With a ceaseless rustle, tiny snow grains tumble across the ice sheet. Dunes reach towards the building eves, footprints are obliterated, spindrift curls around corners and floods inside the moment a door is cracked. In the turbulent approach to the buildings, the wind-blown snow is chaotic and fierce, its energy concentrated, and the first steps into a building are almost blinding. We draw our heads deeply into our hoods, turn backs against the wind, but still the spindrift assails our faces, and we’re reduced to groping and careful plodding for the first few steps.
The drone of the 50-meter tower penetrates the haze, its taut steel guy lines vibrating in uncanny harmonics. A strange temple might reverberate with the same deep, hypnotizing tones. Flags snap crisply along our daily routes. Split with age, some bamboo poles whistle in the gusts. And always the rushing wind. While the wind seems to activate a fresh acoustic landscape, the visual landscape becomes muted. The surface loses all definition: the sky indistinguishable from the ice. Objects simply appear in space, unbound. Each trip outside is met with a subtly different landscape, and we stumble over invisible drifts and down newly scoured faces.
One morning, I stepped out of the building, turned east, and soon was walking into a perfect featureless grey, with not an object in sight. I moved forward deliberately, placing my feet onto the blankness, slowly pacing forward without reference. It was almost dizzying. I considered the strangeness of the situation for a while, still moving forward into open space, then caught a bamboo flag in the corner of my vision and was snapped back to normalcy.
When the wind dies and the sun comes out, we’ll be out with shovels and loaders, digging out doorways, cutting stairs, returning our station to order. Preparing for the now-delayed first flight of the season. And marveling at the bizarre sculpted forms that will have emerged from behind the veil of blowing snow. Cornices, pedestals formed of footprints, surreal drifts. Past events give some hint. But for the time being, we’re hunkered down.
