have to be reserved for special occasions such as midwinter or sunrise dinner. Go crazy, wear one every day if that’s your preference – it probably won’t end up smelling like diesel in the real world.
• People of small size and extremely youthful appearance are most likely children. Though tempting, staring in awe or disgust at children will likely get you labeled as a pervert, which, in the real world is a derogatory label.
• Those awful devices that spew forth advertisements, rhetoric and pseudo-drama are called televisions. Many people, especially in the U.S., seem enamored with these devices and insist on structuring much of their free-time around the so-called programming on them. This is a cultural oddity and must be respected lest you be thought of as cretinous.

Daily Activities
• You may find the transition to unstructured time difficult. Try your best to simply exist without rigid schedules. You probably won’t be able to rely on your outlook scheduler to remind you to do things. Take small steps in structuring your time; for instance, if you feel an unfamiliar twinge in your stomach, you may be feeling slight hunger – that means that it might be mealtime
• Speaking of mealtime, you can eat any time you like so no need to go to dinner just because you’re afraid you’ll miss out and be hungry later. If you are hungry later, you can simply eat
• Your day won’t be broken into four uniform blocks of time book-ended by snacks and coffee in the galley. It’ll be tough, but if you work at it, you can probably make the necessary adjustments and eventually find this way of life tolerable until you can get back to The Ice.

Most important, take lots of pictures and bring back stories for your travelogue next season!

Imagine this:

It’s four A.M., you’re in the midst of a bleary-eyed hoard of people dressed in super-thick red parkas and comically bulbous white boots. You’re being herded, like cattle, onto a giant military aircraft. In five hours your flight will be landing on a sheet of ice. The cargo door will open and you’ll be aware of the frigid temperatures, but that’s not what consumes your attention. The vastness, the Seussian landscape, the overbearing brightness of the sun are the things that try to wrestle your senses into submission, but your senses have no frame of reference from which to draw on so your experience becomes nearly incomprehensible.

Imagine this:

You’re in a helicopter, flying over what appears to be a topographical model of Mars. The ground below you hasn’t seen rain in millions of years. The aircraft lands; supplies and people are shuffled, the aircraft takes off again, repeating this ritual a few times before landing at a remote fuel station. While the helicopter is being refueled, you’re treated to fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies. You board the helicopter and depart for “home” – but you don’t go directly home. See, it’s early February and the sea ice is in full retreat. The helicopter hovers just over the very edge of the ice – where it meets open ocean. The point where ice meets water is teeming with wildlife; seals, penguins and orcas all feeding on krill. You don’t know it now, but in a few years, you’ll get to experience what krill tastes like when it’s served at a celebratory mid-winter meal. Through the headphones built into your flight helmet, the pilot’s muffled voice says something, but you’re too immersed in the experience to hear it or really even care what is being said.

Imagine this:

You board a ship at the southern tip of Chile. For the next 11 days you will be sailing to Antarctica. Several days into the cruise, the ship sails into the caldera of a volcano. A volcano – you’re sailing INSIDE a volcano! You’ll go ashore aboard a rubber boat. On the beach, you dig a pit that rapidly fills up with geothermally heated water. As the impromptu hot tub becomes too hot for comfort, you dig a trench to allow cold water from the ocean to mix with the hot water, creating a pool of absolute bliss. A few days later, the ship enters the Neumayer channel. The surrounding landscape is so pristine that it appears as if it were a painting. Nothing this beautiful could be real, could it?

Imagine this:

You’re road-tripping from Colorado to Utah with nine people you met only a week ago. You’ll go on a sunrise hike to Delicate Arch in Arches National Park. You’ll commiserate with your new friends about the absurdity of Utah’s liquor laws. You eventually find yourself combing the desert for clues which will help you find a “lost” doll. In this unlikely desert environment you are training for search and rescue in Antarctica. You’d like to believe that you have now seen the pinnacle of absurdity, but you know better. On your way back to Colorado you stop at a roadside diner where you meet an ex-con turned artist who is so open and interesting that you will always remember him and his story has become irreversibly enmeshed with your story.

Imagine this:

Job satisfaction is attained when you are 40 miles away from town and the ambient temperature is 40 below. Your behemoth tracked vehicle breaks down, stranding you; your mind is the only resource available to get you out of this situation. The difficulty of each task is magnified by whiteout conditions, windchills exceeding 70 below and only a couple of hours of daylight. Though it takes three days, there is no describing the feeling you have when you manage to get yourself out of this mess with no external support. You now have a new yardstick with which to measure possibilities and you can’t imagine how grave a situation would have to be for you to think of it as impossible.

Imagine this:

You see seas as smooth as glass and a landscape that looks like it was colored by an eight-year-old girl*. You and your friends are going to enjoy a day of boating. You’re surrounded by icebergs that are bathed in a hue of blue that is absolutely indescribable and unimaginable. A blue so deep, pure and bright that your eyes try to refuse that you are seeing it. Penguins are porpoising beside your boat and in the water you witness the serpentine grace of a leopard seal. The sea ice has set up in places, and at times you think that all forward progress will been halted by it, but alas you get through and around the next bend you’re confronted with another vista of infinite beauty.

Imagine this:

You step outside on your way to work. The temperature is an inconceivable 80 below. Your first thought might be that you need to expedite moving between buildings – but then you see it – the sky above is lit up with colors not of this earth. The lights dance against a backdrop of stars so thick that if it were called the “creamy way” that still wouldn’t be descriptive enough. The temperature isn’t even noticeable as you’re mesmerized by the light show above. You realize that this is what the sky will look like for several more months.

Imagine that your circle of friends includes several people who have terrain features named after them or who have summited Everest (and other notable peaks) multiple times, though these people certainly aren’t boastful of their accomplishments. Imagine that one of the best meals you’ve ever eaten was prepared in a tent, 800 miles from running water. Imagine that you’re one of a handful of people who has seen the once-per-year sunrise at The South Pole.

Imagine this:
All of these things that you’ve experienced are part of your job!

These things are only a minuscule part of working in Antarctica, but over time these threads are woven into the fabric of fond memories and revered experiences.

Most of the time, working in Antarctica is drudgery, pure and simple. We have hellishly arduous conference calls, awful fluorescent lighting, a never-ending mountain of bureaucratic red tape and ineptitude, budget struggles and a vast array of nonsensical corporate rules, as well as many of the other things that people deal with in their jobs each and every day. We have all of that AND we have the problems created by extreme weather; and we have to wash dishes and scrub toilets, yet all who come, and especially those who return, do so because the experience, as a whole, surpasses imagination.

I’m often asked why I keep coming back – the short answer is usually something along the lines of “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand” – but when I actually stop and think about how privileged I am to get to do some of these things I realize just how badass it is to work in Antarctica.

*paraphrased quote from Neal

Antarctica‘s history is replete with tales of explorers and expeditioners going completely mad. One of my favorite tales is from the Mawson expedition of 1911. While Mawson and two members of his team were out doing sciencey stuff, disaster struck as a sledge loaded with most of their food was lost in a crevasse along with the team of dogs pulling the sledge and one member of the party. With no food Mawson and his remaining companion started the 500km journey back to their base of operations. They began eating the dogs. Unbeknownst to the men, dog livers contain toxic levels of Vitamin A. The combination of the stressful situation and Vitamin A toxicity drove both men to madness but had a greater effect on Mawson’s companion who eventually, in protest of eating the dogs, bit off his own finger and eventually died, probably of complications caused by Hypervitaminosis A.

Mawson continued on, facing even greater adversity. He fell into a crevasse, but was saved when his sledge acted as an anchor. Mawson admitted to considering cutting the rope at that point. The soles of his feet separated from the feet themselves. He cut his sledge in half with a pen knife and dragged it approximately 160km back to camp. Upon his arrival to the base camp, he discovered that his ship had left just days earlier. There was a party of six men left behind in case survivors returned – this party was able to radio the ship, but poor weather thwarted a rescue attempt. One of the men left behind succumbed to polar madness very early on, was locked up and eventually institutionalized upon the party’s return to Australia.

Admiral Byrd’s historic (but controversial) flight over the South Pole is seen as the line of demarcation between the heroic age of exploration and modern exploration. Things have gotten easier in Antarctica, but that doesn’t mean the crazies don’t still find their way down here and the winter seems to be their time to shine. There are stories about one man violently bludgeoning another with a hammer, mutinous crews, a doctor who attempted to build a time machine and a man who was convinced that aliens would land. More minor symptoms include memory loss, quick tempers and apparently hallucinations. Popular opinion is that everyone wintering in Antarctica will go crazy to some degree.

During my first winter at The South Pole I was quick to dismiss as myth the things that I had heard people talk about. I really do believe that people embellish the symptoms of T3 (AKA winterover toast) a great deal. I did, however, have a minor experience of my own in which I completely lost a four-hour block of time. The incident did at least cause me to be a believer.

This season I may have actually “lost it” in a more classic way, perhaps the isolation and lack of stimulation are finally getting to me, but the other day when I was returning from the Marr glacier I saw what I thought was a person (which my mind quickly turned into people). I went as far as to radio this sighting in. Upon my return to station quite a few folks were out with binoculars trying to see what I thought I saw. By this point I was quite a bit less sure about what I had seen, but to satisfy my own curiosity I went back out with another person and a pair of binoculars only to discover what I had seen were rocks that looked like a person and a bird fluttering which added movement to the scene. I expected to catch quite a bit of razzing, but it was fairly mild actually. Perhaps nobody wants to try to push the guy who’s seeing things too far or perhaps it’s because I turned the thing around pretty quickly by calling them all suckers.

At any rate, it might be time for me to take some time off. More to follow.