I presented her my hypothesis that no one at McMurdo was popular in high school. Or so it would seem.Īt midnight on my last day there, I had a deep conversation with someone I’d only met in passing before, but who was totally down to have a long talk with a random stranger on a footbridge in the middle of the night. When you come out the other side of self-aggrandisement and jockeying for status, and are happy just to be yourself and let others be themselves, you get a happy, harmonious society. Power? He had power.“ So Cherry wrote about Wilson in 1948, but many modern Antarcticans might sympathise. "Glory? He knew it for a bubble: he had proved himself to himself. Perhaps what unites Antarcticans is an awareness of what really matters, when you get right down to it: they’ve played the game enough to see through it, and are done with it. There is a bit of a running gag in Where’d You Go, Bernadette? that everyone doing a mundane job in Antarctica is a high achiever in something amazing, who left it all behind – and that’s not exactly untrue. You go the third time because you don’t belong anywhere else.” Many of them live in remote places, or travel, or do itinerant work when not on the Ice. You go the second time to relive the first time. A few years ago, I came across this adage from an Antarctic veteran: “You go the first time for the adventure. They tend to be types that exist on the fringes back in The World and, like me, may struggle to conform to its values. There is no denying that everyone there is a bit odd. I suspect there is an element of self-selection – something about the sort of person who would want to go to Antarctica correlates with a certain mindset, one that gels extremely well with others who share it, however different they may be in other respects. Is it because a harsh environment triggers something in the human psyche to support each other, rather than compete? Maybe, but these people seem like they’d be solid wherever they are, and were like that before going South. Is it because they’re scientists, as someone theorised? But they’re not – most of the people at McMurdo are support staff, working in the kitchen or waste disposal or shuttle fleet helping the science happen, yes, but that’s not necessarily why they’re there, personally. It was a wonderful surprise to discover that they would not be out of place amongst their modern counterparts. Warm, genuine, accepting of and attentive to each other, a wide range of personalities and dispositions that nevertheless got on and functioned together as a society, in the face of environmental and emotional extremes … I needed to know such people were possible, and clung to them as an ideal. One of the main things that attracted me to the Terra Nova story, and has kept me committed to it for so long, was how wonderful the people were – far outside what I had come to expect from humanity.
In my first days there, my supervisor joked that if you shake the world, all the best people end up at the bottom the remainder of my time there proved how right she was. It turned out that the best thing about McMurdo was, in fact, those very people I had been afraid of. Not knowing who ‘herself’ was, I took this with a grain of salt, but it was an encouraging answer nonetheless. She responded that, speaking purely from her own experience, she had never felt more comfortable being herself than when she was at McMurdo. When I was shortlisted for the placement, the person handling the admin briefed me about the process and asked me if I had any further questions, and I raised this concern.
#Depressing tumblr drawings how to#
I don’t know how to deflect the ire of people who’ve taken a set against me – and, for whatever reason, I tend to rub people in the States the wrong way. Sure, the continent wants to kill you, and every way of getting to and around it comes with risk of serious accident, but the only thing I was actually afraid of was finding myself in a stressful social situation and not having any recourse to escape.
#Depressing tumblr drawings full#
Whether it was school or work, a recurring motif in my life is that I do not do well in a big box full of Americans, and that is, almost literally, exactly what McMurdo is. My biggest anxiety about going to McMurdo was the human factor. I may not have used my sketchbook as much as I thought I would, with regard to locations, but I did fill a few pages with one of my favourite pastimes back in The World: people sketching.
0 kommentar(er)
