The recruiter assured me that it would be blowing, and that I’d dig to the point of exhaustion, past that point, and then-scoop by scoop and moan by groan-into another infinite snowbank. Zero at the warmest, 50 or 60 below if it wasn’t blowing. Antarctic Program (USAP), laid out the terms: November to February, six days a week, nine hours a day. My employer, Denver-based Raytheon Polar Services Company, then a subcontractor for the U.S. General assistant was my title, a euphemism for miserable shovel grunt. Accordingly, I traveled there under the pretext of a job. Take some solo time with The Ice.Ī ride to the pole on a chartered tourist flight costs $50,000 and is lame. Touch the edge, the border where inner and outer converge. The idea was to space way out and space way in. I frequently spent Saturday evenings shacked up with only amorphous breath clouds for company, shivering and gazing through the plexiglass window, simultaneously contemplating the sprawling abiotic wasteland and-beneath thermal undies, a fleece sweater, and a fat red fur-ruffed parka-my own navel. In my case-that of a 22-year-old Vermonter who in 2008 ditched his wonderful college girlfriend to chase the ineffable at the bottom of the globe-the Love Shack was a strictly celibate hermitage: pencil, notebook, a couple cans of Speight’s Gold Medal Ale, immense quiet interrupted by chattering teeth. Like a prep school or military base, the station is insular, a cheek-to-jowl compound of laboratories, workshops, dorms, and supply depots, and the 250 inhabitants during the austral summer are hard-pressed to find privacy sufficient for their (ahem) needs. Rumor has it that researchers and laborers at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which sits about two miles away, occasionally require a refuge for romance, something I tried not to think about when I was in there. My favorite spot on the East Antarctic plateau, the planet’s highest, driest, coldest, windiest, deadest desert, is the Love Shack-an uninsulated plywood box the size of a modest bathroom, painted black to absorb the 24-hour sunlight, furnished with a chair, a desk, a cot, and a pile of coarse cotton blankets.
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