Seals And Serpents And The Hour Of The Wolf

McMurdo in November, has become a town that never sleeps.  It is 2am in the morning on Saturday night, and even now there are a score of people talking and laughing in the galley, hours after the bar and the coffee house have closed.  Many have merely retreated to Southern, or Hut 10, or some dorm lounge with their own rations of liquid merriment.  Those here in the galley have come to sober up with tea and food, while still others choose to walk it off up Ob Hill.

Each to their own before they exhaust themselves for bed about the time the early risers begin the working morning.

The BOG (Back of Galley) is still a quieter place than the main room, and from where I sit, I can still look through the window outside onto the Carp Shop and Medical, as the shadows reel  around and around without end.

It is never high noon here in this frontier town, but the sun never sets.  Morning or Afternoon are one and the same, and time becomes even more an alien construct without the ticks of the moon and tocks of the sun to mark it.  In another world, time flies like and arrow.  On deployment the arrow bends around upon itself, becoming an ouroboros.  I have lived in the circle of the snake in Kuwait, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, where all feel that sense of Groundhog Day.

But here... the serpent has devoured its tail to a point.  The day itself frozen, in a land where the millennia, the eons lay still beneath the deeps of ice beyond human measure... almost like immortality.  

Only the reel of the shadows, the glister of the ice upon the mountains across the sound changes.

My work schedule is an entirely arbitrary thing.  Four days on, and two days off... 12 hours a shift and then a turn from day shift to night shift, and after from night to day.  What's in a name?

It is I suppose a little quieter and a little less busy during those hours we call night here, and for most in town, Sunday is the day off.  For weather... not so much.  There are a small portion of us here in McMurdo who have work centers that run 24/7, weather being one.  We in weather miss many of the activities that are scheduled during the routine off hours for most of the rest of town, being at times we are either on shift or sleeping with our twisty hours.  I look for what I can with or without company.

Last weekend was unusually full.  It began with a night in the craft room, having been commissioned by someone to make a zipper pouch out of some canvas she had discovered in skua.  My sewing machine skills are basic having learned over a weekend last spring, in order to make a point to an arrogant and unproductive student about making something without a pattern.  I had never installed a zipper before, nor made anything with an inner lining, so simple as it might be, I had to design, plan, and make something new to me.  

 

Curious how I managed to make it.  Not perfect, but when I gave it to the young lady in cargo who'd commissioned it, she was pleased that it exceeded her expectations.  I counted that a win.
It was a good night followed by a fine chilly morning.  The wind was biting off the ice to the south as I walked to the chapel for Sunday morning service.  The new chaplain is in now, and main body has brought more people to the services.  Though not so intimate as it was before, the wonderful thing is that we now have communion offered again.  I had my first communion in nearly three months which I was happy to have.  Being a non-denominational service conducted by a chaplain that is either Catholic or Episcopal, I was concerned that it would be dry communion which seems a cheat to me, but I am glad to report it was not.  He wears a collar, but is decent to those of us who are not of that tribe nonetheless.

Sunday brunch is always the best meal of the week, spread lavishly with many meats, cheeses, pastries and fruits fresh and not from a can... ah, the freshies!  The first time in two months that I've had strawberries from New Zealand, and Pink Lady Apples from Australia.  I even got an actual fresh avacado.  They were decadence upon the tongue!

After a short nap, I met a small group to finally go out to the pressure ridges, on the generous offer of a friend of one of our ATC staff.  She has the guide training to lead groups out on the ice on the east side of the peninsula over by Scott Base.  The pressure ridges are where the sea ice, forced by the slow incalculable, inexorable drift of the deep mass of the Ross Ice Shelf, is pushed toward the rock of Ross Island.  In the summer season, the sea ice thins enough to eventually buckle as it pushes up against the shore.   

Looking out onto the ice that afternoon, there was a hard line of fog that had descended over the hours of the night from the sky.  It crouched, quietly, patiently, still and without breath, as the air in the Windless Bight congealed into pallid gloom.  

And then, an hour before we were to go hike on the ice, it loosed its breath.  With windchill, the temperature had dropped to nearly seventy degrees below freezing, and the fog of Windless Bight spilled over Arrival heights and Ob Hill.  I did, for a brief moment give it a second thought, going out to hike in that, even as I considered the possibility that the hike might be cancelled anyway.  

 

For a moment.

But then, how could I balk at the chance to go hiking in that?  That is what made the people who dared to come here first, and they challenged it, endured it, fought for weeks and months and years through it.  I had to go if even for a paltry hour and a half hike.

Big Red came down from the corner hook again after resting there for weeks.  

The sea ice, after it buckles, is a color unlike any other ice.  Cerulean blue, under its coat of frost and snow, the cracks below where the seals find their slush scummed ice-holes a deep indigo.  And that is where the senate of the seals convenes. When the lulls of the wind allowed it, the eerie creak of the ice sings to the seals.

Weddell seals are lazier than cats.  They sleep for hours a day, with bursts of activity to dive for their dinner or make woopie on the ice.  It is the pupping season, and over the last month more and more mothers have given birth to the next generation.  Seal pups have about a 50% mortality rate, and they must grow fast to thrive.  Mothers lose nearly half their weight in the several weeks after the pups are born, weaning them within about 50 days.  The most active seals we saw were the little ones, insufferably cute and utterly fearless of humans, playing while mamma tried to sleep as we quietly walked through their nurseries.  Some few were soaking in the ice holes, with water at about 30 degrees.  Considering windchill in the air at just a little less than 70 degrees below freezing, they were soaking in hot-tubs, while their fellows napped beneath a blanket of rime and snow.

 

When at last we made our way back to the van, and chilled fingers, lips, and ears began to tingle with the heat again, our guide gave us cookies to hold us till we could return to the galley for tea and hot chocolate.

It is 4am now... the hour of the wolf here, that quietest of hours of the day-time-night before the day begins.

It may be a place out of time here and the pattern of work routine... but that day was wonderful, and yet so ordinary for this place.

I love the ice.

Sometimes I dream of of my Beloved here where we are strangers in a strange land together.   

 

Perhaps, one day we will.