The storm outside is unimpressive. Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for it to get serious to the point of lifting my tent and twirling it away while I yell frantically for Auntie Em. Much as I'm ready to leave Patriot Hills, Antarctica, I believe I'll be content to wait for conventional air transport. I just find this to be an ambiguous storm and my love of ambiguity has faded with the late summer sunshine.

My season of guiding on Vinson was a good one... it was sometimes tough physically, sometimes tough mentally; I was cold but not frozen; warm and cozy enough of the time; hypoxic when I was meant to be; thanked and befriended by a good number of my clients and fellow climbers; and, loathed and despised by acceptable numbers as well.

I was scared, worried, anxious, angry, bored, awed and elated for months on end. All that having been accomplished, it must now be time to get the heck out of Dodge. Or not... perhaps it is yet another opportunity to learn patience and restraint. The storm outside is just "mank" or "pants" or eight-eighths overcast consisting of cumulo-strato-cotton-marshmallow-nimbuli with some alto thrown in and a little light snow to boot.

I don't know. You'd have to ask Lucy, over in the meteorological/communications tent, and she's English, so you'd have to listen carefully to her reply, and you'd have to dodge her left hook if you were the tenth person to ask her in the last 10 minutes, and you'd have to run fast if you were stupid enough to ask her what this weather was going to do an hour from now (Lucy observes the present, she doesn't predict the future...a good way to live).

I'd describe this weather as the kind that keeps me two weeks extra in Antarctica and causes me to miss any business commitments and social obligations I might have planned or hoped for back in North America. I'd further call it the type that would have me stumbling were I to get my lazy carcass on its feet and lurch over to the dining tent. Doing that, I'd see a cloud ceiling at about 2000 feet over my hatted head, the Patriot Hills themselves a mile or two to the south, a whole lot of flat snow in every other direction (Kansas-sized chunks of it) and abundant quantities of the flattest light known to man.

I'd trip and stumble a few times in a hundred feet of walking, not being able to pick up the variations to the snow surface. And then I'd walk into the dining tent where 40 other folks are also ready to be done adventuring. They'd be talking, and reading and eating and sipping wine, but at least a couple of them would be saying (not necessarily in English), "I don't see why they couldn't land that Hercules plane in this weather..." Personally, I couldn't land a snowmobile in this weather. But that is beside the point. Folks want to travel. Well-meaning folks can drive us all around the bend by pointing at what passes for sky and saying over and over again; "It looks like it is getting better, don't you think so?"

But the Vinson Guide has it easy in Patriot Hills Camp...Steve and Simon do the heavy lifting when it comes to making the calls on the flying conditions and taking the rap for good, safe, slow and conservative decisions for transcontinental flights. What it really comes down to though, is that this particular storm could really help out if it went away. That is obvious, we all want that. What is less obvious is that this storm could also put minds at ease just by hitting us with a little more oomph.

When storms knock you from your feet and thrash you to within an inch of your life, you don't tend to worry much about the calendar. When it blows 80mph, you don't need a weatherman to tell you which way it blows. When your beard hurts because eight or 10 pounds of ice are hanging from it, you seldom concern yourself with picking an aisle or window seat on some hypothetical airplane. A real storm gives great focus to an otherwise cluttered mind.

Such was the case for my own brain several years back when I encountered a decidedly unambiguous storm out at the Dawson Lambton Glacier on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. That big old glacier breaks off straight into the southernmost reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. But a shelf of sea-ice forms on that ocean and latches on to the glacier terminus. When our Twin Otter and Cessna put down on that shelf, it held their weight nicely. We were concerned because the shelf was a mere shadow of its hundred mile or more winter width. In fact, it was down to about a third of a mile shelf. What would happen if it busted in half while we were visiting? Would we find enough of a straight line remaining for a takeoff run? Yeah, probably. At least it was relatively stable stuff that remained, perhaps five or six feet thick... we figured we'd just have to keep an eye out for storms, which might break the shelf up quicker (due to increased ocean motion.)

So pilots and passengers piled out of the planes and were soon met by the local, well dressed, immaculately groomed locals. Penguins. The place was positively infested with them — 15,207 of the big (up to about 90 lbs., four feet tall, teeth as sharp as Kukri Knives) critters known as Emperors. (Alright, no teeth, I get carried away) They weren't all so big, and that was one reason we'd flown 900 miles from Patriot Hills to make their acquaintance. Emperor chicks are small, cute, fluffy, photogenic and hard to find in the well-traveled and warm places on the planet.

Our gang went bravely into the rookery, armed only with cameras and shooting roll after roll of film in an effort to keep the large waddling birds from charging. These penguin communes are not exactly quiet places. But most people find that the constant cacophony of moms, dads, chicks (and some swinging singles) yelling out for one another in bird language is eventually very soothing. Especially if you find Hitchcock movies to be soothing....