Our LC-130 touches down in austral summer, when the sun continuously rolls along the glacial horizon, never rising, never setting, circling like a marble on the edge of a saucer.
All is bright white. All is flat. High spirits, smiles even, despite the fact that nothing lives here except us and the pitiful plants on life support in the station’s tiny greenhouse.
Daytime on the icescape will eventually fade during a month-long twilight, as the earth tilts toward autumnal equinox. Then it will be dark for half a year, no sun anywhere. Daylight savings time is a suddenly a very queer notion.
Foreboding will itch at the back of our psyches. A few veterans will promise we’ll enjoy the unforgettable winter-over experience, forge a bond, and join a select family of Polies. So take plenty of photos.
It’s unforgettable, anyway. That’s fact #1.
Fact #2: Digital cameras stop functioning at -70°F.
Fact #3: Our 250,000 gallons of generator fuel gels at roughly that temp, so we keep it insulated deep in the glacier, along with the food, all of which ends up with a diesel whang, even the coffee.
At the end of January, we lose a flight crew. Their de Havilland Twin Otter departs the Pole at 0523, en route to Terra Nova Bay, and crashes sometime prior to 0827. Their corpses will remain on the mountain until the sun returns to the bottom of the world, the vernal equinox, six months away. Three dead men stuck in the stratospheric winds of Mt Elizabeth. We know them.
That plane should never have left the ice. We know the fallacy in the press releases and official reports. We know two of the crew survived impact and tried to stay warm, though not for long. They were Canadians with Kenn Borek Air Ltd. and they were on the world’s most treacherous flight path outside an active theater of war.
Their families don’t want to hear this. The National Science Foundation, its director and deputy director appointed by the President and affirmed by the Senate, don’t want anyone reading this. Facts remain. At 0100 the previous morning, the flight crew was playing billiards in the station lounge. There was a lot of alcohol. I expressed grave concerns. I was ignored. I live with what more I could’ve done.
Fact #4: Hard alcohol ration on station at the time was 750ml per person. Per day. You could trade for more.
We give our friends a nice memorial at the Pole marker. I’m the tall one in the video, far right, sounding cadence. I make my team shower and shave. I caution one, from the lounge that night, to show up sober or not at all. We send the video to the families of the dead, along with folded Canadian flags.
Morale is spiraling downward and we haven’t even taken the sun shades out of our birthing windows yet. Factions develop. Petty infighting, bitterness, some actual fighting, and vandalism. A Utilities Technician tells me his partner held a knife on him and asks whether he should report it. An electrician wanders the station with a tube sock full of D-cell batteries. One of our cooks gets a Dear Jane email from home and she stops cooking. For many, personal hygiene becomes burdensome.
My admonitions about binge drinking, about expired drugs in the infirmary, about running outside naked when the temperature is -100°F are making me increasingly unpopular with everyone except the Doc. I watch him board the last outbound LC-130, headed back to his life in Houston, his job as a NASA flight surgeon. I study his replacement, a hare-eyed individual with bad teeth whose previous post was a penitentiary.
Just before total darkness, the US government will go into budget sequestration. We are the last to hear about it. We will wonder for weeks whether our paychecks will cease. Regardless, no one is leaving here until October.
