Life in the cold

This year at Pole, I got hired as a carpenter helper. I originally was hoping to get on as an electrician helper, or maintenance, but by the time Cori and I decided to come back, all those spots had been filled. Our former supervisor, who'd been begging us for the past 3 years to come back, got me on with the carpenters. I'm not a carpenter, never wanted to be, but, I thought in the back of my mind that I was enough of a well rounded individual to be able to pass myself off as a beginning carpenter. --I now laugh at that foolish notion every time I try to hammer a simple nail. Whether it's the mittens I work in, the extreme cold that makes the wood split, or the body harness that causes me to flounder around; those nails seem to keep eluding me. Not just the nails, the screws that dont seem to want to go in, or jump off the roof whenever I try to put them in. Those simple, pesky tools of the trade have humbled me to no end! --Luckily, I'm not the only one who has difficulties with our daily battle on the roof. Whenever I'm about ready to throw that hammer over with the nails, I take a look around and see someone else shaking their head, and you just have to laugh! We're at the South Pole! --I sure do miss those rocks though!

I think one of the hardest things to get used to at the South Pole is the round the clock sunlight. I work a swing shift, meaning I start as 2 p.m. and go till midnight. Only, it doesn't matter, because it's just as light at midnight as it is at 7 a.m. The sun is just in a different spot on the horizon. It makes it especially tough when you plan on going to bed "early". I have planned on doing so evser since I started working, but it's hard to when you know it's light out, and there's so much commotion outside. My room is pretty dark, but I can still see pinpoints where the light comes in, and almost feel that sunlight! Most people here it seems, live on about an average of 6 hours of sleep a night. A lot of light sleepers get less. Once you're up and going though, it hardly seems to matter, because that sun that seems to rob you of sleep, just seems to give you endless energy here, like the energizer bunnies, we go,go,go... Until we get back to New Zealand, where we sleep for a week!

It's an interesting thing, this South Pole adventure. For everythin from it's complete emptiness, to it's unreal temperatures; Today was -27 F (-60 windshield), and we consider this an incredible day! --It is, if you consider that just over 24 hours ago it was -50 (-78 windshield).--So what is it that attracts people like us to come here? --Not just once, but in a lot of cases, people here have made careers of it! There is some kind of strange draw to the Antarctic continent. A draw to test yourself, your will, endurance, your inner core, over and over again, every day, 24 hours a day. -I'm not kidding. For one, most of us construction folks sleep in the eqivalent of tents. Large canvas tents. The heat is constantly on, but depending on your proximaty to the furnace, this doesn't necessarily mean you'll have a completely warm room. For instance; my bed is warm, but I put a six-pack on the floor one night, to chill, and to my surprise and dissapointment the next day, it was completely frozen. -Then there was the morning the heater went out altogether. Just let me say, it wasn't too hard to get dressed that morning, knowing that my Extreme Cold Weather gear would be warmer than where I was sleeping! --Sleeping. Another challenge in itself, and a true test of your mental stamina the first week you're here. One would think that a person working outside for 9 hours in -45 weather and carrying around 30 pounds of clothing wouldn't have a problem sleeping. That would be true if said person went home to their quiet bungalow in the country afterwards. We, however, live in tents in the center of a massive construction zone. A lot has to happen here in the 4 month window mother nature allows for man to try and keep his footprint here. All the snow that blows in during the other 8 months has to be cleared from around the station and pushed about a 1/2 mile downwind. This requires a 24 hour plow operation with an army of D9 tractors, pushing that snow, right by our happy tent city. Many nights, you are awakened by the ground shaking operation happening 100 ft. from where you sleep. -Some nights however, the groan of the tractors are a distant roar, and you do get used to it, but trying to sleep while a c-130 cargo plane lands and idles for a half hour is another thing altogether! They're on a round the clock schedule as well. --Why don't we jump the next available c-130 out of this ridiculous madness? --There is just something about this challenge that you can't quit. We all owe it to ourselves to see it through, and as mad as it sounds,-- it's a really, really good time.

Its frickin freezing out here!