Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson
weeks before, at the Driver’s Safety Course in the upstairs lounge of the Crary Lab. The course was mandatory for most employees. Unlike most of us, who were dressed in insulated brown Carhartt overalls for working outside, the Safety Guy wore jeans and a Denver Broncos t-shirt.
“Well, let’s get started,” he said finally, once the room had filled. “Welcome to Driver’s Safety Training.”
He told us that conditions in McMurdo were treacherous because we’d often be driving on ice; that the speed limit through town was 15 miles per hour; and that it was mandatory for us to wear seatbelts at all times. We must make full stops at all stop signs.
“Just like in the U.S.,” he said, “driving here is not a right. It’s a privilege.” He stretched a pause, pregnant with omen. “What that means is that if you’re caught breaking the speed limit, you can have your driving privileges revoked. Now, if your job requires your use of a vehicle, and you can’t drive…” he smiled and held up his hands palms out, as if to show that he wasn’t holding a weapon, “…then that means you might not be able to fulfill your contract and may be sent home.”
There was another pause, a sinking in of consequences.
“Okay? So let’s just be safe out there and drive slowly. I’m here for your benefit. My job here is to make sure that you have a good season and go back safely to your families.”
One moment he said that all vehicles were government vehicles and that we could never use them for non-work purposes. The next moment he said that we were taxpayers and that tax money bought these vehicles, so we should take care of them as if they were our own. Each of these messages he delivered as if explaining something as natural as a tide chart. He ended by saying that if we ever had any safety-related concerns, we should just stop by his office. And that if we ever had any questions, we should feel free to ask.
Then he told us to come up and show him our U.S. driver’s licenses. We rose and shifted in a haphazard queue to have our names checked on a list he kept on his clipboard. When I handed him my driver’s license, he reviewed it meticulously before checking me off. I cracked some little joke that made him smile so over the next few weeks we politely acknowledged each other in the hallways.
When I had finished my work at the Playhouse, I drove up to Building 140 to fork a White Paper that was on my collection list. I saw Nero outside strapping something to a pallet, so I climbed out of my loader to say hi.
I first met Nero one morning during my first summer when I dropped by the food freezer to investigate the legendary supply of hot dogs I had heard about. McMurdo had enough hot dogs, if they were laid end to end, to stretch to Pole. Years ago, when a Galley manager had set up a 24/7 self-help hot dog warmer in the Galley to alleviate the swollen inventory, the food purchaser back in The States compounded the problem by ordering even more hot dogs to keep up with the spike in consumption. With a forklift in the warehouse, Nero raised me to the ceiling so I could photograph the few accessible pallets of wieners, the bulk of them buried beneath a thick plateau of frozen jalapeño poppers and cocktail smokies. He also moved a cabinet from an office wall to show me various graffiti commemorating the hot dogs. McMurdo’s legacy as having the world’s southernmost obscene supply of hot dogs ended at the turn of the century, when most of the franks were retro’d from the continent to an unknown fate.
Nero had many stories from his time in The Program. He had been coming down since ‘94. His first year some guys abducted a penguin and took pictures of it stuffed in bed with someone who had passed out drunk. The irritated bird made a mess and ran around squawking until someone finally let it outside. He had taken part in the first live video feed from Pole, and he was around for some of McMurdo’s most classic events, such as the druginfested winter airdrop in the mid-’90s, and the Hammer Attack incident of winter ’96. Actually, he has been at the center of strange events his entire life. One time when he was a child, Nero’s father had taken him along in the car to kill grandpa, but Nero’s uncle pulled up alongside them, and his father and his uncle screamed at each other through the wind, weaving neck and neck at 70 miles an hour, until the errand was aborted. As a child, Nero had a pet raccoon. When Nero matured, his parents asked him to burn down the house for the insurance money. He had once taken a strange woman home, where she bit off a chunk of his scrotum. Nero often says, “It’s all good.”
Briefly he was a clothed extra in a porn movie. The atmosphere on the set was jovial. One time the men dipped their cocks in some bitter solution as a practical joke before a blowjob scene. The women joked about biting off their dicks, and the men joked that the only way to shut them up was to blow loads down their throats. Between scenes, the other men would stand together naked in the bathroom drinking vitamin potions and joking as they absentmindedly tugged at their cocks. One of the guys wore a gold medallion depicting the fingers of a hand encircling the earth.
Around the time of his film stint, Nero was on a Los Angeles freeway driving to work in an expensive car. The seat was adjusted to accommodate his tree-like height, his long hair bunched in a ponytail, and his muscled arm stretched to the steering wheel; he wore sunglasses and was talking on a cellphone. As traffic slowed, he looked at the people in the other cars and some of them looked exactly like him. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he thought. Then he got a job stacking hot dogs in a freezer in Antarctica.
“Nero, what’s up, dude.”
We stood out of the wind next to my idling machine. Dry wisps of snow snaked over the roads as though the entire town were being dusted for fingerprints.
“Hey, man, did you hear about the janitors?” he asked.
“Uh-uh.”
“I guess they were watchin’ TV in one of the lounges during work. The guy told me they missed their break and so took a late break, but whatever. Some NSF Reps were giving a tour to some DVs and caught them watching whatever-the-fuck in the lounge. One of the Upper Case dorms. He fired ‘em on the spot. One of them was a supervisor, too.”
“So NSF is going to start cleaning toilets or what? Looks like we’re going to be a community pretty soon.”
“Looks that way. I gotta run.”
USAP history is rife with exciting tales of termination and exile, the bulk of them low-level firings early in the summer. It’s easy to understand why some people are fired. In the summer of 1998, Sean was fired for throwing rocks at Ron, who was trying to run him over with a loader. Their rivalry stemmed from a disagreement over which was the best techno club in Christchurch. In many cases, though, firings are largely understood to be a matter of slaying sacrificial lambs, as people in higher positions, or those who have seniors with clout to protect them, aren’t fired for greater infractions. Common are the stories of uncorrected blunder and negligence by someone with allies in the inner sanctum of Denver or NSF, such as the station manager who once rolled a truck, or the System Administrator who made lascivious commentaries to a woman on his favorite of her boyfriend’s emails to her, or the managers who broke into the bar, or the doctor who canceled his office hours so he could take Swing Dance lessons, or the other doctor who emailed a patient’s medical information to her entire supervisor list, or the three doctors who all prescribed different antibiotics that failed to cure a patient’s ear infection because, as the patient later learned, each of them was a different venereal treatment. In none of these cases was anyone fired, because it is tricky to instantly find a housebroken manager, an experienced System Administrator, or a competent doctor without a stateside practice and who is ready to work for peanuts, so most of those fired are like the janitors watching TV, or the woman in the Galley who came to work topless one holiday, or the fingee who fell asleep in the shower after a party, his naked butt cheek covering the drain, flooding the bathroom. After such a termination comes an appeal to the community for volunteers to help the short-staffed janitors, for example, by cleaning in the evenings. Warnings of disciplinary action are addressed to “employees.” Exhortations to chip in are addressed to “the community.”
In 1939, the German vessel Schwabenland spent two weeks off the coast of Queen Maud Land launching long-range seaplanes into the Antarctic skies with a catapult. As the Nazi planes flew over