Someone who knows what they're doing would finish a lot faster than I do, but in an hour I've cut away a lot of ice. I don't know how close I am to water and that makes me nervous, there are all these cracks on the ice and I'm not sure it's safe, don't people get killed out here? I walk away from the tower out on the groaning ice-I almost think I can feel it move-to the floater and pull the cutter out of the back. I walk farther out, about thirty meters away from the tower and jack into the cutter. I focus the beam as tight as it will go and aim straight down and in no time I've cut a hole straight through the ice to water. One meter before I register a change in density. The ice is about a meter thick. Well, a meter of ice isn't likely to dump me into Lancaster Sound. But if it stress fractures it would shatter spectacularly and I'd hate to be there when it happened.
When we get back to the base I'm going to do some reading about ice.
In the evenings I study engineering, and a letter to the Bureau of Education brings back the information that workers under thirty-five years of age who take hardship jobs for one or more years get preferential treatment when applying for school in China and qualify for loans to help with their education, if needed.
To go to school in China. Chinese citizens can take the entrance exams, and ten percent of the seats are open to overseas Chinese and foreigners by competitive exam. If I could get a B.A. Engineering in China I'd be set. I'd be able to get good work anywhere, in New York, maybe even in China. I could probably get a job and stay in it, I'd be assigned good housing, maybe after a couple of years I could live in Manhattan. Talk about luck, like winning the numbers. I begin to request math texts from the library so I can prep for the entrance exam.
Most days I spend at Halsey Station doing construction while everyone else checks recordings and makes observations. Maggie Smallwood tells me everything is going to happen in the spring, when the belukha and the bowhead mate. She says the Sound is just constant activity then. Even now the lights attract plankton and the plankton attract all sorts of fish. Everyone is nice, everyone is friendly, but distant. They're scientists, they have a mission. I'm a six month techie, and although no one would say it, working class. Muscle rather than brain.
Still I hang around sometimes with a cup of coffee and listen to them talk about what they are doing. When Janna needs someone to label bottles I'm happy to oblige. When Jim's atmosphere suit-excuse me, his ARC-seems to have mic problems, I find the fault in the receiver and use one of the labs microtools to repair it. Daniel can never keep all of the tools he needs at hand, so I hang a toolholder over his lab table, like chefs use to hang pots and pans in a kitchen where they'll always be in reach. I hang a rack over Karin's and rig it so she can raise and lower it so her samples will be out of her way when she needs the workspace. Soon they're asking me to do little things for them and I'm busy all the time.
Then we go back to the base in the dark, and the evening is dark, and we wake up in the morning and it's dark, and since we spend most days under the ice at Halsey the only sunlight I see is the blue glow filtered through a meter of ice. Every couple of weeks I have to hammer the ice free of the tower and usually replace ladder rungs where it's torn them away-I never do get my mountain boots-and although I can't get used to the groan of the ice I look forward to it because I do it at noon, when the sun is above the horizon and the ice is blinding white and I feel surrounded by light. If it's after ten and someone mentions they left something on the floater I'm the first to volunteer to get it.
"Do you miss the sun?" I ask Maggie Smallwood. Maggie looks Chinese to me, but she doesn't act Chinese. She acts Canadian.
She thinks a moment, looking at the black windows. "Yeah, some. But after summer it's nice to have some darkness."
Summer. In July the sun never sets. "Is it warm in the summer?" I ask.
"Sure," she says. "There's grass and flowers and baby caribou. You'll see it. Wait, you won't, will you, you'll be gone in April."
"I don't know," I say, "I have to find out about this school thing in China."
"Great," she says abstractedly, then, "look at that seal!"
Outside the window a seal is coasting past, gray and sleek with a neat head like a cat's, looking in at the lights with it's great, almond eyes. Maggie turns to me, beaming from her round Eskimo face, "Isn't he wonderful?"
I've never seen a live seal before. "Yeah," I say, and then without thinking, "Do they all look so sad?"
She looks at me oddly but doesn't answer.
Early in November we stand on the ice at 11:54 and watch the sunrise with the rest of Borden Station. The edge of the sun's disk flashes above the horizon for less than a minute and then sets. I watch the red sky darken. Tomorrow the sky will redden as if the sun will rise but then darken. This is the evening of a long night. Dawn is in February. The Arctic landscape is beautiful at night.
It just isn't meant for human beings.
Maggie's people have lived here for generations. She says I shouldn't worry about the darkness, but suggests full spectrum light therapy, so once a week I go to the clinic and get thirty minutes of full spectrum light. I feel foolish lying underneath the lights like a sunbather but the doctor explains to me how some people are more sensitive to light changes than others. "Do you experience bouts of depression in January?" she asks.
According to Peter I experience bouts of depression if I miss a subway connection. "Not that I noticed," I say, "but my friends say I'm moody." I smile apologetically.
She smiles back and says, "Why did you come here?" It occurs to me that in less than two months a lot of people have asked me that question.
I study engineering texts under full spectrum lights wearing only my underwear.
I work on construction on the first level and they work in the labs on the third.
So I cope, and people are nice to me, if distant, and it's only a year. It's a great experience, back in New York I'll be able to say, "When I was in the Arctic Circle… " One day Jim says to me, "I've got to go out on the ice, want to come? I could use some help."
I don't particularly want to go, I don't want to stay at Halsey all day. It will be an experience. It will make the time go faster. So we load gear into the floater and take off across the ice. We'll plant some pick-ups either in open water or drive them through the ice and then we'll come back. It will only take the morning.
Morning. It's not going to be morning until February. I keep thinking of it as 'dark in the morning.' I find myself waiting for it to get light. The doctor prattles on about the need for something to focus on, a goal. It seems that the reason the scientists are less likely to have problems with depression is because they have an obsession and that orders their Umwelt, their self-world. We live in the same physical space but our feelings about it make us order it differently. Maggie Smallwood tells me that her ancestors used to be able to draw marvelous maps from memory but that their hunting-grounds were always drawn disproportionately large. That's because in their Umwelt, those were the places where their lives were lived, and everything else was thought of in relationship to them. I think if Maggie had to draw a map, the largest place on it would be the open water where her beloved whales lived. Her whole life is organized around whales. Her lab is where she organizes her data on whales, so in a way, that's where the whales are. If she goes someplace else, she's away from her whales, out of her normal world. She would probably be homesick.