Big Dead Place Page 2

  We boarded and the Hagglund rumbled out of town toward Cape Evans. I awoke when it stopped, and we climbed out in front of Barne Glacier. The face of the glacier was a massive, fissured blue wall, and its bigness stunned like that of an anchor store at a regional shopping center. The area festered with seals. Lindy began shrieking and posed beside one of the creatures. She was wearing lipstick and perfume. The indifferent brown slug was bleeding and shitting where it lay. A midget on our crew squirmed on the ice in front of a seal while we snapped photos.

  Hank pointed to nearby landmarks.

  “That’s Big Razorback Island,” he said. “And that’s Inaccessible Island.”

  We were driving across a flat plain of ice, and I could have walked to the landforms he indicated.

  “You just called that an ‘island’,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Why is it an ‘island’?”

  “Because it’s surrounded by water.”

  We were driving across the frozen sea.

  We filed into the Hagglund and continued driving until the vehicle suddenly stopped and Hank hurried us out. There were two Adelies, our first penguins. A wave of giddy hysteria swept through the group, and cameras began clicking. We had received several grave warnings that we were not to molest the wildlife, and that penetrating a penguin’s comfort zone entailed stiff penalties. We did not want to do anything wrong, but we wanted to be as close as possible, preferably close enough to trick one of the birds into an Antarctic buddy shot. We followed Hank’s lead. To us, he came to personify the Antarctic Treaty. We knew there were limits on how close we could rightfully get to a penguin, but the Treaty did not prohibit penguins from approaching us.

  Hank hunkered down on the ice. We hunkered down on the ice. The penguins stood there. They watched us. It was cold and sunny. Someone was hissing in ecstasy. Hank lifted his gloved hand in the air for just a moment. The whispers of excitement froze; breaths briefly stopped clouding the air. The penguins hesitated and then waddled toward us. There was an outburst of gurgling from the spectators. The penguins stopped and looked around. They were cute. But the distance marred them. From this far they might as well have been covered in scabs. Hank began scooting forward across the ice. As if pulled by magnets, we scooted forward too. Scooting shifted to slinking, and then to a fast crawl. A horde of perfumed dishwashers converged on two saucer-eyed penguins oblivious to our designs. I was sure one of the birds would die today, drained of life by hugs and then slung over someone’s arm like a dishtowel. But then Hank halted the advance. The penguins marched forward to an eruption of unregulated giggling then, only momentarily interested in us, wandered off in another direction, probably to find and eat fish.

  The excited camaraderie of the penguin adventure was soon gone. Back in the kitchen, Flo befriended the Galley Supervisor, who knew about Flo’s connected husband. Flo, who had never worked in food service before, disliked Mary and reported to the Galley Supervisor that Mary always stuck her with all the hardest jobs and the most work. To make sure that workloads were evenly and fairly distributed, we were swapping duties halfway through each shift, which meant that the ice cream machine seldom got cleaned. By this time, Gail was getting headaches from the perfume Lindy wore to work each night, and with a piece of hastily cut cardboard blocked the window that separated their work areas. Getting in on the action, June informed the Galley Supervisor that Mary sometimes let us stretch our breaks, so Mary was disciplined and thereafter documented when each of us returned from break, causing even more bitterness toward her.

  One day, suddenly reminding us where we were, Gail was invited by some marine mammal biologists to visit their field camp, Weddell World. A trip to a field camp could only be authorized for work purposes, but since Gail was a cook, the scientists pulled the strings for her to fix them dinner. I, loyal dishwasher, went along as her assistant.

  At their camp out on the sea ice, Lee took us into the Jamesway hut that served as their lab, which boasted 11 laptop computers. In the back behind a hanging sheet was a butterball of a seal with gooey brown eyes and limber nostrils, bobbing in the water through a hole in the thick ice. This hole was so far from open water that the seal had to return here to breathe. Fastened to its head with a liberal application of industrial-strength adhesive was a video camera that recorded the seal’s activities. The recordings usually featured a lot of swimming about and the attacking of prey. The scientists brought the seal (Arnold) to their camp from the ice edge after knocking it out with a cocktail of Valium, ketamine, and a breathing stimulator (because seals involuntarily hold their breath if they become unconscious). Then they spent half a day outfitting the seal with the video camera and a backpack of equipment and plopped it through the hole into the sea like a plump brown berry into cream.

  Terry ushered us outside and down the Ob Tube, a hollow steel shaft poked through the ice like a toothpick through plastic wrap, with a ladder inside and a window near the bottom to observe the seal in the water. In the chill of the Ob Tube I peered up at the bottom of the blushing blue sea ice through the ice-coated window and dark water. The gadget-encumbered seal floated in the hole in the ice. Just then, some marine mammal biologists returned to camp, landing noisily on the ice in a helicopter, whereupon the seal glided over to monitor me. The blubbery graceless seal above1 was a sleek atom bundled for warmth below.

  After a dinner of omelettes, and once I had washed the dishes, we relaxed with coffee in the ironless hut, a wooden black box the size of a prison cell, which was built without ferrous metals that would have interfered with the compass readings taken there. “We even had to make sure the couch didn’t have any ferrous metals in it,” Lee said.

  “I thought you said iron was the problem,” I said.

  “I was trying to be understood.”

  The hut was mostly windows, for calculating the sun’s position without standing in the elements. We drank coffee, warmed by a sun that wouldn’t set until the end of summer. Lee pointed south to White Island. He told us about an isolated seal colony there, which is odd, he said, because White Island is farther south than Ross Island and is surrounded by the permanent ice shelf, rather than the seasonal ice and open water that attract seals around McMurdo. I asked how the seals got to White Island if there was no open water there, but our hosts had not studied the seal colony, so they would not even speculate on the origins of the isolated gene pool. Terry asked Lee whether so-and-so had studied the isolated seal colony. Lee didn’t know, and Terry asked if so-and-so had married such-and-such. “Marine mammal biologists,” Lee said, “there’s another isolated gene pool.”

  Someone mentioned the Botswana water owl, which flies straight into the water to catch prey. Randolph had learned owl calls counting owls in the Grand Canyon.

  He began doing owl calls in the ironless hut on the sea ice.

  Returning to McMurdo, the glow of our fantastic seal odyssey brightened a few weeks of drudgery, but eventually dimmed. In the kitchen, June and Flo and Lindy teamed up against Mary, whose credibility in the eyes of the Galley Supervisor was not helped by her lack of an influential spouse in town, and at her end-of-the-season work evaluation they blamed her for the accumulated problems on our DA crew. June’s connection in town was, at best, lateral to that of the kitchen supervisor, so her eval suffered too, but Flo and Lindy earned praise, as did Steve and I, for steering clear of it all.

  When I returned home after my first summer on the ice, I wore my Antarctica regalia proudly. I wore the casual McMurdo Station ballcap and a few t-shirts from the McMurdo station store, where such items sold well.

  “I just got back from Antarctica,” I would say to people.

  They were curious, and would ask me what I did there, and how did I get a job there, and how cold was it. I told them that I scraped ridges of turkeyloaf from baking pans while listening to Bob Seger. I told them that I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone. I said I didn’t know how cold it was by temperature,
but the shutter in my camera had frozen and a ballpoint pen wouldn’t work outside. More questions would follow, and I would be the star of the show.

  Though the details vary, this exchange, familiar to Antarctic workers, is sometimes called “playing the Antarctica card.” It can be used to impress sexual prospects, potential employers, and those who get a little too uppity about their travel experience. The main drawback of playing the Antarctica card, as people with more than a few seasons of experience know, is that playing it too often can lead to weariness, as might happen to a game-show champion repeating his name, occupation, and hometown night after night.

  Some seasoned workers are careful about playing the Antarctica card, broaching the subject only when they are sure that their audience has time for details, because the place is genuinely fascinating, but not always in the ways one might expect. Some, disdainful of Antarctica’s use as cheap parlor entertainment, refuse to speak of the place except to other Antarcticans, to those who can differentiate between the regimes of ITT and ASA, trace the reputation of a particular department to an interdepartmental squabble six seasons ago, or at the very least understand the impact of Offload. These workers wear highly revered regalia from past seasons with the gravitas of druids bearing ancient amulets. They have risen in the ranks on the highest, driest, coldest, and windiest continent in the world. Behind their eyes lies a calm understanding of systematic hostility. They are never surprised by the weather. They expect storms, ride them out, and find them not worth mentioning, unless to someone who knows what a real storm is like.

  At nearby Cape Evans, on May 6, 1915, a fearsome storm ripped the wooden ship Aurora from anchor and carried it away in the night, marooning2 ten men in Antarctica for two years. They had only offloaded a few supplies. The sea swallowed their cases of fuel, left too near the shore during the storm. The only other supplies were those scattered around the Cape Evans hut by Sir Robert Scott on his doomed expedition to the Pole a few years earlier. The treeless continent provides no firewood.

  Sir Ernest Shackleton, intending to cross Antarctica from the opposite coast on foot, had sent the Aurora expedition to lay depots of food and fuel in a route across the far side of the continent. Distracted from his task when his ship, Endurance, was crushed in the ice, Shackleton and his small crew spent the next few years hopping ice floes and gobbling wildlife until he crossed the ocean in a puny boat, scaled cliffs on a remote southern island, and then strolled into a whaling station to ask for assistance. Shackleton had long since canceled his trans-Antarctic expedition, but the men at Cape Evans didn’t know that. They dug through crates of musty supplies, scavenging materials for a futile sled journey to establish a supply line for an expedition that would never arrive.

  Six of the men sledged continuously for seven months. They wore pants made from an old tent, shoes made from fur sleeping bags; their lives depended on worn tents and defective primus stoves left behind by Scott. They traveled in blizzards. Frostbite covered their faces. One of the party, Mackintosh, reported that his ear had turned a pale green and that his feet were “raw like steak.” Fellow adventurer Ernest Joyce wrote that his nose was “one black blister.”

  On the return journey, the supply depots laid, they began to starve. Joyce wrote that, despite the help of their four dogs, they were still only “crawling three miles in ten hours—our food, biscuit crumbs and cocoa.” They gulped down filthy wads of seal meat scraped from the bags that had held the dogs’ food. Then, with no food and no fuel, they had to take supplies from the depots they had risked their lives to establish. Their salvaged tent split in the wind. While two of the men made repairs, fumbling a needle with frostbitten fingers, Hayward began ranting: “We can have meat. We can kill one of the dogs and eat its flesh. That would keep us alive.” Horrified, they shushed him, imagining their black lot without the dogs there to pull their pitiful effects through the bleak nightmare.

  Besides freezing and starving, they suffered from scurvy. They tied lengths of bamboo behind their knees to keep their legs from curling irreversibly while they slept, a symptom of the illness. Mackintosh, the leader of the expedition, was delirious with the disease. His gums were swollen, his knees were black and bent, and he conversed with imaginary visitors to his tent. A priest brought along on the expedition was strapped in his sleeping bag to a sled pulled by the limping men and the dogs, popping opium tablets from the medicine kit, reciting Bible verses, and bleeding steadily from the ass. He died as they approached the safety of Discovery Hut, south of Cape Evans, another shelter left by Scott.

  At Discovery Hut their worst problems would be alleviated. There would be shelter, a stove, and plenty of seals. Crewman Richards wrote that as the expedition neared the hut, he “had the strongest desire to rush to one of those animals and cut its throat and drink the blood that… would hose from its neck… the blood for which my body was crying out.” They arrived to find the emergency hut half full of snow and had to enter through a window. Richards wrote, “There was absolutely nothing in the way of general provisions—no flour, no sugar, no bread. The sole food we had from the middle of March until the middle of July—four whole months—was seal meat. That is all we had—morning, noon, and night.” For those long stormy months, recovering from their crippling afflictions, the men gorged on seal and huddled from draughts behind a heavy canvas curtain, blackened by smoke from the seal blubber they burned in a corner of the frozen hut, which still stands just across the bay from McMurdo Station.

  McMurdo lies in the shadow of Mount Erebus, a smoldering volcano encrusted with thick slabs of ice. To make room for McMurdo, a ripple of frozen hills on the edge of Ross Island have been hacked away to form an alcove sloped like the back of a shovel, and then affixed with green and brown cartridges with doors and windows. Silver fuel tanks sparkle on the hillside like giant watch batteries. As if unloosed from a specimen jar, a colony of machines scours the dirt roads among the simple buildings, digesting snow and cargo dumped by the wind and the planes, rattling like cracked armor and beeping loudly in reverse.

  McMurdo is the largest of three3 year-round American stations in Antarctica. With a summer population of around 1,200, one need not greet a passing stranger outside or in the halls. Some people drive to lunch. People like McMurdo for the natural beauty that surrounds it, and dislike it because it is loud, crowded, and industrial. In the distance, framed by ratty utility poles and twisted electrical lines, the gleaming mountains of the Royal Society Range spill glaciers that glow like molten gold onto the far rim of the frozen white sea, on which planes land, out near all the buildings with skis. Near Castle Rock, skiing toward Mount Erebus, in the middle of nowhere, you can stop at the bright red emergency shelter that looks like a giant red larva and call your bank4 to dispute your credit card fees.

  The town bustles in the summer with ships, helicopters, planes, cranes, and semis. It is the coastal hub for infiltrating the rest of the continent. By plane or helicopter, equipment and supplies radiate outward from McMurdo to field camps and to Pole, the second largest year-round base, which is officially called “Amundsen-Scott Station.” The name is mildly embarrassing, and seldom used except in government documents and such. Roald Amundsen was the first person to reach the South Pole. His men and his dogs made it to Pole a month before Robert Scott. Amundsen also made it out of Antarctica alive, whereas Scott is still encased in the ice like an insect in amber. Amundsen’s account of his journey is matter-of-fact, while Scott’s is a heroic tale of nationalist sacrifice. Uncertain whether to honor the winner or the team player, the U.S. has given its allegiance to the hyphen. Workers usually call it “Pole.” It is a smeared fleck on a hulking lobe of ice called the Polar Plateau, 800 miles inland from McMurdo, where there are no seals, whales, penguins, or ships. Pole is surrounded by a desert of ice, around which the eye glides without traction inevitably back to the crawling machines, the drums of solvent, and the clusters of cargo that, more than penguins or icebergs, characterize daily life in the U
nited States Antarctic Program, known locally as “The Program.”

  The first science foundation—which fostered the work of Euclid, the first star map, the calculation of the earth’s diameter, and an inkling of the steam-engine—was established in the third century B.C. by Ptolemy I. The National Science Foundation—the federal agency that manages the United States Antarctic Program—was established during the Cold War by Congress. Ptolemy’s ancient think tank, history’s first endowment of science, was headquartered in Alexandria, Egypt. NSF is headquartered near Alexandria, Virginia, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

  Congress passed the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 to “promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure the national defense.” In Antarctic brochures, NSF describes itself merely as “the U.S. Government agency that promotes the progress of science.” Someone exposed only to such brochures or to newspapers might get the inaccurate impression that most Americans in Antarctica are scientists or researchers.

  Most of the population work for NSF’s prime support contractor, which employs everyone from dishwashers and mechanics, to hairdressers and explosives-handlers. All prime support contractors in U.S. Antarctica have been subsidiaries of defense contractors since Holmes & Narver assumed operational control of South Pole Station in 1968. ITT Antarctic Services held the contract in the 1980s. And Antarctic Support Associates (ASA), a joint venture of defense giants EG&G and Holmes & Narver, held the contract until 2000, when ASA was displaced by Raytheon Polar Services Company (RPSC), a subsidiary of Raytheon Company. While the National Science Foundation is known as a proud sponsor of public television programming, Raytheon is known for making the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle and other top-shelf weapons systems.