A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth
Travel Stories: Jason Anthony was working as a U.S. Antarctic Program fuels operator when he was called to remote Vostok Station. It was a trip he would lie to take.
Even for U.S. Antarctic regulars, awe is always part of a conversation about Vostok. Our rare glimpses of bearded, hard-worn Russian personnel and the rumors of their working conditions remind us of how easy our own jobs are. For USAP workers, most of whom live in comfy McMurdo, Vostok is synonymous with pain and suffering. For us, it’s a mysterious, daunting place that commands our respect.
Buckled into our paratrooper-type webbing benches, we jostled and lurched sideways as the Herc slid down the skiway—a runway for planes on skis—and lifted off. Each bench faced the other, with a line of cargo pallets running down the middle of the fuselage. The mostly silent mix of U.S. and Russian personnel either sloughed off their parkas or sunk into them with their eyes closed.
Every Antarctic flight is like this, each person isolated by the roar of the engines and the earplugs we use to shut it out. Hercs have only a few small portholes on each side of the fuselage, behind the benches. Because the plane is dark and the view is blinding, these are nearly useless. After leveling off, we take turns drifting back to the larger square windows in the rear exit doors.
Most of our guests seemed to be asleep by the time the Herc rose over the Transantarctic Mountains into East Antarctica. Vostok’s winter station manager, however, kept his eyes open, staring at the pale-green insulation across the military fuselage. His responsibility for the next year was to keep all 12 men safe and sane. Soon we were droning across an ice sheet the size of China.
Some of the stark Russian faces reminded me of American Civil War portraits staring out from sepia photos. Carved and rugged, dark and impassive: And these were the men who had not yet spent their year on the ice. Then again, the lines on their faces may have been from jetlag. They flew from St. Petersburg to Amsterdam to Singapore to Sydney to Christchurch to McMurdo on an epic one-way ticket.
Over the white emptiness, we veered across Antarctica’s bent tapestry of tightly packed lines of longitude. For three hours of our months-long summer day, time zones passed beneath us like crevasses. Imagine flying from Boston to Chicago and seeing nothing but whiteness out the window until suddenly, out of the snowy expanse, a small speck appears, like a distant dark raft.
Vostok looks to the approaching eye like a small broken blister on the ice cap’s alabaster skin. Mostly submerged by 40 years of accumulating snow, the station (several old small buildings - McMurdo has 100) is not a showpiece. Scattered broken-down equipment reminded me of junk-filled yards in rural America. Vostok, the earnest product of an intellectual nation, has the hollow look of poverty.
We landed, on the hard snow of the plateau. Our flight had launched in the balmy 30°F of sea-level McMurdo but landed in Vostok’s two mile-high -30°F. We’d climbed up to the jet stream and only come partway down, as if we’d ascended to a strange life in the clouds. Around the skiway was perfect whiteness, under a perfect blue bell jar of sky. Breaking up the emptiness were an immense radio tower and a “BOCTOK” sign at its foot. Each seven-foot-high Cyrillic letter (red, of course) stood alone, like the Hollywood sign.
The wonder I felt on arrival was interrupted, as it always is in the Antarctic hinterlands, by the noisy, stinky, busy work we do behind the Herc’s turboprops. The engines would continue to spin during our entire visit, spewing vaporized aviation diesel and keeping their gaskets warm. We pushed the cargo pallets by hand off the end of the plane’s loading platform, because Vostok’s forklift had broken down. Their 30-year-old snowmobile began to ferry loads to the base.
The snow beneath us was like light cement. In central Antarctica, zero humidity, deep cold, little accumulation, and steady winds create tiny snow grains and ice crystals that sinter into an airy white pavement. You can just as easily land a plane on it as cut it with a saw.
One man, just off the plane, with nothing before him but the fringe of the half-buried outpost, pulled off his hat, pulled out a pocket mirror, and checked his mussed black hair. I was reminded of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance journey, in which Shackleton, Crean, and Worsely, having arrived at Stromness whaling station after 17 horrendous months, began to fuss with haggard soot-caked hair and ragged clothes. Their concern, however, was that there might be women: Here at Vostok, this was unlikely. Women have on rare occasion done summer science here, but no woman has ever wintered at this small male-only plywood space station.
Wintering in central Antarctica is hardship duty in extremis. There is no way out. People can fall apart, with small irritations sometimes mutating into seething disputes. Some winters at America’s relatively comfortable South Pole station have ended with a once-joyful community split into enraged factions. And within the thinner walls and deeper cold of a Vostok winter, one of Antarctica’s most notorious events took place: a disputed chess game that ended in an ax murder.
Once I’d been assured that the Herc crew wasn’t going to try to take fuel, I set off over the white rise—years of plowed-out snow—toward the station. The visible exteriors of the station buildings were sun-bleached and rusting. Slumped-over tracked vehicles littered the outskirts.
Wearing the USAP parka is like wearing a sleeping bag, but at -30°F, it’s helpful. I would have left it in the plane, but it made walking the long path between skiway and base more comfy. On that walk, noisy Herc behind and Russian unknown ahead, I was able to briefly tune in to the immense silence of the continent. I can only compare it to walking over a frozen Atlantic Ocean. Until you’ve lived at length in the white abstraction of central Antarctica, it’s hard not to feel the weight of the frigid expanse crowding in on you. I can’t say that Vostok felt more isolated than other camps—one raft in the ocean feels like any other—but the tenuous barrier this facility maintains against the cold unsettles the American mind.
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz