Fade to Black

6. McMurdo Station, Antarctica

71 McMurdo Station, Antarctica GPS Coordinates: –75.250973, –0.071389 March 18, 2010 Located sixteen kilometers from Williams Field—a seasonal airstrip carved into the frozen backbone of the Ross Ice Shelf—McMurdo Station was an outpost in the strictest sense of the word. Isolated well beyond the fringe of civilization in a region whose rumored existence was the stuff of globetrotting heretics until only recently, the modest community, a collection of rusting Quonsets and prefabricated warehouse -style buildings had the rugged look of a boomtown. There were no roads in or out, only a few sloppy brown tracks that allowed for travel within Antarctica’s only permanent fixture besides ice—mile upon mile upon mile of ice. Not that it would have made a difference. Cut off from everything but itself, McMurdo was truly the end of the earth. The farthest point south accessible by ship, the gritty outcropping resembled an enormous scab on an otherwise pristine slab of white. A large storage yard stacked with dozens of shipping containers stood at one end of the itinerant community. Without year-round assistance from the outside world, it would’ve been nearly impossible for a small family to eke out an existence no less a population that in the summer months could swell to more than a thousand. Every ounce of supplies had to be imported. Similarly, every ounce of waste, either human or manufactured, had to be disposed of elsewhere. The nearest sewage treatment plants, landfills and recycling centers were thousands of miles away. Claire shuddered at the thought of the awful tonnage periodically bellied away in sewage tankers . Although she was an Einstein when it came to the mathematics of consumption and waste, the environmental implications of such equations always had the unpleasant effect of awakening her to her own contribution to the ongoing global disaster of overpopulation. The fact that she was now in a place where natural selection had successfully excluded Homo sapiens only augmented her reservations about being here. Or maybe it was the realization that in a matter of days the sun would go into hiding for the next six months and leave her alone to be gnawed at by every soul-sickening 72 ~ Fade to Black anxiety she’d ever had—thousands of miles away from humanity in whose presence she realized both comfort and catastrophe. Poof! Gone. . . . Fade to black. Currently, McMurdo was a hive of activity. The majority of its residents were packing up in anticipation of the long, dark winter months ahead. In less than a week, the population would shrink to a skeleton crew of less than two-hundred, and the sloppy black roads would be virtually empty. It was on one such road that Claire and the others rumbled through town in the mud-splattered four-wheel drive van that had collected them at Williams Field. After ten minutes of jostling they skidded to a stop in front of a row of brown, two-story dormitories. The identical steel-paneled buildings, four in all, served as temporary shelters for anyone crazy enough to travel this far off the beaten path. It wasn’t exactly dark out­­­ —the sky was stained with rich sepia hues, but snow landings were tricky enough in the best conditions. They would stay here until the sun reappeared before covering the remaining distance to their final destination nearly six-hundred miles farther south. Almost nostalgically, Claire remembered the trip she had taken with the highschool ski club so many years ago . . . Remembered the budget accommodations in which she and a half-dozen of her classmates had cranked up the heater after skiing all day, and gotten tipsy on peppermint schnapps. Everything had been great until one of the girls had gotten drunk enough to ask Claire about what had gone on between her mom and dad. Was it true that she had watched her mom stab her own husband, Claire’s father, to death? What was it like knowing that your own mom was “. . . so hardcore?” Did Claire have trouble finding guys who weren’t afraid to date her? And of course there’d been other questions, mostly harmless, but Claire had chosen not to remember them. She had dismissed the girl’s queries with a tolerant smile, intimating that she never dared break the rules set by her mother for fear of the consequences. The reality, however, was less imminent than she had let on. The beatings, the verbal abuse, the aloneness—had...