It’s just something I haven’t thought about. There are times that I have been asked to clean some nooks and crannies of the Galley that have not seen the light of day or a disinfectant since Sir Robert Scott threw away his food waste of pemmican and penguin.
Beneath the rim of trash cans in the front of the Galley or in the far corners of the pot room there are layers of Mesozoic era waste. On my back or down on my knees with size 10 rubber gloves and a blend of Clorox and nuclear isotopes, I scrub away what looks like the building blocks of primordial sludge. I wipe past the debris caused by the Chicxulub meteor that caused the extinction of dinosaurs, unearth the genes of the first Acanthostega and then finally reach the tile or the steel of the Galley floor or the food waste bins.
But, here’s the thing, if I had to do this type of deep cleaning in my past apartment or future house, I would be mindful of spiders, cockroaches and mice. In Antarctica, the nearest single-celled or multi-legged venomous creature is sequestered far away in a city called Denver.
There is a certain freedom to living in a bug free environment that I just don’t think about, until I’m reaching behind the sink to retrieve a dropped spoon or crawling under my bed to find a dropped glove or missing boot.
This morning as I was getting ready for work, one of my non-slip Galley shoes had slipped away from its usual resting place. Even though my commute to work is less than three minutes away, this missing shoe was causing a bit of a delay.
After getting down on my hands and knees, I saw the shoe had been kicked below my dormitory bed. Imagine if you had to reach beneath a bed at a motel that was constructed in the 1970s. The dust bunnies hanging from the mattress, the random bits of human skin-dust dangling from cotton strings that form the bottom of a box spring mattress and, no doubt, spiders, mites, roaches and other bugs that have yet to be phenotyped.
If this shoe had been lost in such a motel, I would have left it were it lay and gone to work with one shoe and asked the staff to call me a new nickname like “Lefty,” “One-Shoey” or “Heather Mills.”
Instead, I said out loud to my brain, “You’re in Antarctica. There aren’t any bugs.”
It’s just something I haven’t thought about: The ability to clean without fear of unearthing the Hantavirus. Since arriving in Antarctica, I have not heard an eeek or a shrill or a cry because of a bug. It’s like the opposite of a nuclear bomb has detonated, and instead of unleashing a holy hell of fire that kills everything except cockroaches, hell has frozen over, the cockroaches are dead and I call this home.
If you have claustrophobia, agoraphobia or Spheniscidaeaphobia, then Antarctica is probably not your continent. However, if you suffer from arachnophobia, then you might want to consider moving to Antarctica.
