Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson
live here, everyone else’s room is bigger than yours.
The Lower Case dorms are nearly identical except for 210 and 211, which were designed by a Hawaiian architect. They have high ceilings and uneven heating. Recently, Lower Case dorms 204 and 205 were renamed 203B and 203C, circumventing an arcane code concerning the number of simultaneous building renovations. Now there are three dorm 203s. If you live in the Lower Case dorms, everyone else’s room is not really bigger than yours, but it appears so because their furniture is arranged differently.
The most desirable rooms are in the Upper Case dorms, 206-209, the large brown dorms with three stories. Dorm 209 is special in that 209 Bayside rooms have a view of the sea ice and the Transantarctic Mountains. 209 Bayside is full of managers and old salt. Some people with enough Ice Time to live in 209 choose another dorm instead, because 209 is considered stuffy and the walls have ears. If you live in Upper Case, your room is bigger than everyone else’s.
2 Forty million years ago, Antarctica was home to a giant carnivorous bird called Titanis, nicknamed the “Terror Bird.” The New York Times (“Fossil ‘Terror Bird’ Offers Clues to Evolution,” by Walter Sullivan, Jan. 31, 1989) wrote, “The bird’s head was longer than that of a horse, and it presumably used its massive, hooked beak to tear apart its prey, after striking it down with one of its huge clawed feet.” Crazed and insatiable, the feathered beasts slaughtered giant armadillolike mammals for their brutal birdie feasts. A researcher from the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, CA, said it was “probably the most dangerous bird ever to have existed.”
3 Standard usage, though less common, allows “skua” to mean “contribute to the skua pile,” such as, “I figured someone would want these sponges shaped like human organs that expand when placed in water, so I skuaed them.”
4 The Housing Coordinator who had received the death threat had, amongst her other achievements, made a new policy that skua piles were off-limits to winter-overs, who had formed the skua piles to begin with. This policy ended with her covert departure at Winfly.
5 Though most people are very conscientious about sorting their trash, Construction Debris nonetheless remains a community favorite. CD is the category where one should put mixed floor sweepings, an inseparable chair made of metal and plastic and cloth, or a broken mirror, but when no one’s looking it means “anything goes,” and is where people sometimes like to throw bags of trash from their room that they don’t feel like separating.
6 “Diversity” is mentioned just often enough to scratch some statistical itch. The Program is overwhelmingly white.
7 From K at Pole: “We have had a helluva Thanksgiving. The beakers supplied all the wine; so you know where the night went…hell in a handbasket. It was awesome. Last week this chick got busted giving a blowjob in the upstairs bathroom…not once, but twice in the same night. This past weekend she was making out with any woman that would. Wow, I tell you. She propositioned Speed and I one night in the bar; and she continues propositioning me. Oy.”
8 I-Drive might commonly be heard in contexts such as “Did you see your picture on the I-Drive? Why were you carrying a mop at that party?” or “I went to Cape Royds last week and took 42 pictures of penguins. I put them all on the I-Drive.”
CHAPTER THREE
LITTLE AMERICA
We are anticipating that our expectations will become yours as well.
—Welcome to Raytheon memo
Someone has been trying to influence my mind.
—True/False winter-over psych eval
FROM THE FIELD CAMP come many of the greatest Antarctic stories. Here early explorers scrubbed their eyes with cocaine to ease the pain of snowblindness and then went to bed with bellies full of pony meat. At the field camp, paper-thin tents shudder beneath katabatic blasts of freezing wind, stoves sputter a stingy flame, and a few trudging specks haul shovels through a cold world where extra food and equipment cannot be bought at any price. The compilation of infinite suffering of those so isolated from society is an entrancing lesson that seems never to wear thin. The field camp—remote, minimal, and inconvenient—is the underlying image on which other Antarctic images are built.
Fingees arrive ready to work at remote field camps. When they instead find themselves beneath 155 chipping away at a glacier of frozen urine1 deposited by staggering Naval ancestors, or shoveling on a snowy hillside looking for a load of buried pipe lost in the shuffling of expendable supervisors, that’s when they realize that they have been tricked, and they begin to pine for the rugged field camp, where they can show what they are made of. Volunteering for what they imagine to be a daunting task, eager fingees are soon told by the old warhorses to get in line.
Field camps are desirable destinations. Given the chance, most people would work in the wind and cold surrounded by glaciers and nunataks at Lake Fryxell rather than work in the wind and cold surrounded by ditches and buildings at McMurdo Station. The stakes are as high as they have always been, but risk of death in the frozen wilderness has been reduced by the airplane, the radio, the emergency-homing beacon, the GPS unit, the satellite-tracking Orbcomm device, and improvements in clothing. Field camps have stereos and laptops. Abundant field camp provisions include New Zealand white cheddar, smoked meats, and lots of chocolate. The McMurdo field support Food Room dispenses dozens of beaten copies of The Joy of Cooking. Field camps are established only during the summer, and few scientists or employees stay at a field camp for more than a few weeks at a time. But field camps lack running water and may be cut off from communication by solar flares, so they provide the caliber of inconvenience that makes for an attractive struggle against nature, where mortality is as apparent as the tent and the radio. Nonetheless, in modern USAP history, most Antarctic fatalities have been related to transport or industry.
Fatalities are rare now, but in the bloodiest years, the first 30 years or so after World War II, an NSF safety report records that only three deaths were related to field activities: a scientist at Byrd Station disappeared, a research diver died from an accident beneath the ice, and a man died of a fall at Asgard Range. The other 40 or so American deaths during that period were more run-of-the-mill. Most were from plane or helicopter crashes, as when an aircraft cartwheeled during landing in 1956, or when, as recorded in an NSF report, an “aircraft landed in poor visibility conditions, and a few seconds later exploded.” Many deaths were from tractors falling through the sea ice, and one went into a crevasse. People have been killed offloading ships and planes, crushed in loaders and trucks, scorched by an exploding fuel drum, and electrocuted in a ship’s engine room.
But it is not risk in the face of industrial mishap that brings to the continent legions of people who wear Teva sandals over wool socks. When I asked people why they first came to Antarctica, they said they wanted to climb mountains, ski glaciers, hike, and see wildlife. At first I was shocked, not by the particular answers, but by their unanimity. Surrounded by people talking about climbing, skiing, paragliding, kayaking, or rafting, I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing down here.
The main draw for many who go to Antarctica is a love of nature.2 I find nature creepy and disturbing. No matter how staggering the horizon, wilderness only reminds me that I must eventually return to the colony. The great outdoors is at best a sideshow