Blog #2 – First Couple of Weeks (on ice)

Ahhhhhhh, what a week (a couple weeks…?) Some things to get started – I loved reading all of your comments so thank you for that! Makes my day to hear from y’all when I am off my phone for most of the day and don’t see the group chat happenings. Second of all, thanks to my father for posting a little background and history!! Although, it’s one of those places you absolutely cannot describe. Ella has told me things for years, and I’ve seen my fair share of photos of life here, but it is truly a singular experience. That being said, the history is pretty damn cool, and I’m glad I did not have to take time to explain everything because it’s one of those places that requires context on context on context. And fun fact relating to the church here in town – it’s burned down (2+) times, specifically from candles used for religious reasons (which is the ONLY exception to the no candles in town rule). Because of the wind and dryness, if a fire were to break out, it’s pretty hard to keep under control, especially when our town has buildings situated close together.

Let’s start with a little background on the station and daily stuff here, and then I’m sure I’ll launch into work stuff eventually. 155 is the main dorm where all first years, no matter your position, usually live. There are 4 beds to a small room and one of those beds is usually a bunkbed, so it can be livable for five people, but that rarely happens (usually if a 5th person is staying with you, they are passing through town for a couple weeks or so, and then will be on their way to do something else). Because it’s still Winfly (which ends the last week of September), I don’t have a single roommate yet! There are three Winfly flights and the fuelies in ChCh got pushed up to the second ice flight instead of the third, and last, one because our supervisor requested it. Which was actually super nice, because the third flight is just arriving today. The conditions have been pretty rough here – at least on the ice shelf where the main airfield is. Anyways, there’s a shared bathroom between 10 or so rooms, equipped with a few toilets and two showers. Very college-dorm like. If you get into the “uppercase” dorms (the higher numbered dorms, like 207, etc.) after your first season on station, you share a bathroom between you and your suitemate, and two suitemates on the other side, like a jack and jill situation. There are also saunas in most of the dorms, except for 155, because there was too much funny business going on (yeah). The galley, or cafeteria, is also in 155, so that’s really nice! We also have three gyms in town: the gerbil gym (cardio), the weight room, and then the big gym which is a full sized gym. We have a climbing wall somewhere too, but I have yet to come across it. Yoga is offered on Mondays and Fridays. There are two bars on station, Gallagher’s and Southern. Gallagher’s is where many of the events are held, like trivia on Wednesdays and Karaoke on Fridays. Southern is open 24 hours and is more of the drinking spot. We have prom later in the year, and we also celebrate all major holidays pretty hard. Thanksgiving and Christmas are HUGE here, and all departments will eat dinner with each other at tables in the galley and you can volunteer to wash dishes in the back afterwards to help the stewies out. There’s Icestock for New Year’s, which is an all day concert/performance/dance party on a stage that the carpenters put up. And movie nights galore depending on who you know! We did a twilight marathon yesterday and on Thursdays, an older fuelie named Sean hosts bad movie nights (last Thursday, we watched a movie called Crackcoon). There’s also a number of hikes and recreational trails you can use throughout the year. And, a marathon… which I will not be participating in. I didn’t run back in the states, so I’m not starting now! They offer a 1k, 3k, 5k, and half marathon, as well as a turkey trot (which I would maybe do).

I’ve been lucky enough to make friends with some of the people who have been coming down here for awhile, which means they know where to find the good stuff! After a night out at Southern (playing Uno and drinking Coors Banquets) with some of the other fuelies, I was shown the vinyl room. It is under lock and key, and key inside lockbox. If you get “trained” on the radio room and the vinyl room, you get access to the code to get the key. It is *apparently* one of the largest record collections in the world, but who knows! It is a small, probably 9×9, office space hidden behind a random door on the first floor of 155 amongst dorm rooms and bathrooms. There are pull-out drawers when you enter that contain basically library cards of every single record they have in the room, sorted alphabetically by artist last name or genre, and each card has a corresponding number to a section in the actual shelves of records. Literally floor to ceiling. And then there’s a small desk with a record player and that’t it! It’s super cozy, with string lights and comfy chairs, and it’s one of the only places on station that you could probably find some good privacy. Some of the radio hosts do pull from the records, but it’s uncommon. And otherwise, I don’t know if a ton of people know about it. And yes, there are a couple radio stations that get blasted around station and reach as far as the ice shelf and airfields. One of them is volunteer based – so anyone could pick a slot to play music for an hour or two if they felt like it, and otherwise it just shuffles from their huge catalog of music – you can also just mess around and go in there and queue a couple songs if you feel like it.

Everyone here is super awesome and I feel like I’ve already made some really good friends. I think because everyone here has a common goal of simply surviving this place, and the fact that everyone you see, you also eat with, work with, live with, you get really close to people fast. It is probably about 60:40, maybe 70:30, men to women, and there’s no true average age here. People are from all over, with all completely different experiences, and it makes it a really cool melting pot. We also get a few kiwis passing through, as the US and New Zealand share a lot of equipment and infrastructure (we even fuel their tanks that they use to fill up their buildings and vehicles). It definitely seems like everyone looks out for each other. As I’ve updated this draft a few times already – creeping towards that post button – I did get a roomie! She was on the last winfly flight, which was like two or three days ago now. She is very sweet, also a first year, and a stewie. Stewies are probably the biggest working group on station, and they do all of the food services and cleaning services. My roommate works the morning shift, so she has to be at work at a crisp 5 AM (and they granted no mercy, even when her flight arrived the night before). We’ve already remodeled our room a bit so it’ll be more livable for us, at least until mainbody comes in October and we get another roommate. Because the last winfly flight just got here, I now have all of my friends that I made in Christchuch here, which is really nice. The firefighters invited me to their boxing night/unofficial martial arts club, which I think I will attend next time!

Okay, so as for the job… it’s really good. It is definitely a learning curve, and a lot of technical/mechanical nonsense that my brain does not process as fast as normal, but we’re getting there! We are active all day, every day. Our shifts are on town schedule, so 7:30 AM – 5:30 PM Monday-Saturday. It’s honestly a really nice set up. We have a morning meeting at 7:30 each day and will get grouped and tasked out for the day, and then we have a 10 minute stretch break + plank (we started at 30 seconds and add one second each day) + pull-up. We are also one of the most outside departments at McMurdo, so we are very cold all the time. But, that means we get to do really fun stuff! We are granted a privilege not many people in town have, which is that we get to leave town and go to the transition and ice shelf and airfields. We have a few vehicles at our disposal: Delta Liz (if you look up an Antarctica Delta…), Delta Scharen, Juice Moose, the Polaris, and a Pisten Bully and snowmobiles when we need em’! I’ve driven most at this point. The Polaris is very fun to drive but is capped at a government max speed of 15 mph, but the guys were saying if you send it down a hill, it can get up to like 30 mph. The simple joys are important here.

There are weekly/monthly tasks we have to get done and then there are a lot of special runs that’ll shake up the routine a bit. We do town runs in Juice Moose (and if Juice Moose is out of commission, we try to use Delta Liz) and fill up the fuel tanks all around town. Each building’s heat and power runs on our fuel, so we have to make sure their tanks are staying full. It’s a fun job and I got to do it yesterday for the first time. Everyone on that job for the past couple of weeks has been coming back to the barn super happy and I finally get it! Other than measuring the tanks and filling them up, which probably takes five minutes or less usually, you’re sitting in the warm truck! Meanwhile, I was at the helo pad with two of my coworkers (who have both worked previous seasons) replacing these filters and separators in the fuel tank stations that the helicopters will fill up with, come summer. The issue is, everything is very, very dry here (this could also just be a fuels thing but I’m inexperienced!) and you have to ground yourself while working with the fuel or you can blow up. It can also really damage whatever materials you’re working with and cause them to not work properly, so we could NOT touch the filters with our glove liners or mittens, as it would electric shock the filters into not… filtering correctly? We had to wear only nitrile gloves, and of course everything in the tanks is metal, as well as the tools we are using, so everything is soooooo cold!!! I know how to use a torque wrench now, though. We did finish all the tanks after freezing our damn toesies off, and we just have to repack them with fuel and start the system up, but helicopter flights won’t start for at least another month so we’re not worrying about that part yet.

We will start hose lay next week at some point. We were supposed to start on Monday, but we need our Pisten Bully for that job, and it crapped out on us within a day. The funny thing is, none of the vehicles we use seem suited for the cold, so it becomes half the issue. We got our PB into our bay in the fuels barn and checked her out and gave her a name (Aunt Fanny). It’s not a vehicle we’ll have the full season and they’re fun little vehicles to drive apparently, so everyone was excited to get ours. BUT, our foreman Dan took it out to fuel it the next day and take it for a little test drive, and it died at the top of Scott Base Hill (Scott Base is the NZ station we share a lot of supplies and infrastructure with and the road out to the ice shelf runs right past it). Full hydraulic tank dropped out of the bottom and leaked all over the road so the Haz Waste (wasties, we call em’) had to come out to the scene, too! I’ll get pictures uploaded of the vehicles once I get some good ones. Honestly, it’s been a little too cold out to take my fingers out of my mittens to take a good picture. It is the coldest time of the year at the moment even though winter is ending here. Think January/February in the Midwest, but on steroids. It’s been pretty nice out the last couple of days, windchill of only -18 and not very harsh winds. We had some really, really cold days last week; working out in -20s to -30s and windchill of -75. Pretty gnarly, but all my fingers and toes are still here! They are good about pulling us if it gets too crappy outside, but we do pretty essential work for the town to survive so we tend to be more outside, and more outside in shitty weather. We fuel all buildings, including the dorms and powerplant, so we HAVE to get the job done no matter what. It feels really good, though. And the successes here feel fantastic.

I think that is all the update for now, and my apologies if anything was repeated! It’s been drafted up for a week now and I’ve been adding to it whenever I have some free time to access the desktop computers here. Some pictures below for your viewing pleasure.