McMurdo Station

The use of the word skua has been derived from the noun, skua gull, a notorious Antarctic scavenging sea bird. Skua, as a McMurdo Station colloquialism has become a verb; the act of people searching for things other people no longer want, skuaing. There is even a building devoted to skua. It is a goodwill bin sorting room lacking organization, cleanliness or price tags.

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.

Facts

This picture shows me standing in the middle of the ski way at summit station on the Greenland ice cap. The reason it is called a ski way rather than a runway is obvious if you really think a little about physics and airplanes, verses snow and cement. You can see the flags vanishing to a point in the distance. The point in the distance is less than 3 miles behind me. This picture was shot on a calm day in the fall. I would say the ambient temperature was around -20 F, or even warmer, because I am not wearing a neck gaiter or my big- issued, down parka. The down parkas we are issued, weigh about 12 pounds new and cost over 800 dollars. I have a radio in my back pack along with a thermos of hot water, snickers bars (which have already frozen into jaw breakers). Steve took the picture, so someone is with me. Further more, other people know that Steve and I had set off for a hike.
Mexico covers 756,006 square miles of land. The ice cap of Greenland- covering five sixths of the worlds largest island, is roughly the same size as Mexico; since Greenland's total land mass is 840, 003 square miles.
Imagine yourself now being lost on this ice cap in a blizzard. You cannot think about the blizzards you have seen in Michigan or Connecticut or Maine, because in fimiliar contexts, your imagination will be biased: you might be traveling home from Christmas caroling with a church group, you might be out on the side walk shoveling- everything is still near and the lights can be seen, motors heard, your chances of dieing are nil. It would be better for you to try and imagine being lost at sea in a fog in the arctic in a skiff that has run out of gas. You didn't tell anyone where you were going-which doesn't matter since you are not where you were going. You are lost. You don't have a radio or a flare or a tent or even an issued parka.
The temperature is well below freezing. It is minus 35 F. The wind is blowing a gale. The only navigational aids are flags which have long ago become obscured in the frost and wind and blowing snow. There is nothing else to delineate your landscape. Remember you are at sea, far off shore, or in the middle of the flattest part of the storming Sahara; you are on top of the world,s largest ice cap, alone. Your chances of dieing now, are superb.
On the 16Th of this month, unbeknownst to Steve, or anyone else up at camp, two of the camp staff went for a joy ride on snow machines. Maybe they even had had something to drink. They went out into fresh winds- not yet gale force. They followed the bright black flags down to the end of the ski way ducking behind the wind screens, exhilerated and then, ideling the engines at the far end, they were overcome with the immidate knowledge that they had better go back. But they lost one another and themselves. The mechanic stopped when he knew he was lost and dug a hole with the shovel that had, by luck, been on the back of his machine. After 16 hours living like a sled dog on the trail, he dug himslef out, started up his machine and went back to camp where he was shocked to learn that his friend was not home.The other man, the man now in the burn center of the University of California, at Davis, kept going. In fact, his machine, when found 3 days later, was far away from the ski way; you will have to forgive me for not being able to cite the exact distance, but roughly 13 miles, and was run out of gas. As soon as it was known that a person was missing out on the ice cap, Steve launched a search and rescue mission involving every resource they had. For three days he was beside the phone and radio maintianing communcation links; catching only short naps, he continued with the neseccary camp duties required of him while commiserating with and encouraging the three remaining crew to remain hopeful.
The only news story I could find relating this incident was published by Fox news, who repeated the National Science Foundation's blurb. Giving no names, other than, NASA, the NSF, the Royal Danish Air force, "people in Kangerlussuaq", and, the 109Th Air National Guard, I found it outrageous that the photo they slectected, encaptioned, "Ariel view of the ice cap" was a floating ice berg. If you watch this crap, shame on you for being so unintelligent-you are probably still trying to figure out what the differences are between a runway, and a ski way.
After 60 hours, the lost man was found. He was spotted by a colluege of ours, a man of both Danish and Inuit ancestry. A man named, Basse. Basse and I spoke on the phone a few days after the lost man was found. Basses described to me what he was looking for as being what is known as a body drift. He happened to be driving a tracked snow cat when he noticed a "speck on the windhseild -but it wasn't a speck". He kept his eyes on the mark and as they neared the body drift, for after 50 hours lost man was presumed to be dead lost man, the "body drift", stood up! He was 12 miles from camp.
The damage done, was mostly to his hands. Leather, thinsualte lined mittens with no cuffs had slid down below the wrist bone and were no longer able to be pulled up, once the hunting stage of cold (as low as minus 50 with wind chill) had set into the fingers. After this, ischemia occurs, which is loss of blood flow. Next, cells begin to die. When his clothes were cut off of him, inside the warmth of the station, his mittens and socks were not among the articles removed. Ice crystals held them to flesh. Lost man, thought to be dead man, now found man, was medivaced first, to the hospital in Nuuk, (the capitol of Greenland) and later, to the UC Davis burn center near his family. Last I heard, he had gone in for a surgical procedure; a final analysis of the vascular and cellular damage sustained before what we are all presuming to be amputations of both hands from mid wrist down.
Over 4000 years ago, the Inuit migrated to Greenland form North America. They developed senses which enabled them to survive sea ice travel, long dark winters subsisting off of raw meat, isolation- stymied only by mythological visitors: the northern lights, understood to be the spirits of their ancestors, senses that were accute and as critical as instincts. Basse and I have spoken a few times about the knowelged of his people's past and the responsibilities of being aware still, divided by intersecting aspects of modern times. I listened to him well. As soon as I heard that he had gone up to the ice cap, a place no ancient Greenlandic person ever would have gone-for there is nothing there to offer the living, other than death; I knew he would find the man he was looking for. I dint know that he would find him alive.
To give some perspective on how the people of Greenland view this story, I could find no mention of it in their news. It is no where as near as extraordinairy as recent findings of methane gas or integrating schools with non native speakers. To them, it must be not so much a moment's story- now told between family over cell phone or via email, as it is a permission slip into recollection; an ability to beleive again in a past now thought to be more incredible than real. Life goes on. Back at home In Kangerlussuaq, on the west coast of Greenland, Basse sips his coffee, plays with his kids, surfs the hundreds of thousands of satellite channels on his wide screen TV and gazes out at the changing fjord: it is begining to melt, slowly. He might even be thinking about trying again to grow a lawn this summer. Or maybe he is thining about a speck, on a vast, white, seeminlgy endless surface of 40 below where someone from the spirit world lingered- just long enough, to help show a lost, white man, his blundering way home.

Defrost

This picture of Steve, standing on the Greenlandic ice cap, looks cold-too cold for bees-, but is at least: sunny and bright. Steve reports that things at camp are moving along well with a wonderful crew of four. They are preparing for the Summer influx on April 23, when an LC 130 cargo plane will land on the ski way ;delivering fruits and vegetables and people. Steve will leave then, for the coast where the emergence of spring will welcome him . Meanwhile, here in Welcome Valley, spring has sprung! I have been fortunate enough to be able to walk the four miles to the rural bus stop a few times this first week back in school. These early morning wakings allow for me to really notice what kind of an environment I am apart of- as does turning the compost. I notice, not only what is in bloom or what is in bud at the eye level, but observe the delicate castings off of those plants I cannot see in the upper canopy. I pause at the river to watch a beaver swim up current. I listen to the singing of the birds. I loose my breath for a moment as suddenly, where there was none the day before, an ocean of tiny white violets reflects back the dawn. I laugh at robins tugging at worms and I think about nothing.
Yesterday, I received two packages of bees. The packages are wooden shoe - box sized crates, with window screen sides. They contain: a can full of sugar syrup, roughly 10,000 worker bees (females) and a queen, sequestered in a cage of her own, plugged with a cork. My friend Lorena, herself a beekeeper, helped me empty the packaged bees into the hive boxes I had prepared. This is a weird operation for the novice; though I thought I knew what I was doing, I was rather haggard from my first week back at school and a spontaneous, 12 mile hike home the day before - the bus broke down - I was lucky Lorena was there with me. I pulled the syrup can out: bees began to fly. They were loud and sounded angry. I hadn't taped up my wrist cuffs or my pant legs. I didn't wear gloves. The bees crawled on my hands. One went up my pant leg. I remained calm and slowly pulled the queen box out. Lorena brought tiny marshmallows for replacing the cork with- the bees will eat through the marshmallow releasing their queen. I wedged the queen's cage in between the frames in the hive box and then inverted the package of bees over the queen. Then I put the lid on and walked very carefully, like a man with elephantitis (or so I would presume) over to the compost area to release my little companion who did not sting. The second pacakge went smoother, as most things do after dress rehersals.
Today, in between studying and turning the earth, talking on the phone, petting the cat, and ignoring the dishes, I checked on the bees. Honey bees tend not to fly when temperatures are below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Somewhere around 3pm the weather in the valley soared to 52 F. The bees were humming about and settling in; crawling in and out of their respective hives and orienting themselves to our humble estate. I placed extra sugar water jars in the hives along with one pollen patty each; food enough for the bees until the natural nectar bloom becomes sufficient forage.
I did not manage to plant the onion starts or seed potatoes, but the trillium and the rhubarb are up and the old apple tree will be white before the moon is half way gone.

Do your part to create a confidence virus!

"Hear the voice of the bard!
who present, past and future sees
whose ears have heard
the holy word
that walked among the ancient trees"

"O earth o earth return!
arise from out the dewy grass
night is worn
and the morn
rises from the slumberous mass"

William Blake. - 1794

If you are still feeling gloomy about the economy, I invite you to visit the following site. Published by the American psychological association's president, Dr James H Bray, this bit of intelligent thought is worthy of contemplation. I learned of this site from my psychology course and still visit it frequently for I find it offers a rather cognitive dimension to our society's behavioral traits, our contemporary issues, or "news".
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/03/pc.html (bare with me as I get this link to work)
Meanwhile, I walked through the woods along the right hand bank of the Middle Fork river this morning listening to the robins sing. If the robins are back in your neck of the woods, please remember to drive slowly along rural fields. There take off trajectory cannot out pace that of the hurried windshield. Now that I am walking the four miles one way to my bus stop, I am noticing some robins, worm still in beak, who have met their automobiled fate. But spring has indeed arrive in welcome valley. This does not mean it is still not freezing at night, or that it might not snow, but that the sun is much higher in the sky, the shadows longer and the potential warmth of the day significantly greater; even the swallows arrived late, yesterday afternoon.

Steve is still patiently awaiting better weather on the ice cap for his flight up to Summit (below in the links, there is a hyperlink called, WHO WE WORK FOR, showing summit station's weather etc). He wrote this morning saying he hoped to go for a long hike. There is 6 inches of snow in Kangerlussuaq where spring is but a short allegro composed for the grandeur of summer.
I sat in my chair after my walk this morning with my tea and looked out over the hills from which the sun would soon be shining. I was listening to Bach's Brandenburg concerto Nos 4 in G. really listening, and it seemed freshly composed that instant for the sun cracked over the tips of the trees and shone in upon my face and I smiled. May you all have a wonderful day.