Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  Tom Yelvington told us that in making these worksite visits, he discovered that we employees seemed to be concerned with wages. He said that a thirdparty consultant had been hired, and their task was to make sure that wages were the same as market wages in CONUS for equivalent job descriptions.

  Someone asked him, “Will they take into account that we work a 54-hour week instead of a 40-hour week?”

  “Now that’s a good question. To tell you the truth—I don’t know. I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. And I’m going to get back to you on that.”

  He scribbled on his Palm Pilot.

  About a year later, when the “compensation structure” review was completed, we received an email from Tom Yelvington in Denver saying that no significant changes to wages were needed in order to attract and retain talented employees.

  I sent a query up the chain of command asking again whether the compensation structure survey was based on a 40- or 54-hour workweek. The Operations Manager, after two weeks of no response from Denver, wrote back saying, “Must be a good question if the answer is so elusive.”

  NSF is eager to bring to Antarctica anyone who can further the funding of science, such as the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Basic Research:DR. ERB (NSF): Well, it is a wonderful place to do science, and it is a fascinating place to see. And I do hope members of the Committee will be able to find time, Mr. Chairman, yourselfincluded, to see it firsthand.

  CHAIRMAN SMITH: Thank you.

  So late December through the end of January is high season for politicians, journalists, tourists, and other USAP special guests. At special banquets in the Galley they are fed creamy feta and red pepper roulade and stuffed chicken breast with rum-lemon glaze and green beans amandine, with fresh shrimp flown from New Zealand. DAs are yanked from the dishroom to serve them.

  In the summer of 1998, NSF invited a group of Republican senators led by the Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman for a Pole boondoggle so NSF could beg for $125 million to build the new Pole station. One of the Senators was from my home state, and has been referred to in one of the Seattle papers as Skeletor, an alarmingly accurate portrayal. H.L. Mencken once wrote: “Observing a Congressman, one sees only a gross and revolting shape, with dull eyes and prehensile hands.” I’m certain Mencken was referring to one of the Senator’s ancestors. When I was a kid I had first seen the Senator at a groundbreaking for a shopping mall in my small hometown. For a while, the Senator had even sent me Christmas cards each year with a picture of him and his family. I had never contributed money to him but, in a political studies class in high school, our teacher had told us to volunteer for a political campaign, and I didn’t hesitate in my choice to work for the Senator: I had been haunted for years by the Senator’s vein-hewn skull, the half-lidded roving tumors that dwelled within cavernous eye sockets that seemed big enough to receive endless buckets of golf balls, and by his smile, which looked like a compound fracture.

  In a house-basement in the suburbs I stuffed envelopes for the Senator’s campaign with a friendly woman who openly hated Democrats and carefully disliked Mexicans. A young professional guy with a white shirt and tie came in occasionally to stuff a few envelopes, but mainly just to soak up the action. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and the smell of wet envelope glue seemed to excite him. Our little campaign outpost was furnished only with tables and chairs and phones, the bare essentials of groveling for funding. But though we were small, we were part of a large and noble organism; there were thousands of us all over the state, huddled in basements like this one, doing our part to plead for money for the ghoulish Senator. After the school project, other students surprised me with revelations that they had volunteered for their chosen candidates, not from morbid curiosity, but from strong political beliefs.

  I never did get to meet the Senator on the ice to reciprocate his Christmas greetings, but I liked to think that my efforts long ago helped get the Senator his million-dollar boondoggle to the South Pole to watch an NSF Rep wearing a hardhat and a smile grovel for $125 million, and that we were square.

  One summer, during January’s high tide of politicians, as Kath and I were driving the Haz Waste truck back to town after checking trash at Willy Field, we picked up two red parkas outside Scott Base who were waiting for a shuttle back to McMurdo. One of our passengers was Dr. John Berry, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Interior of the U.S. He asked why we came down here.

  “For the money,” said Kath. “Plus there’s no bugs here, so it’s probably the best place in the world to be a garbageman.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Antarctica is 100% maggot-free.” I asked what the Dept. of Interior was doing down here.

  Part of NSF’s program is Antarctic mapping projects, which involves a great deal of time and money. In the U.S., the Department of Interior pays for mapping projects. NSF brought him down to convince him to further open the DI purse for Antarctic mapping projects so that NSF could spend that money on other projects.

  “How long are you going to be down here?” asked Kath.

  “Oh, just a short time, but we went to the Dry Valleys yesterday and we’re going to the South Pole when the weather clears,” he said, and we’re having the time of our lives, he exuded, clutching an armload of Scott Base souvenirs purchased from their gift shop.

  We dropped him off at Bldg. 125, the lush apartment where only DVs stay.

  A year later, I found the guest log from Bldg. 125 in the trash. John Berry had written:The words in this book focus on the awesome beauty and power of this special place. However, I am struck more by its fragility and its ability to signal to the rest of the world the vulnerability of our planet home. The science here shines as a beacon—both warning us of rocks ahead, as well as lighting our way to a safer homecoming. The people here are as dedicated and courageous as any who have gave [sic] so nobly before—and their mission is far more important than national or personal glory. With you, and the work you do, lies the hope for future generations: people united in peace, united in talent, to better understand and protect the handiwork of God’s creation. As one privileged to stand both at the North and South Pole, I am happy to be part of such a fair-hearted clan and wonderful mission.

  —John Berry, Asst. Sec. Dept. of Interior, Dec. 19, 1999

  John Berry had not used the words “fruitbasket,” “boondoggle,” or even “money.” These concepts were too crude to convey our awesome collective purpose. John Berry had not hitched a lift in the Haz Waste truck with a bag of souvenirs. Rather, he was riding the powerful wave of collective action, by which the fires of hope power the shining beacons that illuminate our planet home. Jesus, how exciting! If I had only known, I would have asked him whether hope matured like a treasury bond or whether it burned with a half-life like radiation. I tried to imagine actually applying the phrases “united in peace” or “this special place” to any experience I had ever had here. I tried to imagine for a moment that I believed that “the hope for future generations” lay with a seasonal swarm of scientists who squabbled over the specialized equipment in the Crary Lab as drunk workers squabble for their turn at the pool table. I imagined joking about appropriating funds as porn stars joke about blowing loads down each other’s throats. I thought of the porn dude who wore a medallion of a hand gripping the Earth, and the NSF logo: people holding hands, encircling the Earth.

  In January, as the town was crawling with DVs, the tourist ship Khlebnikov arrived. The Khlebnikov is a luxuriously refurbished former Russian whaling vessel. In little inflatable motorboats the crew brings the tourists to shore, where an NSF chaperone escorts them around town on a tight leash and keeps them out of the way. Dr. Karl Erb, Head of the Office of Polar Programs for NSF, had a different take on the role of the McMurdo chaperone when he was questioned at a Hearing before the Subcommittee on Basic Research in 1999:CONGRESSWOMAN CONNIE MORELLA: It is rare, indeed, though, that tourists get to go to McMurdo, is not that correct? Or has that changed? I mean, when you get
your tour ships in and the planes, you do not let them go to McMurdo, do you?

  DR. ERB:The tour ships do come into McMurdo Sound each year… But when they arrive in McMurdo, they are, as Dr. [Donal] Manahan said, escorted around town. We have a fixed tour that we allow them to take, which keeps them from causing environmental trouble.

  Besides putting trash in the wrong bin, or maybe throwing a cigarette on the ground and igniting McMurdo’s fuel-soaked earth, it is hard to imagine what sort of “environmental trouble” Dr. Erb expects from the tourists who come to McMurdo.

  Actually, just a few weeks before the tourist ship arrived, a few tons of sausage buried in the ground during a previous era had been discovered by a Fleet-Ops operator who was drilling into the earth in preparation for a new building down by the sea ice. With the drill he struck a noxious pocket of primeval sausage slime that squirted onto his face, searing his eye with a swift yellow infection that puffed up half his face and put him out of commission for about a week. The earth-sausage mixture was excavated from the frozen ground and dumped in piles beside the road, where a squad of GAs was dispatched into the feeding swarm of skuas to separate the meat from the rock and to throw it into triwalls that we banded up and loaded in milvans to be exported to the United States.

  The activities at what became known as Sausage Point were not on Dr. Erb’s tourist route, which is probably for the best, since the tourists were already too shocked by the machines thundering by and the skuas gorging on ruptured bags of spaghetti in the Galley bins to do anything but lope with dazed squints behind the chattering NSF emissary, who mercifully led them to the store to calm them with souvenirs.

  One time I hopped out of my machine as I was making my rounds and asked one of the tourists a question about the ship. She laughed nervously and ran to catch up with the group as if I had asked her for spare change. I had approached her on my best behavior, but as I recovered from the sting of rejection, I realized I must look a mess, lurking in filthy clothes amid a terrific array of clanging metal and hydraulic voodoo at this lawless outpost on the lip of the world.

  Where tourists are slain and their fat burned as fuel to heat our bowling alley.

  All winter-overs have to take a psychological evaluation to determine their mental fitness to endure the long Antarctic night, when (because planes cannot fly in) they are trapped at the end of the planet on a continent made of ice with only a substantial video collection to keep them from polar madness.

  The best method of selecting winter-over personnel has been a source of controversy since the earliest expeditions. Shackleton’s interviews lasted only a few minutes, during which he asked questions such as “Can you sing?”, “Do you know any good jokes?”, or whether the applicant could recognize gold if he saw it. He selected one applicant because he looked funny.

  One day in early January, while an equipment operator recovered from sausage infection, we packed into the back room of the Galley, where test booklets, pencils, and answer sheets were waiting for us on the tables. The overseeing psychologist was the same woman who, earlier in the summer, had told us she was here to counsel us confidentially and would have nothing to do with our winter evaluations.

  We were taking this test for only one reason: Antarctic history is rich with grim tales of madness.

  On December 14, 1912, Antarctic explorers Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz stood at the edge of a 200-foot-deep crevasse in the ice.

  “We are in dire peril, Xavier.”

  “Yes,” said Mertz, “We shall have to eat the dogs.”

  The third member of their expedition had just fallen into the crevasse—with most of their food. Their initial goal of surveying a 500-mile stretch of Adelie Land suddenly became impractical, and they set out for their base camp on the coast.

  They fed their dogs with pieces of clothing until the dogs grew too weak, and then butchered one after another to feed the remaining dogs and themselves. They sawed the paws off with a knife and boiled them into soup, then took turns spooning out the brains and gnawing on the skulls, and frying the livers.

  Unbeknownst to them, the dog livers contained toxic levels of Vitamin A. As a result, the men’s flesh and hair began to litter the bottom of their tent at night. Pus-filled cracks opened on their faces. Their scrotums bled.

  It was not long before Mertz went mad. He could no longer help pull the sledges and he would no longer eat. In his journal he wrote, “I cannot eat of the dogs any longer.”

  When Mawson tried to coax him to drink some “Beef Tea,” Mertz screamed, “It is of the dogs! They make me ill because I eat their flesh!”

  Mawson put Mertz on the sledge, which he pulled on his hands and knees through the twinkling white brutality. In their tent Mertz howled gibberish and filled his pants from dysentery. One morning Mertz screamed at Mawson, “Am I a man—or a dog? You think I have no courage because I cannot walk—but I show you, I show... ” and bit off part of his little finger and spat it onto the floor of the tent.

  Before he died, Mertz screamed, “Ears, ears! Earache!”

  Mawson cleaned up. He was alone now and suffering from fingers black with frostbite, loose teeth, and snowblindness. The soles of his feet were falling off.

  When Mawson finally made it back to camp, he had missed the rescue ship, so he and the remaining crew faced their second consecutive winter in Antarctica. The ship had brought some supplies and new support staff.

  One of the new staff was a radio operator named Jeffryes who started “going off his base” a few weeks after Midwinter’s Day, when he refused to do any work and began to suspect the others in the hut of being in league against him. Jeffryes secretly sent, in Mawson’s name, radio transmissions to the outside world saying that the other members of the expedition were insane except for Mawson and Jeffryes. Mawson overheard him and sent a message the next day saying: “Censure all messages Jeffryes insane…”

  22 November 1913

  Jeffryes is getting better. I spoke to him. He says he is helpless, that I have a spell upon him. I tell him that I put a spell upon him not to play monkey tricks when I am away.

  —Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries

  Back in Australia, after a harrowing winter of dark lunacy, Jeffryes freaked out on a train, from which he was escorted to an asylum. He wrote letters to Mawson from the nuthouse, reminiscing about the special time they spent together: “We seven were chosen that scripture might be fulfilled… I am come as Christ in the Spirit of Prophecy, and the Wrath of God in the Flesh.” Jeffryes suspected that his hospital had been infiltrated by Freemasons.

  Stories of violent madness have flowed from Antarctic exploration since the beginning. In 1898, when the Belgian ship Belgica was stuck for 13 months in sea ice, one of the members of the multinational crew attacked whomever said “something” in French, because he believed the word meant “kill”. More recently, the Associated Press wrote that “a violently deranged staffer” at Mawson Base had to be locked in a storage room for the winter, in the Australian tradition that has continued proudly there since Mawson Base was built in 1953 and, as recalled by station leader Philip Law, a man “had the habit, when heavily intoxicated, of piling papers on his bunk and setting fire to them.” In 1983 the doctor at Argentina’s Almirante Brown station burned the base down to force his own pre-winter evacuation. At a Soviet base, a man killed his chess opponent with an axe.

  In the winter of 1996 a Galley worker in McMurdo clocked his supervisor on the head with a hammer while he was eating lunch. Someone who intervened got the claw-end in the face.8 The red-parkaed assailant left the Galley and was intercepted in Highway 1 singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and taken into makeshift custody by firefighters. Carpenters made wooden bars for the windows on Hut 10, where the cook stayed in luxurious captivity until the FBI arrived to spend three days taking scenic pictures before escorting the attacker to Hawaii for processing. A new dining attendant arrived that evening for his first shift in McMurdo. He was excited to be on the seven
th continent. His first task in Antarctica was to clean the human blood from the chairs in the Galley. The following Halloween, hammer-related costumes were in vogue.

  The proctor told us to start the psychology test.

  The first part of the test consisted of over 500 true-or-false questions, such as:I see things or animals or people around me that others do not see.

  Someone has it in for me.

  There is something wrong with my mind.

  Dirt frightens or disgusts me.

  Often I feel as if there is a tight band around my head.

  I like repairing a door latch.

  I am sure I get a raw deal from life.

  I sometimes tease animals.

  I believe in law enforcement.

  I believe I am being plotted against.

  The top of my head sometimes feels tender.

  I like science.

  I believe I am a condemned person.

  Everything tastes the same.

  Most of the time I wish I were dead.

  I would certainly enjoy beating criminals at their own game.

  I like to drive a hard bargain.

  and

  I would like to be a florist.

  I answered all questions on the test false if they mentioned “dread” or “worrying” or, in dealing with people, trying to “put them right,” and I made a point of favoring “social engagements” over “alone time” because solitude is widely disapproved of and is favored only by criminals. In questions of authority I chose the most spineless possibility unless—when snitching on my fellow workers, for instance—a firm moral conviction impervious to peer pressure was called for. These methods of response brought me great success in passing the standardized psych eval.