Wednesday 5 May 2004
The morning commute
I'm typing this entry at 9:15am, just after my walk to work. Normally it's a fairly gentle affair, a hundred metre stroll across flat ground, a chance to wake up and collect your thoughts. Today it felt like an ordeal. It's dark in the mornings now and the temperature is -29C with a wind speed of 45 knots, which makes for a wind chill temperature of -60C. The whole platform is shaking back and forth in the wind and I arrived to find four of the science experiments have broken during the night.
I followed Jeff over here from the accommodation platform along the hand-lines we need to get between buildings in weather like this. And boy do we need them. I could barely make out his silhouette and he was only a couple of metres in front of me. I was wrapped up in layer after layer of clothes but the wind still managed to find the smallest gaps and turns the skin beneath numb. My field of view was restricted to a foggy, narrow pillar-box by my misted up goggles. Everytime I reached one of the metal support poles I got an electric shock caused by the build up of static from snow flakes rubbing together in the air. Sometimes I could even see the sparks arching from the pole to my mitten. The snow was soft and uneven, making the walk seemed longer than I remembered it. Eventually a faint light appeared and grew brighter, until the Piggott platform loomed out of the darkness. I had to pull myself up the stairs against the force of the wind. Jeff's pockets were full of snow, my boots were full of snow. Our hands were numb. It was only a 10 minute walk.
This is the first time I've ever experienced weather like that before. I'm sure given time I'll get used to it as the second year winterers seem to have done. I still felt like I'd somehow achieved something when I slammed the door shut on the storm outside. I had to remind myself that all I'd really done was to walk to work.
Posted by simon at 3:52 PM