ANZAC Memorial, Sydney Australia July 2010

April 25th means little to Americans other than, probably, waiting anxiously for whatever you ordered with your tax refund to arrive. But to the fine folk of Australia and New Zealand it is ANZAC Day which, generally, means a fall holiday. At the very least it is an excuse to have gunfire breakfast, AKA coffee spiked with a very respectable amount of rum, which is something I learned as retaliation for my observance of St. Patrick’s Day with my exceptionally Irish coffees.

For St. Patrick’s, I got up early, relatively speaking, checked my dewars and telescopes, and then went up to Club 90 South. I then spent the next five hours cleaning up months of accumulate detritus and generally ignored maintenance in the bar. FACT: one of the reasons bars are dimly lit is so you don’t have to clean them as thoroughly. Once cleaning was completed, I compiled the finest 14 hours of drinking music that the X Drive had to offer, and then decorated the bar with shotglasses and bottles of Jamesons. At 5pm, I pressed play on the tunes and poured myself some whiskey so that I would be ready to salute whoever came through the door as I poured them their shot.

It was good time. Eventually, people started biting beer cans and spitting torn aluminum at each other. That’s how good a time it was.

A little over a month later, our telescope mechanic and former New South Wales rugby prop walked into the bar a plunked down a bottle of something special he’d brought down in his luggage: a bottle of Bundaberg rum. I was familiar with and fond of Bundaberg’s ginger beer but had no idea they made a rum. Flavor-wise, it’s a grassy salty rum agricole similar to St. George Spirit’s Aqua Libre. I can’t possibly do justice to Allan’s accent which was so thick you could drown sheep in it, but when I asked what that was for he said, “Have a Bundy with me. It’s ANZAC Day.”

Turkish Artillery in the Morning – rum by Bundaberg, mug by R. Stevens of dieselsweeties.com

While I knew the history well, it was thus I was made privy to many of the modern cultural secrets of ANZAC Day, primarily the concept of the Gunfire Breakfast, which is coffee with sufficient rum added to it that you didn’t care about the guns anymore. In honor of that, and the fact that they’re running almost 20 hours ahead of the west coast of the US, I made myself a mug of gunfire breakfast with the Ipsento Panama BBotE and my bottle of Bundy I picked up three years ago in Sydney. This was, perhaps, not the best idea at 9pm but it was goddamn delicious and I hereby dub it “Turkish Artillery in Morning”. The recipe:

• 1 part BBotE (I found the blueberry fruitiness of the Ipsento Panama went well)
• 3 parts boiling water
• 1 part agricole rum (grass, salty flavored rum that uses the whole cane)

So, to all those who fell at Gallipoli, all those that mourned them back home, and all those that returned short a few limbs or marbles, here’s to you. And to the people of Christchurch who had to endure me giving a damn long semi-inebriated lecture on the history of the Great War and why the Arch of Remembrance at the end of Cashel Street was there to my ignorant fellow Polies in 2003, I apologize again.

With that, the band played Waltzing Matilda…

Ten years and eighteen days ago, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station closed for the winter, with the last LC-130 ski cargo plane departing the skiway on Valentine’s Day 2003. I watched it disappear from a mostly abandoned experiment in the Dark Sector (AKA the pie wedge extending from pole with all the telescopes in it). With the rapidly vanishing dot in the sky, I don’t know if anyone else felt it but the weight of 8-9 cold dark months finally settled down on me.

If this all was a terrible mistake, it had officially been made. There would be no escape. The last planes leave Antarctica when the temperatures start dipping below -50F and won’t return until the temperatures are reliably above that. Below -50F, we’re no longer entirely confident that we can keep the engines running (possibly freezing solid, ne’er to move again, should they stop), keep the skis from welding themselves to the ice, or that the JP-8 fuel won’t start to gel in the lines thus leading to tragic explosions. I list these things as they’re all incidents that have occurred in Antarctica or near Thule AFB in Greenland. It is also worth noting that the very first LC-130 is buried roughly 30′ under the snow where it crashed at the end of the skiway. Shit happens when things that would normally be a minor error can easily turn fatal at the hairy edge of safe operation. One of my favorite sayings when trying to teach radiation safety to recalcitrant undergrads, grad student, and postdocs is “Every safety regulation is written in someone’s blood. Try not make any new rules, okay?” My other favorite is “Stupidity is a harsh teacher and pain is Her lesson plan; not everyone is lucky enough or survives to get a second lesson.” but that one’s somewhat more insulting.

Antarctica, however, is the most unforgiving classroom. Every year, at least one person dies on the continent for failure to appreciate that Antarctica Does Not Care About You. Humans are only the apex predator at South Pole Station because absolutely nothing else except, maybe, bacteria can live there. On the coasts, you can get your ass handed to you by the goddamn penguins; the little bastards fly through water so don’t think for a moment that they aren’t a hell of a lot stronger than they look. The bruises I got on my shins from a 18″ tall adelie lasted for weeks; I’ve been told of the 4′ tall emperors breaking bones. The lack of fear of humans in all the animals of the Antarctic isn’t necessarily just because they have no experience of us, but rather that the average human isn’t much of a threat down there. We are a frail and feeble ape that is a few hours away from death in the environment that they happily live.

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station – Last Flight Out, Valentine’s Day 2003

All that and more went running through my head as I watched this through the viewfinder of my camera before the battery froze up.

I invite you to look long and hard at this picture. The VAST white expanse with a bunch of footprints I made. You can see something that looks like buildings in the background beyond the skiway that my last escape to civilization is leaving on. They aren’t buildings, they’re pallets of supplies on raised berms that can survive the average -85F temperatures that are coming in the winter. Almost enough equipment to rebuild the entire station. There’s enough food on those berms to survive three to five winters without rescue, depending on the size of the winter population (fifty eight questionably damned souls when I was there). Mind you, there isn’t enough fuel to keep the lights on, buildings warm, and water liquid for more than about 18 months…maybe.

So, it is vitally necessary to keep in your mind that YES, a plane is coming back for you to maintain sanity. Actually, that’s not true. Most of my compatriots weren’t thinking more than a day or two into the future, focused on the task at hand and whatever hobby they’d chosen. If there was ever a moment of existential crisis where someone started losing it because they were afraid they were going to be stuck at Pole forever, I never saw it. Maybe I did and that was one of the nights as Station Bartender that I served alcohol until someone reached sweet oblivion and killed one more day of winter which they didn’t have to remember on the way to Station Opening. It’s hard to say.

But what helps most people through hard times are customs. The Antarctic traditions run back to the early explorers with a strong naval slant, which means many of them are dumb, most of them involve alcohol, and some corporal punishment. After the last flight leaves, everyone goes back to their rooms to get ready for the Station Closing Dinner, something that’s happened every year since South Pole Station was established in 1957. I want you to all understand that the desire for adventure that brings people to the bottom of the Earth also brings some truly fantastic cooks. The man in charge of the food for the continent as whole while I was there was a Michelin starred chef from New Orleans, Cookie John. Despite the limitations of being at Pole, Closing Dinner may have been one of the finest meals I’ve eaten in my life. People bring tuxedos for this dinner despite the limited weight allowance. It is, in a word, a soiree.

After that, a more modern custom that dates to the early-1980s happened: the full station viewing of John Carpenter’s The Thing. This movie is grossly inaccurate about how an Antarctic station looks like and is run, but let me tell you the mindsets are spot on. You want to know how are things are a few months deeper into winter, you need only watch this MacReady’s thousand yard stare as he fumbles with the bottle of whiskey. At the end of the movie, I turned to the station manager and pointed out that we were woefully under armed, particularly with respect to flamethrowers, for an American station. I’ll treasure the look he gave me for life as he realized he was trapped with me for nine more months.

You might have thought we’d watch The Shining. Goodness no. We saved that for Midwinter, along with Dark Star (not surprisingly, also by John Carpenter).

NEXT TIME: Winterizing the station, because you’re still not quite ready for it to get really cold.

This is a not-at-all-paid endorsement of the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History’s Kickstarter project to make a very neat interactive exhibit, one I would have loved as a kid. I say not-at-all-paid because I tend to be the one who buys the drinks when my sister visits.

Wherever you went to school as a kid, there were field trips in elementary school. Now that I’m an adult, I suspect this was so there was time to fumigate the classrooms and disinfect every surface covered in the toxic biofilm of Cooties. Of course, the quality of your field trips was directly proportional to the level of funding your school had. Growing up in the immediate aftermath of post-Prop 13 California, this meant these trips got a lot more local with parents driving since we couldn’t afford to run the buses.

Before the Monterey Bay Aquarium opened, the most popular science field trip destinations for the kids of Santa Cruz County were Shark Tooth Hill (now known as the Randal Morgan Sandhills Preserve) and the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, AKA THE PLACE WITH THE WHALE SCULPTURE YOU CAN PLAY ON!!!!! It was, of course, forbidden to climb all over the concrete gray whale model outside the museum but somehow it seemed to attract dozens of second graders just the same. We got yelled at to get off of it, but were back on again within seconds of the Museum Lady turning her back. (NOTE: my sister now holds the role of Museum Lady for today’s kids)

The Museum is small but somehow manages to be a focal point for scientific inquiry for the whole county. Strange rock? People call the museum. Found a skull you think is a dinosaur’s despite the fact that the geology of Santa Cruz didn’t exist in the Mesozoic Era, a fact I totally learned in first grade there? People call the museum. Weird fungus on that tree over there, recording of a bird call you don’t recognize, etc.? I think you get the idea. The answer to your question may be “Umm, please don’t bring roadkill into the museum, unless it’s Bigfoot, TOTALLY BRING THAT IN” but it’s at least somewhere to start asking.

Now, having mentioned the geology of Santa Cruz, most all of what you see is uplifted marine sediments. The drier parts of the county tend to have a lot of exposed sandstone which is why there’s several quarries around. And as any student of paleontology, or sufficiently dinosaur obsessed six year old (e.g. Li’l Phil), can tell you quarries tend to find fossils as they’re doing the most digging. Being marine sediments, the fossils you get reflect that.

Near Scotts Valley, there was an exposed hill face of sandstone that science field trips and cub scouts went to regularly to go play in the sand, particularly after good storms. What were we looking for? Shark teeth. They washed out of the hill with astounding regularity which captivated my imagination as a kid. Even six year old Phil had some grasp of statistics, populations, and the geologic time scale. My first grader math quickly put together a picture of submerged Santa Cruz as a place that was a thronging sea of almost nothing but great white sharks, HUGE sharks, to have caused that many teeth to be in that hill.

Really, it only takes one Megaladon tooth side by side with one from a modern great white to make you stare at the calm ocean surface and never want to get near a boat again.

But other fossils and than shark teeth get found in those hills. There’s plenty of whale skeletons and massive loads of sand dollars, but one of the more interesting ones is the long extinct Dusisiren jordani sea cow (same family as the Steller’s Sea Cow, which fur hunters in the North Pacific hunted to extinction to keep sailors fed). They would like to make a replica of this skeleton for students to practice exhuming this from a sandbox. If you’ve gotten the opportunity to play in an archaeology/paleontology grid, this is precisely what they’d like start teaching kids about in elementary school, except with a sea cow to discover and assemble.

As much fun as I had sliding down those sand hills to the point I abraded holes in the seat of my pants as I kid, I’m not sure I can express what kind of dark pacts I would have made to have a skeleton to assemble. So, go on over to Kickstarter and toss a few bucks at them. Do it for Li’l Phil. Do it for some unnamed mischevious child that’s out there now with a healthy sense of the morbid that has future in forensics.