Antarctica: Life on the Road

Antarctica: Life on the Ice hit the road this past weekend. First stop: Boulder, Colorado where I read with Traci Macnamara and Beth Bartel.

Traci brought a blow-up globe so that everyone would know where the

Antarctic is (not "up there with the polar bears"). She read from her

essay about spending Thanksgiving on the ice, while Beth read from her

essay that describes her time spent on Mt. Erebus. They were both

stars. In the audience were a lot of ice people, including Elaine Hood,

from Raytheon who was my guardian angel during my trip. And then there were friends and fellow writers BK Loren and Sallie Greenwood. Christine Weeber, who contributed to Solo: On Her Own Adventure showed up, as did Jenny Dellaport, from my hometown of State College, PA! Watch for news of more readings at my website: www.susanfoxrogers.com

'Antarctica: Life on the Ice' Hits the Street!!!

Antarctica: Life on the Ice is the just-released anthology that I collected and edited to bring you first-hand stories of those who devote their lives to the most beautiful and cruel environment on the planet -- Antarctica. Inside you will meet explorers, penguinologists, geologists, iceologists, cooks, pilots and others who have been drawn, almost mystically, to life at the bottom of the world.

In the 2004-2005 austral summer, I spent six weeks in the Antarctic as part of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Based at McMurdo Station, I also visited the South Pole, several camps in the Dry Valleys and Cape Royds. When I was a young girl, my father regaled me with stories of the Antarctic. To walk the terrain and visit the outposts of explorers like Scott and Cherry-Garrard was the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

Following is an excerpt from my Introduction to  Antarctica: Life on the Ice (Click here for the full Introduction and Table of Contents):

In the austral summer of 2005, I made a day trip by helicopter to

Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island. This was

Scott’s base in 1910, the expedition that ended with his death and the

death of four of his crew. The story of this expedition is one of the

saddest in Antarctic history and is my favorite, so to visit the hut

where they lived was a sort of pilgrimage. The hut was busy with a crew

of New Zealand men digging out ice from its south side.  I

knew how the ice piled up there as I had read about it in Scott’s

journals and in Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s marvelous account of Scott’s

final expedition, The Worst Journey in the World. The men handed me a

pickax and for a while I chipped away with them with the great sense

that this small gesture connected me to the past, even to heroism. Soon

enough, though, this heroic traveler was tired, so I gave up my digging

and wandered into the hut.

Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light I stood, overwhelmed by what had

been left there: cans of collard greens and bottles of medical supplies

above Dr. Wilson’s bed; reindeer sleeping bags and finneskos (the

Norwegian-style boots). When I looked closely I could see that the

leather soles were peeling away. The daily lives of these explorers I

so admired became clear to me as I looked at Cherry-Garrard’s bunk bed,

and noted where Ponting processed his photos. When I saw toothbrushes

propped in glasses at the head of some of the men’s beds I wanted to

weep. For me, their lives were contained in those toothbrushes.

Daily details allow me to imagine a place and the bigger the place, the

more I need those details. Lucky for me, Scott’s narratives are filled

with passages like this from his 1901 expedition: “The first task of

the day is to fetch the ice for the daily consumption of water for

cooking, drinking and washing. In the latter respect we begin to

realize that many circumstances are against habits of excessive

cleanliness, but although we use water very sparingly, an astonishing

amount of washing is done with it, and at present the fashion is for

all to have a bath once a week.

A bath a week in melted ice water--for almost two years. With this sort

of detail the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration is brought down to

the basics. What they ate, how they slept and other facts of daily life

make up much of the 1,200 pages of Scott’s narrative of his 1901

expedition. Readers are dragged through days of manhauling; along with

Scott and his men we suffer great cold and eat a lot of hoosh and

biscuits. It is these details that are the foundation their great feats.

What is remembered is the tragic manner in which Scott and his men died

in 1911, eleven miles from a food supply on their return from the pole.

A cross rests at the top of Observation Hill above McMurdo marking the

deaths of Scott, Bowers, Wilson, Evans and Oates. On it is inscribed

Tennyson’s great line: To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

When I arrived at the top of Observation Hill, breathless in the thin

clear air, tears emerged spontaneously and unexpectedly. I realized

that the cross told the same story as that contained in their

toothbrushes. I looked at the Ross Sea, made sure no one else was

nearby, and kissed the cross. (Click here for the full Introduction and Table of Contents)

Letter from Cape Royds, Antarctica

I’m writing from a Rac tent set on Cape Royds half a mile uphill from an Adelie penguin colony. The tent pitches and shakes in the wind of a storm that has kept me tent bound for four days. When I woke at eight in my tent, snow padding the walls, I heard a helicopter, the distinct whop-chop-whop of the bird that will, eventually, haul us out of here. I bolted upright in my sleeping bag and scrambled into clothes and coat in disbelief and, I’ll admit, some excitement. That they could land in such weather (today, 45 mph gusts) seemed amazing. I could barely see the Rac tent from my small camp tent and it stands but fifty yards away. But the helo did not land

and so we’ll have another day ofwriting, reading, idle conversation in this space that is but 12X25 with one small heater that keeps us in warm enough at about 55 degrees. I wear three layers of clothing pretty constantly. When I first arrived on the Ice I wanted really cold temperatures and to experience a big storm, a condition one storm—these things would test my Antarctic toughness. And now I’ve got my storm.

We here at Cape Royds on Ross Island is me, David Ainley, penguinologist, and his intern assistant Jen. He’s been down here twenty-two seasons and is Mr. Penguin. He’s a long legged, grey bearded, bespectacled man who speaks and listens only when necessary. One night, after a few glasses of wine, he said, “I’m not a good conversationalist,” which is a bit of an understatement. Yet when he gives in to a grin he’s completely enchanting. In our email correspondence he’s been welcoming and warm so I was at first a bit surprised by his reticence. But I don’t need him to talk much: I’ve read his book on penguins, listened to him lecture in McMurdo and get what he’s saying not just about penguins but the ecosystem of the waters in the Ross Sea. It’s all a bit frightening, thinking about how this odd, precarious world is so easily unbalanced, potentially destroyed so easily by whale hunting, or by fishing Antarctic Cod.

Jen is the woman you want on your team, whatever the team is—she could do anything. She’s tall, pulls her blond hair back in a pony tail, is smart and strong (from time to time she launches into pull ups on the frame of the tent), and relentlessly good humored. She’s 26 and spent a few years working in McMurdo before switching over to the science side of things this year. That involves following David around, counting penguin, penguin chicks, locating the bands, which they place on about four hundred chicks a year here at Royd, and in general shadowing him in his work, which is to look at the ecology of the penguin.

I arrived here on Monday, one of those ridiculously beautiful Antarctic days—searing sun, visibility to the horizon. Paul, my helo pilot, is a tall, thin British boy, who flew me over the exact route Cherry-Gerard, Wilson and Bowers followed from Hut Point to Cape Crozier in the dark of an Antarctic night to collect emperor penguin eggs. This journey is the “worst journey” of the title of Cherry-Gerrard’s famous book on Scott’s last expedition: The Worst Journey in the World. We crossed the Ross Ice Shelf, rounded Erebus and dropped down onto the camp at Crozier. That this took us twenty seven minutes and not three weeks baffled me. We only had enough time there to load up Jen and David and then we were whisked off to Royds. Arriving there, I was disoriented. In essence, I had flown the circumference of Ross Island, with Erebus now behind me, McMurdo Bay in front of me and across it the Dry Valleys and New Harbor.

David helped me set up my tent. He kept hauling enormous chunks of rock over to secure the fly and I kept thinking: why make such a fuss, nothing is going to happen. It is perhaps easy to become relaxed here, after days of good weather; clearly that is never a good idea. I’ve had to dig out my tent a few times a day and reattach many of the fly lines. In the tent I have an enormous sleeping bag with a fleece liner and two pads—this keeps me quite warm. After tent set up we headed down to the colony.

Cape Royds is where Shackleton settled his 1907 Nimrod expedition and with good reason: a deep harbor in Backdoor bay, open ground, and a freshwater lake, named Pony Lake, for his ponies. His hut is in the shelter of the wind, unlike ours. When we arrived, there was another helicopter just down the hill, near Shackleton’s Hut and a pack of tourists that had been shuttled in from their ship, which we could see in the distance. I followed David down to the penguin colony, on a worn trail through the dark, basalt from Erebus and past the tourists in their orange parkas taking pictures from the top of the cliffs. As we strode past the signs that read: Do not enter, Area of Special Scientific Interest, I felt grateful I was in Antarctica with the National Science Foundation and not as a tourist. And suddenly, without warning, I was amidst about 1,500 Adelie penguins. Well.

Penguins in person are everything that I imagined: comical and engaging, as they move about, determinedly taking a rock to build their nest, or walking purposefully from one place to another and tripping over small boulders. Out on the pack ice, which is breaking up, they move more gracefully, tobogganing along, then diving in the water. I could watch them swimming in Pony Lake as well, and their speed and grace is lovely, like the finest breast stroker popping out of the water then gliding underwater.

But there is another side to penguins that I had never imagined. They are not all neat and tidy in their black and white tuxedos—many have guano smeared onto their white chests, or blood trickling down their sides from a recent battle. I’m struck at once by the fragility of their lives here on this wind-swept area and the violence of it. Obviously, this comes mostly from the elements. Adelies nest high up, to keep from being buried in snow and so that their nests don’t get flooded, but in addition they have a real land predator: skuas. These large scavenging birds, a relative of the gull, are constantly hovering, ready to steal eggs and chicks. Cracked egg shells litter the ground, and most of the eggs from this year, abandoned by hungry penguins, have been eaten by the skuas. Carcasses of freeze dried penguin chicks abound, legs twisted in awkward positions. Or a foot of a chick lies abandoned, the only thing the skua won’t eat.

Yesterday when we finally ventured out I witnessed a real slaughter. A skua took a fairly good sized chick by the scruff of the neck and, unable to lift it and cart it off, dragged it away from the nest. Adelies nest in clusters within sub-colonies as protection—often you can see them, beaks in the air, stabbing at a skua who is trying to land. But in this case, there was open land and the skua got in there. Joined by a hungry mate, the skuas slowly tore the chick apart before my eyes, an excruciating slow process during which the chick continued to peep and try to flee, flesh exposed, with no success. It’s blood, so red against its downy grey feathers, appeared in patches and then eventually there was more red than grey. When they were done the snow was splattered red with blood.

Beyond outside threats there is the violence amongst the penguins themselves. There is little open ground here in the Antarctic and so spots such as this one at Royds are prime penguin real estate. Stones are also at a premium. Seems both people and penguins fight for property and here it’s manifested in aggressive establishment of nesting space. They want to be close enough for protection but far enough apart that they can’t peck their neighbors. To establish this distance isn’t easy and involves a raucous fight amongst pairs. The noise is astounding, and something Shackleton complained of. It begins low, like a transmission trying to turn over and as they peck at each other it gains momentum so that it is more like a donkey braying (there are jackass penguins, which really do bray). But this bray is more like a jackhammer, clanging, staccato. And below this noise the peep of the chicks. If space isn’t established in this manner, fights break out, and when they are chasing each other it is not in some gleeful game—they are out for blood, territory. The sulfurous smell of penguin guano surrounds everything, has entered into my ears and my clothes, and the colony rests on a very thick layer of guano, the ground piss-brown against the black rock. So the world of penguins is not picture postcard lovely, and yet, of course, I’m completely taken with these funny, tenacious little birds.

That first day in the colony I stood amongst the penguins for about five hours, just watching and completely enraptured. I had no idea what David or Jen were doing, writing their numbers in their little orange books. Yesterday, when the storm calmed and we were all stir crazy, we headed out for a few hours and I helped David by writing numbers in his book. Using binoculars, he read the numbers from the stainless steel bands he has placed on them as chicks. He’s determining if penguins return to a colony or to the same nest. Turns out they are not fully faithful penguins—to their mates or to their nests, but rather seize the moment, because the moments are rare. The penguins were surrounded by snow and at times I could not see them because they were half buried, their black backs mounded up like a rock. It seems like this is some sort of protective coloring, but in fact they don’t need it on land, only in water, where they are “invisible” from below with their white bellies and hard to see from above with their black backs. The first day, I walked about three feet away from the penguins. Since they have not been hunted in years they do not see people as a real threat, though they begin a growl if you get too close. But yesterday a penguin walked right up to me, inches away, and I asked what he wanted. He stood there, all two and a half feet of him, and swayed and looked at me with those round, unblinking pale eyes, and did not answer.

There are two sub-colonies that are fenced off and then penguins, clever as they are, enter and exit through a little bridge. This bridge is a fantastic electronic scale and detector that notes their number that is encoded on an injected tags. Their weights are recorded as they come and go. The whole thing runs off solar power, and as David explained, the two men who set up the computer program are geniuses who took three seasons to get all of the technology right.

Late in the day yesterday David decided to put tags in the penguins who were nesting with chicks and so began my work as a penguinologist. Jen grabbed the penguins, wrapping them into her arms like a chicken (they weigh about nine to ten pounds and come football shaped) while I came in, marked the nests with a stake that I pounded into the ground, and covered the chicks with a canvas bag, weighted down with stones so that they would not be harassed by neighbors and so that they would not run off. No one was particularly pleased with this process—the penguins would try and fend us off and as I kneeled to cover the chicks, nearby penguins would peck at me (since I had on my usual three layers, top to bottom, I felt nothing). Only one chick tried to flee, and I scooped him up and placed him back in his comfy stone lair. For the final of the ten birds I got to pick up mama or papa, and hold him/her while David injected the bird. The bird weighed about nine or ten pounds and felt like a solid football tucked under my arm. Holding that warm, soft penguin, its flipper faintly beating me, was truly miraculous. Maybe it is simply being that close to something so wild. For hours after I was elated. My hands and body smelled of penguin and I did not want to wash it off, though in fact we do not wash at all (in dire situations, we use moist towelettes).

My second day here I visited Shackleton’s hut, down the hill from where we are in our tent. Though there is a power to entering a place that is still fresh with the lives of these men, I was less moved than I imagined. Maybe it’s because Shackleton is not my man. Everyone in the Antarctic has read their Scott and Shackleton, and in McMurdo you can quote from either and people smile, knowing what you are referring to. Everyone holds their hero dear. Scott people are romantics, Shackleton want high adventure but a safe return. Amundsen people are rare—they are the ultra efficient, the ones who will get the job done with no fuss. David is an Amundsen man. Of course.

Inside there were tins of corn flour (“made from rice” ) cabbage and parsnips left over (“not even the skuas will eat parsnips,” David commented) and full hams hanging from the wall. There are biscuits, broken in a wooden crate and shoes left under a bench, curling at the toes, the soles separating. A reindeer sleeping bag stretches across one cot in the open room, and suspended from the high ceiling are two Nansen sledges though when Shackleton was there the dining table hung to allow for more room. I marveled at their tenacity, at their strength, but I’ve done that from afar. Maybe, in fact, seeing their hut made me marvel less: their home practical, their daily life clear. Surviving here is a matter of day to day and they were very methodical, had food and warmth and a clear job to do. Though clearly the physical side of Antarctic life has softened enormously, keeping the mind occupied is the trick, and remains the trick. The early explorers gave lectures and staged performances and played their pianolas. The same remains for us: we read and discuss books and talk about penguins. I am responsible for my own happiness; everyone here knows that. The food supply is low, but so is our book supply. It’s the end of the latter that worries me the most.

So here I am, sitting in the Rac tent, trying to stay warm. The Rac tent (a Kiwi invention) is a fairly utilitarian place, with a two burner stove top, a propane heater that for some reason we keep on low except when Jen and I decide it really is too cold, and little decoration except three postcards sent to David. There’s a sticker on one door with an American flag that says: God less America. In one corner a machine tells us temps inside and out, wind speed, wind chill factor (highest wind speed has been 45 but at the pass where I was blown over David says the wind must be at least 65). We consult this about a hundred times a day. There we also have our communications with the outside world—we call in every night to tell Mac Ops how many souls are here and that we are ok. We also speak daily to David’s researchers at Cape Crozier, who have had 100 mile winds and have lost three tents. Oddly, we have email, through a satellite, and an iridium phone. At one point David called his mother, who must, I am convinced, still be wondering what it is her son does down here every year. (“Oh, you know, they’re being penguins,” he said at one point.) He never let on that he was sitting in the eye of a storm—there’s a good son. When we aren’t reading or writing email we stand at the doors (one at either end) and stare out the plastic windows, and speculate on the weather (“seems to be letting up” is the constant refrain, when it isn’t “it’s clouded over again”) though most of the time we can’t even see out the window. We are eating well enough but I’d love to see something that looked like a vegetable. Most of the food supplies expired in 2002 including the wheat thins that seem to be keeping me alive.

So this is where we’ve sat for four days, the canvas walls flexing and snapping. The stove rattles with the movement and from time to time ice chunks scuttle across the roof, sounding like squirrels at work. Even the difficulties seem marvelous. I am happy.

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.