Traveling in Antarctica: Skin, eyelids and hair hurt

By Frosty Wooldridge 

                   “We also suffer from ‘Amenomania’—wind-madness.  This

           disease may be exhibited in two forms:  Either one is morbidly

           worried about the wind direction and gibbers continually about it, 

           or else a sort of lunacy is produced by listening to the other

           Amenomaniacs.”

                                                              Crewman James, Endurance

In the first week of October, Sandy, who was distinguishing himself as an outstanding editor of the Antarctic Sun newspaper, and I were talking in his office in the Galley building when Guy Guthridge, the head honcho of the National Science Foundation and Antarctic Support Associates, walked in.  He was impressed with Sandy’s comments at the meeting about showing friends their journalistic efforts and asking what they DIDN’T like about them.  He liked my last interview piece on one of the scientists who was a friend of his.

          Guthridge, small in stature, reminded me of a mad scientist with gray hair and dour looks.  He possessed a brilliant mind and was tops in his area of research in Antarctica.  We enjoyed a most stimulating conversation.  Later, he invited us over to the Southern Exposure for a beer.  We walked over in a blizzard—blinding, raging, biting cold and horizontal snow.  Bitter cold scoured our lungs for the 100 feet of distance to the bar.

          When we opened the door, a steam cloud blew into the tavern as the warm air met the cold air.  Our breaths looked like NFL football players during a December game when the weather was nasty.  After peeling off our ECW gear, we sat down at a round table with metal chairs.  The room was square with a bar on one side and shuffleboard on the opposite wall.  Pictures of polar explorers and paintings of Antarctica lined the walls.  There were no windows.  Everyone’s favorite beer was available at the bar:  Coors, Budweiser, Millers, Blatz, Old Milwaukee, Schlitz, Heineken and other brands.  On the shelf, Jack Daniels, Tanqueray, Wild Turkey and more.

          As we sat there, Al Fisher and Dwight Ford, the other top guys at the station stepped into the bar.  Sandy and I asked them a ton of questions.  To me, it was amazing that I was talking with the top ‘dudes’ at the station.   After cleaning out recycling bins in the afternoon, I was learning about gamma rays and how they were affected by the gravity of the earth at the poles after work.  Being a bit brash, I asked Guy what he thought about ‘Global Warming’? 

          “I don’t think much about it as a scientist,” he said.  “There’s no doubt a lot of bad things are going to happen…but like most humans, we’ll wait until the last minute when there is a severe crisis…then, we’ll try to solve it…but what we don’t know is that we won’t be able to solve it.  From a scientific standpoint, we’re in over our heads.”

          “What would solve it?” I asked.

          “Plant enough trees to fill a continent the size of Australia,” he said.  “Stabilize world population levels and stop burning fossil fuels to suspend the green house emissions from heating up the atmosphere.  It’s that simple, but the human race will keep populating until nothing can help us.”

          “In other words,” Sandy said. “Mother Nature will take care of us in her own ways.”
          “That’s right,” he said. “Global warming, ozone hole cancers, famines, and diseases will correct the human factor.”

          “When?” I asked.

          “Anytime in this new century,” he said.

          Later, we hit the shuffleboard for a spirited match at the bottom of the world.

          Once they left, I walked over to Gallagher’s where a band was playing.  I grabbed a woman named Laurie and danced until midnight.  There was too much smoke and many people were seriously drunk.  They were pushing, shoving and jamming.

          On Sunday, we enjoyed two lectures.  Dr. Borg, the NSF director, presented ‘Surface Heat Budget of the Southern Ocean’.  Dr. Reedy talked about ‘How Antarctica Will Change You’.

          Dr. Borg experimented with how heat dissipated from the oceans to the atmosphere.  He worked with other stations from Norway, Russia and Canada.  Their accumulated findings showed how, among other things, interaction between the ice and atmosphere drove weather patterns.

          Dr. Reedy pointed out that our core temperature would drop a degree in three weeks in response to living in the extreme climate.  Additionally, we would suffer short-term memory loss.  We would be burning as much as 40% more calories.

          We walked outside to see a sunset that lasted for three hours—gold clouds that effervesced into blazing pink and on to deep purple, garnished in white.  Colors struck the heavens radiantly bright with a transcendent brilliance.  Nowhere else in the world could a sunset be seen such as the one we saw that evening.  Soon, the sun would not set at all.  It would hang in the sky at 12 o’clock for three months.

          That night, on the TV, a couple of rock stars were shot and some rapper had overdosed on drugs.  Several suicide bombers had blown up

a few buildings.  Death made its appearance on national TV every night but we were so far away from it.

          Funny how men like Shackleton tempted death at every turn, but lived.  Then, when he least expected it, at 45, he died of a heart attack on his last trip to Antarctica.

          By the second week of October, I came down with the ‘McMurdo Crud’.  It attacked me one night and by the next morning, I could hardly get out of bed.  I couldn’t breathe through my nose and my chest felt like someone had stuck a pitchfork through it.   My head pounded, my skin ached, my joints screamed and my eyes hurt.  I swear that my fingernails hurt!  My teeth throbbed and it hurt to talk.  I felt close to death for five days.  I lay in my bed, sipped hot soup that Jack brought me, and could barely gather enough strength to go to the bathroom.  I was so weak that the only thing I could do 24 hours per day was lay in bed and breathe.  I hadn’t been that sick in 20 years since I went winter canoeing and fell into an icy river—giving me a severe case of pneumonia.

          Even the medical people couldn’t do anything.  I just had to suffer through it.  Once I had groaned and moaned my way back to health, Sandy asked me to go along with him to photograph a story on an ice cave deep within a glacier.

McMurdo residents enjoyed a unique adventure to the Ice Caves on the glacial tongue of Mt. Erebus.  But, like Judy Garland said in the Wizard of Oz, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”  The same held true for traveling to those unique underground caverns in Antarctica.

          On the seventh continent, nothing was like Kansas.  Because of frigid temperatures, no one took anything for granted. We couldn’t jump into cars and drive to Wendy’s.  At the bottom of the planet, no roads existed.  We couldn’t take a walk around the block in summer in our shorts because we’d freeze to death.

Before departure, Denton, our driver, who looked like a grandpa, made sure we had our Extreme Cold Weather gear with us–thermal bunny boots, extra wool socks, snow pants and parka, long johns, mittens and extra fleece pants and jacket.   Denton counted 10 heads and wrote it in his book.  Our vehicle, a Delta, sported tractor tires three feet wide and five feet high.  It resembled one of those big snouted dirt movers used in highway construction.   Inside the vehicle were four Scott expedition tents, food rations for a week, shovels, and survival bags.  Denton called into McMurdo Operations to verify our destination, number of hours out and when we would return.

          He closed the back door where we sat on benches around the box-like cabin.  Eight windows provided a view of our icy landscape.  Denton drove down onto the ice and followed red flags on bamboo poles placed every 50 feet along the route.  We bounced along at 15 miles per hour and felt like we were pioneers traveling across a new frontier.  Like them, we had no idea what lay ahead.

          An hour later, we turned right and followed blue flags along a ridge that stood three feet out of the snow.  We followed the side of the glacier’s tongue.   By the time we stopped three miles later it had grown to 30 feet high. The glacier’s terminus resembled what an Irish setter’s tongue would look like if he rolled it out of his mouth and extended it onto the porch on a hot day. It was rough, bent, buckled and bumpy. 

          Denton stopped the Delta a short distance from the entrance to the caves.  A fierce wind blew snowdrifts along our path as we walked 150 feet to a round cave hole in the snow.

          At the entrance, we climbed over a six-foot snowdrift–slid down the other side–and climbed up to the hole in the glacial tongue.  It resembled a swallow’s nest on the side of a bridge.  Once inside, we slid down a ten-foot ice tube, which ended at a narrow crack.  The ice turned to an indigo blue, which changed into sky blue to silver white as we walked through the crack. 

          In the main cavern, a 20-foot ceiling featured blooms of ice crystals, much like thunderhead clouds crowding each other for space.  Ice stalactites hung from cracks in the crystal ceiling and stalagmites grew from the floor.  From the walls, ice shards stabbed out like kitchen knives gone wild, and smaller, fuzzy crystals carpeted every crevice, crack and cranny of the cave.  Hundreds of ice configurations dangled from dome, triangle, square and circle shapes on the ceiling.   It was as if the Santa’s elves had gotten fed up with working so hard and threw their toys up to the ceiling where they stuck.

          Further into the cave, I struggled through a tunnel big enough for a human and reached a throne room 15 feet high and 20 feet in diameter.  The cavern was more than 100 feet into the glacier.  I climbed up icy steps to a stalagmite that had formed a seat where I sat near a bluish crystal wall.  No one followed me.  More diamond chandeliers hung from the ceiling.  Blue/white light entered through the ice in a soft mist-like elegance.  Peering deeper, I saw faint yellows, greens and whites in the cloud plumes.

          Quiet.  No sound.  Only silence.  A stillness I had not known in my lifetime engulfed me.   It was a cold, frozen, dead quiet.  No movement of life.  No hint of the wind.  Utter serenity.  I reached out and touched delicate ice flowers along the wall.  They broke off and tinkled like metallic glass down the sides of the ice, and strangely, the sound pulled back into the ice.  No echo.  The air returned to dead quiet after the tinkling.

          Sitting there, I realized that glacier was formed thousands of years ago, and would be frozen tight for centuries into the future.  I was nothing more than a speck that would be gone in the blink of an eye.  It would remain, having never noticed me.

          After several minutes, I noticed my breath mingling in the air around my head.  My hands numbed from my journaling.   With careful steps, I climbed off the throne and wormed my way back to the exit.  Denton guided me toward another tunnel that carried me into the bright sunlight of the cave opening.

          Looking out across the raging windswept landscape, the tempest rushed at me and snow devils swirled toward the mountain peaks in the distance.  I looked back into the silence of the ice cave.  No sound was there, yet there was something….

          I had heard the pulse of the universe in a quiet sanctuary in the depths of a glacier.