I have romantic feelings about Antarctica in general, and McMurdo in specific. Though I probably shouldn’t. Here’s a description of the base from a brilliant essay by Maciej Ceglowski:
McMurdo looks like a series of shipwrecks that people have tried to make the best of. Four diarrhea-brown dormitories dominate the landscape. Behind them is an assortment of white fuel tanks, pressed into the dirt like oversize aspirin, and between these large structures extends a chaos of pallets, antennas, earth-moving equipment, sewer pipes, and general rubble. A fat radome perches on the ridge line like a giant’s golf ball. We can hear earth-moving equipment growling in the volcanic dirt, as if the island hasn’t been put through enough. The whole visible part of the peninsula has been bulldozed into terraces to try and contain the American base. It’s not just that McMurdo station is ugly–and it is lens-shatteringly ugly–but that there is so damned much of it. After sailing for three weeks with no signs of human activity, no power lines, no chemtrails, no evidence that we exist on the planet at all except for a mournful wooden cabin at Cape Adare, it’s jarring to see this open-air museum of prefabricated regret. Only the United States could find a way to create sprawl with a thousand people… . The first two groups press on to our first destination, the Chalet, an ancient administrative building built in a style I would call ‘Ford-era National Park’. Nothing about McMurdo improves with proximity. Up close, the station looks like a cross between an oil refinery and a struggling community college.
The McMurdo Zippo is, as Ceglowski explains, more or less the Holy Grail of lighters:
Portable, useful, and stylish, it is the most desirable consumer item on the Antarctic continent. Unlike the Chinese knockoffs sold in other ports, the McMurdo article is the real deal, stamped ‘Made in Bradford, PA’ on an all-metal case, with a little golden silhouette of Antarctica embossed on the side. But you can’t just buy this lighter. Getting one involves a Grail-like quest. For starters, you have to cross the Southern Ocean from New Zealand in a tippy little ship, a two-week ordeal that leaves everyone bruised and miserable. Once in Antarctic waters, you must find a path through the belt of ice that typically guards the entrance to the Ross Sea. There is no guarantee that this will be passable–an identical tourist trip in 2008 had to go back to New Zealand without even glimpsing Antarctica (no refunds). If you make it through to open water, you must time your arrival at McMurdo Sound between the time the resupply ship arrives (the high point of the Antarctic liturgical calendar, when the entire station is occupied with Offload) and the time a few weeks later when most of the staff have left for home. If McMurdo Sound is frozen over, which happens frequently and unpredictably, there are no second chances. The Shokalskiy is ice-hardened, but it’s not an icebreaker. And there’s no time in the itinerary to wait for conditions to change. Even if everything goes perfectly, the harbor is open, and the ship is able to anchor in Winter Quarters Bay, passengers still need an invitation from the Americans to come ashore. The station is friendly to visitors, but tourism is not an officially-sanctioned Antarctic activity. Tours are conducted by NSF volunteers in their free time; if the volunteers are busy, you stay on the ship. It’s perfectly possible to reach McMurdo, sit at anchor and stare at the gift shop, three hundred meters away, without being able to come ashore… . The whole thing is like one of those Russian fairy tales, where the hero must cross seven seas and seven mountains, slay Koshchei the Deathless, find the giant oak, exhume an iron chest, open it to find a hare, cut the hare open to find a duck, dig through the duck to find an egg, and crack the egg open to reveal an enchanted golden needle, or in this case, Zippo lighter.
Even if Zippos aren’t your thing, the Ceglowski essay is worth reading in its entirety. And if it hooks you on the idea of Antarctica, then I have something else for you, too.
I don’t normally talk comic books in this space (I know how to take the temperature of a room) but one of my favorite comics, ever, is a book called Whiteout, written by Greg Rucka and drawn by Steve Lieber. There are no capes or superheroes in it–it’s a murder mystery, set in Antarctica, in which the protagonist is a sub-grade U.S. marshal who, after the first act, can’t even fire her gun.
I realize this doesn’t sound like much, but Whiteout is amazing. Rucka is probably the great comics writer of his generation and Whiteout has the economy of Donald Westlake mixed with a sense of place so deep it would make Lee Child proud. And the art is something else altogether. Lieber does things with snow and ice and wind that will blow your mind.
It’s a comic book for people who think they don’t like comic books. I can’t recommend it enough. And if you read Whiteout and love it (which I pretty much guarantee you will) you can repay the favor by sending me a McMurdo Zippo on the off chance you ever come across one.
