Читать книгу Big Dead Place - Nicholas Johnson - Страница 10
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 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 several 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:
by department or division (“You know that science support guy?”),
by past or present sexmates (“…went out with that Fuels gal?”),
by job title or function (“…is grooming runways at AGO sites?”),
by physical characteristics (“…tall, has glasses?”),
by roommate (“…lives with Nick Johnson?”),
by past department (“…used to work in Fuels?”),
by office location (“…works up at 191 or MEC if he’s in town?”),
by famous antics (“…the one who had his hat stolen by a skua?”),
then, in the unlikely event familiarity has not yet registered,
by door decorations (“…field of flowers on his door?”).
As I had winced regarding his door decoration, Señor X urged me to examine the flower photos more closely, and said something about landscape and consciousness. In turn I reminded him that Gorgoroth were countrymen of Roald Amundsen, who had defeated Robert Scott in the 1911-12 race to reach the South Pole, and that they had authored such contemplative songs as “Crushing the Scepter” and “(Under) the Pagan Megalith.”
Though my roommate and I were dissimilar in many ways, we were unified in our tireless enthusiasm for all things Antarctic. We were armchair strategists who argued over the complex logistics of the industrial caravans that traversed to the Black Island communications outpost 60 miles south of Ross Island. We regarded as superheroes obscure Antarctic figures such as Rozo, the baker on one of the French expeditions who did nothing but wear slippers around the hut and bake croissants, or Anton the Russian Pony Boy, who entertained everyone with his national dances.
Señor X had invited people over tonight for Thai food. He emptied tiny jars and festive packets into a prized wok procured from a departed winter-over, while I futzed around the narrow room, arranging the moth-brown Eastern Bloc furniture with grave deliberation, and running extension cords for our many appliances. I shrieked when I zapped my video camera with static electricity, forgetting to first reach for something grounded—this would become habit after a month or so in the dry air. On the walls I hung some Robert Scott masks and a map of the Tucker Glacier Area. I attached a tally counter, like bouncers use at nightclubs, to a new bulletin board, both of which I had recently found in a skua pile.
A skua (rhymes with “Kahlúa”) is an Antarctic gull that feeds on baby penguins, seal placenta, McMurdo Food Waste, and is prone to cannibalism. Skuas are tough and aggressive. They occasionally appear at Pole, 800 miles away, and a skua was once spotted on a beach in Florida, gobbling corn dogs and sandy ice cream cones. Skuas sometimes molest people carrying trays of food on the short walk from 155 to their dorms. A bagel or danish may be plucked from someone’s hand, and a screaming skua once swooped down and stole Señor X’s hat from his head. The tasseled knit cap was found two years later across town near the Helo Pad.
Though the penguin image pervades McMurdo via work order forms, the mail flag, t-shirts, hats, bumperstickers, postcards, and cheap shotglasses, it contributes little to the language. As far as anyone knows, penguins don’t really do anything, they’re just darling and funny. Skuas, on the other hand, steal food from each other, prey on stray penguin chicks who move too far from the group, and try to eat each other’s heads. The skua’s workaday sensibilities have found it a significant place in the McMurdo vernacular.
Each of the dorms has at least one “skua pile,” where people dump potentially reusable goods they no longer want, useful things like clothing, books, coffee mugs, and temporary tattoos of dinosaurs2, as well as more optimistic items like broken pencils, packets of ketchup, and near-empty shampoo bottles. Skua piles are first-come-first-serve and free for all.
The early summer skua frenzy is often so vigorous that at times it might be called a mass pillage. Furniture raids on dorm lounges are planned, and information about a coveted loveseat is closely guarded to foil any preemptive strike. Anything left in the hall, when moving between rooms for instance, should be marked “Not Skua.” This will protect the owner, not against clearheaded theft, but against rationalized theft. An adventurous woman once left a pile of food in the hall for less than one minute and returned to find a bag of avocados missing. “No one skuas3 a bag of avocados,” she said angrily. This incident recurs, but the objects change, from hot pots to bundles of clothes hangers. Despite problems of liberal interpretation, skuaing is a treasured community practice, convenient and practical for some, and for others a fond hobby, like rooting through thrift stores, but where everything is free4.
Aside from the tally counter, I had recently skuaed a functional light bulb (an item sometimes scarce for those who don’t know anyone in Housing), a bag of seaweed, a bottle of cumin, the sheet music for Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a reference book of bone fractures and their treatments, with photos and X-rays.
“What can we count with this thing?” I asked Señor X as I fiddled with the tally counter. “I think we should click it whenever someone says ‘plane’.”
“Each conversation involving planes? Or each use of ‘plane’?”
“Yeah, that’s a problem,” I said. I imagined Ben repeating, “plane” as fast as he could. (Ben and I had become friends our first year when he was a blaster and I was a dishwasher. He told me how to use explosives to move ice and rock and I told him how factions evolve in a kitchen. Ben had introduced me to the beauty of the high-quality Hawaiian shirt.)
“Let’s count the number of times someone clicks the counter,” Señor X said. “Then we’ll always be accurate.” We agreed this was the best idea so far.
Kath arrived with a halfrack of Export Gold (a New Zealand beer). She was working Waste at Pole, but would be in McMurdo yet for a week or two.
“Hey Kath,” I said, “look at our new counter. No, on the bulletin board.”
She clicked it. “What are you keepin’ track of?”
“None of your goddamn business. Where’d they put you?”
She began stocking our fridge. “155,” she said. “But I got the whole room to myself, so I’m open for business.” Kath had spent the last few months sewing fleece hats that she would now sell for $15-$20 apiece to her coworkers, who had plenty of money and nothing to spend it on. “I had five people come up during dinner. I already got a list of people who forgot to bring cash. That’s the thing about this place. It’s easy to trust people because they can’t go anywhere and you always know where to find ‘em.”
We drank beer and talked while Señor X conjured steam at the desk.
Kath had first applied to work in The Program for the summer of 1996- 97 when all Galley and Janitorial services were subcontracted to International American Products of Charleston, South Carolina. IAP’s bread and butter was prison contracts, but they were branching out.
For a call to their office, Kath was rewarded with the position of nightshift Janitor Supervisor. She and the other IAP employees were flown to Charleston with contracts they had received in the mail, for lower wages than they had agreed to by phone. In the office, a secretary was collating stacks of documents by hand from the floor. They filed into a conference room for Orientation and the manager told them to rip up their contracts, then he passed out new ones with accurate wages. People who had worked in The Program before asked why they were only receiving $290 instead of the usual $300 for travel expenses. The manager told them ten dollars each was deducted for the pizza and Cokes they would have after the meeting.
One of Kath’s new co-workers asked her where Antarctica was, and if there were cats there. The unemployment office had rung him one day to offer him a position as a cook, and said if he didn’t take the job his benefits would be cut. “Is it cold there?” he asked.
When they got to the ice, they found that the IAP manager wore alligator shoes and a suit and tie to work each day. Wearing a suit and tie in McMurdo is like wearing a spacesuit to a bullfight. Even though he was a manager, Housing had dumped him in Lower Case, and Kath watched him from her window as he commuted to work through the wind in his parka and alligator shoes, clutching his briefcase.
Alligator held a meeting with the janitors. He set up his laptop on the Galley table and handed out graphs charting the season’s performance. He introduced them to something called the managerial module, and asked the toilet-scrubbing crew for their input on measurement tools to chart performance efficiency. Nearby, a DA wiped tables with a wet cloth.
The meeting adjourned, Kath asked him where he was from, and what he had done before this. He rattled off a résumé. When he told Kath to attend weekly supervisor meetings at 2 p.m.—in the middle of her nightshift sleep schedule—she said no. He insisted, but she demanded to know how he would like to wake up for a meeting in the middle of the night. He relented, but was thereafter wary of her team spirit.
Meanwhile, the Galley staff was at odds with Alligator because he ordered that each day fresh fruit be decoratively cut and placed on top of the serving islands in the Galley, for the touch of class it added. “We’re in Antarctica,” they complained, “Fresh fruit is scarce and valuable.” He demanded that the practice continue, so the top of the food warmers sported halved oranges with triangular ridges and sprigs of grapes that were hot and mushy by the end of the day. Finally, when murmurs percolated up through management that the new subcontractor wasted fruit, plastic fruit was flown down.
After a few months it became obvious that payroll problems among the janitors and Galley workers were not isolated mistakes. Some were receiving half pay and others had not been paid for as long as two months. Those who did receive checks noticed that these were handwritten and drawn from an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. Those who reexamined their contracts noticed an article prohibiting employees from discussing their salaries with NSF or with ASA (the support contractor at the time), punishable by termination.
Unrest in the rank and file was evident, so Alligator held a meeting with all IAP employees and told everyone to sign a statement promising not to discuss their salaries with NSF or ASA; anyone who did not sign would be fired and required to pay for their own plane tickets back to the U.S., and thus pay straight into IAP’s pocket, since their contract with NSF guaranteed them the cost of employee travel expenses. No one signed the paper, and a few brought their contracts to NSF and ASA managers for consultation. The contract was illegal, and NSF demanded that IAP provide the employees with a new contract. Because of their previous troubles, 15 or so people no longer wanted anything to do with The Program and refused to sign the new contract. But because Alligator had previously fired a number of people to emphasize a no-nonsense work environment, the Galley and janitorial staffs were already running on skeleton crews. NSF and ASA had an emergency meeting and determined that the only way to keep those 15 people from leaving was to keep them bound to the original contract, meaning that they would have to pay for their own plane tickets should they decide to leave.
Now they had to pay to leave Antarctica. A few people told Alligator quietly that he wouldn’t make it through Christchurch without a beating. Alligator, now afraid, held employee parties in the Coffeehouse and paid for oceans of wine from his own pocket, but the threats lingered in meaningful looks and gestures. At the end of the season he tried to leave on an early flight but ASA rebuffed him because, after all, he was a manager and supposed to oversee things until the end. As the end of the season closed in, he panicked and finally, wanting to make it through Christchurch before his disgruntled underlings got there, declared that he had a “family emergency” at home. “Family emergency” is a potent phrase, like “safety concerns” and “inappropriate behavior.” It worked; a woman was bumped from her flight so he could leave.
No one knows whether Alligator made it through Christchurch scot-free. But some still remember the day one of Alligator’s bags was run over multiple times with a loader, cologne seeping from smashed vials within, seams bursting, so that the entire mess had to be tied together with twine before resuming its place on the pallet of cargo.
Laz and Jeannie arrived for Thai food. Bulky red parkas slumped in a pile by the door. Boot treads relinquished filaments of snow onto the worn carpet. “The wind is loud in these corner rooms,” someone said.
Señor X distributed bowls of rice covered in spicy gray sauce, spiked with carrots and peppers. If you had just awoken from years of sleep and walked into the room, the carrots and peppers would tell you a plane had recently visited. The white shreds of snow on the carpet turned clear before they melted. To the bulletin board I pinned a note that I had found tucked inside a cheap novel at a Seattle thrift store. I read it aloud to the feeding throng:
Meg,
Take this money to use toward your dress. I just wish I had more. You are just the best daughter I could ever have asked for. I love you dearly, Meg. There is some soup on the stove on “warm.” Can you stir it and turn it off when you get up. Wake me up before you go so we can visit a little.
Love you, Mom.
“Awww,” Jeannie cooed. “That’s nice.”
Señor X nodded.
“That’s sweet,” Kath said.
“Isn’t it?” I said.
Laz remained silent, his mouth contorted like a toppled parenthesis.
“What the hell are you smirking about?” I demanded.
“I don’t want to spoil your tidy illusion,” he said.
“Oh please.”
“Obviously they had some sort of fight. They had an argument and now the mom’s trying to make up for it. ‘Hey, here’s some cash. Sorry I yelled at you.’ She might have hit her. The daughter came in drunk or all messed up on cocaine. She’d been out sucking a bushel of dicks. This is clearly the aftermath of some grievous turmoil.”
“You’re all fucked up.”
“Sir, you may adjust your blinders as you see fit.”
One morning near the end of October, settled and adjusted to my rounds as a town garbageman, I took a loader down to check the Wood and Construction Debris dumpsters that needed constant attention at the Playhouse demolition project. The Playhouse was a large Quonset hut in the center of town, located between the Coffeehouse and Southern Exposure, the smoking bar. The Playhouse had been constructed by the Navy many years ago, and was being demo’d to make room for an office building called JSOC.
It was Condition 2, the windiest day of the season so far, and the sheets of metal at the apex of the Playhouse arches were acting as a wind-catch. The whole structure was very unstable and leaning about 45 degrees, like a crumpling covered wagon. The workers had chained the bucket of a Caterpillar loader to the end of the Playhouse to stabilize it.
The new Safety Guy was there to watch. He had recently emailed emphatic demands that people on the construction projects wear hardhats and eye protection. He had braved the wind to visit the Playhouse to ensure strict compliance with Safety procedures. With one hand gripping his own clean hardhat to keep it from flying away, and the other clutching a clipboard, he watched a group of men wearing hardhats and eye protection run into the quaking Playhouse to collect the tools and scaffolding before the structure collapsed in the wind.
This brand of playacting, in which rigorously enforcing minutiae (such as hardhats) symbolically defends against larger dangers (such as a collapsing building), pervades The Program. The act requires a straight-faced zeal that favors the ignorant or the ambitious, simply because it is avoided by everyone else as a contagious brain-eating disease. One time, with winter temperatures hovering around -80°F, the South Pole Safety Representative, running out of topics for the mandatory daily meetings, instructed workers on first aid for heatstroke.
This new McMurdo Safety Guy had made his first public appearance a few weeks before, at the Driver’s Safety Course in the upstairs lounge of the Crary Lab. The course was mandatory for most employees. Unlike most of us, who were dressed in insulated brown Carhartt overalls for working outside, the Safety Guy wore jeans and a Denver Broncos t-shirt.
“Well, let’s get started,” he said finally, once the room had filled. “Welcome to Driver’s Safety Training.”
He told us that conditions in McMurdo were treacherous because we’d often be driving on ice; that the speed limit through town was 15 miles per hour; and that it was mandatory for us to wear seatbelts at all times. We must make full stops at all stop signs.
“Just like in the U.S.,” he said, “driving here is not a right. It’s a privilege.” He stretched a pause, pregnant with omen. “What that means is that if you’re caught breaking the speed limit, you can have your driving privileges revoked. Now, if your job requires your use of a vehicle, and you can’t drive…” he smiled and held up his hands palms out, as if to show that he wasn’t holding a weapon, “…then that means you might not be able to fulfill your contract and may be sent home.”
There was another pause, a sinking in of consequences.
“Okay? So let’s just be safe out there and drive slowly. I’m here for your benefit. My job here is to make sure that you have a good season and go back safely to your families.”
One moment he said that all vehicles were government vehicles and that we could never use them for non-work purposes. The next moment he said that we were taxpayers and that tax money bought these vehicles, so we should take care of them as if they were our own. Each of these messages he delivered as if explaining something as natural as a tide chart. He ended by saying that if we ever had any safety-related concerns, we should just stop by his office. And that if we ever had any questions, we should feel free to ask.
Then he told us to come up and show him our U.S. driver’s licenses. We rose and shifted in a haphazard queue to have our names checked on a list he kept on his clipboard. When I handed him my driver’s license, he reviewed it meticulously before checking me off. I cracked some little joke that made him smile so over the next few weeks we politely acknowledged each other in the hallways.
When I had finished my work at the Playhouse, I drove up to Building 140 to fork a White Paper that was on my collection list. I saw Nero outside strapping something to a pallet, so I climbed out of my loader to say hi.
I first met Nero one morning during my first summer when I dropped by the food freezer to investigate the legendary supply of hot dogs I had heard about. McMurdo had enough hot dogs, if they were laid end to end, to stretch to Pole. Years ago, when a Galley manager had set up a 24/7 self-help hot dog warmer in the Galley to alleviate the swollen inventory, the food purchaser back in The States compounded the problem by ordering even more hot dogs to keep up with the spike in consumption. With a forklift in the warehouse, Nero raised me to the ceiling so I could photograph the few accessible pallets of wieners, the bulk of them buried beneath a thick plateau of frozen jalapeño poppers and cocktail smokies. He also moved a cabinet from an office wall to show me various graffiti commemorating the hot dogs. McMurdo’s legacy as having the world’s southernmost obscene supply of hot dogs ended at the turn of the century, when most of the franks were retro’d from the continent to an unknown fate.
Nero had many stories from his time in The Program. He had been coming down since ‘94. His first year some guys abducted a penguin and took pictures of it stuffed in bed with someone who had passed out drunk. The irritated bird made a mess and ran around squawking until someone finally let it outside. He had taken part in the first live video feed from Pole, and he was around for some of McMurdo’s most classic events, such as the druginfested winter airdrop in the mid-’90s, and the Hammer Attack incident of winter ’96. Actually, he has been at the center of strange events his entire life. One time when he was a child, Nero’s father had taken him along in the car to kill grandpa, but Nero’s uncle pulled up alongside them, and his father and his uncle screamed at each other through the wind, weaving neck and neck at 70 miles an hour, until the errand was aborted. As a child, Nero had a pet raccoon. When Nero matured, his parents asked him to burn down the house for the insurance money. He had once taken a strange woman home, where she bit off a chunk of his scrotum. Nero often says, “It’s all good.”
Briefly he was a clothed extra in a porn movie. The atmosphere on the set was jovial. One time the men dipped their cocks in some bitter solution as a practical joke before a blowjob scene. The women joked about biting off their dicks, and the men joked that the only way to shut them up was to blow loads down their throats. Between scenes, the other men would stand together naked in the bathroom drinking vitamin potions and joking as they absentmindedly tugged at their cocks. One of the guys wore a gold medallion depicting the fingers of a hand encircling the earth.
Around the time of his film stint, Nero was on a Los Angeles freeway driving to work in an expensive car. The seat was adjusted to accommodate his tree-like height, his long hair bunched in a ponytail, and his muscled arm stretched to the steering wheel; he wore sunglasses and was talking on a cellphone. As traffic slowed, he looked at the people in the other cars and some of them looked exactly like him. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he thought. Then he got a job stacking hot dogs in a freezer in Antarctica.
“Nero, what’s up, dude.”
We stood out of the wind next to my idling machine. Dry wisps of snow snaked over the roads as though the entire town were being dusted for fingerprints.
“Hey, man, did you hear about the janitors?” he asked.
“Uh-uh.”
“I guess they were watchin’ TV in one of the lounges during work. The guy told me they missed their break and so took a late break, but whatever. Some NSF Reps were giving a tour to some DVs and caught them watching whatever-the-fuck in the lounge. One of the Upper Case dorms. He fired ‘em on the spot. One of them was a supervisor, too.”
“So NSF is going to start cleaning toilets or what? Looks like we’re going to be a community pretty soon.”
“Looks that way. I gotta run.”
USAP history is rife with exciting tales of termination and exile, the bulk of them low-level firings early in the summer. It’s easy to understand why some people are fired. In the summer of 1998, Sean was fired for throwing rocks at Ron, who was trying to run him over with a loader. Their rivalry stemmed from a disagreement over which was the best techno club in Christchurch. In many cases, though, firings are largely understood to be a matter of slaying sacrificial lambs, as people in higher positions, or those who have seniors with clout to protect them, aren’t fired for greater infractions. Common are the stories of uncorrected blunder and negligence by someone with allies in the inner sanctum of Denver or NSF, such as the station manager who once rolled a truck, or the System Administrator who made lascivious commentaries to a woman on his favorite of her boyfriend’s emails to her, or the managers who broke into the bar, or the doctor who canceled his office hours so he could take Swing Dance lessons, or the other doctor who emailed a patient’s medical information to her entire supervisor list, or the three doctors who all prescribed different antibiotics that failed to cure a patient’s ear infection because, as the patient later learned, each of them was a different venereal treatment. In none of these cases was anyone fired, because it is tricky to instantly find a housebroken manager, an experienced System Administrator, or a competent doctor without a stateside practice and who is ready to work for peanuts, so most of those fired are like the janitors watching TV, or the woman in the Galley who came to work topless one holiday, or the fingee who fell asleep in the shower after a party, his naked butt cheek covering the drain, flooding the bathroom. After such a termination comes an appeal to the community for volunteers to help the short-staffed janitors, for example, by cleaning in the evenings. Warnings of disciplinary action are addressed to “employees.” Exhortations to chip in are addressed to “the community.”
In 1939, the German vessel Schwabenland spent two weeks off the coast of Queen Maud Land launching long-range seaplanes into the Antarctic skies with a catapult. As the Nazi planes flew over the Antarctic interior in a photosurvey of Eastern Antarctica, each flight carried 500 pounds of swastikaengraved javelins, one of which was dropped every 18 miles as they flew over the surface to mark “Neu-Schwabenland.” They collected five emperor penguins for a zoo and planted a Nazi flag in the snow near the coast. The German press announced their scientific interests in meteorology and oceanography.
The night of the Halloween party, Laz came to my room dressed like a Nazi soldier with a trenchcoat, a helmet, and a Hitleresque moustache.
“I always suspected you of harboring some nationalist warchest,” I ranted. “I suppose your pockets are full of swastika-emblazoned thumbtacks? On which scrap of frozen waste do you plan to scatter them, hmm?” Laz smiled patiently as I continued. “The frost-pocked bank of mud behind 165? A patch of abandoned gloom between the beige ribs of Crary? I have always felt that that thin scratch of a snow-clogged ditch behind the Haz Yard was a ravishing bit of property best claimed by some august patriot.”
“Sir, once again you have leapt to ignorant conclusions—though I suppose that is befitting your education. I am the Fun Nazi! I intend to make sure no one has fun this evening.” He produced some implement to corroborate his claim. A whistle or something. “And you, I see, have labored intensely in the small hours, on the rim of imagination, sparing no expense to rise to the occasion.” I wore a dirty white sheet, a hole cut for my head.
We walked down the Crary Road to the Halloween party at the gym. The firetruck was parked outside. Men were blazing steaming incisions into the snow behind the gym. There was a line of women waiting for the u-barrel. Inside, lit only by spinning and flashing colored stage lights, the gym was dark, and packed.
Hundreds of nearly indistinguishable red or brown parkas clogged the entryway. I stuffed my own into the back of the pile and pushed it to the bottom because I didn’t want it taken by mistake. The next day Highway 1 would have “Lost Coat” signs, listing the contents of the pockets and the nametag on the front. It is usually a matter of mistaken identity, but some coats end up in surplus stores or as souvenirs in someone’s closet in the U.S.
The Rec department was selling cans of Canterbury Draft and Steinlager for $2. I bought a Steinlager and tipped the Rec guy a buck. He would make about $300 in tips tonight, because opportunities to throw money around are few.
Occasionally someone at one of these parties has Pole moonshine or some concoction of peppermint schnapps and JATO from one of the station’s many secreted barrels of pure grain alcohol, thought to have once fueled Jet-Assisted-Take-Offs when overloaded planes needed a boost on short runways. JATO tastes horrible, but since the community fate depends upon planes, there is a pleasure in drinking jet fuel, as an agrarian society eating dirt or a warrior culture drinking blood.
Through breaks in the mostly ‘80s music, an emcee urged people to sign up for the costume competition, which highlighted McMurdo’s vast skua reservoir. Costumes have included a Caterpillar loader, Robert Scott and his ponies, a pee flag (yellow flag planted at camps to consolidate the ugly snow in one area), a black flag (planted to signal danger by crevasses or thin ice), the South Pole, an Aluminum Queen, a u-barrel, a Construction Debris5 bin, the Greenwave supply vessel, and someone dressed in his workclothes who said he was a drunk ironworker. The year the support contract was rebid, two guys came to the Halloween party as blind men with canes. One wore an ASA sign, the other a Raytheon sign, and they were connected by a rope labeled NSF.
“What are you?” a pirate yelled as I maneuvered through the dancing crowd in my white sheet. I handed him a pair of glasses with white paper taped inside the lenses and he put them on.
“Condition 1,” I yelled.
McMurdo officially has three kinds of weather, or Conditions. Condition 3 involves wind speed of less than 48 knots, visibility greater than a quarter mile, or wind chill as cold as -75°F. Condition 3 is ordinary weather in which those so authorized may drive to the runway and those off the clock may enjoy outdoor recreation. Condition 2 involves wind speed as high as 55 knots, visibility of more than 100 feet, or wind chill as cold as -100°F. If Condition 2 is called, even those authorized to drive out of town must first check out with Mac Ops, so that when you disappear someone will know to look for you. Outdoor work is permitted in Condition 2, but not outdoor recreation. Condition 1 involves wind speed of more than 55 knots, visibility of less than 100 feet, or wind chill colder than -100°F. In this weather everyone must stay in whatever building he is in, as winds toss milvans into the road and send loose plywood into the air like a platoon of wooden blades in some unnerving Fantasia. Everyone except the Galley workers sits around drinking coffee, and the managers fret over delays to The Program.
Though the Condition System is theoretically based on observable scientific criteria, there are other unofficial considerations. For example, Condition 1 may be narrowly avoided because declaring it would necessitate having a Search and Rescue Team escort workers home. Since work schedules and other practical matters constrain the official severity of the weather, one must dress carefully and with forethought, no matter the Condition. Sometimes Condition 1 weather afflicts every location but McMurdo, which remains at Condition 2. Sometimes Willy Field and the road to it are in Condition 2, allowing Fleet-Ops to go to work there, but ten feet off the road, where Condition 1 prevails, is officially too dangerous to set foot. Among the legendary weather events is a Condition 1 storm that raged all day and night on Sunday but abruptly eased to Condition 2 at 7:15 on Monday morning. Once a fueling team, stuck on the road between two runways by an overly optimistic official pronouncement of Condition 2, negotiated a declaration of Condition 1 applying to the road they were on. This exonerated them for the delay, but to avoid the costly inconvenience of turning the plane around, everywhere else remained in Condition 2. This was like having tolerable weather everywhere on the gridiron but the storm-battered 50-yard-line.
Wandering around in a gymnasium dark but for disco lights, sipping a tepid beer, dressed as weather, watching administrative coordinators grinding to “Funkytown” and “Love Shack,” I decided I was done for the evening. I retrieved my coat which had floated to the top of the pile, and returned to my room to read Gulliver’s Travels.
The Halloween party, my first supervisor once told me, ends the introductory stage of summer. The couples that form at the party eat breakfast together in the Galley the next day, which announces to town their new mating status. Nearly everyone who’s summering has come in from Christchurch, and the roommate and initial housing issues are settled. The people who latched onto each other at Orientation have joined separate cliques and now they have strained conversations when they see each other in the halls. New people are starting to understand how things work, and returning people, thrust back into the action, the jargon, the politics, and the stories, are starting to remember why they keep coming back. Some claimed they would never return again, but that was last season.
Just after Halloween, the National Science Foundation confiscated a shower curtain. Some women hung it in the bathroom of Hotel California for more privacy while men visited the nearby co-ed sauna. The NSF Station Services Manager seized it because it was unauthorized. After the women in the dorm petitioned NSF and filled out a work order, the shower curtain was reinstalled, and their revoked privacy reinstated.
Such skirmishes are a daily occurrence. They are the natural result of a teetering bureaucracy stuffed into a small town of people improvising in an unusual environment. The “by the book” mandates of management are eroded daily by the slippery traditions of a shifting mass of seasonal contract workers whose innovation—useful for jerry-rigging an engine or concocting some out-of-stock tool—does not dry up at the end of the work day, when residents sneak work tools to build lofts in their rooms, barter goods between departments (without all the messy paperwork), and find nice warm places to grow marijuana. Management’s ceaseless campaign to harness this ingenuity only for the power of work is one of the primary themes of The Program, and incidents that illustrate this theme are popular gossip when they occur.
A few weeks after the shower curtain was confiscated, an NSF Representative went into Daybar looking for someone. Daybar—held in the smoking bar, Southern Exposure—is open three or four times a week in the morning for nightshift workers who, because the sun doesn’t set in the summer, keep the bar as dark as possible. Often the only source of light is the glow from the screen on the cash register and the periodic flame of a cigarette lighter. The NSF Rep came to Southern and stood peering in through the doorway, remaining there longer than the standard time required for entry or exit. The glare from outside pained the Daybar golems, who let out a clamor to shut the goddamn door for chrissake.
She was not subject to the etiquette of a caveful of slouching grumps—she worked for NSF. She became furious and stormed into the bar, demanding the lights on. The next day the National Science Foundation sent an email to staff insisting that the bars must at all times have adequate lighting. Due to “safety concerns.”
These weird little eruptions occur more frequently in the summer, when more big fish are around. Big fish in Antarctica are little fish in Denver and Washington, trying to impress by bringing big pond ways to the tiny backwater pool. So shower curtains are impounded, and sitting in darkness becomes dangerous overnight. But the workers know that they can redecorate and click off the lights the minute the bureaucrat creeps onto her plane. Despite the administrative sophistication that impounding a shower curtain reveals, the lesser inhabitants of the murky puddle resist the bureaucrat’s refinement, not so much from a firmness of character as from a lack of interest in the bureaucrat’s goals, like that of reptiles ignoring gameshow incentives that urge them to reach for the bigger prize.
One night in early November, the summer season in full swing, AGO Jordan gave a lecture called The Reality of Dreams. The lecture packed the Coffeehouse. The rumor of his rendezvous with aliens had brought the curious out of their rooms on a school night. Jordan was tall and had bright eyes, with dainty gestures and a perfectly groomed goatee. He wore a smart scarf around his neck.
The lecture was a fascinating mishmash of Southern Californian nonsense. After he reminded us that we live in a physical reality, he said that humans could transmit radio waves that are imperceptible to the human ear, because we have made transmitters and receivers, but that we have entered a digital age where data are reduced to ones and zeros. He said that dreams are just as real as our measurable external world and that humans transmit and receive streams of digital data via our minds and that these data streams are not measurable with current scientific apparatus, and that we do so at all times over great distances.
This explained that Jordan was not giving women creepy stares; he was actually transmitting messages to them via digital data streams. I wondered if his digital message was creepy too, or if it was more romantic. I wondered if he could hack into people’s brains and look through their eyes or make them eat corn chips when they weren’t hungry.
After his lecture he invited questions. Some people asked questions so they could argue a point here, a point there, get involved, and join in the freedom of intellectual debate with a horny mystic. I had seen this kind of excitement-murdering filibuster before at a lecture by four people with Romulan haircuts and infomercial sweaters who claimed that the human race was an experiment by a race of extra-dimensional Scientists who had given us life but urged us to recognize our true nature and join them on “the next level” where we would drive bio-organic space-time vehicles and live in harmony with our masters. Their cult drove around to colleges in a van trying to recruit people to join their “Astronaut Training Program” which involved computer programming and fasting. Even at that exciting lecture, the niggling pedants squawked about points of logic, drowning out the few in the crowd who tried to find out what the Scientists’ space-time vehicles looked like.
Finally, someone delicately asked Jordan about the aliens:
“Many of us came here to verify something we’ve heard: Did you come here to meet someone? What do you expect to see out on the plateau? Why did you come here?”
Jordan replied: “I’m here to do maintenance on data collection devices for the AGO sites.”
As was polite and proper, no further questions about aliens were asked, and people began to leave.
The new town psychologist was facilitating several community support groups, including a Women’s Group, a Men’s Group, and a Diversity Issues Group6. The psychologist had put flyers around town that read, “Need a place to talk? Support Groups starting soon…” The flyer was a soothing green with puffy bright yellow lettering. In its center smiled a beady-eyed clown made of primary-colored plastic. Its face, hands, and feet were agreeably rounded and smooth, as if to be safely gnawed by toddlers. When the support groups drew low turnout, she sent out an all-station email assuring employees that the group discussions, though sponsored by the company, were confidential.
The psychologist worked for Nicoletti-Flater Associates, a company hired to administer psychological screening for wintering Antarctic personnel. Winter-overs’ employment packets included a handout, “Bypass the Winter Blues” by company co-founder John Nicoletti. The article outlined tips for minimizing “depression, irritability, apathy” and other psychological problems brought on by the disruption of the “body’s circadian rhythms” by prolonged darkness, extreme cold weather, and “trying to co-exist with a small group of people.”
Besides his stated expertise in cold weather psychology, John Nicoletti had been a police psychologist in Denver for over 25 years, and was an expert in crowd control. At a conference on campus riots held at the University of Northern Colorado, Nicoletti told a group of law enforcement and university workers, “The earlier you intervene, the higher the probability you can prevent a riot,” suggesting that a riot is what happens without professional intervention. Nicoletti said, “When you decide to assault, assault with enough intensity that they know you’re serious. You’ve got to look mean and quick and foreboding. This is not a touchy-feely time. You’ve got to come in as one big scary thing.” He also suggested that water cannons are very effective but look bad on videotape. “We have to assume that rioting will occur,” he said, “—that’s where we have to come from, so then we’re prepared.”
The McMurdo psychologist came up to the Waste Barn one day to speak with the Waste Department about Stress Management. It was the end of a long week with heavy trash flow from Pole. We sat in the breakshack in our dirty Carhartts that had been ripped on metal from climbing in the CD flatracks, our gloves smelling of Food Waste, our sleeves sticky with beer from sorting Glass.
She described to us tunnel vision—when most of the world turns black and closes in on you—and told us that stress alone can give a person tunnel vision, and it can happen in an instant.
An instant? I fretted. I suddenly remembered all the clanking and crashing and rattling that I had grown accustomed to. I thought of how the details of each day are obscured by familiar patterns. I worried that all of life’s sleepwalking moments would one day simultaneously demand accounting. The psychologist was an expert. I began to pay close attention. I did not want to suddenly get tunnel vision.
The psychologist was upbeat. Ready to make a million friends. She told us that we could talk to her in her office in the library anytime, and that she was hired to help the community and thus would have nothing to do with employees’ winter psychological evaluations. She had powers of confidentiality. She told us that things were not easy here in this environment. But there are things you could do to recognize and relieve stress.
I was gripped as if by a thriller. The psychologist appeared to recognize how weird were all the little moments, even when just trying to relax. For example, each day before work I would drag myself out of bed in time for a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the 155 smoking lounge beside the barbershop. The stale chamber was outfitted only with couches, ashtrays, and a television. Few talked in the smoking lounge, because when we heard people talking they sounded stupid, saying things to each other like they were talking only to each other, even though the rest of us could hear them too. So we smoked and watched television, usually in silence. One day in particular I remember about a dozen of us, all haggard men in torn and filthy polar clothing, solemnly chain-smoking in the dark until the start of our shifts, silently watching a gardening show. It was not that anyone wanted to watch the gardening show, but that’s what was on. The channel had most likely been selected an hour before by an early riser. Those who filed in later had watched whatever he was watching. Perhaps Bonanza. But once the early riser had left and Bonanza was over, each person who arrived believed the current channel had been selected by someone in the room, or possibly by everyone in the room. There was a sense that the channel was intended. Very rarely, someone would enter the filthy den and say, after a few minutes of watching The Flintstones, “What the fuck is this? Anyone watching this shit?” We were all watching it, but everyone shook their heads. The channel-changer would be fortunate if there was a ball game on another channel, which would be greeted by a murmur of approval. But if the other channels were no better, like a soap opera or the news, then sometimes the channel-changer would murmur, “Shit, nothing on…” but now he was in a pinch. In the warm ashtray smell of the lounge, he was to blame for whatever stupid show we watched, even if he returned to the original channel.
I listened to the psychologist carefully. As a backstage participant in the field of behavior modification, perhaps she would explain the indistinct variable ratio schedule of approval and negative reinforcement that rained down in daily emails. Maybe she would translate in which cases the artificial and material reinforcers in our contracts were authentic and in which cases they were just part of the shtick, to be later revoked. The psychologist might even reveal the Solomon’s wisdom behind it all, and a design for frontier social control, thoughtful and well-executed, would clearly emerge from the smeared napkin-plan of The Program. I was on the edge of my seat.
The psychologist suggested that we go to bed early, quit drinking coffee, and quit smoking.
On Thanksgiving7 weekend we had two days off instead of one. The Galley made an extravagant meal and people dressed in their finest. Many men bring down one suit and tie for these occasions, and women often pack at least one dress. On the tables were cards sent by kind people, such as the members of the Covenant Congregational Church in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, who wrote: “…we hope the important research you are accomplishing more than makes up for all the hardships you encounter.”
Speed, an Equipment Operator from Pole, stuck in McMurdo by weather after a winter at Pole, had met AGO Jordan, and invited him to eat with us.
When someone asked Jordan what he did at home, he said he was studying lightning and then, in order to describe the fundamentals of his research, went into a detailed description of how a radio works.
I was focused on the cheese and salmon on my plate, and was pondering scenes from the previous evening in my room where I insisted on playing Brujeria all night, and maybe it was the dark metal vibe that led the editor of the NSF-sponsored Antarctic Sun to demand that Ben stab him in the arm with a fork. Ben made a practice stab on the cutting board, leaving four deep gouges from the prongs. Ben said, “You probably won’t be able to use your hand afterward,” but the editor didn’t care. He was drunk. We were all drunk. It was a two-day weekend. I wouldn’t allow the transaction in my room because I knew Ben would do it, just as he had once attacked me with a vacuum cleaner outside in the snow, and there was no reason for the editor to lose a hand if I could halt the game of chicken with a spontaneous policy prohibiting blood on the carpet, though I would have loved to see it.
I lost track of what Jordan was saying about radios and lightning, but I appreciated his thoroughness, and he was sincerely curious about local operations. We told him about the ice pier in Winter Quarters Bay that is formed like a cake with alternating layers of ice and dirt and attached with cables to the shore. We told him about the year the ice pier had outworn its useful life, and the Coast Guard was charged with towing it out to sea, but it broke into fragments that they surrounded in dinghies, scratching their heads in the middle of the bay, and how the replacement ice pier split in half last summer and had to be stitched together with cables. We told him how the hill above town is scraped by dozers to collect dirt for spreading on the icy roads, and how buried beneath the town’s surface are deposits of scrapped wood, metal cables and barrels and charred debris from the trashburnings at Fortress Rocks, and how the entire town is saturated with fuel, and how the Navy in the winter used to push barrels of bad fuel onto the ice where they would disappear into the bay come the summer thaw. We told him that Laz’s ass was likewise a repository for piss, but Laz argued that he was good for no more than two liters.
An NSF Rep was walking around to the tables serving pumpkin pie. The time-honored tradition of a head honcho adapting a servile role on a holiday was performed gracefully, and people laughed nervously and snapped their fingers for more pie, which he obeyed amidst a chorus of mitigating thank-yous.
The week after Thanksgiving, Jordan began approaching lunch tables and telling people that aliens would arrive at noon on Thursday, November 30. The aliens would come down from the sky to meet Jordan in the open lot between Medical and 155.
A local prankster made signs showing the spaceship from the movie Independence Day with the caption “We Are Coming.” Someone else made pictures of the top of nearby Ob Hill and various landmarks in town exploding from laser blasts. These were posted on the I-Drive8, communal space for photos on the local network.
On Thursday, November 30th, a co-worker and I were banding flatracks all morning at Fortress Rocks. Absorbed by the task, we lost track of time and came down late to lunch.
As we hung our coats in Highway 1, people were filing in from outside and a male and female NSF Representative were pacing the hallway. She said, “What should we do?” He said, “Well, I know what I’m going to do…” and he began ripping down the “We Are Coming” posters while his colleague stood in the hallway menacing those who toted alien paraphernalia. “What are you doing with that?” she asked a woman who walked by with an alien mask in her hand.
At noon Jordan had been outside waiting for the aliens. 50 people that Jordan had met at the lunchtables came to meet him. They were wearing alien masks and glittery bobbing antennae from the Rec Office costume closet. They had showed up to see what would happen, and stood in a group nearby, watching as Jordan wandered the dusty lot looking to the sky.
The NSF Representatives and some other higher-ups had heard about the gathering crowd and showed up to keep things in line, one of them taking video. They surrounded Jordan. Then someone wearing an alien mask raced up on a four-wheeled Polaris, did a few circles in the lot while the crowd of aliens laughed and cheered, and sped off. Recovering from their temporary confusion, the bigwigs corralled Jordan into Medical.
Later that evening Jordan was still in Medical; the word “lockdown” was used. He was manifested immediately and flown out the next day. A memo to the Commander of Operation Deep Freeze (CODF) described the evacuation of Jordan: “…a civilian patient began exhibiting erratic behavior. He described events about ‘aliens’ coming to McMurdo. He had been previously examined in Christchurch by a psychiatrist and deemed not acutely psychotic. However, due to his increasingly bizarre behavior, it was decided to transport him back to CONUS.”
The abduction was hot on the grapevine and would certainly be talked about for years.
That Saturday, after work, lounging with the Fuelies on some cargo in the sun, an administrator told us she had seen the Photoshopped pictures of destruction on the I-Drive and was scared that Jordan was going to blow up the town. Before noon on Thursday, while Jordan was waiting for the aliens, she had driven her work truck down to Scott’s Hut to avoid the explosions.
“Are you joking?” I asked.
“I’m not joking,” she said severely. “At home I’m a grade school teacher. We’re trained to pay attention to these things.”
