Sky, And Sea, And Gravity
3 February 2020
This has been my office for a couple of weeks.
Phoenix Airfield. A snow runway, the trailer where the airfield staff manage operations, the latrine, and the double-wide where pax can get out of the cold if it is dangerously frigid.
Weather has to begin taking observations six hours before a flight comes in from New Zealand, and at least three before they leave. Sometimes, the weather observer is the lone human inhabitant for hours.
The view out the door is magnificent. Mt. Nipha on Black Island, over sixteen miles away.
And a splendid view of Ob Hill, Crater Hill, and Castle Rock back on Ross Island. On the road back, crossing through the pass back into town, you pass the three giants, Cottus, Briareos, and Gyges, the middle one inviting Quixotic tilting matches when the trio are not industriously plying their craft, making thunderbolts to power Scott Base and McMurdo.
This is ship season.
Surreal visions of the ice breaker sailing across the dry and frozen plane like a dream born of Fata Morgana... it is the sort of magic that makes me laugh. If you catch it just right on sunny days, the ship flies over the scintillant horizon.
The ice breaker opened a channel
for the Ocean Giant, which has been offloading a year's worth of supplies and taking on containers with a year's worth of garbage. They are about a week behind schedule, having had mechanical problems on the way down. The tanker, with a year's worth of fuel is anchored some distance up the sound waiting to come into harbor and offload.
We can all hear the ching of dollars adding up in the wind as they sit waiting.
Derelict Junction between the dorms and 155 was a staging area for about a week while cargo was processed. Hut Point road was set aside for cargo traffic, and the penguins moved around the point to a the quieter suburbs. It is still possible to hike the long way round over Arrival Heights to get to the point. When cargo operations are still for meal times, it is lovely as always, looking across the sound over open water where sometimes the plume of whale sign shows the stately mariners for a few beats of the heart... and then is gone again, with clouds floating stately in the sky, like ghosts, like echoes of those travellers.
This is the season for the science camps to close down. The Chalet flies the flags of those many nations who share the treaty for love of this continent, so long as the summer sun shies through the 2,064 hour day. But, winter is coming, and the summer crews are leaving for home.
Phoenix has gotten cold enough to open again, and the C-17s are coming back to bring in the turnover crews. The first one back three days ago, brought about fifty, with about one hundred seventy Americans and Kiwis, French from Concordia, and Italians from Terra Nova Bay. One of the cargo handlers from the ship got his hand smashed by a container the night before the C-17 came in, which shut down operations for another 24 hours. He was first on the manifest, to be medevaced North.
"Medevac", means something different down here. A piece of engine cowling came loose in flight, and rent an 8" gash in the titanium heat shield on engine no. 4. For a few hours, the passengers waited out on the ice... waiting to get to the green and pleasant land of New Zealand... waiting for fresh food, and real milk... for the luxury of a hotel bed and bathtubs... for a hundred choices of beer, and good New Zealand wine... for high speed internet, and easy entertainment, in the lands of mirages and hyperreality North.
...waiting to go... home...
The excitement of leaving became the tension of waiting without answers. Some joked. Some played ice-clod soccer. Some napped in the crunchy snow. Pizzas were ordered from town, and morphine for the wounded. The mechanics and aircrew, having spent hours trying to find Boing engineers in the States at 11:00pm on Friday night, had grown solemn. Waiting for the dozens of high resolution pictures to transfer through email 10,000 miles away so the engineers could assess the plane's capability to fly took time. The passengers, all two hundred twenty odd of them, were loaded back onto Ivan the TerraBus, and a passenger Kress after 10:00 at night. About thirty would have to be bunked on cots in the big gym. The man with the smashed hand would have to wait for an LC130 flight North in the morning.
It's a harsh continent, we say down here.
The repairs have to be completed tonight, and the C-17 has to be moved a little every twelve hours so it's massive bulk does not sink the wheels into the ice. If it does, it will never move again.
It is, a harsh continent.
Only the blessed were undisturbed when the the airfield had grown still again, after I closed out the day with the observation tagged LAST. The little fellow lay by the fuel tanks on the runway side, dreaming of flight through ice roofed caves, drowned in aquamarine, dreaming of fish sharp and silver and salty.
He deigned to wake for a moment, with one shining eye upon mine...
"Oh, Human Race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?" he sighed to me...
But sometimes, in the magic of this place... far enough out on the ice... far enough from the sound and fury... you can fall into the Sun, where it gifts you with coldfire rings, and gifts you with mother-of-pearl clouds...
...sometimes... when the wind is still... the water and the sky become one like lovers of a flesh...
...sometimes for a moment... when the wind is still... you need not even strive to spurn the ground, for gravity draws you home when you forget how to fly...
.
This has been my office for a couple of weeks.
Phoenix Airfield. A snow runway, the trailer where the airfield staff manage operations, the latrine, and the double-wide where pax can get out of the cold if it is dangerously frigid.
Weather has to begin taking observations six hours before a flight comes in from New Zealand, and at least three before they leave. Sometimes, the weather observer is the lone human inhabitant for hours.
The view out the door is magnificent. Mt. Nipha on Black Island, over sixteen miles away.
And a splendid view of Ob Hill, Crater Hill, and Castle Rock back on Ross Island. On the road back, crossing through the pass back into town, you pass the three giants, Cottus, Briareos, and Gyges, the middle one inviting Quixotic tilting matches when the trio are not industriously plying their craft, making thunderbolts to power Scott Base and McMurdo.This is ship season.
The ice breaker opened a channel
We can all hear the ching of dollars adding up in the wind as they sit waiting.
Derelict Junction between the dorms and 155 was a staging area for about a week while cargo was processed. Hut Point road was set aside for cargo traffic, and the penguins moved around the point to a the quieter suburbs. It is still possible to hike the long way round over Arrival Heights to get to the point. When cargo operations are still for meal times, it is lovely as always, looking across the sound over open water where sometimes the plume of whale sign shows the stately mariners for a few beats of the heart... and then is gone again, with clouds floating stately in the sky, like ghosts, like echoes of those travellers.
Phoenix has gotten cold enough to open again, and the C-17s are coming back to bring in the turnover crews. The first one back three days ago, brought about fifty, with about one hundred seventy Americans and Kiwis, French from Concordia, and Italians from Terra Nova Bay. One of the cargo handlers from the ship got his hand smashed by a container the night before the C-17 came in, which shut down operations for another 24 hours. He was first on the manifest, to be medevaced North.
...waiting to go... home...
The excitement of leaving became the tension of waiting without answers. Some joked. Some played ice-clod soccer. Some napped in the crunchy snow. Pizzas were ordered from town, and morphine for the wounded. The mechanics and aircrew, having spent hours trying to find Boing engineers in the States at 11:00pm on Friday night, had grown solemn. Waiting for the dozens of high resolution pictures to transfer through email 10,000 miles away so the engineers could assess the plane's capability to fly took time. The passengers, all two hundred twenty odd of them, were loaded back onto Ivan the TerraBus, and a passenger Kress after 10:00 at night. About thirty would have to be bunked on cots in the big gym. The man with the smashed hand would have to wait for an LC130 flight North in the morning.
It's a harsh continent, we say down here.
The repairs have to be completed tonight, and the C-17 has to be moved a little every twelve hours so it's massive bulk does not sink the wheels into the ice. If it does, it will never move again.
It is, a harsh continent.
He deigned to wake for a moment, with one shining eye upon mine...
"Oh, Human Race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?" he sighed to me...
But sometimes, in the magic of this place... far enough out on the ice... far enough from the sound and fury... you can fall into the Sun, where it gifts you with coldfire rings, and gifts you with mother-of-pearl clouds...
...sometimes... when the wind is still... the water and the sky become one like lovers of a flesh...
...sometimes for a moment... when the wind is still... you need not even strive to spurn the ground, for gravity draws you home when you forget how to fly...
.
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