Nearing Sunset
It's five days from sunset.
After the Ocean Giant offloaded cargo and took on the northbound load it left the harbor ahead of a storm. In the two days after it left and before the wind, the sea ice began to congeal over the channel, clad in the snow that heralded the tempest. The open water disappeared once more, a harbinger of the end of the short Antarctic summer, harbinger to the approaching winter.
It grew cloudier, and darker before it became whiter and the world vanished in the lucent abyss. The Heights, the Hill, the Town itself became a memory, a dream as the wind alone became the sole compass marker.
I slept as we went into Condition, slept through the wind, the storm... slept and dreamed.
...and awoke to the stillness outside...
McMurdo Sound was clear, just like that, the congested ice had gone. It was open water for twenty miles out to the southwest and west, and open water to the horizon looking northward up the sound, and open all the way to the iceshelf, indomitable to the south. What had been a lake, and a once-and-future plain of snow, had become a wine-dark sea.
I have begun to forget how to breathe more often here... I am not always sure that I want to remember how.
The sun is sinking two degrees every day now, and the nights are becoming closer to twilight. The last day of summer is seven days hence, and the shadows are longer. Flights are increasing as the summer crews are marshalled to depart, leaving the tenth part that will winter over. I have two days off, two days to work the airfield, and two days scheduled for travel home. I asked the LC130 Supervisor of Flight if there was a jumpseat open for the last four flights down to pole to bring the last of their crew out before it closes for winter. The weather was getting worse again here and at pole, so when the aircrew came in for their briefing, they said that they would have to delay till Monday.
The snow began to fall, and I recorded the clouds and the winds outside.
The commander of the crew asked me if I still wanted to go and I told him that the storm was calling me. I went to bed after I got off shift with the flight delay posted, went to bed dreaming of Ultima Australis... the Utmost South... that place beyond the margin of the map... the very End of the Earth...
I dreamed of going to The Pole, not merely to set foot on it for a bucket list... but to introduce myself that it might know me when I return again.
And then I awoke. They had dared to fly anyway.
Bad luck.
Had I just stayed awake might I have gone?
There are so many things still that I have not done here, because I was not in the right time or right place or with the right person. I have tried and been unable to find someone to go climb Castle Rock with. I have not been able to get out to old Pegasus with the plane half buried in snow. I was not able to make the snowmobile class to go on the trip up Erebus. My name was not drawn for the camping trip out on the ice.
What is luck? Fortune? Fate? Fata?
What goes into that magic spell, that unlocks the doorways beyond the ordinary into the unexpected the serendipitous the extraordinary?...
It is made of more than mere curiosity or desire for risk...
...of sharing your passions?...
...of fitting in with people?...
...of this messy town unlike any other, unnecessary and thriving on necessity and imagination...
...of loving human beings who are not and never will be perfect...
...does Grace grow strongest where it has been given and broken?...
...I flatter myself that I know the answer to that, even when I am not sure anymore of good answers to much.
But knowing it, and living it are two different things.
The ouroboros circles round.
Time begins to tick once more.
I think about remembering and forgetting, as I drive through the vanguard of the winter storms.
I think about that piece by T.S. Eliot:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”
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