…silent night

Sorry I haven’t been writing much – its hard to find the motivation lately and although I don’t have much to say, I do have a lot on my mind.

I’ll try little bits and pieces to restoke the creative fires.

So here goes…

It’s Sunday night and I’m settling in for the start of ‘Star Wars Sundays’ – a little something I’ve cooked up as a bit of a Star Wars celebrations now that ‘The Last Jedi’ is released and we’ve got SFA chance of seeing it in the cinemas.

Tonight I’m kicking off the season with Rogue One in our little Theatrette here at Davis Research Station.

This is primarily to try to get past this feeling of isolation – an ‘aloneness’ that’s crept in over the past few days – despite being constantly surrounded by people its easy to get lost in the crowd here. I’ve been avoiding people a bit – the library and theatre have been a great place to hide out in the dark.

Hopefully being surrounded by fellow Star wars geeks will help.

Also its Christmas time – my least favourite time of the year at the best of times (for many reasons) driven home by being away from whats left of my family (which usually doesn’t bother me), and this creeping icy aloneness thing I mentioned.

It’s an old enemy but I know a few tricks.

I do miss my small circle of friends though. Facebook messenger doesn’t quite cut it but its all there is really.

We got the last pre-Christmas Mail in the other day – the station excitement levels were ramped up as gifts and cards and such arrived from friends, family and loved ones back home. It made me all too aware of the gaps in my life I guess and it really kicked my funk off.

Christmas …meh.

Anyway..

Lets talk about the wind.

Its been blowing a technical blizzard here since Saturday evening – a howling, shrieking gale gusting up to 80 knots and strong enough to take you off your feet. There is no break in its fury, except for the occasional cyclonic gust that blasts your face with driven snow , dust and gravel. It drives you backwards and forwards and sideways with every step.

You don’t lean into this wind, you lean ON it. Hard.

You grab walls and handrails. People next to you. Vehicles. Signposts. Penguins.

You shuffle your feet, head bowed, less this bastard wind takes your leg away mid step and throws you to the stony ground.

Get the picture? It’s a bit windy.

I saw a guy taken by the wind yesterday, and if not for a quick jacket-grab from his colleague, he would have been blown down to the dock.

And then there’s the visceral unearthly sound of it.

It howls and rages around the stairwells and guy lines and radio masts, it shrieks and slams into the buildings with a relentless crash and smash, throwing anything not tied down into the air like a demented poltergeist: it’s endless assault setting up harmonic vibrations that make all of the manmade structures shiver and shake and rattle and groan. Its almost impossible to sleep.

…and it’s effect on the landscape here is stunning and immediate.

There is barely any snow left here now, its been atomised and blown to the ends of the earth. Whats left is buried under a crusty brown layer of dirt.

The dust has been swept from the ground, blasted into our faces like a gritty horizontal hail, until theres nothing left to strip away. With its unsatiated appetite for destruction, the wind vents it’s frustration on the earth and starts to carve its way into the Antarctic bedrock.

A frightening force of nature and a reminder of how dangerous Mother Earth can be.

**MASSIVE fun though to jump INTO the wind and be carried along although I’ve almost come undone a few times now 🙂

The most surprising effect for me is how quickly it erodes and rots the sea ice.

The islands we walked to last weekend, accessible by ice 1.8 meters thick, are now surrounded by open ocean again. Whitecaps 15 feet high pound the edges of the sea ice, dust and dirt cover the once blue-green ice, increasing the rate of melt.

It’ll be all gone in the next few days if this keeps up, but the positive thing to take away is that once the ice is gone, boat trips up to 3nm out to sea become a possibility. It’ll mark the return of the Elephant Seal colonies, and the penguins will leave their rookery and hunt in packs/swarms/huddles in the open ocean (whatever the Hell a group of Penguins is called)

Bring on the iceberg cruises!

*Anchorage Island – the central memorial cross has been torn away by the wind

So what else is new?

Well I just came off 2 days of survival training that was great fun and an amazing learning opportunity.

Choppered out to a remote Hut where a small team of us practiced our Sea Ice survival and rescue skills, drilling sea ice samples for depth and research…

…and finally a 18Km death march with full pack and navigation exercises in some of the most rugged and remote country I’ve ever been in.

Well…apart from Australia I guess.

*heading down to Deep lake in the Vestfold Hills. Saltier than the Dead Sea.

Apparently much of it looks like remote areas in Canada, although Ive never been so will have to take our training officers word for it. What do you reckon?

I’d think not.

*traversing some massive blizztails and snow drifts on the way home

But it sure is pretty though  🙂

We hiked and dug our evening ‘graves’, slept deep in the snow in our ‘chip packets” – basically a yellow ripstop plastic bag, a thin foam mat and a down sleeping bag, using our packs for pillows.

It was much warmer than you’d think.

Sleeping out under the open Antarctic sky, in the endless daylight and complete absence of sound was something that ill never forget. It was an eerie quiet, with barely a breath of wind, or whisper of sound from anywhere.

2am I awoke, but even this early hour brought only the occasional whistle of a hunting snow petrel or rustle of a chip packet as a team mate stirred but that was all.

A deathly silent night.

We could have easily been on the moon, or in the vaccuum of space, or deep deep deep underwater. This place was completely alien, completely silent and completely entrancing.

*Digging in for the night – its 9pm

*our cosy snow ‘graves’ for the night.

We hiked the long and arduous 18kms back through this incredibly alien landscape using a compass and map, through glacier carved valleys crisscrossed by black dykes of rock, around snow melt lakes so salty you could float in them, and deep powdery snowdrifts waiting to swallow you up.

I was completely out of my element…

*black rock dykes crisscross the landscape – different molten rock types flowed and cooled at different speeds to form this unusual landscape

…and in absolute heaven.

Hey maybe I should write more often 🙂 i feel better already.

to be continued…