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Before he took the x-ray, the doctor said not to worry, it was only a sprain. I'd be good to go in a week. After the x-ray, he said my leg and ankle were broken in three places, and that it looked I'd been in a motorcycle accident. "Are you sure all you did was fall through a hole in the ice?"
Willy Field was located out on the Ross Island ice shelf, seven miles away from the main base, McMurdo Station. We lived in white boxes with big silver freezer doors that clunked when you shut them. Main Street divided one row of white boxes from the other. Isolated as it was, Willy had a bit of an Old West feel to it. Anything went, as long as you didn't get caught. Liquor - the Navy's solution to the problem of keeping the natives from getting restless - was cheap and in abundance. On Saturday nights we had parties that got rowdier as the season progressed. By December we were throwing the furniture out the door and wrestling on the plastic runners in the lounge that overlaid the grungy industrial-strength brown carpet. The atmosphere was macho and no wonder, out of a civilian crew of twenty-two, I was one of three women. (All twenty-two of us shared the same shower and bathroom located in a closet in the kitchen.) The Navy, who billeted 150 sailors at Willy, had a ratio of eight men to one woman. Testosterone was as pervasive as ice. Another 800 military and civilian personnel lived in McMurdo, which we called 'Dirt Town' because it sat on Ross Island's lava rock. I worked for the greatest boss in the world. Lord Webster we called him, and as long as I stayed out of his hair, he didn't care what I did. My job was to answer the phones and say, "No, I don't know where Jim is" or "No, I don't know when he'll be back. Jim hated the office and he liked it that I didn't hassle him about his whereabouts. In return he left me to daydream in peace as I watched Mt. Erebus, a snow-covered active volcano, puff smoke and attract clouds that wrapped themselves around her cone like feather boas. Though the crew performed many operations and maintenance tasks, our most important one was to keep the 'skiway' operational so the Navy could take off and land their ski-equipped C-130s. (Both the Navy and civilians were in Antarctica to support the science conducted by the National Science Foundation.) A skiway is different from a runway because it's constructed on compacted snow. Our heavy-equipment operators groomed, smashed, squeezed, rolled, sheeps-footed, and dragged the snow until it was practically ice-hard. Still, it was a never-ending job. The weather seldom cooperated. In December temperatures could soar above freezing and the skiway turned to slush as runny as the instant mashed potatoes served up by the Navy cooks in the Willy Galley. No matter how trying the conditions became, we always had the landscape for solace. Once you got away from the noise of camp, the only sounds were your footsteps, your breathing and the wind. I learned to cross-country ski and spent the evenings traversing the Willy Field road. You could ski all night if you wanted to. Since it was summer, the sun never set. Around three a.m. the sky turned pink behind Erebus, purple and gold hues richocheted off the bottom of clouds, and you knew it was nearing 'dawn.' Just to get a look at the horizon is reason enough to go to Antarctica. Desolate, pristine like the bare bones of the earth exposed. Across McMurdo Sound loomed the Royal Societies, a ghostly mountain range with glaciers spilling into the frozen sea at its feet. You do things in Antarctica you'd never dream of doing at home. There's something about being at the bottom of the world where no one can get to you - unless they've booked a reservation on a C-130 months ahead of time - that loosens your inhibitions. No spouses, no girl or boyfriends, no parents or relatives. Just you and your newfound friends who are all in this adventure together. Many of the things I did I best not tell here - word gets around, especially on the Internet. But I can tell you the story of how I broke my leg. It was January and we'd just helped NASA launch one of their football field size long-range balloons. The previous year the only place the balloon went was straight down, nearly smothering some people, so it was a big deal that this one looked like it just might make it into orbit. It was time to celebrate. And there was no better place to party than on the roof of the power plant. Maybe a half-dozen of us clambered up there. I'd had one beer. (Later, when people asked if I was drunk, I said, "No, but I wish I was, I might not have hurt myself.") Tina Turner belted out 'What's love got to do with it?' on the boom box, and all of a sudden, it seemed like a good idea to me to jump off the roof into the snow. It was only a twelve-foot drop and the ground looked soft enough. I did it three times. The third time I backed up and took a running leap; I wanted to catch some real air. "Be careful," my friends said. "I don't think that's a good idea," they warned. When I landed, I didn't hit anything soft. I hit hard ice. I heard a sickening pop, went into shock and started spouting swear words and variations on swear words. My buddies carted me off to Willy Medical. They took a look at my ballooning ankle and suggested I take a trip to the big hospital in town. No one could find my coat, so I stood out on the ice shelf leaning on my crutches in just jeans and a sweater waiting for the shuttle. Before I left camp we all got our stories straight: I was just walking along on the ice and turned my ankle in a hole. No sense in alarming the powers-that-be in town. It'd just give them a reason to stick their noses into Willy Field business. Nobody wanted that. After the doctor put a cast on my leg - leaving a cut up the side so my leg wouldn't swell and explode on the airplane - he sent me back to Willy where I packed up my things in between condolence calls from my friends. They saw me off two days later. I was still crying. I ended up in Christchurch Hospital in New Zealand where I had surgery and spent a delightful week amidst the geriatric set in the orthopedic ward. Twice a day the tea lady came around with her tea cart. It was all so damn civilized. But that's another story. Lord Webster hired me back the next year, and I managed not to break anything. Well, nothing of mine anyway. I did smash up a window on a Caterpillar tractor and earned the nickname 'Crashglass.' Or then there was the season after that when I took a job in town as a shuttle driver and forgot to put the brand new orange passenger van in park when I jumped out to get dinner. It rolled into a building, smashed the hood and scared everybody inside half to death. In total, I've worked 31 months in Antarctica over six seasons. The times at Williams Field were the best but maybe that's just because Willy's receded into the annals of lore. They tore it down a couple of years ago. Said it was too expensive to maintain and that from now on everybody would live at McMurdo Station. They yanked the buildings right out of the ice shelf like they were bad teeth that had to be pulled. Nothing's left but a couple of phone poles and raucous memories. Fortunately, that is enough to sustain me. More on Antarctica - Click Here - |
