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By Dr. Jerri Nielsen If this story is to begin anywhere, it should begin in the night. I have always been a night person. When the sun goes down, my spirits rise. I'm more alert, quicker, more in tune with the rhythms of the world. There are many nights to choose from, but one comes to mind now, in the emergency room at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, two months before I went to the Ice:
As I walked into the nurses' station, I arrived in the safe zone of emergency medical technicians, nurses, x-ray techs, and lab techs. My physician partners looked stressed and hurried as they usually did at this time of night, prime time for emergency medicine. "Nielsen, really good to see you!" said Max, a friend and fellow ER doc as he raced toward a trauma room. "Grab some charts; we just took a big hit." No time to get a cup of coffee or converse, there were eight charts in the rack, representing patients ready to be seen. An emergency room in a big American city is a crucible of human suffering and desperate behavior. Everybody and everything rolls in off the streets at one time or another, and anything can happen. The walk-in case might have the flu or viral meningitis, the man on the stretcher might have a bruised shoulder or a bullet in the heart. I should say here that I am only five foot three, but nobody has ever thought of me as small. It was a lesson I always taught my female interns: Doctors are not short. Doctors have no gender. Doctors are in control — or at least you have to seem that way as a patient's world spins into chaos. Through it all you have to wear a face that shows no judgment, no revulsion — only empathy and calm. After a while it becomes second nature. THE GOOD DOCTOR'S ROOTS The sun was coming up over the farms and rolling fields of eastern Ohio as I drove home from the hospital. Home — what a concept. I was 46 years old and living in my parents' house, sleeping in a bedroom decorated with the ruffled curtains and daisy wallpaper of my teen-age years. I parked the Volvo in the gravel drive and breathed deeply to banish the lingering smell of blood and disinfectant from my lungs. This was not the place where I grew up — that was a ranch house in the country a few miles away. This was the house made of the dreams and quirks of the Cahill family in its boisterous prime. My father, Phil, was a master builder. He had taught my two younger brothers, Scott and Eric, his trade while constructing this house. We had built the house, stone by stone, deep in a rugged forest, with big picture windows on all sides. Every cupboard, each tile, the doorways, the rocks in the massive fireplace, all had been placed there by a close relative. The paneling in the hall came from a barn that I had helped to tear down. The slate roof was scavenged from an old farmhouse. I remember sitting tied to the roof of the three-story gothic building, ripping off slate and sending it down in a box to the girl whom Eric would one day marry. My mother, Lorine, had started college when I was 12 and became a psychologist. She decorated the house with found objects and treasures bought at flea markets and estate sales. We have always been a close-knit clan, and the house was our monument to ourselves, a shrine to loyalty and love and good hard work. I will always think of it as my mother's house, as her spirit pervades it, but it has my father's soul in its strong foundation and solid frame. It was the obvious refuge for me when everything else in my life fell apart. This morning, as always, my mother had carefully stacked my mail on the kitchen table. As I made myself some tea I absently fanned through the pile of bills and journals and then started to read. The back pages of The Annals of Emergency Medicine usually carried ads for job openings in the medical field, and that was where I was looking when some display type caught my eye: Polar medicine. Physicians needed for U.S. Antarctic program. The job called for a full year of work at one of the three American bases in Antarctica. Half of the time would be spent in the isolation and darkness of the austral winter. I felt a prickling sensation up and down my skin, like the kind of physical excitement a child feels at the sight of a bicycle under the Christmas tree. I read the words over and over again, and my pounding heart told me this was what I had been looking for without knowing it. I believe in geographic cures — they allow you to throw all your cards in the air and see where they land, then pick them back up and deal them again. I was ready for a new deal. I had stayed in a terrible, suffocating marriage for 23 years and lost everything by the time I saw that losing was inevitable. In the end, I lost my self-respect, almost lost hope. Like an animal in a leghold trap, I gnawed away at parts of myself to escape. I survived, got a divorce, but I lost my three children in the process. And that is something that still seems impossible to me. CALL ME 'DUFFY' I grew up believing anything is possible if you just work hard enough to get it. I remember most of my childhood as sun-splashed and magical, full of friends and freedom and adventures. I was given the name Jerri Lin Cahill, but from the time I was learning to talk, I was known as Duffy, or Duff, for short. It had something to do with the first sounds I made: duff-duff, duff-ree. The nickname caught on. It was Irish, sporty, lively, and it suited me well. My brother Scott was two years younger than I, and Eric was born four years later. Scott and I sat in the hospital parking lot on that cold February night with our Aunt Mona and saw the aurora borealis in the Ohio sky for the first time. When Mr. Baby came home (that's what we called him then, and still do) he was placed in my bedroom and I moved into Scott's room. Dad had built matching beds for us. As soon as we were roommates, Scott and I started to imagine things together. We were pirates on the high seas. There were alligators under the beds and witches in the closets. He would chase after them with a baseball bat, screaming, "Get out of there, you dirty thieves!" Forty years later, he would spin wonderful fantasies for me when I was trapped at the South Pole, to help give me the strength to survive. 'I DO' At age 23 — practically a spinster according to my mother — I married a fellow medical student for a number of bad reasons that seemed logical at the time. We had known each other for three months when he proposed. This med student seemed smart, zealous, and oddly charming. His impulsiveness, at that time, excited me. The first time I met his parents, he announced that we were engaged. This was news to me. But before long, he swept me up in his plans for our marriage. I mistook his enthusiasm for love. Later I would learn that was how he responded to everything new, at first. He showered me with attention and affection. He could make anyone feel like the only worthwhile person on earth when he set his mind to it. He was full of schemes and grand ideas, and he led me to believe that we would be doctors and partners together in an adventure overseas, in poor countries where medical care was needed. This was, of course, just what I wanted to hear. I thought it meant that he really cared about helping the sick, and that he cared, most of all, about me. My professors, my parents, and my brothers never liked him, and that should have been a warning to me. He started to change soon after the wedding ceremony. It began with small, cutting comments and minor demands. He would laugh when I dropped things. He told me I was awkward and ugly, an "overachiever" with little natural talent. He made all the decisions in our marriage, from what we had for dinner to where we lived. He exaggerated and twisted everything, so I lost track of what was real and true. If I corrected him or disagreed with him he flew into a rage that wouldn't stop until he got his way. It wasn't worth fighting over the small things, but soon there was nothing he didn't control. I abdicated everything, gradually but completely. People who had known me before the marriage couldn't believe how meek I had become.We waited to have children until we had finished our medical training. Julia was born when I was 29. Ben came two years later, and then Alex two years after that. I loved being a mother and adored my children. I switched from emergency medicine to family practice so that I could be home more when the children were small. We went everywhere together, to zoos and parks, hiking and swimming. We lived in the country where we kept dogs and goats and geese, and where the children could spend their summers barefoot, as my brothers and I had done before them. I used to put them all in a wagon and pull them along the forested trails around our house. When I think of those times I see a van full of my kids and their friends, and I hear high-pitched laughter and shouts and singing. My ex-husband's face and voice are not in these memories, because he was almost never there, too preoccupied with his business plans and investment schemes. When we were all together, the tension was awful. He criticized me constantly, and if I defied him, he would retaliate in terrible ways. Once, when we were driving along a two-lane road with the children in the back seat, I told him that I wanted to see our checkbook. There was no money in the joint account and I wanted to know where it had gone. My husband pulled into the oncoming lane and stepped on the gas. I swear he would have kept going if I hadn't given in and told him I didn't need to see the checkbook. Another time, he strangled the family dog right in front of me and our daughter, to teach us a lesson. He later told my mother how he'd watched the look of disbelief on the dog's face as he squeezed its throat. Then he shot it to finish it off. After years of this treatment, I forgot how to fight him. It wasn't worth the battle for each inch of ground. But always, as soon as his behavior became unbearable, he would ease off the pressure. It was such a relief it felt like a gift.
Looking back, I now believe that this was a textbook case of domestic abuse. The obsessive jealousy and control, the isolation, the constant berating and threats of violence: all of it was characteristic of emotional and psychological battery. I first tried to run away with the children after my ex-husband started physically hurting the boys. Julia was always his favorite, and he treated her as his confidante. But he was usually cruel to our young sons, ignoring them or telling them they were stupid. Then one day I caught him slamming both boys — who were in grade school — into the living-room walls, complaining that I had let them run "out of control." I knew we had to get out. I waited until he left the house for a medical conference, then I packed up the van and drove the children across Ohio to my mother's place. A judge granted me a restraining order to keep him away from us. The separation lasted a month. I looked for a new job and found a school for the kids. Then my husband sent mournful, apologetic letters to each of us, begging for another chance. He sent 12 dozen roses to the house. I made the mistake of agreeing to meet him, just to talk. Afraid of a trap, I insisted we meet at an airport, where there were plenty of people and security officers if his anger got out of control. To my surprise, the man who greeted me looked like the man I had fallen in love with. There was tenderness in his eyes, not the rage that I was accustomed to. When he hugged me, I felt tenderness, instead of the stiff, perfunctory embraces I'd known for years. He told me he had changed and realized how much he loved me. He would never, ever hurt the children again. I fell for it and agreed to come back to him. At his insistence, I retracted the restraining order. Now, I tried even harder to be the perfect wife; after all, didn't he now realize how much I meant to him? The "honeymoon" did not last long. While he no longer hit the boys, he was cold to them and brutally critical of everything they did. If I challenged his judgment or contradicted him, he took it out on the kids, knowing how much that hurt me. Soon the cycle started all over again, the jealousy, the anger, the obsessive control, and the fear. I felt trapped. Finally, I found a way to escape him once and for all. I had to do something he couldn't forgive, so that he wouldn't try to win me back again. I had a brief affair, out of town, with a man who treated me with kindness and respect, something I hadn't felt in years. At last, my husband agreed to a divorce. LOST CHILDREN When I finally left for good, I asked the children to live with me in another town. Ben and Alex agreed, but Julia wanted to finish her senior year in high school. My ex-husband was amazingly amenable to the proposal, but suggested, to make the transition easier for everyone, that I remain at home while we worked out the details of the divorce and I found work. That was another mistake. While I was working and trying to build a new life for my kids, he became the attentive father they had always wanted. Suddenly he was warm to the boys and involved in their lives. When it was time to go, the boys changed their minds. They said they wanted to stay together in their school, and live with Dad. Before the divorce, once the children were old enough to handle it, I had gone back to emergency medicine. I took a succession of ER jobs at progressively larger hospitals, building my career and skills. Now I had a new job waiting for me back near my old hometown, a four-hour drive away. I had arranged to live with the boys at my mother's house, to save enough to soon get our own place. I was blindsided by the sudden change in plans. Over the next few months, my weekly visits with the kids grew shorter and stranger. Repeatedly, after driving all morning to pick them up, I would arrive at the house to be told they would be available for only a few hours, not the weekend I had planned. Sometimes they wouldn't be there at all. Again my lawyer advised me not to fight, to just give it time. But time was working in favor of my ex-husband. After a year had passed, I was seeing my children only on rare, brief occasions, and when I did, they seemed increasingly remote and stiff, like strangers to me. My work was all I had left by now. I had recently started a new job as an ER physician at a major university teaching hospital in Cleveland. It was the job I had always thought I wanted, but it was not enough to fill the void in my heart where my children had been. HELP WANTED Then I saw the ad for the job in Antarctica, a place I had always wanted to see. Why not? I faxed my CV to the Denver offices of Antarctic Support Associates, or ASA, the company contracted to staff and supply the U.S. government's research facilities there. A few days later, Norman Wolfe, the medical recruiter, called and offered to fly me to Colorado for an interview. There was just one opening left — for the doctor at the South Pole — and they needed to fill it immediately. I was on a plane to Denver two days later. For the past 10 years, ASA had held the government contract to support U.S. scientific bases, camps, and vessels in Antarctica for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Norman Wolfe met me in his office, where I was introduced to Mike Masterman, a young man with short, sandy-colored hair who would be the South Pole station manager next winter. He was an electronics engineer who had worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, designing telescope systems. We chatted for a while, just to get a feel for each other. I was comfortable with both of them and very interested in the job.They gave me a rundown of facts about Antarctica, most of them so bleak that they came across as a warning: Antarctica, I was informed, was "the highest, driest, coldest, windiest, and emptiest place on earth." The continent was one and a half times the size of the United States, and 97 percent of it was covered with ice. Nobody owned Antarctica; it was administered by an international treaty. The United States, however, had a large scientific presence on the continent. It maintained two scientific research vessels, the Nathaniel B. Palmer and the Laurence M. Gould, for marine and atmospheric studies, and three land-based stations at McMurdo, on the western coast, Palmer, on an island off the Antarctic Peninsula, and the South Pole, where I would be assigned. Temperatures at the Pole could slip to below minus 100 degrees F. For eight and a half months each year, between February and October, the Pole was totally unreachable, since it was too cold to land an aircraft. Half of that time would be spent in darkness. It was during this interview that I first heard the word winter used as a verb. One does not spend the winter in Antarctica, one "winters" or "winters-over." If I took this job, I would "winter-over" at the South Pole, as the only doctor among 41 scientists and support staffers. There would be a certain amount of data collection and paperwork, but not that many patients. I was shown a set of statistics from previous years: On average, the South Pole doctor saw only three patients a week during the winter. It would be challenging and cold, very cold, and I would be taking a huge cut in pay. But the upside was that it would be a hell of an adventure, with plenty of time to read and study, explore and reflect. I needed that time. My children were the only ones who could have changed my mind. When I called to talk it over with them, my daughter would not even come to the phone. I told my boys that I had an opportunity to go to the South Pole, but that I would not go if there was any chance for us to be together again, for weekend visits, not just the occasional meal once a month or whenever I was allowed to see them in the presence of their father. They told me no, it wouldn't happen. I knew that it was not my children's decision to hurt me. I had been unable to defy my ex-husband when I was living with him, and I was an adult. How could I expect any more of them? My children were the most important thing in my life and always would be. But I knew I couldn't let him use them to keep punishing me, even if it meant not seeing them for a long, long time. I called Norman Wolfe to tell him I would take the job. TESTING 1, 2, 3 It was now late October, and there was little time to prepare for my journey. I was quickly called back to Denver for a complete physical with a battery of lab tests, an EKG, a cardiac stress test, and a mammogram. Everything was fine. The next day I was scheduled for psych screening. All people wintering in the Antarctic must pass extensive psychological testing — said to be similar to choosing candidates for nuclear submarines. The ASA recruiters were looking for people who were stable, easy to get along with, and intuitive: Living in extreme conditions requires a flexible intelligence, where the ability to quickly absorb and react to new situations is a valuable asset. They wanted to weed out people with personality disorders, chronic complainers, the chronically depressed, substance abusers, and who knows what else. After multiple written tests, I had a personal interview with a psychologist. Once I got to Antarctica, almost everyone I met joked about the screening process. One story going around described an ASA manager with a good deal of experience on the Ice who was interviewing candidates to winter at Pole. "Do you drink?" she asked.
I was staring, overwhelmed, at the piles of my possessions stacked around my room when Mike Masterman called. Mike would be the winter site manager at the South Pole station and was visiting friends nearby, in West Virginia. He wanted to stop and see me and meet my family before departing for the Ice. "Things get pretty spooky when you're getting ready to leave for the South Pole for a year," he explained. I had noticed. He offered to help me with anything I needed to know, and I jumped at the chance to get together. Both my parents were thrilled and relieved to finally meet someone who had lived at the South Pole. My mother prepared one of her famous huge dinners for him. As we wolfed down steaks, Mike answered all of our questions and put most of our fears to rest. Only 30 years old, he had crammed a lot of experience into his life. He was a firefighter and instructor, an experienced SCUBA diver, and certified cave rescuer. He had already wintered at the Pole as a scientist in 1995. Now he was returning as the winter site manager, the civilian equivalent of a ship's captain. After dinner, Mike looked over my packing list. "You won't need 10 bottles of deodorant, Jerri," he laughed. "You won't even need one. We all stop using it when winter hits. No one will smell you through all those clothes, and no one cares anyway." He scrutinized the rest of my alleged necessities: "You don't need razors, no one shaves. Six bottles of shampoo is way too much when you only shower twice a week. You will need a couple of cameras, they all go bad. Have yours fitted with low-temperature grease. And take film; we can develop it in the darkroom." After Mike Masterman headed off for the Ice, I began an email correspondence with Will Silva, the South Pole doctor over the past winter. He was still at the station, waiting for me to relieve him. Will had useful information about what sort of computers and medical equipment I would find at the Pole. He told me to bring good sunblock, and even though he said he wore Teva sandals in Biomed — the tiny hospital center — he said that some Polies preferred the sheepskin slip-on boots you can buy in New Zealand, on the way to Antarctica. For indoor clothes he gave me the email addresses of some of the women he knew at the Pole. My female correspondents said that a few "frivolous things" went a long way at the Pole. They told me to bring some fun, bright, feminine clothes for special dinners, a cookbook or favorite recipes, herbal teas, and my own bath towel, among other things. I was enormously grateful for their suggestions, especially later. ANTARCTIC COMPANIONS I flew to Denver to completed the final paperwork for the trip, then different people handed me things to carry to Antarctica: some papers, some computer software, and a Styrofoam cooler full of flu vaccines and tuberculosis tests. Then I met the people who would be traveling together to the Ice: a woman cop, a plumber, a tinsmith, and a heavy equipment mechanic. We sized each other up tentatively, like teen-agers from different schools glancing across the dance floor. I felt a bit giddy and awed: These people were all going to be there before long. It was exciting just to breathe the same air. Before we left there was a final briefing to remind us of the lofty purpose of our adventure on the Ice: to support science. The array of scientific research in Antarctica was staggering. The previous year there had been 187 U.S.-supported projects on the continent, from studying fish with a natural antifreeze in their blood, to monitoring global warming through the behavior of glaciers. Some of the most exciting work was being done at the South Pole, where the unsullied atmosphere was perfect for astronomical observations and for detecting changes in greenhouse gases. As a future resident of the South Pole station, I was also reminded of the other, perhaps more important mission this year: to support construction. After almost three decades of service, the facilities at the South Pole were in desperate need of repair and modernization. A huge construction project was underway to build a new station alongside the existing structures. It wouldn't be completed until 2005.
In Los Angeles we all went through Customs and waited together in the passenger lounge for our flight to New Zealand to be called. We were already forming a tight group of friends. We talked about our lives and what we would be doing on the Ice. I told them that I had taken a road that I would not return on, that I already felt I was no longer of this world. I knew that I had made a major decision in my life, and that things would never be the same again. I told them I felt like Alice going through the looking glass. As we boarded the Kiwi Air flight to Christchurch, my sense of wonder only deepened, and it never really never left me. WELCOME TO CHRISTCHURCH The airport acronym for Christchurch, New Zealand, is CHCH, hence its nickname: Cheech. This charming, leafy city on the temperate southern coast of New Zealand is the gateway for most North Americans traveling to Antarctica, since it is closest to McMurdo. In Cheech I found that ASA had booked me into a fancy, expensive hotel, apart from my traveling companions. I suppose they thought a doctor would expect a luxury suite, but I was horrified. The last thing I wanted was to be separated from the group. So I invited Mandy to share my room with me. The next morning we all reassembled at the International Antarctic Center out by the airport, a large, modern complex that serves as an operations center for the New Zealand, Italian, and U.S. Antarctic programs. The National Science Foundation and ASA had offices there. Our first stop was the CDC—Clothing Distribution Center. Men and women were ushered into separate rooms to try on the ECWs or Extreme Cold Weather gear they would wear on the Ice. Every item was government issue; it would all be returned (probably for burning) at the end of the season. The warehouse was brimming with racks of geranium-red parkas, insulated Carhartt outerwear — familiar to me because they are a favorite with construction workers — and shelves upon shelves of fleece, wool, and microfiber clothing and accessories. Your choices depended on where you were going on the continent and whether your job was primarily inside or outside. Mandy and I had to take more clothing than the men because we would be wintering over on the Ice. I had the most of all because I was going to the Pole. My standard outdoor attire would start with underwear, then long underwear, then a fleece jumpsuit, then a fleece jacket, then full-bib Carhartt's or lined wind pants, then a red goose-down parka. The red parkas were made in Canada, with a nylon shell and feathers mixed into the down for loft, and were widely believed to be the warmest coats on the planet. You could also get a green and black canvas parka with south pole stitched on the breast pocket. These were referred to by Polies as their "colors," but I was told they were not as warm as the red ones. In the end, I had stuffed three huge orange bags with my government-issue clothing. Next we watched a movie about how to survive in Antarctica that included helpful hints about how to avoid hypothermia ("if your feet are cold, wear a hat"), how to tell if a blizzard is on the way, and how to take a two-minute "Navy" shower, which was all we would be allowed at the Pole. Then we lined up to pass through Customs and get our passports stamped. We were given a sack lunch, herded onto a bus, and driven out to the airport, where a New Zealand Air Force C-130 was waiting to take us to Antarctica. Normally, planes operated by the U.S. Navy or the New York Air National Guard ferried American scientists and staff to the Ice. But it was late in the austral summer, and almost everybody was already in place at the three U.S. bases. So for our trip to MacTown — what everybody calls McMurdo — we piggybacked on a Kiwi supply flight. We had to wear our ECWs in case we crash-landed somewhere on the Ice. It was hot and uncomfortable, but soon we were strapped into rope seats in the cavernous fuselage of the cargo plane. After takeoff I was able to shed my parka and stretch out on top of the pallets stacked in the center aisle for the duration of the eight-hour flight. To put us in the mood for a trip to the Great White South, the Kiwi flight crew blasted a rousing performance of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" over the intercom. We were totally stoked and ready for our big adventure when the pilot announced that we had reached the "Point of Safe Return" and unfortunately weather at McMurdo had deteriorated. We couldn't land safely, so we had to turn back to Cheech. We were being "boomeranged" — a common occurrence in Antarctic aviation, I soon learned. Four hours later we were back in New Zealand. There was nothing to do but wait for the weather to clear. Customs would not return our checked baggage, since we had already been processed out of the country, and we had to be ready to leave on short notice. We showed up at the airport every morning for almost a week, only to be sent back into town. We ran into only one rough patch during our visit, when a burglar slipped into our hotel room one night. In retrospect, it was funny rather than scary. Our intruder had picked the wrong room to burgle: what he found was an angry ER doctor and a policewoman. We screamed at him and cornered him. Mandy demanded to know what he was doing in our room, assuring him, "I start nice so I have somewhere to go." The poor guy sputtered something about needing to give us new shampoo, that he worked for the hotel. We knew he was lying, but we let him go. We didn't want to spend time talking to a hotel manager or filling out a report in a police station. Our instincts were good. That very morning, at 4 a.m., we got a call telling us that the weather had cleared. We were going to Antarctica. A SIGHT TO BEHOLD As we started our descent to McMurdo, I peered out a porthole window in the C-130 Hercules. My first view of Antarctica was a panorama of dark blue seas thick with icebergs under a blazing summer sun. MacTown occupies the southern tip of Ross Island, a mountainous knot of land in the Ross Sea that is attached on one side to the Antarctic mainland by a thick shelf of ice. (Scotsman James Clark Ross first sailed into this body of water in 1841 on HMS Erebus; Lt. Archibald McMurdo commanded the sister ship, Terror.) The U.S. base is located where the water, ice, and land meet to form McMurdo Sound. Above it all looms Mount Erebus, an 11,000-foot active volcano near the center of Ross Island that belches a plume of steam and showers ash onto the fragile, puny buildings below. Even from the air, McMurdo station looks like a Klondike mining camp, crisscrossed with muddy roads and rows of tin-roofed huts glinting in the sun. We touched down on a long ice runway, frozen solid enough to accommodate the hard rubber wheels of the big cargo carrier. It was cold enough at McMurdo that day — probably 10 below zero F. — but I was outfitted for an expedition to the Pole. I was overheated and exhausted by the time I reached my accommodations at the infamous "Hotel California," a dumpy hostel for people passing through MacTown. The rooms, strewn with empty bottles and sleeping bags, seemed to sleep five or six. I quickly called Mandy and asked if I could stay with her until I caught my flight to the Pole. Poor Mandy hadn't seen Toby since their wedding. Now she had finally arrived only to find that her husband had been sent to the South Pole for a few days to maintain the fire extinguishers. I took advantage of the situation and moved in with her for the duration.
I hoped to spend a few days in McMurdo working with some of the medical people there to pick up more training in x-ray, lab, and dentistry. But Gerry Katz, ASA's physician advisor for Antarctica, who was there to help me adjust, told me I had to get to the Pole as soon as possible to relieve Will Silva. On my second morning in MacTown, I got a space on a flight to the South Pole. From: Jerri Nielsen Dear Mom and Dad, The Duff TOUCHDOWN It's not easy landing 65 tons of sheet metal on skis. The LC-130 cargo plane touched down on the icy landing strip with flaps pulled back, propellers in reverse, and all four engines howling like angry animals. I was one of a dozen passengers strapped in the dark belly of this aircraft, confined to a windowless bench seat. I had hoped to watch our descent over the polar plateau and catch a glimpse of the continent's most famous landmark, the geodesic dome at the center of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Still, I could picture the ice-bound world beneath us, as I had visited it in my imagination so many times since I was a child. The LC-130 was a standard Hercules-class transport plane outfitted with special skis for landings on unstable polar ice. We barreled along the taxiway until the plane bounced to a stop near the Dome. Bundled again in my brand new ECWs, complete with big fur gloves and colossal white boots, I felt very much like the Michelin Man as I hauled my carry-on luggage up to the passenger door. I stepped out into a blinding light, into the whitest world under an impossibly blue sky. The naked sun seared me right through my polarized goggles. The next thing that hit was a cold so deep and complete it was surreal. My first breaths torched my throat and chilled my lungs. It was cold from another dimension, from an ice planet in a distant galaxy. And this was summer in the Southern Hemisphere. After a few stabbing gulps of thin air I was quickly reminded that I had gained almost 2 miles in altitude during the three-hour flight from McMurdo. While the plateau was flat as a griddle, it was also as high as the Austrian Alps. The South Pole station rests on a 9,000-foot thick slab of ice soaring 9,3000 feet above sea level. I immediately felt light-headed, lead-footed, and slightly nauseated, but I still had to drag my bags to the Dome. I forced my body to move, even though it felt like I could not. Then I noticed two figures in bright red parkas walking up to the plane, waving and laughing — presumably at me as I struggled down the stairs. The Pole is a great physical leveler. At first glance, everyone looks the same dressed in 20 to 30 pounds of almost identical clothing, with heads and faces completely covered. They were almost in front of me when I recognized one of the figures as Mike Masterman, the winter station manager. With him was Will Silva, the doctor I had come to relieve. I couldn't hear them over the noise of the engines, but they were shouting and pointing up to the sky. I looked up and saw the sun was ringed with a brilliant halo of ice crystals and framed with an array of sundogs like blazing outriggers. Will slapped me on the back and smiled. As we walked together toward the entrance to the Dome, I felt like I was finally coming home. |
