From my vantage point near the rear of the plane, the open door looks like something from a Sci-fi movie. A portal. From it, an unearthly white light pours into the dark and relatively comfortable confines of the C-17. I step to its edge, unable to see more than the blinding white which has by now engulfed me wholly. I know there are steps below and act as though I can see them plainly. I feel my way down and it is not until I reach their end do I realize that I have indeed entered another world; A world as foreign to me as the moon, as mars, as the blank universe beyond. I am alien. I am not supposed to be here. By the simple fact that I am alive I do not belong here. Nothing does. This is not the Antarctica of National Geographic. There are no whales, seals, penguins, or fish. Life in this place is unthinkable. I am on a straight and sterile plane of white stretching well beyond the horizons. Simplicity incarnate. None of the variation that makes life possible.
Insignificant, Helpless, alone, lost? I search for words to accurately portray the feelings this place invokes, but there are none. My heart sinks and my stomach tightens, my evolutionary memory has not seen this, is not prepared, this is obviously a mistake. A sudden blast shakes all thoughts from my head. It is cold, terribly so, with a biting wind that has already begun to freeze parts of my face. I fumble with mittened hands to pull a neck gator over the all too dead tip of my nose. Now comfortably warm I can step back and re-orient myself. I look behind and see the drab hulking shell of our plane, beyond that a towering cone of a mountain, too smooth and round to be real. To its right a range so high and ragged they rival the Himalaya. To my front and left there is an even greater cone, billowing smoke, or steam, or clouds (maybe this is where clouds come from). In all other directions lie flat and utterly barren Ice. 
We have landed on the Pegasis ‘ice runway’ about 30 miles from McMurdo station. Situated on the blank slate of the Ross Ice Shelf, Pegasis is little more than maybe 2 dozen bamboo poles with flags, a fuel tank, and a squadron of vehicles with tires taller than me. I climb into one and we are soon bouncing (why do we bounce? There are no bumps, everything is perfectly flat. It’s my first day, I won’t ask.) in the direction of Mount Erebus, (the larger and billowing cone). As we near its base, I see amongst the dark blackish brown of bare volcanic soil a smallish town made up sheet metal boxes. McMurdo, the communications and logisitical center of Antarctica.
After exactly zero minutes in town, I want out. I want them to turn around and drop me off at the runway again. This is not what I planned on. I may as well be in any small town in America. No a city. With only 400 people in town right now it already feels like a metropolis (albeit with an unemployment rate of zero). The majority of people here do not go outside if they can help it. They shuffle from one building to the next, spend their days in shirtsleeves, washing dishes, mopping floors, cooking meals, tending the store, or providing financial assistance. They are ‘support staff’. There are support staff to take care of support staff who take care of support staff. Standing in ‘downtown’ McMurdo you would never know the mission of the U.S. Antarctic Program is simply to aid in scientific research. With at least 10 staffers on base for every researcher, this place seems more like a government make work project. I want away. I want to get away from the noise, the coarseness, the endless hustle waste that is McMurdo.
Only a few hundred yards out of town stands the long since abandoned hut of Robert Falcon Scott. He who gave his life in pursuit of adventure, who loved this land more than anyone can know, who would shutter if he could see what has become of his outpost and grave in the Great white south. I come to the hut and walk into the past. I leave behind the excess that is McMurdo and enter the world of Scott and Shackelton, Wilde and Ross, when this little bay was more remote than the moon, when men gave their lives only to have a chance to see it. I can see Minna Bluff, White Island, Mount Discovery, the Royal Society range, all with great glaciers flowing around these isolated islands of rock. To the Northeast lay a few jagged spines, pushing their way through the flat white that is the Ross Sea. Never in my life have I experienced as pure and harsh a beauty as this. I shiver with excitement and with a rush I remember why I am here. I walk back toward town, knowing I will be fully immersed in the basic reality of Antarctica soon enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment