Read Part 1 first for your own sake.
*Originally written on Feb 9, 2023 at McMurdo Science Station in Antarctica*
Hello again,
Fair warning. This entry is long and isn’t written well. It barely talks about interactions or events that have happened in my time here in Antarctica. However, it does hint at prostitution without actually saying prostitution. Whoops. Now it straight up says prostitution, but it only hinted at prostitution before I wrote the word prostitution five times. I also say “fuck” but not in any of the same contexts as the afore mentioned allusions to prostitution. And now I’ve written prostitution seven times in a… journal entry?... that is going to be seen by my most of my family. Hello family. Hello Kai Bird, Zola, Della, Cito, Vanessa, and June. Hello Dad. I am going say the word fuck. I don’t think that is a surprise to any of you.
It’s -22 °F right now. I work in Antarctica as a Paramedic behind a desk with a banjo nearby at a clinic called McMurdo Medical and it’s -22 °F outside and the sun is shining like is has for the last two months non-stop and I may have already lost my mind. Now we are all caught up. -22 °F. That temperature is dipping into the area of “I don’t know how cold it actually is but I can’t imagine that it can get much fucking colder anywhere in the Universe,” which, of course, is incorrect, and easily disproven while living on a science base on the bottom of the planet, except for the fact that there is no immediately available internet access for impatient arguing parties to immediately prove that I am wrong. Also, no one here has a spaceship with an on-board thermometer to prove that it can’t be colder than the -22 °F mere footsteps away from my desk with a banjo nearby. Everyone that doesn’t have a spaceship also seems to lack the patience to wait for the low-speed internet to non-immediately load some actual historical temperature data, and therefor there is no colder place in the Universe for people without spaceships and/or patience. If you have common sense, you just straight up know that there are places in the Universe that get colder than -22 °F, but there is a fundamental lack of common sense (and spaceships and patience) here at McMurdo Station, including within the weatherproofed warehouse walls of Medical. I have patience so I, not so quickly, discovered that the coldest recorded temperature in Antarctica is −128.6 °F (−89.2 °C) from Vostok Station on the 21st of July 1983. I also discovered that the coldest known natural place in the Universe is the Boomerang Nebula, which lies in the Centaurus constellation, about 5,000 light years from Earth. Its average temperature is (-272 °C) (about 1 Kelvin) according to the European Space Agency. Before using the slow internet, I knew, from personal experience alone, that it can get colder than -22 °F but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that it can’t get colder than -22 °F when I have to walk across the dirt road from the Galley to Medical. And that is where I am and where my desk with a banjo nearby is: McMurdo Medical, the unconfirmed, and easily disproven, coldest place in the Universe. One thing I have learned between living in Vermont, Chicago, and Idaho is that it can always get colder. Of those three places, people in Idaho complain about the weather the most, and they undoubtedly have the best weather and don’t appreciate it nearly as much as they should. By the way, fuck Idaho. Just saying that makes me feel better. Not warmer, just better. No one complains about the weather here in Antarctica. It’s understood that it will be cold in Antarctica rather regularly and noticing that it gets cold in Antarctica is not a solid conversation starter here.
Let’s review. It’s a very cold and windy day and I am sitting at my desk with a banjo nearby at Medical and I’m at work even though there is no work to do currently… and I may have lost my mind. The good people of McMurdo tend to stay away from Medical, and the good people of McMurdo make it no secret that they stay away from Medical. There are Stickers here…
I stepped away from my desk for a second and as I stepped back to my desk and reread that last line I became very distracted.
There are Stickers here…
There is more to that sentence, just follow me for a minute or two and we will see if I have indeed lost my mind.
There was a whole thought locomotive, a “thought train” if you will, in which I wanted to discuss how being an active member of McMurdo Medical gives me the immediate outward persona of “The Enemy” to the working class as well as the science class (the scientific class? Is that a class of people? Scientists?) that live and work here in McMurdo, on Ross Island, in the Ross Sea, in Antarctica, where it is cold. And to deviate just a touch further from that thought train that I just deviated from, the working class and the science class rarely agree on much down here, besides the fact that it is cold, so the unifying force here being that Medical = The Enemy is not something I am proud of. The same, now almost fully abandoned thought train would have continued at this point from: “Medical = The Enemy” to discussing what the “There are Stickers here” Stickers actually say, but “There are Stickers here” was as far as I was able to type before a completely different distraction pulled me away from my desk, which ultimately caused this thought train wreck. I would have tried, had the thought train continued unabated, to attempt to explain why Medical = The Enemy, which would include a description of the PQ process, and before you ask I’ll straight up admit that I’m not sure what PQ means anymore besides saying it is the process in which a USAP (United States Antarctic Program) applicant gets medically approved to come down to Antarctica for a winter or a summer or a full season… or for the rest of the productive years of their life until they can no longer pass PQ and are no longer approved to live/work/sleep/die here and are doomed to roam the populated, climate controlled, hospitable, civilized cities and towns of the rest of the Earth with all the conveniences, day-and-night cycles, and taken-advantage-of luxuries that modern civilization offers. So, I was typing with these thoughts in mind, points of interest further down the thought-train-tracks, and I was going to complete that now broken and derailed sentence: “There are Stickers here…” when I was pulled away from my underutilized desk by the IT guy named Adam. Adam periodically comes in to restart computers that have frozen; not temperature-wise, just functionality-wise.
I know Adam the IT guy, he is kind and outgoing and wears glasses and has bad posture and ultimately fits the stereotypical description of a comic strip IT guy, so any further description of Adam is unnecessary because you already get it. I like Adam. He fixes things, or at least he tries to fix functionally frozen room-temperature broken things. He is always busy because everything here is always a least a little bit broken. Always. Adam tries, but we all know that Adam can’t win. He is friendly though, so when he walked into Medical, which no one does on purpose because Medical = The Enemy, I stood up from my desk to chat with him halfway through that fated sentence, “There are Stickers here…”
Adam and I joked about… something… I forget. I forget what we joked about… I forget a lot of things and I am surprised that I even remember Adam’s name even though the name Adam is a name that I SHOULD be able to easily remember, but I can forget anything these days (this single long day) down here… probably because I am losing my mind. I can forget anything quickly. I can forget anything quickly. Did I already say that? I can forget anything including the point that I was trying to make originally, which I haven’t yet made. I haven’t forgotten, maybe you have, but I could have forgotten my point because I can forget anything quickly, but I haven’t. I am trying to make a point about a broken sentence, I haven’t forgotten, I just got a little derailed. (Is there such thing as “a little” derailed? It’s it an all-or-nothing kind of situation; derailment?) I still haven’t gotten to the point yet, besides the fact that it is cold, I was at my desk, Adam tries to fix The Broken, and “There are Stickers here.” All of these are valid and interesting points but not the point that I am trying to make, not my original train of thought. I am currently fully off the rails. Anyway, I have taken to calling myself a dry-erase-board because of how quickly and effectively I can forget anything. The metaphor goes like this. “Hello, my name is Roger, I am a dry erase board, one hand is writing down your name in my head while the other hand is simultaneously erasing it.” And that is how I forgot what Adam and I were joking about. I returned to my desk after joking around with Adam and I looked at my computer. I read the last words that I had typed, “There are Stickers here”.
After reading that I suddenly got excited. Very excited. Because I read that there are Stickers here. I think I probably looked around, like the words were a real time, third-person narration of me sitting back down at my desk unaware that there were Stickers here. I might have looked around, I don’t remember, probably.
If there are Stickers here, I want them. I want the Stickers that are everywhere. I want to know where more Stickers are. If there is the possibility of more Stickers, then I would do just about anything for those Stickers. I would do… I’m not sure what I would do because there are no Stickers available as a prize for accomplishing whatever it is I would do for more Stickers. But if that Sticker exists, and if you have one, then I will tell you what I would do to get the Sticker that states what I will do for more Stickers.
You might be asking yourself why I am so into Stickers. You might want to know why I keep capitalizing the word, Sticker. I would hope that you would like to know why, otherwise this is a pretty uninteresting… email? Journal? Memoir? Still not sure what this is, or to whom this is addressed, but I’m pretty sure I will send it to my family who are patiently waiting for a simple list of things that I have been up to at the bottom of the Earth. We are way off the rails right now, fully derailed. I bet that you noticed.
Here at McMurdo, money doesn’t really matter. We are utterly and completely removed from the world of strip malls and shopping centers. McMurdo has no banks, no convenience stores or gas stations, no car dealerships or movie theaters or billboards for auto accident lawyers with large untrustworthy smiles. There are no restaurants of any variety; from Taco Bell to Gastro fusion experiences to international sub-par steak houses with fancy ways of serving a deep-fried onion; the entire pallet of food options is empty save for the Galley, which will never get a write-up, good or bad, in a culinary review magazine. There is none of all of the things that are everywhere else where people be (yes, I meant to write that like that). There is an ATM machine here that works… maybe 30% of the time. In the real world, I usually don’t carry cash, but here I’ve been holding onto the same $100 in 20s and 5s for a little over a month. There are places to spend cash, there are two weatherproof warehouses that we call “bars” where there is beer for sale; they are named Gallagher’s and Southern Exposure. They both sell cheap beers, PBRs and Coors, expensively. $5 a can. Or at least they used to, before the giant cargo ships pulled into McMurdo’s port to resupply the Galley and all the other places that are not McMurdo Medical. When a cargo vessel pulls into the port, it activates a station-wide prohibition. No alcohol will be sold while a vessel is loading, unloading, or refueling. People are not happy about that, the not-selling-of-the-alcohol. I usually don’t go to the bars here, but I have been going recently. I play banjo in the weatherproof warehouses that, currently, don’t have beer for sale in them and I continue to carry around my $100 cash in 20s and 5s. Don’t get me wrong, there certainly are things to buy. Sweatshirts and T-shirts and hats and vests, water bottles and onesies and deodorant and Q-tips and three types of vaginal cream. There is a store on base. It is off Highway 1, which is a hallway, not a highway. The store is called the McMurdo Store. Highly effective name, no billboards necessary, you can’t miss it, it’s the store on Highway 1. They sell everything except beer right now. They definitely sell clothing with the McMurdo / Antarctic Logo and you initially might think, as I did, that some of these items for sale are ugly. It’s easy to think that while there are stacks and stacks of them, whatever they are, in-stock, and you would be right: olive green, mustard yellow, hot pink, and Galley brown (don’t ask) shirts and hats, boring, ugly, unnecessary, no big deal… but it has words “United States Antarctic Program” written in bold caps on it somewhere, or a map of Antarctica on the back, or a McMurdo insignia on the sleeve. And soon the stock dwindles down, and as it does that ugly olive green sweatshirt gets cooler and cooler. And once the store is out of stock, someone will be offering to buy yours for $200. So buy two of each size while they are ugly and unpopular.
Yes, for real, someone offered $400 for an XL IceStock 22-23 tee-shirt. And yes, they bought that sold out shirt for way too much money because it was no longer for sale. The shirt is undoubtedly and unanimously agreed upon as ugly. I wish I had one.
That brings me to Stickers. Stickers are the effective currency of the McMurdo population. They don’t “have” monetary value, Stickers are a monetary unit. Stickers are proof that you did a thing, or saw a thing, or know a guy that saw a thing that had cool Stickers and that person wanted you to have one. Stickers are usually free here, but you gotta work for a Sticker. No one just gives them away, but someone with Stickers will instantly get more attention that someone without Stickers. Every department down here has Stickers; Helicopter Operation (Helo ops), Vehicle Maintenance (VMH), Waste Management (Wasties), Food Services (Stewies), Janitorial Services (Janos), even Medical (the Enemy) has Stickers. There was a scientist that lost a bet and had to stand in the middle of “Highway 1” and answer questions while wearing an Ask-Me-Anything sandwich board, and if you asked him a question he would do his best to answer it, and then he would, of course, hand you a Sticker from his science team’s ice core carbon dating project. That was the only way to get that Sticker. That’s a good Sticker. My current favorite is the only one that I have put on my laptop. It has a skull inside the outline of Antarctica and in blood red letters it says, “It gets worse, before it gets worse.”
Other notable Stickers include last year’s Helo Ops which is a florescent green helicopter carrying a crate. The Sticker fits perfectly over the Antarctic map on the official USAP (United States Antarctic Program) Nalgene bottle that is sold in the store. There’s a seal wearing a hard hat for the Carps. Carps are not fish, they are carpenters, but, just to make things confusing, there is a Carp that has the nickname Fish. I have no idea what his real name is, but he is the fellow in the NASA spacesuit and the silver sombrero in my Ice Stock photos. Fish, the Carp, is a funky dude. There’s a ‘Rosie the Riveter’ Sticker that says “A Stewie will do it”, that’s a real good one. There is a Sticker of an Astronaut with a chainsaw. There are Stickers of hand drawn caricatures of Ivan the Terra Bus, Pickles the Forklift, and Dawn the Delta 2. And then there is McMurdo Medicals current, small run, limited edition addition to the Sticker community. Okay, hear me out. Patches are different than Stickers. Patches are an echelon above Stickers and usually have a more official connotation to them and are “worth” more. In fact, I think that the hierarchy is something like this:
Challenge Coins
Sex
Drugs/Gummies
Helicopter Rides
Erebus Crystals
Prehistoric Ice Core Samples (for alcoholic drinks, of course)
Alcohol and Alcohol Rations
Patches
Stickers
Freshie (fresh fruit and/or veggies)
Out-of-Stock McMurdo / Antarctic Logo Clothing
actual money
Medical Advice
For clarification:
Challenge Coins are ornately designed precious metal coins that are selectively given out by commanding officers to servicemen and women and/or civilians for exceptional service. It is a physical “Thank you for your service” coin. If you are lucky enough to get one, you hold onto that thing until about 5 minutes before you die and then you give it to your great grandkid who has no idea what it is and will pawn it off for $20. I have one from the Polar Star US Coast Guard Ice Breaking Vessel and it makes me smile every time I look at it. Nobody sells Challenge Coins. Nobody.
Erebus crystals are Feldspar Crystals formed by only 2 active volcanos on the planet; Mt Erebus (Antarctica) and Mt Kenya (not Scandinavia). I have 2 Erebus Stickers after winning “Roller Derby” which I absolutely guarantee is not what you think it is. Every time I look at my Erebus crystals I smile, and my guts hurt. Maybe I will explain in my next… whatever the fuck this thing is.
Sex is not for sale here. Buuuuut the 75%-25% male to female ratio in a total population of about 800 people makes sex one of the most valuable activities / commodities / bargaining tools on the base. I do not have sex here, I didn’t expect to have sex here, and I don’t think I would want to if I could partly due to the harshness of the continent and partly due to the caliber of women that volunteer to spend months on said harsh continent. I believe I might be… destroyed. That being said, it seems that everyone else in my dorm does have sex, a lot, non-stop, vigorously and unabashedly, at all hours of the day, every day, for the whole 2 month I have been down here. I am happy for them, and exhausted by proximity.
Medical Advice. No one wants, or for that matter, follows medical advice here, or anywhere on the planet, and we all know that no matter how much you might pay for medical advice, it is not worth any amount of money no matter how much advice you actually get. Thus Medical Advice is worth less than money.
Notice that “Patches” are higher on the list than “Stickers”. Yes, I am getting somewhere, really. Patches are usually department issued and are official enough to be attached to jumpsuits or uniforms. Stickers are more or a free for all. Last year, a PA at Medical wanted to reorder some Patches that are given out to the volunteer McMurdo Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) response team; a group of non-medical volunteers that come in once a week for medical training and can be deployed in case an “Event” happens. Examples of an Event would be a plane crash, or an overturned Ivan, or a riot due to the closing of the bars and the prolonged prohibition of alcohol sales on the base. Events don’t happen and MCIs are historically not activated. People sign up to be part of MCI partly for the medical training, partly for the group activity, but mostly for the Patch. It is a woven patch of a penguin in front of a red cross superimposed over a map of Antarctica with the words “Antarctic Medical Operations” around it in gold thread. It is a badass patch. Fuck yeah, Medical has a badass patch. Medical was running low on PATCHES stock and the PA, we will call him Mike… because that is his name, Mike wanted to order more PATCHES. So he took a picture of the PATCH and emailed it to the company that makes the PATCHES… that company also make STICKERS. Mike received a box of 200 Stickers of a photo of a badass woven Antarctic Medical Operations patch that are historically given to members of MCI. This round of Stickers is the equivalent of a Baseball Card collectors prized “Error Card”, where they spelled the Pitcher’s name wrong or print the wrong stats on the back. These Medical Stickers are priceless because of a big ol’ fuck up.
There are a lot of great Stickers. Everyone here wants all these Stickers at all times.
Including me.
So, when I saw the words, “There are Stickers here…” on my computer screen, which I myself had written only moments prior to reading it, I got excited and now, finally, you know why I was excited. Because Stickers are more valuable than fresh fruit, which is more valuable than money, but not as valuable as a Helicopter Ride to the crater of Mt Erebus to collect Erebus Crystals. And if there are Stickers, I want them.
Here is the problem with this… memoire? This epic poem? This literally display of collapsing mental fortitude? I was distracted and I was mistaken. The words “There are Stickers here…” were not an indication of where Stickers were actually located. The rest of that sentence I was attempting to write would have been:
“There are Stickers here that say, ‘CAUTION: Never go to Medical’ in big yellow and black block lettering. The ‘CAUTION: Never got to Medical’ Stickers were printed years ago and are highly sought after to this day.”
There. That’s what I meant to type. I wanted to show how untrusted Medical is by showing that there were Stickers made about how untrusted Medical is. Let that sit for just a second; there were Stickers made to remind people to never ever enter to doors of Medical, where my desk it. That is proof that we here at Medical are The Enemy, we were The Enemy, and we always will be The Enemy. Someone, years ago, spent time designing these Stickers, spent money getting them printed up off-continent and then shipped to the bottom of the Earth, and all this effort resulted in a widely accepted entry in the unspoken competition for the “Best Stickers of McMurdo.” The ‘CAUTION: Never go to Medical’ stickers are legendary. Their popularity has risen to the point that even some of the Doctors and PAs on staff at McMurdo Medical (Mike included) have this Sticker on their water bottles. And I want one, because fuck Medical. You can’t trust um. You wanna know why? A Sticker told me so.
I enjoyed this. Please keep writing.
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