Meanwhile, I had flown to the Dry Valleys, where I spent a week hiking with various groups including geologists, the Stream Team, and the Worm Herders (they study nemotodes). We tramped about on the glaciers and frozen lake surfaces, examining mummified seals and the enormous walls of ice at the feet of the glaciers. On the flight back to McMurdo from the Dry Valleys, I looked out the helicopter window and saw that not only was the sea ice now a mosaic of pieces, no longer an unbroken whole, but also that the cracks were full of orcas. The pilot landed the helicopter next to one of the sea ice-cracks, and for thirty minutes we watched six orcas, not ten yards away, diving and swimming and fishing.

By this time, I knew I was in trouble. As 007, I had lost touch with my mission. Books? Articles? Those projects were fading into oblivion along with all left-brain capabilities. I began scheming about how I could get my wetsuit sent down from home. My new venture, not approved by the NSF, would be a performance piece called Dances with Whales.

Antarctica does this to you. It’s like a hallucinatory drug. The intensity of its beauty slams the immediate moment into the foreground, so that it becomes the only ground.

For Shackleton, the dangers were wind, cold, breaking sea ice, food stores. But for an NSF-supported artist, the pitfalls are entirely different. I was afraid my awe might kick me into a Buddhist monastery for life. I was in danger of dropping the writer thing and becoming a volunteer dishwasher if only they would let me stay. What if the only honest response to this continent were a vow of silence?

Luckily, upon my arrival back in McMurdo, a meeting with Coast Guard Commander Steve Wheeler brought 007 back in line. Wheeler and I met in the coffeehouse. Since the icebreaker was due soon, he was the man of the hour, and it was difficult keeping his attention. He was busy teasing women, greeting friends, and jumping out of his chair to take care of stray business. "I love the place," he told me. "It’s the people thing. You have to have something on the ball to work here. I come back because I have a lot of very good friends here."

Of all the shipping operations under his charge, the most important is his work as liaison between the icebreaker and McMurdo. He described the 1976 Polar Star as "pretty old for a ship that runs into things for a living. It’s 399 feet long, and a lot of that is pretty delicate."

"The biggest problem I have," Wheeler said in his tough-guy voice, "is mechanics. Get the channel open, and get the tanker in."

Wheeler has been doing icebreaker work for over ten years, and this was his fourth season in Antarctica. "The amazing thing is that every single year since McMurdo has been open, the icebreaker has made it. It would be devastating if it didn’t."

His first job each year is to make sure that there is a dock to accommodate the ships. This year’s pier is brand-new, and made almost entirely of ice. The only other ice piers in the world are in Siberia.

Wheeler explained to me how the McMurdo pier was built. During the winter, workers set up a rectangular corral on the sea ice in Winter Quarters Bay. This was flooded with four inches of water, which was allowed to freeze. Every couple of days, another layer of water was added until the thing was about eight feet thick. At this point, holes were drilled and posts were set. Cable, which would act like rebar in concrete, was intertwined across the surface. More water was poured and frozen on top of this until the thing became a gigantic, reinforced ice cube. When the sea ice melted out in February, the pier would remain. Finally, its surface was covered with soil to create friction for the vehicles that would onload and offload the resupply ship.

The ice pier is Commander Wheeler’s baby, and he is fiercely protective of it. Since open water around the pier would speed its erosion, he keeps the Polar Star from opening the channel all the way into Winter Quarters Bay until as late in the season as possible.

I asked him about the increase in tourist traffic to the Antarctic. "Cruise ships won’t be docking on my pier," he retorted. He does allow cruise ships to cut little garages in the side of the channel, just outside Winter Quarters Bay. If they can make it, and that’s a big if, the tourists come ashore either via helicopter–landing at the New Zealand heliport since we don’t allow them to land at ours–or by Zodiac.

"The pier is the Antarctic lifeline," Wheeler said. "I can’t have their engines’ wastewater melting my pier and eroding a big gouge in it. Cruise liners are notorious for that. Plus, you have line-handling issues. I’m not here to tie up lines for someone making money."

Wheeler said he enjoys being the bad cop. He likes to know someone else is saying, "Commander Wheeler will kill you if you go near the pier."

Of course, this story heightened my excitement about being a volunteer line-handler. My big moment was coming–the icebreaker was due that evening. I was told by an underling of Wheeler’s to keep an eye on Winter Quarters Bay. When the Polar Star came into view, I was to hustle down to the ice pier.

I still don’t know how I missed it. The vessel was nowhere in sight, and then the very next moment, it was pulling up to the pier. I yanked on layers of fleece and my big red parka and sprinted down the long road to the pier, in full view of the rest of the line-handlers and Commander Wheeler. He stood there, at midship, with his arms folded across his chest, aviator glasses hiding his eyes, looking every bit the commander. Not a word was spoken to me as I arrived late, panting, at the bow of the ship to help the crew stationed there. I felt like the exact bumbling artist-in-residence I’d been warned about. There was nothing for it but to try to do my best now.

The bow boss was a Coast Guard officer who delivered her orders very clearly. First, someone on board threw us a thin line with a rope ball tied on the end. We stood with our arms stretched out so that the line fell over our arms, but so that we didn’t have to catch the hard ball with our hands. We pulled this lead line as fast as we could so that the actual line, which was as big around as my arm and very heavy, didn’t touch the water. However, even with six of us pulling, it slopped into the sea. Still, neither the officer in charge of the bow nor the commander would scold anyone until after we had managed to get the line up and over the cleat. Then my superior barked, "Get away from the line! Get away from the line! The ship is still surging."

We dutifully jumped back.

More lines were tossed and one time she told us to "dip the line." I was at the front, and very excited that I remembered from my training exactly what she meant: slipping it under the first line already tied to the cleat before lifting it over as well. So I dipped the line, but in the process I stepped over the first line.

"Lucy!" she growled. "People have been sliced in half doing that."

If the ship had surged, the line could have snapped up, making two writers instead of one.

Wheeler’s job does involve considerable risk to the people working under his command. Earlier, when I was chatting with him in the coffeehouse, he had told me, "Worst I had was last season. The ice pier is 700 feet long, 300 wide, 18 to 24 feet thick. It’s basically adrift. Two years ago it was in bad shape. Couldn’t get rid of it, because the icebreaker left in mid-February. The icebreaker usually tows out the old ice pier, but other vessels were due, so the ice pier had to be left. So last year, a whole quarter of it was underwater. Not as solid as I’d like it to be. The icebreaker sailed. Then we started pulling out the things holding it. We had fourteen people and three or four pieces of big equipment down on the pier. Figured at five-oh-oh we’d pull everybody and everything off for dinner. Did that. Then, at 5:15, the ice pier imploded on itself. It looked like the Titanic sinking. Later, I had divers go under there and they described the bottom as a cathedral ceiling. It just folded up on itself. It took us two weeks to get it out of there. Station closed on the 23rd and I was on the last flight out."

Wheeler might like to think of himself as the bad cop, but people in McMurdo love him. He’s the quintessential Antarctic guy: hardworking, sharp as a tack about his duties, tough-acting, but actually big-hearted and fair. Furthermore, he’s the guy responsible for creating–and insisting upon–the annual icebreaker cruises. On a weekend late in the season, the entire town (half on Saturday and half on Sunday) gets to take a four-hour excursion. For many workers at McMurdo, this is the only day all season on which they get out of town. On my cruise, we saw dozens of Adélie penguins, an Emperor penguin, lots and lots of orcas and minke whales, two kinds of seals, and grand icebergs.

Later in the season, when the cargo ship Greenwave came in, my respect for Wheeler multiplied. Every hand in town left his or her job to work twelve on/twelve off shifts unloading the eight million pounds of cargo and then loading back onto the ship another eight million pounds of waste. This task was completed in about six days.

"‘Always flexible,’ is our motto," Wheeler said to sum up his job. "The big issue dealing with ice is that year-to-year, month-to-month, minute-to-minute, you don’t know what Mother Nature is going to throw at you. This is a very humbling place. When Mother Nature says, ‘No,’ it’s not up for debate. This year the weather has been extraordinary. Last year we got creamed."

If the Coast Guard commander in charge of the icebreaker could feel humbled by Antarctica, you can only imagine how a writer felt. I tried so hard, but my mistakes were as constant as the daylight. There was the day I spent at Pivot Peak, high in the Transantarctic Mountains, radioing McMurdo hourly about the weather and my ride home, constantly saying "out" when I meant "over," and vice versa. Then there was the time I accidentally meandered into an off-limits zone, my camera swaying from its strap around my neck as I happily looked around. Someone stepped up and kindly guided me back to the galley. And there were the times (and that’s plural) when I would speak too loudly at meals about something that was, unbeknownst to me, very sensitive for someone at a neighboring table. At the end of the season, my friend who drove the bulldozers at Willie Field presented me with a plaque that read, "No, Lucy, no!" to commemorate the number of times I had heard those words.

McMurdo has its own culture, with rules and acceptable behaviors, all different from anywhere on the outside. My three months were not enough to learn them all, and I was forever stepping in it. But I loved the place, just the same. It’s a very ugly collection of made-for-work buildings in a transcendently beautiful setting, just like a frontier town.

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