REJECTED!

I am suffering the overwhelming sorrow associated with being bumped from tomorrow's flight to McMurdo and being rescheduled to go down on Thursday. With weather as disgustingly sunny and pleasant as it is here in Christchurch, I'm just ever so heartbroken over this prospect...

Fighting the lag

I got to Cheech yesterday, following a pretty seamless trip via LA and Sydney. The A380 was really nice, and the loading/offloading procedure didn't take too excessively long. It's a nifty aircraft, for sure. Cheech is beautiful, as usual. The weather is cool, but dry. The botanical gardens were fabulously gorgeous yesterday, and I'll probably go back for some more green time (not the type according to Honeywell, but I digress...) today after getting my ECW gear up at the Antarctic Center. Anyhow, it looks like we'll fly to McMurdo tomorrow if everything goes as planned. I read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy on the way down. I'm still trying to sort out how that has affected me. What wonders a great book can wreak...

"Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."
~Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

The Fedora Ventures South

Cue the stirring John Williams score...

So, with all my training completed, and only one morning's worth of orientation lectures remaining, I'm headed for DIA tomorrow afternoon. It was good seeing a few familiar faces today at headquarters, and the talks about employment-related topics were relatively painless. I even managed to get all my expense reports processed, so that was a coup. Doing stuff like that from the Ice is always a pain. Anyhow, many miles await me tomorrow, and I hope to be able to score some solid hours of ZZZs with my fedora cinematically tipped down over my eyes. Of course, I'll probably be in a giant Qantas Airbus A380, not a Pan American "China Clipper". The flight takes long enough as it is, let alone retreating to airframes from the first half of the twentieth century. That's reserved for my flight from McMurdo to Pole on the Basler!

“Motion through geography is consoling; association with place names gave one an odd sense of importance, of accomplishment, infinitely better than the depressing, deadly shuttling from one forgotten mud hole to another of the winter past. Here was the big world and we were moving through it to great events; by now we could tell where we were and we had some idea of what was going to happen.”
~Brendan Phibbs, “Our War for the World”

This quote is from an absolutely fabulous memoir of a doctor's experiences fighting on the western front in Europe during WWII. I think this book is right up there on the order of "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge, according to my taste in non-fiction. Thanks Tom!

Next Stop... the Orient(ation)

Well, over the last few days we 8 Polies worked our way through the numerous drills and presentations from the kind souls at fire school. Today we had a refresher/review lecture in the morning and an introduction to the use of tools to perform a forced entry through a locked door. After lunch, we ran a number of scenarios responding to a fire in the burn building (with real fire, none of that imitation stuff), including search and rescue for a patient inside. I think people were having a good time, and certainly learned a lot over the last five days. I still don't know anything about whether or not I'll be the fire brigade lead, but at least I've gotten a good refresher if I am. Credits for the photo to whichever of my teammates took the photo:

So, up next is a couple days of orientation at my employer's headquarters, and then we're off to start the big marathon of flights way west and way south. Yesterday evening I got my email about where I'll be staying in Cheech, so that whole leg of the trip is now in place. I guess some of the flights from Cheech to McMurdo have been backing up, so I'm not sure when I'll be making that flight. Anyhow, it feels good to have this bunch of training completed. I wish I could have had 2 weeks of fire training, but I'll take what I can get.

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
~Bertrand Russell

Getting Fired (-Up)

Today we had our second full day of fire school here in Denver. Yesterday we got all the gear, and spent some time learning about the nature of fire. Today we drilled a bit on donning bunker gear and SCBA, and finished out the morning with exercises crawling through culverts and performing searches in buildings for fire and people. In the afternoon we geared up and sat in a burn room with a bonfire, while the heat and smoke increased and increased. It was nifty how the smoke/thermal layer was so defined from the cooler/clearer layer near the floor. I guess the temperatures got up to around 600 degrees Fahrenheit at roughly head level. When we exited the room, we had to avoid touching our gear with anything but gloved hands, lest we be burned. The last exercise of the day involved using hoses and moving them through the twists and turns of a building's interior spaces. I really wished we could have spent that time doing something with gear or tactics we'll actually use at Pole, where we don't have any sort of fire hose infrastructure and have to rely primarily upon handheld extinguishers for portable fire suppression and attack. I'll try to get some photos in the next couple days.

Anyhow, it was a good day of training, and I love the achy feeling of exertion and exercise I have right now. It's how I remember feeling throughout the entire football season each year in high school. We have three more days of fire school, and then folks kind of go their own way. It turns out not everybody is being made to deploy directly after completing the winterover training, but there are a handful of us that are making tracks for Cheech in less than a week.

“The Way is in training... Do nothing which is not of value.”
~Miyamato Musashi

UPDATE

I just received notification that I passed the psych eval, so am now free to pass "GO".

Yippee!
~Anakin Skywalker, The Phantom Menace

At the Mountains of Madness

Well, yesterday was my appointment to take the psychological evaluation required for people spending the winter at Pole. The first exam was 567 true/false questions, and the second exam was close to 200 multiple-choice questions. Once done with the written exams, I had a pretty brief interview where they asked me a number of questions about my background on the Ice, my personal behavior and history, and a variety of pretty pat (at least for a tame guy like me) other questions about things like alcohol and other substances. I'm still trying to get a call into their office to find out whether I am officially sane in their eyes or not, but hope to get through their busy signal here at some point.

Today we don't have any training scheduled, so people are just taking it easy and making the best of our surroundings. Tomorrow our group of 8 will begin the fire school portion of the pre-deployment agenda, which will undoubtedly be interesting. It is a different academy from the fire school in 2007, so maybe I'll learn something new.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
~H.P. Lovecraft