Out On The Ice

The stillness is profound in the southern fane of the Windless Bight, seven leagues out from Ross Island, on fifty fathoms of sea frozen before the dawn of man.

There is no sound. 

No wind.

No animals.

No machines.

No people.

Only what you bring with you.

The soft chuff of boots in the powdery snow.  Breath in and out walking across the fourscore yards to the steel tower rising up out of the flat plane, unmarked but for the sastrugi fading into the distant white horizon.  Some twenty-odd miles north, the pale slopes of Erebus and Terror, and thirty miles southwest, Minna Bluff low and dark, and Discovery north and west of that.

The sky is aching blue with clouds sharp and rippling above, and the sun is bright and warm.

Whether a place of solitude or loneliness... each alone must say.


I had a day off and three of the techs were nine hundred miles south at the pole.  Tia needed an extra pair of hands, and asked if I would be willing to go.
Would I now?

Oh, but I would!

We would fly out on helo piloted by the McMurdo Air Force.  These are small birds, little resembling the lumbering giants I rode in Afghanistan, and much smaller than even blackhawks.  They are a busy swarm, ferrying crews where it is too far to go by skidoo or Haaglund, but closer than where the Baslers and Twin Otters fly. 

The hangar warns those who have no business there not to dare the swarm.

Your Magic Helmet

              We Dared.






Out, out, out beyond Scott Base, beyond the Long Duration Balloon camp, out into the Windless Bight, we went.  Skimming above the ice at five hundred feet, we came to the tower where the weather array was.  They dropped us and dropped off the tower extension, and flew away home, shrinking into a speck and then vanishing in the yonder.

The sensor array had been buried over the last decade repeatedly, and had already been dug out twice this season.  The tower itself rests about eight feet below and only the last twenty four inches jab up above the surface of the snow.

We were going to remove everything, raise a ten foot extension, and put it all high enough to keep it unburied for the next decade.  We did remove the sensors, and dug out the battery case. 

But, the tower extension was, alas, too large to fit.  There will be more digging before the summer is done, I think...


Nonetheless, we raised the equipment to the tippy-top and got it transmitting again.  An hour and some early... and hour and some to wait for the helo.

I didn't mind a bit, and Tia confessed, neither did she.  She loves going out in the whirly-birds and being out in the remote places.  She smoked, we talked, and we waited in the stillness.

God sure must like ice, because He sure made a lot of it.  You think you can just begin to grasp it's scale from town, looking across the sound.  But out here there is a mirthful whisper under your skin that says "wait till you see this..." and then you get lost in it.  This is my favorite part... bewitched by the immense and ancient reaches. 

Sometimes, during the day that never ends, I can't sleep... but I dream...
...here, and just a little farther... here be dragons.