Antarctica
Diary
A
Weekly regular reports on her winter washing dishes at the bottom
of the world.
Andrea Baer
February 26 , 2003
“You either love it, or you hate it, from what I gather,” said
the taxi driver, tilting his head back toward me. “There seems to
be no in between when you’re working in Antarctica.”
A shudder motored through me as I shifted a blind
stare to the tidy Christchurch suburb passing outside the window.
I’ll scrub pots and pans 16 hours a day,
I had promised.
The good news is, it’s only 10 hours
a day, came the response.
And so, after years of applying for everything
from journalist to janitor, I was finally on my way to McMurdo Station,
a scientific research facility on Ross Island at the edge of the Ross
Ice Shelf. The catch: I would be working 10 hours a day, six days a week
for the next four months, as a dishwasher, also known as a “DA”
(Dining Attendant). The better positions were typically filled by return
hires.
But I had no small reservations. Not only was
my pay to be $6.28 an hour after spending years and thousands on college
degrees, but what about the boredom that would come with washing dishes
all day?
I had heard no one leaves Antarctica unchanged.
Would this change come as a character building experience? What else could
possibly happen to a hometown girl from Honolulu? After all, it’s
basically only a difference in climate, right?
Oct. 8: “Great God, this is an awful place.” The quote,
which began an entry from the journal of ill-fated Antarctic explorer
Robert Falcon Scott, popped into my head as I scanned the cavernous kitchen
with growing horror. Everything here needs to be cleaned, I thought, and
I have a feeling it’s not the cooks who do the cleaning.
Work started after a tour of the base. Stops
included a gym, a two-lane bowling alley, the post office and the library.
I left the group within 10 minutes, when the stabbing winds turned my
legs numb and made my face feel as if it was going to shatter.
Oct. 14: I feel like pinching myself to make sure being here is
not just a dream. Work is better than I thought it would be. There are
13 DA positions including Deli Gal/Guy and “Dishpit” positions
I, II and III.
A “seal head” from the field camp Weddell
World gave the weekly science lecture. The Weddell seal is a curiosity
because it can dive up to 1,000 feet, holding its breath over 80 minutes
in the process.
The sun romps behind a wedge of the Transantarctic
mountain range, turning the frozen sound below it into a Tequila Sunrise
and the jagged peaks pink like cotton candy.
Oct. 22: I thought I’d be leading a nun-like existence here,
but with three bars, free condoms, a 3-to-1 boy-girl ratio and an average
age range of 25 to 35, I guess I was wrong. Nonparty activities include
ceramics, Stitch and Bitch, Gutz and Butz, soccer and belly dancing.
On Sundays there are tours of the Albert P. Crary
Science and Engineering Center. I felt like a groupie backstage at a rock
concert as we were lead to the laser measuring the ozone hole. Fossils
and meteorites were on display. Residents of the aquarium in the bottom
pod include bloated starfish the size of serving plates and a 4-foot-long,
battle-scarred cod.
Nov. 17: A group of us went to Scott’s Hut yesterday. The
tables in the long, dark, 100-year-old building were populated by test
tubes, glass bottles and a perfectly preserved penguin. Carved in the
wood over one of the tiny bunks were the names of some of the men who
had died in Scott’s doomed 1912 expedition to the South Pole.
On the way home, McMurdo Sound, still frozen
because the Delaware-sized B-15 iceberg is blocking circulation with the
Southern Ocean, was a shimmering sea of mirrors.
Nov. 30: Living in this horizonless, featureless mist is like being
imprisoned inside a cloud. It’s “hot,” though, only 2 degrees
below.
I have developed a love-hate relationship with
work, grounded most firmly in hate. Today we laughed hysterically over
an overflowing utensil tub. Let’s face it, we’ve got to get
our stimuli where we can. Another form of it comes from making “baskets”
into the various recycling receptacles, which I can now pull off nine
out of 10 times.
Dec. 3: Today was my first day at the Long Duration Balloon field
camp. The balloon, sponsored by NASA, will be sent into orbit for a number
of reasons, including determining the origin of the universe. For the
next six days I will be washing dishes in a wooden-framed, semicircular
building with buckling floors called a Jamesway. Framed in the windows
sits Mt. Erebus, a moody volcano that gushes gas plumes one day and spits
wispy puffs the next.
Dec. 8: Deadline coming up for The Antarctic Sun, and I’m
still feeling blue and unmotivated. The article is about the Antarctic
Circumpolar Current, which influences world temperatures by mixing with
the major ocean basins. Reaching my prospective interviewee, University
of Hawai‘i professor Eric Firing, has been maddening: Up to 1,200
people share three outgoing phone lines.
Dec. 14: Our new DA, who was sent as an alternate to replace someone
who quit, has that starry-eyed gleam the rest of us had when we first
got here. I don’t know why I find it so annoying. I turn my attention
out the dining-room window. A hunched figure pushes through gliding walls
of snow. I’m beginning to be able to tell who’s under what bright
red parka based solely on gait.
Dec. 20: Found out that Alex, the helicopter pilot I’d been
kind of seeing, is married. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I
asked him.
“I would have, had you asked,” he replied,
with a sheepish grin like the rogue that he is. And to think I lost another
guy over him, too. It turns out they knew each other and were comparing
notes when they discovered they had both been dating me at the same time.
Oops!
Dec. 22: You know it’s going to be a long day when your first
thought as you walk into work is that it’s only nine hours and 59
more minutes to go. It all began and ended with the clown party last night.
Sometimes I feel like I’m on Gilligan’s Island, where all this
stuff magically appears in time for the next scene. Where the elaborate
costumes came from is anyone’s guess, especially when we were only
allowed to bring 77 pounds, about one-third of which is the ECW (Extreme
Cold Weather) gear issued to us.
Dec. 28: Shireen the janitor said her supervisor asked for volunteers
to speak at the upcoming job fair about how wonderful their work is. No
takers. Their morale is almost as low as ours.
Screaming gusts punch at the dorm buildings and
mutate the road marker flags into colored blurs. It’s Weather Condition
2. Condition 3 means all clear, and in Condition 1, often coming in the
winter, your skin can freeze in under 30 seconds.
Jan. 4: Seal on the ice today. On closer inspection it was an arc
of blubber smelling of rotting fish and stale urine. Every once in awhile
it would lazily give me the once-over, stretch its immense flippers and
go back to sleep. Seals have no predators on land, so they are unafraid.
Jan. 5: I got the opportunity to go camping and freeze my butt
off with the Outing Club at “Snow Mound City.” The mound I shared
with a National Guardsman looked like a sick igloo. One of the leaders
slept in a trench she dug behind a snow wall. The next morning, all I
wanted was a big hug. It took a full day to exorcise the chill from my
bones.
A friend back home wrote to say she thought there
was something spiritual in doing manual labor. This may be true, since
I often have to grab my psyche by the collar to keep from bolting out
of the galley.
Jan. 9: The sun burst into my half of the room waking me up at
3 am. It was so inviting I felt like going outdoors to frolic. Just where
all this frolicking would be taking place was another question, since
not only is McMurdo commonly referred to as a mining camp (because it
strongly resembles one), but there are only so many hikes you can go on
without encountering black flags, which mark crevasses. Instead, I located
my blinders and went back to sleep.
Jan. 12: A day off and fairly good weather for a change. Hiked
to Castle Rock with Mike, a “beaker” (scientist) studying antifreeze
proteins in diatoms. We plodded along, wondering how much farther it was,
when suddenly the glowing mist parted to reveal a rust-brown monolith
towering overhead. We climbed to the top where there was a rope, luckily,
because I slipped on the lava and began a plunge that might have lasted
several hundred feet had it not been for its presence.
Jan. 19: Five more days to go. I keep racking my brain as to whether
I’ve changed. I don’t feel as though my character had been built
one iota, though I may make mopping my own kitchen floor more than a biannual
occasion.
I saw my first live penguin. It had already spotted
me and was waddling in my direction so fast it left a flurry of snow dust
in its wake. Then it switched to pushing itself along on its belly. I
think it was lonely and figured I was a funny-looking relative.
Jan. 22: Did the Polar Plunge today. Was really happy I finally
did it — once the convulsions subsided.
Jan. 24: I feel like pinching myself to make sure leaving this
job is not just a dream. No more slimy yellow gloves or chiseling burnt
lasagna pans or trying to ignore dinnerware in vomit-inspiring patterns.
But also no more living in a town centered around science, no more haunting
snow-desert of surreal beauty, no more Sunday-night poker with the gang.
And I wasn’t sent home in shame and disgrace because I couldn’t
hack it as a dishwasher, either.
So maybe the moral is, you don’t always
have to change from difficult experiences. Maybe it’s just about
taking it all in. Or maybe, as I chuck another draft of this piece, it’s
just about making a basket nine out of 10 times.
ANTARCTIC
INFO
Governed by: the Antarctic Treaty
U.S. presence established in 1955
Coldest continent: minus-129 F recorded in 1983
Highest continent: average elevation 8,200 feet
Windiest continent: gales reach 200 mph
Driest continent: average precipitation less
than 2 inches per year)
Iciest continent: reaches a depth of 15,669 feet
Cold facts
Area: approximately 1.5 times the size of the U.S.
Contains 90 percent of the world’s ice
Oldest ice is 130,000 years old
Contains 70 percent of the world’s fresh water
Only continent where human survival
depends completely on technology
Body hair and nails grow twice as fast
Only 1 percent of its area is usable to wildlife
Terrestrial animals: springtails (2 mm-long insects)
Albert P. Crary Science and Engineering
Center, McMurdo, circa 1992
Five pods built in three phases with 4,320
square meters of working area. Contains a
two-story core pod, biology pod, Earth
sciences and atmospheric sciences pods.
Also includes an aquarium.
Number of scientists: over 250
Number of projects: 130
Number of field camps: 21
Demographics
Number of DAs: 24
Percent of janitors holding doctorates: 62
Percent of DAs holding doctorates: 55
Percent of science grantees holding
doctorates: 30
Percent female: 33
Average age of men and women: 37
Pounds of turkey eaten for Thanksgiving: 1,200
Money spent on alcohol in October: $16,000
Recycling rate: 65 percent
Hawai‘i presence
Number of Hawai‘i-based people working in
science support positions at McMurdo
Station: six
Notable: Dr. Eric Firing, University of Hawai‘i
at Mänoa, taking measurements of the
Antarctic Circumpolar Current; and Joe
Ferraro, architect, of the Honolulu-based firm
Ferraro Choi and Associates, responsible for
designing the new station at the South Pole.
