10/19/92
Hello,
This is my first letter from Antarctica. I have been here just over a week. I got here around 3 PM on October 10th, which was a Saturday. I flew down on a C-141 airplane flown by the U.S. Airforce. It took about five hours. Working hours are 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM, six days a week. Sunday is our day off. Those are the scheduled working hours, but if need be we work until the job is done. The weather has been mostly nice. The temperature has averaged around 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit. The warmest it has been is 20 degrees. Even so, the snow is melting rapidly, and dirt is appearing everywhere. Today is cold and windy, a frigid -5 degrees and wind at about 20 knots. This is the coldest weather I have been in, but I am nice and warm indoors. It is nice to have an indoor job down here.
I spent just over two weeks working in Christchurch, New Zealand. I had only one full day off and two half days. Even so, I saw most of the city. There isn't too much there to see. The surrounding country side is more interesting. I only saw a small part of that. One very maddening thing is that virtually all the shops close at around 4 PM and are open only Saturday morning on the weekends. It is very hard to go shopping when the only time shops are open is when you're at work. Restaurants and bars were the only shops open in the evenings. The city is quite beautiful and it has a great Town Square right in the middle of the city. There are lots of parks all over. The buses were easy to get around on. I had a good time there, even though I didn't do much besides work.
My schedule has gotten a few wrinkles in it lately. Right now my schedule is to go to the South Pole in a couple of weeks to install the software I have been working on. I will probably be there for a few days. Then sometime in November I will go back to Christchurch for about a week, and then all the way back to Port Hueneme for a couple of weeks. After I am finished there I will come back down here for the remainder of the summer season, which ends sometime in February. The reason for my bouncing around like this is that I am the only person working on this computer program, so I am the one who has to make sure it is running properly. These locations (Port Hueneme, Christchurch, McMurdo Station, and South Pole Station) are the places where it is (or will be) installed and being used. I have to get input from the users of my program and make modifications based upon that input. I will also train them on the proper use of the program. Port Hueneme really needs help in this category. I will have an exciting time over the next few months, that is for sure.
When I first arrived I was assigned berthing in the "Jamesways" which are quonset hut shaped tents. That's right, TENTS. They squeeze eight people into them, which leaves only room for a bed, locker and maybe a small desk for each person. I didn't have a desk. It was quite cold in there. The tents were insulated and had multiple layers, but they were still cold. The floor was plywood, and there was one communal bathroom/shower facility for nine of these "Jamesways." It was not fun. So, I got some strings pulled and in a few days I moved into the dormitory. The dorms have small rooms (but they are warm) with two persons each. Two rooms share a single toilet and shower, which is between the rooms.
This is the layout of the two rooms. In the case of my room, the four of us in the two rooms turned one room into a sleeping area and the other room into a lounge area. It works out pretty well. To fit the four beds into one room they had to be stacked as bunkbeds. Since I was the last one to move in I am on the top of one of these bunks. The dormitory has three floors and I am on the top floor. There is a lounge area on each floor and a laundry facility on the first floor.
10/20/92
I have been doing a good amount of reading since I arrived on the Ice. I am about 2/3 done with a book I started reading almost two years ago. I should finish it in a couple of days. I am back into the reading mode. I like that. I brought about twenty fat books with me, so I have plenty of material to read. One of the helicopters that the Navy flies here for us crashed last week. It was beginning to storm pretty good, and there wasn't much visibility. From what I have heard, it just flew into the side of a hill. It took the rescue team about six hours to find them. By then the three passengers were dead, and the two pilots were in real bad shape due mostly to hypothermia, with core body temperatures of 88 an 93 degrees. The two survivors were flown to Christchurch. Two of the passengers were New Zealanders. Today I saw a helicopter carrying a piece of the wreckage back to town. It was pretty demolished.
10/23/92
It has been really nice weather most of the time. On a couple of days it was cold and windy, though. When the wind kicks up it gets real cold. The wind chill factor can make a 40 or 50 degree difference in the relative temperature. I have never been in this cold of weather before, but it isn't all that bad. When the temperature gets below freezing it's all the same. Twenty degrees and five degrees feel the same if there is no wind. The humidity is real low here, about 2% to 5% 1 have been told. That causes more problems in every day life than the cold does. Dry skin is a real factor, and static electricity is rampant. I pulled two bed sheet apart in the dark and it looked like a lightning storm. There were all these blue sparks everywhere. The computers here get zapped all the time. One bizarre thing that the cold does is that it freezes the snot inside your nose. It's a weird feeling. There are some unusual vehicles here. The snow, ice, and cold make for some strange requirements. The ones that have wheels have huge wheels. Lots of them have tracks. I plan on taking pictures of them because they are so unusual. That's about all for now. I need to finish this so I can get it into the mail. I have procrastinated long enough already. Please send mail if you are able. I enjoy mail immensely. Bye for now.
Map of area surronding McMurdo. Map of Antarctica.
