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CHAPTER THREE

LITTLE AMERICA

We are anticipating that our expectations will become yours as well.

—Welcome to Raytheon memo

Someone has been trying to influence my mind.

—True/False winter-over psych eval

FROM THE FIELD CAMP come many of the greatest Antarctic stories. Here early explorers scrubbed their eyes with cocaine to ease the pain of snowblindness and then went to bed with bellies full of pony meat. At the field camp, paper-thin tents shudder beneath katabatic blasts of freezing wind, stoves sputter a stingy flame, and a few trudging specks haul shovels through a cold world where extra food and equipment cannot be bought at any price. The compilation of infinite suffering of those so isolated from society is an entrancing lesson that seems never to wear thin. The field camp—remote, minimal, and inconvenient—is the underlying image on which other Antarctic images are built.

Fingees arrive ready to work at remote field camps. When they instead find themselves beneath 155 chipping away at a glacier of frozen urine¹ deposited by staggering Naval ancestors, or shoveling on a snowy hillside looking for a load of buried pipe lost in the shuffling of expendable supervisors, that’s when they realize that they have been tricked, and they begin to pine for the rugged field camp, where they can show what they are made of. Volunteering for what they imagine to be a daunting task, eager fingees are soon told by the old warhorses to get in line.

Field camps are desirable destinations. Given the chance, most people would work in the wind and cold surrounded by glaciers and nunataks at Lake Fryxell rather than work in the wind and cold surrounded by ditches and buildings at McMurdo Station. The stakes are as high as they have always been, but risk of death in the frozen wilderness has been reduced by the airplane, the radio, the emergency-homing beacon, the GPS unit, the satellite-tracking Orbcomm device, and improvements in clothing. Field camps have stereos and laptops. Abundant field camp provisions include New Zealand white cheddar, smoked meats, and lots of chocolate. The McMurdo field support Food Room dispenses dozens of beaten copies of The Joy of Cooking. Field camps are established only during the summer, and few scientists or employees stay at a field camp for more than a few weeks at a time. But field camps lack running water and may be cut off from communication by solar flares, so they provide the caliber of inconvenience that makes for an attractive struggle against nature, where mortality is as apparent as the tent and the radio. Nonetheless, in modern USAP history, most Antarctic fatalities have been related to transport or industry.

Fatalities are rare now, but in the bloodiest years, the first 30 years or so after World War II, an NSF safety report records that only three deaths were related to field activities: a scientist at Byrd Station disappeared, a research diver died from an accident beneath the ice, and a man died of a fall at Asgard Range. The other 40 or so American deaths during that period were more run-of-the-mill. Most were from plane or helicopter crashes, as when an aircraft cartwheeled during landing in 1956, or when, as recorded in an NSF report, an “aircraft landed in poor visibility conditions, and a few seconds later exploded.” Many deaths were from tractors falling through the sea ice, and one went into a crevasse. People have been killed offloading ships and planes, crushed in loaders and trucks, scorched by an exploding fuel drum, and electrocuted in a ship’s engine room.

But it is not risk in the face of industrial mishap that brings to the continent legions of people who wear Teva sandals over wool socks. When I asked people why they first came to Antarctica, they said they wanted to climb mountains, ski glaciers, hike, and see wildlife. At first I was shocked, not by the particular answers, but by their unanimity. Surrounded by people talking about climbing, skiing, paragliding, kayaking, or rafting, I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing down here.

The main draw for many who go to Antarctica is a love of nature.² I find nature creepy and disturbing. No matter how staggering the horizon, wilderness only reminds me that I must eventually return to the colony. The great outdoors is at best a sideshow curiosity, and at worst an unreliable informant. For example, working at a fish cannery in the Aleutian Islands, I admired the austere hills and the white bulbs of cloud that could grow above them in an instant, as if the hills had ideas, but the natural image seemed a treacherous deceit. I preferred those more honest times inside the cannery at a meaningless task among the decaying machines and the vast architecture of technology. I preferred the aggressive hiss of a highpressure hose echoing through a yellow-lighted room of stainless steel bins, with drains thoughtfully placed for the chemicals and the blood. I preferred those times when the tranquilizer of cosmic perspective could not reach me.

In contrast to the sobs of praise that accompany any barren stretch of dead backdrop, McMurdo Station is often called ugly by those who came down for sport. On his way to Pole from McMurdo by ski, Eric Philips, a member of the “Icetrek” expedition, stopped at Willy Field to talk with some grunts. They eventually went back into their job-shack, and Philips, who had a corporate sponsor, a huge insurance policy, and a satellite phone, wrote of them, “I pitied their restriction, bound to the confines of the Mactown environs by their work, by safety regulations, and by a general satisfaction with their experience of a civilised Antarctic wilderness. I was glad to see the door shut.”

The resilience of mankind in Antarctica is inexorable; even the constant bleating of those who whine for permanent silence and infinite pristineness dissipates into an insignificant Buddhist drone beneath the soothing rumble of fleets of machines with pulsing hydraulics.

McMurdo is beautiful. A construction site exposed long enough to a rattling generator grows a building. Each growling machine drags a fumbled leash of diesel exhaust. A line-up of washing machines waits to be executed at the metal baler. In a janitor’s closet in 155 a ladder leads to the attic, where a door opens into the sky. In the winter darkness, falling puffs of snow are bathed in the luminescent blue of a welding torch. A contingent of cylindrical acetylene tanks watches over a pile of inventoried triangles. In McMurdo one can warm up from the cold by a generous furnace, and fuck to the sound of helicopters.

A week into December I went out to the ice shelf with the women of the Remediation crew to dig garbage out of the ice, a rare trip for me away from station. The sea ice beneath us was over 100 feet thick. Beneath it was the Ross Sea. The Ross Ice Shelf continued for hundreds of miles to the south, a lot of nothing. We scratched and pried at the surface of the hard blue ice to extract wire, conduit, food, machine parts, and other debris near Pegasus Airfield, named for a plane that crashed in a blizzard in 1970. The plane remains buried in snow and ice, and is a popular landmark for NSF to show to DVs (Distinguished Visitors). The unsightly debris we were to remove was too near the plane.

Today it wasn’t too cold or windy. The sunlit views of Black Island, White Island, and the Transantarctics were clear. From this distance McMurdo was an insignificant drab smudge swallowed by smoking Erebus, its silent overseeing authority. Daily life in the hive washed over me with a shock of pointlessness. I need to start paying attention, I thought. Shit, I need to call my mom more often. I should really sit down with my friends and tell each of them what they mean to me and why. My God, I’m going to die. I need to stop smoking. Like the psychologist says. I should jog or ride the Exercycle, and drink green tea, with antioxidants.

As I blasted away at the ice shelf with a diesel jackhammer to retrieve a 40-year-old fuel barrel left by the Navy, I imagined laughing with co-workers at lunch over jokes about cows or leprechauns rather than jokes about asses full of piss. I imagined in the evenings writing to schoolchildren in the United States, describing to them the raw beauty of the Antarctic and the quirky ways of the penguin rather than the toxic hill by the ice pier and the fierce hunger of the skua. “Your youthful enthusiasms drive me to such mirth,” I practiced, as I reexamined my strategy for breaking from the ice what had at first appeared to be a small broken mop handle, but had now revealed itself through my successes to be a large cabinet of some kind, encrusted with turds. The crashed airplane slumped nearby like a slain bull. This irreverent debris cluttered the tragedy.

When I shut off the jackhammer, only a few sounds remained. My coworkers chipped at the ice in crisp intervals with ice-axes that sparked tiny explosions of cold shrapnel. The Spryte idled nearby, gargling fuel. The wind spoke as cautiously as unseen vermin. Each sound was like a distinct boulder in a river of silence. This turbulent silence, the sprawling ice, and the occasional sharp gusts of wind warn that eventually you will make a mistake. The threat is babbled endlessly, as if Antarctica were a lunatic.

At four o’clock we loaded the picks and shovels onto the sleds, refueled the jackhammer, parked and plugged the Spryte at one of the job shacks, and tied down at a Pegasus cargo line the triwall we’d been filling with debris. Then, jerry cans secure on the back of the skidoos and masks snug, we bounced the 18 miles back to town over the ice shelf, weaving fast through the trenches and divots made in the snow by all the heavy equipment traffic. Small, bright canvas flags of orange, green, and red fluttered on the bamboo poles marking the route. Though the poles were five or six feet long, some of them had been there so long that the ceaseless accumulation of snow on the ice shelf had left only their tops as nubs, the tattered flags brushing the snow in the wind like the foliage of trees shrinking back into the ground.

This first week of December had been warm, so it had snowed constantly, and so the planes stopped arriving. When the week of bad weather broke and the temperature dropped, flights resumed immediately. The good weather had allowed us to come out and hack garbage from the ice. The good weather had taken my roommate away to the plateau, and had promised to bring the Hot GA back to town from Siple Dome camp, where she had been for over a week.³ The Hot GA was comfortable in dirty Carhartt overalls, sunglasses hanging around her neck, her face slightly burned and her lips perpetually chapped from shoveling snow beneath the ozoneless sky, her leather work gloves with the little steer logo marked as hers by the rounded scrawl of her name written on the back with a Sharpie, and her unruly blond hair plotting a disorganized escape from the knit cap that threatened to fall over her eyes. Since my roommate had been sent out to the plateau to break his arms in the service of science, my room would now be a good place for the Hot GA and me to drink wine and have sex in the chair.

The Hot GA, whom I had met recently, was an accomplished white-water kayaker.

Despite Pope Leo XIII’s urgent warnings in 1884 that Freemasonry “generates bad fruits mixed with great bitterness,” Freemasonry remains a time-honored Antarctic tradition. I only discovered the creeping Masonic influence when one evening the Freemasons held a meeting in the Coffeehouse. The Coffeehouse is a Jamesway, a type of portable halfcylinder of wood and metal made famous during the Korean War. Adorning the curving wood-paneled walls are some old wooden skis and a Nansen sled that Señor X one season rescued from a Construction Debris flatrack. The Coffeehouse is warm and has a big plastic tree and various smaller fake houseplants. At square formica-topped tables people knit, play chess, and read Trivial Pursuit cards to each other.

I sat near the Freemasons with a book titled Secret Societies on the table in plain view, to be sporting. In the Outer Rituals of the Third Degree, Masons commonly keep a Junior Apprentice at the north wall to ward off any “Eavesdroppers.” If one is caught, he is to be “plac’d under the eaves of the Houses (in rainy Weather) till the Water runs in at his Shoulders and out at his shoes.” Perhaps because it is too cold to rain in McMurdo, the Masons there had retired this hallowed code; I sat nearby, curious and unmolested.

The ringleader of the Masonic Secret Society spoke of a bust of Richard Byrd that had been installed early in the USAP and had originally displayed a Masonic plaque, which someone removed.

“When was the bust put up?” asked one curious Mason.

“Well, we don’t really know,” said the leader.

“When was the plaque taken off?”

“Well, we don’t know that either.”

“Who took it off?”

“Well, we can only assume that NSF doesn’t want to be affiliated with a philanthropic organization and so removed it.”

The Masons didn’t know anything, but they were ready for action, about par for Antarctic Freemasonry, which goes back to at least Scott’s Discovery Expedition. Both Scott and Shackleton were Freemasons. Neither of them knew how to ski, and Shackleton had never pitched a tent before their first expedition. Before the Discovery left port in 1901, a pre-voyage ceremony aboard the vessel festered with Freemasons. King Edward VII, a notable figure in the occult fellowship, inspected the national investment and chuckled attaboys to Scott, who had been recently promoted at the recommendation of a Vice-Admiral who happened to be a Masonic Grand Master.

The idea was that loyal fraternity and Royal Navy discipline—rather than cold-weather experience—would pull the gallant Brits through polar setbacks such as scurvy, which killed sailors by the drove and was described by a man on one of Cook’s southern voyages thus: “I pined away to a weak, helpless condition, with my teeth all loose, and my upper and lower gums swelled and clotted together like a jelly, and they bled to that degree, that I was obliged to lie with my mouth hanging over the side of my hammock, to let the blood run out, and to keep it from clotting so as to cloak me…” The sponsor of the Discovery expedition, Sir Clements Markham, wrote in 1875, “a contented state of mind is the best guard against scurvy.” Robert Scott also felt that scurvy was to be prevented by running a tight ship and maintaining a positive attitude, and that avoiding scurvy’s dementia, swollen limbs, loose teeth, putrid gums, and stringy green urine was largely a matter of character. Shackleton developed the disease on the way to the Pole, and thereafter Scott hated him, grumbling that Shackleton had spoiled their expedition.

Unbeknownst to Scott and Markham, in the 1600s Britain’s East India Company had administered to sailors a spoonful of lemon juice a day to ward off scurvy, and in 1753 the Royal Navy surgeon Lind had proven that scurvy, now attributed to Vitamin C deficiency, could be prevented and cured with oranges and lemons. Because of Lind’s studies, which were later successfully applied by Captain Cook, in 1795 the Royal Navy began supplying vessels with lemon juice, and scurvy became, after a few decades, a medical rarity. The respite lasted until lemons were replaced with limes, which were cheaper, but lower in Vitamin C, so that scurvy once again began decimating ships’ crews. Lime juice was dropped as ineffective. With detail-oriented efficiency, the blackened and stinking flesh of scurvy had been managed back into existence, the cure forgotten by the time Scott and company went on their polar quest.

As the Masons in the Coffeehouse had discovered, American explorer Admiral Richard Byrd was also a Freemason. In 1929 Byrd led the first expedition to fly over the South Pole, thereby proving Antarctica’s penetrability by plane and officially ending the dog-and-pony show of the Heroic Age of exploration. Byrd was particularly worried about the possibility of dissension infecting his winter-over crew, and had once written, “Of the thousand or more men who lost their lives in the attempt to conquer the Arctic, many of the deaths were caused by disloyalty or mutiny.” Only 11 of the 42 men living at the remote polar base were Masons like him, so in the middle of winter he established his secret Loyal Legion. He furtively approached each recruit, said that he had a proposal the recruit must swear never to reveal, then subjected the recruit to a fivepage screed of makeshift Masonic inducements: “. . . join with me in trying to prevent the spirit of loyalty of the expedition from being lowered by disloyal, treacherous or mutinous conduct on the part of any disgruntled members,” and “Until you agree and become a member of this fraternity it will be nameless, for its name must not be known by anyone but its members.” Then Byrd administered an oath in which the initiate promised never to divulge the existence of the Loyal Legion, always to follow Byrd’s command, and to “strive just as faithfully after the expedition ends to maintain its spirit of loyalty and… oppose any traitors to it then, as now.” In return, Byrd swore his own loyalty to the initiate, and pledged, “in evoking through you the spirit of the expedition to help save it from malcontents, agitators or traitors, that I will at the same time do whatever is practicable to save these men from themselves and from ruining their own lives.” Byrd spun his covert network of informants as a support group for those not invited to join—sure to boost camaraderie in a small crew isolated for the winter in Antarctica.

Like other famous Antarctic Masons, Byrd felt that public glory was the natural result of dispensing with the petty details. Though the Smithsonian Institute gave Byrd an award for aeronautics, the renowned aviator was said by one of his pilots to be little more than a distinguished passenger with questionable navigation skills. The American Humane Society commended Byrd for his treatment of the dogs he took to Antarctica, unaware that Byrd had decided not to fly dog food to a sledging party, who consequently built an execution wall of snow against which to shoot some of the huskies to butcher them as food for the others. Earlier in his career, Byrd had received a ticker-tape parade in New York City because he told the public he flew over the North Pole. The pilot who accompanied Byrd on the flight later revealed that they did not actually fly over the North Pole, but rather disappeared over the horizon, beyond range of the nearest base, and flew in circles for 14 hours before returning.⁴

Byrd considered himself to be in the “hero business.” To help nudge the public in the right direction, he manicured the image of his expedition by censoring radio messages, and though he allowed a journalist on his first Antarctic expedition, he insisted that no story be released without his approval. He made the crew turn over all their photos and negatives to him so that his account of the expedition would be the primary one. (On one of Byrd’s later expeditions, a similar order came down, but from President Roosevelt, requiring of each person “the surrender of all journals, diaries, memoranda, remarks, writings, charts, drawings, sketches, paintings, photographs, films, plates, as well as all specimens of every kind.”) On the way back from Antarctica, when the Hearst papers offered Smith, one of the crew, $15,000 for his story of the expedition, Smith’s diary was stolen from his locker. Byrd ordered the ship searched, and swore to Smith that he didn’t know who took the diary, but one of the crew later confessed to Smith that he had stolen it on Byrd’s orders.

Awed by his fantastic public image, some suggested naming the newly discovered ninth planet “Byrd.”⁵ Byrd’s Antarctic expeditions were sponsored with lard from Crisco and money from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Edsel Ford. After flying over the South Pole, Byrd returned to a hero’s welcome in the U.S., and began raising money to pay off the debts on his expedition. Charlie Bob, a friend who had given Byrd a good sum of money for the expedition, was indicted for fraud associated with his mining company and sued Byrd to get some of the money back, after which Byrd changed the names of Antarctic mountains that he had originally named for the shady sponsor. In McMurdo, behind the Chalet, overlooking the sea ice and the Royal Society Range, a bronze bust of Admiral Byrd donated by the National Geographic Society presides on a pedestal of black Norwegian marble. It bears no Masonic plaque.

Byrd named his first Antarctic base Little America. He had captured penguins on his expedition, but most of them died on the return voyage from drinking cleaning fluid.

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