Journal entry 25~27 January 1999
I am on my way to The Ice again. This time, I shall be working on my own, setting up equipment and making measurements of pollution of the working environment, hopefully getting to scope out the Dry Valleys for my next project. But what this means is that I won’t be meeting up with Harry Mahar, I won’t be getting the feedback and validation that come from working with a peer on a project of mutual interest. Harry will be on the end of the wires – e-mail that is – but he won’t be physically there. In terms of on-the-spot scientific program decisions, I’m on my own. I look in a mirror. The person that looks back at me is the kind of person that I would expect to be able to handle it. The person that looks out at the mirror is still surprised. Blink once and you grow up. Blink twice and you’re in charge.
My son Christopher comes to my office at LBL. The digital camera is on my desk, the pixels captured when he presses the button delineate this person that I have miraculously become. The perspective is that of a child: the angle of view tilts upwards. What flows back down this same slope?
We trade places, this time I press the button and we see the next generation aspiring. But my instinctive view is horizontal – not tilted down – either as if envisioning this future, or more simply, as a proud parent.
This time, the routine for preparing for a trip to Antarctica is – routine. On my last two trips I’d recorded faithfully all the clothing I used, all the stuff that I didn’t use. The shadow of the Bennett Island Project had faded to the point where I now knew I didn’t have to pack my own toilet paper and scotch tape. I knew that the efficiency of the U.S. Antarctic Program really would provide. It would be a trip to the known, rather than the unknown: a trip to the furnished and familiar, despite the remarkable natural setting. 4 pairs of underwear – check. 2 cotton turtlenecks – check. Extension cord – check.
In this insidious way, the process of traveling is transformed. The more the destination contains familiar elements common to the source, the more there is to immediately associate with upon arrival: the perception of having gone anywhere is proportionally diminished. Yet ‘we’, in communal marketplace action, seem to like this. Our collective actions and preferences lead to the replication of some kind of familiar environment no matter where, some kind of clean haven from which to sally forth to view the natives from a safe distance. No matter where travelers from the dominant west go, they want to find a clean bed, running hot water, familiar food. It may be thrilling to see the tribesmen, but few tourists want to live like one, even temporarily, and none want to eat their food or catch their diseases. The tribesmen are placed behind a sanitized curtain, rather like a Web browser screen.
In a similar way, the gross magic and myth of Antarctica that filled my imagination in 1996 has been tamed. The obviously astounding will be anticipated: I must look closer for the details. Closer at the natural world, and, if I am able, closer at the human side. Maybe travel has a fractal nature: the closer you look, the more you see, the picture transforms but the complexity remains.
– – – –
Boxes. We pack boxes. Pumps, cables, spares and supplies for the equipment at Pole, an aethalometer to measure pollution levels in the work environment at McMurdo. From past experience I use giant bags of miniature candy bars in place of packing filler. An official Box Of Chocolates (shiny wrapping, brown crinkly paper cups), with which to appreciate favors from administrative staff empowered to assign me either to the farthest Jamesway tent, or to a comfortable close-in Hypertat.
Boxes. We paint boxes. In 1997 I used several cans of aerosol paint and asphyxiated myself while simultaneously producing only blotchy designs on the cardboard. This year it’s a quart of Best Matte Black, two brushes and an assistant.
Life speeds along. I pack my bags a week in advance, knowing that the pressures of everyday life will not release me until the last moment. At 4 PM I’m printing out a report for my boss at the Lab: at 5 PM I’m discussing Christopher’s homework: at 6 PM we’re in a car to the airport. I envy Shackleton his heroism, partly for the attendant recognition and build-up.
Kiss, hug, “I’ll be back soon”. Shackleton couldn’t say THAT to his family.
– – – –
At Oakland airport, the illusion intensifies. A familiar and known situation, one of the most recognizable and yet anonymous artifacts of our modern age: The Airport. No matter how hard the planners and architects try, all they can do is to ice the inevitable fruitcake: The Airport. It’s a shuttle flight to L.A., in the waiting lounge area I am surrounded by eager young men talking into cellphones. We fly, yet there is no sensation. If my window is a screen, it is dark for most of the time. Suddenly, the lights of L.A. appear and start moving across my screen. I was raised up, and the earth obediently turned beneath me to its new position. There’s a vending machine at the Lab that has a carousel of many partitioned shelves that can be aligned with opening doors. A button on the front says ‘Press To Rotate Product’. I pressed it, but the products didn’t rotate – the whole carousel did, positioning first one then the next behind the sliding doors. (did I really expect each sandwich to pirouette?).
In a similar way, a flight could be entitled ‘Sit Here to Rotate Planet’.
I get to LAX: the only real difference is that this airport is under continual construction. Find Gate 76, a vast sweaty mob of people all haunted by the look of fear that derives from anticipation of a 12-hour flight.
Horror. My name is called. “Mr. Anthony Hansen, to the podium please”.
They’ve bumped me, I flunked the attitude test, people whose last names end in N will be denied boarding.
“Mr. Hansen? – we’ve had to upgrade you to Business Class to make room for all the coach passengers.” I resume breathing, I board, the world of privilege welcomes me in muted shades of dove gray and teal with a glass of champagne.
As I sit guiltily in a seat with more controls than my first car, the sweaty mob files past me to serve out their sentence in the rear. The distant screams of babies will be a murmur in my slumber, like the cries of seagulls as one snoozes on a beach.
We rise, the world slips away beneath the wings. What really happens to scenery after it’s been used?
We descend, it’s Another Airport. Auckland, not Oakland – though the buildings could be interchanged without anyone really knowing that they were on the other side of the world. I walk the half-mile from the international to the domestic terminals, and I start to register a difference: it’s Hot and Humid, it’s almost Tropical, there are puffy white something-something clouds all floating at a fixed level in the sky. In the domestic terminal I have an hour to wait: I pull out my laptop and Hah! – I am so smug, I brought with me an adapter for the bizarre angled power outlets, I plug in and type, I’m back in the Oakland waiting area with the other road warriors.
Another flight, Auckland to Christchurch … but when approaching ‘Christchurch’ becomes departing ‘Cheech’ the illusion and privilege will be abruptly replaced by rivets and webbing, this much I know. What has up until now been a detached, visual-only phenomenon is waiting to burst forth in sound and fury, ECW’s and eye-popping noise, the aesthete in the hands of the military.
But first …
Journal entry 28-Jan-99
I was lucky in Cheech – that is to say, upon arrival I was met by Marlene, friendly and efficient, expecting me on her clipboard: and informed that my clothing issue was that afternoon in a couple of hours [good], but that my flight would be in two or three days’ time [not so good]. So I chatted to Mike, the supervisor: ”Mike, much as I love your fair city and could scarcely be happier than to spend three days in its bars and restaurants …. Is there any chance I could get out of here sooner?” “Eeeair”, he replied, “go talk to Sairndy in th’ office. She’ll fix you up”.
I did, and she did. Report at 7 AM the next morning, there’s space on the flight for me. It was a flight that had been ready to go the previous day, all the passengers weighed in and suited up .. then a mechanical problem, too bad folks, come back tomorrow. Sandy seemed surprised that I wanted to change my assignment from the Friday flight. At this time of year, the end of the season, most of the southbound passengers are ASA support personnel on their way down for the winter. For them, flight delay in Cheech is a last extra day of paid vacation, per-diem amidst trees and flowers and the attractions of a small city. While they are proud of their work and assiduous in their duty, none complain if they’re told to stand by for a couple more days before 8 months of Ice. For me, I want to get there, to get started. One evening of a steak dinner and a couple of pints of beer in Bailie’s is enough of quaint, cloying Christchurch for me.
The embarkation terminal has been redecorated, the procedure streamlined a little as the transportation and logistics are devolved from the military and transferred to ASA and NSF. But some truths remain, constant and inviolable. I head straight for the back of the number-2 bus. We drive out to the airfield …. And …
Joy! (or anticipation)
We really are flying down on a C-141, a medium-size jet plane, about as big as a small commercial jetliner. The ‘Hercules’ that I’d always flown on before, and whose propellers I had heard from over at the terminal, were on the tarmac but not for today’s flight. All I knew now was that the flight would be 5 hours instead of 8, theoretically more comfortable, less noisy, and provided with a real toilet instead of a funnel.
Alas, no opportunity to get a picture for this journal, the second bus held back a bit while the passengers (‘pax’) from the first were loaded, then we drive up, everybody out, from the front, onto the aircraft please.
Quick mental arithmetic suggested that our approximately 40 pax would have plenty of room in the plane which can hold almost 200 in Maximum-Sardine Mode. As one of the last ones on, I got a seat near the front, a vista of parkas and boots and orange bags stretching down the aisles towards the rear of the plane where the people first off the front bus were now entombed.
Sack lunches, seat belts, the webbing seats are the same. This is going to be a MUCH BETTER flight, no propeller vibration to shake your fillings loose after 8 hours. Maybe even the heat will work. But then something strikes me.
Windows. That is to say, No Windows.
There aren’t any windows – not that I or anyone else can get close to in a casual way, to look out. There is a small round window about halfway down the passenger area, a spot too bright to look at, behind the seat webbing and people’s coats and separated from me by many, many feet and bags in the passageways. Even if I could negotiate the aisles and avoid annoying everyone, I wouldn’t be able to look out in any case. No window in the entrance door nearby. No window with which to at least imagine the passage of distance, no ocean waves, no ice edge, no mountains.
I am inside the digestive tract of a giant olive-drab metal slug. I have been ingested and will be regurgitated upon arrival. The time in between can not be equated with distance in between, because no clues are available as to what’s going by outside. It’s another magic carpet ride, another transformation, but this time we’re in a subway car. After 5 hours’ flight we could find ourselves in Tahiti, and none of the passengers would have a clue until the door opened.
Yes, it’s smooth. Yes, the heat works – almost too well. Yes – it’s noisy: not the constant RRRRRRR of propellers but the loudest continuous whooshing of white noise that I’ve ever been in. Even with ear plugs, its formlessness washes away the senses and prohibits concentration.
We sit. We yawn. We doze. On a commercial flight you would instinctively look towards the windows, even if there was nothing to see: just to set an imagined horizon, a reaffirmation of where you are. Here, we’re nowhere, we travel in suspended animation.
Finally, announcements. FOLKS WE’RE APPROACHING MCMURDO PLEASE GET BACK INTO YOUR ECW’S AND SECURE ALL LOOSE ITEMS. The plane dips, turns, climbs, sways, turns again, goes up, down, and side to side. All of this is sensed purely by inertia. No-one has any idea how close the ground is. We dip, turn, climb again, the engines sigh, then whine again. Some of the returnees make hand gestures suggesting ‘Boomerang’, meaning to turn around in flight and go back to where you started, if conditions make it impossible to land. Boomerang .. ugh. Another 5 hours of sensory deprivation, back in Cheech for who knows how long, try again.
Finally, bonk, thud, roll of wheels. We’re down! I’m Back On The Ice Again.
After a while, the door opens. Gray light and howling cold wind blast into the plane. A bundle of fur grabs the microphone and yells FOLKS IT’S BLOWING PRETTY HARD OUTSIDE ABOUT 40 KNOTS GO STRAIGHT TO THE BUS TAKE EXTRA CARE NOT TO SLIP OR GET BLOWN DOWN ON THE ICE.
And he wasn’t kidding. It was blowing – not hard as it can here, but enough to be a challenge to walk 20 yards with a heavy bag. No surprise that the pilots had difficulty landing. It seemed warm – that is to say, not cold as in COLD. The windows of the bus were spotted with drops where blowing snow had melted on the warm glass. The bus was completely packed – all 40 of us in full ECW’s with huge orange bags, wedged in and barely able to move. I managed to get a couple of pix before the windows completely steamed over against the featureless whiteness outside and we were plunged back into the same process – the perception of moving, poorly correlated to the outside world, swimming in some mechanical fog for almost an hour as the giant bus ground its way slowly across the sticky drifts, more than ten miles from the airstrip back to town.
Journal Entry 30~31 Jan 99
By the time we got into town, the wind had subsided and the clouds were a threatening memory over the distant mountains. McMurdo was gray above and brown below. There was no snow on the ground, no snow on the hillsides, nothing to cover up the dirt and allow it to even pretend to be pretty. It seemed strangely deserted, too: vehicles in the distance, the beep-beep backup warning of heavy trucks, but not many people about. I’m not sure what I expected but it looked even more like a town out of an old western. Face the buildings with clapboard and replace the distant roar of dumptrucks with the formalized clatter of hooves and wagon wheels, and I could almost envision John Wayne striding out of a building across the dirt, the freezer-chest door banging shut behind him: he faces his nemesis, a florid beaker in a red parka with a diametrically opposing theory about cosmic rays, and data to prove it: they face off across the empty plaza, gun hands hovering over Palm Pilots in their belt holsters. The Duke of Antarctica grates: “Mister, the AGU ain’t big enough for the both of us, and Ah’m gonna git to Stockholm if Ah have step over your dead body …. “
The dream fades, I blink twice, I’m in Mactown.
My first order of business is to make sure that the equipment arrived, and to find the person in Environmental Health who will be my contact for the workplace air quality monitoring that we’re doing for NSF. All is well, I meet Kurt in his office, we get the aethalometer box from the cargo warehouse and take it over to the Vehicle Maintenance Facility, a.k.a. the ‘Heavy Shop’. Aside from the types of vehicles up on the racks, you wouldn’t know you were in Antarctica. It’s a large industrial building with pieces of caterpillar tractor and trucks up on repair racks and rock music attempting to drown out the sound of air tools and the banging of sledgehammers (fixing a large caterpillar tractor ain’t neurosurgery, Bub.) At one end the offices and the stores counters are staffed by young guys wearing bass-fishing t-shirts and young women wearing tight-fitting turtlenecks. The mechanics curse, swear and spit into the open drums of degreaser solvent. When a vehicle is ready to roll out, it’s fired up and ….. AHA ! a huge cloud of smoke belches into the indoor environment, before they roll up a steel door and drive it out.
Smoke. My nose twitches, I look up at the ceiling lamps: each light is targeted by an illuminated cone pointing upwards, like the streetlamps of my childhood in foggy London.
The occupational air quality issue arises because almost all of the vehicles on The Ice are diesel. This allows logistics supply to provide only one fuel for almost all applications: the same kerosene can power aircraft turbine engines, vehicles, the diesel-powered main electricity generators, and can be burned for heat in the building furnaces. But the downside of diesel is the smoke with its attendant toxic compounds, and that’s becoming the main reason for my visits to Antarctica.
We set up the aethalometer in the Heavy Shop, switch it on, and ………it works perfectly. Each day there are two work shifts, separated by a 2-hour break. Each shift they typically drive a few vehicles in and out. Perfect: we should see large increases in particulate concentrations whenever a vehicle is run, followed by a gradual drop-off as the ventilation system brings in fresh air and removes the polluted air. In the between-shift breaks, we should see the levels fall to essentially zero, the clean background atmosphere.
With this first activity working according to plan, I see a sign announcing the ‘End Of Season Party !! – Saturday Night – Bands Bands Bands’. As the evening progressed, the bands got worse, louder, and more appreciated by the growing and increasingly-inebriated crowd. But the first band played excellent bluegrass, the second played great swing music, the third sounded as if their instruments were taken straight from the Heavy Shop, and by the time the fourth band came on, the cans of weak, fizzy Kiwi beer could no longer dull the remnants of my judgment, and I left. Not knowing anyone to recognize by face, I had no communication, since the noise level prevented all conversation. Outside, a crowd stood and smoked and drank more beer. Suddenly, a tall young woman in fashion overalls comes up to me. “You’re Tony, from the Pole last year.” (I always wear a blue workshirt with a red name patch, script cursive embroidery). “You’re the guy who did the Elvis impersonation at the music hour!”. Finally, my name patch has achieved its purpose! – instead of getting wisecracks about checking the oil and wiping the windshield, a pretty girl comes up to me and starts talking! But my euphoria lasts a millisecond: she spots a handsome young guy in a check shirt and is gone, my acknowledgment unheard.
The next day, Sunday, I double-check the aethalometer in the Heavy Shop and send the preliminary charts back to Harry by e-mail. Then, a bite of lunch and down to the pier where the Coast Guard icebreaker ‘Polar Star’ was berthed. The ship had arrived the day before, and today was the opportunity for a recreational cruise. This seems to be offered almost every year and is much awaited by the McMurdo population. We signed up, lined up, boarded and stood on all possible outside flat surfaces, like hundreds of roosting seabirds in bright red plumage. We went out and up the channel, then into some open water parallel to the ice edge, and finally turned around and cut a new channel through the ice on the way back for a total excursion of about 4 hours.
It was great! – there were seals, there were the mandatory 2 penguins hopping in a desperately comic way to get out of the path of an onrushing icebreaker: and there were orcas (‘killer whales’) in the open water along the ice edge. We must have seen a couple of dozen of the ominous fins arching up through the water. The largest pod was 7 orcas in a group, cruising the ice edge looking for seals or penguins or beakers to eat, occasionally “spy-hopping” by coming vertically up, half-way out of the water, looking for their lunch. Unfortunately they were so transitory that it was impossible for me to get a photo. If I kept the camera out and switched on, the cold temperatures would drain the batteries in a matter of minutes. If I kept it warm inside my coat and switched off, the orca was gone in a flash of black and white far too quickly. Finally, I closed the camera up, put it away, and simply enjoyed the spectacle for myself. Sorry folks, there are limits to the vicarious life. It was snowing and blowing hard, darn cold, I was doing the best I could.
Mactown / fried chicken and gravy / bagdrag at 2030 / report for Pole flight at 0700. On my way.
Journal Entry 2-Feb-99
We depart from McMurdo early on Monday morning, and drive out in blowing snow to the ‘Williams Field’ airstrip. There are about a dozen passengers today, no freight, but the overcast skies may nullify the value of being able to get up and walk around, if there’s nothing to look at anyway. When we arrive at ‘Willy’ there’s a half-hour wait while they prepare the plane, so everyone gets to cool off a bit.
Now I’m back on a ‘Herc’, the C-130 Hercules cargo plane that had constituted my entire Antarctic flying experience until this year. It has windows, lots of room to move around, and a bag lunch with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. They fly us at a cabin pressure equivalent to sea level: I ask the flight engineer why they pressurize the plane so much, wouldn’t they save fuel if they pressurized us to, say, 5000 feet as is usual on a commercial flight. The answer is logical but surprises me because I’d never thought about it. She says: “The aircraft structure is designed to be optimal when stressed by a specific pressure differential, equivalent to about 25,000 feet. Since we’re flying at a low level over the icecap, we have to pressurize the cabin to sea level. If we were flying at a more usual higher altitude, the operating pressure difference would result in a cabin pressure more like 5 to 7,000 feet.” In other words, the aircraft’s fuselage derives some of its strength from being inflated by the pressure, like a car tire. But as we approach Pole, our ears pop. As the plane descends to land, the cabin pressure is reduced in order to be equivalent to the surface pressure when to doors open. This is the exact opposite of what used to make your ears pop in jetliners years ago. I chew gum, my ears pop, the pocket barometric altimeter that I carry with me gradually winds itself from an apparent elevation of zero, towards 10,000 feet.
As the plane taxis on its skis towards a gradual halt, the loadmaster has already opened the rear cargo hatch in order to save time. A blast of really cold air swirls in with blowing snow, and the view out of the open rear of the plane is of low buildings, piles of freight on pallets, a gray sky with a weak sun behind a gauze veil of snow. This is truly Solzhenitsyn’s gulag, in stark contrast to the Walt Disney Frontierland of Mactown. For some of the passengers this is their first visit to Pole: chatting to them while waiting at Willy had revealed that they didn’t really know what to expect. They look horrified, as wondering Why On Earth Would Anyone Want To Be Here ??
We clump out of the plane’s front door, lugging our orange bags which have suddenly become much heavier thanks to the effects of the thin air. There, waiting just in front of the plane, two bundles of red parkas walk forwards to greet me .. Jerry Marty and Dave Fischer, managers both, many seasons at Pole, people with whom I had worked and socialized on my previous two visits. I gasp for breath, they clap me on the shoulders, down into the Dome, down that familiar squeaky snow slope into a little world at the end of the world.
I can barely breathe, I walk as if swimming. I am assigned to live in a Jamesway in the Summer Camp area. The ‘Jamesway’ is a tent, yes indeed, a tent at the South Pole. I believe that the military used lots of them 40 or 50 years ago, and mine looks the part. There are low plywood side walls, wooden arches, and olive-drab quilted canvas covering. Being modular, a Jamesway can be extended to any length, but the cross-section is always the same. Since there are no windows in the curved covering, the inside is as dark as a rabbit burrow. My berth is at one end, so I do have a window, a luxury.
It’s a space about eight feet long and six feet wide, bounded by the curving outer canvas on one side and a hanging blanket on the inner corridor side. I have a bed, a plywood desk, and a Navy steel wardrobe for my stuff. I unpack in a trance-like state induced by lack of oxygen, but this is the thing to do on Zombie Day. It had seemed warm inside, but it then got cooler and cooler until ……. RRRRRRRSHSHSHSHSHSH the heat comes on and blasts really hot air throughout. Abruptly, the temperature rises 20 or 30 degrees until it clicks off. For me, I’ll be here a week, with the privilege of a window: for the construction crews and support workers, these tiny and unprivate spaces are their entire home for 3 months.
I sleep 12 hours and awake breathing much better. I start my work (another story), but the buzz on station is …..
Super Bowl
A video tape of the superbowl game came in and a great party is planned. On pain of death or ostracism, no one has been allowed to reveal the score from the Internet. It’s Tuesday, the game is history: but here it’s an event.
The party will be in the ‘Summer Camp Lounge’, a larger Jamesway right next to mine. The pre-game party starts at 6: the galley has cooked up a mess of chicken wings and chili, and there is what appears to be a cargo transit container full of beer. Two big-screen TV’s are connected to the VCR and the place is packed.
I suppose the scene had already been repeated a hundred thousand times in bars and clubs all across the US, a ritual familiar to much of the population, but one that my particular life’s path had managed to avoid. Thus, I avoided asking questions, gradually figured out which team was wearing which color uniform, and drank every can of beer that was handed to me. I didn’t get the part about the chain and the stick, but I recognized one commentator from placards in the Berkeley hardware store. For me, the phenomenon was the incongruity. Behind those cheering fans was a canvas wall: behind the canvas wall was the Antarctic Plateau, a place visited only twice until 40 years ago. Yet on this side, we could have been in a bar almost anywhere ‘back home’, the cheering a temporary escape from the harsh drudgery of life at 10,000 feet and 40 below.After getting used to the darkness and hilarity for several hours, it was a jarring shock to walk outside into glaringly bright sun, a biting cold wind, and the flat horizon of Scott’s demise.
Journal entry 4-Feb-99
A couple of days later, I go for a walk to the edge of the world – the human world, that is. The map of South Pole Station can represent the relative location of all the buildings on a geographic grid. Meridians radiate out from the Pole Marker, lines of latitude like ripples of geography drawn on a frozen pond. But how to describe relative direction? – all directions are North. The four points of the traditional compass are replaced by lines pointing to London, Chicago, Honolulu and Delhi. Pragmatically, the convention here is to describe the meridians as ‘Grid North’ – i.e. London, zero degrees; ‘Grid West’ i.e. Chicago, ninety degrees; and so on. The conventional map of Pole has the Greenwich meridian pointing straight up to the top of the page, the heritage delineator of our Eurocentric history, the central flagpole of colonial geography. Off to the left is Grid West, the downwind end of town. Just as in all medieval European cities, whose constant west-to-east prevailing winds blew the grime and soot of the West-End rich over the hovels of the East-End poor, here too at Pole the prevailing wind from right to left creates a pristine Atmospheric Research Observatory on one side, and the construction camp and cargo dump on the other. Beyond in any direction – nothing, nada, zippo.
I’ve stood on the roof of the ARO building and felt the vastness blowing in my face, a thousand of miles of ice fetch to the ocean. Now, I walked the other way and stood with my back to the wind, and saw what was left over, what was to come for the air’s travels. It was exactly what Scott saw when he turned his back on Amundsen’s flag and headed towards ultimate defeat and victory combined. What could I see? – nothing. The sun glared at me as I stood on the last set of caterpillar trackmarks. I could walk for weeks and it wouldn’t change, I would be the tallest thing within my entire field of view, I would lose my sense of scale, get vertigo and fall down clambering at an inch-tall rise.
Then I turned, and, for a moment, I was in the Arctic. A pressure ridge of ice reared up from the surface, Nansen’s obstacle course. But it wasn’t. It was the end of a cargo-storage berm, a raised area carved by subtraction from the natural surface. Farther away on top of it and its parallel brothers, thousands of tons of materials lay neatly stacked in lines parallel to the prevailing wind. Plywood. Steel girders. Cardboard boxes labelled “Windows – Fragile”. Giant lumpy things strapped to pallets with steel bands.
All of this stuff constitutes the ‘IN’ box for the construction of the new station, delivered in advance according to an incredibly complex logistical dance whose steps are planned five years into the future. An airplane flew by and reminded me that all of this stuff – not just the stored cargo, but the entire station and the Dome and the buildings and the cranes and the caterpillar tractors and the toilets and sinks – all of it had come here by air freight, every last ounce of it.
As I walked back towards the station, I noticed that the horizon was becoming clouded. Anything unusual is usually bad. This became true. The wind picked up, stronger and stronger, as the day went on. The sides of my Jamesway flapped alarmingly, incredibly fine snow blew in under the plywood door. Like the defenders of a medieval castle, the station personnel closed the outer entrance doors to the Dome to keep the invading wind at bay. From time to time, the small inset door would open to admit a blast of snow containing a person bundle. The screens told us that the wind chill was equivalent to -79 degrees. I knew I had to go outside.
I put on all of my ECW’s, every piece of clothing I had from longjohns to windbibs. Hat, goggs, parka hood zipped into a snorkel. I clumped out of the tent like a Michelin Man, waddling like a penguin. Immediately I was plunged into another world, a roar and swirl of white. I had felt like saying “I may be gone for a while” but that would have broken the Jamesway code of silence. I wondered if Jaques Cousteau had ever gone diving in a vanilla milkshake. By the time I reached the city gates, I was exhilarated, buffeted all over by a giant shiatsu massage. I squeezed through into the calm of the Dome and changed worlds again.
The buildings inside the Dome all look like giant freezer chests, their functioning inverted since it is the Dome that is unheated, the contents of each box that need to keep warm. They are piled two high like shipping containers at the docks, the ‘stairs’ of ‘upstairs’ being snowy metal treads on the outside of the boxes. One of these upper boxes contains an astonishing minature world behind its 6-inch-thick door. I climbed the steps, peeked in and saw a farm tractor.
The Station has a hydroponics greenhouse in which they grow ‘freshies’, especially important during the winter when planes can’t bring in produce from New Zealand. Row upon row of lettuce plants waved their leaves at me under the warm breeze of fans, heaters and high-intensity lamps. A clipboard showed the harvest log, greens and herbs, a tiny world of life unaware of ECW’s, sprouting from seed at 90 degrees South while the wind howled over the Dome outside.
Journal Entry 8-Feb-99
It is my last couple of days at Pole: last for this trip, who knows, maybe the last ever – my 3-year funded research project has run its course. In these visits I have seen the sublime and the ridiculous, the light and the dark. I have seen the reason why people come to Antarctica, and the ways in which individual heroism still shines thanks to and despite The System that makes it all work. There is a necessary dichotomy: each person does far more than their job description would provide, each person works for their own inner cause even when they are shoveling snow or cleaning toilets, and somehow The Company – i.e. ASA, Antarctic Support Associates – must coordinate them, must orchestrate them like a concert hall full of hyperactive virtuosi, each playing a very different instrument. I talked with the diesel mechanics in the Heavy Shop. They work in a small, oily hole of a room, where each tractor driven in temporarily fills their world with smoke. They are surrounded with engine parts and thick iron pieces of caterpillar. They are immersed in grime, their work horizon extends no more than ten feet in any direction, they are allowed two 2-minute showers per week. When the front doors open to admit another patient, their ambient temperature drops a hundred degrees. I asked them if they liked it. The answer had nothing to do with liking it or not liking it – there was a job to be done.
During the windstorm a few days ago, I brushed my teeth in the washroom next to an older man who works the radios. I commented to him that despite the wind and swirling snow, I could still hear the clank of tractors, I could see headlights dimly through the blizzard. He replied: “At Mactown, they have Conditions: 3, 2 and 1. Here, we have only one condition, it’s called Work.”
I asked Jerry Marty, the NSF’s construction manager for the new station, about the fact that I saw quite a number of young women in brown overalls – i.e. tradespeople or laborers. I asked him how they compared to men in terms of physical strength. He answered that the crucial factor was not so much strength as sheer determination. Earlier in the season, the new construction required that a whole lot of ice and snow be chipped and shoveled out from under and behind the arches, some 30 feet below the surface. At that depth there’s no heat from the sun, the temperature is a steady minus 55 degrees. In this agile hard labor, he said, the women beat the men no contest, and though they were dog-tired at the end of their 10 hour shift and covered with ice, they were proud of themselves.
No-one has to ask the people to do this – it comes from within. Somehow the interviewers at ASA have an x-ray vision that identifies the right candidates and screens out those who wouldn’t make it. But when this workforce arrives on-site, they find a definite hierarchy, a company town.
A graduate student in an esoteric branch of Physics doesn’t have many options within his field if he seriously angers his professor. Technical managers in specialized industries in small countries don’t have good job prospects if they seriously mess up. The smaller the fishbowl, the direr the consequences of upsetting the Chief Fish. At Pole, the fishbowl consists of maybe 150 ASA employees, a very few NSF managers, and a steady flux of visiting scientists. This last group, the redcoats, have their meals served and their electricity provided. Their eyes are in the stars, they notice nothing if it’s bigger than a neutrino. They come and go typically for a few weeks at a time, just as I did. They are similarly motivated from within, but the results of their work accrue directly to themselves. They will get their name on the published paper, they will get their funding renewed. In contrast, the visible results of the toil of the ASA employees accrue to others. Excellent meals are cooked … and then eaten. Trenches are dug in the snow … and then filled in again, after the cable has been laid. Girders and steel plates are welded together for a structure that will not be completed for years, the final floors not to be walked by those who set the foundations. In some way then, the motivation must be internal, the reward is the process, the process is the reward.
The company town aspect of South Pole Station is like a mining or lumber camp in the Old West. There is some product that is wrested from the earth (or snow) by sheer hard labor. There are the distant beneficiaries, the investors, the consumers of the product. There’s the chow hall, the company store, the rec. room and the Saturday night beer bust. In this case, there is the tempering influence of one-third women, but none of them are blushing violets either. From time to time the Feds come around and make sure that no-one’s getting hurt or worked to death, but for the Company there’s only one goal: Meet The Schedule, Punch The List, Get The Job Done. “Kinder and Gentler” is a phrase that no-one expects to hear. ASA management knows this: their contract to provide services in Antarctica to the NSF is up for renewal, they are judged according to progress on the project. This puts someone like me in a potentially uncomfortable situation. Much of what I have been doing these last years has been connected with studying the occupational and living environment. If a workspace is suffused with fumes, does ASA really want to know? Those employed within that workspace are hardly going to complain: a real troublemaker gets an immediate ticket off The Ice, termination of contract, deleted from hiring list. One wonders exactly how Adam Smith’s invisible hand works down here. In these three visits I have been struck not only by the dazzling natural aspects of Antarctica, but also by the interaction between individuals and the organization, and how we adjust and adapt the social contract to meet the reality of the location and conditions.
For instance: for a period of time, the water in the Elevated Dorm building was quite frankly unfit to drink or wash in. ASA was reluctant to make any official announcement in any form (e.g. e-mail) that could be forwarded or become part of a record on their contract: like the Soviets of old, a problem is not official until it has been heroically remedied. Some of the employees were unhappy: if the water is unsafe, why don’t they fix it right away, why don’t they cop to it? But then another voice says “Hey, we’re in ****ing Antarctica. Outside, it’s just as deadly as it was for Scott, it’s 30 below zero and we’re a thousand miles from the coast.. Inside, you’ve got heat, TV and 3 good meals a day. Quit whining.” How do we reconcile these? Does one condone the other? Two years ago, in my journal I reacted strongly to the manner in which the military herded us around on cargo airplanes. Today, I’m sitting on the same webbing seat, I’m used to it, it comes with the territory. I can read with embarrassment the pansy text that I wrote only 2 years ago. Does learning to put up with something make it acceptable? – or do we need the bright lights of competition to show us that better things are possible?
I can’t answer these questions. The scale of human operations in Antarctica is too small to allow for the effective exercise of competition. I expect that some Econ. student has written a thesis about it: if not, it would be a fascinating topic with a field trip thrown in that would dazzle the examination committee. Suppose Alaska Airlines offered competing air transportation from New Zealand to The Ice … they certainly have the equipment and the expertise. You or I could go to a travel agent and buy a ticket in February to Anchorage, then Fairbanks, then Prudhoe Bay. Minus 54 degrees and blowing hard. You would sit in a real seat in a real airplane and they wouldn’t ask you to wear ECW’s. Given this kind of option from Cheech to Mactown, the 8 hours of webbing straps and the funnel toilet at the rear would go unpatronized pretty quickly.
My eyes mist over … but the dreaming of air travel brings me back to my immediate reality.
I pack all my stuff into my soft-sided case. Everything has to fit into the standard orange zip bags, and I had discovered on my first trip that the orange bag can just swallow my suitcase. It opens wide, straining its canvas gums, its brass teeth grasp at the nylon and slowly, like a snake eating a rabbit, the bag goes in.
The baggage pickup point is outside an adjacent building. Alone in the snow, next to a sign saying “Goin’ North”. Soon a snowmobile zooms by to whisk it away to wait by the runway for the plane in a couple of hours.
Down in the Dome, something far more important than my ruminations is going on. The winter season’s supply of beer has arrived, several pallet loads. It must be stored indoors before it freezes: all hands on deck. Everyone who isn’t doing anything essential rushes out to form human chains, passing the cases from one to the next, off the pallets and into the buildings.
After helping out, I go into the galley for my last meal at Pole. I don’t know whether to feel like a good friend being wished good-bye, or a convict getting his final selection. Michelle the van driver is knitting, having only recently learned how: in the space of a few days she has knitted two socks and a hat. I joke with her that it’s a good thing she’s not wintering, she could knit 28 sock-and-hat sets in a month and then what?
She looks at me very seriously: there would be more to it than knitting, to be left behind by mistake.
Outside, it has clouded over. There is a plane on the runway, pumping out fuel into the storage tanks. Mine will be next. I walk over to the Clean Air building to get a last view of this little world, this outpost on the Ice Planet. As the first plane departs and I hear mine arriving, I walk back and look at the Dome for a last time. It symbolizes a remarkable achievement, an expression of the National Will: yet it is based upon and contains today the essential elements, the contrariness and individuality of all the people involved, the suits, the overalls.
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