Nomads, Freebooters, Rebels, and Rejects

6 Oct 2019

After a storm that lasted for four days, the vast expanse of ice is once more visible northward up the sound past Asgard, across the 60 odd miles to Mount Discovery and Mount Morning to the west, and to Mount Aurora southward on Black Island beyond the thin ribbon of the distant airfield.  The sunsets after these storms are arresting.  We call them "Herbies", those kind of storms that build hundreds of miles south, where the winds murmur, and stir, and dance their dances to the edge of the mountains of madness and join under the white banners of katabatic chieftains who lead them as a horde roaring and screaming northward.  They assault Minna Bluff with Mongol savagery.  Did they care for our modern entertainments, brief and ephemeral by their ancient reconing of time, old before man ever set foot upon this southern shore, they would laugh at us who say "winter is coming" from the comfort of our modern lives.  These winds are The Winter, and have been beyond human history.

The peak wind down on Black Island from that storm, came through the pass at 94knots...over a

hundred miles an hour.  The Winter horde was somewhat more merciful by the time it reached us here in this frontier town.  We only reached about 60knots.  The Ice People, for the most part, know not nor care about the details, for they live by a simpler rubric.  There are special light poles around station with three amber lights and three red lights.  When the lights are off, normal operations proceed... Condition 3.  A little worse than that, Condition 2, is marked by the amber lights.  Few need the lights to know.  Condition 1 is the miserable condition marked by the red lights.  It is an ironic jest, for in condition 1, a whiteout, the red lights are rarely visible.

Condition 3 a deceptively broad category however, as that can be anything warmer than 110 degrees F below freezing, with wind below 48 knots, and visibility greater than 400 meters, or a little better than a football field length.  In Condition 3, it is still possible to get frostbite in mere minutes, or hypothermia in little more than that.





Condition 2 is more severe, requiring cold as low as -100 degrees F, wind at highway driving speed, and any visibility above 100 feet.  Operations beyond station or the airfield are suspended, and this is the kind of Brütal Köld with an umlaut.  Only the very hungry or very thirsty go to the galley or the bar during Condition 2.  Those on the airfield rarely risk even going to the porta-potty then. 

Condition 1 is the full wrath of winter, chewing through even the smallest gaps in Big Red to suck heat like marrow from long bones.  There is no malice in that Winter... the horde cares not one way or another what stands in it's way.  But that careless disregard is just as fierce as malice nonetheless.  It moves faster than 60 miles an hour, is colder than -100 degrees, and visibility is less than 100 feet.  In reality, it is often less.  

We in weather have that peculiar madness that compels us to look toward that Winter host and it's snowy wake rather than to look away.  Some of us want to touch it, the way that we seek to chase the monsters in funnel clouds or the titans that ride the cusp of the hurricane.  It is for me a mad sort of beauty that is perhaps the rawest face of this continent.  It is like standing on the shores of Japan looking into the tides of a typhoon, or on the mountains during an earthquake.


The dizzying distance out off the rock and onto the sea ice, less than two feet thick now, is like that.  It makes all our vanities small, out upon the sea ice in the mind-bending expanses, in in the smallness the comfort of being not only noticed but loved by God big enough to make it all.  I like to fancy that perhaps one day, beyond the earthquake, beyond the wind, the still small Voice on the other side might bless me with bread borne by ravens.  But until then, I am a small child watching a Magician perform feats impossible to fathom, whispering "watch this", while I say "do it again", and "do it again"...

I called it a frontier town, and that I think is the best picture in my mind now, for it is an outpost on the edge.  On the edge of an island, on the edge of a frozen sea, on the edge of the world where night tilts past the horizon in a summer where the sun does not set for months... on the edge of a continent buried in ice with mysteries lost in fathomless time sequestered in icy oubliettes miles below the sky... on the edge of curiosity and discoveries about biology, geology, and the cosmic deeps of space... where gunslinger bush pilots fly on the edge of safety, barnstorming the cracks in the furious skies... on the edge of post-industrial society a hemisphere away. 

The Ice People are composed of every kind of nomad, freebooter, rebel, and reject. 

They are the hardy man who works the Austral winter mining gold, or logging, or fishing Alaska, before coming back to The Ice below.  I had breakfast with him, and he drank coffee sweetened by frosty-boy soft serve with as much relish as he defends the Bible in simple salt of the earth grace.


They are the ageless pixie of a woman with rose-grey hair who drives a Hagland here, and spends her Northern summers driving a Prius living in national parks.  She devoured two chicken breasts with predatory verve equal to the elegance with which she cleaned her dainty fingers afterward.

They are the members of The Frozen Few, biker radio techs, satellite engineers, tradesmen and logisticians who have modified snow mobiles into choppers. Who might have once had a brief brawl in Gallagers, and made up over a beer, keeping their code of silence over the matter.

They are those who did not fit in to bubble communities of complacent safety in a world of inordinate abundance and convenience whose important people pat each other on the back in satisfied and safe humility. 

I'm sure I fit into all of those categories to one degree or another... vagabond and mercenary meteorologist, as well as Christian, quondam artist, erstwhile writer, dilettante mythopoeist, philosopher, apologist,  historian, house-breaker, and game designer.

On Saturday after work, at 8:00 in the evening, it was still bright as late afternoon, with the sun not due to set till after midnight and then only so far as to keep the gloaming for an hour before the hours long sunrise.  I took a hike out to Hut Point, about a mile or so walk distant.  Robert Falcon Scott built it as base for his expeditions, and from there he walked with his last team south toward the pole a century ago.  Over 1600 miles and nearly half a year on foot across the expanse of terra incognita.  Plagued by hunger and frostbite, they all marched and starved and died on the way back.  Scott was the last of his deadly, tragic expedition succumb on the fatal march back toward the Hut, where hope and life waited... they fell but eleven miles away from Ross Island out on the ice shelf.  His Hut still stands there, frozen in space and time, with a hundred years of memory silent and still.

There is on top of Hut Point a cross commemorating that daring and doomed expedition.  It looks across the ice to Town.  In two months, the resupply ship and the tanker will berth between this point and that, after the icebreaker opens the channel.  Scant feet from the cross is a cliff, and thirty feet below is a cove where seals sleep undisturbed on the windy ice, a fissure on the ice edge into the sub-freezing water.  They have no fear of man here in this Ultimate South, like all the wildlife on the continent... almost like the innocence of Eden preserved in a glassine globe.

 When I took pictures, it almost seemed an indecency to make sound, here below that marker of the Prince of Peace, to whom even The Winter horde is subject.  The only seal to wake, stirred long enough to yawn before rolling over and resuming it's nap, with dreams of pups and fish.  My fingers numb in the scant minute I took the picture, it was time to return to that frontier town, and to hot licorice tea to warm life back into my hands.


I listened to the voice of the snow as I walked... the dry snow layered and scoured and polished into strata that squeek, and hiss, and crack, and crunch, and thud, and chuff, and boom.  That snow more alive than any snow I ever knew from temperate climes ten thousand miles to the north.  The alien song of The Winter when it has made it's peace again.