Alan Nelson's Daily Commentary for 29 August 1999

Kwajalein Island and Meck Island, Republic of Marshall Islands

I made it on the boat this morning! Here is the view looking back to the island of Meck. The tethersonde is hanging over the right side of the island. The tower on the left is a missile launch site. It is a high-security area and so we don't know much about it. The TRMM folks can only use the south end of Meck. The north end of the island is fenced off. On days of missile launches, all nonessential people are shipped off of Meck to other islands in the atoll.

After the boat ride from Meck and a shower, I attended the nondenominational chapel here at Kwajalein. As a first time visitor, they gave me a necklace of shells. Such shell necklaces are a common Marshallese handicraft (indeed, it is pretty common throughout all of the Pacific). It makes for a great souvenir of my visit. I talked with the pastor later at lunch and learned a bit more about the psychology and sociology of living on isolated islands. For one, he is an employee of Raytheon corporation. Raytheon has enough employees here that it is worth it for them to cater to the spiritual aspects of their employees. He also said that he does a lot of counselling of his parishioners. Partly because this is a small island, and so people here can't avoid social problems, even temporarily. It can make the environment feel quite claustrophobic if one is unhappy. Compound that with the fact that your neighbors, your friends and your co-workers are pretty much the same people. I can understand that it would be a very difficult problem if you were stationed here for a year but soon discovered that you didn't really like it.

I have mentioned the high humidity around here previously. One of the reactions to that high humidity is to (in my opinion) over-cool the air inside the buildings. The combination of very humid outdoors and very cool indoors has really hit home several times. Condensation of water is an important part of this science project. Condensation of water is everywhere in everyday life! Any object that has been sitting indoors, will have water condense on it immediately as it goes outside. Any object. My glasses fog over every time I exit a building. My clothes feel clammy every time I exit a building. My camera feels slimy every time I exit a building. My camera lens fogs up every time I exit a building. My laptop feels slimy every time.....You get the idea. It is not a great environment for electronic equipment!!

Several times, the TV crew's cameras needed to "acclimate" for about 30 minutes out of doors before they would function. The same thing happened to my camera the day we went to Roi (the airplane flight with the fog coming out of the air conditioning vents--August 12). The constant wetness coupled with salt spray from the ocean make this a very corrosive environment. I have been told that this environment is seven times as corrosive as the West coast. I have no idea how one measures that, or what units might be used in measuring it! I do not, however doubt the truth of the statement. When I got my bike, I raised the seat an inch. The rest of the stem of the bike seat was rusty, but the inch that I exposed was shiny metal. A week later, I can barely tell which part is old rust and which part is new rust! For all you skeptics, here is a picture of my bike seat. I took it off the bike and turned it upside down so that you could see for yourselves.

Yesterday and today my sinuses finally started complaining about constantly going back and forth from air conditioning to outdoors and back. A couple days of training, working with people who smoked didn't help either. So I'm not feeling great, but this evening I'm starting to feel a little better. I hope that trend continues.

Alan Nelson