Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah

 Dear Mom and Dad:

Greetings from Summer Camp.  I mean Winter Camp.  I mean Day Camp, because the whole year is just one single day.  Anyway, my cabin counselor said we all had to write to our parents tonight. 

How are you?  I am fine.

I would like to say that I’m spending my time engaged in serious clinical work in support of the National Science Foundation’s mission in Antarctica.  However, since you’ve been my folks for lo these sixty years, you would know that my attention span, while good when needed, drifts elsewhere at the first opportunity to do so.  As does this letter.

It may surprise you to learn that not everything we do at the Pole is in pursuit of knowledge and learning.  There’s plenty of down time, and one can only contemplate time, geography, climate, the cosmos, and how to work the World’s Oldest Betamax Machine so much before your mind longs to do something less taxing.  The small numbers of us here over the winter means that some of that time is taken up in housekeeping tasks.  Once a week, we all participate in “House Mouse,” divided into teams to keep the place clean and tidy.  During the summer, here’s a full staff of House Stewards (“Stewies”) who do the cleaning up, and your community cleaning is limited to doing the bathrooms in your berthing pod once a week.  In winter, however, most of the Stewies have gone home, and so we all have to help keep the public areas clean.  This season we’ve been split into eleven teams, with each assigned a task for the week, which is usually done sometime Monday afternoon to help clean up from the weekend.  Tasks vary and include cleaning bathrooms, mopping floors, emptying trash bags, restocking consumables, and shoveling snow away from the exits.  The only things notable to report from these activities is that I now understand how those toilet paper dispensers that have two stacked rolls work, and that even when it’s in support of high-level science I still despise mopping and vacuuming, in that order.  In the category of Ongoing Polar Adventure, I can also say that House Mouse has led me inside a women’s restroom for the first time in years, and I would say that the fairer sex has a lot better aim than my DNA fellows, and it seems a much more restful place than the men’s room, as everyone gets to sit and relax rather than stand and publically exert yourself for all to see.

(The last time I was in a women’s restroom was several years ago in the Atlanta Airport.  It’s two AM, I’m waiting to board a flight to Tulsa after being rerouted from Springfield, Missouri, and when I get to Oklahoma I still have to rent a car and drive three hours to my original destination.  I’m exhausted, the concourse is deserted, and I’m simply not paying attention.  So I go into the women’s restroom, and I don’t notice anything different until I’m washing my hands and in  in the mirror I notice that behind me, everything is pink and it’s a No Standing Zone.  Another woman emerges and begins to wash next to me, but doesn’t seem to pay me any mind.  Perhaps she thought I was wrestling with gender issues but was too gracious to comment.  In any event I was certainly not going to start a conversation, because I’ve never felt the restroom was a place to build lasting relationships.  I don’t really care about your gender identification or which bathroom you use as long as you follow the rule, “It’s not meet and greet.  It’s sit and excrete.”  But you can bet that as soon as I got out of there, as a self-confident middle-aged man I went and hid in a corner four gates down hoping no one would see me ever again.

Speaking of interesting restroom tales, it seems the stalls in the men’s room in my berthing unit are positioned just right so you can see who’s coming into the bathroom through the slots on the door.  So it’s pretty unnerving to walk in and hear a disembodied voice say, “Hi, Doc!” accompanied by the aromas and noises you might expect.  I long for my own bathroom in my own house, where the dogs watch me with fascination, but at least they don’t comment or critique.)

The secret to House Mouse is that in every team there are at least two go-getters who start early.  So if you show up on time, most everything is already done, but you aren’t considered a slacker because you were there ON TIME.  Not that I would know anything about this.  It’s just what I’ve heard.

The housekeeping tasks that’s yours alone is the Dish Pit.  Galley staff handles the breakfast and lunch dishes on weekdays, but each night for dinner and all day Saturday there’s a roster for dishwashing duty.  (Sunday the galley is closed to give them a day off, so we scrounge through leftovers or heat up plates we’ve set aside earlier in the week, and we’re expected to clean up after ourselves.  Everyone has sort of adopted a particular piece of dishware or cutlery that’s been here forever; mine is a dog bowl festooned with colorful paws left behind eons ago.)  I don’t mind the Dish Pit at all.  The Dental Empress and I have opposite feelings about doing the dishes.  Growing up, she and her sister had to do the dishes by hand, so she has a natural antipathy towards the process.  At home, she’ll take the dishes and simply toss them in the appliance, with no regard for distribution or if the forks and knives point up, trusting in the machine to scrub things clean and if you get stabbed by an errant piece of cutlery, well, that’s on you.  On the other hand, I grew up using a dishwasher and was instructed to scrub the dishes before you arrange them in a space-saving, safety-focused pattern.  We agree to disagree, but I’m clearly better at it.

I like doing dishes, because in a world of uncertainty and variance dishwashing represents tangible progress.  I’m not waiting for a policy, or an approval, or anyone’s input or advice.  They’re dirty, now they’re clean.  The dried marinara sauce is gone with a quick swipe of the sponge and a rinse from the tap.  No matter how hard you scrub them, how hot or cold the water, how close they’re packed to their neighbor, the dishes don’t complain.  If people worked that way, it would be the ideal Emergency Room.

So I genuinely look forward to my day in the Dish Pit, so much so that I even took some shifts for one of our lot who doesn’t really like the socializing that happens when people drop off used goods at the window.  I wear a USAP baseball cap and a pair of scrubs so I don’t get water and suds on my better clothes. You can wear whatever you chose to work the Dish Pit, as long as you wear gloves and a hat.  One of my friends was in full pirate costume, with sea shantys blaring out from his phone and a Jolly Roger draped over the dish return window.  I’m not that creative, but I did have someone think that I was wearing scrubs because I was scrubbing the dishes.  Alas, I was not so swift to figure that out in advance. 

There's an entire process to working the Dish Pit.  You put on thick rubber gloves, then fill three sinks in turn.  The first contains hot water and soap (wash), the next just hot water (rinse), and the final sink holds cold water and sterilizing solution.  These are used mostly for items from the kitchen, and each pot or pan in turn is washed, rinsed, and sanitized before being placed back into the galley supply.  Usually I do an initial rinse of the pots and pans with a handheld hot water sprayer, which is great fun because you’ve essentially been given a giant Super Soaker water gun and a license to use it, but it also gets everywhere like when you’re playing outside with your dog and the lawn sprinklers go off but without the wet dog smell on your couch for the next week. I’m loving it.

The real fun comes when working with the Hobart Machine.  The Hobart is simply a big metallic box that washes dishes, but does so with such elan that it’s a pure joy to use.  You take a tray of dishes or glasses or silverware, slide it on one side of the machine, and close the box using  a large metal handle on a hinge.  As soon as the box closes, it hisses like a nest of snakes, then makes a chugging noise like a diesel engine trying to catch it’s first breath, and you feel, rather than hear or see, some steam building inside.  It spends a minute or so moving in place in what can only be called seizure-like activity, and then the first set of sounds stop and is replaced by the trickle of draining water and you note the red LED temperature gauge, which was previously glowing quietly and minding it’s own business, rockets into the triple digits. At a certain point, never quite predictable, the apparatus goes silent, and when you press down on the lever again and open the box there lie your dishes and glassware and silverware, clean, dry, and hot.  I have no idea what goes on in there when the box is closed, but the entire event is like pulling the lever on a slot machine in Vegas and wondering what’s happening as the wheels turn, but this time you know you’ll always get a return. 

(With the exception of special occasions like the Sunset Dinner, all our plates and cups are made of plastic.  Rumor has it that some years ago, actual dishware was broken on someone’s head in a fit of mid-winter madness.  It’s probably just a story.  Probably.)

Another job we share is Power Plant Watch.  We have three power plant engineers, who take an 8-hour shift each day.  They need some time off, so on two-day weekends we rotate watching the power plant.  Essentially, what you do is go down the Beer Can steps (the unheated cylinder at the end of the station containing a staircase and cargo elevator) and through the ice tunnel to the Power Plant, where you engage in a scavenger hunt looking for specific dials and gauges and switches and lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) and noting any abnormal readings.  If something seems out of line, you call the Power Plant Guys, who presumably would come down and fix whatever it is, because there’s no way you’re going to randomly stick a screwdriver into an electrical generator just to see what happens, and if there’s no power plant we freeze and die.

It is pretty fascinating to learn how the station works.  For example, all our heat is actually waste heat from the operation of the generators as they produce electricity to power the station.  (While the indoor temperature does cool off as winter comes…especially if you have a window in your room…it’s usually about 65 F or better indoors.)  There’s no furnace or heat pumps to keep us warm.  I was also interested to learn that our main draw for electrical power is not the station itself, but the South Pole Telescope located about a half mile from base.  While there are four generators in the power plant, we usually work off of only one at a time; and in the event that all the generators should fail or the Power Plant be destroyed, one of our berthing pods is equipped as a “lifeboat” with it’s own power system.  It’s good to know this, because it corresponds with my NASA Redundancy Theory of Children.  When I worked with NASA providing medical support to the Space Shuttle Program, someone told me that there were five computers on board the Shuttle, and for anything to happen at least three had to agree in case some of the other data was in error.  Somehow I extrapolated that to mean that it would be best to have three children, because that way if one is broken you still have two to continue the family lineage.  Mom, Dad, you had three kids, right?  Is one of us broken?  You know, maybe the one who decided to start his seventh decade on the planet at the SOUTH FREAKING POLE?

(Oh, maybe the winter darkness thing is kicking in.  The sun’s been down for about ten days.  Better hide the good dishes.)

Every now and then I do actual medical things, but Eric the Physician Assistant is shaming me with his work ethic.  Unlike me, who can enjoy inactivity for it’s own sake and feels no shame in collecting a paycheck for minimal effort, he needs to stay busy and feel like he’s constantly earning his keep.  He’s helping with much of the outdoor work, winterizing the telescopes and get them ready for the long polar nights.  His latest clinical project is to organize the distribution of the “Happy Lights,” the portable ultraviolet lights we use in our rooms and workplaces to simulate periods of daylight to keep ourselves on some kind of circadian rhythm.  It turns out there’s a whole science behind this…it works best if you keep the light at an oblique angle to your face for 15-30 minutes between 7 and 10 AM.  He’s even arranged to have one of the vacant berthing rooms converted into a Tropical Suite, complete with carboard palm trees for mood.  Also, since we discovered that we have an endless supply of liquid nitrogen, PA Olsen’s Wart Clinic is in business.  I’m not sure how I feel about using our role as acute care providers to freeze off verruca, but I must admit that it’s pretty damn fun to take some segments of orange, freeze them in liquid gas, and then smash it with a hammer.

Meanwhile, the fitness craze continues.  The Muscle King is running his punishment Saturday Night Boot Camp (“When you’re body tells you to quit and it’s in pain, you just need to push harder,” which I think violates every medical tenet I know), Supply Guy is putting his charges through a 22-day abs cycle, and everyone continues their journey to McMurdo.  I’m out of action for the moment given my back and leg issues, but I was able to ramp up to an hour on the treadmill before I had to back off, just enough time to watch an episode of Space: 1999 and do a five minute cooldown as the credits roll.  My latest obsession is trying to figure out how many episodes the series could last given how fast they knock off crew members.  There are only 330 people on Moonbase Alpha, and they seem to lose at least two (and an Eagle spaceship) per show.  Unlike Star Trek, there’s no new Starfleet redshirt fodder to refill the roster.  So I would give them 165 shows at best, which is probably why they stopped at 48 episodes in the can.  And I think I have a fifty-year-too-late crush on Barbara Bain, especially in the episode where she turns into a cavewoman.  She’s Jewish, so Mom would like that. 

Our community social life is in full swing as well.  The weeknight clubs tend to have a limited lifespan, but new ones have taken their place.  Now there’s a group that plays Age of Empires 2 networked against each other on Monday nights.  This is a game I know well from past years, but it’s new to this generation.  I’ll watch and make pithy comments, and they think I’m a veteran gamer full of knowledge and experience.  But I won’t play, because even on easy mode I used to get my butt kicked, so why give away my good reputation?  I’ve also started my own Friday evening event.  Called Analog Game Night (I figured anything that wasn’t electronic was analog…that was wrong and a scientist corrected me, but I’m keeping the name anyway), we play easy card games, board games, and party games which only get more fun after a beverage or four.  Perhaps the fact that we play the night the alcohol rations are issued has something to do with this.  Current favorites include Exploding Kittens, Green Team Wins, and Tellustrations, a drawing version of the old telephone game.  I often can’t explain how an innocent phrase like “best friends” turns into a drawing I’m certain is against the USAP sexual harassment policy, but hey, it’s science.  (I’ve decided to use that phrase often to explain away things that otherwise defy comprehension.) 

Weekends usually feature a large party or event.  A couple of weeks ago it was Bingo Night, where the prizes included a gift certificate for a ten-minute shower and a five-pound bag of expired Lucky Charms; the weekend after featured a Polewatch party, complete with beach attire, a wading pool, inflatable palm trees, and eight lifeguards in red Baywatch one-pieces, but not always of the proper gender.  Drink selections (non-alcoholic only, in case the National Science Foundation is reading this) were poured over Genuine Unaltered Unfiltered South Pole Snow.  Who needs ice?  As for me, I spent the time wisely with my feet in the pool between games of cornhole.  (Did you know there are actually rules to cornhole?  Me, neither.  In fact, a bit of research found that there is an American Cornhole League with 16 professional teams, yet another example of how America leads the world in sports nobody else cares to play.  I think it’s a science thing.)

This past Saturday was Trivia Night, and I was finally in my element.  I’ve been into trivia contests since high school, when I was Captain of the Shawnee Mission East Categories Team that defeated all comers (well, at least the four other Shawnee Mission Schools) over the memorable 1979-80 season of Johnson County Kansas public access cable television.  The BGFE and I go to Trivia Nights at the Club Continental, and private dining and tennis club on the St. John’s River back home, and even with just the two of us as a team we often win because the club has mostly an older population so we have a monopoly on answering any question past 1990.  (To be fair, though, we lose when we play trivia on Cunard cruises, because even though we still play off the older competition they always ask a handful of British questions we have no way of knowing, like who won the FA cup in 1886, or who was Noddy’s best friend, or something like that.  On the other hand, when we close down a bar at midnight, we’re the only ones still awake on the whole damn boat and we feel like youthful rebels with an alcoholic cause.)  

I arrived somewhat late to the event, so most of the teams were already formed and I found myself to be an unwanted waif.  This turned out to be a good thing, because also arriving late was our baker, who I don’t get to see much anymore as she’s now working a galley night shift preparing for the next day’s needs (in the parlance of the Pole, night shift workers are “Midrats.”)  We've had some nice conversations over the past few weeks, most significantly about relationship bullets dodged, mine who grew pudgy with a mustache, hers with a plethora of back hair.  Because we were trivia orphans, we fell into a group with three other misfits.

We turned out to be a powerhouse team, and we swept the contest.  The categories fell in our wheelhouse, and between Baking Chick acing the two sets of 80's music questions (a category during which I was alive, and three-quarters of the contestants weren’t) and my clean sweep of ten state flags, we took the lead early and never lost pace.  I did get asked how I knew so many state flags, for which I have no real answer.  But I did explain that  when I learn things like flags, I forget other stuff because of space requirements, like how many chambers the heart has.  I think it’s between two and six.  Thank the Lord for Wikipedia.) 

It wasn’t all perfection.  For example, the study of time, which we thought was chronology, turns out to be horology, which sound smore like the science of compensated companionship.  There was also a question about the title of Einstein’s first paper on special relativity, which apparently was published in German.  We thought if anyone wrote anything in German, even the phrase “I want to go to McDonald’s,” nobody would understand it, and when the answer was read off in English we could say of course that’s what we wrote in German, and it’s not our fault if you can’t read it.  Alas, our German-speaking colleague exhibited some integrity and would not cheat his way to victory, which is problem I need to work on for the next outing.

(There was a trivia question about the current Muslim year…turns out it’s 1444…that nobody knew, but it did give me an opportunity to share the fact that as the Hebrew Year is 5783 and the Chinese Year is 4719, for over 1,000 years my people had no place to eat on Christmas Day.  Diversity and cultural exchange is what it’s all about.)

We named our team The Waffle House Gang after the first question (in what state was the first Waffle House opened?), but our name was a boring, last-second decision.  The best team name was “# Stop Asian Hate.”  This quintet is our version of the Spice Girls, each with their own self-appointed name…Quality Asian, Supreme Asian, Trash Asian, Sleepy Asian, and Technically Asian…along with Quality Asian’s boyfriend as a token Caucasoid.  Taking up the challenge, another team dubbed themselves “Beat Stop Asian Hate,” and fittingly wound up behind the sworn foes after Trash Asian ran a perfect score through the last round of music.

As noted, we kicked butt.  We awaited our prizes, but there were no gift certificates for ten-minute showers as we had just gotten a lecture the day before from the Facilities Guy about water use, and as I had just seen two patients this week with Lucky Charms-induced GI distress I did not inquire as to the availability of expired five-pound bags of cereal.  Still, glory stays with a man, and I limp just a bit more proudly today.

After the contest itself, our team expanded and we played a few rounds of Exploding Kittens accompanied by some adult beverages.  These in turn prompted a number of particularly intellectual discussions about things like how one does a “Superman” with a subject of horology, how a Waffle Stomp differs from a Waffle House, and other things that one doesn’t learn at MIT but does at UC-Santa Barbara, none of which I can tell you because you’re my parents and because there’s a National Science Foundation policy about these things.  Maybe when I get home I’ll tell my cousins.  It’ll make great Thanksgiving conversation.       

In Dungeons and Dragons news, our party had gained a small reward by killing off a bunch of goblins.  Goblins are generally vile but harmless creatures who call out to each other in a high-pitched jibberish that sounds like a Stop the Steal Rally.  They really don’t know any better….very few have graduate degrees…so I felt bad for the one who was used as a Guinea Goblin for the purposes of finding out if a sack we found was a bag of Holding (good) or a Bag of Devouring (ick).  Let’s just say there’s now one less goblin in our midst around to hold.  Slump the half-orc also decided to turn another goblin’s ear into a chewie, the same way my dogs do at home.  Slump also held Tally the Paladin in a most passionate adult embrace during her hour of sadness (“I don’t know I would feel this bad when I killed someone!” she exclaimed after first announcing her intention to bash skulls), but Tally said she felt nothing in his...ummm…arms.  The person playing Slump is a PhD candidate at MIT, which I’m certain means something but I’m not sure what.

After trekking to a new city in search of adventure and a three-nippled man who might be the father of Slump and a Pirate of dubious origins, the group split up with our thief and sorcerer seeking out magical tomes, my cleric and the Turtle of St. Cuthbert (previously referred to as the Reptilian Scalliwag with the Three-Chambered Heart) sharing a philosophical discussion about how much charity do the poor really need, and would I give the poor some money if I found any?  (Any poor, that is.)  Meanwhile, Slump and the Pirate wound up at a House of Ill Repute in their continued search for the three-nippled man.  While the Pirate was content to mind his own business, Slump felt it necessary to sample the wares.  He rolled a 3 for performance, which left him immensely satisfied and his lady host wondering what had just happened.  Our sorcerer, a late arrival to the brothel, rolled a natural 20 and not only spent the night, but was given his money back and asked for his phone number.  The actual player is an engineer, so he probably knows how that works.  At the current moment, we’ve descended into a pit and fought a fire demon, and the damn hungover turtle punched the eyeball of a Spectator and killed it so next week we have to face it’s Big Daddy Beholder.  Someone’s gonna die, and stupid turtles not only live forever but have 4+ shell armor.  Stay tuned. 

Passover starts this week, so I’ll be donating to the galley the ten boxes of matzah ball soup mix I had sent down here in advance.  It just so happens the first night of the holiday brisket was on the menu.  BBQ, not with Lipton Onion Soup, but close enough.  And they serve a lot of rice here, so the Annual Ashkenazi-Sephardic Switch will be on for the next week as well. 

Miss you, and see you for Thanksgiving.

Love,

Your Son,

Howard Rodenberg

(PS:  I don’t sign my letters with “The Good Son” anymore because you kept saying you have two good sons.  But you always knew which one it was when I wrote it, didn’t you?)