Visions and Revisions

I mentioned that the tanker had arrived. Together with Rachel and Charissa, I toured the Maersk Peary and got an inside look at the ship that delivers the six million--six million!--gallons of fuel: enough to power McMurdo Station, Admunson-Scott South Pole Station, field camps all over the continent, and several smaller, multi-national outfits, including neighboring Scott Base. That's a lot of oil. Everything in Antarctica runs on oil. Frankly, it's a little scary. If suddenly we had to burn seal blubber to stay warm and cook our food, we would all die, the end. Ours is a tenuous grasp on this uncompromising land. All the water, heat, electricity, and transportation that makes our way of life on this continent possible relies entirely on the annual arrival of fuel.



A portion of the fuel delivered to McMurdo's big white tanks is piped into the bellies of C-130 aircraft and transported to South Pole. The New York Air Guard makes more than eighty flights across 600 miles of ice exclusively for this purpose---like truckers. Sometimes, since there's no other cargo, these Antarctican oil-truckers permit small groups of passengers to hitch a ride in the cab. Round here, a day-trip to the South Pole is known as a Sleigh Ride.

I sincerely don't know how it happened, by lottery or selection, or who picked my name out of the hat, but I got invited on a Sleigh Ride. Thunderstruck, I had to read the email several times before the words made sense. "Congratulations! You've been identified as a candidate..." The unofficial party line states that we're only supposed to have one boondoggle per season, and first-years never go on Sleigh Rides. It's one of the most coveted trips on station, the one mentioned with breezy mock-disdain by folk on their fourth or fifth seasons, the pipe dream for all the newbies at Orientation. I mean---it's a trip to the South Pole! Even after I learned that a handful of other galley 'rats had also received invitations, I thought surely someone had made a mistake, including me on this list.

A short meeting at the Chalet (the NSF's McMurdo headquarters) a few days later briefed us on the standard protocol. (Nothing around here happens without holding a safety meeting first.) Bring ECW and a sack lunch. Three hours flying each way, over the Ross Ice Shelf and the Transantarctic Mountains, in order to spend thirty minutes on the ground at Pole. Just long enough to take photos and go to the bathroom. The crew start pumping fuel as soon as the plane comes to a stop---they don't even turn off the engines---and the passengers had better be back, strapped into their jump seats in the cargo hold, by the time the delivery is finished. Or else.


The weather turned, as it will, and the anticipated Friday flight was rescheduled for the following Wednesday. Then on Sunday evening I went to work, opened my inbox, and discovered that we were leaving in the morning, which is to say, forty-five minutes after the end of my workday. That's how things happen on Antarctic time: when the window of opportunity opens, go!, no dallying. I like it.

It would be fair to say I wasn't good for much during the intervening ten hours. I think I made breakfast that day. I don't remember. Had I been making something with, you know, ingredients, like bread or cookie dough, I'd probably have left out the yeast, or the chocolate chips. My whole day passed in a haze of daydreamy absent-mindedness, alternating with bouts of racing through the galley on the back of the dish-cart, yodeling like a maniac. Finally Rachel shooed me out of the bakeshop at six-thirty. All I could think of was the South Pole. Going to the South Pole! The South Pole!

Among other things, a Sleigh Ride offered a brief escape from this eyesore mining town where I've been captive for six months solid. It's funny, and a little disheartening, to realize that McMurdo doesn't exist for its own sake. It's principal purpose---the Whole Point of keeping it open---is to operate as the gateway between the inhabitable world and the extremities of the rest of the continent (read: field camps). We distribute food and fuel, and process wastes. That's right. McMurdo is a GAS STATION. Maybe that was evident to everyone else from the beginning, talking about icebreakers and whatnot, but I think the arrival of the ships really brought it home for me. I was excited to get OUT.

Historically, Pole-bound explorers elected to build on Ross Island for its geographical convenience: the last solid-ground port that could be reached (and resupplied) by ship. What I'm saying here is not much has changed in a hundred years. It was (and remains) a cache, a warehouse, a staging depot. In 1902 Scott erected Discovery Hut, filled it to the eaves with hardtack and hot chocolate, waited for the right conditions, and then set off for 90 degrees south.


On board the "sleigh," I was shocked and appalled to note that most of my fellow passengers did not appear to share my enthusiasm. They looked bored. And at one point I wanted to stand up and start kicking people furiously in the shins. What's wrong with you? Don't you understand? We're going to the South Pole! I have a theory that the galley houses many of the folk who took a job--any job--just to get to Antarctica. A number of those employed in other trades, however, were tempted hither by a good salary and good benefits---"I can make a year's pay in six months' time!"---Antarctica is neither here nor there. A pesky locational detail. To them, I suppose, a Sleigh Ride amounts to little more than a day off from work. To each his own, but it drives me crazy.

Dan, one of the mid-rats DAs, and I were both visibly vibrating with excitement, and the crew, perceiving this, invited us to the cockpit. For about an hour, we flew over the Ross Ice Shelf, that vast frozen plane of Nothing. Answering my interested queries, a uniformed woman wearing headphones explained the empty green screen before her--the radar can't detect ice--and then zoomed out the instrument far enough for us to see the chain of Transantarctic Mountains coming up ahead.





Before long, the mountains were everywhere. Glaciers run through them like slow-moving rivers. The bleat of the aircraft didn't encourage much conversation, but passing through those mountains we gazed through the windows in awestruck silence. Here stands a land untouched by humanity. It's so harsh and beautiful that it stops you in your tracks. I cannot begin to fathom the mindset of the men who crossed that brutal, crevasse-ridden terrain on foot. What made them think they could do it? That they should do it?

Last spring, visiting McCarthy, I savored the wild loveliness of Alaska feeling guiltily that my presence necessarily detracted from it, that I was destroying it by being there. Antarctica regularly provokes a similar self-consciousness, but with something else besides. Maybe it's fear. Flying over crags and glaciers that have never suffered a human footprint was exhilarating and…terrifying. Awesome in the original sense of the word. In all my travels, here lies the one place in the world where mankind's occupation of the planet appears not just inconsequential but very recent. Like gazing into the mouth of a volcano. LIke walking over a sleeping god. It reveals us as the soft, short-lived animals that we are.

What a piece of extraordinary luck that I should have the opportunity to see those mountains, that white emptiness, from my comfortable, airborne vantage, but I couldn't help feeling that we have no business here. Humans don't belong in Antarctica at all. Microbes haven't evolved to survive the conditions on this continent, for crying out loud. Antarctica moves at a geological pace, eroding mountains with wind and ice, steadily burying dinosaurs (and research stations) under miles of ice. It doesn't compromise. It's as remote and inhospitable as outer space. What a monstrous piece of folly for us to insist on being here.




But I got to see it. Me.



I've never so appreciated the foolhardy hubris of our species.


Scott and his team made it through those mountains to the Pole, then died of starvation and cold on the return voyage, evidently very proud of their accomplishment.

"For my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of providence, determined still to do our best to the last..."

It's quite an interesting story.


Admunsen beat him to it, of course.

Preoccupied with wars, and probably awaiting the advance of technology, it took another half-century for anybody to return to 90 degrees south, and they didn't try to approach by land again. Ostensibly they arrived not in the name of Honor but for Science. Maybe some Politics thrown in for good measure.

"The US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was established by air over 1956–1957 for the International Geophysical Year and has been continuously staffed since then by research and support personnel."

"Before November 1956, there was no permanent human structure at the South Pole, and very little human presence in the interior of Antarctica at all. The few scientific stations in Antarctica were located on and near its seacoast. The Amundsen-Scott Station has been rebuilt, demolished, expanded, and upgraded several times since 1956.

"The station stands at an elevation of 2,835 meters (9,301 ft) on the interior of Antarctica's nearly featureless ice sheet, which is about 2,850 meters (9,350 ft) thick at that location."

The Pole's particular combination of high altitude and low barometric pressure meant that I was no more than two minutes out of the plane, trekking around the Mothership to the Poles, before I began to feel light-headed. The sensation intensified the impression that I had traveled outside of normal time and space. I'd gone out with the unicorn. Paul did a fine job of summarizing the matter:

"Apparently, the South Pole averages a barometric pressure of 513 mmHg, which is equivalent to about an altitude of 3200 meters (10,500 feet). Seems the combination of weather systems and lack of water in the air creates a situation of less pressure than you would get elsewhere at that altitude. So, you were working with about 2/3rds of your normal amount of O2."

Not that I stopped for a second. Thirty minutes is only thirty minutes. I was gonna see the Pole or pass out trying, by god! But many Polies experience terrible headaches during their first weeks in residence, and every so often an incoming visitor suffers a case of altitude sickness and gets rushed back to McMurdo.




Some people get hung up on the fact that Ross Island is, well, an island, and spending a season at McMurdo means they haven't actually set foot on the Antarctic continent---which makes me wonder if anyone visiting Manhattan dares to believe they aren't really in America---so going to South Pole offers these misguided fools a chance to scratch the seventh continent off their To Do lists "officially." I don't suffer from this particular brand of idiocy, but there's something extraordinary about standing at the southernmost point on the planet.


The South Pole. Looking away from the station, which resembles a blue barnacle, there is no scenery, no wildlife, no indigenous culture---nothing but a flat, white, empty plane stretching uninterrupted in every direction. Desolate, desolate, desolate. Except desolate, in my experience, suggests a landscape abandoned. The Pole hasn't been abandoned. There's just nothing there. It's so empty it presses---it made me want to glance over my shoulder. The ice meets the sky in an indistinct blur of murky white; there are no landmarks, no points of reference.


But that is precisely the point. It's a landscape of the mind, a blank, an empty page, the farthest south you can go before you start heading north again. I wonder if Scott, Shackleton, Admunson, or any of those other Pole-bound crazies---even Peary---ever managed to articulate their obsession. They certainly had plenty of opportunity to turn it over in their minds as they traversed hundreds of miles of ice. Prior to embarking on his Terra Nova attempt, Scott wrote, "The main object of the expedition is to reach the South Pole and secure for the British Empire the honour of that achievement." Please. "Honour" doesn't even begin to rationalize the world's fixation with the Poles. I think we seek empty places---wilderness, outer space, the Poles---in order to make meaning, and in so doing reaffirm ourselves, over and over---but the South Pole defies the human mind.

A team of McMurdoans travels to Pole overland every year to deliver heavy equipment (and fuel), driving CATs pulling sledges, camping in trailers. It's called The Traverse---three months in a rumbling caravan, staring at an indistinct horizon of white.

The participants are only allowed to do it once.

Maybe it's something to do with magnetism.

I should probably point out that there are several "poles" at the South Pole, and none of them mark a permanent fixture--the Earth's axis "wobbles," the magnetic pole scuttles all over the place, and the geographic pole slides steadily about 10 meters every year, due to the drift of the continental ice shelf. The ceremonial South Pole---the candy stripe job above---stays put for cosmetic reasons, while the geographical Pole receives regular updates. The residents at the Station hold a stake-moving ceremony annually on New Year's Day, so it had been freshly repositioned shortly before I visited.


It also happens that we just finished celebrating the centennial of Admunson's and Scott's journeys to this most god-forsaken destination.


Wrapping up our photo shoot, Dan and I turned our attention to the Mothership, the principal edifice at South Pole. The new station is constructed in sections with science, medical, administration, communications, multipurpose rooms, a greenhouse, and living quarters called berthing, which I found inordinately funny. Various sections can be sealed during emergencies. It is entirely self-sufficient---except for the part where it runs on jet fuel---and during the winter it seals up like the space station that so many visitors compare it to.

Many features at Pole are buried under the snow, a circumstance that necessitates a lot of maintenance bulldozing, and one that precipitated the recent deconstruction of the overwhelmed BioDome--not a contingency that the original settlers foresaw in the '50s. It's kind of a problem, but they're adapting. A traveling circus of Jamesways houses a portion of the summer population (up to 200 scientists and support staff), and these small, portable buildings can be raised on berms over the winter. They're also a lot easier to dig out than large structures. The Mothership, having replaced the BioDome, sits on stilts which can be jacked up an additional seven meters to compensate for the accumulation of blowing snow.


I was hailed by Casey, a longtime resident, standing guard just to one side of the Poles, ensuring that none of the visitors wandered astray. He remembered me from win-fly--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he recalled a short, red-haired baker from win-fly, but I'm going to give him extra credit for remembering my name. Strictly speaking, Sleigh Riders are not welcome in the Mothership because they make a mess and forget about the time. Accompanied by a local, however...

I started asking questions about the station, and in turn Casey asked the lucky group standing within earshot what they wished to see. Is the store open? The store is not open. Several people voiced a desire to get their passports stamped at the Pole Post Office. I mentioned that my friend Panda was substitute-cooking for ten days while some of the Pole winter-over cooks were on R&R in Christchurch. And SCIENCE! I would like to see some SCIENCE! How about some SCIENCE? Casey nodded and ushered us towards The Beer Can, which houses a spiral staircase leading into the Mothership.


(The stairs nearly knocked me flat--you try doing three flights in 15 lbs. of cold-weather clothing on 2/3 the usual levels of oxygen.)

Obviously delighted with such an attentive audience, Casey delivered a tour at break-neck pace, cramming in as much information and as many sights as possible. I didn't get any photos of the interior, more's the pity, but it was too dim and we didn't have time to stop. Passport-stampers got their passports stamped, and Casey led me to the Galley doors and disappeared to ask after Bill. Needless to say, Panda was astounded to see me at Pole, and I gave him a big hug before racing down the hall behind my tour guide as he barked out the names of the rooms we passed by.


It's all a muddled whirlwind in my mind. The gymnasium! Berthing! Labs! The music room! The dining hall! Berthing! The movie lounge! More berthing! We reached the dispatch center, clear at the opposite end from where we started, and he herded me and a couple of others inside. Situated on the corner of the Mothership, it was lined with windows on two sides, and Casey took advantage of the view to point out Ice Cube and the telescope.

The South Pole is a unique research site that supports projects ranging from cosmic observations to seismic and atmospheric studies. The extremely dry, cold air is perfectly suited for observing Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation-the faint light signature left by the Big Bang that brought the universe into being nearly 14 billion years ago.

Another large astrophysical project at the pole is Ice Cube--—a one-cubic-kilometer international high-energy neutrino detector built in the clear ice, 1.25-2.5 kilometers below the South Pole Station."

What a tease. I wish I could have seen more.

And then it was time to bid our farewells and get back in the plane.


I sat in the cockpit for takeoff, still marveling at the white emptiness around me. I don't think I could live at Pole. I'm going to lay that right out there. I don't think my mind is well-suited to the featureless landscape; it would start to fill in the blank spaces with inventions of its own. But what a thrill to know that. What a humbling thing to catch a glimpse of Antarctica at its most real and know it would take my brain apart.

AND. I can put a big black dot at the bottom of my map. Ha! The South Pole! I'll have dreams about it for the rest of my life.

Last week I flew to the South Pole. The list of extraordinary things that I've had the privilege of putting to words here has grown truly extra-ordinary lately, hasn't it? (I also toured the Maersk Peary oil tanker, and ate a 120,000-year-old piece of ice.) The Sleigh Ride was so unexpected---I literally rolled into work at 9pm, still sleepy-eyed, and opened an email that read: pack a lunch and report to the post office building at 7:45 in the morning---and so delightful---the South Pole!---that I want to do it justice. Right now, with ten days left on the Ice, that's a difficult mood to capture. I tried music, and I tried reading, and I tried coffee, and I tried going for a walk, and I tried eating Frosty Boy, but still I just want to tell everyone to go fuck themselves.

In part I blame Pole, because it's all downhill from there, and in part I'm going to blame Brian. Brian, who was here during win-fly and who will occupy the bake shop this winter, arrived in town the same day I went to Pole. A week of small miracles ensued on his return. I made a couple of jokes that nobody understood about Brian being the messiah. That snarky old pirate has intuitively, almost effortlessly, restored order and harmony to the anarchic bakeshop, and what an enormous relief, but without the struggles at work to draw focus, suddenly my attention wanders. Good lord, I'm about to leave! Turns out I'M TIRED. Tired of working, god damn it. Tired of stooping over a bench for sixty hours a week. My hands hurt, and not from the ordinary cracks on the surface. I spend so much time grasping tools and sheet pans that all the bits and pieces of anatomy up and down my wrists and forearms are sore, and I clench my hands in my sleep. It drives me crazy. I will never be tall or fast or graceful and my eyesight is shot, and I'm okay with that, but I need my hands. I stopped lifting weights a while back because I couldn't bring myself to curl my fingers around a five-pound dumbbell. My first taste of arthritis.

And lo! Turns out I'm tired of living at McMurdo! I keep having dreams about being in a cage. What a surprise. I'm tired of the lack of privacy, of autonomy, of mobility. I'm tired of living among coworkers, of being civil to one and all, of talking. EVERYONE WILL PLEASE STOP TALKING. I know, I know, life at the Hermitage spoiled me terribly. The little niceties that make it possible for us to cohabitate at close quarters for months on end have worn my patience threadbare. I'm tired of sleeping in earplugs, waking up at three in the afternoon because the fuckwit across the hall is watching a western blaring at ten thousand decibels. I'm tired of brushing my teeth elbow-to-elbow with three other women in front of the bathroom mirror. I'm tired of running a gauntlet of galley-rats every time I want hot water for a cup of tea. There's nowhere to escape; even out for a solitary walk, we all hail passersby with a nod and a greeting as if by universal agreement. EVERYONE WILL PLEASE JUST GO AWAY!

I miss the company of those I know well enough that I don't have to be so fucking polite all the time. I miss sitting on the floor. I miss talking with my mouth full and wearing tank tops without having anyone make a big deal about it. At the same time, I miss the anonymity of living in a town occupied by more than 1000 souls. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name---but sometimes you don't. Sometimes you want to sit on the metro among complete strangers. I don't like being recognized by a random firefighter as the red-haired girl-baker who was wandering down the hall in her pajamas this morning. Some days I finish my shift and just lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling, because I can't bear the idea of seeing anyone I recognize and saying "hey how's it going" to one more person when I really don't give a shit how it's going.

And I'm tired of being tired. I arrived here after three months of perpetual motion, feeling energetic and comfortable in my skin, and as the months of confinement passed that feeling slowly drained away, leaving behind a discontented residue of exhaustion and frustration. The gym was a tolerable placeholder for a couple of months, but it's boring, I'm sick of being leered at (see: gender imbalance), and sick of overhearing Fox News. EVERYONE WILL PLEASE STOP TALKING. And do you think it's a coincidence that they named it the Gerbil Gym? Caged indeed. A treadmill is no substitute for a wandering lifestyle. I willingly traded many things in order to be here, but I want my body back now, thank you very much. I'm tired of inferring a negative relationship between the food going in my mouth and the fit of my trousers.

AND I AM TIRED OF DRUNK PEOPLE.

It's funny, some folks are perfectly at ease here. Panda said the other day, "Eh, I could do another six months, easy," and I was floored, because I can be packed and out the door in fifteen minutes. Other people ache to see trees again, or to sit on a warm sand beach, or to revel in the darkness of night. These are things I'm looking forward to, yes---plus rain and color and the whole lost world of smells, and I imagine that my first trip to a grocery store will be so gloriously overwhelming that I may have to sit on the floor and put my head between my knees. But it isn't Antarctica that I anticipate leaving, it's McMurdo.

Did I mention that I'd been to the South Pole? I polished an Erebus crystal and learned how to bind a book in the Coptic style. McMurdo Sound, cleared of ice by the wind and tide, presently hosts a perpetual cast of minke whales going ppppfffff!, and the molting, motionless Emperor penguin standing patiently near the eight-mile marker on the ice road to Pegasus runway now has his own Facebook page. Antarctica remains extraordinary. That's what Antarctica does best (and thank god for that, or I'd never have withstood my employment). My roommate passed on six episodes of Frozen Planet that served to confirm the addiction. I want to come back to this continent again, perhaps to the Peninsula side, perhaps to Palmer if I am very, very lucky. I find myself toying with the idea of applying to be a cook in a field camp someday, and more than anything I'd love to travel on a research vessel, where the Science is RIGHT THERE. But it's time to go now, I'm tired, and frankly I never want to set foot in McMurdo again.

Eric and I were discussing cookies this week. It bears repeating that Eric is a bread-baker. When Eric first arrived he declared within my hearing, "If it isn't alive, I don't make it," and found himself on the receiving end of the most scornful stare in Antarctica. What about cookies? He's come around since then. All season I've picked his brain about gluten and hydration, fresh yeast and instant yeast, making no secret of my ignorance; he finally unbent enough to ask how I made the SYP chocolate chip cookies. We talked about browned butter and the ratio of brown sugar to white sugar as he copied the [current] recipe from my Green Brain. "There was some salt on top, too, right?"

"Yes, just a few flakes of kosher. I think it really sets off the chocolate."

Salt is a big deal to bakers. I'm only just beginning to figure this out. Salt breathes life into sweet foods. I loved the salted caramels at the chocolate shop, but never thought further than the fact that they were delicious. I'm learning. I've been itching to try this recipe from Orangette (a roundabout adaptation from Tartine) since she posted it, and I mentioned it to Eric. "It's too bad all we have is kosher. Wish there was some other kind of flake salt kicking around."

He agreed. "What we really need is some fleur de sel."

Sea salt.

SEA salt.


It just so happens that I have enormous quantities of sea salt just lying around in solution, entirely at my disposal! Over the last few weeks, the crack in the ice has yawned into a beautiful blue lake full of liquid sea. Open water reaches clear up to the edge of Hut Point. Reasonably clean water, too, if we agree not to think about whatever the Navy got up to during the first half-century of their occupation of this island, and whatever residue they may have left behind. Cleaner than your sea, I bet. It doesn't belong to anyone. There is nothing at all to prevent me from collecting a portion of this sea and extracting the salt from it. Gadzooks, Antarctic sea salt!

Even before the shift ended that morning, I'd picked out some buckets for collecting water. The galley keeps and reuses containers almost as vigilantly as my margarine-tub-hoarding father, so we have a respectable array to choose from. Excited as I was to make salt, I would like to report here that as a former dry-cabin dweller I knew better than to go for the five-gallon drowning-baby-buckets. Lesson number one of hauling my own water was: you haul it, you don't waft it on a breeze. Water is heavy. Half a mile becomes a long walk with five gallons draped casually over each arm. I fished through the stacks of plastic until I found a couple of odor-free four-kilo peanut-butter buckets and lids.

Remarkably, as I trotted to Hut Point to scoop up some salt water, I discovered that the ice breaker had arrived that very morning, and was leisurely cutting inelegant dark scars through what used to be a smooth, frozen plane in every direction. Seeing it out there was, well, exciting! Whether or not we'd have an icebreaker this year was, if you recall, a matter of some importance, and behold, here's our much-anticipated shipful of Russians suddenly circuiting the McMurdo Sound.


Exciting, yes, and disorienting, too. There's good reason that the availability of sea salt didn't occur to me sooner. Most of the time McMurdo's situation on an island, near an ocean, never enters my head. At least eight months of the year, you can't tell where the land ends and the sea ice begins. It's all one big plane of frozen vastness: The Ice. For months we walked and drove over the frozen sea as carelessly as if it were solid ground; massive aircraft landed on it for nine weeks. Suddenly the ship's presence in the same plane as our pedestrian activities turned that reliably solid white surface into an amorphous, unpredictable piece of ocean.


It even smells like ocean. Not like seaweed or washed-up-dead-things-on-the-beach; like ocean. Like salt. It wakes up parts of my brain that I haven't had to use for the last five months, that I didn't realize were sleeping.




"After collecting your salt water, the first thing to do is to strain it through cheese cloth or a fine sieve…to make sure any sand or small bits of debris get filtered out of the salt water."

I chuckled about this on my first trip down to the water's edge--debris, ha ha--but of course over the next couple of days the icebreaker proceeded to chop up the ice and distribute all of the surface pollution into the water, and the tanker arrived with our fuel delivery not three days later, taking up residence at the ice pier and kicking god-only-knows-whatall runoff into the sea. I collected my salt at a good time, I think.


The station's water treatment plant produces all of our fresh water from this very same salt sea by reverse osmosis: they take out the sodium chloride molecules. For a regular lunatic like myself, however, who doesn't store a lot of hydrostatic pressure in jars under the bed, the easiest way to extract sea salt from salt water is to take out the water. I can't even tell you how many people looked at me, when I told them I was making salt, and said uncertainly, "So...what? You just boil it?"


Science!

I think it took about seven hours for the first experiment to boil completely dry. Armed with information from this post over at Not Without Salt, I expected to render about half a cup of white crystals from my peanut-butter buckets, but I wound up with more than two cups. (Salinity of annually-frozen Antarctic waters: discuss.) I gave away a lot of the first batch, then made a second (before the tanker arrived) by cooking the water down to a salt slurry, pouring it into a shallow pan, and allowing evaporation to do the rest. (This was supposed to produce a flakier salt. It didn't.)

Part of me acknowledges that most fifth-graders, having graduated to projects testing laundry detergents or decaying meat in brand-name carbonated beverages, would look askance at my delight in having distilled salt from the raw ocean, but mostly I'm just ridiculously pleased with myself. I made salt! Antarctic sea salt!


When I get around to those cookies, I'll be sure to let you know.

A 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012. Suomi NPP is...the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth."

The Suomi what?

NASA launched the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, or NPP, on Oct. 28, 2011, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. NPP was renamed Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, or Suomi NPP.

A polar-orbiting satellite? But that means it's checking in right here!!!

You won't believe this. Or maybe you will! For a span of about four hours, this blog was blocked by the United States Antarctic Program in accordance with the NSF blah blah blah agreement. Not like I got a message in my inbox about it, either. I tried to bring up my homepage and the screen said: no. This site has been blocked. Just like that! In a strange game of blind-man's bluff, I could add or edit posts through the dashboard, which is password-protected, but I couldn't view or even preview any of my own pages. Great heavens. I've been censored.


I can't decide if this is hilarious or horrifying. Helios seems to think it was inevitable. It isn't as though they were violating my freedom of speech, because I could still say whatever I please, just that nobody operating out of the Antarctic network would be able to read it.

It's a strange feeling. A lot of torrents sites are blocked, and Skype severely frowned upon, ostensibly to prevent us from jamming up the bandwidth with illegal music and video downloads, preventing the scientists from doing their work. And of course porn, gambling, and whatever other "mature content" trips the wires of the filtering system. We were warned to be mindful of what we put in our blogs, too. I'm not surprised by the tap on all of our internet activities, but in a detached, speculative way, I can't help but wonder whether there's a machine out there registering particular words and phrases, or whether a real human being has the unenviable job of reading through our blogs (and there are a lot of them) and individually earmarking them for objectionable content.


Hi, censor! Enjoy this penguin comic. I had to get it sent by a third party, because The Perry Bible Fellowship is blocked, too.

Mid-rats bakers mostly make Breakfast. We make some other things, Rachel and I, sure; but our principal concern, the driving force behind all of our activities, is Breakfast. It's quite a task. We take it in turns. At the beginning of our shift, 9pm, we greet each other amiably, wash hands, don aprons and ask: who is making Breakfast? The process consists mainly of emptying boxes. Boxes of frozen pastries that arrive to us after a minimum of two years in transit and/or storage. The rest is smoke and mirrors: thawing them or baking them, gussying them up with cinnamon sugar, with chocolate, with drizzles of powdered-sugar icing. For the sake of our pride and our sanity, we balance these abominable pastries with box-mix muffins and coffeecakes, homemade scones and quick breads--but the truth is that around here people like shitty pastry. They like the Sara Lee frozen cheese danish best.

That's the routine, six days a week. And then on Sunday, by our powers combined, we make Brunch, which is a different animal altogether. In a more perfect world, the head baker would put together a menu, and the minions would busy themselves throughout the week with preparing the various elements of Brunch, stashing them in the freezer until the big day. We don't live in a perfect world. As it happens, our head baker got the sack not too long ago; the lead baker standing in for him is…struggling.

Not much has changed for the mid-rats bakers, to be honest: we defaulted to semi-autonomy months ago, when we transitioned to the night shift, and we keep making Breakfast, because that's what mid-rats bakers do. But the question of Brunch begins to wear on our patience. We're tired of waiting for someone to behave like a manager and take charge. Explaining the widespread preference for down-home desserts and pastries to a French-trained-SoCal-organic-ethicalvegetarian-yoga-yuppie lead baker has proven…a challenge. He isn't unpleasant or mean, and he isn't really stupid, but he's isn't helpful, either, and he doesn't get it. Gibassier and Küchen are delicious but we serve them for days, trying to get rid of them. This community does not like scones. They do not appreciate the labor involved in scratch croissants. They don't know how to pronounce "pithiviers," nor do they demonstrate any interest in eating it. They like white-trash food. There, I said it. Trailer park fare. Wonder bread and Cheez Whiz. Tater tots and chili mac. Rice Krispy Treats and Hostess cupcakes. The trashier the better. When it doubt, cover it in chocolate syrup and Non Dairy Whipped Topping. And sprinkles.

Initially I found this hugely disheartening, then after a while I began to see a certain utility to it. As a baker, I spend a lot of time standing in the shadow of French, German, and Austrian traditions, but as a home-school baker, at the end of the day I like people to eat what I'm making. So oscillating between Grassroots Solidarity and Utter Disgust, Rachel and I try to meet the plebs halfway. Sometimes I want to die of shame. Other times I get a lot of vicarious pleasure from making things As Awful As Possible. And it requires some creative thinking: when you're out of cream until the next freshies delivery, melt canned hot fudge ice cream topping with shortening and powdered milk to make a chocolate glaze. Hey, presto! Who knew? And they make people so happy, those junky, simple foods. Go with it.


What is that old saw I'm thinking of? "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."


Ladies and gentlemen, taking matters into our own hands, the mid-rats bakers staged a Trailer Park Brunch. Oh yes we did.

Rachel volunteered to tackle doughnuts. Doughnuts require a field trip to The Hot Side, because that's where the fryer lives. The fryer scares me a little. It's a bathtub of boiling oil. But it certainly has its uses. During previous seasons, Rachel attests, they made doughnuts for Brunch nearly every week. So she's got plenty of experience. She's a professional. She knew exactly what she was angling for. Not sufganiot or apple fritters, either, oh no: glazed chocolate cake doughnuts and Homer Simpson-style yeast doughnuts with pink frosting and yes---you begin to see where this is going---sprinkles.



(I think I'd have made Donettes, myself, but it was her project.)



Eric, the bread baker who has only recently become an official mid-rat, wanted to do pigs in a blanket, but we couldn't unearth any Li'l Smokies from the bowels of the big freezer. And his strength lies in yeasted doughs, not imitation Pillsbury biscuits, so between mountains of sandwich bread, he made Bagel Bites and miniature Bagel Dogs instead. They were exactly as awful as they should have been. With mustard. And sprinkles sesame seeds.


Tyler (the mid-rats sous chef and Rachel's boyfriend) wanted badly to contribute somehow, so for the mid-rats dinner (served around 5am) he made Hamburger Helper. (No sprinkles.) He kept stirring it around proudly. "Look!" he said. "It looks so nice! Doesn't it look nice? I even cut up the noodles a little bit, see?"


My roommate, Kim, suggested Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. Thank god for the internet, because I can't remember ever having been to Red Lobster in my life. Essentially it's a Bisquick-based drop biscuit loaded with cheese and garlic powder. Hilariously, considering all the prefab shit kicking around the kitchen, we don't have any Bisquick on station. None at all. And the purveyors of copycat recipes adamantly insist that Cheddar Bay Biscuits start with Bisquick, so I had to look up another recipe and make Bisquick from scratch: flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, and shortening. Did you catch that? I HAD TO MAKE BISQUICK. Another of those benchmark moments in baking, like the day I made a bread dough that weighed more than I did. The rest was easy.

Almost immediately after the plan for Trailer Park Brunch was hatched, I decided to make Pop Tarts. The only thing trashier than a Pop Tart is a Twinkie. (I'll get to it eventually, I'm sure.) I researched several recipes for scratch Pop Tarts and found all of them wanting. Clever home bakers trying to make the toaster's favorite cardboard treat a healthy breakfast item. Whole wheat flour? Organic homemade preserves? Savory pesto and olive fillings? No, no, no. I'm sure it's delicious, but no. This is not the venue for those sorts of hippie innovations. And none of them included frosting. Where is the frosting? A Pop Tart must have frosting!



In the end, I most closely followed Smitten Kitchen's version, quantity blown into the stratosphere. It's so entertaining, these days, to read a recipe that yields nine. Nine tarts! How cute! Nine! Between Eric and I, we made more than two hundred and fifty. And by god they had frosting. And sprinkles.


They weren't perfect. Not by a long shot. Too many oozing tarts; too much dough to filling; and a good flaky pastry dough (ahem) puffs like there's no tomorrow, which was kind of a problem. I would approach them very differently if I attempted to make Pop Tarts again, roll them a lot thinner, vent them more carefully. I expect my cohorts would say the same of their respective projects. But---am I allowed to say this publicly?---all of that trashy food was awfully tasty. I got a positive comment card on those idiot Pop Tarts. We never get positive comment cards. I wonder how many poor fools tried to put them in the toaster. I wonder how many of the 250 were smuggled away in Tupperware for later this week. They love that shit.

And finally we were having fun at work.


Why the hell don't we do this more often?