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Out of the Storm

Okay, somebody had it in for us. We asked for a couple days of bad weather. Who wished on us the 5-day storm?

Wednesday night, storm threatening to come in. Thursday morning, storm undoubtedly in.

This is a picture of the view from the window towards the orange hut. Orange hut is about fifty feet away.

At this time, the wind was gusting at about 40 knots and the temperature was -30 C (Note: Bill and Nelia say the warmest they've seen this place is -12 C, which I think is about 15 F). That morning, we recorded gusts up to 52 knots. This storm was a little fiercer than the last, with snow besides. It's hard to tell what was precipication and what was remobilized, but either way, we couldn't see. No field work Thursday. Internet had gone down. Only one thing left to do: Relax. Watch movies, read, write, play cards, knit, tinker. Rich E. slept in the orange hut. Rich's tent fly had been minorly sliced by the winds from a particularly disruptive helo arrival the day before, allowing snow to drift into his tent. Sarah, Rick K., and I slept in the main hut. No tent problems. Hut warm, not windy. Tent cold, noisy.

Friday, the same. Will it clear? Doesn't look like it. Another two-movie day, a lot of snacking, and individual activities. I read an interesting book called "Killing Pablo" about drug wars in Colombia. I ate it up. My cousin asked whether I feel like reading about the tropics or about Antarctic adventures. I started with a hankering for Shackelton-type adventures, but have moved on to anything interesting. The Colombian drug cartel is very interesting. It's also nice, sometimes, to listen to upbeat, hot-place music. I did, however, overdose on Ricky Martin. See Q'n'A entry. Too out of place, and too... Well, as much as I love him, it's Ricky.

I had time to think about these things. Almost five days of time. We thought the storm was breaking yesterday--word from McMurdo was that as one storm was ending, another was moving in, but then they changed their tune--and went out and cleaned the snow out of the skidoos and drove them around and waited to see if we could run off to do some work. Good thing we waited. About an hour later, Bill was back outside putting the skidoo covers back on. False alarm. The wind was still with us.

But, it was slowing. Today, we felt, we'd wake to good weather and be able to work.

Skank. And wind. We spent most the day inside, and then around 4 o'clock we saw our opportunity. The wind seemed to have subsided. We'd go to Truncated Cones.

I'd never been to Cones, but I'd heard it was beautiful. Rumor has it, it's the place to be at midnight. I still haven't been there at midnight, but I have been there.

At first, there was nothing. It was amazing. I truly felt like I was driving a skidoo in Antarctica. I heard rumors of great views, but shortly after leaving camp I couldn't see anything around me but skank, the world melting into whiteness with a vague division between white floor and white walls. I could see skidoos ahead of me, and the dark forms of their riders. At some point, the world went flat and the skidoo tracks in front of me disappeared. I relied on the sight of Rich Karstens ahead of me to guide my way. Surreal, I thought. This is cool.

Bill turned off our tradjectory sharply, it seemed to me, into the skank. We pulled up at a craggy rock ridge, with a majestic snow-covered mast bright white against the milky white sky. The mast supported three or four Yagi antennas and about a ton of rime ice. The ice extended about a foot from one of the antennas, completely amazing me. The guy wires looked ready to bust under the extra weight--rime ice forms on everything, regardless of how thin and mobile. I wish I had a picture, but I don't.

When I returned to the skidoos, rime ice had already started to form on the handles, the throttle, the kill switch. It was forming on my backpack, after just 15 minutes. It was forming on Rich Karsten's eyelashes.

Rich E. and I got to lay cable. It's our specialty. We lay cable at the repeater site, home of the White Tower, and then skidoo-ed over to the nearby geophysical monitoring site. A miracle occured. I'm a believer. In what yet, I don't know, but I believe it. The skank cleared in a matter of seconds. My creative writing teacher in college warned against the use of the word 'suddenly' (nothing happens 'suddenly'--come on), but this seemed to occur suddenly. Regarless, it happened fast. The clouds cleared. There was a horizon, with blue above and white below; there were ice towers; there was crazy, chunky-looking snow clutching the rocks; not so far away, there was our White Tower of radio antennas; and, there was a volcano.

Rich E. encouraged me to go to the edge and see how far down I could see. The veterans love this spot because it is right on the caldera rim. Brief explanation: Erebus (as you can recognize in distant profile) is characterized by steep slopes at its base, and then an abrupt break in slope above which the flanks angle more gently to the crater rim. The abrupt break in slope is the caldera rim, likely formed by a collosal eruption a long time ago which caused collapse of the top of the volcano. After this collapse, the void in the center of the volcano filled in with lava flows and pyroclastics (chunks thrown from the rocks, like the bombs). This upper, reconstructed part forms the gentler slopes up to the top.

Truncated Cones is on the caldera rim, where the slope changes abrubtly from gentle to steep. But what would I be able to see below me? It was a sea of clouds.

There's something to be said for a sea of clouds. The world dropped away (SHOOP), plunging my attention to a second, fairy-tail world below. In the fairy-tale world, cloud banks swirled and collided before me. The blanket of clouds extended like the Neverending Story's nothing to the horizon before me, and beyond. Shoop.

[Fairy-tale. What creatures lie beneath?]

The ride home was a whole new adventure. The views, before shrouded by skank, were spectacular. My attention, however, was directed mostly towards the bumpy terrain directly in front of me, and, before too long, to the painful and then disturbingly numb nature of my throttle thumb. I didn't realize just how cold my hand had gotten until getting back, heading immediately into the orange hut, and howling along with Nelia over the pain which meant blood was circulating back into our hands. It was cold outside.

The story ends happily. Inside, it was warm, and though it was painful, both Nelia's and my hands recovered completely, and we were greeted by the tantalizing smell of cooking potatoes and then by the site of a cheese and olive platter, tuna dip, potato chips (food of the gutters in the regular world, food of gods after a day of cold in the field), and, soon, halibut and potato pancakes and broccoli. Life is good.

And then, after dinner, Bill and Rich K. fixed the internet. And, the hut looked immediately like this:

And here, I'm still on the darn thing. Thanks for sticking with me.

Posted by beth at December 23, 2002 10:40 PM | TrackBack