Whose fault it was, it was difficult to say. I took the fault squarely upon my shoulders, of course, and because he is a gentleman the Welshman blamed himself, but regardless of who was to blame it was a matter of simple and objective mathematics that we were going to run out of water in two days, and we weren't scheduled to leave the field for twelve.

From the moment that we recognized our water shortage, water was all we thought about. A quick inventory of the camp supplies after our discovery had turned up a shortage of mo-gas (needed to charge our radios and sat-phones), paper towels, and alcohol). Luckily we had solar panels for the comms and 24-hours of daylight, so as long as it wasn't cloudy we could still charge the radios. Movie nights came to a stop. We played music until one by one our mp3 players ran out of batteries.

But all we thought about was water.

According to the United States Antarctic Program and Raytheon Polar Services, the recommended amount of water for each person to drink while in the field in Antarctica is two liters per day. Nobody ever drank that much water except for Chipmunk, which might have been why he was so energetic and lively. We never used water for cleaning, instead wiping off dishes and pots with paper towels. When we made pasta, we put in only enough water to make the pasta, with no residual. As time went on, we didn't make pasta or rice at all, instead opting for meat and bread which didn't require any additional water. We guarded the water barrels, terrified they would spill. Our PI, who was in a different camp, finally told us that his camp was going to pull out a couple of days early, and we could bring in our water when the helicopter came to get them.

At first we would joke about water. Joke about our PI and how he didn't want us to call another helicopter because we were low on helicopter hours, joke about how he told me to tell Chipmunk to just drink less water. But as the days wore on, we grew sick with our thoughts of water. We kept repeating the same jokes but we stopped laughing at them.

We started to talk in hypothetical terms about what we would do if the helicopter didn't make it in on time. Katabatic events, strong wind-storms that came roaring off the polar ice cap, often came without warning and lasted up to four days, making it impossible for helicopters to fly out to the valleys. We thought about walking to Lake Vanda, a thermo-haline lake a half day's walk away. We thought there might be a few huts there a couple hours farther on-- maybe there were some scientists living there who could take us in. But we hadn't heard their chatter on the radio, so we couldn't count on it. There was a fairly large possibility that we would arrive to find empty huts, too cold to sleep us over night without our incredibly heavy sleeping kits, and find that we could only gaze hungrily on a lake that was too salty to drink.

Another source of water was the looming alpine glaciers, far above our camp. Unfortunately a hike to these sources was more demanding and took just as long as hiking to the lake due to the extreme change in altitude. Even if we got there it would be difficult to carry back all of the snow we would need, since ice and snow take up such a greater volume than water.

Chipmunk pulled out a juice box on one of our breaks from hiking. He told us that he had been replacing one of his daily liters of water with a juice box to save water. We told him not to listen to our PI's unkind remark about his drinking habits, but we all started drinking juice boxes instead of water. Chipmunk started mulling over ways that we could extract the alcohol from our five remaining beers to leave behind enough water to hydrate us.

Our other plan was to try to hike to the camp down in the lower part of the valley where our PI was. Without gear we could probably make it to their camp in a hard day's worth of hiking. Still, their water supply was probably only enough to sustain them, and we weren't quite certain of the location of their camp. All we knew is that we had line-of-sight radio contact from the ridge overlooking the lake. But up on the hillside near their camp were four large alpine glaciers, beautiful frozen tongues of fresh water-ice, uncontaminated by life or salt. If we could make it to the glaciers we would have water. If we could make it to the Lower Valley camp, we would survive the night.

The next day I awoke to see that a rare, thin blanket of snow had covered the valley walls during the "night". I told the boys where I was going and went out with a trowel and a plastic trash bag to try to collect as much of it as I could. The snow was very thin, and where it collected on the sand it was impossible to harvest without gathering mostly dirt. Where it collected on the rock I could scrape it rather efficiently into my bag, collecting millimeters of snow on most rocks and a little more than a centimeter on the best. The Welshman came out after a short time to help me, but our usual carefree banter was subdued by the growing seriousness of our task. He and Chipmunk were developing sores on the sides of their tongues from dehydration. Everyone's urine looked like apple juice. Our exchanges consisted of pointing out rocks which seemed to hold the thickest snow or the greatest surface area. It struck me to think about what a strange situation I was in: thousands of miles from home, in a cold, isolated desert surrounded by the largest ice cap on the Earth but unable to get to it. At home I could go to the sink and turn on the tap. Even in a different year in the Dry Valleys there would be snow-banks large enough for us to mine for our water, but not now. Now I was carefully scraping bits of ice off the sides of rocks with a shovel.

After three hours the snow had started to sublime from the rocks and our ratio of work to snow was dropping off precipitously. We dragged the snow back to the tent and melted it. To my pride we had collected about a pot's worth, which would be enough to last us for an entire day.

The snow tasted very strange, being as it was mixed with so much sand and rock, but we drank it gladly.

The next day was the day of the camp pull-out for the other camp. They were tired of the field and wanted very much to get back to base; we were unsympathetic as we imagined them pouring whole jugs of water over their heads for sport and making vast vats of pasta and rice. The weather looked bad. There was a large cloud that seemed to be blocking the entrance to the upper part of the valley. We heard our colleagues on the radio: "The Lower Valley is very clear," they said, "but the Upper Valley looks blocked." They didn't want the cloudiness of the upper valley to ruin their chances of pulling their camp out, but we were rather outraged that they would relay unnecessary discouraging remarks about the upper valley when they could easily stay another night in the valley while we would be forced to drink our very last day's worth of water!

The fog was getting thicker over the lake. Helo-Ops called to inform us that they were delaying their pick-up and drop-off to see if the weather improved. The Lower Camp was unhappy; we despaired. In the late afternoon Helo-Ops called to say that they were going to attempt the operation. We waited in silence. At last we heard a far-away shudder of helicopter blades echoing against the valley walls. A tiny black dot appeared out of the eastern fog. It contained twenty-five gallons of water and ten gallons of mo-gas. After dropping off our supplies it returned to the lower valley and pulled out our colleagues' camp. We had a grand celebration and drank all the water we could fit into our bellies and watched movies all night long. We threw out the rest of the funny-tasting water that The Welshman and I had spent so much time collecting.

The next day a Christmas helicopter arrived carrying a large number of Christmas elves and reindeer and a box filled with fruit, bread, vegetables and cheeses. Two days after that it was Christmas, and it snowed and snowed and snowed, more than any of us had ever seen it snow in the Dry Valleys before! The helicopters couldn't fly for days, but it didn't matter. Water! Water! Everywhere! The finest Christmas ever!

And now here I am, sitting in my warm apartment, a foot away from a magic spout that dispenses that life-giving liquid at my pleasure.

water is the essence of life
I think we take water for granted. It is given to us by the skies through a complex process and we simply abuse and do not conserve it. I live in Perth, Australia and we have had the longest period without rain since the 1800s! This is going to be a dry summer... Thanks for following my blog, I write to reason with my thoughts that race through my head. I'm not very good at verbally expressing my feelings I like to type :) I think your writings are fantastic too!
» von-nation on 2010-03-09 07:24:58

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» Caleb (202.91.225.187) on 2011-06-07 08:50:55

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