Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson

at a fish cannery in the Aleutian Islands, I admired the austere hills and the white bulbs of cloud that could grow above them in an instant, as if the hills had ideas, but the natural image seemed a treacherous deceit. I preferred those more honest times inside the cannery at a meaningless task among the decaying machines and the vast architecture of technology. I preferred the aggressive hiss of a highpressure hose echoing through a yellow-lighted room of stainless steel bins, with drains thoughtfully placed for the chemicals and the blood. I preferred those times when the tranquilizer of cosmic perspective could not reach me.

      In contrast to the sobs of praise that accompany any barren stretch of dead backdrop, McMurdo Station is often called ugly by those who came down for sport. On his way to Pole from McMurdo by ski, Eric Philips, a member of the “Icetrek” expedition, stopped at Willy Field to talk with some grunts. They eventually went back into their job-shack, and Philips, who had a corporate sponsor, a huge insurance policy, and a satellite phone, wrote of them, “I pitied their restriction, bound to the confines of the Mactown environs by their work, by safety regulations, and by a general satisfaction with their experience of a civilised Antarctic wilderness. I was glad to see the door shut.”

      The resilience of mankind in Antarctica is inexorable; even the constant bleating of those who whine for permanent silence and infinite pristineness dissipates into an insignificant Buddhist drone beneath the soothing rumble of fleets of machines with pulsing hydraulics.

      McMurdo is beautiful. A construction site exposed long enough to a rattling generator grows a building. Each growling machine drags a fumbled leash of diesel exhaust. A line-up of washing machines waits to be executed at the metal baler. In a janitor’s closet in 155 a ladder leads to the attic, where a door opens into the sky. In the winter darkness, falling puffs of snow are bathed in the luminescent blue of a welding torch. A contingent of cylindrical acetylene tanks watches over a pile of inventoried triangles. In McMurdo one can warm up from the cold by a generous furnace, and fuck to the sound of helicopters.

      A week into December I went out to the ice shelf with the women of the Remediation crew to dig garbage out of the ice, a rare trip for me away from station. The sea ice beneath us was over 100 feet thick. Beneath it was the Ross Sea. The Ross Ice Shelf continued for hundreds of miles to the south, a lot of nothing. We scratched and pried at the surface of the hard blue ice to extract wire, conduit, food, machine parts, and other debris near Pegasus Airfield, named for a plane that crashed in a blizzard in 1970. The plane remains buried in snow and ice, and is a popular landmark for NSF to show to DVs (Distinguished Visitors). The unsightly debris we were to remove was too near the plane.

      Today it wasn’t too cold or windy. The sunlit views of Black Island, White Island, and the Transantarctics were clear. From this distance McMurdo was an insignificant drab smudge swallowed by smoking Erebus, its silent overseeing authority. Daily life in the hive washed over me with a shock of pointlessness. I need to start paying attention, I thought. Shit, I need to call my mom more often. I should really sit down with my friends and tell each of them what they mean to me and why. My God, I’m going to die. I need to stop smoking. Like the psychologist says. I should jog or ride the Exercycle, and drink green tea, with antioxidants.

      As I blasted away at the ice shelf with a diesel jackhammer to retrieve a 40-year-old fuel barrel left by the Navy, I imagined laughing with co-workers at lunch over jokes about cows or leprechauns rather than jokes about asses full of piss. I imagined in the evenings writing to schoolchildren in the United States, describing to them the raw beauty of the Antarctic and the quirky ways of the penguin rather than the toxic hill by the ice pier and the fierce hunger of the skua. “Your youthful enthusiasms drive me to such mirth,” I practiced, as I reexamined my strategy for breaking from the ice what had at first appeared to be a small broken mop handle, but had now revealed itself through my successes to be a large cabinet of some kind, encrusted with turds. The crashed airplane slumped nearby like a slain bull. This irreverent debris cluttered the tragedy.

      When I shut off the jackhammer, only a few sounds remained. My coworkers chipped at the ice in crisp intervals with ice-axes that sparked tiny explosions of cold shrapnel. The Spryte idled nearby, gargling fuel. The wind spoke as cautiously as unseen vermin. Each sound was like a distinct boulder in a river of silence. This turbulent silence, the sprawling ice, and the occasional sharp gusts of wind warn that eventually you will make a mistake. The threat is babbled endlessly, as if Antarctica were a lunatic.

      At four o’clock we loaded the picks and shovels onto the sleds, refueled the jackhammer, parked and plugged the Spryte at one of the job shacks, and tied down at a Pegasus cargo line the triwall we’d been filling with debris. Then, jerry cans secure on the back of the skidoos and masks snug, we bounced the 18 miles back to town over the ice shelf, weaving fast through the trenches and divots made in the snow by all the heavy equipment traffic. Small, bright canvas flags of orange, green, and red fluttered on the bamboo poles marking the route. Though the poles were five or six feet long, some of them had been there so long that the ceaseless accumulation of snow on the ice shelf had left only their tops as nubs, the tattered flags brushing the snow in the wind like the foliage of trees shrinking back into the ground.

      This first week of December had been warm, so it had snowed constantly, and so the planes stopped arriving. When the week of bad weather broke and the temperature dropped, flights resumed immediately. The good weather had allowed us to come out and hack garbage from the ice. The good weather had taken my roommate away to the plateau, and had promised to bring the Hot GA back to town from Siple Dome camp, where she had been for over a week.³ The Hot GA was comfortable in dirty Carhartt overalls, sunglasses hanging around her neck, her face slightly burned and her lips perpetually chapped from shoveling snow beneath the ozoneless sky, her leather work gloves with the little steer logo marked as hers by the rounded scrawl of her name written on the back with a Sharpie, and her unruly blond hair plotting a disorganized escape from the knit cap that threatened to fall over her eyes. Since my roommate had been sent out to the plateau to break his arms in the service of science, my room would now be a good place for the Hot GA and me to drink wine and have sex in the chair.

      The Hot GA, whom I had met recently, was an accomplished white-water kayaker.

      Despite Pope Leo XIII’s urgent warnings in 1884 that Freemasonry “generates bad fruits mixed with great bitterness,” Freemasonry remains a time-honored Antarctic tradition. I only discovered the creeping Masonic influence when one evening the Freemasons held a meeting in the Coffeehouse. The Coffeehouse is a Jamesway, a type of portable halfcylinder of wood and metal made famous during the Korean War. Adorning the curving wood-paneled walls are some old wooden skis and a Nansen sled that Señor X one season rescued from a Construction Debris flatrack. The Coffeehouse is warm and has a big plastic tree and various smaller fake houseplants. At square formica-topped tables people knit, play chess, and read Trivial Pursuit cards to each other.

      I sat near the Freemasons with a book titled Secret Societies on the table in plain view, to be sporting. In the Outer Rituals of the Third Degree, Masons commonly keep a Junior Apprentice at the north wall to ward off any “Eavesdroppers.” If one is caught, he is to be “plac’d under the eaves of the Houses (in rainy Weather) till the Water runs in at his Shoulders and out at his shoes.” Perhaps because it is too cold to rain in McMurdo, the Masons there had retired this hallowed code; I sat nearby, curious and unmolested.

      The ringleader of the Masonic Secret Society spoke of a bust of Richard Byrd that had been installed early in the USAP and had originally displayed a Masonic plaque, which someone removed.

      “When was the bust put up?” asked one curious Mason.

      “Well, we don’t really know,” said the leader.

      “When was the plaque taken off?”

      “Well, we don’t know that either.”

      “Who took it off?”

      “Well, we can only assume that NSF doesn’t want to be affiliated with a philanthropic organization and so removed it.”

      The Masons didn’t know anything, but they were ready for action, about par for Antarctic