Here's the thing about arriving at McMurdo: It's kind of like diving into your first week at college. You have a series of orientation sessions, a bunch of classes in different buildings with random numbers, and you meet a lot of new people with names and roles that are hard to keep straight, while also being offered a wide range of interesting extracurricular activities and trying to navigate the intranet to find the information you need or missed along the way. On top of this, you have to learn the strict and unusual rules around getting your food and sorting your garbage, and adapt to the unwritten conventions and jargon of the society.
A starter:
155 – The big blue building which contains the Galley as well as a number of useful offices like Lodging, Gear Issue, and Recreation. Noticeboards and the Lost and Found are here too. Essentially the hub of the station.
Galley – the cafeteria. To prevent spreading germs, one must always do time at the handwash station before entering the Galley, even if one has just been to the bathroom and thoroughly washed one's hands there. The handwash station is a regular rendezvous point.
Crary – the building where most of the scientists have labs and/or offices. It has three sections, or 'phases,' connected by a downward sloping 'spine.' Phase 1, at the top of the slope and nearest 155, has an upper floor with a conference room-cum-library. My desk is in a dark little room just off the library, which has been set up with cubicles. The best views in McMurdo are from the library windows.
MacOps – the communications hub, which handles radio traffic amongst other things. When you leave the station you have to check out with MacOps.
The SSC – stands for Science Support Center. Lots of classes in the classroom here. Otherwise it's a staging area for science teams heading out into the field.
The BFC – stands for Berg Field Center. The warehouse of supplies (tents, sledges, stoves, pee bottles, etc) and where things go to get repaired. Denizens of the BFC are a tribe unto themselves and they have a most atmospheric lair on the upper floor.
Helo – pronounced hee-low: a helicopter
Snow machine – a snowmobile
The 203s – three interconnected dormitories, numbered 203a, 203b, and 203c. I am in 203c. They are two storeys; off a long corridor are about twenty double-occupancy rooms, with a bathroom for men and for women on each floor, and a common area on the ground floor. They are being torn down in February and replaced next season, so it is a bit surreal to be living there.
Here is what my first three days looked like:
Wednesday 13 November
16.30 – Arrive. Orientation video. Receive dorm assignment and keys.
17.15 – Get onboarded with IT, set up network login and WiFi access
17.30 – Walk up to the transport building to receive luggage and haul it (with vehicle and coordinator assistance) to dorm. Gratefully change out of bunny boots into regular boots and feel 20lbs lighter, possibly literally.
18.30 – Dinner with coordinator. Introductions to many new and exciting people.
19.30 – Science lecture in Crary; tonight's is about the ongoing study of Weddell seal pups and at which stage in development they acquire the skill of hyperoxygenating their tissues for long deep dives. A bespoke seal-sized metabolic chamber has been built for this purpose. The pups in the study are named after favourite candies.
21.00 – Stagger into bed
Thursday 14 November
06.45 – Meet coordinator for breakfast
07.30 – Inbrief at the Chalet (administrative hub) where department leaders and new arrivals introduce themselves and explain what they do.
09.00 – Harassment Awareness training. We had to do anti-harassment training every year at Disney and this 45-minute class was way better – insightful, pragmatic, realistic – than anything we did there. Well done, USAP.
10.00-12.00 – Me time. I think I tried to write up my journal.
12.00 – lunch with coordinator, meeting more new people
13.00-14.00 – more me time. I think I tried to answer some emails. It can take about five minutes to send and receive an email in HTML Gmail, on daytime McMurdo bandwidth, so it takes a while.
14.00 – picked up my communications radio, got briefed on how to operate it and the communications protocols. The comms team have a stuffed husky mascot named Apsley.
15.00 – Visited the Discovery Hut
16.00 – walked uphill against the wind back from Discovery Hut
17.30 – dinner, meet the other Artists & Writers under my coordinator's wing. They have just come back from the Dry Valleys. Ian Van Coller is a photographer; Todd Anderson is a photographer and printmaker. Together they are documenting the disappearing glaciers of the world. See The Last Glacier.
18.00 – History Club
21.00 – Collapse into bed
Friday 15 November
06.45 – Breakfast
08.00 – I was supposed to take Core Training – the introductory briefing on ways and means of McMurdo (trash sorting, the water system, the taxi/shuttle system, medical centre, etc) but in light of the parlous state of the sea ice this year, my coordinator wanted to get me on a snowmobile ASAP so I was ushered instead into
09.00 – Snowmobile Theory, i.e. how to start it, how to drive it, how not to tip over going around corners. This was entirely indoors with a specimen snowmobile. The Snowmobile Practical would be a few days later but I had to have theory first, and there was an opening here.
12.00 – rendezvous with coordinator at my desk, then lunch
13.00-16.30 – Antarctic Field Training. This consisted of a series of lectures and videos interspersed with practical demonstrations, designed to familiarise oneself with the contents of one's survival bag, which is taken with you every time you leave base, in case you're waylaid by a blizzard. We learned how to set up and run the Whisperlight stove (similar in theory to a Primus but with the burner and fuel tank as separate entities) and set up the standard issue tent. I learned the extremely clever Trucker's Hitch knot and forgot it about half an hour after class ended. In fact it went much longer than the allotted time because the power kept going out whenever we tried to watch one of the several requisite videos, so eventually Helicopter Training was postponed to 7.30 the following morning.
18.00 – Dinner. Met the new arrivals from today's C-17, a film crew making an episode of the NatGeo-Netflix-Disney series One Strange Rock.* Despite the American commission, they are in fact British, and one of them was cameraman on the show about the restoration of the Cape Evans hut, which has hitherto been my best point of reference for that interior space. Instant friends. Power outages continued. Went to bed during one particularly long one.
Saturdays are work days here, so the schedule didn't let up then. The standard work day is 7.30 - 17.30, a ten-hour day which significantly favours morning people, of whose tribe I am not. One would think that, in 24-hour daylight, circadian rhythms would be more or less malleable, but I never succeeded in going to sleep before 10 or finding it easy to wake up before 7. People complain of a certain befuddlement in Antarctica – constantly losing things, inability to concentrate, loss of vocabulary – and they call it McMurdo Brain, but my experience of working 60-hour weeks at Disney makes me think it’s probably chronic low-grade exhaustion. When I stole time for a nap or was allowed to sleep in, I felt noticeably sharper.
This particular Saturday, after the makeup Helicopter class, was entirely given over to Sea Ice Training. That was such a full and interesting day that I will give it a post all of its own in the future.
*One Strange Rock is still on Netflix until January 15th, at which point (I assume) it moves to Disney+. This team worked on ep.10, ‘Home’ – if you only have time to watch one episode, watch that one!