Home

Tuesday morning woke up absolutely glorious. Bright blue skies, shimmering white snows and a knot in my stomach. Today I was going home. Back to my husband and my cat and my garden. Still, there was a little part of me not too sure about all this. I packed up my bags and headed off for breakfast.

After eating we stuck in our last two interviews and finally put our recorders away. And before getting lost in the tedious thoughts of listless waiting we were invited to help do some sea ice thickness drilling. So we hopped into the Hagglund and rumbled off down the Armitage Loop that wraps itself around the headland from Scott Base to McMurdo. We stopped at every set of crossed flags, found the now blown in cracks and set to drilling them. This is a weekly occurance as the sea ice here is known to melt out first and from below. You don't want to loose your Hagglund or Pisten Bully down a crack in the sea ice, let alone your best mate. So we drilled, measured and drove on to the next one. And were home in time for lunch.

After a tasty lunch of fresh salads (remember the C-17 was able to land yesterday), we were back to the listless waiting game. As the kitchen was usually quiet at this time of day, I decided to see if any help was needed and was put to work making cookies. A huge batch of chocolate afgans in fact. Mixing and blending, rolling and squashing and sliding them into the oven. By the time they were ready and pulled out, our shuttle to the sea ice runway had arrived. My stomach was in real knots then. I was excited to go home, but at the same time, having lived here at Scott Base for 3 weeks, it was starting to feel like home too. I had friends and things to do, I knew the places I liked to go to ski and walk and even do yoga.

It's a strange feeling "home". I grew up in the Yukon for 25 years, so in one sense it is my home. But we have now lived in Christchurch for 2 years and it too is home. And after just 3 weeks of time at Scott Base, it too was beginning to feel homey. It wasn't something I noticed in the people who had been in camps, perhaps being completely comfortable you let your guard down and allow yourself to settle in and adapt. Although we generally like think of Antarctica as this distant place of absolute extremes, it is also a home. Not just to the penguins and seals that live there, but to the people who spend much of their lives here with any of the Antarctic programmes. Any place we haven't been seems exotic, but to someone it is still home.

We climbed onto the big C-17 and took in one last breath of cold Antarctic air before settling inside. The door was drawn up and tightly shut and the wheels starting rolling. We were once again in that liminal space between departure and arrival, between home and home.

For 5 hours we thundered along in the sky and finally arrived into the greyness of Christchurch. It was a gentleness to arrive on a cool cloudy evening, as many of us were still dressed in our ECW (extreme cold weather) gear. We were ushered from plane to bus and driven to the international terminal where we joined the line to entre the country. Grabbing my bags from the conveyor, I trundled through customs and finally walked out to a happy hug from my husband.

On Track

[Flying kites out on the sea ice in front of Scott Base. Photo by Gary]

After a weekend of high winds and blowing snow cocooning us into our warm little base, the weather has calmed. The winds are just a whisper now (by Antarctic standards, which means perfect kite flying weather) and the clouds have parted letting in the sun. The C-17 that was scheduled to leave last Friday took off today and all going well. Our plane will take off tomorrow - with us on board.

It has been an amazing 3 weeks, with lots of interviews, lots of skiing and not a lot of sleep. Some of the things that I noticed in my time here include:


- the snow feels like talc, very dry, fine and powdery
- even with a high, high wind it can still be quite warm outside if you're wearing the right clothes
- some sea ice tastes salty and some doesn't
- most of the rocks here are volcanic, so black or brown and rough
- penguins have longer tails than I thought
- you can tell if the scheduled plane hasn't come in by the amount of fresh produce for dinner that night (or lack thereof)
- despite having light all day, time still seems to whiz by
- Antarctica is a really cool place, but it is also a home to the people who work here


I've really enjoyed my experience here. We've worked super hard to collect as many interviews as possible and I am really looking forward to getting home and sleeping (and eating lots of fresh fruit like cherries, strawberries, apricots and nectarines).

Hidden Horizons

[The wind whistling through the bamboo poles]

Yesterday, the wind picked up. In fact, we had gusts up to 35 knots (that’s about 65 km/h). And although it doesn’t actually snow all that much here in Antarctica, there is a lot of snow around to be blown about. So with all that snow caught up in the wind and being whipped about we loose something rather important – the horizon.

The horizon is an interesting feature. When we are at home we often do not spend much time thinking about it. It is simply there, in the distance, disappearing around the bending of the earth. But here in Antarctica it is important. Because the sky and the ground can be such similar shades and tones and colours, the absence of a horizon means you can loose yourself between the earth, or ice rather, and the sky. It also means the planes can’t land.

Yesterday, the C-17 was supposed to land and take several people home to New Zealand. But without knowing where the sky stops and the ground begins, the pilots have no idea where to land. So our friends are stuck here at Scott Base until Monday. And hopefully they will be able to land then, because my flight home is the next day, on Tuesday. Fingers crossed the storm has passed by then.

Measuring Space with Time

Antarctica presents us with some unique and not so unique challenges. Perhaps not one of the most obvious ones being the incomprehensibility of the space it occupies and places you in. I can only imagine that being in outerspace and out in the middle of the ocean would be similar. But perhaps they are not because here, in Antarctica, you can stand, not on the ground, but several thousand metres above it on top of the frozen water that is there. Scott Base is on solid ground, but take a step out onto the sea ice or ice shelf and you can feel the ground dropping away from you until it is but a thin rope that tethers you to reality, to a time and place that are comprehensible in human terms.

My favorite view aroun Scott Base is South East, out over the Ross Ice Shelf. To me it epitomizes Antarctica. It is flat and seemingly empty of everything, including time. Yesterday, when we visited the Long Distance Balloon programme out on the Ice Shelf we were pointed towards a tiny wooden crate. This, it was stated, was all that we could see of the 30 foot high building below. Over a period of 16 years, the snow and ice had built up around it and slowly swallowed it. So you see, an empty expanse is never truly empty, it has only swallowed up the tiny markers and comforts we try to place on top of it. Somewhere, below the surface of the ice lie a thousand reminders of our presence here, we are simply blind to their stories because we can only skim the surface with our eyes. We are reminded that for all our time here, we are insignificant in comparison.

While the space around us is vast and seemingly endless, it is time that is truly immeasurable. It is swallowed whole by the space we attempt to mark - to show progress, for personal satisfaction, and for the pure comfort of knowing someone has come before.