Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  This cold, which often depresses Polies to post-work catatonic slothfulness, is without financial compensation. Denver pays by job description, so Polies make no more money than if they worked in McMurdo. Furthermore, Pole has no boondoggles. There is nowhere to go. No trips to ice caves. No trips to see penguins at Cape Royds. No lucky opportunities to help out at Siple Dome or Black Island. South Pole Station sits on a bulge of ice two miles thick at the center and thinning gradually toward the coasts. There is nothing around but ice under empty space. The place is a visual Alcatraz where the surrounding nothingness bends one’s attention inward, back to the station. Speed told me that he and some other Polies once gathered to admire a rare clump of dirt stuck to a piece of cargo.

  At Pole, any administrative blunders (such as canceling the subscription to the daily New York Times faxsheet to save money) are seen as the result of either kinked local powers or of McMurdo meddling. “Denver doesn’t exist at Pole,” one Polie said.9 Pole’s contempt for McMurdo is fueled by the stacks of McMurdo’s weekly Antarctic Sun that are flown to Pole in the summer. In the McMurdo paper, announcements about bowling tournaments and peppy stories of marine logistics accompany the explorer trivia questions and pictures of penguins. (Similarly, Denver’s office newsletter Polar Services News fuels McMurdo’s contempt for suburban Denver. In the Denver paper, announcements for the company golf tournament and the family BBQ accompany explorer trivia questions and pictures of penguins.)

  To many people around the world, “the South Pole” is synonymous with “Antarctica.” Grumbling workers in McMurdo receive well-intentioned cards from relatives who remind them to bundle up down there at the “South Pole.” Polies are conscious of and enjoy their status at the most famous location on the continent. But because the location itself generates the fame, more than anyone working there or anything that happens there, the fame is hard to enjoy. In 2002, management scheduled the New Year’s party two days earlier than New Year’s so that it would fall on a weekend rather than a workday. Polies reported a dismal general inability to feign excitement about New Year’s at the party on December 29, and on New Year’s Eve people celebrated in separate groups because there was no main party. People at McMurdo and Pole work even on Labor Day (which is observed in Denver and Washington), so Polies went to work on New Year’s Day without surprise or complaint. But the sting of Pole’s fame, and their place in the shadows, was worsened by a New Year’s greeting from an outsider. A Writer’s and Artist’s Grantee that summer was friends with Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons. The cartoonist had been kept abreast of the novelties of the polar station, and for New Year’s had sent down a signed poster that showed the famous cartoon family greeting the Polies with a cheery reminder: “South Pole, the only place on earth to celebrate New Year’s twice!”

  Though Polies probably do have the most lucrative bragging rights in The Program, swaggering one-upmanship is common at every level of The Program. If you’ve only done one summer, you are a fingee. If you do multiple summers, you haven’t done a winter. When you do a winter and find out that winter is actually easier than summer, then you haven’t done multiple winters. If you’ve done multiple winters, you haven’t been to Pole. If you’ve done a summer at Pole, you haven’t done a winter at Pole. If you’ve done a winter at Pole, you haven’t done multiple winters at Pole. And, finally, once you’ve done multiple winters at Pole, you are afraid to leave Antarctica because you’ll have to pay for food and look both ways before crossing the street.

  Occasionally I paused from sawing to look at the horizon, flat but for the nearby buildings and clutter, as if planed and glued to the sky uniformly by an unimaginative but exacting craftsman. Somewhere out there buried in the ice were barrels of fuel, tool chests, and bundles of lumber, all lost during airdrops the first year at Pole, traveling since then at a glacial pace away from the Pole as naturally as we are drawn to it. There are tomato juice and caustic soda, sausages, a bag of mail that broke open in mid-air and rained down like a confetti of names and dates over a half-mile area. A whole set of encyclopedias was out there somewhere, making a break for it.

  A few days after I arrived, the scientists at the Atmospheric Research Laboratory hosted their monthly slushy party in which they use a cooler of “the cleanest snow in the world” to ice various liquors. I talked to a Galley worker about soccer hooligans for a while, then went upstairs to see the laser that flashed purple in the dark while the engineer explained that it needed more power, which she hoped would be provided once the new power plant was completed and the emergency plant got a rest.

  Full of snow and Kentucky whisky, I walked to the South Pole. There was a shark crafted from snow, as if emerging through the surface of a white ocean, contender in a recent ice sculpture contest. Nearby was the tent of some Danes who had skied from the coast.

  In 1997 a United States Antarctic Program External Panel evaluated U.S. activities in the Antarctic. The 11-member panel was chaired by Norman Augustine, CEO of Lockheed-Martin. It found that “the geopolitical importance heretofore assigned to a permanent U.S. presence in Antarctica, particularly at the South Pole, appears fully warranted. This consideration, in itself, justifies a year-round presence at several locations, including a moderate-sized facility at the Pole, along with necessary supporting infrastructure.” The panel chairman called Pole a “crown jewel.”

  Usually only such musty logs as External Panel reports, Unclassified Memoranda to the National Security Council, and Congressional Hearing Records mention “geopolitical and stewardship considerations,” or recognize that “strategic and foreign policy objectives” are “anchored at the South Pole,” or that “this vital experiment in the governance of a non-sovereign territory has been so successful.” If we relied only on these dust-caked tomes to fuel the flames of our charitable pursuits, we would soon feel the chill of self-interest, so we are lucky to have newspapers.

  Robert Lee Hotz from the Los Angeles Times got his Pole boondoggle in January 2001 and wrote an article describing “a community struggling at the limit of what the human body can endure and civilization can sustain.” He described the skiers who “walked the ice like the maze on a cathedral floor, seeking the one true journey concealed in every labyrinth. It brought them here, where nothing can grow or survive except the spirit.” Construction of the new station at Pole was called “a labor of grace and renewal at the last place on Earth.” When his plane landed back at McMurdo and the cargo door opened, he was “born again into the white.” The article ends: “If we can, we repeat certain journeys, each a voyage to something true in us, to all who will listen.”

  When the Los Angeles Times ran the story “Last Journey to The Last Place on Earth: At the South Pole, Nothing Can Grow Except the Spirit,” it was forwarded to all Antarctic staff by the RPSC Communications Manager: “Below is a piece written by Robert Lee Hotz who visited South Pole as a media event last season. It’s a ‘make you proud’ article. Please distribute to your staff.”

  Robert Lee Hotz is a science writer for the Los Angeles Times. Journalists who come to Antarctica are hand-selected by a USAP committee including media officers from NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs. Journalists apply, and NSF decides which ones are allowed on the plane. “I would like to quantify in some way our support of media visitors,” wrote an NSF publicist to her colleagues. “It will help me to analzye [sic] whether or not the return is sufficient, and to more obviously make the point to journalists—when required—that they are ‘guests’ of NSF. (Which *might* in turn increase sensitivity to giving NSF credit.)”

  By the time the “guests” arrive in Christchurch, an NSF scout has sniffed them out for trouble, alerting on-ice NSF Reps to what kinds of questions they’ve been asking (“Kelly asked about coordination among nations. Marta asked about role of State Dept.”); or their moods (“He slept comfortably on the plane and is feeling fine. He bowed out of lunch in favor of shower and shave…”); or any other notable or useful
traits (“Pam has avoided computers. She reports a pleasant train trip to Greymouth (a potential point of conversation for you).”)

  Arriving in Antarctica, they are busied with field training and boondoggles to the huts or the ice edge or the snow caves. They have a day or two in town before they are flown to the South Pole or the Dry Valleys or Siple Dome. They’re understandably excited. “Even though we’re doing a piece for ‘60 Minutes’ (among other shows),” wrote a CBS producer who deployed in January of 1999, “we’re not Mike Wallace ;-) No ambushes, no tricks; we want to work with everyone to help tell a series of great science stories as clearly, accurately, and colorfully as possible!” If such professionalism is maintained, the journalist may be invited back, or even hired to help with NSF Public Relations.

  It is more professional for a journalist writing a story about the polyethylene weather balloons going up not to ask where they come down.10 And as an adventurer, the journalist’s Antarctica card is bolder, brighter, and more dazzling if his eyes scurry away from the old leaking machines and big screen TVs. Describing American journalists who cover presidential campaigns, Joan Didion wrote: “They are willing, in exchange for ‘access,’ to transmit the images their sources wish transmitted.” Similarly, we read in the paper that science in Antarctica is the end rather than the means, and because of this generous pursuit, everything, very soon, is going to be even better than it is now.11 When the NSF-sponsored journalists step from the plane, Antarctica’s beauty speaks for itself, and the psychedelic vastness hobbles the critical faculties. Their stories recount the “howling wilderness” and the “galeforce winds” on “the highest, driest, coldest” and most “desolate” continent, which is “pristine” and “remote” and “isolated.”

  “I just got back from Antarctica,” they’re saying.

  We are like a broken record still playing classic hits from the days of Captain Cook and Columbus. The reported particulars are not always untrue, but the consensus fellowship of professional journalism keeps things simple and catchy, so that Antarctica always brims with scientists and researchers just as wooded clumps next to the freeway brim with wildlife.

  When the ad agency representing Hostess became interested in McMurdo’s eccentric Twinkie Club, whose members launched Twinkies into the winter night against monotony with pressurized airguns, a draft of a Hostess press release described the enthusiastic participants as “scientists.” When the Twinkie Club President clarified that none of them were scientists, the agency asked if the word “researcher” would be better. A New Zealand paper once wrote that an aircraft was “flying back with scientists from Antarctica,” but it was full of winter-overs, none of them scientists. Aviation Week and Space Technology calls Antarctica “a pristine frozen laboratory.”

  This notion is creatively incomplete. Science and science support play a large role in many people’s workdays, but science is also the only way to expand by the letter of the Antarctic Treaty. In 1970 Richard Nixon said, “Science has provided a successful basis for international accord, and the Antarctic is the only continent where science serves as the principal expression of national policy and interest.” As stated by the External Panel, the primary national interest is physical occupation, and science is the loophole through which the necessary infrastructure can emerge.12 For every grant-funded American scientist on the ice, there are approximately five wage earners, most of them involved in building or maintaining infrastructure. As the External Panel wrote: “The U.S.’s scientific and environmental research in Antarctica give substance and relevance to the national presence.” In other words, ironworkers don’t support science; science supports ironworkers.

  The perverted notion of science leading the brigade is nurtured by NSF and dispersed mainly through network television, newspapers, and magazines. But there are other information support staff for the American frontier. The NSF Artist’s and Writer’s Grant brings down a more sophisticated breed of bricklayer. Writer’s and Artist’s recipients are usually either naturalist writers like Barry Lopez or the genius Stephen Pyne, whose vast talents would be wasted writing about anything less than Antarctica’s history as a cultural construct; or ex-schoolteachers who make children’s books or paintings about seals and penguins, like Sandra Markle, who authored such books as Pioneering Frozen Worlds and Science to the Rescue, or Gretchen Legler, who wrote on her website: “… when we first entered the dive hut a mother seal and her baby (these are Weddell Seals) were in the dive hole in the hut, breathing hard, their black eyes and whiskers above the water line, curled around each other like a yin-yang symbol, that ancient Chinese symbol of balance.” While the seals are engaged in a cosmic dance, winter-overs are bribed not to report work injuries. While science is on its way to save the day, a fuel spill is officially reported with great understatement as “over 200 gallons,” and Lake Bonney in the Dry Valleys is tainted with glycol from a previous spill.

  These daily unpleasantries are more common than meteorite-seeking robots, seals with cameras on their heads, the discovery of new microbes, and photos of the beginning of the universe. They are Antarctic facts, but distasteful, not suited to the pristine popular image of the continent. Accordingly, everyone who arrives at the last frontier is an explorer who throws caution aside and ventures to live a dream, conducting wholesome and tidy science. Antarctica is the pure white fatted calf that will yield a feast for all if tended thus.

  This was the attitude of a man who one day came to the Waste Barn for a tour. For ten minutes he helped me throw bags of plastic in the baler. He had come down as part of NSF’s program for schoolteachers (Teachers Experiencing Antarctica) to help scientists, and to promote education about Antarctica in the classrooms of America. (Later NSF brought down journalists from Education Week to write stories about the teachers they brought down.) The teacher had worked for NSF. Later I read on his website about how he had helped me for ten minutes: “I decided to give them a hand. After all, I helped produce the trash, I might as well help recycle it.” I met the teacher again when I went to Sea Ice Training at F-Stop. The instructor asked us, in the course of introducing ourselves, to name our ideal Antarctic boondoggle. The teacher wanted to go to Pole. “It’s not for me,” he said. “There’s five thousand kids back in Wisconsin who need me to go.”

  This recasting of self-interest as generosity was masterfully executed in the famous rescue of the doctor from Pole in 1999. The incident held the attention of the press around the world. The doctor, diagnosed with breast cancer, received an airdrop of medical supplies in the middle of winter. A Baltimore Sun headline read, “Mercy flight heads to end of the Earth.” USA Today called it “a risky humanitarian mission.” An Australian paper wrote: “The drop opened a new chapter in the dramatic record of Antarctic emergency aid.” CBS called it an “unprecedented effort.” These stories did not mention that winter airdrops to Pole were standard procedure until 1996, when they were stopped because of budget cuts. 13

  The doctor was finally flown from Pole on October 16, 1999, about ten days before Pole’s first normally scheduled flight. One northern hemisphere journalist called it a “never-before-attempted feat of flying to the South Pole in deepest winter …” It was so deep into winter, in fact, that it might have been called the beginning of summer.

  Out with the doctor came a worker who had an undiagnosed broken hip. He had been in such pain that he couldn’t work most of the winter and had to walk on crutches. When both he and the doctor were flown from Pole, he was dropped off in McMurdo to wait for the next plane, while she went on to Christchurch, where the media would be waiting. Some headlines from that time included the following: Mercy Dash to Antarctica; Antarctic Mercy Run: Dangerous Airlift for Ailing Doc; Rescue at the End of the Earth. At lunch, I talked to the guy with the busted hip who had been dumped in McMurdo. Though at the time he attributed his pain to kidney stones, he didn’t mind waiting for the next, less publicity-arousing flight, and found the situation amusing. A feather in the cap of NSF’s
Office of Legislative and Public Affairs, the rescue story rephrased slight deviations from standard procedure as heroic goodwill. Public approval is a useful amulet against future budget cuts, such as the one that threatened The Program and eliminated the airdrops in 1996. The Rescue had all the elements for a good return on investment.14

  In early 1999, while the doctor was still adjusting to her first months at the South Pole, a Washington Post journalist, Curt Suplee, was allowed on the continent by NSF. He already had a good history with NSF, and his interests that year revealed a perfect triangle of Antarctic media stories: climate, astrophysics, and a story on penguins. Two years after the South Pole rescue, Curt Suplee had left the Washington Post to work for NSF, where he offered suggestions on how to handle the famous South Pole doctor’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, whose associate producer had approached NSF with requests for a special email hook-up to Pole, and for stock footage of Pole and the new station construction. “There is absolutely no way to predict what Dr. Nielsen will say in a forum such as the Oprah show, with an audience literally in the tens of millions,” the ex-journalist cautioned his colleagues, citing her statement that her cancer was caused by stress. “One does not succeed on these shows by talking about the weather.” He suggested that NSF not be involved in arranging an email hook-up to Pole for the show—“What question will be asked? What will the answer be? Is the modest amount of attention NSF will get conceivably worth the possible downside?”—but that NSF would provide stock footage “as long as it clearly emphasizes science and dedication to research.”