An Engaging South Pole Millenium
Wanderlust is as much a disease as malaria, infecting its host like a mosquito bite that will never stop itching. Anyone stricken with it will not mistake its symptoms, yet few of us ever seek a cure.
Most people I've met with this condition can point to a seminal moment when they first caught the relentless fever for travel. For me that moment came in my final semester of college when I undertook a round-the-world voyage by ship. My travel resume up to that point was meager and uninspired, consisting of a few domestic car trips, one Mexican border crossing, and a single flight across the pond for an English music festival. That shortsightedness changed forever in one fell swoop in the spring of 1995, when I joined a small academic community in sailing around the globe.
The experience of crossing vast stretches of open ocean, sometimes on a glassy smooth mirror reflecting a dazzling firmament and other times under calamitous weather upon severely roiling waves, instilled in me the exhilaration and romance of travel like nothing I could have ever imagined. Landings upon four continents offered visits to eleven countries, each for just a handful of frenetic days. Those brief moments in port punctuated a fifteen-week campaign across the introspective landscape and boundless isolation of the sea.
That experience left an impression that was as indelible as it was eternal. The headiness of those days forever changed my view of the world, impacting the way I approached both the present and the future. I graduated college upon return from this voyage, only to take a menial job and immediately begin saving all my money and time for travel. My primary pursuit became the shameless search for passable excuses to do unusual things in remote locations.
So it was that I wound up in Antarctica for the 1999-2000 New Year. I had quite naturally started scheming about exotic ways to spend the impending millennium, that once-in-many-lifetimes experience of watching the calendar's odometer flip from 1999 to 2000. I felt lucky to be alive at such an exquisite moment, and I vowed to mark the event in a manner fully befitting that extraordinary fortune.
My original decision was to hop back on a boat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and cruise out to the International Date Line, where for 24 hours I could zigzag back and forth between the past and the future at that singular epochal moment. But as the century drew to a close, I began to see that this idea was hardly unique anymore: multiple travel outfits were offering exactly that opportunity, at a multitude of locations up and down the 180th line of longitude. One nation (Kiribati) even had the International Dateline moved slightly, to better accommodate the burgeoning tourist trade that the millennium promised.
I wanted something more unusual, and eventually the idea dawned on me that the only thing better than bouncing between two time zones, was to be in every time zone! And there are only two places on earth where this is possible: the North and South Poles.
It quickly became obvious that the only legitimate option between these was the South Pole. Located on a high continental plateau amidst the stark and windy whiteness of Antarctica, the South Pole at the New Year would be propitiously bathed in the full-time sunlight of austral summer. Even more fortunately, it is home to Amundsen-Scott Station, an American base dedicated to science with a small but full-time population. So there were certain to be at least a few human beings at the South Pole for the millennium, and that meant I had a chance to be one of them.
By contrast, the North Pole at the New Year would be plunged into the frigid inky blackness of the long northern night. Located atop the frozen Arctic Ocean, no permanent structure is found within many hundreds of miles of the North Pole. Moreover, the bleak desolation and spitefully repellent nature of 90 degrees north latitude in wintertime have prevented any human soul from ever visiting the North Pole at any turn of the calendar throughout history. New Year 2000 was not destined to provide the first exception.
So the trick was to somehow get to the South Pole for December 31st, 1999, and right away the reasonable options for this were reduced to two: pay a lot of money to go there briefly as a tourist, or find a way to get a job at Amundsen-Scott Station during the millennial new year.
The minimum price for the tourism option was $30,000, which was a bargain in the sense of costing only half the price of scaling Mount Everest at that time. But it was not an ideal option for a twenty-something middle-class American, working as a temp and living in a tiny apartment while struggling to pay off student loans.
So getting hired to work at South Pole Station quickly emerged as the only credible alternative. It is a long story unto itself how that evolved into existence, but that's exactly what happened - not just for me, but for my girlfriend Jennifer who I was planning to marry someday. She and I had agreed early on that if only one of us could go to the South Pole, then neither of us would go. For us it had to be all or nothing – and in the end, through miracles of persistence and serendipity, we both made it there.
Our employer was a government contractor named Antarctic Support Associates (ASA), whose contract was with the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF had become the steward of America's Antarctic program when the U.S. Navy had formally concluded Operation Deep Freeze in the mid-1990s. The South Pole's resulting mission shift - from housing an arcane military operation to performing peaceful scientific research - had opened the door for hiring regular civilians to support the cutting-edge science experiments that require extreme polar conditions. Fortunately for Jennifer and me, there were surprisingly many of them.
My job, however, was hardly scientific. Once I was on the ice, my role was completely straightforward and brutally simple: shovel snow. Less than a single inch of new snow falls upon the South Pole every year, due to the extremely low humidity that is inherent to frigid temperatures. But the ceaseless winds of the polar plateau cause massive drifts, and entire buildings get swallowed whole over the course of a single winter. So the first and biggest effort of every summer season at the South Pole involves digging everything out from beneath the epic proportions of the Antarctic winter.
The terms of employment at South Pole required all workers to put in ten hours per day for six days per week, with only Sundays off. Aside from scientists, who were referred to somewhat derisively as "beakers" and who were bound by the NSF rather than ASA, everyone at the South Pole was expected to contribute mightily, and bodily, toward the success of the missions that we were there to support. There were galley cooks and carpenters, electricians and plumbers, managers and meteorologists, and roving tradesmen of all sorts who worked different details every day. But we all had in common a sixty-hour work week, a paltry paycheck that was not governed by American minimum-wage laws, and a requirement to endure the harshest daylight conditions that Planet Earth offers up anywhere on its surface.
Those conditions were mainly temperature based. The warmest temperature that was recorded during my four months there was -17 Fahrenheit, minus wind chill. Several times the wind chill pushed temperatures into the negative three digits, with wind conditions so fierce that whiteouts reduced visibility to only a couple of feet. But never once was outdoor work suspended. And I shoveled tons upon literal tons of snow all throughout it; terribly uncomfortable at times but always thrilled nonetheless to actually be here at this incredible destination.
Fortunately Jennifer fared much better than I did: she was enlisted as a shuttle driver. The sprawl of Amundsen-Scott Station encompassed a great many acres across several miles of hard-packed tundra, and specially calibrated vans were there to handle intra-station transport. Jen possesses a great many wonderful and unique characteristics, but her quality of simply being female placed her in a tiny minority (ten percent or so) of the population, which afforded her quite a few perks. She spent her first few days paying dues on the shovel like all new recruits, and throughout the season she picked up odd jobs outdoors that usually lasted for a few days at a time. But for the most part she was rewarded for her femininity with a position behind the wheel of a heated transport van. She spent much of her time on the ice in that relative comfort, which was a source of great relief for me - and an equal amount of envy!
In this manner Jen and I progressed, day after day without ever seeing night, through October and November and all of December under a sun that never set. The community of people who wind up at the South Pole includes some rather unique characters, and an amazing array of extremely accomplished adventure travelers suddenly became our colleagues, and eventually our friends. Each individual had a unique story and a personal reason for being there, and every story that I heard was as compelling to me as any great work of fiction. But to my astonishment, not one of those stories centered on a desire to be in every time zone for this particular New Year. The station's population at its high point in December reached over 200 people - and apparently every one of them would have been just as content to pursue their personal goals of reaching the South Pole in the year prior, or two years hence.
My own reason, of course, had been conceived solely upon the premise of timing. And to be sure, standing in every time zone when 1999 turned to 2000 (24 consecutive times!) remained the primary driver that got me through the languid weeks of torturous work. But the fact that Jennifer had actually followed me down here, all the way to the end of the earth through forbidding conditions, just to help me indulge a simple and largely arbitrary whim – well this was as humbling an expression of love as I could ever imagine. So once that dream came true – as soon as we both got hired by ASA and realized that we would actually get to experience the Millennium at the South Pole together - that was the instant when I vowed to get engaged to her in that culminating first moment of the year 2000.
So I had conspired with her parents in the months leading up to our October 1999 departure. Over the summer I had asked her father for his daughter's hand in marriage, requesting this permission from her burly and imposing 300-pound patriarch - while in a sauna, no less! And I had brought the news of my intention to Jennifer's mother over a secret lunch during a midweek workday, launching a conspiracy that thankfully included my use of a family heirloom as a part of the engagement ring. The diamond from Jen's grandmother's engagement ring was placed in a new setting and concealed deep in my luggage for weeks leading up to our departure. Once it was safely with me at the South Pole, I stashed it atop a heating duct and checked for it daily when nobody was looking.
And I also made sure that Jen and I brought appropriate attire for the New Year's party that would include the surprise of my marriage proposal. I owned a tuxedo (thanks to my previous job as a waiter for D.C. fundraisers) and Jen brought a festive dress, and we donned these clothes and joined the rest of the South Pole community at a raucous soiree in the final hours of 1999.
The New Year’s party was held inside a common area where station meetings were convened, indoors but not very far from the actual South Pole outside. The U.S. Geological Survey visits Amundsen-Scott Station every December to place a formal dateline marker in the tundra to indicate the "new" South Pole location, because the polar plateau upon which the South Pole sits is made of sheet ice two miles thick. This gargantuan sheet ice moves across the continent at the glacial pace of about 30 feet per year, so a Y2K marker had been hammered into the ice at the precise location where the geographic South Pole would exist, at the exact moment that the year 2000 would first grace the Planet Earth.
This was the location where I had to ask Jen to marry me. And that is what I did! She understood when I told her that I really wanted to be there at the actual pole when the new millennium struck, even though the party indoors was both warm and overwhelmingly convivial. She agreed to join me in walking out to the Y2K marker at a few minutes until midnight, and although she did not realize it then, I made sure that I would be standing in 1999 while she would be positioned in the tiny slice of 2000 - literally representing the future.
As we heard the party crowd inside count down from ten, I asked Jen whether she was glad she had come here. She said of course, and we shared a kiss as the New Year rang in. Then I asked her if she would marry me, and I held in front of her the ring that I had concealed all these months just for this moment.
Jennifer was entirely speechless, dumbstruck with surprise. Her stunned silence dragged out for a while, so just to be sure I asked her again if she would marry me - and this time she said yes!
There is so much more to the story, including the rest of the party that night where the entire crowd toasted our engagement, not to mention the rest of the summer season that still required six more weeks of hard labor from both of us. And there was also four months of travel after that, through Oceania, Thailand, and Scandinavia.
But the most important denouement to this tale is that Jennifer and I were married after twenty months of engagement. We bought our first home together a few years later, bore a daughter three years after that, and now finally have a son just a few months old. Amidst all of this, we have continued to indulge our insatiable wanderlust by traveling through thirty countries together, and so far neither of us shows any intention of changing pace.
This beautiful harmony we have achieved certainly had auspicious beginnings there in the vastness of Antarctica as the cosmic calendar flipped pages. But the soundtrack of our life together always seems to return to my favorite song lyrics: Turns out not where, but whom you're with, that really matters. And the traveler in me knows that this realization is perhaps the only destination I can ever really call home.
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