Turkey crisis strengthens friendships

Thanksgiving is a good time for remembering the things you’re grateful for. Often it’s the little things that make the most difference. I am thankful for the invention of the hand-warmer. I swear I get up in the morning because of those things.

Thanksgiving also is a time for family, friends and food. With few exceptions, all of us at South Pole station are far away from our families. Having this in common brings us even closer together during the holidays and strengthens our friendships – we become each other’s family.

Plus there’s nothing quite like living at the bottom of the world in the harshest environment on Earth with only two bags of personal possessions to give you a renewed appreciation for all those little things you do have.

Thanksgiving preparation began, for me, nearly two weeks before the actual event, when three others and I hauled nearly 500 pounds of turkeys by sled from storage at the station dome to the galley freezers. That’s what I call earning your holiday indulgences.

Just a week before the big dinner, that winch that’s used to haul shipments of food and cargo nearly three stories into the air from the ground to the galley in the elevated station broke. Replacement parts to fix it would arrive about two days after the galley needed our food. We, however, were not to be deterred. An all-hands call was announced throughout Amundsen-Scott station and a human chain was built, forming a line to pass what amounted to 12,000 pounds of supplies, for Thanksgiving and for the week, hand-to-hand all the way up to the galley. The turnout of people was so great that the job, which usually takes several hours with three of us and the winch, was completed by hand in less than a half-hour.

Just as whole families pitch in to cook on Turkey Day, so did we here at the station. Sign-up sheets appeared in the galley for people who wanted to help with the cooking. Many volunteers, myself included, felt that it just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving if we couldn’t hang out in a kitchen and help prepare food (like I said, it’s those little things). Having handed boxes of groceries from their recently flown-in cargo boxes all the way up to the galley, I then signed up for potato-peeling and pie-baking duties.

Banter flew in the kitchen as workers and scientists donned aprons and tackled the art of the flaky crust. A potato-peel fight broke out among the carpenters. I traded recipes with one of the bulldozer operators. Someone played music on a CD player.

Thanksgiving finally arrived, marked first and foremost by an extra stationwide day off. Shifts usually are worked six days a week, 10 hours a day to keep the station running. Our Thanksgiving holiday gave us time to relax, catch up on laundry, and look around at all of the work we’d done so far this season.

We dressed up, we feasted, we danced, and we celebrated. We rang in the holiday season together – 800 miles from our closest neighbors at McMurdo station and more than half a world away from the United States. While I cannot betray my loyalty to my mother’s stuffing, I have to say that Thanksgiving dinner tastes all the better when the fixings have been brought so very far, and with such effort.

During a pause in the festivities, I thought again about everything I am thankful for. As I looked around the table, I saw a camaraderie that had already formed a family of sorts. I am thankful for the community at South Pole station and for how we had all come together. Not only for the work we had done just to make a viable, functional station, here in the most unlikely and difficult of circumstances, but for how we had gone on and made the holiday season come vibrantly alive. And I am thankful for the opportunity to spend this season here in Antarctica and experience this continent for myself.

That – and hand-warmers. Yes, I am definitely thankful for the invention of the hand-warmer.

Meg Adams, who grew up in Holden and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, shares her Antarctic experiences with readers each Friday. For more about her adventure, information about Antarctica and to e-mail questions to her, visit bangordailynews.com.