A Day in the Life upheld by the Childish Joys of Playing in a Pile of Snow (at the South Pole)

I’m just shy of a month here at the Pole, for the most part baking and sleeping. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. Then again, it feels like forever since I saw my family or ate a leaf of lettuce! What a blur it’s been but also unlike anything else I’ve ever done. What will I remember? Surely, if nothing else, the beauty of the pristine snow and the routine.

My body now knows to fall asleep at 5 AM to the comfort of Simon Vance reading David Copperfield (I’ve listened to it dozens of times) and to wake up right around 1:30 PM with no idea what time it is. Because the middle of the night is as bright as noon, I have a cardboard window cover. I can always see light creeping around the edges but the quality of light tells me nothing about the time of day.

When I come to in my tiny room on my elevated extra-long twin bed I turn on a light, pull the cover off the window and invariably throw on my robe and make my way to the communal bathroom down the hall. (It’s fairly sparkly thanks to a thing called “house mouse” which involves everyone taking a weekly turn to thoroughly clean it. My favorite job, naturally.) I then get dressed in thermal leggings with my snappy silver down pants, a wool shirt and clogs and I’m ready to go, my handy red backpack loaded with laptop, Kindle, thermal mug and water bottle.

The galley, with its endless windows and gorgeous white light all day and night long is usually empty at 2 PM. Meals are on the early side here and I seem to miss most of them. Breakfast is 6 AM-8 AM, lunch 11 AM-1 PM and dinner 5 PM-7 PM. Honestly, I pretty much pick around the edges of what’s served so it hardly matters. I eat ramen or soup—if I like the look of it. The best part of soup is adding handfuls of oyster crackers which are crunchy and crispy in a way they never are on the East Coast even when you just open the bag. (Everything here is snaps and pops—cereal, crackers, granola. Then again, things you don’t want to crack and snap do—like oatmeal cookies and the edges of cakes not to mention lips, skin and hair.)

Once I’m in the galley I try to sniff out the best cup of coffee I can find. Sometimes this involves creating a single pour-over but most of the time I just pretend I’m at a Shell station in the middle of nowhere and just drink the fucking coffee. After I check email and do a little writing I rustle up some ramen, mixing in vegetables from the “grab-and-go” fridge which is the leftover refrigerator where various items sit for six days before they end up in food waste. (By my standard that’s about three days too long for comfort—one wants to watch the dates.)

Normally, after an hour or so in the galley, I head back to my room, layer up, and go for a ski or a walk. This is where I get my strength to keep doing my job—call it my religion. I love the snow. I’ve said this before, but growing up playing with my sister in big white piles of the stuff has left me a hopeless romantic when it comes to virtually any shape of frozen water. So I walk or ski or climb a mountain of snow and slide down. Works wonders for my mood.

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I return from my walk, rosy cheeked and frosty, just in time to change into my dour black chef uniform. I smear my lips and under my nose, where I’m perpetually chapped, with coconut oil I found in Skua. (As previously noted, Skua is the giant, scavenging seagull that flies the South Antarctic Ocean. In honor of its habit, residents leave things they don’t want and others take what they need from “Skua.” There are whole sheds containing Skua items both here and at McMurdo but the bathrooms also have Skua shelves.) I tie my hair up tight and throw on a beanie or head-scarf. Off to work I go.

The low roar of the dining room in full swing hits me as I pass the dish pit where the “Stewies” or stewards slog through piles of kitchen and dining room dishes, rubber gloves up to their elbows, rubber aprons covering clothes from the splashy, icky, slop of other people’s dirty dishes. It’s an unpleasant task I plan to avoid as much as possible—I figure I fulfill my dish duty when I wash my massive mixing bowls. (There are two for each of my large mixers but sometimes I go through three in a night.)

I fill my coffee mug for a little boost of caffeine and check to see how the kitchen has put out my dessert for the evening. I’m more of a cake than a pie girl. Banana cake (made from deep-frozen bananas I found in the most-beautiful-freezer-in-the-world), yellow cake with lemon icing (we have bottled lemon juice), chocolate cake with mocha icing. I also make lots of crisps from the frozen fruit—mango chunks with “fresh” ginger from a big plastic bottle in the walk-in, apple and rhubarb, blueberry, peach (peaches are now gone, alas).

Inside the kitchen, I give my workstation a scrub and try to stay out of the dinner sous chef’s way as she hustles around for the final hour of her meal. Mostly, the food she’s cooked waits in the hot box, ready for the line, but occasionally she needs to roast vegetables. (The mixed frozen vegetables are surprisingly edible. When I’m not floating them in ramen, I sometimes eat them with rice, butter and salt.) Standing at my station, I stare at my list which is attached to the week’s menu.

As I explained in my previous post, my daily job requires producing a morning pastry, a lunch cookie, dinner bread and dessert. It’s also my job to replenish the puck supply (manufactured cookies that sit in a box at the end of the hot line) and make yogurt which involves heating powdered milk, adding culture and letting it grow overnight. It’s a lot of work even if I do have nine hours—or should I say nine paid hours—to accomplish it all.

I begin with bread. Last week the menu listed Hula Chicken and Maui Rice (this is the spirit of the dishes not the exact names) so I made Hawaiian Rolls with real pineapple juice. Yum! One day, to go with bangers and mash, I made Irish Soda Bread. I make focaccia at least once a week because it’s reliable and easy. Bread blows up rapidly here! Within an hour my dough, even in the walk-in, will be pushing the top off the Lexan I’ve put it in. It’s nuts! Adjusting to actual atmospheric pressure holding my dough down back in New York is going to be tough.

After I set the dough to rise, I start on my dinner dessert because it is, aside from the bread, the most important item. I’ve made massive batches of cookies so I don’t always have to mix up a fresh batch—I just line the frozen balls up on sheet pans and bake them. As for the AM pastry, I often cheat and use the pre-made frozen croissant, Danishes, and bear claws. They’re easy and make people happy. I almost always have all my items going at one time—cookies in the oven, frosting in the mixer, cake cooling on the rack, dough rising.

Around 11 PM I’m either hungry or dizzy. Food! Now that we have fresh eggs I make myself a sausage, egg and American cheese sandwich. It’s among the highlights of my day. I’ve always loved egg sandwiches but when I eat them close to midnight in my lonely kitchen at the Pole they taste magical. Who knows what it is—maybe just the ingredients which aren’t any different than I might use at home. Or maybe it’s the way they remind me of my habit of sitting on the blue velvet sofa with the New York Times as I drip egg yolk on A1 that does it. When I finish, I instinctively think of my dog, Maebelle. She always gets the messy plate.

Back to work. Cakes to frost, morning pastry to move from the proof box to the oven, cookies to platter and label, yogurt to cool. Just last week, the yogurt took forever to come to temperature and by 3 AM it was nowhere near cool enough to add to the culture. (If the milk is too hot it will, naturally, kill the good bugs.) My solution? To make use of the most-beautiful-freezer-in-the-world. In no time that yogurt was cool enough to take the starter, allowing me to check one more item off my list.

At the end of the night I write notes with allergens for all items—Wheat, Dairy, Egg, Soy, Allium, Nut—along with instructions for re-heating, if needed. I clean my stations, sweep the floor and, if I’ve made a real mess, mop. What is it about mopping a floor that’s so damn humbling? Or is it just me? Every time I do it I get a little depressed thinking of all the people who mop floors every single day. Maybe it’s that those big rag mops made of cotton strings never strike me as very clean. This reality lends the whole process an ersatz quality that doesn’t sit well with me. Or maybe it’s just that in most workplaces it’s the lowest status worker who does the mopping, no matter how essential the job might be. I’m probably overthinking the whole thing—as anyone who knows me will agree, I’m not exactly the cleaner.

Off to bed I go but first my flour-dusted, egg-crusted uniform goes into the laundry bag and then I head back down the hall for my precious hot shower. I try to make it as brief as possible in the spirit of conservation but it’s a luxury that’s difficult not to indulge signaling, as it does, the end of my shift and, usually, something like twelve hours of freedom to sleep, read, write, and by all means take a tumble in the snow. I stand there, the hot water relaxing my tight shoulders, knowing the next day is already upon me for as time would have it, morning has nearly broken—no matter what the lights does or does not indicate. By the time I’m back in my room, pajama clad, Simon Vance whispering me to sleep, I’ve willingly forgotten the details as the routine of my life melts the hours into days and the days into an entity that the calendar tells me is a month here at the South Pole.