Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson
500 pounds of swastikaengraved javelins, one of which was dropped every 18 miles as they flew over the surface to mark “Neu-Schwabenland.” They collected five emperor penguins for a zoo and planted a Nazi flag in the snow near the coast. The German press announced their scientific interests in meteorology and oceanography.
The night of the Halloween party, Laz came to my room dressed like a Nazi soldier with a trenchcoat, a helmet, and a Hitleresque moustache.
“I always suspected you of harboring some nationalist warchest,” I ranted. “I suppose your pockets are full of swastika-emblazoned thumbtacks? On which scrap of frozen waste do you plan to scatter them, hmm?” Laz smiled patiently as I continued. “The frost-pocked bank of mud behind 165? A patch of abandoned gloom between the beige ribs of Crary? I have always felt that that thin scratch of a snow-clogged ditch behind the Haz Yard was a ravishing bit of property best claimed by some august patriot.”
“Sir, once again you have leapt to ignorant conclusions—though I suppose that is befitting your education. I am the Fun Nazi! I intend to make sure no one has fun this evening.” He produced some implement to corroborate his claim. A whistle or something. “And you, I see, have labored intensely in the small hours, on the rim of imagination, sparing no expense to rise to the occasion.” I wore a dirty white sheet, a hole cut for my head.
We walked down the Crary Road to the Halloween party at the gym. The firetruck was parked outside. Men were blazing steaming incisions into the snow behind the gym. There was a line of women waiting for the u-barrel. Inside, lit only by spinning and flashing colored stage lights, the gym was dark, and packed.
Hundreds of nearly indistinguishable red or brown parkas clogged the entryway. I stuffed my own into the back of the pile and pushed it to the bottom because I didn’t want it taken by mistake. The next day Highway 1 would have “Lost Coat” signs, listing the contents of the pockets and the nametag on the front. It is usually a matter of mistaken identity, but some coats end up in surplus stores or as souvenirs in someone’s closet in the U.S.
The Rec department was selling cans of Canterbury Draft and Steinlager for $2. I bought a Steinlager and tipped the Rec guy a buck. He would make about $300 in tips tonight, because opportunities to throw money around are few.
Occasionally someone at one of these parties has Pole moonshine or some concoction of peppermint schnapps and JATO from one of the station’s many secreted barrels of pure grain alcohol, thought to have once fueled Jet-Assisted-Take-Offs when overloaded planes needed a boost on short runways. JATO tastes horrible, but since the community fate depends upon planes, there is a pleasure in drinking jet fuel, as an agrarian society eating dirt or a warrior culture drinking blood.
Through breaks in the mostly ‘80s music, an emcee urged people to sign up for the costume competition, which highlighted McMurdo’s vast skua reservoir. Costumes have included a Caterpillar loader, Robert Scott and his ponies, a pee flag (yellow flag planted at camps to consolidate the ugly snow in one area), a black flag (planted to signal danger by crevasses or thin ice), the South Pole, an Aluminum Queen, a u-barrel, a Construction Debris5 bin, the Greenwave supply vessel, and someone dressed in his workclothes who said he was a drunk ironworker. The year the support contract was rebid, two guys came to the Halloween party as blind men with canes. One wore an ASA sign, the other a Raytheon sign, and they were connected by a rope labeled NSF.
“What are you?” a pirate yelled as I maneuvered through the dancing crowd in my white sheet. I handed him a pair of glasses with white paper taped inside the lenses and he put them on.
“Condition 1,” I yelled.
McMurdo officially has three kinds of weather, or Conditions. Condition 3 involves wind speed of less than 48 knots, visibility greater than a quarter mile, or wind chill as cold as -75°F. Condition 3 is ordinary weather in which those so authorized may drive to the runway and those off the clock may enjoy outdoor recreation. Condition 2 involves wind speed as high as 55 knots, visibility of more than 100 feet, or wind chill as cold as -100°F. If Condition 2 is called, even those authorized to drive out of town must first check out with Mac Ops, so that when you disappear someone will know to look for you. Outdoor work is permitted in Condition 2, but not outdoor recreation. Condition 1 involves wind speed of more than 55 knots, visibility of less than 100 feet, or wind chill colder than -100°F. In this weather everyone must stay in whatever building he is in, as winds toss milvans into the road and send loose plywood into the air like a platoon of wooden blades in some unnerving Fantasia. Everyone except the Galley workers sits around drinking coffee, and the managers fret over delays to The Program.
Though the Condition System is theoretically based on observable scientific criteria, there are other unofficial considerations. For example, Condition 1 may be narrowly avoided because declaring it would necessitate having a Search and Rescue Team escort workers home. Since work schedules and other practical matters constrain the official severity of the weather, one must dress carefully and with forethought, no matter the Condition. Sometimes Condition 1 weather afflicts every location but McMurdo, which remains at Condition 2. Sometimes Willy Field and the road to it are in Condition 2, allowing Fleet-Ops to go to work there, but ten feet off the road, where Condition 1 prevails, is officially too dangerous to set foot. Among the legendary weather events is a Condition 1 storm that raged all day and night on Sunday but abruptly eased to Condition 2 at 7:15 on Monday morning. Once a fueling team, stuck on the road between two runways by an overly optimistic official pronouncement of Condition 2, negotiated a declaration of Condition 1 applying to the road they were on. This exonerated them for the delay, but to avoid the costly inconvenience of turning the plane around, everywhere else remained in Condition 2. This was like having tolerable weather everywhere on the gridiron but the storm-battered 50-yard-line.
Wandering around in a gymnasium dark but for disco lights, sipping a tepid beer, dressed as weather, watching administrative coordinators grinding to “Funkytown” and “Love Shack,” I decided I was done for the evening. I retrieved my coat which had floated to the top of the pile, and returned to my room to read Gulliver’s Travels.
The Halloween party, my first supervisor once told me, ends the introductory stage of summer. The couples that form at the party eat breakfast together in the Galley the next day, which announces to town their new mating status. Nearly everyone who’s summering has come in from Christchurch, and the roommate and initial housing issues are settled. The people who latched onto each other at Orientation have joined separate cliques and now they have strained conversations when they see each other in the halls. New people are starting to understand how things work, and returning people, thrust back into the action, the jargon, the politics, and the stories, are starting to remember why they keep coming back. Some claimed they would never return again, but that was last season.
Just after Halloween, the National Science Foundation confiscated a shower curtain. Some women hung it in the bathroom of Hotel California for more privacy while men visited the nearby co-ed sauna. The NSF Station Services Manager seized it because it was unauthorized. After the women in the dorm petitioned NSF and filled out a work order, the shower curtain was reinstalled, and their revoked privacy reinstated.
Such skirmishes are a daily occurrence. They are the natural result of a teetering bureaucracy stuffed into a small town of people improvising in an unusual environment. The “by the book” mandates of management are eroded daily by the slippery traditions of a shifting mass of seasonal contract workers whose innovation—useful for jerry-rigging an engine or concocting some out-of-stock tool—does not dry up at the end of the work day, when residents sneak work tools to build lofts in their rooms, barter goods between departments (without all the messy paperwork), and find nice warm places to grow marijuana. Management’s ceaseless campaign to harness this ingenuity only for the power of work is one of the primary themes of The Program, and incidents that illustrate this theme are popular gossip when they occur.
A few weeks after the shower curtain was confiscated, an NSF Representative went into Daybar looking for someone. Daybar—held in the smoking bar, Southern Exposure—is open three or four times a week in the morning for nightshift