In the heated, modular, Korean war era T-5 building known as the, skua barn I look for whatever just for interest. There is an assortment of Westerns, sci fi and romance novels, a feather boa, a snoopy sno cone maker, a nappy yellow bean bag, silk flowers, worn out clothes, a curling iron, dirty coffee mugs, text books and plastic toys. I collected a wooden dradle, a three inch tall plastic tree stump- complete with a wedge notched in it and a bag of balsam needles from the Maine woods.
The act or art of skuaing offers visual and creative stimulation, a short respite from the 60 hour work week.
The view out of our third story window is of the other brown sided building full of brown creaky wardrobes and brown spongy beds. The food is good and someone else does our dishes after every single meal.
Today is Sunday and so we can all relax. I took a hike up Observation hill, this morning, still, in the soft glow of a magma hot sun rise (plus 5 degrees F). We ate fresh baked bagels and fruit and drank our tea, idly chatting with friends.
A glaciologist wears a blue crocheted octopus hat with googly eyes. A man at breakfast dressed as a penguin. One man plays the ukulele in the stairwell at night after work, another friend plays the fiddle. Dawn occurs at 6 am and dusk comes 12 hours later. The colors are tropical and almost give off a false sense of being warm. There are afternoons when the sky is alive with nacreous clouds, swirling cirrus wisps pf electric mother of pearl unique only to these high latitudes.
One of the dish washers was formerly a graphic artist for Victoria's secret.
This place can feel as strange as science fiction with the giant geodesic communication domes perched like static moons on the hills-especially when the temperature drops to almost 100 below zero Fahrenheit with wind chill. But beneath the luminous lens of a storm cloud formed by Mt Erebus, there are cigarette buts tossed in the snow and ford trucks driving around and the droning noise from the power plant. People are busy all the time here either putting radios on penguins and cameras on seals or baking 20 loaves of bread or fixing things with parts wrapped in cosmaline bearing a hand typed part number on yellowed paper or with duct tape that lost its stick sometime shorty after the end of the cold war.
