On my first day of work in Antarctica, I found a vibrator. I had been sorting through a skua cabinet, a freebie bin named after the seabirds that harassed us, demanding snacks.

My supervisor, Nikki, had just asked me if I planned to date during our seven-month contract.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re outnumbered, two to one,” she said. “So the odds are good, but the goods can be odd.”

I didn’t tell her I was the odd one. Instead, I pretended to sing into the vibrator, which I hadn’t immediately recognized as such — it was one of those old-school wands with a bulbous head and dangling cord.

I had hoped to amuse Nikki, who doled out her cascading laugh sparingly. Instead, she said with a disgusted look, “Where are your gloves?”

Mortified, I fished them from my pocket and began sifting through the trash more carefully.

Mere weeks before, I had been tutoring the children of migrant agricultural workers around Flathead Lake in northern Montana, after graduating from the University of Montana. At sunset, I would jump off the dock into turquoise water. My whole life sprawled before me; I was curious and joyous to meet it.

But when I encountered a man who had assaulted me two years before, memories of the event came flooding back, my confidence crumbled, and I ran as far away as possible — to Antarctica, the coldest, driest, highest, windiest, emptiest continent on earth.

Antarctica had never been my dream, even though I was the third generation in my family to go. My grandfather visited in 1965 as part of his stint on the U.S. Coast Guard’s Eastwind icebreaker, and my mother followed suit, navigating ice runways in passenger vehicles with six-foot-tall tires. My mother’s connections helped get me an offer to be a janitor at the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station, where I arrived in mid-August, the tail end of winter, which in the southern hemisphere means constant darkness.

The weeklong journey took 31 hours of airtime over four flights, three continents and two oceans. I emerged from the belly of the C-17 military plane into a powerful wind that pushed the temperature to 40 degrees below zero. Feeling disoriented, I staggered blindly before noticing a glowing pink line at the horizon. I placed it as west before remembering all directions from here are north.

Among my duties was organizing each building’s trash center, an initial step before solid waste technicians retrieved, palletized and shipped it all back to America. Trash centers consisted of eight cabinets: skua, glass, aluminum, mixed paper, plastic, food waste and the particularly unsavory sanitary waste.

“What’s ‘Non-R’?” I asked Nikki.

“Non-recyclables,” she said. “Stuff that doesn’t belong, like that vibrator. Just plain old junk.”

That was the bin for me — I too felt like plain old junk that didn’t belong. Only 23, I had been raped twice in recent years, first by a stranger in Costa Rica who had laced my drink and then by a co-worker after a party.

I made the mistake of blaming myself in each case and trying to move on, but I couldn’t shake the belief that I didn’t deserve tenderness or respect. Feeling discarded, I limped to Antarctica.

A few days into my stay, I was headed to eat lunch alone in my dorm when I encountered Kevin, a fellow first-time janitor who had arrived on my flight.

“Where are you going?” he said. “The galley is this way.”

I tried to slink away, but something about his snaggletoothed grin made me comfortable. “Honestly,” I said, “the galley intimidates me.”

“Me too,” he said. “Let’s go tackle it together.”

Over pizza, I told him about the vibrator.

“Oh yeah?” he said. “I found a film canister of teeth.”

I soon learned the garbage could provide things of real value alongside the oddities. I found a cashmere sweater with the tags still attached and a George Foreman grill to make late-night quesadillas. Kevin gave me a pair of salvaged headphones to replace the ones I had dropped in a toilet.

I began hurrying to the recycling centers every morning, scavenging through the contents. Later, we janitors would huddle in our supply-closet office and amid bleach bottles, floor wax and industrial scrubbers, bonding over the grotesque nature of our job.

Unlike my co-workers, I had mostly shut myself off to the adventure and wonder around us, too burdened by the hurt I was trying to outrun. But you can only hide for so long at an isolated research station with a peak population no bigger than an average American high school. Time warped as I worked, ate, played, bathed and slept alongside so many weird and wonderful people. My fellow janitors seemed to love me, which of course I distrusted. Sooner or later, they would discover how unworthy I was of their love.

In late October, a Halloween costume contest was announced in which the winners would receive what we called a “boondoggle” — a daylong field trip, this one to see the penguin rookery at Cape Royds.

We janitors decided to recreate Lady Gaga outfits using foraged materials. I wanted to make a minidress with conical shoulders. Just as I started worrying how I would pull it off, Kevin produced an oversize white Tyvek suit he had found in a skua cabinet.

“I know you know how to sew,” he said. “You could do something with this.”

Together, we went to the craft room, where I used an ancient sewing machine to turn the legs into a skirt, take in the waist, and fashion shoulder points. With some horizontally painted stripes and my long brown braids tucked under a blond wig, I embodied Gaga.

Not only did we painstakingly make each costume out of garbage, we also learned choreography, performed a dance mob at the Halloween party, and won. On a balmy 15-degree day, the sky so clear and blue it hurt, nine of us set out in a rusty old Hagglunds transport vehicle for Cape Royds, hardly minding that we would miss the galley’s coveted cookie day.

As we motored across the vast frozen sea, our desolate surroundings overwhelmed me. The endless white invited existential dread, and again I remembered the events that drove me here. Nobody had loved me the way I’d needed, and nobody ever would.

We smelled the penguins before we saw them, a putrid blend of fish and rot. Below us were thousands, squawking and buzzing from rock-pile nests. My co-workers spread out, transfixed, but I stayed near Nikki, pestering her with questions: What was wrong with me? Would I ever find love?

She narrowed her eyes. “Look where you are, with these amazing people,” she said. “Shut up and enjoy something.”

Her words felt like a slap, the kind that wakes you up.

“Maybe if you stopped moping around, you’d see what’s right under your nose,” she said, pointing down the hill to where Kevin sat.

“No way,” I said. “He’s my friend.”

“Exactly.” She stood, brushed off her snow pants and wandered off to explore.

Kevin came over and we sat silently, watching as penguins offered each other pebbles in hopes of winning over a mate. After a few minutes, he pulled two plastic-wrapped cookies from his chest pocket and handed me my favorite, peanut butter.

Something rustled, feathery, in my rib cage — affection, yes, but also fear.

Nikki’s words stuck with me. It became impossible to ignore Kevin’s generosity, enthusiasm and grit, and I began to chart my own personal shift, too. I laughed hard and often, provided a gentle ear for the problems of others, and was always the last to leave the dance floor. After months of working and laughing with friends, I had started to like myself again.

By Christmas, the sun stayed up all day, spiraling above us. The carpenters hosted the McMurdo Alternative Art Gallery in their shop, a celebration of art made of trash and salvaged items. Kevin had invited me to go with him, and I was nervous while finishing up at work. Scrubbing toilets, I examined my trepidation. I was afraid that opening my heart would only invite more pain and rejection.

After dinner, Kevin and I strolled up the hill, shoulders bumping as we hoofed over icy volcanic rock. In the carpenter’s shop yard, people capered on adult-size playground equipment built from scrap wood. Inside were textile landscapes made from discarded garments, a corded phone programmed to make music with button beeps and a weaving constructed of black VHS tape.

In each revived artifact, I saw my own beautiful, imperfect life and knew that I was worthy of the same loving resurrection.

Under hundreds of fluttering paper cranes made from old mail, I finally surrendered, and my future husband and I kissed amid the trash as a group of janitors entered the shop and giggled — not at us, but with us — at the otherworldly joy of it all.

Elizabeth Endicott is a writer in Denver.

Modern Love can be reached at [email protected].

To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.

Want more from Modern Love? Watch the TV series; sign up for the newsletter; or listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”

Source: Read Full Article