Rees on the Road: Whiskey on the Glacial Rocks

Blogs often only focus on the amazing and extraordinary or weird and wild aspects of one’s adventures. This skews the real experience however. I don’t want to only focus on the ‘facebook moments… I mean, hell, I’m not writing this to make people jealous! Im writing this for my million dollar movie deal… and to please my sisters… So with that in mind I’ll describe a quiet moment after a hard day spent on the ice working with the seals.

Today was a shorter day than most, only 9 or 10 hrs or so, no lunch, no break… but despite it being a shorter day it still was a big day. The pups were everywhere calling and flopping, pooping and peeing on the ice and often enough on us… Three of our northern study areas for our project were successfully worked, 30+ pups tagged, five adults head-bagged and tagged or retagged and several mommas weighed on a giant weigh sled towed behind one of our snow machines. Head-bagging is something we do when we need to tag or replace broken tags on an adult. It’s exactly what it sounds like. We throw a bag over their head with the hopes of keeping them calm while we work them, making it safer for the animal and us. More on head-bagging and tagging later.

So at the end of this hard day my body is tired and cold, brain a little fuzzy but soul full, satisfied and euphoric. Standing outside our kitchen hut looking east, an incredible view greets me. Across the ice covered bay, Mt Erebus is glimmering in the evening sun, seals are out on the ice like giant grunting sausages, and in my hand is a glass of whiskey being chilled by glacial ice from a nearby iceberg. Never has drinking whiskey felt so profound. One can’t help but wonder as you look at the bubbles escaping the ice and mixing with the liquid, when the last time that bubble of air was in the atmosphere. Perhaps it comes from the time of our revolutionary war, perhaps the time of the Romans and Jesus, perhaps even before the pyramids were built… It’s moments like these, standing outside our kitchen hut after a very long and difficult but still fun as hell day, that this job seems even more surreal than my brain can handle. There are absolutely moments of boredom and mundane tasks, like prepping gear, or processing genetic samples or sitting inside a hut waiting out a three day wind/snow storm, but even those moments of boredom and frustration are still awesome. Hell, my commute, a part of our day that most of us dread, is a 20-30 min snow machine ride that takes me along a glacier slowly falling off a volcano! The reality is, I’m in Antarctica! I’m exploring the sea ice and sea cliffs and caves, something that literally only a handful of people in the entire world have ever had the chance to do, plus I’m doing it all to freaking put hands on seals!!! And now, after that kickass day, I’m relaxing with a glass of whiskey that is currently being cooled by thousands of years of pressure and cold. I love my job.

Ok, so maybe that quiet moment wasn’t as ordinary as I had planned, but honestly there are very few things here in Antarctica that are anything other than extraordinary. Even the posting of this blog, the amount of craziness involved in getting a wifi signal out here, solar panels generating electricity to power it all… the number of people and processes utilized to make it happen…. Unbelievable. My life currently is extraordinary, and that… that is ok with me.