The Whole Wide World

I am a person of extremes. All or nothing. Go big or go home. All the cake or no cake. Moderation is not my forte. I’ve known this for quite some time now, but every now and then I get a nice little reminder of who I am. Like setting up this blog/website, once I decided to do it I barely came up for air- spending every precious minute of my free time working on it. I’ve toyed with the idea for years now. I kept a blog years ago when I did the Peace Corps and I wrote for ‘The Trek’ on my Appalachian Trail thru-hike, but setting up a dedicated website, paying for the domain, that seemed more like a real commitment. And so, I’ve hummed and hawed over it for ages. Then I found myself down here at the bottom of the world, in Antarctica. 

I came down here on a contract for the austral summer season which runs October-February. In early December, I realized I was already halfway through my Antarctic experience and that it would soon be over before I knew it. That’s when I started toying with the idea of staying for the winter season and I began asking people who had multiple seasons under their belt and who had wintered-over before, what their experiences were like. I kept getting a similar response; winter was their favorite season on the ice. When I dug a little deeper, another common theme in replies was that those who had ‘winter projects’ thrived more so than those who spent the winter doing twelve-ounce curls every night.

I knew that with the station population drop from 1200 in the summer to 150 over winter, the pace had to change too. Summer was a hustle. I was in a state of perpetual exhaustion, but I was also happily seizing every opportunity to do all the extra curricular activities, socializing almost every night, working 54-hours a week at my full time job in the galley and another 10-hours each week at the station store and bartending, plus a volunteer coffee shift on Saturday mornings before work…see what I mean by perpetual exhaustion? 

Spending a full year on the ice sounded like another adventure. I would go from having all the light during the 24/7 sunlight of the austral summer months, to all the darkness, as winter at the bottom of the world is in 24/7 darkness. I envisioned winter as a slower, more laid back vibe. I knew that rather than having three to four roommates like I did over the summer, I would have my own room and that in and of itself was a huge enticement. Space for just me, something the summer did not provide. All those comments about ‘if you wrote a book, I’d read it’ on social media and from friends and family started swirling through my head again. I started envisioning my winter project. I’d write. 

And that’s how The Whole Wide World and 100-Days of Darkness came to light. My winter project.