Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  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.