Tonight, a group of us closed the evening by watching the movie, Apollo 13. It was the tail end of a series each Sunday night that included documentaries and a mini-series about the Apollo space program.

I remember, growing up, of boyhood obsessions with rockets, with the lunar module, with the entire idea of our traversing to another planetary body. Some of the first drawings that I remember hanging on a wall were of the Apollo spacecraft, dreams marking the summer before third grade. There was still a public excitement about NASA and our pursuits beyond Earth’s atmosphere, or so I remember. The shuttle program was exciting, I tracked satellites to the other planets, and the images of the Challenger disaster are still seared in my mind.

Lately, it seems, the only public information I find regarding NASA deals with budget cuts, the end of the shuttle program (and its lack of a clear replacement), or the Columbia accident. It’s rare to see passion, fire, or drive toward the exploration of our heavens, at least that as directly experienced by fellow human beings.

I don’t aspire to be an astronaut myself (unlike a very committed man here, but I still dream. The auroras never cease to steal my breath or the moon to add shadowed comfort to a late night. My imagination runs rampant that here, on the bottom of the Earth, if I just let loose my feet, I might fall into the stars below…

…and I find it troubling, that in order to explore the wonder that grew in me as a child, I have to look to our actions, our stories, from before when I was born. To go to the moon, Mars, or else may not be the most pragmatic choice possible for a society, but to unify as a community behind that idea, that ideal? To me that seems a far better focus for our energies than war.

Posted by noblehobo at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our station is sleep-addled today, a community-wide malaise of exhaustion and the tired mind. The vast majority of us were woken at 5 AM when a fire alarm went off in the Rodwell, the building that provides our water supply. The Rodwell, an out building, is several hundred yards from station, so a crowd of bleary-eyed folk dressed and hustled to respond. It was -80 F, with a 12 knot wind.

In the end, there was no major surprise, just a small footnote in our response to any alarm as a serious one. A fan in a heater had gone out, allowing the heating element to warm the air directly below a heat sensor, rather than dispersing it throughout the room. All told, the response, stand-down, and investigation took little more than thirty minutes. As for getting back to sleep, however…

Conversations today represent the lost dream-time. Words are flipped, brains are scattered, and trains of thought rumble in anything but a straight line. It makes for an interesting (and laughable) series of personal interactions, light-hearted moments, and deep thoughts - the best parts of sleep deprivation.

It’s exhaustion like this that makes it difficult to maintain relationships with friends and family off-continent. Our community, insular in nature, is an easy out to turn to. When the day is over, dumping down in front of a movie with several others makes an easy escape. We stay entertained in our own ways, from modern media to evenings of pub trivia, or the upcoming race (BF5K) and concert (Polestock ‘08) this weekend. We provide an atmosphere of ambivalence or creativity as needed.

That being said, when I return to my room tired and satisfied (or at least tired), it becomes monumental to tackle the timezone difference, contextual distance, and mental fatigue in the efforts to contact back home. Or at least that’s how it feels.

When living in Duluth this past year, I’m not convinced that I was any better at communicating with my friends and family than I am now. The distractions, however, seemed more wordly, seemed to keep me in a sense that I was more in touch with those a few hundred miles distant than I was.

Here, with no one a few hundred miles distant and nearly all interactions created within our crowd of sixty, it becomes a poignant note when you remember who you haven’t spoken with in a few months or written to lately. It is placed mostly on your own time and ability to reach out, because technology makes it difficult to reach in. My phone, barring emergencies, is effectively one-way.

What does all this resolve out to? Possibly a self-guilt trip, but an expansion on one of the many things that we deal with as loyal Antarcticans. It’s an environment where challenging oneself takes a constant willful walk, where love and friendship seemingly happen easy, but take time and care for true depth, and where great perseverance and presence is required to stay fast to friendships 8000 miles away.

Most people I’ve known who have wintered in the past have a limit, a wall that they hit when it comes to this experience. After a season, several, a career, eventually there is no more challenge or dreams dig in toward another existence. Watching the pattern of friends’ ebb and flow, I used to think it related to this continent. While it does, in some manner, I’m finding that it is more internal - a human imperative.

For some of my friends, the traveling life is coming to a close, the modern hobo way losing appeal to larger, more singular pursuits. Some, like Dane, seek a path with goals that will leave a mark on this planet. Others, like Jeff, are simply ready to settle for a bit and try something else. There’s also holding to one place and maintaining a hold on wonder. It catches me every time someone I know chooses to dream more solidly, more static-like in place or pursuit, prepared for a long dream, because I do not yet know that feeling. I’ve tried it, quite unsuccessfully, and instead end up happy here.

Here, where outside is a deep breath unlike anywhere else, and above me, the sky dances.

I crave aspects of the long moment, but I don’t yet see my path there. I wonder if the guilt I wear in the distance between conversations looks to be assuaged in a long-settled future, in a place where friends can be gathered for a lifetime instead of the simple present. Or is building the simple present simply enough?

Perhaps in increments of year-long contracts and months-long dreams I’ll grow my way in to the multitude of years. In the mean, I will treasure those I meet, know, and love. In the mean, I’ll listen to the ether and thank those who understand, those who’s smiles grow no dimmer by time or distance.

And always, I’ll be learning…

Posted by noblehobo at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we age, we gain the insight into character necessary not only to better know what we need and want but how to articulate it to others. We learn how to state, how to demand, how to ask. I am envious (and attracted to) those who give the impression of ability to state their mind clearly. Even with the image of clarity, however, so few people actually know how.

If I could go back, so long past, to that thunder and rain on a capital rooftop, a brief reunion in the midst of an artistic flood, would I have the courage to grab you in the storm, to hold you close and kiss you? Would I have the courage to admit the truth of what I felt, to say, clearly, what was on my mind and in my heart?

I picture carrying that courage now, yet know truthfully that it is still an honest struggle to speak without filters. I search for understanding and answers, find truth and history wiling away in my brain, and seek to be able to share it in as pure a form as I feel it. And I wonder, when I chance upon another rooftop encounter, what I will find in the ether between two people…

Posted by noblehobo at 02:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tonight I feel as if I earned some cred as a Systems Administrator. We had a brownout around 9 PM this evening - nothing very noticeable to the eye, but two five second periods where we dropped 25 volts from the 440 volt station feed. It seems a small amount but that little change can play hell with electrical equipment.

The next several hours was spent by facilities engineering, science techs, and IT running around checking to see what equipment was affected and, if affected, to what degree. Personally, I had about ten servers lose power in a distant building due to reasons unknown (they are supposed to be connected to UPS systems to prevent that).

Most everything we have can be accessed remotely, so I spent two hours doing so, checking services, restarting servers, looking at error logs to see if anything else was affected, etc. Most everything was fine. Our redundant domain controller was not.

A domain controller (for the non-techies) is an essential part of the computer network infrastructure in a large corporate environment. It doles out the rules that allow various computers and network-capable devices to talk to each other and the outside world. If you lose access to your domain controllers, your network becomes very unhappy very quickly. We run two here for the purpose of redundancy.

My backup domain controller had decided to power down during the brownout and I could not contact it via remote services. Because of its necessity, I had a late night trip in store, all to push a button.

The building that the domain controller is in, the RF (Radio Frequency) shack, is about a mile from station, on the ‘edge of the world’. It’s the building that houses all of the control systems for our satellite connections, the network components to communicate with the satellites, and our backup computer systems. So, off I went to make an 11 PM trip to the RF building. I bundled up. It was -70F with a -100F windchill.

The walk was eerie in the best of ways. Most everyone on station was asleep and no equipment was running. The only sounds were the thrum (soon distant) of the power plant and the wind. When I stopped, letting the crunch, crunch, crunch of my walk in the snow wind down, it was as quiet as I’ve heard here yet.

The stars, newly arriving in our final days of twilight, are incredibly brilliant here. More so when you are on the edge of the world, so to speak, with the nearest manned station 800 miles distant. Out past the buildings, on the edge of the horizon, the sky holds great power. Looking up, smiling, I could only imagine the sheer magnitude of awe I will carry when the Southern Lights begin.

Stateside, winter nights after a fresh snow are my favorite times to wander. Whether in a city or in the woods, sounds are somehow both muted and amplified, the light heavy - as if the entire world has been draped in a thick blanket. It creates moments that are easy to share and easy to lose oneself in, easy to find warmth in a smile or the glow of a window.

Here, that window is covered (to protect light-sensitive science projects), that smile frozen (covered up by two layers of neck gaiters), that blanket stretched over an entire continent, but the warmth is still present. We just look around in a few different places to find it.

Tonight, I looked up.

Posted by noblehobo at 03:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sitting here, in my hammock, typing away, it’s not a bad life. The sun is nearly gone outside, the last seconds of twilight are fading to night. We can see the first stars (when the sky clears) and all of our light sensitive experiments are finally being powered up. Our windows are all covered now (to keep stray light away from the instruments) and our interior world is now distinctly separated from our external one. Outside is parceled off by insulated freezer doors, a red-tinted headlamp (unless the moon is up) and enough clothing to keep warm at -80F.

I struggle to remember to go outside. When your job does not require it, it is easy to forget. I haven’t been out since Sunday…

I’ve got a new batch of pictures ready for you to peruse, all annotated with the stories that accompany them:

February, roughly, covering random activities, a trip off-station to a hole in the snow, and our sunset party. Next up, a pile from a tour of SPT (South Pole Telescope), my room, and our wine tasting from two weeks ago. Heidi has a good deal of photos from our wine tasting as well.

I also added another couple of links to the mess at the left - Heidi’s from above (the Amazing Flying Lim) and Jeff’s (eighteen percent), a former Polie who has decided to leave and attempt a different life. We wish him well and that nostalgia does not haunt.

Posted by noblehobo at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We played pub trivia tonight - tossing around answers to four rounds of questions in exchange for small shots at pride and a few beers. Good questions from a pun-favoring fellow, Adit. A perfect combination of humor and hubris.

Its easier to catch, as we get tired, our levels of frustration and ego - easier to catch in others. As we tire, we fail to hide our discomfort or annoyance, fail to hide (or be polite about) small disagreements. We stand our ground for the simple sake of doing so, for the credit (from no one in particular) of being right. We strive to bring others to our viewpoint much more so that we willingly work to understand theirs’.

I’m projecting here quite a bit, as the above I most certainly see in myself (we see that in others that we fear in our self). Still, the tendencies exist. The question is, as winter progresses, will we learn to observe ourselves, to catch our pride and frustration in the act? Will we miss the immediate action, only to notice it later? Or will we be oblivious entirely, creatures of our base natures, acting out without first formulating our responses?

The psychology of the unfolding months will be hard-pressed not to intrigue me.

Mary Roach puts it very well in the introduction to her book, Spook:

The deeper you investigate a topic like this, the harder it becomes to stand on unshifting ground. In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.

_______________

On other notes, the windows are beginning to be covered to prevent stray light from our station to leak out and interfere with experiments sensitive to the visual spectrum. From now on, our views of the sky will be from the outdoors, our faces and minds exposed to the heavens and -90F temps. The wind is kicking at near thirty knots, and the front “sail” of the station (a giant piece of material bearing the US Antarctic Program logo) rattles away, sounding like the heavy rain of a thunderstorm.

Repairs were also performed in the New Power Plant (NPP) yesterday, requiring power to be conserved throughout station to balance the generator loads appropriately. Most of us worked in the dark, the soft glow of our monitors the only lights. I spent some time visiting with a couple of good folk over in the B2 science lab, laying on the floor in the dark, listening to harmonica, laughing, and singing whatever pop songs rolled into our heads.

There’s something great to be said about the camaraderie that beckons in the absence of power, the memories we pile up of family and friends circled around candles during blizzards or august thunder storms. That gathering calls to mind the feeling of friends around a fire, philosophical discussion and banter around a woodstove, or a group huddle on a cold Michigan road in October, watching the Northern Lights flare up in the sky at the beginning of an epic backpacking trip.

Losing something so familiar, and finding that we do just fine without it, seems to bring up a smile, a playful edge, and more risk than usual. When the power goes out, I have an overwhelming urge to have a snow day - skip work, responsibility, and concentrate fully on something we oft forget about - play.

Ethan (from the link in the upper left) and Calee write about the dark a touch too.

Posted by noblehobo at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’ve a new light in the heavens, gliding gently next to the moon. Not a star, technically, but Jupiter has made an appearance. Not long now and the sky will fill with constellations I’ve only rarely seen. Not long now and I’ll see the Milky Way for the first time since early October.

Posted by noblehobo at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)