Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica

13. Bucketheads

69 13. Bucketheads eee The next morning found me ready for action with a sense of humor, a rope in one hand, and a white plastic bucket inverted over my head. We Happy Campers looked ridiculous. After retreating indoors to warm up after our night out (nobody in this group had contracted frostbite, unlike earlier cohorts, and the weather had held steady, unlike in previous weeks), we launched immediately into the next phase of survival training. To simulate whiteout conditions, we wore white buckets over our heads, incidentally the same kind I’d soon be using in lieu of a loo. With every movement, my bucket clanged into walls, standing objects, or other people’s buckets, leaving my brain ringing. If this was like a whiteout, I sure hoped I’d never have to rescue anybody. Today, though, that’s exactly what we were supposed to do. We were told that a man had exited the building during a storm and become lost in the whiteout. Somewhere within a hundred yards of the door, an instructor sat outside on bare snow. We were tasked with venturing outdoors, finding the “lost victim,” and guiding him back in. Super easy—without the buckets. Our bucket-blinded class hatched a simple plan. We’d hold on to a hundred-yard rope at equal intervals, deploy ourselves to full stretch, then do two semicircular sweeps and hope someone tripped over the target before following the rope to safety. The plan turned out to be a recipe for chaos. Just try sometime to walk with your eyes closed. You don’t walk straight. In 2003, a high school student named Andrea Axtell illustrated this with a simple experiment in which she blindfolded test subjects and had them start walking from one end of a football field to the other. Of several dozen volunteers, 70 Noah Strycker none made it to the opposite goal line before veering to one of the sidelines, and the paths they followed were directly related to handedness (right-handed people curved left and left-handed people curved right) and height (shorter people walked in tighter arcs). In other words, without visual cues, people literally walk in circles. On the ice, with buckets over our heads, we Happy Campers were doomed from the start. We happily clanked out the door in an orderly line, linked by the rope, thinking this was going to be a cinch. What could be easier than finding someone less than a hundred yards away who wasn’t even trying to hide? When my turn came, I was yanked outside by a sudden pull on the rope. I tried to follow the same direction as the guy six feet in front of me, but the plan quickly deteriorated. Soon, it was so difficult to stay afoot on the ice that all thoughts of direction were scrapped in favor of just hanging on to the rope. I covered a few dozen yards in this way, bumping and slipping in my own world of white. It became easier to half squat as I moved along, feeling ahead as much as possible and keeping a broadly planted base between my feet. The guy in front of me tripped and fell, smashing his bucketed face to the ground. He grimly held on to the rope for a while, trying to regain his footing while being dragged along. He lost track of the rope and frantically groped for it until I came up behind, equally blind but still walking with the rope. Without warning, I stumbled into his body and we both went down hard, buckets clanking. “Do you have the rope?” I shouted. My voice reverberated inside the white plastic bucket, making my head spin. He shouted something back, which to me sounded like, “Eh willat borderpolt cole!” “I can’t hear you. Do you have the rope?” I yelled. He made some reply, but it was no use. We made no progress yelling into our own ears. We just crouched on the ice, inches 71 Bucketheads apart, yelling and gesticulating at each other with white plastic buckets over our heads, each unable to understand the other. Although I still gripped the rope, it had stopped moving. Up and down the line, people were encountering similar difficulties. I could hear muffled shouts from behind me, but had no idea what was going on. The class had pre-arranged a signal...