Home Sweet Home

It’s been a week at the pole – here are some observations.
I live in a tiny room in a Jamesway, among 100 other people living in a cluster of Jamesways affectionately referred to as ‘Summer Camp’. A Jamesway is quonset hut, essentially a large semi-cylinder, wooden framed, canvas tent. The floors and walls are freezing, (don’t leave your pee bottle on the ground at night!), but the inside is heated. Rooms in the Jamesways consist of three canvas curtains and the canvas wall draping the metal frame. The lone piece of furniture is a smooshy bed. The structure is divided into half by a dark, red-light lit hallway that runs the length of the structure and leads to doors at either end. Due to shift variability, quiet hours are 24-7. Every creak of the bed, every squishy footstep of an outside passerby, every click of your headlamp radiates through the entire building. The air is dry and stagnant. Privacy is an illusion (even if you are lucky enough to have a room with plywood walls). People tromp through the hallway at all times of night and day. In order to pee in the middle of the night, you have to brave -70 wind-chill on your short hike to the ice palace (the name of the summer camp bathroom). Walking barefoot in your room is a mistake you make only once. So is turning the knobs of the outside doors with bare hands.
On the surface, my living situation isn’t cozy. Over the years, however, inhabitants have made this temporary housing into a home. Walls, desks, and shelves have been patched together out of spare plywood. Windows have been cut into the canvas. Art has been sketched onto any and every workable surface.
When you move into a Jamesway, you move into a piece of the life of its last inhabitant. Maybe they left you flannel sheets or a bottle of Jack Daniels as a welcome present. Maybe they painted a mural into the wall. Maybe they sewed a curtain out of used clothing to cover the depressingly dark green canvassed walls. In most cases, the previous tenant went to great length to make improvements, functional or aesthetic.
Living in summer camp is like house-sitting, only the owners are a constant string of transients, and every house-sitter tries to leave the room a little bit nicer than they found it. Its actually very homey!
Of course, I’m romanticizing the experience. But I like it here. It sure beats having roommates. It sure beats a tent. My room has character, and I have collected endless amounts of decorations and knick-knacks left behind by the thousands of people that have lived and worked at the South Pole before me. I feel at home here.

Goodbye, McMurdo

In a McMurdo daze, I had lost hope that this day would ever arrive.
But it is here. Today I fly to the South Pole.
Woo-Hoo!

With Goosebumps on my arms and Tears in the corner of my eye . . .

. . . we watched the next president elect deliver his victory speech. We glared wide-eyed, teary-eyed, at the tiny, fuzzy television screen. I will always remember where I was, who I was with, and the feeling, the until now so distant feeling, of hope, when Barack Obama was elected the first non-white president of the United States.
Even here, on the bottom of the Earth, ten thousand miles from home, the momentousness of the occassion, the sense of history, of novelty, surged through our bodies like an electrical charge.
This is a Moment.