Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  I inadvertently crossed the line from selfless sacrifice into business one summer when my intestine blurped through my abdominal muscles as I lifted a bulky HF radio. I thought I had pulled a muscle, but when the pain didn’t recede I went to Medical. The doctor determined that it was a hernia, and told me to avoid lifting more than 50 pounds at work and to have surgery when I went home. Our transaction was complete. That afternoon, as I remembered the word “surgery,” I went back to Medical to determine how this expensive process would unfold.

  “Am I supposed to fill anything out for Worker’s Comp?” I asked the Medical administrator after explaining my diagnosis.

  “Sure,” she said. “Here’s an Injury Report Form.”

  I filled it out then gave it back to her.

  “Okay!” she said, as she slipped the form into a folder.

  “Okay,” I said, standing in front of her desk awkwardly.

  “You’re all set,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Later I learned that you can’t PQ (Physically Qualify) to be rehired if you’ve had surgery within six months of deployment. I went to HR to see if I could get the ball rolling. I explained my wish to be rehired next season to Missy, the friendly HR representative, who told me I should wait until I went home to take care of all this.

  “Is there any paperwork I need to fill out?” I asked.

  She didn’t know.

  I said that I didn’t want to endanger future contracts by these events. If there was no paperwork, that was fine, I told her, but if there was paperwork, then I could fill it out in the meantime. She told me to call Jo, the HR rep in Denver.

  Jo was very friendly. She told me that the work comp carrier dealt with all the claims, and that I should call them when I went home. “I’ll be home in February,” I said. “Is there any paperwork that could be sent to my PO Box in the meantime?”

  “Why can’t you wait until you get home?” she asked.

  “Because I want to work next summer. If I get a summer contract, or a winter contract, or any contract, I don’t want to be physically disqualified for it because of a delay in paperwork or whatever.”

  “You have a winter contract?”

  “No. But if I did, then this would be even more important.”

  She said she would call the Work Comp insurer to find out what the process was and that I should call her the next day.

  The next day she didn’t sound as friendly. She had not called the Work Comp carrier. “I called Missy in McMurdo,” she said. “She checked your file and you don’t have a winter contract.”

  “I never said I had a winter contract,” I told her.

  “I thought you did,” she said.

  My supervisor told me later that HR had called him, his boss, and his boss’ boss and had told each of them that I was trying to get out of my present contract. That’s when I dropped the questions about medical insurance.

  A few days after I returned from Pole, the field instructors at F-Stop invited the Wastees and the GAs to Room With a View, a Scott tent planted during the summer at the base of Mt. Erebus. After work we piled in the Hagglund and rode to the Scott Base Transition, where we mounted skidoos and sped over the sea ice and then back onto Ross Island until we reached the base of the volcano. We ate, peed in the snow by a yellow flag, and took photos. A dark cloud hung like a wool blanket draped over the sky. Inland the gray light purged sky and snow of contrasts; with eyes wide open nothing was visible but a uniform gray as pure as sleep. The ice shelf to the south was glowing. People complained that the clouds were blocking the view of Erebus.

  One of the guys on the boondoggle, Arthur, was a cop in his other life. He was the one who had posted signs all over McMurdo selling phone cards featuring pictures of penguins and icebergs. He also had manufactured and brought down packaged CDs of the hundreds of pictures he’d taken throughout his seasons. Many of the photos were of a teddy bear named Spencer in different locations.

  I told him I had always been curious about law enforcement and asked him about his job at home. He worked in a small town, he said. “And it’s the communities themselves who decide the kind of law enforcement they receive. It depends on how much they’re willing to take,” he said. “If you don’t like your local law enforcement and want to change it, you have to be active. It’s the apathetic communities—”

  The trip leader hollered for us to start our machines and follow him. We sped down the hill to a patch of snow scarred with skidoo tracks and footprints of recent visitors to IMAX Crevasse, so nicknamed because of its use in an IMAX movie called Antarctica. We roped together in groups of four in case one of us should fall into a cavity hidden by a snowbridge. We filed down the hill and then crept along the bottom of the colossal chasm. The crevasse walls were infused with a thousand blurred hues and covered with intricate striations. I thought of small objects, like boxes of envelopes and folding chairs, and then heavy machinery and airplanes and mobile homes. All these things could fit in here at the same time. But there were no handrails or counter space. This crack in the ice was indifferent to our dimensions. We were warm microbes infecting the frozen wound. It would have been enough to unhinge anyone from culture, were it not for the group, roped together and chattering within the monstrous gloom. Arthur, behind me, was asking J.T., behind him, about the weather of northern Wisconsin in April. When the line moved slowly Arthur pulled out the teddy bear and took pictures of it against the crevasse wall.

  I was roped to the Hot GA in front of me. We didn’t speak. Once only, in a twilight blue, walls of dark ice rising on either side, we kissed.

  The far end of the crevasse opened into a cavern. I was gawking at the forms and patterns and fractures of the surfaces when Arthur edged over beside me. “Pressure, Ice, and Time,” he said with gravity, like a National Geographic narrator, before sighing.

  After we left the cavern we rested outside in a smaller grotto. People ate cookies. I noticed for the first time Arthur’s amazing array of gear. His sleek black clothes matched his form-fitting backpack. They were cold weather clothes, but managed to look as thin as a sweatsuit. I remarked on his gear, and he showed me his watch that, if I understood correctly, would function as perfectly on the moon as at the bottom of the ocean. Unlike anyone else in our group, including the trip leader, he wore a bouquet of carbiners on his waist. We all wore connecting ropes clipped to harnesses, and each of us had an ice pick to grip the mild hummocks we had scrambled over.

  “Have you been here before?” I asked.

  “Many times,” he said.

  “What are all those carbiners for?”

  “You can’t be too safe,” he said.

  We inched slowly in formation through a serpentine gallery of archaic frost and then up a featureless rounded incline. When we got to the skidoos, I couldn’t get mine started. Arthur came over to help, and started it on the second try. I thanked him.

  Each year around New Year’s the Coast Guard icecutter cleaves through miles of thick sea ice to get to McMurdo, where it docks at the ice pier and loiters off the coast until the end of the season, tending patches of open water and loosening the sea ice in hope that the wind will blow it all out to sea. The boat slices through ice that supported landing planes just a few weeks before. In this way it makes a path for the tanker that delivers the next year’s fuel, followed by the supply vessel.

  The arrival of the supply vessel begins Ship Offload of milvans full of cargo for the coming year’s operations.1 The cargo includes materials for construction projects, spare parts for machines, and janitorial supplies. It includes new videos, liquor, and penguin souvenirs. The ship deposits a mountain of liquid eggs and frozen chicken.

  For some departments, and in terms of traffic around town, Offload is the busiest time of the year. A year’s worth of stuff in milvans is unloaded in about eight days, and a year’s worth of plastic, cardboard, piss, heavy metal, ground wood, and radioactive contaminant is loaded and exported to the United States
. Some people work all season just preparing for Offload, which runs 24/7 until it’s finished, requiring of most people 12-hour shifts with no day off. Crews split into day and night shifts if they don’t have them already. Someone must man the scalehouse to weigh the trucks. The Galley must prepare extra snacks and hot food for workers at the ice pier. A hundred NAVCHAPs (Navy Cargo Handling and Port Group) are flown from the U.S. to help. (The bars are closed during Offload, and no alcohol is sold at the store, reportedly because one of the NAVCHAPs drank himself to death years ago.) A line of trucks is on the pier at all times, each one waiting for a “can.” The Supply Department drags people from other departments to keep up with the mammoth workload. Bamboo, bundles of orange plastic road markers, construction steel, pallets of food, and thousands of mysterious crates are stacked around town, then disappear gradually, squirreled away to the cargo lines. Offload marks the end of the summer season, after which people will start flying to Christchurch.

  This season the Polar Star icecutter arrived. Last season it was the Polar Sea. The first serves Starbucks coffee, and the other serves Seattle’s Best Coffee, each from a small counter by the weight room, where we lined up as soon as we boarded for our seasonal Morale Cruise one Sunday at the end of January. As the boat plowed through the ice like a bullet through cake, widening the shipping lane to the ice edge, a few hundred of us wandered the decks in red parkas cooing at minke whales and sipping hot coffee from Seattle through petite oval holes in sculpted plastic lids. We were allowed on the bridge and almost anywhere on the upper decks.

  The Coasties are gracious and courteous hosts, patiently conceding the right-of-way as McMurdoites lollygag in the gangways, oblivious to the most fundamental military protocol. They have creased pants and shiny footwear. We are hairy and soaked in filth. Their pins, stripes, and baubles of rank remind us that we have more freedom than they do. We snore sprawled on the deck in the helo hangar, our limp paws stuffed with souvenir t-shirts from the ship’s store.

  As the vessel cut the ice, squads of penguins sprang from the water and fled in terror on their bellies across the ice. Some of the seals took evasive action, but most just watched as we slid by. We have heard of them getting popped like grapes beneath the boat. Whales stitched the surface of the open sea with spray. Cracks emerged in sheets of ice like dark lightning on a clear white sky. The boat wedged the floes apart, each one disintegrating at the edges, sounding like crumpling styrofoam, but deep like a toothache. Clean tables of ice beside the ship were spattered with blue stains in the snow that vanished once washed with seawater. The boat maintained an even speed. The effects were mesmerizing and too numerous to watch.

  In their wooden ships, the first people to enter McMurdo Sound were on the edge of the known world. Every mile south was a new mile of map previously unreleased to the public. No one had lived here before moving on, and no one had been here by accident on the way to somewhere else. The people who first sailed through these waters were in danger. Now as the hulking steel vessel crashed through the powerless terrain, I reflected that among my earliest memories were those of supermarkets and parking lots. I once spent six hours at a video game and got a million points. I had worked for Kits Cameras, Subway sandwiches, and as a valet at International House of Pancakes. I had once been an office manager. As I dawdled on the deck of the shuddering ship that chewed up 4,500 gallons of fuel per hour, I imagined that I was trapped under ice, clawing futilely to reach the surface. I imagined falling overboard, floating paralyzed with cold as a pod of killer whales nuzzled from below. Or being swept into the propellers, the meat of my body then bobbing peacefully in the ship’s wake. One wrong move and my goose would be cooked, I thought. What’s that asshole doing here?

  Howard Dell stood nearby in his pristine red parka. He worked for the company that bought the recycled waste from the USAP. Last year in Denver he had tried to pep-talk the Waste crew into sorting plastic into 12 types, a process that would require roughly ten times the labor and processing space and would save his company a little money. His company also sold industrial equipment. His casual but tucked-in decorum pleased our managers. He was always trying to sell them something or other, and they enjoyed being tempted by his catalogue of Waste Management technologies that entailed certain improvement. When he had visited Pole, he had tried to pump up Kath’s enthusiasm for a cardboard baler. “We don’t have electricity running to the Waste building,” she had reminded him.

  I moved away from him and wandered up to the bridge. There were telephone handsets in the ceiling and a video monitor that showed the ice cracking in front of the ship. Below, employees clogged the railing in red parkas, flowing from one side to the other as the sights escalated in novelty. Seals were household objects by the second pod of whales. Delighted gasps had ceased a few dozen penguins earlier. After the icebergs, the front deck thinned out as if after the biggest firework. I went down to the rear deck and found Butch lounging on one of the nets at the perimeter. While we were talking, a McMurdoite in a red parka piped at him from nearby, “I think that’s probably against the rules to sit on that.”

  I walked across the yard one night after dinner. The Hot GA and her friend Sonia were on nightshift for Offload and were strapping some cargo between dorms 210 and 211. I stopped for a minute to shoot the shit.

  “We were just talking about your cock,” the Hot GA explained.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Sonia wants to see it.”

  “Not here,” I said to Sonia. “Let me take you somewhere warm.”

  “That sounds kind of dirty,” she said, and then the girls had to get back to work.

  Though living so close to one’s coworkers has many unwelcome aspects, a powerful motive behind chronic Antarctic recidivism is the polar community’s opportunities and appetite for heedless fucking. This attraction, best in the summers, is never mentioned in employee handbooks or at the job fairs. People are thrown together for a finite time. No one lives in town permanently, and each will return, if at all, under different circumstances. Winter-overs have to take an HIV test to get their jobs. Each season is a clean slate that makes it easy to change partners or to hook up for kicks. Though the gender ratio is unbalanced, and many will go hungry for long periods, whatever sex does happen whips the mob into an expectant frenzy, as the sound of coins piling up in a nearby slot machine excites the other gamblers. Everyone has busybody roommates, so people have sex in the greenhouse, the library, the aquarium, and the Cosray Lab. Any warm little generator shack will do. The radio station, the record library, and the band room are premium, because there are only a few keys to them, and no one is likely to intrude. Sometimes you’d swear it was a full moon by the sweaty tension and people making out in Gallagher’s on a Wednesday night for no particular reason. On these nights there are antics in the bar bathrooms, in the dorm lounges, and weird careful sex behind curtains while the roommate pretends not to notice.

  There have been so many hail-Mary fucks that men learn never to say never, despite a woman’s boyfriend, despite the fiancée back home, despite marriage. Men with wives at home turn to “ice-wives.” Couples form who later marry—in the BFC is a wedding photo where both the bride and groom are ice folk, and about half of the guests are somehow involved with the ice—and long relationships, even marriages, are broken within months of exposure to the sexual free-for-all.

  Classic tales are repeated, such as the one about the married couple who once worked on the same shift in the Galley. The woman had an affair with a Navy guy and would bring him back to the dorm room when her husband was out skiing. Everyone knew about it except the husband. Eventually the affair was revealed, and the married couple separated, but continued working in the Galley on the same shift.

  A man who had sex with at least three gorgeous women at Pole one summer is a legendary figure whose name will be uttered with quiet reverence for a few seasons, and he may have a cargo berm or other industrial landmark named after him. A woma
n who manages to sleep with an NSF manager in McMurdo or an FEMC manager at Pole gains social power, an ambassador’s immunity from the piddling hoops traversed by hoi polloi. The sneaking around of big players is of particular interest, for it affects tomorrow’s interdepartmental leniencies. The doors in 209 in the early morning are those most carefully closed.

  Here’s a more clinical view from a psych report by Lawrence A. Palinkas:Temporary relationships between male and female crewmembers are a common and accepted part of the winter-over experience. Although John’s relationship was not widely approved by the winter-over crew as a whole because it violated the normative rule that this form of coping behavior should not be exercised by married men or women, it was tolerated because it met the individual’s immediate need (to depend upon someone to cope with the isolation) and because it produced an improvement in John’s performance at work. Thus, although the extra-marital affair may have been viewed as maladaptive back in the United States, it was seen as a pragmatic means for coping with the unique circumstances of the Antarctic physical and social environment.

  As the female population (30% to 40%) is always smaller than the male population, a unique sexual culture forms. Women, whether they like it or not, have the pick of the litter. A woman there in the early ’80s, when the female population was even lower, said that living at Pole was “like being a bone in a pack of dogs.” One woman who has been down for many years said she enjoyed the attention for the first few seasons but tired of it, eventually finding it more of a hassle than anything else. She said some women treasured the ego boost of having a hundred suitors at their beck and call. A female friend reports that, as long as a woman maintains good standing with other women on station, there is not much damage to social status if she wants to sleep around, but that if someone avoids other women and only hangs out with guys, the other women will probably turn on her.