Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  Recently, the third and highest floor of the Denver office had seen auditors from the Defense Contracts Audits Agency in residence for a week. I’d no specific idea why they were there, but maybe it was no coincidence that relations between NSF and the support contractor lately seemed less than congenial.

  Erick looked squarely at me. I looked squarely back. All other spectators faded into peripheral gray. Erick had been in my tunnel once at South Pole, just him and me then, just straight talk and respect. Perhaps he was judging whether he still heard straight talk, or carefully rendered company-man talk.

  “Very well,” he ended our meeting. “I will approve your $636,000 proposal, including the Case tractor and the red-sleds. And we will call it proof-of-concept.”

  Erick’s declaration hung in the air for a long moment. Then, with our eyes still fixed on one another’s, I nodded slowly: “Thank you.”

  Nothing more needed saying. I left the cramped office and wandered back to my cubicle. At $636,000 now, and another $340,000 in fiscal year 2006 to run the show in the field, Stretch had been right. That was a million-dollar decision turning us back from SPT-18.

  PART III.

  YEAR FOUR: PROOF

  11 Return to Farthest South

  The last of the breakfast crowd shuffled slowly out of the McMurdo galley, heading off to shops and meeting places to start their day’s work. We gathered at our headquarters, an abandoned round table in the corner of the dining room, near the windows.

  At round tables in earlier years, we took turns closing our morning briefing with a thought for the day: a poem, line or two of prose, a quote from memory. Spreading the inspirational message duty diluted the oratorical tendency of some and opened fascinating glimpses into the souls of others less prone to speak up. This morning I asked Russ to open our meeting.

  “What was that quote you gave us a couple years ago from Jonas Salk?”

  Russ had described seeing a girl in an iron lung once. Years later he spied a pile of iron lungs in a scrap heap. Now he leaned back in his chair, rolled his eyes, and searched out a memory residing in a far corner of his brainpan. “Polio gone forever. Lemme see … yes … I think it was …” Russ opened his eyes and leaned forward: “You can only fail if you give up too soon.”

  That started our Year Four.

  Around the table sat Russ, Stretch, and John Van Vlack, our new mechanic. They’d been on station since late August bringing our tractors and sleds out of hibernation. John V. had several years on the Ice working out of the McMurdo Heavy Shop. Clean shaven, sandy hair short to the point of bald, and deeply freckled, John V. was ready with a smile and pleasant to work with.

  Judy Goldsberry rejoined us. And Brad Johnson finished his Greenland job in time to help us start this one again. Tom Lyman, our mountaineer from Montana, brought back his curious mix of high-tech savvy and basic earth-sense. He’d been with us through the heart of the Shear Zone.

  The young marine I met on the plane home that first year now joined us. Capt. Greg Feleppa had been called back to service in Iraq. I found him a year later working the parts window at the heavy shop.

  Of the five of us who returned, Stretch was the most reluctant. Our exasperation on turning back was, for him, particularly acute. Many of us felt we weren’t getting any younger. Maybe we’d not physically qualify for another year … if there were another year. We couldn’t then penetrate the rationale that turned us back when we were so close to the Pole. We’d all felt robbed.

  I cajoled Stretch last April, “If you had not left your bulldozer at the Leverett, we wouldn’t have a Year Four. Are you going to let some other guy take your title: The Man who Drove the Bulldozer to South Pole?”

  “I’ll think about that,” Stretch answered in an e-mail.

  I later sent him our Con-Ops for Year Four and asked the straightforward question: “Are you in?”

  His reply came back, simply worded. “I’m in.”

  Every one of us was “in” this October, gathered around the breakfast table. I looked across to Rick Campbell, our traverse coordinator. Rick was the skinny, ponytailed fellow who’d met me with a pile of reports my first day in Denver. He’d briefed Brian from the field support office in McMurdo before Brian took off in Linda. The only one of us employed full time, Rick was allotted half of that full time toward traverse support. His heart was 100 percent with us.

  “Rick, tell us where we’re at with our stuff coming in, please, sir.”

  “Happy to.” Rick flipped open his stenographer’s book and ran down the list.

  A C-17 delivered our fourth fleet tractor: a new red Case Quadtrack. Counting the Pole’s MT 865, our launch fleet now numbered five. We’d pick up a sixth, Stretch’s D8R, at the Leverett. Then we’d deliver both the MT865 and the D8R to Pole.

  The same plane brought our fuel bladder sleds. Environmental permission to use them came while we were at McMurdo, rigging for launch.

  A few odds and ends were still missing, like 1,500 green flags on ten-foot bamboo poles. These would mark our new trail and restore markings on the old. Two weeks before launch they’d been put on a boat in California and sent to New Zealand. They wouldn’t arrive on-Ice until mid-December.

  “On a fucking boat?” I shot back at Rick, who had the unfortunate duty to inform me at my McMurdo cubicle.

  We’d scheduled them for airlift to Christchurch, then airlift again to the Ice. Airlifting was a penalty we paid for late project funding. Meanwhile, NSF had been leaning on the contractor’s logistics group for delinquent deliveries. The pressure filtered to the purchasing group which changed the required on station dates to reflect a new on time performance. The new on time for us would occur a month after we left McMurdo.

  My boss was on the Ice occupying a closed-door office around the corner from my cubicle. “Did you know about the boat?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, plainly surprised.

  I, our whole project, needed all the time in the field nature would give us to get that one traverse through. My e-mail to the logistics group pleaded our need for the missing items, begging for any way possible to get them to us and not delay our launch. On the copy list I included my boss, my boss’s boss back in Denver, and Dave Bresnahan, who was on the Ice. We were all in the loop.

  Forty-eight hours later a return e-mail from my boss’s boss chastised me for including Dave on my original, breaking the chain of command. The scolding recalled a desperate scene from a familiar movie where all the Zulus in the world were busy wrecking a British square. A frantic soldier in the center tried smashing open an ammunition crate with his rifle butt. The supply sergeant threatened courts-martial, insisting the crate be opened according to regulations: by twisting the screws out with a screwdriver.

  Dave was the top of the chain, and he’d told me to keep him informed in that first phone call I made from Denver. I promised if I took the job, I would. Dave could order our stuff delivered with priority, if he felt it was a priority. I returned an e-mail to my boss’s boss in Denver, asking simply, “Did you know about the boat?”

  “Yes.”

  Eight at the breakfast round table would be heading out soon. Rick would see us off, then head home for the States.

  “So we’re going to have to come up with work-arounds,” I said, managing a calm tone. “Let’s start with flags. Rick, how many green flags do we have coming?”

  “One thousand, five hundred.” Rick’s spreadsheet mind dipped into his archive. I couldn’t ask for a more meticulous coordinator.

  “And they’re ten-footers, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How many can Science Support spare us?” I asked.

  “Six hundred and fifty,” he said, right back at me. “But they’re only eight-footers. Air Field Management will give us 950, also eight-footers.”

  Our flags were durable, quality-made items on poles stout enough to withstand gales and tall enough to remain visible after years of snow accumulation. We depended on those fl
ags. Others would depend on them for years to come.

  “And both Science and Air Field will send us off with theirs, and accept our ten-footers in a month or so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Rick, take Greg and Judy. Get the flags down to the staging area on the sea ice this morning. We’ll load them up this afternoon. What else you got?” I asked, expecting news of other missing items on the boat.

  “Air Field asks who’s going to pay for the labor to cut two feet off our ten-footers?” Rick reported.

  I sighed. “Cut me two feet off of one of the eight-footers, would you please? Make it the top two feet with the green banner still on it. I’ll see if they really want a two-foot flag.”

  That drew a laugh around the table. The rest did not. Corporate Safety had issued a new rule prohibiting anyone from lifting over forty pounds, or working above four feet without tying off. The forty and four rule. Safety required an elaborate, written justification for any variance.

  “Over the next few days, be careful who’s watching. Let’s get out of town before paper work grinds us to a halt.”

  The day was gray, the same color as the sea ice we stood on at our staging area just off-shore from town. There was no wind. Air Field’s spindly flag poles, each as big as my little finger, lay on the ice strapped down to a pallet. I pulled one out of the bundle and the bamboo stick snapped in two.

  Stretch lay down on the ice, working on one sled’s running gear. When he finished his job, he crawled out and joined me by the milvan, which was a standard shipping container that served as our parts supply sled.

  “You wanted to see me?” Stretch asked, business-like. At six feet, five inches he stood a good two inches taller than me, and now close enough to me that I could speak softly.

  Stretch had served on the Defense Early Warning, or DEW, line project in the Canadian Arctic years ago. He later became a sergeant in the combat infantry in Vietnam, though he’d wanted helicopters. He returned from that war to Wisconsin for farming, and he raised a beautiful daughter who’d since grown into a sharp, professional woman in the information technology world.

  Stretch was a deep thinker. When he acted, he acted deliberately. Give him the information he needed, and he’d bring any mission to a successful conclusion. Yet he shunned the madness of crowds. His current reading interests included biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. I’d brought a book or two with me this year, specifically to share with Stretch.

  “Stretch, two new guys this year have asked who takes charge if I’m unable to carry on. I haven’t answered them yet, but I’m about to. And I want your buy-in. If something happens to me on the trail, I want you to take charge. Whether that means go forward or come back, that’ll be for you to decide.”

  Stretch’s eyes bored into mine. “I am surprised. And I’m flattered you have such faith in me.”

  “I always have, Stretch. From the days we first ran the radar out to GAW. Just you and me. And ever since then. You studied the maps, and ran your own GPS. You, of all, have a better idea of where we are at any time. The rest of the job is a gimme. You know the machines. Folks respect you. What say you?”

  “Very well, I will,” he consented.

  I didn’t intend to announce my choice, exactly. Teasing on the trail, such as might arise from my announcement, we could do without. But I told Stretch that he was my designate last year, too. Stretch’s eyebrows rose at this new knowledge. The question didn’t come up then, so I hadn’t mentioned it. I simply placed his name in an envelope stored in the cubby by my bunk. Another of the crew would unseal that envelope if it was necessary.

  This season, with the subject in the open, I advised my boss of my plans. But he declared the decision as to my replacement would be his and his boss’s.

  “You’re not hearing me,” I hurled back. This was not about job-title changes and paperwork and approvals and policies and procedures and human resources and other irrelevancies. “I’m talking about a bad situation in the field that requires an instant leader and change of command.”

  Eight of us had just enough room to shuffle around our own galley. Some sat on the bench mounted along the wall, behind the narrow board that was our dining table. Others sat on stools, and some leaned against the kitchen counter. With nine of us today, the ninth being Rick, somebody had to stand back in one of the bunkrooms to hear.

  “Tom and Greg have both asked, ‘Who’s in charge if something should happen to you?’ A legitimate question, it deserves an answer.”

  Tom, at sixty-four, was the oldest of our crew. Greg, at thirty-three, was the youngest. We joked that I hired Greg because I hired Tom … to bring down the average age of the whole crew, or they would not let us go. All of us together averaged 51½ years old.

  Small group dynamics in remote field settings were a natural concern of Tom’s. But he understood the traverse business was not solely a mountaineering proposition. He also understood we were dealing with big machines on an industrial scale.

  Independently, Greg asked the same question. Greg, however, was totally new to our group. I’d sought advice on his marine background from my friends who were marines. One Desert Storm veteran observed from Greg’s resume that he’d been given command of an amphibious assault vehicle company, as a second lieutenant.

  “That’s rare, and speaks well for him. Company commands usually go to captains,” my friend explained. “The other stuff tells me the Marines invested pretty high-power training in him. They don’t do that for everybody.” He referred to Greg’s training in Anti-Terrorism tactics and command. Greg’s question came natural for a marine.

  I cleared my throat. “Among our combined talent, we’ve got all we need to deal with any situation. At this stage, I’m not particularly important … except I’ve a better feel than any of us for the ground ahead. But down the trail, my incapacity for any reason could happen.” Thinking of Brian in Linda, Bwana Kim in the Shear Zone, and the three close encounters last year, I began with the ultimate “incapacity.” “If I die, my first wish is that my body be left where it is. My wife understands that. Although at the time, we were thinking of letting the coyotes have at my bones …”

  That raised a smile or two.

  “But if you must move my dead body for whatever reason, know that my second wish is that I be cremated.”

  More smiles linked the dying wish of Robert Service’s poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

  “That’s out of the way … In the event of my incapacity, a marked envelope in my cubby contains my instructions for succession. I want one person to open that envelope and read it at the appropriate time. Stretch, you be that one who opens the envelope. Call McMurdo after that, if you want.”

  Stretch nodded. The one word penned on the paper sealed inside that envelope read: “S-T-R-E-T-C-H.”

  If they had to turn back for whatever reason, flags planted every quarter mile pointed the way home. Tom, Greg, and John V. had not been on that trail. They couldn’t visualize that elegant simplicity stretching 738 miles from McMurdo. I pointed to maps and distance charts posted on our galley walls. All anyone needed to know about getting back to McMurdo from the top of the Leverett was there. If they wanted more, route notes and operations reports stored in the cabinet above the comms desk would give it.

  None of us knew what the ground beyond our farthest south was like. Part of our job was to find out. But all my research on those last three hundred miles traveled with us, and I’d brief them on the ground ahead at appropriate times on the trail. Now I showed them where that information resided on our computer’s desktop. Anyone was free to access it, without a password, at any time.

  “As a final note,” I explained, “in the event of my incapacity, the best of us to interpret those digital maps and coordinate lists is Tom Lyman.” I hadn’t spoken of that to Stretch, but he just learned he’d not be alone.

  “This afternoon we’ll start staging sled trains to Williams Field along the Pegasus Snow
Road. We’re going to launch from Willy sooner that you think.”

  All our tractors and sleds lined up head-to-tail on the Williams Field road at the “city limits.” The fleet weighed in at 933,000 pounds, our heaviest launch weight ever. For now we parked, with engines idling. It was picture time.

  Dave Bresnahan showed up. After we’d won our funding in April, I extended Dave my formal offer to join us. We’d discussed the possibility for over a year. NSF stood to win, for it did not have anybody within its walls that knew traversing by experience. How unlike the French program that was. It had Patrice Godon. On the other hand, we’d get to pick Dave’s brain in the field and fathom the bureaucratic mysteries that propelled us. A few days before my deadline, Dave opted out for the very good reason of other needs of his family. I immediately phoned Greg Feleppa: “You’re hired.”

  Dave generously threw us a party two evenings before in McMurdo, dates and friends only. The intimate affair at the comfortable NSF quarters brought Ice stories out of all of us.

  Ann Hawthorne, an NSF grantee photographer, also showed up. We’d become close friends, and she held the respected position in my family of “honorary auntie” to my two children. The striking gray-haired woman, half-hillbilly and half–southern belle, once remarked that she and I were fraternal twins, separated by birth.

  Ann took the pictures that morning. The long line of tractors and sleds defined her horizon. In her foreground, our disorderly crew bore smiling, hopeful faces. A warm sun lit her subjects under a bright blue sky on the chill November day.

  After we stood for the picture, I walked across the snow to my waiting tractor, smiling at a message George Blaisdell sent me that morning: “Take the big scalp this time.” George and Dave fought the intramural battles for us at NSF that sent us out to the field to fight for ourselves. Now, looking forward to the unknown future, I felt pretty good. There was nothing more we could do to be ready. I climbed into Fritzy’s cab, repeating to myself once again, “There is no other job. This is the job.”