Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  How could both those men cross a place full of crevasses without incident? Linda had followed an “established route,” Brian said—Hillary’s route. Crary’s information had been bought by American taxpayers and published. It was available and I was looking at it. Had Linda’s planners ignored it? What good was institutional knowledge if nobody paid attention to it?

  Crary drew several maps projecting ice shelf characteristics into the central regions he had never traveled—projections of ice thickness, elevations, snow pack, and others. The one that caught my eye showed a region of soft snow right where the line on the colorful show-and-tell map went. What’s that like … under that line? How will heavy tractors handle soft snow?

  I set Crary’s work aside. The more I looked into it, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. That intimidated me, for Linda was never far from my mind.

  Turning back to Linda herself, I asked around the office; who was there then, who remembered what? The McMurdo station manager at the time advised the operations director against going at all. The ops director dismissed his warnings, bowing instead to the NSF representative’s interest to proceed. The NSF rep at the time occupied the “big chair” in McMurdo. He was the godlike boss of all. I never learned what was on his mind. But the ops director’s acquiescence told of the contractor’s need to please the client. That’s dangerous.

  After Linda, the ops director remarked to the station manager, “You never said ‘I told you so.’” The manager replied, “I told you the first time.”

  Had there been too much project inertia? Who actually said “go”?

  John Evans occupied another cubicle on the basement floor we shared. His desk lay over the horizon from mine.

  “Yes?” he said, cheerfully, when I approached his desk. John was a cleanshaven, bright-blue-eyed, and fair-haired man perhaps ten years my senior. A rugged mountaineer, he’d made the first ascent of Mount Vinson, the highest mountain in Antarctica.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “I remember you. How can I help you?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about the South Pole Traverse project.”

  We decided to talk outside, away from the nearby cubicles and folks we might disturb. In the parking lot, we enjoyed deep breaths of fresh air. The Rocky Mountain’s Front Range lay snow-covered on our western horizon. It looked strikingly similar to the Royal Society Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, across the Sound from McMurdo Station.

  I began, “John, I reckon you know the NSF is starting the South Pole Traverse business back up. The job of running that project is not awarded yet. That’s why I’m here this week … to scope it out. I’ve spent the week reading through your legacy reports. Great stuff.”

  “Well, I thank you for that—”

  “I mean it. So much so that I’m prompted to ask why you don’t go for that job? Here’s a chance to complete it, maybe. You’re a natural. And if you are going for it, I’d like to work for you to make it happen.”

  “Oh. Well thank you again. That’s very kind of you. But no … I’m quite happy with what I’m doing now.” John organized and landed field parties by boat in and around the Antarctic Peninsula, and the many islands in the region.

  “Then I have to ask … is there anything at all about this project, something you learned from the SPIT work, something about the organization that warns you off the traverse project? Anything you might care to share with me?”

  “Nothing except the usual. Politics and personalities. It’s a grand project. It can and should be done. But I can think of nothing to warn you off. If NSF is going to take the next step … make certain the money is there. “

  “Shoals of Intractable Funding?” I offered.

  “Precisely,” he laughed. “And if you take the job, I wish you the best of luck. Feel free to talk to me at any time. I’ll be happy to help you.”

  We walked back into the office where I made my way through the geometric maze to my desk. I dialed a number in Washington, D.C. There was the matter of my original concern. It was a question of time.

  “Dave Bresnahan, this is John Wright. I’m calling from the Denver office. And I’d like to talk about the traverse project. Is this a good time?”

  “I’ve been expecting your call.” Dave was the operations and logistics officer for the U.S. Antarctic Program. He was NSF’s sponsor for the project.

  “Dave, I’ve been here a week going over reports and gauging the support I might get. I’m happy to find high quality in Evans’s legacy documents—”

  “You should see the smile on my face to hear you say that, John.”

  Dave might have sat in a cubicle like mine, in some endlessly bigger government office, but he sounded comfortable. Perhaps he sat at a deluxe executive desk in its own room. With a door. When the SPIT project lost its funding, Dave had instructed Evans to leave a record that the next person could start right in on. “Very happy indeed to hear your opinion. We had no idea how long it’d be, or even if we’d start up again. And if there’s ever another hiatus in the project, I’ll want you to leave the same kind of trail.”

  “If I take the job, I will. But we need a reckoning about that. This is not a three-year job. I read the draft proposals while I was at Pole. And I wrote back that it was a five-year job at a sane pace, a four-year job with luck. Now that I’m in the office, I find the project is slated for three years. We don’t know the terrain, and we do not know what kind of tractors or sleds will work on it. Three years assumes we know everything at the outset, and that ain’t so.”

  Dave’s voice became less familiar, less friendly. “We’re going to fund the project incrementally. We’ll take stock of lessons learned each season and fund the next step. And we’ll hope to get the concept proved in three years.”

  Dave had advanced the cause in little steps for more than one decade. And he was passionate about the project. But three years was not entirely a matter of reckless bravado; it was a matter of what he could sell. A longer project would not have sold in the upper echelons at NSF. The contractor wrote what Dave told them to. As for me, the nature of my employment through the support contractor would not be full time, rather individual contract employment from one six-month period to the next. The incremental project funding Dave described offered no promise for the project duration.

  “Three years is too fast,” I declared.

  “You let me worry about that,” he said. “You are the right man for the job. Call any time, with any concern you may have. And keep me informed.”

  “If I take the job, I will.” We hung up.

  Even with the promise of support from NSF’s sponsor, pay-go was vulnerable to a three-year pass-fail. On the flip side, the support contractor’s cost-plus contract held no incentive for project success, only for its duration and the total dollars spent on it. Where were my allies? I’d just hung up the phone with one.

  The footpath winding around the Denver office park, where the contractor’s huge building was only one of many, followed a drainage stream that babbled over artfully placed rocks in a manicured streambed. The sun overhead warmed the crisp, spring air. I strolled alone.

  A years-old conversation with a mechanic in the McMurdo shop came to mind. My traverse partner and I had managed a field fix on our fifteen-ton Delta truck on the frozen waters of McMurdo Sound. With radio support from the shop, we completed our delivery to Marble Point, and we drove our vehicles back to town.

  There I met the mechanic foreman in the eight-bay cinderblock “Heavy Shop.” Folks spoke of him with awe, for he’d been in the program a long time and had worked at remote outposts on the continent. He looked like their stories painted him: a shaggy-bearded, grease-stained Harley-Davidson biker, a half a dozen years older than me. He’d chew me out, so I approached him apologizing for our fix out on the sea ice. I’d blown a hydraulic steering hose.

  He treated me kindly instead. “Yeah,” he grinned. “But you brought it back! That means one of us didn’t have to go out and get it!” />
  “Well, I … I appreciate that. I like this traverse business.” That caught a twinkle in his eye. Emboldened, I asked him casually, “What do you think of a traverse to South Pole? Think it can be done?”

  “I ain’t going unless I can take a shower,” he said gruffly, more like the tone I expected in the first place.

  “What are you talking about, shower?”

  “I’ve been traversing with those French at Dumont D’Urville. We dug up an airplane out there. Man, they never took showers! You got to have a shower, or you can’t live with yourself!” He was speaking of places and times in Antarctica I’d never heard of.

  “Showers, huh?” I walked away. On the local traverses, we had showers at both ends of the line: at Marble Point and at McMurdo.

  That conversation was six years old. Only last week Brian had explained this same mechanic was the one who followed Linda in Pam, the one who probed his way to the edge of the crevasse and first looked down.

  The program later razed the mechanic’s home at Williams Field, ten miles out on the Ice Shelf from McMurdo. I did the blasting on that job. Not liking life in McMurdo the next year, the mechanic found work on an island in the South Pacific. I pictured him in baggy shorts and a t-shirt, standing idly on a rusty World War II dock, staring deeply into the water, working out some intricate mechanic’s dilemma.

  “Never turn your back on anything—or anyone—in that place,” Brian had told me. Yet even with a reasonable promise of support, most of the job was up to me and the sweeping scope of it all was intimidating. But as I walked along the footpath I began to understand the job as a series of sequential critical steps that could only be taken one step at a time. Each step headed toward the goal, but each step may or may not succeed and so the ending was uncertain. Now, though, seen in increments, the job became more comprehendible. I’d take the job and see if we could even win the first step: crossing the Shear Zone. The rest of it could wait.

  My walk was over.

  “Anybody know how I can get in touch with Russ Magsig?” I asked around the office.

  Russ did not keep a computer, did not have an e-mail address, and rarely answered his phone. Nobody really knew if he had a phone. But he was the one man I knew who had been in the Shear Zone, and who might be willing to go back.

  Sooner or later a phone number appeared on my desk. I called it. “Hello, Russ? This is John Wright … I doubt if you remember me—”

  “Yes,” said his familiar voice. “You used to do the blasting and the Marble Point runs. What’s up?”

  “Russ, I promise there will be showers …”

  3 Frontier Attitude

  If we hurt one person … if we killed one person … if we had anything like another Linda … there would be no hiatus for this project. We were the South Pole Traverse Proof-of-Concept Project (emphasis mine). We asked, was the traverse even feasible? Could we pioneer a route to South Pole and run it safely? Who was “we”?

  NSF had recently hired a defense contractor to run the support job for its U.S. Antarctic Program. At NSF’s urging, the new contractor hired me to pull off the traverse project. The traverse was a dangerous undertaking. How would the new contractor help me do it safely? I got an inkling in the tunnel.

  Since the millennial year of 2000, everybody who got off the plane at South Pole wanted to see the tunnel. Neutrino hunter Bob Stokstad and his crew of astronomers, who’d spent a summer at Pole looking for those subatomic particles from outer space, saw to that.

  Our crews exchanged tours one Sunday: Bob’s telescope for our tunnel. Bob rotated back to McMurdo, debriefed his science project, and spread the word that the tunnel was the best tour going at South Pole. When U.S. representatives and distinguished visitors stepped off the LC-130 Hercules at Pole, they all wanted to see the tunnel. Never mind the new station going up on stilts, standing boldly against the skyline. The tunnel below them, that thing they could not see, was what they wanted to see the most. The chief operating officer (COO) for the new support contractor was no different. Station manager Katy Jensen told me so.

  Katy was sharp. At thirty-three, the new contractor identified her as a “star” for future career interest. And she was well liked by everyone at South Pole. With her swimmer’s broad shoulders, and long, straight dark hair, she was attractive. Folks vied to win smiles from Katy. She freely gave them. Her laugh had the quality of a baritone bell, clear, from somewhere deep inside her, a sound that turned your head. She’d accompany the COO.

  I looked forward to showing off the nearly completed tunnel. This was the last year of the four-year tunnel project, and the second year for the new contractor: 2001–2002. The COO was young, clean-cut, and energetic, keenly interested in everything it took to make the Antarctic program work. He’d worked a shift with the shovel gang in McMurdo. You could see gears whizzing behind his bright blue eyes when he engaged you.

  I had to check on the night shift anyway. “Tell him it’s cold. You know, parka, gloves, bunny-boots.”

  The main tunnel was long enough to be impressive. We walked on and on in the darkness, dimly lit by my wandering cap-lamp and a string of light bulbs lining the left side of the tunnel. For the sameness of it all in the numbing cold, it seemed like we got nowhere. But we stopped at the perfect hole-through.

  “Look behind us as far as you can see.” My cap-lamp beam swept sideways over the COO’s head. “Now turn and look the way we’re headed.” Either direction, points of light receded like an infinity of opposing mirrors.

  “Think of starting your tunnel way out there, beyond the last light you can see. Think of another one starting behind you. Now imagine the two tunnels approaching each other in the dark. They have to meet squarely, face-to-face …” My mittened fists demonstrated, meeting knuckle-to-knuckle. “… on line and on grade. If they don’t meet like that, well, imagine the consequences: you’ve driven your tunnels too far, past where you were supposed to meet. You haven’t found the other tunnel. So where do you look for it? Do you look up? Down? Sideways?”

  The tunnel would carry sewer and water pipes connecting the unique water wells bored into South Pole’s ice. The pipes had better align. Katy smiled. She knew what was coming next.

  My hand and cap-lamp pointed above our heads, lighting a two-foot-long block of unmined snow. That was our hole-through monument. My mitten grazed the tunnel walls, pointing down to the floor. “And this is where the two tunnels met.”

  I looked at him sideways like a miner, keeping my light out of his eyes. “You won’t find more than one-eighth of an inch off line. You won’t find that much on the bottom grade.”

  “How do you do that?” he asked, properly awed.

  “Miners know how to do that,” I said proudly. “The cost of failure is too high.” That knowledge had been passed on from one miner to the next since humans came out of the Stone Age and dug in the ground for metal. In some places we’d used techniques as old as Babylonian times.

  The COO soaked in the constant -55 degree Celsius tunnel temperature. “Shall we go to the dog-house?” I suggested to Katy.

  “Lead on, mister.” She smiled.

  In a few hundred feet we reached the eight-by-eight-foot plywood shelter recessed into the right side of the tunnel. I slid its door shut behind us, welcoming the 20 degree warmer air inside. Our breath filled the closed room with fog. Diffuse yellow light from a lone bulb reflected off the walls and created an illusion of cozy fireglow.

  The COO and Katy sat on a bench along one wall. I took a folding metal chair and sat facing them. Each of us leaned over the electric space heater in the middle of the floor. We’d stay inside warming our faces and hands until I gauged the COO’s condition. We might turn around and go out, or continue deeper into the tunnel. For now he looked okay, and he wanted to talk.

  “I remember some guy you had on your crew last year. A hillbilly-looking fellow, sort of skinny, wild-eyed …” he began. I knew exactly whom he was talking about, and I remembered the fello
w fondly. But I’d not heard a question.

  “He said you were the best boss he’d ever had. He went out of his way to tell me that … after I asked him about you.” Nobody that year had any mining experience. I gave the guy a chance and he did well.

  “How come he’s not back this year?”

  Clever. If I was such a good boss, why didn’t he come back? He wanted to. And I’d tried to get him. “I couldn’t get him off work-release. I wrote to the judge in Idaho and everything. Nothing doing.”

  Katy’s laugh rang through the dog-house. But I didn’t take my eyes off the COO.

  He probed a new line: “I understand you have an excellent safety record?”

  “You mean nobody hurt? Nobody killed? Yeah.”

  “How do you do it?” he asked.

  “Mostly luck I don’t have a lot to do with.” I bought time, considering another answer. I had no illusions. I’d been lucky.

  The new contractor invested a lot of words at our multiple orientations on work-place safety. This very COO spoke to eighty souls waiting to catch a military transport in New Zealand for our flight to McMurdo. He pointed to colorful slides of charts and statistics. He described trends in Total Recordable Incident Rates. He lectured on the new company’s drive to reduce the total number of incidents. “Of course we don’t want any of you to get hurt,” he said about no one in particular. I saw an MIT grad.

  “It can’t be all luck. What’re you doing that’s different?” The COO stayed on me.

  I stole a glance at Katy, hoping for help. Both our fathers had served on submarines in the Pacific in WWII, and that became something she and I discussed often. I told her once that driving two tunnels to meet face to face in the dark might be like steering a submarine blindly through a deep ocean. I’d mentioned the same point to Dad. He said: “I wouldn’t know, Son … I’ve never driven a tunnel.”