Big Dead Place Page 8

  At lunch, one day in mid-December, J.T. and I were discussing our plans for next week’s movie, in which an emissary from Zordon would come to Earth to reclaim Antarctica, which is only a fragment blown from Zordon long ago in an intergalactic space battle with its nearby enemy, Planet Raytheon.

  Several of us made a movie together every few weeks. We scripted as we went and shot linearly to avoid editing. The only hard rule was that the movie had to be done by the end of the day even if it meant throwing a very bad ending on it and calling it good.

  Hank joined us at the table. Overhearing our plans for making movies, he asked, “Were you filming last night?”

  “No, but we made a movie on Sunday night,” I told him.

  “Oh,” said Hank, “I’m supposed to investigate some people who were down there last night.”

  Hank and I were friendly. I admired his ability to weave together disparate facts to evoke the great suffering of the miserable bags of blood that crewed doomed expeditions. He appreciated my comprehensive research on the same subjects, and was curious about the irreverent interpretations I drew from the histories he knew so well.

  I first met Hank when I was a fingee and he had taken several of us to Cape Royds on a boondoggle. In Shackleton’s gloomy hut he told us stories about the Endurance expedition, on which Shackleton’s boat was crushed in sea ice and his crew spent two years camping on ice floes, devouring seals, and amputating each other’s frozen extremities.

  I was overwhelmed with the sensation that I was merely a ghost compared to old tins of lunch tongue and Savoy sauce and rations of pea flour left behind by Shackleton. I was annoyed by my new boots, my camera, my breath, and the patch on my parka that bore the mark of a government institution. I felt trapped in a cheap knock-off of some original meaty experience. I wandered around the hut with my notebook, cataloguing cans of plain gravy soup and liquid bottled fruit. The ink in my pen had frozen, so I scratched into the paper: curried rabbit, sweet midget gherkins, roasted mutton, and Moir’s Gooseberries. While everyone else went outside to take pictures of penguins I stayed inside documenting dysentery medicine and concentrated egg powder. Hank, a fellow Stamp Collector, noticed this.

  “Are you sure the filming you heard about wasn’t on Sunday night?” I asked him, describing the plot of the movie we had made, and then asking if it sounded familiar.

  He nodded, and explained to me that a low-level administrator in the Chalet was, at this very moment, in tears. She had begged Hank for help. She had given the key to Discovery Hut to someone who reported that there were drunk people dressed like devils inside the hut smearing blood on Robert Scott’s artifacts from 1902.

  The explanation was simple.

  Our movie last Sunday had been called Cape Hades, about two fingee NSF Reps who see a sign-up sheet in the hall for a boondoggle to Cape Evans. They sign up, but when their guide arrives, it is not a certified trip leader from F-Stop, but the Devil, to whom they have unwittingly signed away their souls. The Devil takes them to Hell, played by local landmark Hut Point, and begins torturing them, but they scarcely notice because of their excitement about seeing penguins. NSF hears that two of its reps have been abducted by the Devil and sends a Quality Assurance Representative to rescue them. In the climactic scene the Devil pushes him off a ledge, and then NSF tricks the Devil into signing a contract to work as a GA. The movie ends with the Devil shoveling snow for science and humanity.

  For the torture scene, Jeannie had pricked her finger so we could shoot a formulaic close-up of blood dripping on my pure-white bunny boot.6 While our film crew gathered around this, three ANG crewmen came over to see what we were doing.

  We were not inside the hut with Scott’s antiques, but Emily was wearing a devil mask, and Jeannie was smearing her blood on my boot.

  “Of course we were drunk,” I said. “It was Sunday.”

  Hank laughed. Originally Robert Scott and his crew used Discovery Hut only as storage and to perform “amateur theatricals” that historian Roland Huntford notes “were an absolutely essential part of Victorian polar expeditions.” For performances the hut was called the Royal Terror Theater, and the men—many of whom had military backgrounds—brought down wigs, dresses, and makeup for use in the dramatic exercises. The hut’s use as a stage for amateur drama predates its use as a frozen historical shrine.

  Hank knew of my roiling passion for the historic sites, and that the rumor was out of hand. He assured me he would calm the skittish bureaucrat.

  Every year during the holidays, large plywood candy canes and twodimensional gifts are hung along the main roads around station. A paintedplywood Grinch on a utility pole has been authorized. The Galley is decorated with tinsel.

  A week before Christmas we received a holiday greeting from Dan Burnham, the CEO of Raytheon Company. He wanted us to understand how much Raytheon appreciated our “good work” and our “hard work” that year. He said that he and the Leadership Team would like to thank us for our many contributions to Raytheon during the year 2000, including an Integrated Product Development System and an Earned Value Management System, as well as advanced technology for missile defense, new tactical missiles like the AIM-9X, and the AESA radar for advanced fighters. He wished us the happiest of holiday seasons and a healthy New Year.

  A few days after the email, we all shuffled into the Galley for an All-Hands Meeting. Tom Yelvington, RPSC President and Program Manager, had come to town to scope out the operation at the ground level. He had a goatee and wore a baseball cap and jeans.

  I forgot that we had this All-Hands Meeting and otherwise I would have worn my full ECW gear to really look professional. Would that not have been appropriate? Does anybody wear that stuff? I see the red jackets, but other than that there’s some pretty eclectic combination of outfits I see here. I saw a guy that had his big red jacket on, then he had some kind of paisley vest over it. Is this a throwback to the hippie generation, or—what do you do at a rave? Is that what you wear to a rave? To get your groove on?

  Silence flooded the room.

  The former president of Raytheon, and my old boss, was fond of saying that he had two kinds of people working for him. He had the people like the people in this room, that he called “the earners,” and he had the people like me that he called “the burners.” So we are here to support the earners, and that is you guys.

  The juice dispenser hummed.

  Last year there was a party and there were commemorative glasses, and just the people at the party got them. The full-timers who were here didn’t get them. So they complained bitterly about that. So well heck… So what we’ll do is have an end-of-season party and at that party we can celebrate the success supporting science this season… Last year we polled people for our first party and they preferred to dress down so we had a party at this place called “The Stampede” and everybody dressed up in Western gear and some people who had too much to drink made fools of themselves on the mechanical bull.

  The snow melted from our boots.

  Did I say why I was here? I did say why I was here?

  Someone coughed.

  The company has a very altruistic goal… How many people hear about Safety routinely from their Supervisor? Every hand in here ought to be raised. Two hands ought to be raised. You’re going to hear about it until it makes you sick. And if those numbers come down and people quit being injured, then you’re not going to hear about it as often, and then you’ll feel a lot better.

  Tom Yelvington continued to talk, and we continued to listen, trying not to move too much, and hoping that he would say something intentionally funny so that we could laugh.

  “I can be a squeaky wheel,” he said. “I can go to the boss and say, ‘Hey, these people need to know, we need to know, I need to know. If I know I can let ’em know.’”

  He told us, “There’s very little that goes on in this company that we won’t be completely open about,” and that if there was something we wanted to know, then we should consult the
management and “ask them, prod them, cajole them into letting you know what’s going on.” He joked that people at home thought he was walking off the face of the earth by coming down here, but that they didn’t realize how accessible phones are and that “it’s easier for them to call in than it is for us to get out.”

  The RPSC New Employee Assimilation Survey reads: “If you are a contract employee (not a full-time Raytheon employee), please disregard this survey.” In other words, we would receive neither commemorative mugs nor incoming calls in Antarctica. We were not supposed to be squeaky wheels. It was ominous to consider what would happen if we “prodded” or “cajoled” management for information. We were contract workers. We did not receive health benefits, matching 401(k) plans, signing bonuses, or holiday bonuses as Denver employees did. We knew what we had signed on for, and no one cared, but it appeared to us that this man running the show did not know the difference between a full-time and a contract worker, a difference plain to all.

  He opened the floor to questions (“Questions are important—I ask a lot of questions”) and eased the strained silence with chatter.

  “Now I’ve been part of the All-Hands Meeting! I like All-Hands Meetings. The term though—there’s got to be a better term—it brings back bad memories for me. My sweetheart in the tenth grade fired me. She ran me off. What do you call it? She broke up with me. She said I was ‘All hands.’”

  At this there was a nervous tittering.

  One of the fingee DAs raised his hand. He was a trickster. Some feared him. Many disliked him. When I met him at a party in MMI, he was making fun of everyone around him and lifting his legs and ass in the air to show them his “pussy.” He had a tattoo that said “Tattoo.” He had seizures on the floor of the bar, and no one could tell if he was faking or not, though there were reasons to suspect he wasn’t.

  Tom Yelvington called on him. The DA, with a controlled smirk, told the President of RPSC that there was no First Aid kit in his dorm, and that this was a safety concern. The powerful man with the goatee became excited, like a circus strongman asked to prove himself by crushing a grape.

  “We’ll take care of that right away,” he said. The next day, we received this email:All,

  In response to yesterday’s RPSC’s all-hands meeting….First Aid kits have been installed in every dorm’s laundry room.

  Regards,

  Jim Scott

  Raytheon Polar Services Co.

  McMurdo Area Manager

  About mid-December, the buildings from the Ice Runway are moved to Willy Field on the permanent ice shelf. The larger wheeled aircraft can’t land at Willy, so everything arrives on smaller ski-equipped aircraft. Mail slows to a trickle. For most of December, package mail piles up in Christchurch and people temporarily whine about the mail rather than the food.

  Then, sometime just before Christmas weekend, NSF gives a thumbs-up, the planes are stuffed with pallets of mail, and the mailroom stays open late with the help of volunteers to distribute thousands of pounds of packages. People eating barbecued ribs and sipping cans of Canterbury Draft next to a hydraulic lift at the Heavy Shop Christmas party spread the word that the mailroom is still open. Hurry up, the mailroom is full! They need you to get your packages out of the way! It’s about time, because people were almost out of decent coffee, had been making it weaker in the last few weeks, and now there would be new CDs and stylish ski apparel. People lug the boxes to their rooms, then return to the Christmas party, for which the mechanics have degreased the concrete floor with a highpressure sprayer and hung tinsel and cardboard candy canes around the garage to host the eating of meat and the drinking of beer while the bands play classic rock covers.7

  On Christmas, Ben and I met after brunch in the lounge of 210. We huddled over a soldering iron that I had checked out from the tool room in Ben’s name, in case it got lost, and we built insectoid solar-powered robots that I had ordered on the Internet. People walked through the lounge all afternoon, and we fed them Bailey’s and good coffee while we tested our robots on the table and Laz expounded on the merits of the gleaming red asses of baboons.

  In 1826, when Antarctica had been poked and prodded around the edges but was still thought to be a smattering of islands, John Cleves Symmes revealed his theory that there was a giant hole at the South Pole through which one could enter the earth and find balmy weather, abundant reindeer, lush gardens, and a race of humanoids eager to open a new trade route to the surface world. Symmes sought funds for an expedition to prove his theory, and enlisted charismatic disciple Jeremiah Reynolds to give lectures, which Symmes hoped would increase the public’s receptiveness to his theory, thereby eventually coaxing official support. Unfortunately for Symmes, Reynolds fluttered away once boosted into the limelight. Reynolds had discovered that more people cheered, and more politicians sniffed about curiously, when he broadened the goals of the expedition. He no longer stirred interest by hypothesizing on the gaping cavities at the Poles, or the subterranean world with its “salubrious climates,” or the deranged troglodytes thus far deprived of humanity’s friendship. Now he promoted a scientific expedition that would benefit the “human family” and “add something to the common stock of general improvement” that would bring the “thanks of the human race.” Eventually, Reynolds broke with Symmes completely and became a key proponent of and lobbyist for the United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Charles Wilkes, who, according to some, was the first to prove that Antarctica was a continent, not a collection of islands.

  130 years after John Cleves Symmes published Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres: Demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open About the Poles, Antarctica had largely been mapped and probed. No vast recesses hiding gardens of earthly delights were likely to be found. No unexpected tribes would emerge with strange spices or new species of meat. Putting an industrial station at the South Pole effectively rolled a boulder over the hole in the Pole, forever entombing hopes of new subterranean frontiers. All the real estate had now been parceled and X-rayed. There were no more remote corners promising vast riches and unmolested virgin lands to keep us marching when we became tired, at least for most of us. In 1969, when Pole had already been inhabited for over a decade, Raymond Bernard published The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles: The True Origin of the Flying Saucers, suggesting that UFOs came from within the earth rather than from the stars, and that Richard Byrd had actually flown into the earth’s interior in 1947. Enthusiasts such as Bernard, against all reason, pursue fantastic frontiers, unsatisfied with the second-rate real ones, such as the muddy ocean depths, where fish don’t have eyes, and the darkest reaches of space, which are very exciting, but where payoffs are small for huge efforts and long waits.

  In 1605, 200 years before Symmes published his hollow earth theory, Bishop Joseph Hall wrote a fictional account of travels in the southern polar lands. Written under a pseudonym to avoid persecution by the grumping magistrates he criticized, the book satirized Hall’s own country and the church that dominated it. No one had seen Antarctica or set foot there; it hid in a great blank space at the bottom of the map. Hall’s book appeared long before the Pole had a hole, and before the hollow Earth was a hive of alien spacecraft. It appeared before Antarctica was the most pristine and dangerous land in the world, and long before it contained the secrets of peace and hope for future generations. His book, written when Antarctica had hardly been invented yet, was Another World Yet the Same.

  A few days before New Year’s, while we were all energized by Christmas and giddy from the anticipation of another upcoming two-day holiday, Tom Yelvington and Erick Chiang, NSF head of the Polar Research Support Section of the Office of Polar Programs, met the Waste crew in the break shack on a rare visit to learn about our jobs, The Program, what we liked, and what we thought should be done differently. A few days earlier our manager had emailed us reminding us to
talk with him first before bringing up anything new at the meeting.

  Chairs were brought for them from the office, we introduced ourselves one by one, and said where we were from and how long we had been in The Program. Erick Chiang took notes on a pad of paper, and Tom Yelvington used a Palm Pilot. Erick asked what we thought would improve the Waste Operation. Suggestions abounded, most of them involving the replacement or improvement of capital equipment, which would probably be the proposal of many departments; budgets must be met, and none of us expected that Waste would take priority, since our equipment was adequate for the most part.

  The subject of an entirely new Waste facility was brought up. This idea had been kicking around for years, Erick said, but was unlikely to be realized anytime soon. Still, he humored us by reflecting on the plan.

  “Where would we put it?” he asked.

  Because the Waste Barn is on the edge of town, we spend a lot of time transporting waste, and our department would be more efficient if it were central to the work centers we most often service. Someone suggested the Ballpark. Someone else suggested the empty area next to FEMC. These were the only options, really, without displacing some other facility.

  “We could knock down the Crary Lab and put it there,” I said.

  “I don’t think that will happen,” he said.

  The Crary Lab, with its three-phase architecture, one-pass air exchanges, and deep freeze chambers, was very expensive to build and construction was a lengthy process. In order to remove it, a new lab facility would need to first be built so as not to disrupt scientific activities. That would take a few years. He had quickly assessed the input and found it was not feasible, so he did not write the idea on his notepad.

  Someone asked why Raytheon had mistakenly ordered a costly amount of redundant ductwork for the Galley remodel. Tom Yelvington said this was embarrassing and that he was working hard to get rid of such kinks.