Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

He told me he was a medicine man and had visions. He told me I would be rich. I would be a great leader. I would someday meet him on the floor of the Navajo congress. Our faces had to be close together to hear each other, so I took a lot of spit.

  “These people here don’t understand anything,” he said. “I don’t belong here. Not in Antarctica. These people cannot understand the Navajo. The Navajo respect humility.”

  I told him about the Americans I had met in South Korea who had lived there for three years and couldn’t order from a menu. I told him those Americans were filthy people.

  He told me that if I wanted to know the Navajo I had to learn the language.

  I excused myself and went to find another beer.

  Later that night Injun Joe, who had been kicked out of the bar early in the evening, was also kicked out of the party. Later in the season he would be kicked out of Antarctica altogether.

  The new fleet of red trucks had been around for about a year, and the fleet of old orange trucks had been sent out on Vessel last summer. Only recently, though, had we learned of the trucks’ fate after leaving McMurdo. The Director of Operations was beside himself because he had thought the trucks would fetch more money than they did. Most of us had gauged the trucks’ value as being approximately that of their weight in scrap metal, plus the value of any salvageable parts. And that, Denver was now finding out, was their value.

  In desperate yet half-hearted attempts by the Waste managers to get us to feel some sense of responsibility for the heat they were enduring, they sent us stern emails about the poor loading of the trucks during Vessel last summer, even though some of the recipients weren’t in McMurdo when the trucks were being loaded. The actual sale price was unknown to us, but we knew it was less than they thought, because shit rolls downhill, and clumps and clods were coming to rest around us. Our minimal involvement with the project, contrasted with the volume of shit rolling to us, was a confusing lesson—seemingly to disregard anything that came from uphill.

  The “truck problem” began like this: all summer an entire fleet of orange pickup trucks and vans sat on the pier. Whoever was in charge of such things (no one knew who) had determined that the trucks would be loaded and strapped to the deck of the ship. Suddenly, once the vessel had arrived and we were in the midst of Offload, someone decided that the trucks had to be loaded into milvans. We were told that this was to keep the trucks from being damaged on the deck during the long voyage.

  It was amusing at the time to hear of concerns about the trucks being damaged. We knew right away that these decisions were coming from Denver, from someone who had no idea what he or she was talking about, from someone who lived in a world where trucks worked for about a decade on unpaved roads in Antarctica and don’t depreciate but are treated as rare gems, perhaps to be sold at auction as historic artifacts.

  The trucks were a mess. The tires were flat, the rims falling off, the windows broken, the grills busted, the engines full of ice; few, if any, would start. Putting them in milvans was a rush job, and no one was really quite sure whose job it was. At first it was not Waste’s responsibility; then, after a few days in which no trucks were loaded, it was, and then, after a few days of loading trucks, it suddenly wasn’t anymore. No one knew what was going on, but everyone was in a hurry.

  I spent a day helping to load the 50 or so trucks into milvans. The technique settled upon was this: one person sat in the truck to steer while the other chained the front of the chassis to a loader and dragged the truck back across the pad opposite the milvan, making sure not to block the path of semis driving through every few minutes. When the coast was clear, the loader would push the truck backward into an open milvan. Since most of the trucks had flat tires, the rear suspension would usually take a heavy hit bumping into the milvan. Since there was no side clearance, the mirrors would get ripped off, and the sides would get scratched. Since the trucks didn’t start and the loader couldn’t push them far enough into the milvan, a pickle was brought down to push the truck to the back. A pickle is designed to lift pallets and ill suited to moving large vehicles. Loud snaps and pops and the uncomfortable screech of warping metal rang through the chilly air like a church bell in a metal baler.

  Saul, manager of Waste Operations, and Don, his boss, manager of Waste Programs, had come down to watch all of this. Saul and Don, often referred to as a unit, had a good rapport with us. If they made a mistake, you could accuse them of smoking crack, and they would return the accusation. They usually left us alone to do our jobs, a management style we appreciated. Don knew our department’s responsibilities well, and therefore he knew the responsibilities of other departments also; he had a protectiveness toward us that at times seemed strictly territorial, but at other times paternal. He smoked, and he had a belly on him. He was self-effacing about his age and his brains and his weight, but he kept a well-groomed moustache, boasted of his computer prowess, and left no doubt that he was the king of his domain. Don knew The Program’s politics as well as almost anyone. I asked him once why the relationship between NSF and the subcontractor doesn’t always seem cut and dried. He said, “NSF is a science outfit attempting to oversee what is essentially an industrial operation. The people who have risen into the upper echelons of the NSF come from a background of science, and science administration. They’re not used to hardhats, so they make bad decisions that cause hundreds of thousands of lost dollars in the blink of an eye. Eventually the contractor they hire realizes this and begins to exert their expertise, sometimes where it is not, politically, wanted.” The Program has an elaborate structure of departments and agencies that no one quite understands. Experienced managers who have spent a lifetime commanding vast budgets and enormous crews at government contract sites around the world have stumbled out of Antarctica in complete bewilderment. From years of experience, Don has lucid insights into a system of almost mystical complexity and opacity. He enjoyed talking office politics, and I probed him about them whenever he was in town. Don would eventually have an Antarctic island named after him.

  Saul, second-in-command, also maintained a familiar rapport with us. We could play darts and drink beer with him and never have to watch our mouths. He was self-effacing also, and responded with good humor to being called a bald dwarf. Saul was like a vibrating nerve; even in good spirits he never seemed completely relaxed. We said his knees never stopped jerking, because when a problem arose, his preferred solution was the one quickest to implement.

  Saul and Don came down to the ice pier to watch us load the trucks. When not chaining a chassis to the forks of the loader, I stood with them, shooting the shit, exchanging jibes and insults. We laughed at the absurdity of the task that had fallen to us at the last minute from muddy skies—these pathetic trucks stuffed into milvans to protect them as precious cargo when they were not precious, nor was this a solution if they had been. But if that’s what needed to happen, that’s what needed to happen. We laughed.

  But now the trucks had hit the spreadsheet.

  CHAPTER 8 NOTES

  1 “Last year, midwinter, that party of ten, eleven researchers and staffers got evacuated out of McMurdo. Biggest incident of its kind ever. USAP was a little vague with its explanations, don’t ask me why. Maybe the beakers came down with cabin fever, went a little crazy, got into an oldfashioned punch-out, and were embarrassed to admit it. Or maybe the caginess was just a typical bureaucratic reflex. Next thing you know, though, you got thousands of conspiracy theorists on the Internet posting bulletins that they made first contact with flying saucer people. There’s Antarctica for you.”—from Cold War, one of Tom Clancy’s “Powerplays” series, 2001

  2 A can of fiddleheads had been floating around the skua piles for several consecutive years. Someone told me that he finally ate them just so they would go away.

  3 “Censorship by the NSF of electronic mail (e-mail) continued to infuriate scientific parties operating out of the U.S. base at McMurdo as recently as 1990. Then the NSF Representative would hav
e the e-mail printed out to check it for possible personal messages before it was released for transmission. However, by my latest trip in 1995, technology, the vast bulk of e-mail messages, and common sense had solved these problems. I was able to log into my computer in Denver from a terminal at McMurdo and send and receive messages directly.”—John C. Behrendt, Innocents on the Ice: A Memoir of Antarctic Exploration, 1957. University Press of Colorado, 1998

  4 The earliest known performance of “I’m a Little Teapot” in Antarctica was by a civilian at Ellsworth Station in March of 1957.

  5 One of the comms techs told me that the roof of the T-site building had once blown off in a storm and when the storm ended some of the equipment that is still used today was packed in snow. The tech at the time holed up in a shed and ate cookies until the storm ended and someone could come up and get him.

  6 “While I was sitting reading in my cabin this afternoon at half past one—the men have washday today—I suddenly heard three or four long, terrible screams. I thought the noise came from the afterdeck and hurried there together with the doctor and Koren. There was nothing to be seen. Then we ran to the engine room but there was nothing to be seen there, either. Everyone was inside. The commander was walking on the deck and had heard nothing. Lecointe and Racovitza were on the ice and had not heard anything either while Arctowski was asleep. The doctor, Koren and myself were the only ones who heard the terrible screaming. I do not know what it was but I have recorded this event as accurately as possible for a number of reasons.”—Roald Amundsen, Belgica Diary

  7 “Even thinking seemed too great an effort. Men became absentminded, staring vacantly and having difficulty concentrating on anything. Discussions usually did not stay on one topic for long, and talk tended to become assertive and unresponsive. Conversation turned more and more to badinage—the language salty and the banter ribald.”—Historian Eugene Rodgers, description of Little America inhabitants by Midwinter’s Day in June 1929.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE UNITED STATES EXPLORING EXPEDITION

  The outcome can be a more benevolent future for all citizens in all nations...

  —Dr. Neal Lane, NSF Director, at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

  The Author having laboured so long and done so much to serve and instruct the Publick, without any advantage to himself, has at last thought of a project which will tend to the great benefit of all Mankind, and produce a handsom Revenue to the Author.

  —Jonathan Swift, “A Project for the universal benefit of mankind,” in which Swift satirically announces to publish a work describing the unexplored territory Terra Australis incognita

  26 June 01

  David,

  I have received my first classic Antarctic injury. I have frostnipped the tips of the fingers on my right hand. No, now, don’t worry. It required no medical attention, and already the pain is going away—though they are still tender—and there is no visible disfigurement. This is the way of classic Antarctic injuries; they are wrought covertly, the weather teaming up with the body to seize control of strategic facilities until their demands are met. In this case, I was walking in a class-action storm trying not to spill the can of beer clutched in my ungloved hand. The back door of the dorm, wherein lay our supplies of liquor and handy ice buckets, had frozen shut and no amount of vigorous kicking and pummeling would jar the latch mechanism loose, so the band of hearty explorers and I, sound and seasoned in all cold-weather survivalism, decided to go around to the front door. In this merciless frontier where one’s life is only a temporary concession by the whimsical crushing forces of nature, my beer had grown warm, and I knew the mere hundred-yard walk to the front door would replenish the quality of my supplies. Like a company considering its contract workers, I had given little thought to the biological tools that merely facilitate the logistics of some vague inebriating purpose. The front door was open and we continued our research, me being the only ungloved, running my hands under warm water for a short period emitting nervous laughter.

  After concluding some pressing research, we were very drunk and completely ravenous… [So] we bravely ventured out into the fray to get to the variety of meat and rice dishes that awaited us in the institutional cafeteria where a big screen TV continuously airs Sesame Street… The next day the entire station would receive an email saying that we could be terminated for disobeying orders to stay inside during a Condition 1. One young woman, N, who read this email and then deleted it received a call within minutes from her supervisor, E. E told N that she had received a call from the Station Manager saying that N did not read the Safety email and that it is mandatory that she read all Safety emails. Apparently there are electronic functions that allow the sender of an email to determine whether a message has been opened before being deleted. N, who like everyone else uses Microsoft Outlook, a program capable of personal settings which can allow the user to view a message in a frame without actually opening it, had been flagged by the Safety Girl, who alerted the Station Manager who alerted N’s supervisor who assured N that this was a very serious issue. There are other reasons the Safety Girl is very funny. I’ll tell you why.

  You see, since the beginning of winter an entire crew of carpenters and painters and various tradesmen has been remodeling dorm 203A. It has recently come to light that the tile flooring and some of the drywall in that dorm has asbestos in it. I don’t know how the initial question came up at all, but once the cat was out of the bag, it was discovered that a report in an office of some medium-level building coordinator who isn’t even on the ice and who is no doubt involved in important matters in Denver, indeed confirmed that there was asbestos in said flooring. Flooring that was ripped up, cut up, and smashed by hand so as to fit into the dumpsters by workers who, during the demolition, continually came to lunch covered with a fine dust, and who were unaware of the results of the report that no one told them about, perhaps to be saved for a rainy day’s reading by some giggling accountant aware of the costs of asbestos abatement. There is much ado about much involving the incident, though I brought it up only to make this point: the Safety Girl has written exactly no emails about asbestos while her regular reports about slippery ice and safety glasses and injury records and safety statistics continue unabated. My supervisor tells me about the Supervisor’s Meetings and revealed to me that the Safety Girl’s contribution to the matter at last Saturday’s meeting was this: a safety video about asbestos is now available for our weekly safety meetings.

  When the workers on the 203 remodel discovered they had been exposed to asbestos, they stopped work in the building. The FEMC Supervisor at a meeting accused NSF of “criminal negligence,” and wrote in a follow-up report: “An incredible error was made in removing the sheet vinyl with no abatement procedures, and this error was compounded by aggressive sweeping of any possible remaining asbestos-containing dust. There can hardly be a worse procedure for asbestos-containing material.”

  Though the exposure had already occurred, and though the asbestos flooring in the building had long been removed, the Safety Girl took air quality samples, after which the Safety Board in Highway 1, usually plastered with color charts of injuries broken down by body part and department, displayed only an array of charts showing that the asbestos levels in the buildings were currently within OSHA standards.

  Fingers pointed in all directions, and contract supervisors, who had overseen the work but had not orchestrated it, had to defend themselves from Denver’s immediate thirst for nonmanagerial blood. Even the unlikely head of the Paint Shop supervisor was prodded to see if it would look good on the stake.

  The key element that prevented Denver from pinning the negligence on some expendable and unsuspecting local supervisor was the asbestos report by AECOM, a subcontractor that had performed an asbestos inspection of McMurdo and Pole Stations from October 25, 1991 to December 12, 1991. The asbestos report had been gathering dust, ignored much as was the Royal Navy’s cure for scurvy in the he
roic era of Antarctic management. The report lay on a bookshelf in the office of a full-time FEMC administrator who had left at the end of the summer to work in Denver for the winter. Local winter supervisors had never heard of the report, which stated that the vinyl flooring in 203 contained 25-30% chrysotile asbestos. The authors noted, “Sheet vinyl flooring was observed in the vestibules, laundry rooms, and janitor’s closets. This material has been damaged in several areas and the friable backing has been exposed.” The inspectors suggested, “These areas should be repaired with duct tape or otherwise encapsulated to prevent the release of asbestos fibers and should be scheduled for removal.”

  Wilson came to my room one night to tell me about a conference call he had with Denver. He had led the push to accurately document the incident. Some workers on the 203 project, the foremen, the station manager, and a few others sat around the speakerphone. On the other end of the speakerphone were several people in Denver, including Jim Scott and the Safety Guy. The previous summer the Safety Guy had answered questions from children at a grade school in the U.S. He wrote, “My job is to try to keep people safe from occupational hazards that may come from their particular work place…” Now he discouraged the workers from reporting their exposure to the doctor. He urged them not to overburden McMurdo’s overly busy medical staff. This sort of advice is probably what a USAP Safety Review Panel had tried to prevent when it suggested in a 1988 NSF report, “Contractor support for [the tasks of the Safety, Environment, and Health Officer] must be totally separate from the U.S. Antarctic Program prime support contractor in order to avoid real and/or perceived conflict of interest.” Jim Scott and the Safety Guy would not answer any questions about whether OSHA policies had been disregarded. Wilson asked what the plans were for disciplinary action against management. Everyone was told to leave, and Wilson sat alone with the speakerphone, alone with Denver. While those excused from the room wondered whether or when the mesothelioma would start, Jim Scott yelled at Wilson for asking about disciplinary action against management in front of the others, in violation of policy.1