Telling Antarctica’s stories

“A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drowned now and again.”

-J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands

The snowstorm rolled in, slowly but steadily. We watched the sky in the direction of McMurdo base go dark. That was when the radio clicked on, the announcement crackling across every channel: “McMurdo Station is now in Condition Two …”

These weather announcements define our mobility. Condition Three means business as usual; in Condition One, no one leaves the building unless absolutely necessary. Though we still have visibility here at Marble Point, no one will be taking a helicopter back to town now. Sure enough, 15 minutes later, Condition One is called, locking everything down. I pull some more hamburger out to defrost. There’s no telling how long we will be holed up here.

So what do we do while we wait out the storm? Our stomachs full of stew and our mugs brimming, we settle in at the table and on couches to talk, telling stories about the times we’ve seen on this southernmost continent.

I am the youngest person here by at least 15 years. Some of the pilots have been working for longer than I’ve been alive. They know more about Antarctica’s wilds and dangers than I probably ever will and have seen things here that no one will see again.

And these guys certainly know how to spin a story.

“You know the man who designed the South Pole Station?” someone asks. “I crashed a plane in Alaska with that guy once.” Crunch tosses out the comment casually and is immediately prodded for more.

Tales are woven one into another. There are successes and failures, great adventures and great tragedies. The deaths of two men in a crevasse is mentioned, and everyone is quiet for a moment. “What happened?” I ask.

“They were hiking when they saw a storm coming in – they knew they had half an hour before it would hit,” Scott tells me. “They decided to shortcut straight to the Kiwi base for shelter, left the trail, and they both fell into a crevasse.”

When the two men didn’t return or radio in, workers went looking for a good mountaineer to help find them. “It didn’t matter,” Scott tells me. “The two men fell quickly, wedged in, and the snow refroze around them. There was nothing we could do to get them out and they both died of hypothermia.”

This happened more than a decade ago, but stories like that don’t lose their power.

Other tales remind us of the times when miraculous successes have happened against the odds – like the men in a helicopter crash here in the Dry Valleys who were rescued by pilots and field camp workers who were serendipitously nearby. “We didn’t have any gear with us, so we took the helicopter apart with an ice ax. We got the pilot and the technician out just in time. Saved their lives.

“If we hadn’t been in the right place at the right time to help them – if they hadn’t known exactly what to do – those guys wouldn’t have made it.”

Another pilot recounts the time that one woman jury-rigged a broken high-frequency radio, sending the distress signal that rescued another would-be hypothermia victim.

“Do you remember that blizzard Johnson got caught in?” Peter asks. “He dug himself a hole, sheltered in it, and waited it out. It was unbelievable.”

These stories of rescues, disasters and survival serve two purposes: One is to teach and to warn. “We haven’t had a near run-in with crevasse accidents for a few years now,” Matt says. “People are getting too comfortable.” Tales are retold to remind us of the dangerous face of Antarctica and the need to always stay careful.

But these stories also are told to inspire – stories for the sake of stories, personal and community legends that are recounted again and again. Because in Antarctica, stories often affirm what we are doing here – pursuing the unknown, in science and in exploration – and they help keep us alive.

After all, this is a continent that was itself only a guessed-at legend not that long ago, a story that inspired some of the most daunting exploration man has seen.

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, go to bangordailynews.com.