Put a bird on it, Antarctica style

Here's the ridiculous vista picture of the day to start us off.

Those three tiny figures are some friends of mine who were out watching a pregnant seal. This is the closest thing I ever see to darkness; the sun really doesn't get any lower than this, and even this approximation of a sunset will soon disappear as the season progresses. This was taken around 11pm. I walked out of the bar after watching the world cup rugby finals and decided that I needed to take myself on a long, meandering think. There's something to be said for perpetual sunlight and being able to charge off on a hike at any hour of the day or night. I will say, though, that it's giving me some mighty strange sleeping habits. By which I mean I don't really sleep.

What I want to talk about today is the prevalence of all things penguin related. As far as I can tell, there are two reasons for this overabundance of penguins: 1. Penguins are really cute. 2. There aren't really any other animals down here, so they win by default. I keep thinking of the put a bird on it Portlandia sketch (if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're clearly on the internet-- google it and watch)... Penguins are the unofficial mascot of Antarctica, and as such their likeness shows up on every sticker, patch, memo, sign etc. on station. 

I decided to walk about with my camera for half an hour to take pictures of every penguin related thing I saw in the course of my natural wanderings. I actually gave up after about 10 minutes because there were just too many penguins to photograph and I lost interest. But this gives you a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about.

 This is one of my favorites. Adorable!

 Bookdrop. I do believe that all libraries should have bookdrops that look like this.

 Penguins flanking the doors to the chapel.

 View from the chapel window. I love the fact that someone actually made a stained glass window in the shape of antarctica with a penguin in it.

Penguin banners in the library. There's a lot of strange art down here, and I'm gathering material for a future post about Antarctic Art.

While Antarctica has a lot of penguins, do you know what it doesn't have? Polar bears. Those only live in the Arctic. People apparently don't necessarily know this, and so someone made a very helpful t-shirt that is far and away my favorite item available for purchase at the McMurdo Station Store:

I've spent the last few years on a crusade to not own unnecessary possessions, and I have a pretty firm rule about not acquiring any sort of commemorative memorabilia T-shirts, but I might have to make an exception for this one.

Solidarity from Antarctica and a very cold hike

I didn't actually take this one, but I figured it was awesome enough to be worth nabbing and sharing. You might have seen this kicking around other places on ze interwebs, as it seems to have gone viral on facebook and reddit and other such things. Four of these folks are my roommates, and they took this a few days before I arrived. Kind of crazy how small the world can become...

Yesterday was my day off, so I waited around in the galley until I found someone else who doesn't work Tuesdays so I could kidnap them and go hiking. You have to take a buddy with you on most of the hikes that you can do around here, and you also have to check in with the fire house and get a radio and give a detailed account of where you're planning on going and how long you'll be gone. If you don't show up by your estimated return time, they start mobilizing helicopters and search and rescue. People have died while out hiking, so it's a very good policy, but the fire house gets very mad at you if you forget to check in and they have to send out helicopters when you're actually just back in your room drinking a beer.

One of the two emergency shelters along the route. They're pretty adorable. They're stocked with caches of food, extra sleeping bags, camp stoves, and a very random assortment of out of date reading material. One of them had a National Enquirer from 2009 in it.  

  

Complete with classy furniture!

They look a bit like flying saucers from the inside. 

...which is fitting because the landscape looks like another planet.

That little dome off in the distance is some sort of fancy science thingee. I'm going to go investigate it sometime this week. 

This is what I looked like by the end of the hike. It's a very strange feeling to not be able to blink properly because your eyelashes are frozen together. Also, this picture further confuses me as to whether my eyes are hazel or brown. I think I could argue for either?

 

The Observation Tube!

I am probably going to be saying this a lot over the course of the next handful of months, but I just saw something truly incredible. I've been taking a fair amount of pictures that I don't know quite how to work in, so I've decided I'm going to start every blog post with a picture or two of just how stunningly beautiful this environment is.

Although I technically knew that I was coming down to Antarctica to work as support staff for the scientific research of the United States Antarctic Program, it somehow didn't fully sink in that I'm working, through one degree of separation, for the National Science Foundation. This is funny, because I've often complained about the fact that my preternatural ability to act as a magnet for scientists means that my day to day life is often dictated by science that I don't really understand. Ha. Clearly some part of me must actually enjoy this, because I have no one but myself to blame this time, and I'm LOVING hearing about the research that's going on down here.

There's a pretty stark division between the science that goes on here and all of us townsfolk who cook and clean and operate the heavy equipment that allows said science to happen. But there are definite attempts to make the research down here available to those of us contractors who want to learn about it. There are weekly science lectures, and we can go tour the labs, and sometimes we get to play with some of the scientific equipment that's not currently being used.

 

And some of that equipment is really, really, reaaalllllyyyy awesome. Like this thing here, which looks like one of them there tubes from Super Mario Brothers. This is the Observation Tube. And it is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Basically, this is a 30ish foot pipe that has been drilled through the sea ice so that the bottom length of it is underneath the water.

 

You climb down through the tube, and there's an observation chamber at the bottom. There's only room for one person at a time, and you shut the top so that the surface light doesn't interfere with the view. It's a tight fit. 

It was pretty much impossible to get a decent picture here, but this is one of the windows down in the tube. All the little white specks are krill, punctuated by the occasional jellyfish. Apparently seals sometimes come by.

The sea ice from below. I wish you could see the subtle variations better. It was pretty damn awe inspiring. 

This gives you a bit of an idea of what the observation area looks like. 

Yay for unused science equipment! 

I'm in Antarctica!

Hey! I'm in Antarctica!

Well. I had all these ambitions that I was going to write some sort of thoughtful summary of everything that came out of riding my bike across the country, but one thing led to another and now I am solidly in the middle of the next adventure and can’t seem to summon up much retrospective contemplation at the moment. So instead I will just briefly say—it’s been a wonderfully crazy year, and I feel extraordinarily grateful for all the marvelous adventures and partners in crime that have entered my life since I decided to throw myself out at the world to see what would step up to catch me. These past seven months feel like they’ve held at least a few years’ worth of inspiration and joy. And now I’m in Antarctica!

I’m currently writing this from the coffee shop (yes, there is a coffee shop; it also serves wine and whiskey) at McMurdo Station, where I’m working as a cook until February. It’s hard to know quite where to start in describing this place, so I’ll begin with my most frequently asked question: Why the hell did you want to work in Antarcitca?

There were a few reasons I wanted to come down. The main one was the simplest. To quote the explorer George Mallory when asked why he wanted to scale Everest: “Because it’s there.” I applied for this job while I was still riding my bike, at the time, I felt like the last thing I wanted to do was just get a day job and settle into some sort of normal living environment. So this seemed like a good middle ground. It wasn’t traveling per se, but it certainly wasn’t the anemic domesticity that I’d been living in before and that I desperately wanted to avoid returning to.

It seemed like the perfect way to experience a strange and fascinating place-and its equally strange and fascinating populace- while fostering a temporary sense of home and roots. And, after spending so much time being an itinerant painter, I was pretty excited at the prospect of a steady paycheck.

I was also curious to see how I would respond to the isolation and the weather. For those of you who know me personally, you are probably well aware of the fact that I hate the cold. Not just a little bit, but a lot bit. Kind of to the extent that it is one of my defining personality traits. Somewhere between Los Angeles and Maine, my bike ride began to foster a fascination with testing my own limits--with seeing how many second, third, and seventeenth winds I had in me. I have always been an extremely stubborn person, and I find some measure of perverse joy in putting myself in situations where I have bitten off more than I can chew and am then forced to rise to the occasion. So I figured I’d get myself to the coldest place on earth. Thus far, I’m doing fine, but it’s apparently quite warm for this time of year. It was 12 degrees when I landed, and the coldest I’ve thus far been outside for (I’ve only been here two and a half days) has been -2.

So I applied while I was on the road: I sent in my application from New Orleans, and my written interview from DC. I had my phone interview from New York, and found out that I’d got the job while in the mountains of Vermont. I’d had to hike up a ridgeline to get cell phone reception, and it somehow seemed very fitting to be doing my excited holyshiti’mgoingtoantarctica dance in that setting. 

And then I came back to Seattle for two months, and completely fell in love with a city for which I’d previously harbored nothing more than grudging apathy. The universe basically slapped me in the face with all the things that I’d complained that Seattle lacked, and I left feeling like I had many things that I wanted to stick around and explore. It was certainly funny timing to be dashing off on this crazy adventure at one of the few points in my life where I was actually full of curiosity and excitement over where I already was.

Alright, enough of this rambling backstory stuff. So! Antarctica! 

Actually getting down here involved a truly stunning amount of bureaucracy. I won't go into the details, but I think I probably heard at least 25 safety lectures, all of it covering the same material. I understand where they're coming from-- we are, after all, working in an environment where you can actually die of exposure quite quickly if you go out unprepared and all... Anyways, after about 3 days of lectures and informational videos in Denver, we headed out to Christchurch, NZ and were issued our cold weather gear. We are provided with everything we need for the outdoors, and out most noticeable layer is our Big Red, which, as you can see, is an enormous red parka. Everyone who works down in Antarctica is issued one of these, so at times the station looks like a pack of red penguins waddling from point A to point B.  

Sitting in a lecture at the Clothing Distribution Center in Christchurch. A sea of red parkas.

 We also got issued these things called Bunny Boots, which are enormous, insulated boots with valves on them so you can regulate the inner air layer. They are HUGE, and remind me of those ads for moon boots that used to be on TV when I was a kid. Anyone else know what I'm talking about? They were like little trampolines for your feet....

Here's my bunny boot next to my shoe for a size comparison.

We flew down on a military transport plane. The cargo bay was crazy loud, so we all had to wear earplugs and couldn't really have conversations.

Most people opted to just curl up in their Big Reds and go to sleep.

These are the transport vehicles down here. They all have nicknames and the insides are covered in stickers, and riding around in them makes me feel a bit like I'm in a science fiction movie and am in the infantry on some foreign planet and about to step out and wage war against strange creatures. Most things here make me feel like I'm on a foreign planet.

Antarctica is a place of contradictions. The sparse landscape is every bit as impressive and daunting as one might think, but McMurdo itself is gritty and industrial and everything that goes into actually living and working down here is... uh... well. It's not austere and romantic. It's greasy and poorly organized and slipshod and generally looks like a construction site.

A view of my home. There are a bunch of weird sculptures lying around, I'll post more pictures later.

The people down here are very much my peoples-- no one can really give a straight answer to the question of "Where are you from?" so instead everyone asks, "Where do you store your stuff?" It is lovely to be in a community where being a vagabond places you solidly in the majority. I'll write more about the people later, I have to dash off to work now. I'm working ten hour days, six days a week, so I'm kept pretty busy. Hilariously, they're serious about uniforms here, so six days a week I'm wearing an immaculately white doubled breasted chef's coat. I'm going to try to update this blog fairly regularly (heh, we'll see how that goes), but in the meantime, I would love to hear from everyone back home! Email me and say hi: tessa.hulls@gmail.com. Also, send me mail! If you write to me, I'll write back and I'll draw you pictures of strange things I encounter down here on the ice. Flat mail gets here waaayyyyyy faster than package mail, so either send two dimensional things, or use a padded mailing envelope. I can be reached at:

Tessa Hulls, NANA
McMurdo Station
PSC 469 Box 700
APO AP 96599

Inspiration

While I haven't been posting, I have been thinking a lot about posting-- and I justify my lack of actual updates by saying that when I do actually post, I am going to have a lot to say. But for now, to continue with the trend of just brief updates, I recently came upon this Ira Glass quote via Lost at E Minor and wanted to share because it's an important message:

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through." — Ira Glass 

Oh, That Sweet Unrest opens this Friday!

Friends! I am done painting, and will soon be done with all my framing and matting. I am so excited to share this body of work with you. It is much more personal than anything I have done before, and I have to admit that makes me a bit nervous. But it's always good to push one's comfort zones, so mostly I'm just excited.

 

And here is my just-now-finished statement for the show: 

I have always firmly believed that if you throw yourself out into the world with complete conviction, you will encounter whatever it is that you need to find. This certainly held true time and time again over the course of my bicycle ride between Southern California and Maine. When I set out on my journey, I knew that I had this show waiting for me when I returned, but had no preconceived notion of the direction the work was going to take. This series of paintings coalesced in direct response to my travels and they are very much tied to the conflicted freedom of being a body in motion.

I grew up with no friends within 20 miles, and so as a child I learned two deeply formative lessons: how to whittle away countless hours wandering by myself in the hills, and how to fall in love with books. The books that I read in my childhood have stayed with me strongly over the years, and I find myself returning to them at unexpected moments. When I first started mulling over the idea of riding my bike across the country, I found myself dwelling on Sir Pellinore from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.

Sir Pellinore was a knight whose family lineage was devoted to chasing a creature called the Questing Beast. One day he decided that he was sick of chasing it, and so he stopped. And both he and the Questing Beast became terribly depressed and were “sick with longing” for the pursuit. Pellinore’s friends and community had to come together and trick the two of them into chasing each other again so that they could both be happy. Ultimately, both Pellinore and the Beast realized that what they had seen as their obligation was actually the thing that gave their lives meaning and brought them their truest tastes of freedom and unrestrained joy.

When I set out on my journey, this story resonated with me on a very literal level: I had given up on my own restlessness and was making myself miserable in my forced complacency. So I thought of my bike and me as Pellinore (after a few thousand miles, the boundary between bike and self begins to blur), and we set off to go adventuring for our Questing Beast with no firm idea of what that Beast might be beyond a sense of hunger for the horizon.

At the end of March, I stumbled upon a second book that became the starting point for this show. I was in West Texas and had been biking through an isolated stretch of desert for about a week. I had just had the rather surreal experience of ending a long and complicated relationship over the phone while illegally camped in a cow pasture (I kept having to kick the walls of my tent to scare the inquisitive cows away) with my ears stuffed with tissue paper to drown out the noise of passing semi trucks. I spent the next day battling up ridiculously steep hills while trying not to cry because my pragmatism reminded me that tears are hugely inefficient when it’s 95 degrees out and you have to go sixty miles up a mountain before you’ll next be able to refill water. I spent two days staying with a fiddle playing astrophysicist and his family at the MacDonald Observatory, and I passed my time there nursing my emotions and bottle feeding a litter of two week old rescue kittens while rereading the family’s copy of The Wind In The Willows.

    One of the things that I most enjoy about revisiting the books that I loved in my childhood is becoming aware of the layers of nuance that were invisible to me upon first reading. On the surface, The Wind In The Willows is a story about a bunch of woodland creatures cavorting about having silly adventures. But it’s also about the resolute yearning for home, and about the nebulous uncertainty and malleability of what home actually means. Rereading the book broke my heart in the most wondrous way, and there was one passage in particular that stuck with me:

`Fun?' said the Rat; `now that's just what I don't understand. If you've GOT to leave this pleasant place, and your friends who will miss you, and your snug homes that you've just settled into, why, when the hour strikes I've no doubt you'll go bravely, and face all the trouble and discomfort and change and newness, and make believe that you're not very unhappy. But to want to talk about it, or even think about it, till you really need----'

`No, you don't understand, naturally,' said the second swallow. `First, we feel it stirring within us, a sweet unrest; then back come the recollections one by one, like homing pigeons. They flutter through our dreams at night, they fly with us in our wheelings and circlings by day. We hunger to inquire of each other, to compare notes and assure ourselves that it was all really true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-forgotten places come gradually back and beckon to us.'

I became fixated on this idea of sweet unrest-- of a bittersweet call to arms that is at once liberating, but also heartbreaking in all that it necessitates leaving behind. I let the phrase sink in over the course of 5,000 miles, and it marched itself through my sketchbooks gradually gaining definition as I made my way East. I painted it as a mural on the wall of a West Texas commune, and discussed it with families that had lived on the same land for five generations. As I rode, I gathered texts that spoke to the tension, built a nest of phrases that explore the contradictory desires for wanderlust and roots.

I have never known quite where I fit in the blurred boundary between fine art and illustration, and I usually choose to opt out of the artist vs. illustrator debate and instead refer to myself as a storyteller. My paintings almost always begin with a title. I get a phrase lodged in my head, and I mull it over until a visual impulse begins to coalesce: text comes first, and image follows. I have always allowed this part of my process to remain implicit, but over the course of my journey I decided to intentionally embrace the idea of text as point of origin. Each of these paintings is based on text that somehow informs my understanding of wanderlust, and the words are part and parcel of the end result.  

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the amazing community that I met on the road. I would like to thank all the puppeteers, computer programmers, electrical engineers, architects, street performers, musicians, astronomers, physicists, artists, deep sea welders, pawn shop owners, special agents, activists, comedians, students, lawyers, americorps volunteers, horse trainers, farmers, midwives, insurance salesmen, anarchists, retired airline pilots, bike mechanics, former Czech pop stars, massage therapists and bank tellers who shared their food, water, hammocks, string cheese, patch kits, tent space, gardens, art supplies, music, duct tape, bike jerseys, clean socks, pools, pets, children, shampoo, cultural tours, margaritas, beds in varying capacities, yoga classes, rides in cars, books, and-- above all else-- stories with me.

Over the course of the past five months, I fell back in love with the world and my place in it. I made my peace with the realization that, at least for now, the thing that I have to offer the world is my hunger. My sweet unrest. I have no idea where it’s going to carry me; I’m off to go work in Antarctica in about five weeks, and after that I’ll be traveling through New Zealand and possibly Southeast Asia. And after that....? Haven’t got the slightest clue. I don’t know what comes next, but I do know that I’m excited to meet it and cover it in paint.

Back in Seattle and painting like mad

Howdy folks! I'm back in Seattle and have gotten myself ridiculously busy. I'll put up a real post elaborating on that sometime soon, but for now, here's what I've been up to:

My four months away from my paints certainly succeeded in pushing me in a new direction. No idea where the fluffy dresses came from.