Cabin Fever
Surprise - I'm home a few days early! And: is clarity overrated?
Dear readers, it’s true — I’ve made it back to Minneapolis, slightly ahead of schedule! My accelerated timeline developed in true McMurdo whirlwind fashion and before I knew it, I was on an LC-130 taking off from Willy Field.1 You may ask: “Kelsey, is it scary, taking off on a runway made of snow and ice, which floats over the sea?” And the answer is…yes? But nowhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I was mostly preoccupied with the novelty of the experience: what may be the only time I ever get to fly on a Vietnam-era turboprop plane with skis on!
By the end of my time on the ice, I had what can only be described as cabin fever, and I had it bad. The psychologist on the ice (yes, there’s a clinical psychologist at McMurdo) gave a talk a few weeks ago about the psychology of ICE (Isolated, Constrained, Extreme) environments: monotony is psychologically damaging. Our brains work to fill in the emptiness; they’ll start to come up with something new on their own. We need variety, like we need water, air, food, shelter, space, company.
Antarctica is beautiful—the most beautiful place I’ve ever been—but monotonous is the name of the game. White. Wind. Rock. Work. Repeat.
The monotony does break, of course. And when it does, it engendered in me an almost religious awe. There are no places hostile enough to rebuff, entirely, humanity’s insistence at creating reasons to be anywhere, everywhere.
Still, turns out being in Antarctica, once you’ve decided consciously or subconsciously you’d like to leave, is a very difficult place to be. Not a prison, but the schematic of one: nowhere to go, no easy way to escape. Not a prison, but the ice would surely tingle at the word, recognizing something of itself.
Anyway! I’m home! And I met some amazing people, worked a lot, and have been left a bit disappointed, even bereft, that I don’t seem to have gained any unique insight—besides, I suppose, what I think will be an enduring gratitude for the typical flexibility of my job, and reinforcements of things I already believed like that a) cars are bad and b) people shouldn’t go to Antarctica as tourists.
Coming back home has been as disorienting as it was leaving. I think it might take some time to figure out what to make of the whole experience and am going to try to give myself space to not need to have gotten some super-special takeaway right away, or at all: after all, at the end of the day, I was there to help other people. And in the meantime, when I got home, my car wouldn’t start after having sat around for 7 weeks in the cold. I moped around in my apartment for a few days pretending I didn’t need a new battery, and gave in, readers, yes, when I came down with cabin fever once again.2
I don’t know what the future of this space is, but I have so much more to think about and time to think about and write about now that I’m not working so much (lol) and I’ve really enjoyed writing these little missives.3 Thanks for coming along with me thus far!
The photos I took of the plane and then from the sky on my trip home are in Los Angeles; I lost my camera while on the way back and am so grateful it turned up at Air New Zealand’s office at LAX!!!! But for the meantime that means no photos.
…and had to go back to work, I guess.
I guess one other takeaway is that I miss writing, and am tired of feeling so overwhelmed by the conflicting feelings I have about various modes of publication (plus the fact that it’s still a lot of work to submit and odds of acceptance are terrible), that it dissuades me from writing at all.