Boat Season

McMURDO STATION, ANTARCTICA

It is always a bit startling when the boats arrive. The Oden, the Swedish icebreaker contracted by the National Science Foundation to clear our shipping channel, has been a part of the program for three out of my four summers in the Antarctic. It is the first of a small caravan of ships to arrive at the ice pier, and it no surprise when it will arrive. The talk of boats begins just as soon as the talk of moving the ice runway ends. For days before, I can make out the dark shape of the icebreaker on the horizon, still miles away. By the time it actually gets here, we have long been expecting it. Still, when I turn a corner and the behemoth of steel comes into view, I am a bit surprised. To suddenly see a boat where we were until recently driving wheeled vehicles is odd to say the least. It will quickly become the norm here. The Nathaniel B Palmer Research Vessel lies in wait in the turning basin. It sits now in the same place where a mere month ago I was unloading cargo planes that landed on the then solid sea ice. I wonder if there are very many places on earth where one has been on a plane, a boat, and a truck in exactly the same spot.