Big Dead Place Read online

  In U.S. parlance, all 5.4 million square miles and 7 million cubic miles of ice that make up Antarctica are “The South Pole.” This is understandable, because from that royal dot have arisen many of the greatest tales of misery and suffering by those whose bodies are scattered across the wasteland. The South Pole, an abstract natural nonlandmark, has no visible identifying characteristics, which only adds to its elusiveness and mystique.

  In Antarctic parlance, all of the United States divides into “Washington,” referring to NSF’s sphere of influence, and “Denver,” referring to a vague suburban belt of Sheratons and brewpubs on the outskirts of Denver, where the support contractor has long been headquartered. Toward Denver is the most immediate over-the-shoulder check for the Antarctic lackey. “I’m going to have to ‘okay’ that with Denver first,” they say, or “I’m not the one who made the decision—if you have a problem with it, talk to Denver.” Denver is where most of the managers and full-time employees work, and where strategies for improving morale are formulated. Some of the clocks in McMurdo and at South Pole are set to Denver time.

  I had just arrived back in McMurdo for my third summer, but this time I would stay for the winter also: a year contract. I was in Sid’s room with him and Milo, upstairs in 155. I had expected them to be wild-eyed and deranged, with big beards and lips glistening with spittle, but Sid and Milo, both on the tail end of a winter contract, didn’t look so bad. Sid’s face looked a bit pasty, and Milo was a little haggard, but overall they seemed fit and tranquil. A few minutes after I greeted them I realized that the winter-overs were emitting a low harmonic drone that I was overwhelming with my turbulent piercing chatter. While they were calm and steady, thoughtful and deliberate, I had arrived with the agitated enthusiasm of one who has had a break from the ice.

  The curtains were open to admit the perpetual summer sun.

  “I got in trouble for making toast this winter,” said Milo.

  All winter Milo often chose to eat toasted bagels rather than attend the meals, because in the winter simple tiresome food can become preferable to elaborate tiresome food. Because there are no restaurants, a small supply of basic foods in the Galley is available for 24-hour community access. Milo said the trouble had begun at Winfly, when the Galley reopened after remodeling, during which the winter-overs had eaten in the library. Once the Galley had been renovated, meals were served there, and the library once again became the library. One of the features in the new Galley was a heavy black curtain that could be drawn to separate the dining area from the service area. The curtain was useful at the end of meal periods for keeping mobs of people from retrieving second helpings while the Galley staff cleared away the hot trays of teriyaki chicken and Hungarian goulash.

  Milo was one day toasting a bagel from the bread tray when the DA screamed at him from across the room and rushed over.

  “You can’t come behind the curtain during non-meal times!”

  “I’m making toast,” he said.

  “You can only use the Galley during mealtimes.”

  “I always eat toast.”

  “You can only use the Galley during mealtimes.”

  He ignored her and left with his bagel.

  Later Milo discovered that since the heavy black curtain had come into play, the DA had been yelling at others also, so he wrote her an email saying that she had no good reason to yell at anyone.

  When she read the email she burst into tears and ran to HR. The email was abusive and threatening, she said, so Milo was brought into HR for questioning. The HR Person read the email, and asked Milo if he would be willing to apologize to the DA. He agreed to apologize, but then asked plainly:

  “Is she allowed to yell at me and the others?”

  “No,” said the HR Person.

  “Can I get toast in the Galley anytime I want?”

  “Yes,” said the HR Person.

  Sid, whom I would be replacing as a Waste EO (Equipment Operator), ate his dinner from a blue Galley tray while explaining to me how the Housing Coordinator had received a death threat and then disappeared without warning six weeks ago. No one seemed to know just what the email threatened, but management had secretly flown the Coordinator out on one of the Winfly planes, which bring new employees and cargo near the end of winter, without listing her name on the flight manifest. This unheard-of departure from protocol added to the excitement and intrigue and promised to keep the incident on the grapevine for more than a week or two. Also, rumor had it the FBI was consulted.

  The task of identifying the perpetrator of the threat was complicated by widespread dislike of the Housing Coordinator. During the winter months, winter-overs each have their own private room. Just before Winfly (the season from late August until summer begins in October) the Housing Coordinator had posted signs saying that the winter-overs would each get a roommate, without exception. Her math was poor. It was simply never the case that each of over 200 winter-overs was assigned a roommate, and old-timers who knew better wrote her emails demanding to know how the lucky few were going to be chosen to keep their private rooms. She replied that people were not paying for their rooms, that their “happiness” should fall “within the policies and procedures,” and that if they didn’t like it they should ask their managers if they could leave on the first plane out.

  This type of counsel may have blunted contention had it come from someone more experienced, but she was a fingee. This was her first year on the ice, so even though she had been appointed head of Housing, her authority was a mirage. She wrote, “I am in the position to implement and enforce the McMurdo Housing polices and I appreciate the full support that my superiors in Denver have given me.” Afterward, she received the threat, and the company scoured the network records to determine when and whence the email was sent. Since the perpetrator had not logged on, Human Resources interrogated a woman who was sitting at another computer when the email was sent, asking who was beside her. She said she didn’t know.

  With secrecy that caught everyone’s eye, the Housing lady was sent to Denver to finish out her contract, after which she was to be flown back to New Zealand to enjoy the fringe benefit of the typical post-ice holiday. As Sid scraped at something with potatoes in it, he pointed out that under the current plan, both the victim and the perpetrator5 would arrive in New Zealand upon completion of their winter contracts.

  “Besides the death threat,” Sid concluded, “it was a pretty mellow winter.”

  CHAPTER I NOTES

  1 “At nine in the morning of the next day we had our first opportunity of seal-hunting; a big Weddell seal was observed on a floe right ahead. It took our approach with the utmost calmness, not thinking it worth while to budge an inch until a couple of rifle-bullets had convinced it of the seriousness of the situation.”—Roald Amundsen

  2 “Perhaps the most interesting of all the reactions between the Antarctic environment and the temperament of the explorer occurs during the catastrophic period of expeditions. For the sake of clearness, this heading also needs subdivision as there are several possible types of catastrophe worthy of separate consideration. Thus we have:1. The detention or loss of the ship in pack ice.

  2. Catastrophes affecting individual sledge parties.a. The starvation of an inland party.

  b. The marooning of a portion of an expedition with inadequate resources on an unknown coast.

  3. Polar madness generally.”—Raymond Priestly

  3 Palmer Station, the newest and the smallest of the three stations, is seldom discussed at the other stations. Palmer lies across the continent, on the life-infested Antarctic Peninsula, which has been called “the banana belt of the Antarctic.” While McMurdo has dirty skua gulls that pester, Palmer has exciting seals that attack; while Pole has a rowing machine in the weight room, Palmer has sleek black rubber speedboats; while McMurdo and Pole share the bureaucracy of a thousand warring subcommittees, Palmer seems merely a nice family. When Palmer arises in conversations at McMurdo or Pole, our eyes roll back in o
ur heads and our quivering tongues sparkle, like hogs envisioning a great feed. But mostly, we don’t talk about Palmer, because it seems a different world.

  4 When trying to explain to a bank customer service representative why you don’t have a phone number, or why your address has a U.S. postal code but that you can’t step into the nearest bank branch to re-key your PIN because the bank cancelled your old cash card, the friendly customer service representative will hang up on you about 50 percent of the time as soon as you utter “Antarctica.” After trial and error, the best workaround solution when trying to conduct business from Antarctica is to say that you are at a “foreign military installation.”

  5 Throughout the summer I made known to many my interest in the details of this story, and over a year later I received an email from a dummy account by an anonymous person who claimed to have sent the death threat. “Annoniemaus” wrote: “Basically [the Housing lady] was a jerk. Everyone I knew was upset about housing, and wherever I went people were talking about it, discussing it, and upset. I was actually quite fine about it, since the way things were going was how I expected them to go. [Her] being a jerk really didn’t feel like that big of an inconvenience, but the more I was around it all, the more it bothered me that someone like [her] could run around affecting people’s lives so uncaringly, and then act so poorly when she was questioned in any way. I thought about it. I thought about how there was no way to show her how it feels when someone screws with your life and you are helpless to effect any change. What I came up with may have seemed rather drastic, but even in retrospect I’m glad that I did it. I made up a dummy account, just like this one, by logging on to a computer without using my login name, and then sent [her] an email that said if I saw her off the ice I would punch her in the face, or something. I never had any intention of doing so. Not even a little. In fact, like I said, I wasn’t involved in any of the housing drama. I merely wanted to let her know what it felt like when you have no control over a situation that is upsetting and affects your life. Simple.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE OFFSHORE ACCOUNT AND THE ALIEN ABDUCTION

  Antarctica, perhaps more than space, conjures up in the mind images of hardship, personal valor, danger, adventure, and of course, the hero.

  —Report of the U.S. Antarctic Program Safety Review Panel

  It has been noted that some individuals are using the ice machines in the dorms for chilling their beer and other drinks or food. This practice can lead to illness, is unacceptable and must stop immediately.

  —RPSC Safety Representative

  IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS FIRST NIGHT in Antarctica, Grif woke up freezing. He huddled under the blankets trying to sleep, but his uncontrollable shivering required action. First he got out of bed, donned his standard-issue expeditionweight long underwear, added the fleece jacket, some socks, and crept back into bed. No big deal. This was exactly the kind of demanding living he had expected here. That’s why the company had given him all these cold-weather clothes in the first place. After a few more minutes of shivering, he got up to find a knit cap and some mittens. Then a few minutes later he went for his parka. Lying in bed, trembling in full outdoor gear, his frozen breath dancing in the dim LED glow of the nightstand alarm clock, he thought of the next four months and the obvious mistake he had made in deciding to spend them here, where everyone wears outdoor gear to bed every night, and the government handbooks don’t even mention it. When the cold became too much, he finally jumped out of bed determined to get his blood moving. He rushed from the room to find all his neighbors pacing the halls in their parkas while the UTs (Utility Technicians) fixed the furnace that had broken down a few hours earlier, leaving the dorm toilets full of ice.

  This story always gets a laugh after you’ve just returned from the ice machine with a full bucket to freshen the drinks of people wearing shorts and slugging margaritas in a stuffy dorm room after work. It is a classic story of fingee awakening, and it makes old-timers laugh because everyone remembers that brief period where going to Antarctica somehow meant going back in time to a world without technology. Before I came down I imagined I would be sleeping in a hollowed-out pit of snow and braining seals for food. I had never imagined institutional modular dorms with laundry rooms and foosball tables. Few come to the ice prepared for relatively comfortable quarters. So it is no surprise that neither are they prepared for the entrenched class structure by which comfortable quarters are allocated.

  In McMurdo, the central currency for buying a larger room with a sink (so you don’t have to walk in the bone-dry air down the hall to the bathroom to fill your humidifier) or a shared shower (so you don’t have to face a robed expedition down the hall each morning, manhauling your toiletries) is called Ice Time. Primitive in conception, the more Ice Time you accumulate, the better housing you can expect. The Ice Time system rewards returning employees, an inexpensive carrot for retaining experience in The Program. But the official algorithm used to allocate housing considers not only one’s Ice Time, calculated in months (minus Ice Time before 1990, which has expired), but also one’s “job points,” calculated from a hierarchical system that measures one’s professional status in town. (For example, a Nurse, the Hairstylist, and the Meteorologist each receive two points, while a Quality Assurance Representative receives 12.) Those with fewer than 36 months of Ice Time add up their months and divide by eight. Those with more than 36 months divide by four. Adding job points to this quotient gives Ice Time.

  A good way to avoid all these messy calculations is to have friends in the right places. Anyone with a friend in NSF (“the customer”) is eligible for Housing policy exemptions, as are those having sex with managers. Managers are also quick to point out that Ice Time includes time “in the Program” and not just time on the ice, meaning that full-time workers in suburban Denver who receive Christmas bonuses, health benefits, who work standard 40-hour weeks, and who go home to their dogs each evening to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, have accrued lucrative Ice Time should they come down to McMurdo for any reason at all.

  In practice, the value of one’s Ice Time changes according to current conditions, but no matter what, in the summer, from October to February, everyone has a roommate.

  When my friend Señor X flew down in mid-October, I rode his coattails across the tracks to Upper Case1 housing. With only ten months of Ice Time, I had barely squeaked into Dorm 208. Now our room was bigger. We had a sink in the room and we shared a shower with only the neighbors rather than the whole floor. These were the fruits of Ice Time.

  Señor X and I had been roommates in Lower Case the previous summer, when he was in Fuels and I was in Waste. Our room smelled like diesel and garbage. I would sit captivated as he explained to me how Fuels would “pig the lines” by blasting an oblong projectile through the hose to expel standing fuel. I would explain to him the latest methods of handling urine. (The task’s greatest challenge was to forget the terrible havoc narrowly averted each time a u-barrel was successfully hauled down a steep and bumpy road above any cluster of buildings.) The relative ease of modern McMurdo urine processing impressed us because when Señor X had worked in Waste years ago, the u-barrels were taken to the Old Incinerator Building to thaw. Warmed as if by a mother hen, the hot piss was then poured into the sea at the hands of Waste Technicians who for the dark splashing foam kept lips clenched while observing firsthand the shades of mass dehydration in Antarctica’s extremely dry climate.

  Señor X was now on his sixth summer, but his first as an AGO groomer. AGO (Automated Geophysical Observatory) is a program of automated data collection sites on the plateau. Each summer the gadgets must be maintained and the generators that power them refueled with propane, which is converted to electricity using special on-site converters. For accommodations, two science techs stay inside the AGO box, a small shed with a heater, while two groomers sleep in tents. The crew is dropped off by a Twin Otter aircraft which leaves immediately because flight time is in high demand. For the next seve
ral days, while the science techs adjust the AGO units, the groomers prepare an ice runway for the larger LC-130 Hercules aircraft that will soon deliver all the supplies that the automated site requires to continue its clicking and whirring for the upcoming year of data collection. The groomers forge the runway on the ice by dragging heavy blades behind snowmobiles at high speed. Because some of the AGO sites have sastrugi—wind-formed ice ridges—as tall as a copy machine, groomers are frequently thrown from the machines. Groomers can break arms or crash through windshields. Their field kits include Vicodin. On the payroll Señor X was listed as a “Carpenter.”

  Señor X was to go to AGO 1 in a few weeks with a science tech named Jordan. Jordan was from a prestigious university. Señor X’s boss was a little worried about Jordan going into the field because Jordan had recently asked at a preparatory meeting if there were showers at the remote AGO sites. Of course there weren’t. The sites were out in the middle of nowhere. Besides that, all the women were buzzing about his eerie stare, and he was barred from one work center for loitering only to ogle them. Also, he had been telling people he came to Antarctica to meet aliens.

  Now, settling into our shared room after work one evening, Señor X taped three photos of a field of flowers on the outside of our door. Beneath the flowers I taped a picture of the Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth slathered in fiendish facepaints and wielding broadswords. One’s door decorations are an innocuous but not entirely unnoticed representation of one’s civic identity, much like at a boarding school. Identification with one’s door decorations in McMurdo increases with abundance or with particularly obsessive themes, such as top to bottom Christmas decorations, or more than ten Peanuts cartoons, or more than one cross or other unmistakable Christian symbol, at which point one might be referred to as “the Snoopy freak” or “the Jesus guy.” If someone were to describe Señor X to someone who didn’t know him by name, the order of clues would be broadcast roughly as follows: