The Big Move
Tuesday, December 30th, 2003
The big runway move happened the day after Christmas as planned. Our dining car is made up of three double-wide trailers modified for the ice. They are all on skis and are double insulated with walk-in refrigerator doors. They are connected by an insulated interface. To move them, we just take out the interfaces, disconnect water and electrical systems, hitch them to a bulldozer and away we go.
Our new home out at Willy Field is on the thick permanent Ross Ice Shelf. It is a snow runway so only ski equipped aircraft can land there. We now have a new perspective on Mt Erebus and the surrounding islands but inside the dining facility nothing has changed. The drive out is more than twice as long and much crazier. The transition from land to snow is incredibly variable. It has been relatively warm lately and the snow has been getting mushier than it was even a few weeks ago. I managed to get the truck stuck on the first day out there. Well, it wasn?t entirely my fault. I had help from my counterpart, Debbie. We picked up a skier who was hitchhiking back to town from skiing out to the runway just before crossing the transition. Debbie was sitting in the middle and when the road started to get bumpy she tensed up and pushed down to the floor with her feet to steady herself, I guess. Only she wasn?t pushing on the floor, she was pushing on the accelerator! W went roaring into the worst part of the transition in our modified V8 4.5l Ford and stopped dead in a hole. We had to get pulled out by a Challenger and discovered that we threw out the alignment. The truck went into the shop, I took the rap like a gentleman, and we got to drive a Mattracks vehicle for a couple of days. A Mattracks is a regular truck fitted with tracks instead of wheels, like the Mt. Washington Summit Coach. Drives like hell.
Christmas was great fun. One of the DAs has a friend who is a costume designer and sent the whole kitchen crew Santa suits that we wore for the Christmas eve dinner. We had Christmas day off and opened our presents at brunch. When we arrived at brunch we found out that a Herc had arrived, like Santa?s Sleigh, loaded with package mail. Our name was on the list and we had a surprise box of presents from my parents on Christmas morning.
All the signs of the season being half over are evident. The runway has moved, the holidays are over, the beakers are starting to wind up their projects, and, most exciting of all, you can see the Coast Guard Icebreaker on the horizon. It has started to cut the channel for the arrival of ?Vessel? which is scheduled to happen at the beginning of February.
Luke