The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (19 page)

There are no restrictions. You are free to travel around and outside of town. You can work outside and recreate.

CONDITION 2
is observed when any of the following is true:

48 knots > wind speed ≤ 55 knots

100 feet < visibility < a quarter mile

-100F < wind chill temperature ≤ -75F

Recreation is limited and travel outside is restricted to town.

CONDITION 1
is observed when any of the following is true:

wind speed > 55 knots

visibility ≤ 100 feet

wind chill temperature ≤ -100F

You cannot go outside for any reason.

The McMurdo weather categories were fine, but after nearly two months on the ice I had been able to pseudoscientifically categorize the weather into five distinct categories that the average person can understand:

CONDITION COLD:
You can wear that cute REI down jacket you brought from home, jeans and a pair of light gloves. It feels like a chilly but pleasant mid-December afternoon in New York or Boston.

CONDITION REALLY COLD:
It’s time to break out Big Red, the huge down-filled parka assigned to all visitors to Antarctica. You have a fleece on under Big Red, a pair of wind pants, a warm hat and mittens. Dressed like this you feel pretty insulated from the worst of the cold.

CONDITION DAMN COLD:
Big Red is zipped up to your nose and the hood is fitted around your head, depriving you of peripheral vision (not that there’s anything to see but blowing snow mixed with black volcanic sand). You must start wearing your extreme cold weather (ECW) gear, which includes glove liners and gloves, wind pants, long underwear, a fully engaged balaclava, polar sun goggles and special foot protection called “bunny boots” made for extreme weather in Antarctica. Most people have never experienced weather like this and may ponder if it is similar to a blustery winter day in Alaska, right after pondering why in the hell you thought working in Antarctica was such a great idea.

CONDITION NO. WAIT! SERIOUSLY?:
You need all the ECW gear the National Science Foundation has to offer, plus that scarf Grandma made for you last Christmas and a strong belief in a higher power. The wind seems to be coming at you from all directions, battering you like a piece of Alabama catfish. Despite your ECW you are still cold. When you’re caught in this, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Adverse Atmospheric Dynamics to know that it’s time to seek shelter.

CONDITION UNCLE!:
If you are not an emperor penguin with an egg nestled between your gut and your little clawed feet, you have no business being outdoors. All the ECW gear in the world will avail you nothing. In fact, nothing short of the McMurdo building is going to protect you from the big bad katabatic that keeps blowing and blowing and blowing.

•   •   •

After the main body had arrived, I learned that I was scheduled to attend the season’s first Happy Camper training. All employees and scientists who do work that takes them out of Mactown and/or into the deep field have to go through Happy Camper training. Happy Camper is a euphemism for Survival Training. I asked a veteran for any advice she could give me regarding Happy Camper. She cackled and said, “Get right with God.”

Happy Camper began in earnest on the sea ice about four miles outside of Mactown and one mile from New Zealand’s Scott Base. Scott Base is a lot smaller than Mactown and sits on the edge of the sea. The total population is under thirty. Its small modular buildings are elevated on stilts. They are all the same shade of green that resembles the flesh of kiwi fruit. From the barren patch of ice that was our home for twenty-four long hours, we could see Scott Base.

After being dropped off on the sea ice with our gear, we walked a mile and a half along a flagged route to the instructor’s hut. It’s a large, solid, semipermanent structure where the instructors slept and some were courses taught. It was rustic but heated.

It was Condition Damn Cold. Our instructors continued the course outdoors. As we stood close together listening to our instructors, every inch of our bodies was covered, including our faces. It would be nearly impossible to distinguish one person from another if not for the name tags we wore on the front of our Big Reds.

Our first task was to go to an unheated shed and assemble sleep kits: two ground pads, a sleeping bag liner and a sleeping bag. We then unpacked and assembled two Scott tents (ten-foot-tall cloth tents) and five regular tents. Then we built a three-foot-high, forty-foot-long wind wall around our camp from snowpack. We actually sawed square chunks of snow from the ground and built a wind wall! We were doing all of this while trying to stay warm, which wasn’t easy. We were not allowed to go to the instructor hut to warm up and have a hot cup of tea. The right to take breaks was suspended. I began to miss my easy days working at the Berg Field Center with my filthy-mouthed but break-loving supervisor, Jesse.

We started Happy Camper at nine
A
.
M
. It was closing in on six
P
.
M
., and we had still not had a break. We ate lunch standing up outside. Our instructors were telling us we must build a Quonset hut—a shelter similar to an igloo—made of snowpack. After that we must construct a trench shelter. This is a deep hole that has a sleeping compartment dug out horizontally at the bottom. It looked like a grave.

Around nine
P
.
M
., I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. We were told the virtues of each shelter. The Quonset hut was the warmest, followed by the trench (grave), the Scott tents and lastly the regular tents. I (like nineteen other folks) got my mind set on the Quonset hut. But there were a few housekeeping chores that needed to be done before we would be left to decide among ourselves where we would sleep. The only instruction we got was that there must be at least three people to each structure. However, before all the work was done, some stealthy cocksuckers started moving their gear into the Quonset and the Scott tents. I unfortunately was not one of those stealthy cocksuckers. I ended up sleeping in a regular tent.

Around 9:30
P
.
M
., we were done setting up camp and the instructors left us to cook dinner and turn in. Though it was nearly ten
P
.
M
., the sun was still shining. People were boiling water for dinner and hot drinks, others were planning short hikes before bed, and others were socializing. I was pissed off because I was cold and had to sleep in a regular tent, so I crawled into my tent and wrapped myself in my liner and bag fully clothed. I figured I’d take a short nap before dinner, and within minutes I was dead to the world.

I woke up to absolute silence and there was no one else in my tent. I looked at my watch—it was 3:30
A
.
M
.! I missed dinner and the others must have thought this tent was full. My feet and hands were as cold as they were before I turned in, despite the chemical hand and foot warmers under my gloves. Worst of all, I heard the wind howling outside and my bladder was about to burst. I spent the next three hours rationing my power bars and trying to use mind control to will my bladder to hang in there until 8:30
A
.
M
., when we would be allowed to make contact with our instructors.

I finally broke around 6:30
A
.
M
. and made a mad dash for the outhouse. Of course it was freezing. The snow wind wall we spent so much time and effort building was oriented toward the south, the direction from which most wind comes. We also oriented the openings to our sleeping structures in the opposite direction: north. However, the wind decided to blow in from the north. As I walked back to my tent from the outhouse, I noticed that the entrance to the Quonset hut was completely snowed in. The folks who slept there would have to crawl up through the freezing snow to get out. I grinned the grin of the vindicated as I passed the snowed-in Quonset on the way back to my humble tent that luckily had entrances on opposite ends.

When 8:30
A
.
M
. rolled around, we deconstructed all tents, ate and repacked all tools and sleeping kits. The graves were also filled in.

I learned later at our debriefing that I was one of only a few people who actually slept. The two guys who slept in the graves seemed to have had it the worst. The folks in the Quonset were blown on by the north wind and had trouble breathing because our instructor forgot to tell them to make air holes. Most everyone said they were cold or uncomfortable. But the purpose of the exercise was not to find a way to survive the night with the comforts you’d find spending an evening at The Four Seasons. The purpose was to get through the night alive and with all your digits. That we did.

It wasn’t until I was safely back in my room in Mactown that I noticed I had frostnip on all of my finger tips, most of my toes and the tip of my nose. After my Happy Camper ordeal, there were days when I hoped and prayed that my next assignment would be doing data entry at the Science Support Center or the Chalet, civilized assignments that meant I would be indoors, in front of a computer, surfing the Internet, taking breaks, drinking tea, staying warm.

Because I have office skills, I had had a fair number of such days. But inevitably my job did take me outside. One morning I found out I was getting an assignment that I had been dreading for a while: flagging roads. This entails going out on the sea ice on Ski-Doos with a sled loaded down with an ice drill and flags attached to bamboo poles. Every hundred feet, we would drill a hole and set a flag in order to create a discernible road in an expanse of white.

This sounds really exciting except for the fact that it was incredibly cold and the task would take all day. The fact that we were flagging the road leading from Mactown to Penguin Ranch, a field camp devoted to emperor penguin research, did little to brighten my mood. I had heard from other support staff assigned to Penguin Ranch that the scientists had not captured any penguins yet. I fully expected to be disappointed as well.

But my mood brightened when I discovered that I’d be wearing a bright red bunny suit for my Ski-Doo ride. Red is my favorite color. When we got out on the ice and began flagging, the work went by quickly. We started at nine
A
.
M
. and were done flagging by noon.

As we pulled into Penguin Ranch, I spied seven beautiful emperor penguins hanging out in a fenced-in pen. We were told by Dr. Paul Pagonis, the head of the project, that they had just brought them in an hour ago. They seemed pretty calm for birds that had just recently been chased down by an old college professor and several grad students, dumped and sealed into large trash cans, put on a helicopter and flown to this little pen far out on the sea ice. Dr. Pagonis said he had to chase one for half a mile before he caught it.

He then asked us if we wanted to check out his dive hole. No, he’s not a dirty old man. He was talking about what looks like a manhole cover in the ice. When you lift the top off, you are looking straight down a Plexiglas tube that goes about twenty feet beneath the ice.

You climb down rebar steps to a small room at the bottom just big enough for two people. The room is encased in shatterproof glass and affords you a beautiful, indescribable view of the ocean and the bottom of the sea ice above. I got an added surprise when I was below and saw a Weddell seal swim by. It was very peaceful and surprisingly warm inside the dive hole.

When I climbed back out, I met Dr. Pagonis’s wife, Mrs. Dr. Pagonis. She is a doctor too. We talked for a while about penguins and seals. She shared that she had also been to East Africa, and so I found myself speaking Swahili to a penguin expert on the Ross Ice Shelf. I think that might be a first.

Since we were done with work early, we decided to go by the Weddell seal nursery to see the new seal pups. On the way we saw a group of ten Adélie penguins in the wild. We pulled over our Ski-Doos and the curious penguins began to run toward us. I guessed they didn’t see well and it took them awhile to notice that, though we were standing upright, we weren’t penguins, because they suddenly stopped, about-faced and slid off on their bellies in the opposite direction.

So we hopped back on the Ski-Doos and went to see the seals. The scientists there led us to the moms and babies. We stood about ten feet from them! The babies were very cute but thin. They were born with almost no blubber. Instead, they had thick fur called “seal pajamas.” For them it’s like being wrapped in five fur coats.

My day got progressively better. The only thing that could have sent me over the edge was if we were to see a killer whale poke its head up through the sea ice just as we were about to pull into Mactown. But if that had happened, my head would have exploded with joy.

•   •   •

When I found out that I’d be going to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS) for three weeks, I was less than thrilled. The bitter cold of my Happy Camper experience was still fresh in my mind. I wasn’t looking forward to weeks of living out of a tent, relieving myself in pee bottles and unheated outhouses, shoveling snow in order to make enough water for a two-minute shower in a co-ed bathroom, in addition to other field camp hardships.

Little did I know that these things would pale in comparison to my adjustment to the sheer emotional magnitude of living in such an alien environment and my sudden insertion into the offbeat camp community.

When I first arrived in McMurdo, it was strange but there were still familiar sights. There were beautiful mountains everywhere, there was the sea. It was frozen, yes, but it was still plainly a sea. There were animals. There were permanent buildings.

But WAIS was different. It was completely flat, white, no animals; the sighting of the occasional lost skua or snowy white petrel was cause for excitement. You won’t find dirt or rocks because the earth is buried under thousands of feet of ice. Nothing but snow stretching out to the horizon in all directions. There were no permanent buildings. We lived in mountain tents for sleeping and several larger tents for medical, recreation, eating, et cetera.