November 1, 1975: Saturday

Our flight out to 1A has been advanced from 1330 to 0900. We load up the remaining food, get Max and another new driller, and load everything up. We take Gentle II (code for “helo”), piloted by Billy Blackwelder, Crown Prince of the helo crew comics.

I get to listen on the headphones on the way out and talk to them about the ice survey and the drill camp. The rear crewman is a New Zealand sergeant. The language is a bit less formal than when Lieutenant Commander Gordon flew.

We do the survey with a centimeter scale, which is easier to hold than the two-yard rod. The ice has gone up a quarter of an inch since the D-8s left. We hop it’s true, and not observational error. We set out a new control flag, twice as far from the drill rig.

Kathy and I measured the distances between all the flags and the rig. I started out awkward with her today. So when I bumbled along in the wind, falling over cracks and losing the tape, I over did it, a little, and laughed at myself a lot. She took pictures of Calvin doing the leveling, for me.

The drill rig has a New Zealand flag flying from the top.

Everything has Antarctic Oil Exploration Co. stenciled on it, including the flag that Lloyd the Cook raises every morning at 5:00 a.m. There’s another one under the New Zealand flag. They’re Kiwi yellow, of course. They make a joke about the Navy and labeled everything like “Pot, Ice Melting, Type II, one each.”

The Mess Jamesway is a very comfortable place. An entry way with coat hooks and everyone’s name (or nickname) above, and a place to wash up, leads into the main room (sometimes called the DVDP Club), with two tables on either side, next to the curved walls, and assorted messes on the tables.

Lloyd stands in the back, behind the counter, in his T-shirt, black mustache, hair sticking out from his chest, slicing potatoes or kneading bread, listening to Santana’s Greatest Hits.

Peter, Kathy, and I went to gather ice, to make into water. Kathy insisted that three ride in the front. In Nebraska, two in the front and one in the back is not nice, but I’ve not bothered about that sort of hierarchy down here. But the insistence was relatively strong. It may have been so she could be close to Peter.

Why do I think such things? It’s certainly not because they are important.

To gather ice, you take these big plastic buckets and place them under ice chunks that have fallen from the iceberg and chip away at the chunk with an ice axe so that the pieces fall into the bucket. When you get the bucket full, it is very heavy, so you slide it down the path made by a previous ice hunter, and load it into the back of 590.

Oh, 590 is fixed, now. We brought out the spare part. But the trouble is, it was for the wrong side of the steering mechanism. Now, to turn the truck right, you turn the wheel left, and vice whatever.

It’s very difficult to back up. In fact, it screws up your whole sense of reality, to go the opposite way you turn the wheel. It’ll be awful fun when 590 gets back to McMurdo.

Sidebar:
Jim fixed it by putting arrows on the dash:
←Right → Left

Peter wants us to bring out a motor toboggan to go places the truck can’t.

When we get home, Dr. Treves tells us that Emmett has O.K.’d it, and we’ll go to ski-doo school after dinner.

Dave already thinks we have too much stuff out at 1A, and we keep bringing more and more. Emmett was out there when they were showing movies. Quig (a driller) wangled a movie projector and four movies out of Special Services. It was Son of Blob, and they made Emmett run the machine, but it kept jumping out of the frame, so he brought it back to be fixed.

They’re making a sign post to put outside, showing the way to various points of interest: McMurdo, Marble Point, Hockey Field, Christchurch, Nebraska, and Crows Nest, Australia (for Howard).

Speaking of the devil, Howard has been cussing like a driller and half of them didn’t know he was a priest.

We have to get into the helo with its rotors whirling, heads down, running with our bodies forward, carrying orange survival bags, like some evacuation or rescue mission.

We’re going back out tomorrow to do another ice survey, deliver the ski-doo and teach Peter how to operate and maintain them. It’s sort of like a riding lawnmower, only simpler. I even think I could fix one. (Berzel will laugh at that statement).

We practiced driving them on the snow hills behind the USARP storage pad, next to the Garage, Sattrack and the Scott Base Road on the other side. The snow hills are over a 45º slope.

It takes a fair amount of nerve to come charging down one hill and attack the next, and larger, hill at some oblique angle, which seems almost insanely dangerous. But it’s not, because you survive, schussing up over the top of the drift, like on “Rat Patrol.”

It was very scary the first few times up and down, finding out when to gun the throttle, etc. It’s very hard to turn ski-doos, a lot of leaning and controlled fish-tailing around a corner. You can’t sit down because I bailed out twice for fear of tipping. They’re very easy to start, hard to kill, but very difficult to shift from forward to reverse.

We’ll do all right. Finished that, made plans for tomorrow, wrote this, listened to Derek and the Dominoes, and drank apple juice. Went down to the Officers’ Club and had a general geologic discussion with Mike Rieff and the RISP guy (who either comes from or likes Nebraska).