Winter life at pole...
 John, Denis and Fritz at the bar. Of course, all of the world's heavy political and social problems got solved here. Or perhaps tonight we were discussing one of the proposed schemes for greeting the opening flight... 
The local band shows up now and then during the winter...Gary, Lloyd, and Stu...and Jonathan Livingston Penguin. One night the recording team from DRØNK Recording Studios showed up and here is what happened...live! The
mp3 file is recommended (2:33, 2mb)...alternatively there is streaming RealAudio version, or downloadable file (315 kb) (Warning! Contains actual uncensored South Pole language! Cover your children's ears! Cover your ears too, because I kept the volume up so you could hear the rest of the conversations from the audience...)
At right...ice cream for dessert, or a late snack in the galley? There's cake too, so it must have been a birthday. This ice cream came from NZ...we didn't use the soft serve/"Dairy Queen" machine (behind Lloyd) very much.   Another quiet night in the bar, this is a view of the other side of the room. We started the winter with a blank back wall, and by the end of the year it was full of photos and artwork! From left: Brad, Lee, Simon's head, Stu, and Gary....Jerry Gastil was a source for many photos on this site.  Al steps in!  Brad contemplates life and the world while ignoring the tall tower behind him. 
We were very environmentally conscious and wanted to keep the place clean... so during the winter we kept the trash sled in the helium arch, that way we did not have to dig out the front door (which the previous year's w/o's had done). This meant we had to take all of our trash and garbage down there. The house mouse got to haul a banana sled loaded with trash bags from the galley to the helium arch. The trick was to throw the bags into the sled before they broke open, because the bags got brittle in the cold weather. Anyway, about once a month the sled would get full, so a bunch of us would head out to the dump. We had dug out trenches to allow us to bury the garbage so it would not blow away. Little did we know that someday there would be an "environmental protocol" to the treaty and all the stuff would get loaded on 130's to send north!! In most years of the dome era, the entrance was dug out so tractors could come into the dome all winter to deal with the trash and recycling bins. 
Here I am in my toaster, er, the station manager's office, the corner one with windows. I had a safe full of store money to watch, but the folks at CAF had a much better view! Based on the calendar this is some time in October. In heavy rotation on the box, the stuff I brought with me included Gordon Lightfoot, Tom Rush, Peter, Paul and Mary, Eagles, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and John Denver (sorry Gary). The stack on the table behind me looks like copied stuff. Many of us shared and copied tapes--John had an extensive collection including lots of Grateful Dead along with Dan Fogelberg and early obscure Fleetwood Mac. Their mega hit album "Fleetwood Mac" was released shortly before our winter and they became superstars unbeknownst to us. As a result they did a world tour and Lloyd acquired tickets for several of us to an outdoor concert in Auckland in November. Out of the 60,000+ in the audience in the hot sun we were the only ones with long sleeves and hats to protect our pale pole skin.. Across the hall in the SSL office is Tadashi Yogi who sent me this picture. |
