In case readers have not seen the 28 year old movie “Dark City“, let me give the relevant plot point here: aliens are running an experiment on humans by swapping memories around to see if there is anything innate to a person. If we are more than the sum of our experiences. But there is one particular bit that comes up several times, the question “Do you know the way to Shell Beach?” No one quite remembers how to get there, but remembers it as a happy bright place. The way to get there is on the Express train, but the Express seems to never stop at the platform. Is Shell Beach even real?
When you go on a long patrol on a submarine, a hitch on the International Space Station, dedicate yourself to village life in the Peace Corps, go into long seclusion in a monastery, or as I did, winterover in Antarctica, there’s a gap in experiences between you and everyone else. It’s something that I tripped across constantly at first when I got home but even now, 23 years later, it still crops up from time to time. It was disorienting to come home to a world that no longer matched my mental map of it: businesses gone, streets that were one way now, stop signs that becaame traffic lights, entire blocks of buildings that were fields before. It was legitimately concerning driving around at first because muscle memory kept betraying me, but I got accustemed to the physical world changes as I redrew the map in my head with new landmarks.
What kept popping up for years after that weirded me out, and still does, are the cultural touchstones I missed. It’s mostly music, movies, and TV shows. Someone will make an offhand remark about a song that was ABSOLUTELY UNAVOIDABLE in 2003, and I will give a blank stare as I have no idea what they’re talking about. On a grander level, because I was at the bottom of the globe with intermittent internet access and internet news service was iffy, I missed the beginning of Gulf War II as the invasion of Iraq began shortly after the station closed for the winter. By the time I reemerged into the worlds with a ready stream of news, Bush the Second had already declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED five months prior to station opening. Saddam Hussein would be captured and I’d learn about it on TV in an Auckland bar two days before I flew home to America. I missed almost an entire formative year in the Global War on Terror. By the time I returned home ICE, which didn’t exist when I left, was nine and half months old.
You might not think missing the original theatrical release of Gigli is that important but, well, if you look at the list of 2003 releases and please know that the only film on the entire list that I saw in 2003 was Underworld, for 2 NZD in Auckland, and I fucking overpaid. As far as TV, I missed Firefly entirely; it debuted right before I flew to Antarctica and was cancelled and gone before I returned. While friends and family made sure I had a chance to scratch my head about Space Confederates, they felt no other show needed my time.
My first real hard encounter with it was in early 2004. Back in 1999, while hunting down game and hobby stores with my friend Thomas to look for cheap packs of the discontinued Jyhad CCG., we found an old place that was absolutely filled with models. Old models and metal minifigs, models in foreign languages, many in Cyrillic, of every military vehicle/vessel you can think of for the last 500 years, with price tags that hadn’t changed since they were put on the shelf likely decades prior. Unfortunately, we were both also fairly broke after clearing D&J Hobby out of Jyhad and thus unable to take advantage of all the deals.
I remembered the place after I returned from Antarctica. I went on a trip over the hill to San Jose to find it but couldn’t. Drove around for hours looking. Couldn’t find the streets, much less a building that looked right. It left a serious sense of unease where I wondered if it had even existed in the first place. Maybe I’d been high on Jyhad card fumes and hallucinated it but no, Thomas had been there too and remembered it.
“Do you know the way to Shell Beach?” has thus become my metaphor for a faulty memory compounded by an ever changing world. It’s not nostalgia, it’s the deep disquiet of not being able to trust my own perception of the world and that I am not a reliable narrator in my own life. I had a similar bittersweet moment when the tastebud that said “artificial sweeteners are poison” seemed to turn off because, yay, I can drink diet soda now but also, oh shit, now I can’t tell the difference and that is unsafe. I’d just lost a faculty.
At least in Dark City, everyone had forgotten the way to Shell Beach.
But someting that has never, ever left me from my year in Antarctica was my feeling of detachment from the world, that I had much more immediate concerns to think about, something I discussed in the Camino Primitivo After Action Report, Part 1. When sitting 14000 miles away from home, it is very hard to care about things that seem seriously trivial. That it’s real hard to empathize with someone worked up about corporate bullshit like the new cubicle decoration policy back at headquarters when you just ran out of your first variety of beer, something essential to crew morale in the Long Night. It’s part of why I kinda stopped wanting to talk to friends and family by our rather minimal radio-phone or VOIP availability. Not only was it precious and should be reserved for emergencies, but I was kind of emotionally unavailable ro relate AT ALL to distant concerns. I wouldn’t be able to do anything about them, so why wind myself up with them?
Often, this is good. That ability to stop when things are stressful and ask “Would I give a shit about this if I was at Pole?” is what can let me be calm to address a problem…or ignore it entirely, if appropriate. It’s not exactly meditative, but I am able to very easily remove myself emotionally from problems just by changing my perspective. I understand this can be frustrating to others when I try to share that with them, which is why I had to get much better at asking “Are you just looking to vent or suggestions to fix this problem?”
The only thing it isn’t helpful for is contemplating problems in Antarctica. It’s really easy for me to get wrapped up in stuff going on down on the Ice if someone asks me about things going on, with an inability to do anything about it. I understand astronauts getting more dedicated to the program than they ever were before after coming back because they wanted to protect that opportunity and experience for others. Giving a shit about Antarctica probably more important than ever with a side order of a US government that seems determined to divest from it completely.
At least things are going well at Concordia.