A Brief "Hello" from the South Pole

When Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the pole to discover Amundson’s Norwegian flag—proof that the wily Norwegian had beaten the strict, moody Navy man in the quest for the pole—Scott declared, “Great God, this is an awful place.” I think it’s a marvelous place but he wasn’t entirely wrong—it’s an inhospitable place for humans and with his 1912 gear, having walked 800 miles, I’m certain I’d feel the same way. I’m finding the South Pole a somewhat strenuous place but by no stretch awful.

I’m exhausted. At McMurdo I clocked 9-hour days with set breaks amounting to an hour a half. Here, I’m no longer on the clock; the clock is on me. I have a job to do and it’s kicking my ass to get it done in anything close to ten hours a day. (What is a break?) Can I blame the altitude, dry air, strange ingredients, lack of freshies, useless oven and back spasms or should I just face the fact that I’m not quite up to the level of this job? Maybe both. As a baker, I’m spoiled by access to terrific ingredients—pure vanilla, high quality chocolate, fresh eggs, sour cream, heavy cream, fruit and flour that doesn’t have the faintest whiff of diesel to it. Stellar ingredients make almost anything taste good. Baking at 11,000 ft (effective elevation) is no joke. In truth, it’s far more difficult than I anticipated. I’m adapting but it’s taking time—as in regular 12 hour days in the kitchen.  The best part is my freezer—this is me, wearing my work duds, standing in it. Naturally, it’s outdoors. I do believe it’s the most beautiful (and coldest) freezer in the world!

My astonishment and joy at being here in this white wonderland unlike any other place on earth isn’t diminished by the challenge of doing my (difficult) job as well as I can. Do I have time and energy to go outside and wander the great white expanse? Not every day but I hope to, once I get the basics of my job down. Each hour that passes in the kitchen struggling to make things that taste and look good for seventy people (soon to be 150 people when the C-130 arrives) I look out into the snowy distance toward the impossibly pale blue horizon. I’m told, on a clear day, the horizon is about seven miles distant. Maybe I’ll walk there soon. What a grand adventure that would be! The idea sustains me, for now.

On my first day, before my job gave me a serious beating, I walked to both the geographic and ceremonial poles with an acquaintance from McMurdo. We exchanged phones to take photos, our exposed hands quickly freezing as we pressed the screen to capture the nearly identical images again and again

Thrilling as it is to stand at the geographic pole, I’m even more excited by the beauty and sudden reality of the sastrugi, waves and undulations that give the surface of the snowy expanse its extraordinary texture. Cherry, in The Worst Journey in the World, repeatedly bemoans the terrible effort required to pull a sledge over the beastly sastrugi; from an aesthetic point of view they are nothing short of astonishing.

The sastrugi remind me, as I bake bread for dinner, a breakfast pastry and separate desserts for dinner and lunch, why I’m here. As I set up the breakfast line with yogurt and canned peaches, as I fry patties of potatoes and roast sheet pans of breakfast sausage, I look out on the great snowy, windblown plateau marked by the feature I’ve read about for years—a feature I can even discern, at least as texture, as I adjust the speed on my massive Hobart mixer.

I never quite knew what Cherry meant when he wrote that Scott’s team was forced to “depot their skis because they were in a sea of sastrugi” near the pole, but now I do. When I can muster the energy after work I put on big red, my face mask, hat, mittens and down pants to go walking. Yesterday, my back felt better and I walked beyond the ceremonial pole and out into the whiteness for a distance. Then I collapsed on my back where I made a snow angel, stretched, and just existed on the earth amidst the architectural beauty of the sculpted snow, beneath the clearest blue sky, in the pure silence.

I have a great deal more to tell—about my journey here on a tiny World War II era plane, about the odd mix of people and jobs, the quality of the light, what it feels like to walk around outdoors when it’s nearly fifty below zero, the crazy logistics that make this place possible—but at the moment I have no time to think or write or do anything other than work and sleep. May it get easier so I can really dig into the landscape I came all this way to experience.