My first day on the job in Antarctica, I found a vibrator while rummaging through a skua bin, a trash can named after those seabirds that harassed us for food.
Nikki, my supervisor, had just asked me if I was planning on dating any guys during our seven month contract.
“What do you mean ?
– We are in the minority, two guys for one girl. So the odds are good, but sometimes the merchandise is weird.”
I didn’t tell him it was me who was weird. I pretended to sing into the vibrator, one of those old-fashioned magic wands with a bulbous head and a dangling cord – I didn’t immediately realize what it was.
The life ahead
I had hoped to amuse Nikki, who rarely offered her cascading laughter. Missed. “Where are your gloves?” she threw at me with a disgusted look.
Mortified, I fished them out of my pocket and started digging through the trash more carefully.
A few weeks earlier, I was teaching the children of migrant farm workers in Flathead Lake, northern Montana, after graduating from the University of Montana. At dusk, I jumped off the dock into the turquoise water. My whole life lay before me. I was curious and happy to meet her.
One day, I came across a man who had assaulted me two years before. The memory of that event came back to haunt me, my confidence shattered, and I fled as far away as possible – to Antarctica, the coldest, driest, highest, windiest, most desert continent on earth.
Antarctica had never been my dream even though I was the third generation of my family to go there. My grandfather went there when he boarded theEastwind, a Coast Guard icebreaker, and my mother had followed: she had traveled the ice tracks in a passenger transport vehicle with six-foot-diameter tires. His connections got me a job as a janitor at the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station. I arrived in mid-August, late winter, which in the southern hemisphere means permanent darkness.
Ordinary trash that goes nowhere
It had taken me a week to get there. Thirty-one hours by plane spread over four flights, three continents and two oceans. I had come out of the belly of the C-17, a military plane, to find myself in a powerful wind that caused the temperature to plunge to −40°C. Disoriented, I staggered blindly before noticing a pink line on the horizon. I had decided it was west before remembering it was all north from here.
One of my tasks was to organize the waste sorting spaces in each building, the first step before the specialized technicians collect the solid waste, put it on pallets and ship it to the United States. The sorting spaces included eight compartments: skua, glass, aluminum, mixed paper, plastic, food waste and, particularly unappetizing, sanitary waste.
“What is ‘No-R’? I asked Nikki.
— Not recyclable. The t
2023-07-30 03:00:25
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