Late Night Nonsense

So it's been a while since I've updated this.

It happens. I'm a busy person here. I have a life at the bottom of the world. I can't always pander to your every whim.

Bet you didn't think that living on a sparsely populated research station could have so many things to do in my free time. You were wrong. Most of you are missing out on some of the best times I've had in my life. I'll be sad to leave this place.

Since it is late (I'm covering the midrats dispatch), I'll be brief tonight. The large quantity of coffee I drank today has worn off. I was splattered with some ancient foam premix today and have savored the aroma all day. I'm covered in dirt after beating various fire trucks with hammers. We just came back from a bells call and the wind is blowing. I'm glad I get to engage the pump and just sit in the truck and stay warm when the windchill is below zero again. I'd like a shower, but I'd like to find my rack and doze off more.

Things have been busy here. We had the annual rugby game against the Kiwis and lost, maintaining our tradition of being forever winless against them. It maintains the Kiwis record of having the longest (time wise) winning streak in the history of rugby. We put up a good fight in the first half, but by the second, everybody was just tired and the Kiwis took advantage of that.

All in all, it was a good time, and I was able to catch a sled towed by a Challenger back.

So I smelled seawater the other day. It was pretty awesome. The Swedish icebreaker Oden arrived almost two weeks ago and has been crushing ice ever since with a couple of brief stops in port to let their crew wander the streets of Mactown. It's interesting to see the slab of ice that I called home for many shifts in Ice Town crushed into little bits.

Anyway, some of the ice has started to push out to sea. It's pretty incredible to walk down to Hut Point and smell the salt air (something that's not diesel) and look into the clear waters of the Ross Sea.

The penguins have been wandering about more lately, too. Packs of up to sixty Adelies have been spotted frolicking in and around town. The seals and whales have found the open water and add to the fauna. The occasional skua rounds it out.

I can hear the fuelies chattering away on the radio right now. They're the only ones working tonight besides us. A few days ago, the USS Paul Buck (an oiler) arrived to resupply us with about a million gallons of fuel so we don't freeze to death in the next year.

In about a week or so the Tern will come to port and bring all the cargo we need so people like me will still have things to break and food harvested in 1998 to eat.

Frisbee golf here in the Antarctic is certainly a challenge. Some of the obstacles I encountered included pipeline traps, bulldozers, milvans, ice covered melt pools, steep and rocky slopes, and the heckling of Cap. It's a fun time, provided you didn't get into the sport to enjoy scenery more breathtaking than unheated storage buildings and Hazwaste.

So we won the scavenger hunt the other day. I got a "Get Rec'd" hat out of it. It took us a while to find the correct cowboy and Ant. 1 sign as well as the penguin pooper, but we did it. That's the most running I've done in boots in a long time. My legs were aching for a few days after that.

Luckily, I have a new hero at the coffee house to remedy that problem. She makes the strongest coffee with whiskey of all the baristas. It goes a long way to relieving those aches and pains (Irish Coffee and extra strength Tylenol have a lot in common as they both have caffeine and thin the blood). Red absolutely hates the taste of it. It's still funny seeing the look on her face whenever I make her take a sip.

Sounds like they're getting ready to shut down the mogas transfer soon. That's a big step, but I'm pretty sure they have a lot more AN-8 to move before they're done.

So I went to "Room With a View" yesterday for my boondoggle. It was pretty cool. It was my first time on a snowmachine and I had a blast. It was the fastest I've gone since I've arrived here. I topped out at around fifty miles a hour. The machine had a lot more left in it, but since I was with a group, I couldn't just blow past everyone.

The views up there on the foot of an active volcano were pretty awesome. The ice edge has progressed up to Inaccessible Island and is apparently approaching Mactown quickly. Seeing wide open water after seeing miles and miles of white ice for the last several months is a little weird.

I just pulled a metal sliver out of my knuckle. That explains why it felt funny.

So I'm a short timer now. Officially less than a month left in this contract. It doesn't really have that good of an effect on me. I'm starting to feel pieces of my old self come back again, the pieces that I was happy to leave behind.

Thoughts of being stuck back home leave me irritable. Looking at jobs makes me miserable. If there was something back home that looked interesting, maybe I'd be in a better mood. Potential unemployment doesn't really worry me. I've set myself up so I can manage for quite some time if the market doesn't pick up.

One of the few things that I have to look past that is the traveling that I have coming to me. I'm going to wander through a few countries before I touch the states again. I'll probably even come out of them with a few interesting stories and a bunch of pictures that can be used to torture people who don't really want to hear all about it.

To all those who keep asking me when I'll be back, the answer is that I don't know. I'm pretty sure I will be back eventually, though. I'll have to pick up my stuff at some point, at least. I'd hate to just leave my tools and truck behind.

Lori just referred to me as a cowboy redneck. I denied it, but maybe there's a little truth in it somewhere.

Looks like I'm getting relieved. Time to go hit my rack and sleep. I'll put some dream time aside to looking towards whatever the next adventure is. I'm pretty sure I'll have to have another one. If I don't, I'll probably lose my mind.

Behold the Truckie

Apparently this is the effect I have on machinery. This is the yoke from the output shaft on the transmission of Ambo 2.

I am the Truckie, destroyer of Zetron and conqueror of calipers. Powerstrokes bleed in my presence.

It turns out I’m a destructive force here in Antarctica. After my ability to supposedly magically break Ambo 2 and Red 1 a few weeks ago, my list of victims has grown considerably. It has grown so much that Cap has banned me from going anywhere near the Oden, the Swedish ice breaker that finally docked at the ice pier several days ago, lest I cause it to sink or bring some other form of mechanical malady upon it.

Working out at the Crash Shack the other day, my ability to magically make things break came out into full force. During my time there, Ambo 2 failed to start on several occasions requiring jumpstarts, Red 4 decided to have indigestion and spill glycol, and Red 1 determined that stopping via use of the brakes was no longer necessary for a 70,000 pound tracked dinosaur.

The most entertaining of these, in my opinion, was Red 1 not wanting to stop. If you get bored by technical details, feel free to skip down a few paragraphs.

Following a hardstand for the C-17 from Cheech Red 1 needed fuel. Since we don’t normally move the Chieftains from their parking spots as they destroy the ice roads it was the first time it had been in motion for the day. As I shifted through the gears, I kept hearing a loud clunking that I couldn’t recall being there before. As I hadn’t driven it in a while, however, I couldn’t remember if this was normal as the Chieftains make lots of strange noises.

Pulling up to the fuel tank, I lined it up and downshifted to get ready to stop. After having dropped to first gear and then into neutral, I hit the brakes. Normally, this is where the Chieftain would come to a stop. Instead, it decided to roll a few more feet on its own and then stop. This came as a bit of a surprise, though it wasn’t a huge issue as the drag from the tracks and the level ice allowed it to come to a stop on its own.

Puzzled, and now wondering what the smell of burning brakes was coming from, I hopped out and dove under the front of the unit. Crawling behind the front pumpkin, I came to the disc brake that is located on the front drive shaft. Upon closer examination, I found that the front caliper bracket was loose (the cause of the clunking) and the vibrating action had loosened the fittings for the hydraulic brake causing it to dump fluid everywhere. Upon further inspection, I also found that the air brake used for parking was not engaged (I set it before leaving the cab) and that the pads had been loosely rubbing against the disc, causing the burning smell. Looking at the rear parking brake, I found the same situation.

After radioing in and letting Lt. Helitack know, I went to work trying to clean up and patch it. Absorbent pads took care of the spill and a wrench solved the leak.

Shortly after, Lt. Helitack and the rest of the crew came out to stare and provide their opinions.

After nursing Red 1 back to her parking spot, I was a little disappointed (though not wholly surprised) to find that the brake line had come loose and was leaking again.

A little while later, the phone rang in the Crash Shack. It was the Cap. He spoke with Lt. Helitack for a few minutes regarding the mechanical problems and then requested to speak with me.

Picking up the phone, I said, “Grant.”

He responded with “I send you all the way out to Pegasus, put you in the biggest fire truck we have, and you go and break it in half?!”

Before I could respond, I could hear the phone slam down on the other end. He had hung up.

It was worth a laugh. While likely at first appearance to you as an uninvolved reader it doesn’t sound like a good thing, it goes back to myself and the Captain having a unique relationship where we give each other a hard time constantly. It’s fun. He called back a few minutes later to laugh at me and then ask some more questions about the problem.

If you were skipping over the broken Red 1 story, please resume here. If you don’t want to hear about me breaking the Zetron radio console and the T-Site, please get off at the next exit.

For the next shift, I was assigned back in town at Station 1. As one of our dispatchers is on R&R before the winter sets in, we are currently short of personnel in the world of dispatch. As a result, lowly firefighters such as myself are required to fill in at dispatch.

This always creates some amusing situations since most of us haven’t really done much dispatching. This combined with the fact that very few real situations actually arise on station leads to various forms of chaos arising when something actually does happen.

Nearing the end of our shift, I had the pleasure of waking up a little early and stumbling in a half conscious manner down into the dispatch office to relieve Jersey, the overnight dispatcher. After the normal pass down, I assumed “control” of dispatch.

It was a quiet morning, with only a few phone calls from people looking for numbers. I sat in the office and watched through the windows as the rest of the crew swept the bays and did the rest of the morning chores.

After a little while, someone stopped in and told me that Scat 1 was trying to raise me on the radio for the morning radio check.

“Huh,” I thought. “How’d I miss that? I had channel two turned up.”

So I tried to raise Scat on the radio.

Silence.

“Weird,” I thought. I went and told someone to get Clint Eastwood to go back out and try it again, assuming that he’d already come back in. He went and tried, and nothing.

By this time, officers were now wandering into the office telling me that Scat was calling. At this point, after hearing nothing, I advised them that channel two didn’t seem to be working. A few quick checks with a portable radio confirmed this, and my status as the killer of the Zetron was confirmed.

Few were surprised when they found out I was in there when it decided to fail.

After a few phone calls and paging in the head dispatcher, chaos continued, albeit without me as I went off shift and went home for a safety nap.

Later, I discovered that I hadn’t destroyed the Zetron console, but in fact I had magically managed to destroy the transmitter at the T-Site. An enviable distinction, indeed.

Though the true cause of the fried transmitter was an unscheduled power outage during the previous night, I will certainly be remembered as the one who broke it.

Lastly, for any that doubt my amazing ability to create havoc and devastation just by being in the same geographic location as something, I give one final example.

Yesterday, an off day, the page came out looking for volunteers to help unload pallets of beer for the store.

Within minutes, off-duty firefighters appeared out of every nook and cranny to help, including myself.

The reason for the mass desire to help is simple: the store typically gives the volunteers free beer that would not normally be sold as perhaps one can of the six pack was damaged.

The beer offload proceeded as normal for the entire first pallet, with firefighters creating human conveyors moving beer from pallet to carts. The second pallet, loaded with Heineken, did not operate as smoothly.

While myself and a few others were inside offloading cases of beer and soda into stacks in the store, the rest of the group were out on the loading dock starting into the Heineken. The beer was wrapped up in layers of plastic rolled around the sides of the pallet, something that you’ve undoubtedly seen in various warehouse club stores such as Costco or Sam’s Club. Acting Lieutenant was cutting through the plastic in an effort to get to the beer.

As he did so, he came down to a layer that was held on by only a little bit of plastic.

He cut the plastic.

Now, what happened next I have pieced together from eyewitness statements.

Apparently, when Acting Lieutenant severed the last strip of plastic, the angle of the sun, gravity, and assorted laws of physics all came together and conspired to do the unthinkable.

With the last shred of saran wrap divided beneath the blade, the beers shifted under these new forces put on them. They shifted back, further back, and then down. It was a dreadful plummet. Horror ensued. I’m sure the terrified faces of those involved will never be equaled again. Case after case cascaded down out of control to the packed volcanic sands below. A sea of green cans and cardboard spilled everywhere. Hissing and spitting came from some of the cans. A few valiant volunteers dove in to save those wounded, doing their best to shotgun the ruptured cans, saving the liquid gold inside from a miserable fate in the sands of Ross Island.

When I stepped out, I was left aghast at the devastation.

I took pictures.

After cleaning up the mess (and having myself blamed for the disaster due to my destructive skills as a truckie even though I was a hundred feet away), we were each rewarded with a six pack of unfit for sale Heineken.

It’s a harsh continent. Sometimes bad things end up being good, though.

This now concludes the tales of destruction that have occurred in the last few days. I’m sure other things of interest have happened, though I can’t recall them. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that there is no sense of time here. It is five days until cookie day. That’s all I know.