What Money Can’t Buy: Christmas in McMurdo, Antarctica

In the holiday spirit I'm offering up this essay I wrote shortly after returning from Antarctica in 2005. Happy Holidays to all.

January 2005, and the wind at Cape Royds on Ross Island, Antarctica, had me pinned inside a Rac tent, with few books I wanted to read, two people I hardly knew, a dwindling food supply, and intermittent satellite access to the internet. When I logged on to see if anyone was missing me, one of those endless internet banners floated across the computer screen: holiday blues? Buy what you really wanted.

    I turned to David, a grey-haired, middle-aged bespectacled penguinologist, and his young, attractive assistant Jen.

    “How did you celebrate Christmas?”

    We had already shared our top ten favorite books, swapped the few jokes we knew and drunk the two bottles of New Zealand wine I had brought with me. David had spent the past twenty-two Christmases in Antarctica studying Adélie penguins and I wondered if he remembered the commercial build up to the holidays, or the scent of turkey or ham roasting.

    David looked blank, then rolled his eyes back as if trying to remember. He shrugged. I had come to know that pause and shrug in the past few days, the man positively noncommittal. But I figured the days of counting penguins and thinking about their fate blurred together, each day very much like the last, and Christmas, after all, is just another day.

    “What would you have done if you’d been at home?”

    “Sulk,” he responded without hesitation.

    Since Christmas in Antarctica lands mid-summer, that brief moment where the temperatures are above zero and the sun never sets, it is difficult for explorers or scientists to stop, take a day, rest, maybe even go to Church. This has always been the case.  William Lashley, a seaman with the Royal Navy on Scott’s final, fatal expedition wrote in 1911: “Christmas Day and a good one. We have done 15 miles over a very changing surface. First of all it was very much crevassed and pretty rotten; we were often in difficulties as to which way we should tackle it.”  On Christmas day, these men are pulling supplies south to lay depots of food for Scott’s expedition to the pole. Cherry-Garrard, that famous chronicler of Scott’s expedition (The Worst Journey in the World) wrote of that same 1911 Christmas: “A strange and strenuous Christmas for me, with plenty of snow to look at and very little ease.”

    Later, after a day of little ease, Scott’s men indulge in a Christmas dinner. “Dinner consisted of pemmican, biscuits, chocolate éclair, pony meat, plum pudding and crystallized ginger and four caramels each. We none of us could hardly move” (187). Except for having to eat pony meat, this seems the perfect Christmas: hard work followed by meal topped with four caramels.

    When I scheduled my six-week National Science Foundation grant in Antarctica to include the Christmas season I gave it little thought. Or rather, I was looking forward to missing out on the gift-buying music-playing frenzy, and on having a guaranteed white Christmas.

    As Christmas on the Ice approached, stockings appeared on dorm room doors; open doors revealed men wearing Santa hats and packages around plastic trees. No one invited me in for a drink. So I began to worry. Christmas dinner required reservations; with whom would I sit? Would I miss not having a single present to open? My mother and sister had announced in October (suggested mail date for Christmas gifts) that they’d sent presents and every day I trekked to the mailroom looking for those packages.

    Since everything in the Antarctic is superlative, I feared that a glacier-sized attack of loneliness might overcome me.

    Early explorers celebrated Christmas on June 22, when they had time to relax in the dark of an Antarctic winter. Cherry-Garrard writes, “Midwinter night and what a celebration it is. . . . Inside the hut are orgies. We are very merry—and indeed why not? The sun turns to come back to us tonight, and such a day comes only once a year.

    “After dinner we had to make speeches, but instead of making a speech Bowers brought in a wonderful Christmas tree, made of split bamboos and a ski stick, with feathers tied to the end of each branch; candles, sweets, preserved fruits…” (237). Titus Oates gets three presents that please him: a sponge, a whistle and a pop-gun. He spends the evening asking his mates if they are sweating. When they answer No, he insists they are and wipes their faces with the sponge. When he shoots them with his pop-gun he announces: “If you want to please me very much you will fall down when I shoot you.” They danced and gave lectures and drank milk punch. “It was a magnificent bust,” Cherry concludes.

    As the sun shone down on my Antarctic adventures, I realized Christmas was not going to be a magnificent bust.

    On Christmas Eve I bolted into the store on base and shuffled past those buying candy bars for colleagues, or sweatshirts for family at home. I asked for two bottles of wine and handed over a twenty (I liked how everything at the store came to round numbers—no pennies on base because they weigh too much). Grasping my wine I sauntered down Highway 101, the central artery of McMurdo life. There were fliers announcing plumbing classes and knitting groups, outings on the weekend, the subject and speaker for the Thursday night lecture. I passed the ATM (the money on base makes an odd circle from store to ATM and back again), and the Human Resources office. There was an odd, festive feeling in the air as workers had the next two days off. This was a rare treat as everyone worked at least eight hours a day, six days a week.

    As I walked back toward the row of brown, ugly dorms, I felt not loneliness but a sense of adventure expanding inside of me; I wanted to share my bottles of wine. I looked around to see who might be near, and just behind me stood all five foot one of Jules Uberuaga. Jules is a McMurdo icon and in a mock-election the fall of 2004 Bush lost and Jules was elected mayor of the town. With a striking, lined, Georgia O’Keefe face that I later learn emerges from her Basque heritage, Jules is not someone you can miss. She’s also not the sort of person I’d expect to speak to me. In new social situations I revert to thinking of myself not as the class nerd, but as a bit too wholesome for the fast girls in town.

    Unlike the glacial-slow continent that she has given the past twenty-five years of her life to, Jules is fast. She’s funny and outgoing and utterly without pretence. So it surprised me when she stopped to talk to me and surprised me even more when I heard myself say, “we should drink this wine together.”

“Why don’t you come back to my room?” she suggested. “Or is that too intimate?” She gave one of her laughs that borders on a cackle.

    In her room, darkened with a cardboard box pressed against the window to eliminate any of the relentless sun that eventually wears you down, sat her pretty girlfriend, Monika. From time to time Jules called her Blondie, even though Blondie’s a tough girl from Ann Arbor with both an MBA and an engineering degree and she ran the complicated helicopter operations in town. Monika had taken up—sort of—with one of the helicopter pilots and so the relationship between Jules and Monika had, for the past year, been on the rocks. There was no animosity between them however, and as we all drank wine and Jules told stories, I could tell Blondie adored her wild Basque girl. Jules drives a bulldozer at Williams Field. Through careful leveling she and a team of bulldozers create the runways where for the large C131 cargo planes land.

    “I drive a D8, does that mean anything to you?” she teased. “You should come push snow.” Push snow. That offer was the best Christmas gift I’d ever been given.

    Jules told story after story as we drank that cheap wine: her first summer at Pole when a pile of supplies buried a friend; the bulldozer that broke through the ice and the driver escaped, swam to the surface; the time she visited the remains of Byrd’s Little America, slid through tunnels into the earth. At the end she took my arm and looked me in the eye, “Rogers, these are experiences money can’t buy.”

    The expression, “what money can’t buy,” always smelled of the worst cliché. On the ice, however, money has no meaning. You cannot buy a trip to McMurdo, or, once there, buy a helicopter ride or a trip up Erebus. To live in town you have to work there or be a scientist on a grant. Or, be a writer or artist on a grant. There are no tourists, no one on vacation. Everyone wears the same government-issued clothes and no one gets to drive a fancy car. It was all wondrously liberating (socialists take note). But above all: No money, no blues.

    What money also couldn’t buy was the party in the heavy shop. The idea that the intimacy of Christmas can be experienced in a building with metal walls and forty foot ceilings permeated with the smell of diesel fuel is a little hard to understand. But that was where the party was being hosted.

As three rock bands performed, blaring out barely tolerable music, I decided to abandon my quaint image of Oates with his pop gun. Santa sat in a chair, enjoying the young women who perched on his lap. I spoke with scientists, danced with Jules, took myself home early to bed. My room mate was already asleep. When I woke I knew that gifts would not appear under a pine tree, that my mother would not be there, giving me yet another flannel pajama, that the smell of turkey or duck would not invade my dull dorm room. I searched for the loneliness I had steeled myself for and could not find it.

    At nine that morning, I joined two women, Peggy and Ann, to ski out on the Ross Ice Shelf. Ann has pulled a sled from the edge of the continent to the South Pole and Peggy has spent over a dozen seasons on the ice. Before heading south, Peggy had coached me by email as to what to bring, including some Cadbury chocolate for her. I had that with me, a small gift of thanks as they had invited me to sit with them for Christmas dinner.

    As we skied out, an enormous yellow bulldozer appeared on the horizon and a speck jumped out of the cab. It was Jules in Carhartts and a Filson jacket. She sauntered over, her height expanding to six foot four. She was working on Christmas day, the day just like any day really. Pushing snow. “Keep an eye on the weather,” she advised.

    If you look south from the Ross Ice Shelf you should be able to see Black Island, White Island and further south, Minna bluffs trailing off on an arm of land that holds Mount Discovery. If you cannot, a storm is coming in. The catabatic winds that begin at the South Pole and gain momentum as they travel north are called Herbies. Their force is legendary.

    We skied north into the Windless Bight on Ross Island. When we turned to head home, Ann said, “I can’t see Minna Bluffs.” The winds had picked up. We had skied out, following the flagged route across the ice. Now we were faced with a brutal return. But surrounded by two strong women I felt safe. And somewhere out there was Jules in her Cat. I was safe. Still, on our return, the wind hard in our faces I thought, little ease today. And smiled.

    I was home just on time to take a shift in the dish room. Everyone had the day off, but the kitchen had to serve meal after meal and the dishes had to be washed. It was a dish room like the one I’d worked in as a freshman in college. There, during the breakfast shift, I burned my fingers pulling clean plates from the machine that never slowed. Here, we stopped the machine regularly to save water. Music blared from the local radio station. I shared the work with two representatives from the National Science Foundation. If there is a boss in McMurdo, it was these two but in the dish room we became dishwashers. We shared stories of family, of home. When people dropped off their trays, their plates clean (to waste food was rare) they poked their heads in to say hello, thanks and Merry Christmas.

    One young man hesitated, then recognizing the two NSF reps in aprons wearing yellow rubber gloves he asked, “How many NSF reps does it take to wash a plate?” 

    The day after Christmas I sat in my office in Crary lab. The fresh snow cascading off the roof created a momentary shadow outside my large window on the still-frozen Ross Ice Shelf. I had become accustomed to a landscape where nothing moves: leaves do not flutter in the breeze and squirrels don’t vault through the trees. There are no trees.  So the movement startled me. How quickly I had become accustomed to this landscape.

    Outside my office scientists continued in their endless tasks rinsing beakers and pipettes, or, upstairs a gang prepared tablespoonfuls of Dry Valley dirt to examine under microscopes. They were looking for nematodes, worms. The television in the hall continued to broadcast from the rim of Mount Erebus, smoke pluming into the sky. Another television showed the movement of the B-15 glacier as it chugged toward the Drygalski Ice Tongue. Everything felt utterly normal, in other words, the party of the day before not been a magnificent bust, but a quick memory.

    I waited to call my family, a day and a half earlier, just beginning to celebrate Christmas in central Pennsylvania. There are few outside phone lines in McMurdo, and almost all 1,300 of us wanted one of those lines to speak to those at home. I wanted to wait until Thomas and Alice had opened their gifts, even though I knew that already, aged 12 and 14 there would be a twinge of regret in their voices. It wasn’t just greed. I had felt that disappointment at their age, the anticipation never equal to the day and the gifts that are unwrapped too fast. What I wanted to tell them was how great it was to get no gifts, to skip the holiday blues.

    My sister’s package arrived ten days later. My mother’s package arrived after I left. My new ice friends emailed that they had opened it and enjoyed the foie gras she sent as well as the plum pudding my father felt should be part of an Antarctic Christmas.

    David stood at the end of the Rac tent, pulling on his enormous blue snow boots. “Want to go count penguins?” he asked.

    “In this weather?”

    He shrugged. I logged off the computer, and slid into my five layers of clothing, stuffed my feet into my white bunny boots and followed him into the wind. At a pass the wind gusted, knocking me over. I crouched to brace myself until David appeared, helped me up and through the pass where we found some relief from the wind. There, the penguins stood, backs to the wind, a thin coat of snow speckling their backsides. A penguin marched up to me, feet pink, wings held out for balance. It seemed to greet me, so I spoke to it as I would to a dog met on the sidewalk in the city.

    “Hello.”

    It did not respond, but did move closer, it’s head bobbing within inches of my lower thigh.

    “It’s rough out here, isn’t it?”

    No response. No familiar wagging tail. Just a stare filled with curiosity.

    “Did you have a good Christmas?”

    No response.

    “Holiday blues?”

    No response.

    My laughter was lost in the sound of penguins braying into the air, creating and guarding their nests; nests that money couldn’t buy.