Читать книгу Big Dead Place - Nicholas Johnson - Страница 9

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

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

1. The detention or loss of the ship in pack ice.

2. Catastrophes affecting individual sledge parties.

a. The starvation of an inland party.

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

3. Polar madness generally.”—Raymond Priestly

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

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

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