Redhead Amok in Antarctica
My Secret Landscape
Some days the silliness is restricted to that which is in my own head, the thoughts I have as I struggle with yet another not quite impossible but certainly effortful task. I like the days spent outdoors doing these things: the hunt through the berms for the right barrel, or to find out if the triwalls I have for winter supplies have been stapled or just glued on the joins. It may seem insurmountable--the cold, the dark, the heavy gear, the climbing and lumping along at the merest physical task--but it is just something that needs doing, and I go do it.
I prefer the physical effort to the database work at a desk in an artificially lit office with cardboard over the window. Days in the office, are days I feel more fatigued and depressed. I will grab at any excuse to go outside and play (errr....work). As much as the after effects of a full day, or even a half day, outdoors in the cold are dehydration and physical exhaustion, my mental response to it is one of high self-esteem. I am buzzing with energy and happiness. I feel more like me than the days I am trapped inside.
Yet, conversely, I also dread the outdoors. Not the BEING outdoors, but the effort of getting dressed and getting prepared for the outdoors. There are days when I am just so tired to start with that the idea of gearing up in my 25-30lbs of ECW gear is unbearable. But then I do it, and I am pleased to have done so. I can feel it in my bones, the pleasure, the injection of energy. Regardless of what I actually may achieve, and it is always less than I expect I will, going outdoors, once I get out the door, is a magnificent thing here.
The other day was a long day outdoors, at temps averaging -80F, windhill about -95-100F (minimal really) and it was a joy. I clambered and climbed and gallumphed in the darkness over my snow-covered and softened supply berm looking at my collection of triwalls, investigating something for one of my bosses in Denver. Many people here, when I mentioned my task for the day, groaned on my behalf, bemoaning the inability of those office bound folks to understand the darkness and the cold and the effort in such a simple request. Which is a crock of shit, really, the Denver folks I work for know the ridiculous nature of this place, and the effort involved in everything here. There are some things I have been asked to do, which truly are difficult, but not because of the cold and the dark, so much as the accumulated weight of several winters' worth of hard packed snow. Inventory under that stuff is just not on the cards for me, that's going to have to be a summer thing with a whole crew of people involved.
But if they insisted, I'd try my best. I see these things as a challenge, and when I mention what I have to do there is a half-bragging quality to it, not one of complaining. Few people here see the work I do, as I do it almost entirely alone and independent, be it paperwork, research, or the multitude of tasks that take me outside to actually organize and command the world of physical waste. So when I mention this, some of it is to alert people to the fact that yes, though they don't see it, I do actually work; and to let people know that if they don't see me ever again, they might want to look on this particular berm for my stiff and frozen body. And they'd better leave my body there for the winter, and plant a Canadian flag there in memorium, or so they can find me under the drifting snows come summer.
So I started my morning the other day on the supply berm. At first I walked around it trying to identify, under the coating of snow, the pallets of flat triwalls, frequently reaching up to rub the inch or so of snow from the vertical surfaces to see if I were so lucky as to locate a label. Pretty soon I was hauling myself up the side of the berm into the stacks of triwalls and drums and pallets stored there. It is somewhat like being in a deserted overgrown cityscape, vertical towers all snow-fluffy and harmless and seemingly unidentifiable but for vaguely familiar shapes, a small road between them running down the length of the berm, drifted in with snow frequently a metre high or more. I was hidden there, except for the occasional glimpse of my headlamp as I turned it on to see details on the towers. Even with no moon, and only stars to light my way, the snow was still lit up and the world was still navigable without the invasion of artificial light.
I certainly stumbled and ended up on my ass or my knees in the snow as I perused this secret hideaway path, depth perception at this low light is not easy. But with a clear sky and not wreathed in the smoke cloud that exists downwind of the power plant, I could distinguish snow from not-snow, as everything not-snow is darker.
When I came upon a stack of the right kind of triwalls I clumsily pulled myself up on top, one mitten wrapped around the strapping and the other flailing for a grip on the flat snowy surface as I tried to hop up and haul myself sideways and one-legged and rolling over onto my back, to the surface. A surface covered in more than a foot of snow more often than not. I'd clear the snow off with my hands and forearms in great sweeps, to see if I could find the information I needed beneath the snow. Frequently I'd stop and roll onto my back and just gaze up through the fur ruff of my Big Red parka, blinking a rapid, icy-eyelashed, clinking tango, into the night sky.
Once the berm had been explored and the information requested found, I traipsed over to my Waste Yard, where I keep the minimal things necessary to band and strap and build triwalls. Well, we'd had a bit of a wind (about 30knots) in the days previous and the stack of flat small triwalls (T32s), though strapped down with a few small wooden pallets on it for weight had...ermmm....gone feral.
Yup, where once I had a stack of T32s shoulder high the wind had picked them up and scattered them downwind of my Waste Yard like so many cards. There had been a veritable stampede of wild triwalls and my once shoulder high stack was now about mid-calf. I stood there in the dark for a moment, slightly disoriented by my new landscape, thinking, "Gosh, maybe I'd better be more concerned about supplies of T32s for the winter than I had thought." My winter mind is slow to catch on to things. It wasn't until I wandered a bit past the short pile that I found the slithery flat pancakes of triwalls skewed right off into the darker dark. I could vaguely make out the patches of darker areas, looking like holes in the lighter snow. I trudged further out and continued to find more and more scattered randomly around the snow.
Thus started the remainder of my day. It was by no means with a sinking heart, or a muttered string of curses in multiple languages that I discovered what had happened. It was just another thing to do outside. I picked up each single triwall from the snow, my arms spread wide, one mitten wedged between the flaps for grip. I backed my way, dragging them one by one, back to the stack of triwalls. Frequently landing on my kiester on the stack as I backed into it, triwall on top of me, trying to remove the mitten from its narrow slit between flaps without losing either fingers or the mitten itself and my hand slipping out to leave the mitten behind.
Sometimes I backed over other triwalls, slick with a surface coating of snow, and staggered and fell on my ass or to my knees. Sometimes I landed on other things in the yard. About 30 triwalls had run off from their future of domestic and industrial servitude, into the wild black yonder, and I had to herd them back up, one by one. It was a hard task that took several hours before lunch, and then another hour or more after lunch. An unnecessary task, if I had strapped the pack down tighter. But no grumbling, just the work, and the joy, and the laughter at each stumble, and the occasional glorious muffled tumble backwards to look up at the sky with its stars and its auroras.
I recall my childhood in Nova Scotia, far enough north that it was mostly dark by the time I reached home after school in the winter. Any outdoor play time was usually after dinner in the dark. My memories of playing in the snow as a child, or playing pond hockey with the neighbouring kids, are all at night, under a clear black starlit sky. Every time I go outside here, I take these moments to feel that playfulness again, that sense of a softened secret landscape begging to be explored. I am dressed warmly, I have tasks to accomplish, but I still stop to stare up at the endless darkness, the sparkles, the occasional dancing streaking aurora, and I feel infinitely young again, every time, comforted by this continuum of winter-lit starclad memories. It is my home, these dark wintery nights, no matter how hard the labour or ridiculous the tasks and the conditions I do them in. The hard work seems small enough in the vastness of this place and my happiness when outside in it.
posted by: coldwish at 05/02/09 17:14 |
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south pole waste winter 2009
