Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
longer seemed bizarre - it was a comfortable feeling. When I caught sight of myself in someone
else's glacier glasses, I saw that I was smiling.
Three days before I arrived, on 20 August, the sun had risen over Ross Island for the first time
since 24 April. Already, for a few hours in every twenty-four the residents of McMurdo were en-
joying a dusky daylight, though they had not yet seen the sun, as from McMurdo it was obscured
behind Mount Erebus. My physiological clock had responded to total light by urging me not to go
to bed; I wondered if so much darkness would have the reverse effect.
The flight was one of eight which made the round trip between Christchurch and McMurdo dur-
ing the third week of August in the annual operation known as Winfly. The function of this com-
plex annual undertaking, timed to take place during the continent's brief cusp between darkness
and light, is to resupply the station and bring support staff to the ice to prepare for the forthcoming
science season, which begins in October. It also allows a six-week handover period with winterers
preparing to leave the ice. Of the 244 winterers in 1995, thirty left during Winfly (one because she
was pregnant), and 200 new faces arrived on the ice.
The first person I saw had tied a knot in his beard, but everyone looked healthy enough after
their 'weary spell of darkness'. They were fish-belly white, of course, and they all caught colds
from us and diarrhoea from the freshies our planes brought them. Most of them weren't sure how
they felt. When I sat down to breakfast on the first day, the woman opposite me burst out, 'Wow,
it's so good to see new faces!', yet posters appeared in the dorms saying
'Coming soon to a room
near you: the roommate from hell, Winfly 1995
' next to a screaming Munch-like face and a be-
mused individual standing in a doorway holding a suitcase. I didn't need a poster to tell me I had
entered staked-out territory - it was obvious. They had been padding the corridors and battling
along the windy walkways for six months without seeing a single new creature.
'I felt the futility of my existence,' the woman at breakfast told me when I asked her how she
had found the winter isolation. 'Nothing mattered. And the hopelessness of the world surviving. It
lingers still.'
It was like watching a whole community coming out of hibernation. I trod very carefully. The
experience put me in mind of an extremely ancient uncle in the west country who was apprenticed
as a printer at the age of fourteen. On his first day he had boarded the bus to the factory at six in
the morning, clutching a packet of corned-beef sandwiches. All was well until a group of hoary
old printers got on the bus a mile or two later. One of them stopped alongside my young uncle and
thundered: 'That's my seat, lad.'
I was allocated a bed in a room in the same dark corridor as the Corner Bar, the latter no longer
under the supervision of Mike the carpenter, as he had retired to ply his trade in the north during
the austral winter. It had been left in the hands of his henchman John, its only regular social gath-
ering Coffee at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning.
'Come along,' said John when he passed me in the gloomy corridor.
Outside the window, daylight lingered like a promise. Six people were lounging around the low
smoked-plexiglass table, which was spread with coffee mugs, plates of muffins and bottles of li-
quor. The Budweiser clock and target-practice penguin were there. When the six people saw me,
