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Journal of Deane Rink
(Deane is Video Producer and leader of the LFA 2 field team.)
The sky is overcast most of the summer, and on any given day, the brash
ice is likely to blow in, propelled by the wind, clogging the small harbor.
There are only two major buildings, but enough piles of discarded construction
materials and millvans (containers for recycling and other shipments)
to make the site, from some angles, resemble a city dump. The people who
live here are circumscribed by a hostile ocean and a treacherous, crevassed,
ever-calving glacier. They live on a small spit of land, a couple of acres
at best. Their "backyard" is rock and ice. Even the inflatable
zodiacs, the only means of island-hopping in the harbor, are limited to
a two-mile radius, for safety reasons. The only recreation is a hot tub,
albeit one with a view of a dynamic glacier whose aspect is modified by
the changing light conditions. Sounds resembling sharp gunshots are liable
to pierce the silence at any time, but they are only the creaks and groans
of the glacier as it inexorably tries to push the base into the harbor
as it flows downhill. Sounds resembling donkeys braying can also be heard
on a still night, and these are the Adelie penguins from nearby Torgersen
Island that seem to have a better toehold on life here than do the people.
Perhaps this is as it should be, since the penguins have been coming here
since before man ever penetrated this far south. The occasional south
polar skua walks around unafraid in the rock-strewn front yard, and closer
inspection reveals that this bird wears an aluminum band around its right
leg. Perhaps it thinks it is human and is awaiting recognition from the
38 souls that inhabit this place in the austral summer. Perhaps it is
fleeing from the group of massive elephant seals that lounge on the ice
near the original site where this human habitation was first established.
Old Palmer is now known as Elephant Alley. And if the sounds of the glacier
and the penguins aren't enough, there are always the sounds of the elephant
seals, barking across Hero Inlet from Bonaparte Point. They seem to do
this most at night, which is odd, since there isn't really any night here,
just a twilight that is a few degrees dimmer than the rest of the day.
The people that inhabit Palmer Station keep normal working hours, just like anywhere else. The two cooks serve breakfast from 6:30 AM to 7:30 AM, lunch from 12 noon to 1:00 PM, and dinner from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. Work hours are fit in between these meals, and the small galley is the social hub of the station, where construction workers and scientists, computer programmers and carpenters, daily rub elbows and trade stories, reminiscences, gossip, local lore. The station is too small to be impersonal, the people too interdependent to allow for reclusiveness. Everybody cleans their own dishes, and the entire galley undergoes GASH every night after dinner, a thorough cleaning done by three volunteers that takes an extra hour, but even more so,
bonds the 38 souls in communal unity. Every Saturday afternoon, works
knocks off an hour early for "house mouse," a station-wide cleanup
in which everyone participates. There can be no prima donnas here, as
the ruthlessness of a small community weeds them out and lets them know
in no uncertain terms what will be tolerated and what will not. But don't let me make it sound too Draconian. Diversity is tolerated,
even personal quirks, as long as the jobs get done and the overall morale
of the people is not harmed. These 38 people are among the most isolated
people on the face of the Earth, accessible under normal conditions only
by ship, and even in these wired times, only able to see the satellite
that gives them internet connections and e-mail, for four hours at a time,
twice a day.
© 1997 Ann Hawthorne New Year's Day is a time when people stateside watch a lot of football,
and reflect on their families, their friends, their prospects for the
future. New Year's Day at Palmer is a time where people cook for themselves
because the cooks have the day off, and all gather in the lounge to show
each other their slides. One couple shows slides of Bali, Nepal, and Thailand,
where they travelled during their off-season. But the great majority of
the slides are familiar to everyone; they are of Palmer and environs,
of the people in the room in various poses, of the outlying islands and
the marine life that populate them, of the multi-hued lichens that cling
to the barren rocky surfaces, of the random, wave-generated iceberg sculptures
that drift in and out of Arthur Harbor with stupefying regularity. The
station doctor shows a slide of the boating coordinator's posterior, to
reveal a three-inch long gash inflicted by a leopard seal who mistook
him for a penguin. Cheers resound around the room as the boating coordinator
blushes in embarassment. Slides of the last Hallowe'en Party also bring
howls of laughter, as memories are refreshed by the sublime silliness
of jury-rigged costumes, some so good that the people, who know each other
like the backs of their hands, and who were all in attendance at this
party, cannot identify their roomates through the disguises. Slides of
the lab supervisor doing a cannonball off the dock, or of a skua skinning
a baby penguin in the ongoing Darwinian struggle, or of the glacier bathed
in pink, or of a flame-red sunset, elicit oohs and aahs from these presumptively
jaded people who have seen these scenes more than anyone else on earth.
Slides of a local hero para-gliding off some high peaks in Chile get polite
applause, but other slides of the same person heaving off the deck of
the Polar Duke in abject seasick misery draw raucous hoots and hearty
backslaps. The isolation "in God's backyard," as somebody has
termed it, has created a camaraderie unimaginable in the States, a closeness
that almost feels privileged to participate in. Having been here all of one week, I feel more comfortable than after
a month in McMurdo, and McMurdo is also an intense place, not at all bad,
more similar to Palmer than to the USA from which all these Antarcticans
come. It is no surprise that the scientists work on their off days or
contribute their time to review one more educational document that seeks
to inspire high school students stateside to become inspired by the wild
majesty of the Antarctic. It is only a pleasant surprise that the cooks,
who, you'll remember, had the day off, have snuck back into their kitchen
to prepare a tray of ginger cookies for the armchair travellers assembled
in the lounge. It is with amusement that... the station lab supervisor,
she of the aforementioned cannonball, can sing verbatim the song from
"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and have two others join in spontaneously.
Suspicious, I check out the video holdings upstairs in the lounge, and
"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" is not there. These are sharp cookies,
ginger snaps all, in the land of the midnight sun. Deane Rink
| From The Field | Video Information | Researcher Q
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