Darkness

 Twilight was officially over on May 13, and even though it had been dark outside for some weeks, there was still this slight glimmer, more of thought than reality, that the endless night hadn’t quite set in.  But now the darkness is fully upon us, in more ways than we knew.

We’ve all experienced night, but night here is different, almost primal in its’ extremes.  Outdoors is either hauntingly peaceful or actively hostile.  There’s really nothing in between.  It’s as if the continent wants to lull you into complacency before killing you in the most ruthless and unmerciful way.  If the sky is clear and the wind is calm, even the smallest sliver of moonlight reflects off the snow and penetrates the shadows such that one can gaze out across the polar plateau with wonder at its’ endless expanse and utter barrenness; as Buzz Aldrin said about the moon, it’s a landscape of “magnificent desolation.”  It’s a meditative space, almost spiritual.  You feel driven to go outside, to simply walk and be within it, not headed anywhere in particular, infinitely alone and yet one with the world.  You feel small and insignificant, yet the focus of every conscious thought for an infinite distance.  The silence causes your thoughts to turn inwards, and the exertion makes you focus on your breath, your heartbeat, your body losing itself in the forward motion.  With the sense of sight neutralized by the unchanging terrain, your other senses take over.  You become more aware of the sounds of your body in motion and the slight crunch of your boots as the break the thin layer of crust covering deeper layers of ice; the absence of scents is felt as a fresh, clean aroma.  The sense of touch becomes focused on small areas of your body, those isolated places where the skin is exposed to the cold; and in your feet where with every step, there is an initial involuntary moment of testing the strength of the ice crust before firmly planting yourself as you move to the next stride.  Even the random misstep when you cannot see the contours of the land and you unexpectedly stumble becomes routine, and you can feel your body adapt, tensing just a bit with each step in anticipation of what the next step might bring.  In the dark, anxious, fitful, not knowing what lurks just beyond your hand, you viscerally understand why the Australopithecus was afraid of the dark, and why the use of fire was such a big deal.  We haven’t evolved much beyond that.  We use our cellphones to light up the dark. 

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On these calm days, the aurora australis, also known as the Southern Lights, is the celestial attraction.  I have mentioned in a prior post that the one certain thing that brings together our diverse crew together are the views outside, whether of sun dogs or the last bit of daylight as our star dips below the horizon.  During these last few weeks of twilight and the first days of night, auroras are our catalyst for unity.   When words spreads that auroras are particularly prominent, the mad rush to the observation deck resembles a parade of cattle through the streets of Abilene.

The southern equivalent to the Northern Lights, the aurora australis results from the interaction of the solar wind and charged particles in the magnetospheric plasma.  Since I have no idea what that means, I asked a quartet of friends, all of whom are actual card-carrying scientists, to explain this in normal human terms. Here is the synopsis of all what I think I understand, in the combined voice of four of the most learned people I know downgraded to my level:

“The sun sends off charged particles like electrons and protons towards the earth.   The charged particles are what we call the solar wind.  When they hit an atom in our atmosphere, the energy imparted to that atom by the collision raises the atom to an excited state.  Atoms don’t like to stay in an excited state.  They’re lazy, like a ball that rolls downhill rather than resist gravity or most people you know.  (I had no idea I was part of the analogy.)  So when the try to chill out in a lower state of energy, they give off photons which we see as light.  The color we see depends upon the frequency of the light waves emitted from the atom.  Different frequencies produce the different colors that we see.”

“How exactly do you excite an atom?  Is it some kind of internet site?  “Hot atoms.com?”

“I have to go now.”

So as I best I understand there are fusion pixies in the sun that shoot protons at the earth and cause the sky to shine in sparkly colors. 

One of the more interesting things about the Southern Lights is that what you see with your eye is not what you see with the camera.  With the naked eye, the aurora appears as gray-white wispy clouds scattered in the sky. The pattern in different than you might see at home; instead of puffs or white or thick alters that stretch across the sky, the gossamer-thin veils seem to form swirls, arcs, and strange angles, often resembling a horn of confetti, narrow at one end and splayed out across the heavens at the other.  They are also ever-changing, but not in a flow or process.  It’s almost like looking at snapshots in time.  You look up and see a pattern; drop your gaze for a few moments, and when you look up again you’re greeted with a new scheme.  But if you keep your eye constantly on the sky, you still can’t see the change occur.  One wisp doesn’t float into another, nothing seems to move, but somehow it just does.  It’s like eating a gummy bear loaded with THC; you remember isolated points in your evening, but you can’t recall what happens in between.  So I’ve been told.  It’s only when you take photo, and your camera adjusts the exposure time to account for the darkness of the night time sky, that the aurora emerges from the ink and is revealed in its’ full chromatic glory.  Therese are the pictures you send home to friends and family, leading them to believe this is what you actually see. 

(Photography is made difficult because of the cold.  Cold drains batteries like nobody’s business, and it’s a real problem if you’re trying to take a timelapse photo to catch the stars as they wheel around the bottom of the earth or the dance of the aurora as it changes shape and hue.  I just try to get by with my cellphone, but the camera fanatics here have designed a number of boxes to keep their camera warm.  Most are made of think cardboard stuffed with Styrofoam , into which goes the camera and a number of small packets of chemical hand and foot warmers.  The ingenuity of my fellow Polies never ceases to astonish me, as I have no head for mechanics nor construction.  But I can’t help reflecting that once upon a time cameras didn’t have batteries, and all you had to do was point, shoot, and crank.  It worked for Amundsen and Scott.  Analog for the win.)

While the auroras are undoubtedly a magnificent sight, I find myself more captivated by the stars.  The utter darkness and the absence of other light means that when the weather’s clear, the dome of stars is overwhelming; even more so when you recognize that what we see is not what is, but what was, and we have no idea what the sky actually looks like in real time.  The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, a bit over four light-years away.  That means the light reaching us reflects what that star looked like 4 years ago.  Sirius, the brightest star in our sky, is 8.3 light years; Polaris (the “North Star”) is 433 light years distant.  Deneb, one of the farthest named stars we can see with the naked eye, is about 2,500 light years away; with a telescope, we can see stars up to 9 billion light-years distant.  Let that marinate for a moment. It’s as if we have a faded Polaroid snapshot of a star from 9 billion years ago, before the earth had even formed.  What’s happened since then?  What’s it look like now?  We haven’t a clue.

(Our sun plays by the same rules.  At 93 million miles from our shores, it takes just over eight minutes for the light from our stellar furnace to reach our eyes.  So if the sun blows up, we’ve got a little less than two playings of Bohemian Rhapsody before we find out about it; and as I time out the song, that’ll be right about when we hear “Galileo!”, which seems the most appropriate refrain ever.)

I used to know more about the constellations back in Boy Scouts; today, I can still find the Big Dipper and follow the pointer stars to Polaris.  I can readily spot Orion’s Belt and then trace out the rest of the celestial hunter, but most of the rest is lost to me in a jumble of light.  Here, I’ve found a touchstone in the Southern Cross, and I’ve kind of become obsessed with it.  I’m not sure why.  It seems to have become the center of my world, and I don’t feel right unless I stick my head outside to try to find it, even on the worst days when I know it’s impossible.  It seems to help me establish my place when I have no other reference, dark and invisible outside, contained indoors in an unchanging cage.

The smallest of the official constellations, the Southern Cross (“Crux”) can be hard to find.  There’s a celestial pattern known as an asterism, which is when stars form a particular pattern in the sky.  There are a number of asterisms in the austral sky where stars appear to align in a square or a cross It’s easy to get fooled by them; the first time I looked for the Cross without a star chart I got it well and truly wrong.   But once you find the True Cross, it’s unmistakable.  Four of the brightest stars in the southern sky (and three of the 25 brightest in the entire heavenly dome) are arranged to form a kite, with the long axis pointing to the Celestial South Pole.  Two other bright stars, Alpha and Beta Centauri, form pointers leading directly to the Cross.  Using the Cross and the pointers as landmarks, I’m able to find other constellations as well; Scorpio seems to be a constant companion.  And while auroras occur in our atmosphere, they don’t block out the stars, and the mix of the intense points of stellar light set against the soft green haze framed by the sheer blackness of space is an intoxicating sight. 

(The book I found on station that’s the most helpful in viewing the sky is “The Stars:  A New Way to See Them” by H. A Rey.  Does that name sound familiar?  He’s also the man behind Curious George.  And Alpha Centauri is where the Jupiter 2 was headed before its journey was disrupted by one Dr. Zachary Smith.  Danger, Will Robinson!)

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The stars, auroras, and the sense of wonder and oneness come with the good days.  Bad days unleash the most basic of fears.

A bad day at the pole is not cold.  Over time, I’ve learned that cold can be managed.  Wear enough layers, use your Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear, walk at a slow pace, make sure you’re well hydrated (and carbohydrated), and even temperatures as low as -80 are not only tolerable, but you often find yourself wet with sweat after even mild exertion.  This doesn’t mean you become immune or indifferent to the chill; even a minute or two outdoors in street clothes and you can feel the impending frostbite.  But it does seem contradictory to be outside when the temperature approaches negative triple digits, and yet knowing in some ways you’ll feel cooler once you get inside and tear off your hat, balaclava, and Big Red Jacket.

What makes a day bad is the wind.  Physiologically, the wind increases heat loss and makes you more prone to frostbite and hypothermia.  But from a practical standpoint, the wind makes everything disappear.  Wind blows ice and snow everywhere, and whatever visibility you had at night with clear skies and moonlight shrinks to nothing.  The only way to navigate between the buildings on station is through the use of flag lines.  You exit the station, point yourself in the direction of where you’re going, and try to find the first few flags.  The maelstrom of ice and snow, plus the darkness, only add to the problems; the difficulty is complicated by the fact that outdoors we can only use red lights for illumination as white light interferes with some aurora experiments on the station’s roof.  But while you may not be able to see ahead of you at ground level, on a windy day the skies themselves may be clear.  So you can look up, but not ahead.

I don’t know if I can really describe how frightening it is outside when it’s fully dark and the wind is up.  On less blustery days, you can navigate by the red lights that mark individual buildings; if you know where they are in relation to each other you can sight your way to the right place.  But on windy days you can’t see the lights, so getting about is an exercise is dead reckoning.  You come out of the station, make a guess as to the direction you need to go, and look desperately for a flag line.  Assuming you found the correct line, you look for the next flag every ten yards, walking marker to marker without any sense of time or distance until you (hopefully) hit your destination, which doesn’t appear in the distance and slowly grow in size, but instead suddenly lurches out at you from the gloom.  This sounds straightforward, but even if you can see the flags there are lots of flags for lots of things, and not every flag leads somewhere.  Flags are used to mark dangerous spots in the ice, access to structures under the ice, and the location of scientific gear.  While some of the flags have different colors, under the red light it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference.

Once the storm passes, and the wind is calm, you itch to get outside again.  But after several days of blowing snow and ice, the landscape is changed.  Walks which were easy on the compacted ice pack, on groomed paths or following well-trod trails of footprints, are now a physical challenge.  The wind causes erosion of the terrain into formations called sastrugi, which looks like waves of snow and ice that are fixed in place.  They tend to be irregular, higher on the side towards the wind, and are often undercut so one end appears as a small promontory with a tapered end.  The sastrugi from peaks and valleys, often not more than a foot or so in height, but in the shadows it’s difficult to read the terrain and even when you’re sure of where you put your feet, you don’t know how solid the surface might be.  You might continue to move across the crust; often you plunge into drifts, and every step becomes a minor Labor of Hercules.

Disorientation happens.  We try to be safety-conscious with the weather, and some days you just don’t go outside no matter what.  You always have your radio with you if you need to call for help.  But most days folks still need to be outdoors, whether to work outside or in transit to a laboratory or other outbuilding.  Even on a good day, hazards await.  One of my colleagues lost a flagline, tried to navigate by the red lights on the buildings, and wound up at an outbuilding about a kilometer from his destination.  I’m not immune to these problems.  On one of my first excursions outdoors in the dark, headed about 300 years away to the Geographic Pole with only a mild breeze, I got fully turned around and only found my way by continually looking backwards at the shadow of the station and comparing it with where I saw lights that I knew would take me down a 40 foot snowdrift to the below-ground entrance to where the heavy vehicles are kept.  I’ve also been headed towards the satellite domes with a friend on a day with less visibility when we lost the flag line, and simply kept walking in what we thought was the right direction until we hit something we knew.  Even when there’s a flag line it cans still get confusing.  A few days ago I came out of the Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO) and, not realizing there were two flag lines emanating from the same doorway, I took the wrong one and wound up not at the Station, but at a radio installation about a half mile away.  When this happens, and especially when you’re with someone else, bravado is the name of the game.  Of course you know where you’re at, and if only whoever set out the flags did it right the first time this wouldn’t be a problem.  But inside?  You’re terrified that you’ll never see home again.

(Why don’t we use GPS to find our way in the dark?  GPS works through a network of geosynchronous satellites that stay in the same spot over the equator of the planet, their orbital speed matching that of the earth’s rotation.  There are no geosynchronous satellites that cove the Pole; the speed of rotation of the Pole is essentially zero, as no satellite can stay in orbit at a speed of zero; gravity would pull it form the sky if not in motion.  We can access communication satellites for several hours daily not because the skybird is in a polar orbit and flies over us; rather, it’s orbit has it “peek” above the horizon for a few hours so we can use it’s’ services.)

I’m trying to get better with going outside.  I’ve gotten back to being able to do my usual walk to the Ceremonial and Geographic Poles, with a loop around the Station for exercise, without much problem.  If I know someone’s going to another site and the timing works, I’ll ask to tag along.  But it still feels strange and dangerous and just a bit exhilarating, like toddler just learning to walk.

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Inside the Station, night is recognized not by looking out the window, but by not looking out the window.  During the summer, all our windows were open, and we were continually bathed in sunlight.  You might need to put a shade over your window to sleep, but when looking outside you always knew where you were.  With the onset of night, the Station locks down with light discipline to prevent white light from interfering with different experiments.  So now every window is covered, and there’s no outside reference to light, dark, or anything in between.  We know it’s night because we’re not allowed to look outside.

There’s also an emotional darkness creeping into our home.  Last Saturday there was a poker game down in the Library.  In the beginning the game was played strictly for chips, no real money, so I sat in for a few hands.  I’m a bad poker player…twice I folded before the next card would have given me a straight, and I went all in on a bluff (because who wouldn’t believe the doctor?), so I lost my stake in fairly short order and went off to bed.  A couple of hours later things got interesting.  People began to open up and talk about their feelings towards themselves and others.  What started as a positive way to express emotions…the person holding the poker chip held the floor, and then passed it on to the next…apparently turned angry.

My introduction to all this was a radio call at 8 AM the next morning.  One of my colleagues wanted the Physician Assistant and I to know what had happened.  Was every accusation and complaint valid or merely perceived?  No idea.  Does the difference between intent and perception matter anymore? Probably not.  Should it?  That’s too far above my pay grade.

On one hand, I was friends with the parties involved; on the other, I have to maintain objectivity as the Station Physician, to be open and supportive to all.  I’m not a mental health counselor by trade or by training, and while I’m comfortable with the brief ED approach to psychiatric issues…listen a while, maybe medicate, always refer…prolonged counseling, or just sitting patiently with someone as they pull within themselves, is not my forte. So I struggle with this new way of care, occasionally offering advice if asked, but mostly learning to be quiet. 

The entire process has been nothing but sad, and I can’t do anything to fix it.  In the real world of the ED, I can usually do something to resolve a problem (at least in part), be it making a diagnosis, prescribing medication, sending a referral, or most often just providing reassurance.  While I understand there’s value in simply being available to listen, it doesn’t come naturally to me and it’s not what I’ve done professionally for over thirty years.  None of my life skills do anything to forward an issue that’s totally out of my hands. 

I remembered that I’ve also had those moments that thought would crush me.  Relationships gone bad, let go from jobs I loved.  Trying to discern if it was my fault of someone else’s proved a fruitless effort, because the result was the same. But you learn and grow, and with any luck you come out of it in a better state.  Of course, you don’t see it at the time; but with years on the planet, you realize that every day is a chance to reinvent yourself, and that most people really want you to do well, even if the only reason is that it’s easier to not waste energy being mad at you.  I want the outcome of this incident to be a growth experience for everyone concerned and not an impediment to anyone’s future success.  But in this sensitive environment, who knows? 

Since this event last week, it seems to me that the whole station seems to be under more tension, that the separation of our group into smaller units I noted before has exacerbated.  Nothing is anonymous here; everyone knows a little (although no one knows everything) and is choosing up sides.  Factions seem to have formed around the problem, and prior friendships have been disrupted or lay in stasis until the process plays itself out.  I have every confidence that the ship will right itself, but it's a long six months to go.

In the end, I’m learning from this as well.  I question how the situation got out of hand if the behavior was going on for so long; maybe this is my first collision with the “culture of silence,” and I ask myself how to fix it.  I have a gnawing suspicion that I saw it all along but dismissed it, as someone who is somewhat inured to such language and behavior from years in the Emergency Department (when greeted by such salutations, an appropriate response is, “That’s DOCTOR Motherfucker to you”).  Could I have intervened sooner and prevented the problem?  The worst thing you can say to an ED physician is “Remember that patient you saw last night,” because what follows is never good and it starts you down the rabbit hole of wondering what you could have done better.  The last week I’ve been wallowing in the ground with Bugs, Peter, and Oswald, but without any of the wisecracks, little blue sweaters, or luck.

I would like to say I stand outside the cold and dark in some sort of halo of bliss, but I’m feeling it, too.  There’s a growing sense of confinement, and while I don’t know that I’m quite “stir crazy,” I definitely would like to see something else besides the same interior walls.   Many days the option to go outside and simply walk is taken away; weather often makes that a foolhardy plan.  As I write this, the weather today is overcast at -59 F with a 30 MPH wind.  I opened the door to the Observation Deck and saw nothing but darkness, felt nothing but wind.  No moon or stars to make you feel connected, the snow not even visible ten feet below.  Boredom is still preferable to oblivion.

My internal countdown to the day I go home has begun as well.  It’s not that I’m unhappy here…people are great, food is good, there’s plenty to do, and I have my projects (like this blog) to keep me busy.  But much of the allure, the initial rush of all that’s new and different, has worn off, and I have a feeling that I’ve seen most all of what there is to see.  The novelty of being at the South Pole is fast becoming a memory, and now the South Pole is simply where I am, not a place to be.  My thoughts have already turned to my first hours in Christchurch as I stop over on the way home….a full waking day reading books in a hot bathtub with a continual parade of room service grilled cheese and roast beef sandwiches on bread that’s not dry and crumbly, fresh squeezed orange juice, and real milk.

I’m also acutely aware of what I won’t see during a year in Antarctica.  The Pole is 800 miles inland from the nearest coastline, no matter how powerful the binoculars I won’t see any wildlife or an ice shelf from the polar plateau.  I’m constantly struck by the irony that aside from setting foot at the Pole, I could probably experience more of what people expect from Antarctica on a two week cruise than living here for a year.  I’ve seen more glaciers in Iceland, more pinnipeds at Sea World, and more penguins at the Dakota Zoo than I’ll encounter during my year on the ice.

I don’t think it’s just me who’s starting to feel different.  I have mentioned before that a friend who was here for a previous austral night says there’s a predictable pattern to the over-winter crowd.  After the station closes, everyone bands together, but gradually the group splits into increasingly smaller cliques until each person retreats into themselves before re-emerging with the sunrise in September.  I think that process is starting now.  I’m seeing the same places, but less of the faces.  Fewer people show up at meals and social events, the events themselves are getting more numerous and thus more fragmented; the crew is adapting to meet their own needs, and no longer to align with the group.  There are now a whole set of night shifters (“midrats”), sometimes related to work…it’s often easier to get repairs and maintenance done in the middle of the night…but much of it seems to be by choice, as a way of finding personal distance in such close quarters.

We’re all starting the retreat into our smaller groups, and soon we’ll be nested in ourselves.  And I suspect that as we pull our thoughts inwards, we’ll manifest more who we really are, sometimes for the best, sometimes not.  But the one thing that I think still unties us is the uniqueness of where we are, and the way that family and friends tend to see us as lost souls, adrift on the Island of Misfit Toys.

It’s not that the adventure is over, but I’m beginning to see it in a different light.   Being and doing at the South Pole is not the adventure I was looking for.  The real adventure is simply that I’m here at all.  In the midst of this barren wasteland, hostile to everything we know, with no resources and nothing on hand, an entire complex has been built over 60 years so I can sit here in shirtsleeves and use a satellite to call home when it’s -60 F outside.  If the real adventure are those flashes of recognition and wonder at the improbability of it all, how much more so the unrealized adventure that always was at home…the moment of awe, of inspiration, of laughter, of peace, harmony, or ecstasy, the brief flash of overwhelming love there for the taking every day if you can only grasp it and hold on.  The adventure is everywhere, and I know now that I didn’t need to come to the bottom of the world and take a year of my life to find it.  The joy in simply just being alive, and knowing that every moment is an experience unlike any other in time, is the real lesson of the South Pole.