Q: What happens to men when they're living in such cramped conditions?
LR: Well, there's a number of strains. There is the strain, first and
foremost of being absolutely isolated and cut off. And this is something that
modern day scientists in Antarctica and the Arctic just really can't recapture.
At a time when if you have an emergency at the South Pole station in the middle
of the winter, you can fly in a plane from New Zealand to Med-evac somebody out
and so on. When you have one winter flight in. When you have VCR's, when you
have well-stocked kitchens and so on. It's very difficult to throw your mind
back to a time when men lived in very crude wooden huts, in bunk rooms with
five or six people there, as Byrd and other people have indicated, every little
human irritation from how you cut your eggs in the morning to how you smoke
your pipe with it, with a raspy bowl and so on, it begins to grate on people's
nerves. And you have to really have a tremendous sense of self-discipline to
be able to live with a, with a very large group over a very long period of
time. Then beyond that is, and Larry Gould and some other people have claimed
that it didn't bother them, but other people it clearly did bother, was this
long period of darkness. You are deprived of light. The only light you have
is the artificial light that you bring with you. So here you are, you're stuck
down here in the middle of an absolutely inhospitable, stormy continent with
no means of rescue should something go wrong. No assurance that the pack ice
the next year is going to be loose enough so that you're little wooden ships
and, and iron sheathed ships are going to be able to get in and even rescue
you. So you have no idea when you're going home. And you have to live with
these guys whom you have been thrown together with at the last moment. So the
strains are tremendous.
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