January 28, 2003
McMurdo Life
And what about all the inbetween? What is McMurdo like? What do you do there in your spare time?
I have had the pleasure of spending about three weeks in McMurdo, working on processing the GPS data and making friends.
First of all, there is the climbing cave. I described it a bit in a previous entry. To reiterate, and add:
[Dave, in rare form, climbs in the climbing cave.]
Some people here crack me up. Blue-eyed Dave is one of them. I’ve had the pleasure of spending a lot of time with blue-eyed Dave, who I met way back on the field trip to Cape Evans, and his friends Tad and Matt. All three are wintering over. All three are nutty. And, not surprisingly, I adore them for it.
We climb together. Sort of. We go to the climbing cave, and hang out together. We climb around some, and then lounge and talk. I swung by the climbing cave two nights ago thinking I might find someone I knew there. I heard familiar voices on my way up the stairs. At the top, I found Dave, Tad, and Matt. Laughing. ‘What?’ I ask, thinking they must have been just making fun of me. They are sitting on the couch outside the cave. ‘We’ve been sitting here for about a half an hour,’ they said, ‘and haven’t even made it inside yet.’ Busted. We migrate inside, but still don’t climb. We sit or lounge on the mattresses. I reach absently for a climbing hold up behind my head, and Tad snaps, ‘Don’t touch that!’
[Matt.]
[Dave.]
[Tad.]
The evening degenerates into horsing around. Literally. They take turns wrestling until they are red in the face, and when I try to climb again Dave takes me down, and I hold my own—either because he lets me or because I had an older brother, which provides excellent conditioning for such occasions—until I somehow end straddling his back, with him on all fours. ‘Do you want to ride the pony?’ he asks and, eyes wide, I immediately say ‘No’ and dismount. He proceeds to buck. ‘I’ll buck you off! I’ll buck you off! I’ll buck you off!’ I can’t even watch him, I’m laughing so hard. I guess it’s a party trick he picked up back in high school. The bucking thing. I’m embarrassed to be a part of the story, but it was so funny that I can’t refrain from telling it.
[Tad and Dave reenact.]
[How would you feel about getting secret admirer letter from this guy?]
[Dave says, "I'll buck you off!"]
[Then, back to business as usual.]
For a while, I had the bad habit of ditching my climbing friends once I get into the bar. It’s an unintentional thing. After climbing several days ago, we headed off to the Coffee House. On my way to the bar to buy some wine for myself and friend Matt, I ran into Geoff, a fellow I had met and climbed the 5th Flatiron with in Boulder, and Brad, a friend of a friend of mine in Boulder who I hunted down, and three of their friends. They were holding philosophy club, and invited me to join them.
"So what do you guys philosophize about?" I ask.
"What do you think?"
"Fish," I guess, randomly.
"Well, there are a lot of them in the sea."
I'm a bit slow. "The sea, then."
"Nope."
"Do you philosophize about women?"
"YES!"
Fish was a pretty good first guess, don't you think? A good way into our conversation, I remembered the glasses of wine. Poor Matt was over playing darts empty handed. “Oh, no!” I exclaimed. Rather than being sympathetic, the philosophy club found it quite funny. I think I gave them some material for their next philosophy session. I just said, “I am a very bad friend.”
[Philosophy club. I mean, who could blame me?]
[Me checking out Brad. Geoff's name for this one was, "Want_Some_of_that."
Then, there are parties, big and small. I don't have any pics of the big ones, although at least one of them does merit some description which I probably won't get to. Saturdays are big nights. Fridays are medium nights, since Saturday is a work day (6-day work week for most employees).
Science tech Seth hosted a Crary (science facility) party out at Cos-Ray, a great building used for monitoring neutrons torn from their atoms by cosmic radiation.
[Seth.]
[Dave poses in front of a poster. "Here, make it look like I'm driving," he says. The poster shows the cab of a truck, well-dusted with snow. It reads: "First rule of the Arctic. Close the damn door."]
[Alex expounds.]
[I show off my tongue, which used to be blue from a fruit roll-up.]
[Walking home. Alex, Matt, Dave.]
Then, there was a going-away gathering on Monday to celebrate my departure on Tuesday. Except I got bumped from Tuesday's flight, so it was just a gathering.
[Up close and personal with Rich Joss. D.J. in the background.]
[Chuck gets ready to take it all off. Or, at least, his coat.]
Eating ice cream in the middle of the night is, like climbing (lounging), an important ritual. Here, Tad gets attacked by an ice cream cone.
And then wins.
Tucker opts for the safer bowl method.
And, there are always tours of the power plant. If you know the right people.
[Power plant.]
[Power-plant Dave.]
Dave and Matt and Tad had mustaches. Dave warned me of this via e-mail before I came back down the mountain. They had joined the mustache club. Eighteen or so men decided to shave their nice beards and leave their mustaches, each contributing $5 to a pot. Whoever is left at the end of January takes the dough. This first night in the climbing cave, Matt still had some nice chops going. The following day, those had to go. The idea was to worsen the mustache as time went on, to make the situation more painful. At first, chops and curling mustaches were fine. Then, mustaches had to be neatly trimmed. Now, at the time of this writing (January 28), they're down to Charlie Chaplins.
I digress. Look forward to photos of mustached men in future entries.
