Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson

during which the winter-overs had eaten in the library. Once the Galley had been renovated, meals were served there, and the library once again became the library. One of the features in the new Galley was a heavy black curtain that could be drawn to separate the dining area from the service area. The curtain was useful at the end of meal periods for keeping mobs of people from retrieving second helpings while the Galley staff cleared away the hot trays of teriyaki chicken and Hungarian goulash.

      Milo was one day toasting a bagel from the bread tray when the DA screamed at him from across the room and rushed over.

      “You can’t come behind the curtain during non-meal times!”

      “I’m making toast,” he said.

      “You can only use the Galley during mealtimes.”

      “I always eat toast.”

      “You can only use the Galley during mealtimes.”

      He ignored her and left with his bagel.

      Later Milo discovered that since the heavy black curtain had come into play, the DA had been yelling at others also, so he wrote her an email saying that she had no good reason to yell at anyone.

      When she read the email she burst into tears and ran to HR. The email was abusive and threatening, she said, so Milo was brought into HR for questioning. The HR Person read the email, and asked Milo if he would be willing to apologize to the DA. He agreed to apologize, but then asked plainly:

      “Is she allowed to yell at me and the others?”

      “No,” said the HR Person.

      “Can I get toast in the Galley anytime I want?”

      “Yes,” said the HR Person.

      Sid, whom I would be replacing as a Waste EO (Equipment Operator), ate his dinner from a blue Galley tray while explaining to me how the Housing Coordinator had received a death threat and then disappeared without warning six weeks ago. No one seemed to know just what the email threatened, but management had secretly flown the Coordinator out on one of the Winfly planes, which bring new employees and cargo near the end of winter, without listing her name on the flight manifest. This unheard-of departure from protocol added to the excitement and intrigue and promised to keep the incident on the grapevine for more than a week or two. Also, rumor had it the FBI was consulted.

      The task of identifying the perpetrator of the threat was complicated by widespread dislike of the Housing Coordinator. During the winter months, winter-overs each have their own private room. Just before Winfly (the season from late August until summer begins in October) the Housing Coordinator had posted signs saying that the winter-overs would each get a roommate, without exception. Her math was poor. It was simply never the case that each of over 200 winter-overs was assigned a roommate, and old-timers who knew better wrote her emails demanding to know how the lucky few were going to be chosen to keep their private rooms. She replied that people were not paying for their rooms, that their “happiness” should fall “within the policies and procedures,” and that if they didn’t like it they should ask their managers if they could leave on the first plane out.

      This type of counsel may have blunted contention had it come from someone more experienced, but she was a fingee. This was her first year on the ice, so even though she had been appointed head of Housing, her authority was a mirage. She wrote, “I am in the position to implement and enforce the McMurdo Housing polices and I appreciate the full support that my superiors in Denver have given me.” Afterward, she received the threat, and the company scoured the network records to determine when and whence the email was sent. Since the perpetrator had not logged on, Human Resources interrogated a woman who was sitting at another computer when the email was sent, asking who was beside her. She said she didn’t know.

With secrecy that caught everyone’s eye, the Housing lady was sent to Denver to finish out her contract, after which she was to be flown back to New Zealand to enjoy the fringe benefit of the typical post-ice holiday. As Sid scraped at something with potatoes in it, he pointed out that under the current plan, both the victim and the perpetrator⁵ would arrive in New Zealand upon completion of their winter contracts.

      “Besides the death threat,” Sid concluded, “it was a pretty mellow winter.”

CHAPTER I NOTES

1 “At nine in the morning of the next day we had our first opportunity of seal-hunting; a big Weddell seal was observed on a floe right ahead. It took our approach with the utmost calmness, not thinking it worth while to budge an inch until a couple of rifle-bullets had convinced it of the seriousness of the situation.”—Roald Amundsen

2 “Perhaps the most interesting of all the reactions between the Antarctic environment and the temperament of the explorer occurs during the catastrophic period of expeditions. For the sake of clearness, this heading also needs subdivision as there are several possible types of catastrophe worthy of separate consideration. Thus we have:

      1. The detention or loss of the ship in pack ice.

      2. Catastrophes affecting individual sledge parties.

      a. The starvation of an inland party.

      b. The marooning of a portion of an expedition with inadequate resources on an unknown coast.

      3. Polar madness generally.”—Raymond Priestly

3 Palmer Station, the newest and the smallest of the three stations, is seldom discussed at the other stations. Palmer lies across the continent, on the life-infested Antarctic Peninsula, which has been called “the banana belt of the Antarctic.” While McMurdo has dirty skua gulls that pester, Palmer has exciting seals that attack; while Pole has a rowing machine in the weight room, Palmer has sleek black rubber speedboats; while McMurdo and Pole share the bureaucracy of a thousand warring subcommittees, Palmer seems merely a nice family. When Palmer arises in conversations at McMurdo or Pole, our eyes roll back in our heads and our quivering tongues sparkle, like hogs envisioning a great feed. But mostly, we don’t talk about Palmer, because it seems a different world.

4 When trying to explain to a bank customer service representative why you don’t have a phone number, or why your address has a U.S. postal code but that you can’t step into the nearest bank branch to re-key your PIN because the bank cancelled your old cash card, the friendly customer service representative will hang up on you about 50 percent of the time as soon as you utter “Antarctica.” After trial and error, the best workaround solution when trying to conduct business from Antarctica is to say that you are at a “foreign military installation.”

5 Throughout the summer I made known to many my interest in the details of this story, and over a year later I received an email from a dummy account by an anonymous person who claimed to have sent the death threat. “Annoniemaus” wrote: “Basically [the Housing lady] was a jerk. Everyone I knew was upset about housing, and wherever I went people were talking about it, discussing it, and upset. I was actually quite fine about it, since the way things were going was how I expected them to go. [Her] being a jerk really didn’t feel like that big of an inconvenience, but the more I was around it all, the more it bothered me that someone like [her] could run around affecting people’s lives so uncaringly, and then act so poorly when she was questioned in any way. I thought about it. I thought about how there was no way to show her how it feels when someone screws with your life and you are helpless to effect any change.