Moon Dog Movie
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Living in the Shadow of the Moon-Dog” “A South Pole Diary
Male
51 years old
South Pole, Michigan
United States
Last Login: 11/18/2009
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About me:
"Living in the Shadow of the Moon-Dog”
“A South Pole Diary", captures the winterover life of 50 people at the U.S. Antarctic research station “South Pole”, located on the highest, driest, coldest continent on earth. A combination of -100F temperatures, fierce storms, hypoxia, stress and the unexpected illness of the station’s doctor all conspire to push people to their limits.
Just days before Paul C. Daniels left Detroit to spend nine months locked into the most remote and isolated outpost on the face of the earth, he bought a Sony-Handy-Cam to keep a video-diary of his experience. He captured everything from melting ice for drinking water, to his five jobs, to his social life as a “POLIE”. Through equipment failures, conflict and crisis the crew could rely on no one but each other to survive.
Despite insomnia, lack of oxygen and exhaustion that clouded his thoughts, plagued his winter and pushed him to his limits, the rewards at the South Pole were great. “Aurora Australis” filled the sky from horizon to horizon and majestic storms rumbled the massive geodesic dome he calls home. The solitude, the tranquility, and “Living in the Shadow of the Moon-Dog” are rewards that keep him hanging on for the sunrise. It was these rewards, and the adventuresome spirit his long departed father’s WWII adventures instilled in him that pulled him through. Experience a South Pole winterover with Paul C. Daniels.
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Bio-Paul C. Daniels
A product of Detroit’s turbulent 60s, 50 year old Paul C. Daniels attended schools in Detroit and St. Clair Shores, Michigan. As his mother relates, “Some graduate Summa-Cum-Laude or Phi-Beta-Kappa, Paul graduated “Oh-Thank-You-Lordie”. In the 1980’s, having begun a successful career as a licensed heating contractor, he decided to see the world, inspired by his late father’s stories of WWII adventure. He first visited the former Soviet Union. The following year he took 17 flights across Asia including (pre-normalization) Vietnam, cruising the Perfume River and crawling through the Kuchi Tunnels near Saigon. In 1991 he sold most everything he owned, quit his fourteen year job and headed to Africa. He camped across 23 African countries, hitchhiking some 5000 miles across the south including the miles logged on cargo planes. In Africa he camped up the Niger River to Timbuktu, visited 900-year-old Ethiopian stone churches, climbed Mt. Muhavura and Mgahinga in Uganda, had a wild gorilla playfully pound on his leg in the mountains in Zaire, bagged a gold-medal Kudu in Namibia and shot the Zambezi River rapids on a surfboard. On the negative side, he was attacked by bandits while hitchhiking through Mozambique and had Ethiopian solders point AK-47s at his head when his driver tried to crash through a road block. He was also once chased by a hippopotamus. He still suffers some of the side affects of his numerous hospitalizations that included bouts of Dengue-fever, Typhus and Schistsomiasis. A blood infection contracted in Zaire turned most of his left arm purple, threatening not only his arm, but his life as well. Other adventures include hiking the Anapurna trail in Nepal, traveling 5,000 miles by train across India, and briefly teaching industrial classes in a Russian auto factory. In 1999 he applied for a job to winterover at the U.S. Antarctic Research Station- McMurdo. Thirty days after his emailed application, he was locked into the Antarctic for his first winterover. In 2001 he became one of the less than 1000 people in history to winterover directly at the South Pole, where he was heavily involved in the first ever mid-winter South Pole evacuation, what he refers to as his greatest adventure. In 2004 he wintered at the U.S. Antarctic Research Station-Palmer, becoming one of only 38 people to winterover at all three American Antarctic stations. Following his Antarctic winters, he backpacked up the center and around nearly the entire perimeter of Australia. Since then, he worked construction in China and North Africa, followed by fifteen months in Afghanistan, driving over 600 times down its most dangerous road. He once found himself running for cover as automatic weapons fired over his head and thousands of rioters sent burning trucks careering into his compound. Citing burnout and exhaustion, he came home to labor on his long-delayed video documentary of the 2001 South Pole winter. Having traveled all seven continents and nearly 90 countries he is always drawn to the most remote and unusual locations.
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Many times I have been asked, "What is the Definition of a Moon-Dog?" A Moon-Dog may be seen when ice crystals of different shapes form high in the atmosphere thus refracting the moonlight in different directions. During a full moon, where this refracted light intersects a Moon-Dog may be formed in the shape of a halo around the moon with spots at its sides. On the most crystalline of nights a Moon-Dog may cast shadows across the polar plateau. -----------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is a sample from my manuscript. If you are a publisher or agent, like what you read and are interested please contact me.
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Chapter 11
“Living In the Shadow of the Moon-Dog”
05/18/01
“Living In the Shadow of the Moon-Dog”
Dear All,
The atmospheric anomalies here at the South Pole are nearly constant, usually vivid and never cease to astound me. Unlike the sun that takes up to a week to rise and set, in the winter we will go from a pitch dark moonless night to the brightest moonshine I have ever seen in only about three hours. In early May, shortly after the moonrise, I viewed my first moon-dog. Identical in mechanical origin to a sun-dog, a moon-dog is a circular rainbow, often accompanied by spots of light, haloing the moon caused by the refraction of the moon’s light through various shapes of ice crystals. As the ice crystals form under differing conditions, the shapes are different and the resulting refraction, spots, and halos are different. Remember, the telescopes here have a view of the heavens almost as clear as if we were in space. Hence, here we simply have some unique conditions allowing us to detect atmospheric sights not seen anywhere else in the world.
It was what we call morning here at the Pole and there it was in the approximate direction of South America. The moon had risen and was casting great tall shadows across the sastrugi of our polar desert. There was a circular rainbow haloing the moon with two distinctive focal points of light to both the left and right of its circumference. I couldn’t help but to first run for both my video and still cameras, and then, after I captured its image, I just gazed in awe of this miracle of nature. The entire world had now changed with its light. We had been stumbling through the sastrugi in the darkness and cold. Then suddenly with an unobstructed moon, the polar plateau seemed a less intimidating and forbidding place. The sky was filled with this haloed beacon and enveloped with ghostly auroras. The auroras were like a glowing blanket of smoke in the sky.
So much activity occurs in our frigid sky. Just before this moonrise, I was walking in the pitch dark and cloudless night when I noticed a massively bright star almost straight overhead. Since it was stationary and reddish, my first thought was “Hmmm that seems a little high for Mars.“ Then before I had a chance to ponder its origin further, it became 20 times brighter than any other star in the heavens just before, in a matter of three seconds, it faded and disappeared completely, never to be seen again, at least by me. (I was told by some of the astronomers this was likely an Iridium flash from an Iridium communications satellite. The flash is cause by the reflection of the sun off the panels on the satellite to the Earth).
Almost two weeks later on a crisp -86 degrees F night with a light wind-chill of about -100 degrees F or so, it was as clear and clean as I have ever seen the polar sky. With only a crescent of a moon to light my way, I had five kilometers to cover on my tour, and as I approached MAPO a long, thin ghostly aurora glistened in the darkness before me. It twisted and turned from nearly the horizon, in about the direction of South America all the way toward the opposite horizon headed for Australia. I trudged across the sastrugi and the Aurora swirled and grew until it stretched over both horizons and expanded over the Pole, then beyond toward Africa. Fully 60 percent of the sky was glistening, flowing and swirling with what looked like green and red glowing smoke. I have never seen so much movement in the glow. It was as if the heavens were on fire and the earth was down wind of the green smoke and flames. I laid down on the ice and stared up at the sky, emotion filled my heart and I remembered it was moments like this I had come all this way to experience. In the north, where the auroras are a small fraction of what they are here in the southern Auroral oval, the Eskimos believed the lights in the sky were the souls of their enemies yearning for revenge.
It was easy to see how superstition could overtake interpreting these spectacles of eerie smoky light. It even made me wonder how such a magnificent event could have been no more than nature at its most spectacular and not a living spirit reminding me of my mortality.
Stay Warm,
Paul-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(2001 was at the peak of an 11 to 12 year cycle for solar winds and hence, auroras. On May 18 2001 our science tech’s magnetometers went wild and Dana reported to Stanford University the strongest auroras he had ever reported in the six months he had been at the Pole. It should also be noted Auroras are detected by the magnetometers equally as strong in the summer as in the winter. The only difference is the 24 hours of daylight in the summer makes it impossible to see them).
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Who I'd like to meet:
I am trying to get in contact with the following people. If you know where they are please have them contact me.
Douglas McNeil,
Marc Hellwig,
Aaron Coy,
David Arnett,
Andrea Grant,
Jake "Speed" Gibbens,
James Crawford.
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