Farther Off The Map

13 January 2020

If McMurdo is the frontier poised on the edge of a rocky island by the edge of the map, Williams airfield is the frontier off The Rock, and on the Ice at the edge itself.  It it not the wild fastness where the dragons dance, but if you look hard enough to the east, toward the hundreds of miles of mind-reeling distance, you can almost see them when the Fata bends in the world a window to the other side of the horizon.

But a score of shipping container buildings face each other in two rows on either side of a snow packed avenue, and at the end of the avenue, the cab on the edge of the taxiway out to the runway itself.  That is where I stand watch.  It is quieter here.  There are no bars here.  No TV.  No parties.  No store.  But a score of people work on the skiway airfield, and it is a simpler, sparer, quieter, colder place. 

I love it out here.

                                                                                                                                                               

January begins the countdown to the final stretch, when the weather turns and the sea ice begins to break up briefly before the transition season back to winter.  Just before that, the last two main holidays  come but days apart, Christmas and Icestock, giving way to the inception of the New Year.  At Christmas, many dress up in coats and ties and dresses to sit and break bread with the quasi families they work and live with here.  Gift exchanges, sometimes serious, though mostly silly and over drinks give laughter and comfort ten thousand miles from home. 


The flip side of that week is Icestock, the all day live music festival, for which many people dress up in whimsy, eating grilled meat and chili, and drinking as the prelude to the countdown to midnight and the New Year, which ends in an open air, white night rave, of indiscriminate kissing, more drinking, and dancing. 

 

Lethe undoubtedly drowns some of what regretful behavior may follow. 

 

Erebus is the name of both primordial darkness personified, and of the realm of that entity, the fane on the edge of Hades and Hades eponomous realm.  Though Lethe may run through that territory, so too is the wrath of Acheron sometimes.  On Christmas Eve, someone went into the chapel very drunk, and very alone, and very angry at God.  He broke every cross and crucifix. He broke the heads of every member in the nativity set in the atrium.  He broke the beautiful stained glass windows, and threw down the Christmas tree.  Awakened in the wreck with a savage hangover I am told, he was flown out before he could join in the calling out of the nacent year.

January is the season, say the old timers, when many people begin to get tired and nerves a bit  more frayed.  Patience shortens and people begin to count down the clock to the exodus before winter freezes movement north.  I cannot deny that suspicion, which makes it a boon working out off the Rock and on the Ice. 

Time pulls and twists in upon itself.  I can't wait to go home to those who beckon at the end of gravity's rainbow... I can't stand to let go these days when I walk out into Diamond Dust in the still of the gyre of the duskdawn that does not cease. 

I pray and pray for the people I work with just now, through the vulgarity, the foul, profane, blasphemous language and banality and unreasoned babble they speak about.  I don't know what to say most of the time.  It becomes habit to not join in, and then to not be included, and even when there is some more substantial moment... I am at a loss to know what to say.  Is it cowardice?  Or complacence?  I pray for patience, and wisdom, and enough love to reach past the ugliness to the eternal person on the other side.   

January is fog season, and the fog rises abruptly oft times.  Sometimes, in the span of a few minutes, the horizon, sharp and clear in the diminishing distance might vanish with a whisper of wind, fog rising like the charm of making, raising a veil, a mantle lapped about that point on the ice that is Williams.  Ghosting in and out, it fades like waking from a dream.  Other times it might rise in a bank, flooding Windless Bight and spilling over the saddle between Crater Hill and Ob Hill, and enveloping the airfield... a deluge that drowns even White and Black Islands, drowns Mount Discovery, drowns even the peak of Mount Lister.  Drowning in that grey deep until the Sun turns, and shreds the mist as if turning the clock back until the frozen Alantis rises.

The icebreaker came in a few days ago, making a circuit just beyond Hut Point, opening up the bay for the ships that will be coming in this month. 

January is the season of life here.  The skuas began to arrive, their scouts flying in at the beginning of November.  Now, they have begun to hatch their chicks.  The seals, who began pupping by the end of November, have most of those pups weaned now.  Joining them on the icefloes and in the opening water of the sound are the penguins, Emporers and Adelies, and whales.  The first whales to show themselves here are the Minke whales, small and elegant.  They will be but short visitors, for the Orcas have learned to course the supply ships and any Minkes left here will become the feast at the end of the journey. 

The sea ice has not broken enough to invite the great whales in yet.  Those grand mariers will be among the last to grace we of the land who will be last to leave with the summer residents of this frontier town. 

Whose is this place?  All of us are visitors... once and future guests, making it home to suit us, each in our own seasons, in the sea... on the Rock... on the Ice...

I wonder often, why I should bother to write of these things, whether it is the self-indulgence of an impostor.  And yet the absurdity of meeting an Adelie in a walk down from Arrival Heights calling out to me with it's "grrrookkk", as though it never knew that I am the child of exiles from Eden... it is wild and yet without the fear of fallen man.  

It is that memory, and all the ones before that I want not to be lost by time, and all of these chiaroscuro reminiscences... having seen the hand of the Devil where angels were supposed to tread one year, and seeing the Hand of God where the pagans revel the next. 

This continent... it is a tabula rasa.  God gives us so many of those it seems. 

But this one is just so much bigger.