Everyday Things at the Bottom of the World: Part 2

 

A Co-Pilot to Fossil Bluff

There is an excellent view from the Rothera kitchen window of the north end of the runway – a narrow strip of crushed rock extending out into the sea. And it never gets old, pausing from the washing-up to watch a BAS Twin Otter coming into land or taking off; a brilliant pop of red against the blue, white, and grey of the sky and of the land. Every now and then we get the chance to experience this from a different point of view – we get to sit in the co-pilot seat of a plane on a flight out to Fossil Bluff, Sky Blu, or even the deep field. This requires no formal training – the Twin Otters can operate here on a single-pilot licence, but a second person is required due to the nature of where the planes are operating. If you are at a remote depot two people are required to refuel the plane, and help is always required with digging, and you may also be asked to take the controls for a short period of time while the pilot fills in some paperwork or gets their flask out to pour a mug of tea. Some people take to this part more easily than others – on my first ever co-pilot, Andy V explained that it was a bit like playing a computer game, which was absolutely no use to me at all! While I do enjoy the sheer madness of it all – to be at the controls of a plane above Antarctica – there has never been that moment for me where you realise that want to change your career entirely and train to become a pilot. But that does not take away from the magic of it all one little bit, and I will treasure the memories of these flights for long after I stop coming South.

I think that it is often the intensity of the experiences down here which means that the people you share them with creates a bond which time and distance do little to diminish the memory of. And the most significant of all are not moments of individual success but a collective effort, team work, and the wonderful and enduring warmth of the friendships formed in this most unhospitable of lands. This place is transitory in nature – people do not stay for ever, but there are those we meet with whom the bond of friendship will endure even when our lives go their separate ways. One such person for me is Dutch – A BAS Twin Otter pilot since 2019, and down here this season for the last time. I spent numerous days with Dutch quarantining in the same hotel in the Falkland Islands in 2020. We were on the same ‘outside time’ schedule for a while, so we often kicked a football between us across the small patch of grass that became known as the sheep pen. Dutch also witnessed my attempts to obtain a quarantine cat – I would save a bit of bacon from breakfast and put it out on a dish, but it only ever succeeded in luring the Turkey Vultures in. He also took a photo for me of the main post box in Stanley with his long lens camera. I could only just make it out with the naked eye from the far corner of the sheep pen. Even if he thought my love of post boxes and post was a little odd, he never made me feel odd or small because of it. He is the kind of person who builds you up. In the 2019-20 season he was the winning seeker in the annual Rothera Quidditch match (which I had started organising the year before). He has delivered many letters out into the field on behalf of Antarctic Postal Logistics – but we only seem to remember the one that he forgot! In 2020 he asked if he could put my drawing of Jenny Island on the back of the Air Unit T-Shirt, and thus begun a three-year collaboration completing the series with Sky Blu and Fossil Bluff. Neither of us made any profit from this project, but £5 from the sale of each T-Shirt went to a charity of my choosing. This season we raised over £1000 for Mind. Dutch, in putting my artwork on a T-Shirt gave me the belief to get my drawings made into art print cards. Until this season though I had never flown with Dutch – and in a place where logistics so often have to trump sentimentality, sentiment prevailed (or the logistics aligned) and on a glorious Sunday in November I went flying with my friend. Station life can seem all encompassing at times, and it’s incredible how within seconds of leaving the ground it suddenly seems so small, and so far behind. We flew south over a glittering Marguerite Bay – that bright Antarctic sun lighting up everything it touched with diamonds. We chatted, and we marvelled at the snowy peaks that lined the King George VI Sound as we headed to Fossil Bluff (an advanced Field Logistics and refuelling station to support deep field science). The purpose of the flight that day was to re-supply Fossil Bluff with fuel. We had about 30 minutes on the deck – time to offload the cargo, and to have a bit of a catch up with Rosemary and JP who were manning Fossil Bluff that week. It was our lucky day – Rosemary had been baking some cinnamon buns, and she gave us a couple to eat on the flight back to Rothera. We chatted about this and that whilst taking in the view. I always try to savour those moments – stood with three friends looking out across the Sound with absolutely no other sign of life. No trees, no wildlife, no construction vehicles – just mountains, ice, and snow to capture your gaze. It always seems like the most improbable thing in the world that we should be there, and yet there we were. And despite the improbability of it we had no words for it and so our words were just the same as we always use – how has the weather been, what’s happening on station, are you cooking anything good for dinner tonight? Time and time again in Antarctica I have been struck by the feeling that it is a place beyond words, and that silence is more than simply the absence of noise, and that when that silence comes our ears cannot process it, but our souls can.

Part of me wished that I could have stood there for longer and listened for longer - both to the chat and to the silence. But I couldn’t tell you how long exactly would have felt like enough. Maybe there is not enough time in the universe for that. We said our goodbyes to Rosemary and JP and took to the Antarctic skies once more. It was about an hour and forty-minute flight back to Rothera, and we arrived in time for dinner. Everything on station was carrying on just the same – on the surface it was as if we had never been away. But for me, something had changed – I don’t think such experiences can fail to change you. It was a breathtaking reminder of how incredible this place is and what a privilege it is to be here. But even more than that – it was a chance to treasure and to appreciate a friendship, and by doing so to treasure and to appreciate the wonder of all friendship in a life that would be worth very little without it.

Everyday Things at the Bottom of the World: Part One

 

The Nightshift Week

In the days leading up to my second nightshift week of the season I came down with the bug that had been doing the rounds of station. Whether it be a cold, the flu, or Covid, something like that spreads like wildfire here. It was unavoidable, and even to be expected in these post-quarantine years. On one of the days, my voice took on a deep, gravelly quality which someone told me sounded sexy. I decided that it would be a shame not to test out my new found powers, and so I set about trying to chat up the Chilean Airforce who had arrived in a couple of Twin Otters that day*. Even with my limited Spanish, ‘yo no tengo mascotas’, and, ‘yo tengo muchos boligrafos’, I thought it was worth a shot. Unfortunately, it all seems to have backfired somewhat. We were hoping that they would be staying just the one night (simply because we need the bedspace), but it’s a week later and they are still here.

Perhaps as some sort of divine retribution, the following day I lost my voice. Which wasn’t too much of a problem as I would shortly be heading onto the nightshift where the need to talk to anyone would be vastly reduced. However, there was the problem of what to do in the event of an emergency. A large part of the nightshift job involves performing three complete checks of vital station infrastructure. This includes checking all the boilers, the Reverse Osmosis plant, and the generators which keep the station operational. If any problems are detected with these, it is then my job to wake up the relevant person or people. So, in the event of my voice not being loud enough to do this, I decided that the best option would be to carry an emergency tin whistle around with me, and then I could play a dramatic tune in their ear to stir them. My musical repertoire is not particularly vast, but I can just about conjure up Hot Cross Buns and Concerning Hobbits. The tin whistle fit just nicely inside the chest pocket of my high-viz jacket, while other pockets were given over to the usual supply of post-it notes and whiteboard markers. These items are for me as essential as making sure you’ve got your gloves on to go outside. Most buildings and offices on station have a whiteboard, and you never know when you’re going to need to leave a post-it note for someone. These messages can range from, “Hello Logan and Scott, one of the boilers in NBH has locked out. Everything else is fine. Thanks for keeping the water flowing. Have a wonderful day, with love from, K x” to “Dear Aurelia, truth be told: I just can’t stop thinking about Alan Rickman’s voice box, and how much better my life would be if I could sound like Hans Gruber every once in a while. That aside, not much to report. Have a wonderful Monday. Take care, with love from, K x”. Sometimes there is a backstory and some context to these messages, but sometimes there is not. It has become a nightshift ritual of sorts to leave messages all around station, and none more so than in the Operations Tower. I’ve left them a post-it note message every night on every night shift week I’ve ever done. That’s five and a half seasons worth of post-it notes, and they’ve kept every single one. There’s a lever arch file to the left of the map board which has ‘K Archives’ written on the spine. I’ve never been quite brave enough to look back through them though – it would be like delving straight back into my brain from another time, and nightshifts are often the strangest of times!

Alongside the checks of station, and leaving messages around the place, there are also a number of cleaning jobs that need to be done on the nightshift – things that can only realistically be achieved when the busyness of the days falls quiet. Even then though, unexpected things still tend to happen. And last Saturday night was no different. I thought everyone had left the building and gone to bed, it was now long passed 1am. I set about cleaning the boot room and the entrance foyer. I picked up all the indoor shoes, mostly a colourful variety of Crocs. Some mysterious soul had been adorning the Crocs with those little jibbitz that sit neatly in the holes. I wondered if it was Addie again. Last season everyone with a pair of Crocs found that they had a Minion attached to them. No one knew who was doing it until Addie either fessed up or was caught in the act. I’m not exactly sure how it went down. Apparently, her mum had wanted to order one for her, but didn’t realise that ‘Quantity 1’ actually meant one pack of seventy odd. This season it was Mario Kart characters and various different Pokémon. I got Charmander and was pretty happy with that. I vacuumed the boot room floor and into the foyer – the world gets incredibly dusty here at this time of year. Most of the snow around station has melted away, so folk are walking about on gravelly rock which has a mind of its own and gets everywhere especially in the dry, dry Antarctic wind. Then it was onto the mopping – we have a small quantity of Zoflora on station, a disinfectant that comes in Winter Spice and Clementine and something-or-other. It’s a delightful fragrance, and for a while it even makes a boot room of a hundred shoes smell quite nice. But if you don’t do this in the middle of the night, the sense of having cleaned somewhere would not even last 5 minutes. So, imagine my disappointment when the previously mentioned Chilean Airforce, along with Jose and Tania, appeared from upstairs and walked out onto the freshly mopped foyer floor. Naturally, I attacked them with my mop. A string of apologies came from Jose and Tania, while the Chileans had retreated to one of the mats and were huddled there insisting that they would wait until the floor had dried. Let’s not call it a diplomatic incident, lets call it international collaboration and an advancement of their military training. The following night, amidst much laughter and broken Spanish and broken English, they asked if they could help in anyway, so I put them to work clearing away the remnants of the late-evening dishes. I’m not sure that a day ever goes by down here that hasn’t been some strange mix of the surreal and the mundane.  

 

 

 

 

*This is not the entirety of the Chilean Airforce. Nor were they in Antarctica for military reasons – their Twin Otters are used to support and enable the Chilean Polar Science operations.