Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  Members of one expedition were hanging out one morning in the warm bathrooms in Summer Camp after their long flight to camp beside Pole. When our friend Quill came into the bathroom barely awake that morning to brush his teeth before work, he met an enthusiastic crowd who asked, “So, it must be exciting to live here, eh?” Quill had once been afflicted with high-altitude pulmonary edema; his lungs had filled with thick black fluids, endangering his life and requiring an immediate medevac to a lower elevation. He grunted at their simplification and drooled in the sink.

  In 1997 three men were the first in history to die while skydiving at the South Pole. When they fell, two Polies were watching the Hollywood blockbuster The Rock, in which terrorists overtake Alcatraz for evil aims. The terrorists make their move during a tour of Alcatraz, and one of the tourists murmurs, “What kind of fucked-up tour is this?” This scene reminded the two Polies that the skydivers were to jump soon. They went outside to watch as three black dots in the distance met the horizon, as silent as falling fleas. “What kind of fucked-up tour is this?” said one of the Polies. “We’re going to have to make a new Waste category,” said the other. The skydivers had paid $22,000 each for the honor of having their wrecked bodies excavated from the plateau by overworked Polies, put in body bags, and sent back to where they came from. The well-outfitted bodies were said to rattle like bags of crystals when pulled from the ice. Later some people were offended when someone partially buried a pair of boots upside down in the snow, but others solemnly hung their heads to veil the giggles, and the next Halloween, skydiver costumes were in vogue.

  Madcap antics such as those of the skydivers have contributed to an official attitude summed up by Dr. Karl Erb of NSF: “They cause us difficulties in different ways. They get into trouble, and we have to go rescue them.” The official cold shoulder is meant to discourage people from coming to Pole and requires the compliance of employees, who have been warned, as in this email from the McMurdo NSF Rep, that “private expedition personnel will not be allowed in any USAP facilities (to include vehicles) without the approval of the NSFREP. Additionally, USAP personnel will not perform any services for private expeditions, to include sending or delivering messages or mail/email.” This means that if you rowed a boat down past 80 degrees south, crossed an ice shelf, climbed glaciers, crossed mountain ranges, avoided crevasses, didn’t die of frostbite, hypothermia, infected wounds, starvation, or suicide, finally made it to approximately the coldest, most hellishly isolated spot on the globe, and asked for a dish of tater tots, you might be told no. Employees are usually too busy to pay much attention to expeditioners, but NSF’s barely restrained contempt for tourists is not shared by the workers, who prefer to deride or praise on a case-by-case basis. Most people seem to understand that a nation building a station beside a global landmark that has attracted tourists since Earth became round is more or less begging to play park ranger.

  New Year’s Eve 2000 brought crowds of tourists. A television crew seized the Pole at midnight to shoot their live footage while one of them pushed Polies out of the way. Earlier that day, the Pole Station Manager had sent out an All-Station email: “Please DO NOT invite [the expeditioners] into the station, including the party tonight, for any reason except for emergency medical assistance.” Rex, who, in defiance of black-tie convention, had assumed the alter ego of a caped and helmeted superhero named “Dash Fantasy,” befriended the Singaporean expedition who’d skied from the coast and tried to sneak them into the party that night by dressing them in makeshift costumes, but the managers kept kicking them out.

  Jim Lovell, American astronaut of Apollo 13 fame, came down for New Year’s. He was extended the extraordinary official courtesy of being allowed to sleep in the gym. He and his entourage were also allowed to eat meals in the Galley. Rex volunteered to work in the Galley one night, where he served three types of pizza: meat, supreme, and spam and cheese, labeled respectively as the “New Jersey Meathook,” the “Cleveland Steamer,” and the “Dirty Sanchez.” (These labels are more commonly applied to hooking a finger up a woman’s ass while fucking her from behind, shitting on someone’s chest, and wiping shit-covered finger or cock beneath a partner’s nose, respectively.) “These all look good. What would you recommend?” Jim Lovell asked Rex, who suggested the Cleveland Steamer and asked the astronaut what it was like to go into space. Jim Lovell preferred talking about the Tom Hanks movie about him going into space.

  About a week after New Year’s, a strange expedition arrived in snowbugs. They included a Mir cosmonaut who planned to be the first to fly a hot air balloon over the South Pole, and a Russian orthodox priest who wanted to be the first to hold a mass at both Poles. A few weeks before they arrived, Rex and some friends had built a 12-foot-tall snow replica of an Easter Island head near the geographic pole. Rex wrote in an email: “The priest was very disturbed by the sculpture. He felt it was pagan in nature and did not want to hold a mass in its presence. We explained that it was only for fun and that we did not worship it. He was wary however.”

  While tourists on plane flights are generally either ignored or treated to hairt-rigger courtesy, Polies are more enthusiastic about cross-continent expeditioners who actually work for their glory. As we smoked, Kath told me about two Norwegian guys who had skied to Pole after working 14 months at the Norwegian base on the coast. 3 When they gave an informal presentation to the Polies in the gym, someone asked one of them what he missed most after all that time away from civilization, and he bashfully replied, “Women.”

  “Did they get any?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Kath said. “I would have heard about it by now.”

  But as the ragtag Norwegians were skiing away from Pole toward Ross Island, a woman ran from the Clean Air Facility and flashed her tits, to which one of the polite Scandinavians called out, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  I agreed to meet Kath at work, then left to attend my South Pole Orientation. When I got to the library, Abby was there with a meek young graduate student. Because of her position, her public role in Antarctica, I knew of Abby. I had heard stories about her and had seen the nice little emails she sent out.4 Abby gave us each a South Pole handbook of rules and facilities with a map on the back. She emphasized that we were not to cross the skiway when planes were coming. We were not to do laundry on weekends because, unlike McMurdo’s, some of Pole’s water is distributed by vehicle, and if the water runs out on the weekend, someone will have to fill up the tanks on his or her day off.

  Here’s how they get water at Pole: Pole Station stands on a gargantuan ice plateau. The ice is so thick that to even consider it reminds you how scrawny and weak you are compared to the massive violent patience of the universe. Into this ice, masterminds drill a hole about 400 feet deep near the station and pump in heat, then pump out the resulting liquid water. This creates a huge subsurface cavern, and when the cavern begins to grow too large, they start a new one somewhere else.

  Abby, about to adjourn the Orientation, asked if we had any questions. I asked if the store took credit cards. I wanted to buy booze and smokes and postcards and perhaps a South Pole souvenir from the store, and I was cashpoor at the moment. Abby said the store didn’t take credit cards because of the poor satellite link.

  Jesus fucking Christ, I thought, what kind of place is this?

  Later, when I was borrowing 50 bucks from Kath, who had piles of money from cornering the fleece-hat market at the South Pole, she told me the credit card question was a sore topic. It was one of Abby’s goals to modernize Pole to McMurdo standards. Her main emphasis this summer, said Kath, was the store, and some thought it strange that steel for the new station was stuck in McMurdo while Pole was getting huge shipments of t-shirts and caps and sweatshirts weekly.

  If the store has a particularly good season financially, those funds will bring a better selection of goods the next season, which is good for morale. One winter an electrician had spent close to $7,000 on alcohol, and when the plane fle
w in to pick up the winter-overs, the pilots came out to take pictures of him lying sprawled drunk in the snow before loading him onto the plane with a makeshift stretcher. The next summer everyone was pleased that the store had so many new gift items.

  That was a banner year at Pole.

  The store quit selling liquor to a scientist that winter because he enjoyed cutting himself about the arms. When winter began, another scientist revealed after all the planes had left that he was afraid of the dark. He always slept with the lights on, and after the sun went down for the winter, someone had to walk or drive him to and from his lab each day. At the end of that winter it came to light that the station doctor had cleaned out the entire supply of painkillers and muscle relaxants. He took a cut from each prescription he wrote, and could sometimes be found in the bar with a fruitbowl of pills.

  During one of the violent tequila parties that summer, a Muslim scientist accidentally partook of the liquor because all the juice dispensers had been spiked. He angrily shrieked, “The fires of hell are burning on my tongue!”

  “Why are the tequila parties always violent?” I had asked my friend who related this incident.

  “I don’t know,” my friend said. “They’re always violent. I got violent. I woke up with my clothes shredded and I didn’t know where I was. One guy broke his leg.”

  Violent parties are a time-honored American Antarctic tradition, going back at least to Byrd’s Little America, when some of the expedition’s unpaid volunteers fueled their parties with drums of medicinal alcohol. Roused by a heated argument, one of the crew attacked and didn’t stop punching the mechanic in the mouth until knocked unconscious from behind by someone with a heavy ski boot. One of the men’s diaries described one party at Little America as “a spectacular and riotous drunken orgy.” And when at another party someone named Mulroy punched someone in the mouth, “the group, enraged, their pent-up hostilities exploding, converged on Mulroy like caged animals released, pummeling him viciously until Gould pulled them off.”

  After my Orientation I walked out to Summer Camp, collected my bags, then went to my Jamesway.5 The Jamesways are very dark and very quiet, because at Pole there are three well-populated shifts, and it’s always someone’s bedtime. The Jamesways are so quiet that discreet couples who want to have sex wait for the furnace fan to kick on before mounting each other in eight-minute increments.

  The space is small (about ten feet by six), but warm and comfortable, with extra insulation on the walls provided by Unicor blankets. I plugged in my video camera to recharge, made my bed with the linen provided, and unpacked a few things, including two huge bags of presents sent with me by Kath’s admirers in McMurdo, containing Jim Beam, fruit, and rewriteable CDs. I also had to deliver a wrapped gift from Jeannie to one of the McMurdo Fuelies who was working a three-week shift at Pole.

  I remembered to put my water bottle on the bed instead of the floor, where, Polies had told me, piss cans freeze. The bathrooms are separate from the Jamesways, so, to avoid dressing up just to run to the bathroom, people pee in coffee cans kept under their beds. A former janitor at Pole told me that many short-term scientists left their piss cans on the floor when they departed. In one case she found a lid for the can, leakproofed it with tape, found the researcher’s address in the States, and sent his piss back to him.

  Before I left McMurdo, Nero told me about his two weeks at Pole. He didn’t know anyone, and no one talked to him except one Polie who was avoided by the others. Nero’s disheartening Pole experience climaxed one day with him knocking over his recently-used pee can. He watched with horror as the golden puddle flowed across the corridor into someone else’s cubicle, whose occupant was present and quickly remarked, “That better not be what I think it is.” Nero, mortified, sprang with his towel to mop and grovel.

  I went to work and found Kath at the Polar Haven, an unheated Quonset hut covered with what looks like colored rice paper. She introduced me to Sundog, one of the Cat 953s, and we spent the rest of the warm sunny evening (-15°F or -20°F) banding triwalls and loading trash onto air force pallets.6 After work we went to the smoking lounge at Summer Camp to catch up. The wooden walls were carved with names and dates. I saw Sid’s name and those of a few other people from McMurdo and Polies I had met in previous seasons.

  At midnight we went to meet Quill from Cargo who was just getting off work. We took a sauna in the Dome, then sat on the floor in an office cubicle downstairs. A seismograph in the corner was measuring seismic activity all over the globe. Handbooks for hazardous chemicals and instruction manuals for gas chromatographs and reference books on database management filled the shelves. Tucked in scant spaces between books were fuel testing kits and spare cartridges for respirators. We munched on cheese and crackers that I had brought from McMurdo while Kath and Quill updated me on Pole news.

  South Pole was unofficially on the edge of fuel crisis. It was January, and Pole did not have enough fuel to make it through the winter. For the rest of the season fuel flights would take top priority, which meant materials for winter construction on the new station would be left in McMurdo, which meant a bunch of winter contracts would be canceled, and no one knew whether they would be paid out or not.

  The NSF Station Rep, singled out by the white hardhat he wore everywhere, repeated at every All-Hands Meeting that construction was currently “on schedule and under budget.” He said this without irony, so everyone laughed at him behind his back. The ceiling of the new Power Plant was melting from the heat of the exhaust pipes a few inches below, fuel was at a premium, and construction on the new station was facing a year delay. The NSF Rep was funny, Kath said. He never said hello to her unless he was showing DVs around the station, in which case he always waved an enthusiastic greeting.

  At first, Quill said, five planes a day minimum were scheduled until the end of season, with only fuel as cargo, but recently the number had gone down to four. Some days only three came in, for various reasons, including weather and Air National Guard crew rest days. Kath hid a few triwalls of wood on a distant cargo line for her friends so they could build fires in case things went to hell when winter came.

  I left them sitting on the floor in the dim office space and returned to my Jamesway, where I slept like marble. The next morning I threw on my long underwear and a shirt, and my fleece and my boots, and my sunglasses and a hat, to go to the Ice Palace 100 yards away from the Jamesway.7 I sat on the shitter and examined the collage on the stall door, a scene of nebulous space dust and distant galaxies pulled from a science digest. Floating in the center, cut from a financial magazine, was a chubby banker with plain tie and eyeglasses and great gleaming watery eyes, the vast expanse of the cosmos flanking him on all sides. The only other distraction of interest in the stall was a sign above the toilet instructing, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.”

  Shit has a rich history in Antarctica. Some stations or camps have primitive outhouses built over snowpits, where “shit trees” grow quickly because the turds do not slide down the sides as they might in steamier climates. The shit freezes into stalagmites of which each new turd is the pinnacle. Explosives have been used to demolish these. In McMurdo, before the recent completion of the waste treatment plant, shit from the dorms was flushed into Winter Quarters Bay, while only shit from field camps was packaged up and sent back to the United States. Nevertheless, NSF long asserted that human waste was entirely removed from the continent. At Pole, shit is pumped into the huge subsurface caverns created by extracting water, where it freezes into great bulbs. By the time one cavern is full, a new one is ready to go. Since the ice sheet is moving toward the Weddell Sea at 2.7 cm per day, it may millions of years from now squeeze frozen superturds into the waters off the Antarctic coast. Mollusks will feast.

  Someone at Pole once took a shit in the tunnel that runs from the Dome to Skylab. The astonishingly thick loaf, though immediately frozen and easily disposed of, so impressed and mystified the rank and file tha
t Pole management felt compelled to quell the disturbance by attributing the turd to an unnamed tourist.8 The mystery may never be solved, but few believed an ecstatic tourist would be more likely than a disgruntled local to dump a load there.

  Uncertain what I’d be working on today, I donned all my gear in the Jamesway and then went to the Dome to drink coffee in the Galley and wait for Kath. We were on swing shift, so though I’d just woken up, people were filing in for lunch. Someone was playing Jane’s Addiction in the kitchen. Kath showed up looking tired, with hair that defied gravity but would settle down after a few hours under a hat. We ate and went to work. Planes flew in and out all day as I minced huge wooden spools with a chainsaw and ground with a demolition saw through the metal supports and loaded the wood onto pallets to be flown to McMurdo.

  Every humidifier or washing machine bound for Pole goes through McMurdo, and Pole’s trash is flown to McMurdo for processing. With their different cultures and linked logistics, McMurdo, the center of the action, and Pole, the famous capital, are like two squabbling but inseparable brothers. Polies are issued green and black parkas; McMurdoites, red. When visiting Pole from McMurdo, it is good to have a reference. If one is introduced by a Polie, Pole is generally a friendlier, less cliquish, and more inclusive community than McMurdo. Otherwise, who knows. As one Polie put it, “When Polies see the red coats come off the plane, we think they’re not real Antarctic workers. We see McMurdo as a luxury resort. We think we’re tougher and want the people from McMurdo to see how cold it is and how much ice we have in our beards.”

  Few McMurdoites have as advanced an understanding of cold as does the Polie, because most intense cold at McMurdo is windchill. Pole gets little wind, so the cold is ambient and cannot be mitigated by a layer of windscreen. I once asked Speed whether he could really feel the difference between minus 60 and minus 90, and terror crossed his face as he nodded and said, “Oh shit yeah.” Polies have told of pissing a blend of steam and crystals, and cold so annoying that even a cigarette won’t work properly because the slightest moisture freezes and blocks the filter. A metal machine brought into a warm building sucks up heat so fast that it emanates cold as a fire emanates heat. Fuel gets so cold that a lit match thrown in it won’t ignite it. Pole workers get used to frostnip as McMurdo workers get used to scrapes and bruises. And Polies are also used to scrapes and bruises.