Found a Cigar

The library has a disproportionately large section of Lonely Planet guides and a hot chocolate station up front for all of your hot chocolate needs. (Also, tea bags lie up front, disorganized, for all of your tea needs.) There is a good range of books in the subjects you might expect, and even perhaps in some subjects you might not expect. There are also, in the library, printed pieces of oversized paper that hang on the walls and say, in red ink, “YOU ARE BRILLIANT AND BEAUTIFUL AND I LOVE YOU” I would guess these come from the winter folks, the Jack Torrance type.

Work continues in the cargo container where a great deal of unloading, reorganizing, auditing, and inventorying remains. Today a coworker and I needed to move six wooden boxes from the front of the container to the back. Four of them were about fifteen feet long and large enough to hold a wide loaf of bread. The other two were smaller. We moved the two small ones quickly to the back. The first large box was exposed, and on top it said “Steel Shaft,” which, indeed, was held inside, and a steel shaft of that size, let me say, is heavier than you might expect. I don't know what it is used for. Perhaps it was placed in storage because nobody else knows what it is used for—one of those classic mix ups, the kind upon which great stories are built.

I hope to hike out to Pressure Ridges tomorrow, a place on the sea ice near Scott Base (New Zealand, two miles away) where the ice is pushed against rocky shore, where it cracks upward and folds upon itself. The results are supposed to be quite beautiful.

And the weather has been more than agreeable, usually peaking around 40 degrees in the afternoon. I work in an alcove of shipping containers, wind is blocked, and the metal reflects heat. My little workspace, outside anyway, must jump into the upper forties. I have still not grown accustomed to daylight at all hours, but the temperature does in fact fluctuate by time of day. The sun drops lower at night, light is more orange, the temperature falls into the twenties or teens. Wind is constant, katabatic I think, flowing down like water from the elevated center of the continent. The mountains are still an impressive sight.

In a way, blogging about Antarctica so far seems much like blogging about the inside of a cargo container full of old lost metal and plastic machines in need of rediscovery. My daily routine has little to do with the continent on which I live. Weekends provide opportunity for hiking, cross-country skiing, a few tours. I'll see what I can do to jazz up this soporific blog.

Then again, it's in the little things, it's all in the little things...

“I don't understand it,” Hans Castorp said. “I never can understand how anybody can not smoke – it deprives a man of the best part of life, so to speak – or at least of a first-class pleasure. When I wake in the morning, I feel glad at the thought of being able to smoke all day, and when I eat I look forward to smoking afterwards; I might almost say I eat only for the sake of being able to smoke – though of course that is more or less of an exaggeration. But a day without tobacco would be flat, stale, and unprofitable, as far as I am concerned. If I had to say to myself tomorrow: 'No smoke today' - I believe I shouldn't find the courage to get up – on my honor, I'd stop in bed. But when a man has a good cigar in his mouth – of course it mustn't have a side draught or not draw well, that is extremely irritating – but with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him – literally. It's just like lying on the beach: when you lie on the beach, why, you lie on the beach, don't you? - you don't require anything else, in the line of work or amusement either. - People smoke all over the world, thank goodness; there is nowhere one could get to, so far as I know, where the habit hasn't penetrated. Even polar expeditions fit themselves out with supplies of tobacco to help them carry on. I've always felt a thrill of sympathy when I read that. You can be very miserable: I might be feeling perfectly wretched, for instance; but I could always stand it if I had my smoke.”